The bloodbath at GE’s propaganda station has reached critical levels: according to Nielsen, CNBC has lost 28% of viewers year over year, and 24% in the 25-54 age group category. This is obviously a stunning failure in an environment where the top stories on any other medium are finance and economy related.

This week, the week between Christmas and New Years, I’m back to driving. Traffic is nearly non-existant so one can blaze in to the city. It’s the only week in Philly where this is the case.

I rent out a few apartments in Philadelphia. Each year around the holidays I try and do something to show appreciation to the tenants. They could have selected other properties, but they chose mine. They have treated the apartments with respect and have made them good homes. I am grateful.

This year I went to the movie theater and picked up tickets. It’s a simple gesture. A way to say thanks. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

If you’re a diehard fan of the Twitter service, rooting for their profitibility is counter-productive. You should realize a move towards real revenue is going to affect the Twitter experience, and almost certainly in a negative way.

Or at least in a way that will affect Twitter’s value to you.

Personally, as someone in technology and media, I want @biz to bring in the green and prove web companies can rake in cash. But I understand that when this happens, the value proposition of Twitter for my needs will negatively change.

The Senior Struggle
A little bit of you can pull them through the winter.
Pay a visit, run an errand, lend a hand. Your support means everything.

Call 215-765-9040 or visit pcaCARES.org for ideas and resources. You can do a lot of good.

It’s Christmas shopping season and I hope you’re not planning on giving a digital picture frame. Besides being the scorn of Adam Frucci (of Gizmodo) by buying a tasteless, tacky, gadget, these things really suck.

And while I’d never thumb my nose at an LCD panel, these suck a trickle of juice equal to a 40W light bulb, twenty-four hours per day. Depending on the cost of your electricity, that’s close to 1/3 of a cent per hour. How much does this cost your friends or family? About $28.03 per year.

$0.0032 x 24 hours = $0.0768 per day

$0.0768 x 365 days = $28.03 per year

If there really were 20,000,000 sold in 2008, that’s $560,640,000 dollars in electricity per year added to the American budget.

Think of these numbers the next time you see one of these suckers…

Michael Lewis’s article The End is covering Portfolio’s December issue. It’s a fantastic read on his forecasting the death of Wall Street back in the eighties in his book Liar’s Poker.

It highlights many of the insanities and irrational modes of operation amongst the firms of Wall Street and is an entertaining and solid I-told-you-so. I disagree that Wall Street is dead… But his insight shows us how things have to change.

The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility.

It’s a must-read, here are links worth following along the way:

• Must End (the article, Portfolio)
  
• Liar’s Poker (Google)
• Liar’s Poker (Wikipedia)
• Google Blogsearch (“Liar’s Poker”)
• Twitter (“Liar’s Poker”)
• Ji Lee’s site (artist of the photoillustration on the cover of Portfolio)

Traffic is always there. You can hop lanes and try to beat the overall flow, but the speed of others affects your progress.

Accidents happen. A lane or two gets blocked as a result. Cars following in the same lane as the crash are stopped and require a merge. Cars in the other lanes are still moving, but their flow is impacted as the blocked lanes attempt to merge (and rubbernecking at the carnage).

If you’re a driver in the lane of the accident, you’re stuck until you can merge to a lane of moving traffic. Your forward progress requires a merge to an adjacent lane.

The drivers in other lanes are performing microbailouts. They’re letting you in so a portion of the freeway doesn’t stagnate.

After looking around on Craigslist for some type of faster transportation I came upon an ad for the Subzero skate shop – liquidating their inventory. So I dropped by and met the owner, a dude about my age (low 30s) clearing out his stuff before remodeling.

Now, I’m not a skater. I did 1/2 pipes and crazy stair jumps on rollerblades as a teen, but I haven’t touched a skateboard since I was seven and did a faceplant on a 1980s’ish Santa Cruz shorty. I’m a two-planker on snow and snowboarded a handful of times.

But with such a good sale, I grabbed a longboard for a song and walked it back to the train (I was too embarrassed to give it a kick in public).

The previously 15 minute walk home from the station (downhill) was turned in to a carving session… Making turns on this thing was like snowboarding and a downright blast. And it was only 5 minutes.

We’ll see where this leads. So far it’s fun and shaves at least 15 minutes each way.

It really feels like a waste of time, this “walking” thing. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not lazy, out of shape, or otherwise averse to exercise. I run a 6:30 mile, rock climb a couple times a week, and love the outdoors.

But right now I’m bored. I’m not able to efficiently respond to email, trees continue to jump in front of me, and my mind is racing about while thinking of the code I want to write. I’m an inefficient human right now.

The commute for me starts in Malvern. Most days I get a lift to the train station. A walk from the train to the subway at City Hall takes 5-10 minutes (walking). Then the walk from the subway to office is 12-15. Back from the office to the subway, 12-15 again. A walk through city hall, 5-10. And finally a walk home from Malvern station, 15 minutes.

My walking math is shaky, but I think that’s 49-120 minutes of walk time. I do very little for myself or others during that time.

I mentioned yesterday on Twitter that I need some rocket shoes or a long board. I’ve seen the Roth Motors scooter and Go Motorboards. Might be a good option. I haven’t seen these around Philly though.

There’s my 15 minute rant. I’m at the office and whipping out the laptop.

–written with the iPhone WordPress app.

I’ve been glued to the news this week and filled up on too much doom and gloom. There are plenty of positive things to focus on. Even if this is the start of a recession, focusing on a tanking stock market doesn’t do any good as a developer. For you stock traders, yeah, you’re boned. But for software developers, there’s much to build.

Focus on what you’re good at. Make yourself better. Enjoy life.

It’s time to switch back to loving this perfect fall weather and looking forward to a killer ski season.

• Great Depression
• Black Tuesday

I’m glad people are educating themselves by trying to better understand similar situations in our past.

A Saturday thought on failure…

I’m not kidding in the title. You should be looking for areas to fail in. You can’t succeed without it. If you’re not accustomed to pushing yourself to the limit, you’ll never reach a goal that exists at the limit.

You should put yourself in situations that significantly challenge your ability to persevere as often as possible (without being reckless). Be used to being in this situation. The most successful people are consistently diving in to difficult situations and using the experience to push them to the next level.

It might mean you have to push yourself to the physical limit while running a marathon. It might mean having to cram 14 hours per day of studying to learn a new technology. In the end, the push to overcome potential failure makes you stronger. And in the beginning, you’ve calculated some risk and chosen a course of action to succeed.

Partners, friends, co-workers, and bosses who push your limits are the best kind. They keep you going and stretch your abilities. You’re on the right track with these folks. These people are the ones who will mercilessly help you reinvent yourself and bring you a better career and appreciation for life.

Get out there and find things you could fail at, calculate the risk, and choose the course of action that overcomes.

On Twitter, the numbers for friends (people you follow) and followers (people who follow you) are being misreported. The most common tweet today is about one’s follower count dropping off. This is telling of your personality, and not in a good way.

If you’re complaining about your follower count dropping off without your realizing your friend count dropped too, you’ve probably only been paying attention to building numbers. You’re also describing to the world that you didn’t care about losing touch with your friends.

For the record, I first noticed my friend count dropped. Over the year or two on the service, I’ve built up a friend list of ~6200 extremely interesting people (~2100 follow me). When I saw my friend count dropped, I checked my followers to verify. My tweet was, “Wow – number of people I follow and who are following me just dropped by more than 1000 each. Not good!”

While they reboot the service and get your numbers back to normal, take a moment to consider what matters. If you’re that important, they’ll find you again.

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Last night I headed down to MCCXXIII, a club at 1223 NW. Connecticut, for a DC Social Media meetup. The meetup featured Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) and Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) as guests.

I’ve been following Scoble more than usual this week, as he’s come to DC to interview politicians and government officials with Rocky (@RocmanUSA) and his son Patrick (@pscoble). It’s been a merging of the blogging tech world and the US government (finally!).

The club was jammed, no room to move, great vibe and so packed the A/C was ineffective. It was awesome to see the turnout and feel the energy towards geeks making inroads to Washington.

Scoble described the experience in a single word, “Incredible.” We talked for a while on East Coast vs. West Coast interviews and the whole crew agreed that it’s been a refreshing experience. There’s nothing wrong with it, but the Silicon Valley CEOs are embellishing the value of their company. Here, it was described, instead of an executive power (pun intended), the power is more pure and the answers more honest.

When Robert described the difference in honesty I did a double-take. Seriously? Whoa. He described a few of the interviews, talking about some of his favorite moments and personal opinions. I’ll let you catch those in the coming days at Scobleizer.com and in video on FastCompany.tv.

A highlight he kept coming back to: His son nailed down the FCC chairman on the topic of porn (it wasn’t on video – wish it was). Robert’s eyes beamed with pride as he described his son having the guts to ask the questions.

Overall, a good meetup and cool to have Scoble out here for a few days, doing something different and interesting.

Existing posts on Scoble’s visit to Washington:

• How is technology changing the world of Washington D.C.? (6/24/08)
• Visit NYC & Washington D.C. with us (6/21/08)

UPDATE: Here’s the link for Gary’s book tour ‘08: http://tv.winelibrary.com/gary-vs-book-tour-2008/

Gary Vaynerchuk is continuing his book tour, visiting the Rockville, MD, Barnes & Noble for a signing this morning at 9:00AM.

Image courtesy of Malingering on Flickr – it is not of either of the homeless men I met today.

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I started off the day by going for a great morning run. On my way home I realized my house key fell out of my shorts pocket, so I was looking around on the ground for it.

A homeless man asked if I lost something, and immediately followed up asking if it was a water bottle before I could respond. After telling him it was a key he informed me the water bottle he saw earlier was very nice.

I walked away cursing the fact I would have to break in to my house, but also thinking about a man with concern over my loss who didn’t have keys of his own to lose.

Breaking in requires scaling a tall wall, jumping through a window a-la Trinity escaping in The Matrix, and finally possessing the key to our inside apartment (which I still had).

At the end of the day I hit the bank for a friend and locked my keys in the car in the process… Two key losses in a single day. It would have been my first key loss in years if it were only once.

As I waited for my wife, bringing the spare key, a homeless man with a harshly weathered and flushed face approached. The conversation went like this:

• Homeless man: Hello, sir?
• I kept silent, posting to del.icio.us.
• Man: Sir, is that your car?
• Me: Yep?
• Man: <upbeat> Where are you from?
• Me: Here, Philadelphia…
• Man: Sir, I could use a cup ‘a coffee, could ya spare some change?
• Me: …
• Man: <poorly rehearsed> Sir, I’m homeless, hungry, scared, and need something to eat. Anything you can offer will help.
• Me: I’m sorry, but I won’t give cash, but I’ll get us cups of coffee.
• Man: <confused, back pedaling> But I’m hungry. I have 55-cents <jingles pockets> and only need a little more for coffee.
• I twittered
• Man: Sir, pay attention to me. I need some help.
• Me: I’ll buy us cups of coffee and a snack then.
• Man: <pausing again> But… I’m hungry.
• Me: <Genuine smile> Let’s go get a cup of coffee, Starbucks is two doors down.

He turned his back to me and walked off without another word. His “hello, sir?” introduction was repeated to each passerby.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on real estate – Lately been hearing a lot of people talking on the subject of short-sales, and I’m trying to digest some of the numbers. The NAR (National Association of Realtors) is describing 18% of homes on the market as being upside down (the owner owes more on the property than he or she could sell it for). I feel for the those in this situation.

A big curiosity is how the upside down sales are distributed. 18% is the average, which means there are big swings around the country. Along the Central Coast of California (San Luis Obispo, Paso Robles, Morro Bay, etc), it’s roughly 50%… But in many locations that are still undervalued, prices still rise.

This is what I’ve been thinking and talking to people about when the topic of real estate comes up. Not many dinner conversations go by without hitting on this topic.

Anyway, the reason I’m on the topic of real estate in this post is because I spent all weekend remodeling… Well, thinking about Facebook applications, Google Social, and other apps while remodeling… Phew!

We gutted the 2nd bedroom of our apartment. First we tore it down to the studs, and then tore out the studs themselves. The plan was to leave a beautiful exposed brick wall.

Unfortunately, the bricks are starting to powder up and refinishing them would have involved amounts of muriatic acid I don’t want to think about (my wife had to run and dive out a window to escape the fumes last time – aweful stuff!)

The decision for covering the bricks was made easier by being able to shrink our heating and cooling bill with some rolls of insulation. So I framed away.

I should note that Galina and I are nearly drooling at the thought of being done with the remodel. Having Summer weekends free for outdoor (and computing) activities will be heaven on earth.

By the time the sun was setting, we called it a day and went for nice walk (some decent sunset pics).