When I tried to delete my Twitter feed from Jaiku today, I got this message:

Did Jaiku always have a bird in their error messages?

Despite embracing the controversial nature of many of the posts here, I don’t want to name names here, and would prefer that any comments be of a more generic nature.

That said… have you ever found that a particular blogger just pisses you off, even though you’ve never met them, haven’t interacted with them personally, and have no concrete reasons for your feelings?

There’s one medium-profile blogger whose every post sets me off. Even though they write in a niche of interest to me, I had to unsubscribe from their feed, because every one of their sentences just dripped with smugness [to my eyes]. Their blog literally made me angry.

My attempt at objectivity is that, if we generally accept that a blogger can be “friendly” then we should also be able to pick up on unfriendliness.

Am I nuts? Has this happened to anyone else?

Over the last few years I have heard people voice an increasing amount of displeasure with the existing literary canon, pointing out that most items within the canon are included because the general population has poor taste and/or no appreciation or understanding of truly great writing.

Fine. Agreed. I’m a lot more misanthropic than they come, and I have raised an eyebrow over many a “classic.” I question whether Emily Dickinson was a poetic genius or actually had no grasp of the proper function of an emdash. (She was a shut-in…) I’ve read every page of Salinger in an attempt to find a single redeeming sentence, and failed. (Holden Caulfield needed a good spanking.) Every time I see “A Farewell to Arms” on my bookshelf I’m overcome with an urge to teach Hemingway how to write a complex sentence via ouija board.

The existing canon gives us a common language with which we can communicate about literature to others. When I read “Prague” by Arthur Phillips, I immediately fell in love with its Fitzgeraldesque prose. I knew to recommend it to others who loved Fitzgerald and knew not to recommend it to the Hemingway fans. (I also gifted it to a new friend only to discover he was in the Hemingway camp — oops!)

Without this “alphabet,” so to speak, it would be substantially more difficult to find new books that I want to read, or to suggest new books to others. Each novel I picked up would be a complete gamble, and given that I had a lot of trouble putting down a half-read book — even if it’s Salinger! — that would translate into a lot of time wasted on lousy books that could be spent reading good books.

Perhaps an even more compelling reason to sample the canon: you’ll know not to name a children’s bedroom set “Lolita” like our friends at Woolworths:

The Lolita Midsleeper Combi, a whitewashed wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard intended for girls aged about 6, was on sale on the Woolworths website for £395.

Whereas many mothers were familiar with Vladimir Nabokov and his famous novel, it seems that the Woolworths staff were not. At first they were baffled by the fuss. A spokesman for the company told The Times: “What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either. We had to look it up on Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now.”

At first the store refused to withdraw the product. It said that although it wanted to appeal to the family market, “we also have to respond to customer demands and follow current trends.”

As one of the few people who apparently read the book (which remains one of my all-time favorites to this day), I would like to remind everyone that Lolita didn’t even lose her virginity to her step-father. I’m not saying it’s right for a man to court and kill a woman to have sex with her 12-year-old, but little Lolita already knew the ropes.

Speaking of the canon, am I the only person who saw the commercial for LOST where a fat guy fell off a hill and shouted, “Piggy!” (?)

At least one commenter also read the book:

I can’t wait to see Woolworth’s new line of Humbert-Humbert men’s reclining chairs.

Maybe I have a little faith in humanity left…

If you don’t know what Startup Weekend is, please crawl out from under your rock and head over to the Startup Weekend website.

Going in I had grand goals of this being the first really cohesive, successful, ahead-of-schedule, profitable-out-the-door Startup Weekend. This bubble burst when I remembered that I hate working with large groups of people. This isn’t to say I dislike a single person within a large group, just that my entire personal and professional philosophy revolves around executing plans with the smallest number of people necessary, and expanding only when necessary. Starting off with 120 people was … new to me.

I was reminded once again that leaders are not self-selected and instead rise naturally within their environment. The first night there was a separate project manager group (of over 20 people), which I volunteered to be project manager of. (Talk about unnecessary hierarchy!) As the “managers” independently thought up task assignments and milestones, leaders within each of the other groups rose and did the same thing, and by the end of Friday night each group was literally hours ahead of the arbitrary milestones the project management group had set for them.

If we didn’t have a 54-hour time limit, of course a core team should define the problem, specify roles, set milestones, and designate team members to take on various tasks. But we did have a 54-hour time limit, and the entire team was not going to spend all of Friday night (the equivalent of three months’ time!) waiting for direction. Instead, they leaped into action, which is exactly what they should have done. In my eyes, this made the existing project manager team unnecessary. The fact that most of the project managers from Friday didn’t even return for the rest of the weekend, or arrived late/inconsistently, made it even clearer to me that assigning outside managers who were not deeply ingrained in a specific group was not the way to go.

When I got home late on Friday night, I shared my frustration with alums from other Startup Weekends, who shared that no separate project manager team had even existed at their events. I ultimately decided that first-thing Saturday morning I would suggest to the project manager group that we disband and be absorbed into teams of interest because every team already had leadership. No one disagreed with me, and that was that.

To the person or people who decided to bitch to the rest of the group that I had “fired” the project managers: speak up or shut up. I’m not a dictator. You were free to disagree, and you didn’t, which made it a team decision. You irk me, and your infantile behavior will be remembered should our paths ever cross again.

What I think would have worked best, and what I would like to suggest a future Weekend consider, is to divide into skill teams (design, UI, development, legal, biz dev, and marketing) and have each team decide on one representative within the first hour. Those representatives would then make sure their groups had something initial to do (like choose a programming language, for the dev team) while the reps quickly defined their respective areas and checked for overlap.

The other main divide I noticed was because of people’s differing goals for the weekend. Some people just wanted to schmooze, others wanted to treat this as a practice exercise, and others wanted to be serious about the idea’s potential. It would be an interesting experiment to divide people by their goals, too. Ultimately I decided that since most people who were sharing strong opinions one way or another weren’t going to be involved past Sunday, most real decisions would be made by the remaining core team, and I’d look at it as more of an exercise to find out who I worked best with.

From this new perspective, Startup Weekend blew my mind with wonderfulness. I have coffees and dinners scheduled out for weeks with interesting, hard-working people. The *worst* case scenario is I’ve made some new drinking buddies to bounce ideas off of. I can live with that worst-case. I got to know my existing Twitter friends Deepak, Lindsay, and Matt even better and converted Andy, Matt, Nathan, Bruce, and Aviel to the Twitter cult (or at least bumped up their Kool-Aid consumption).

I also got to learn a lot. It’s not everyday I get to sit next to a Wharton MBA and build financial models. My time on the finance team was hugely rewarding and gave me new ideas and perspectives on a lot of the existing models I have for businesses in my Idea Box. I’m SO glad I chose a group I was not all that familiar with, as opposed to an area I had a lot of experience with.

Would I do it again? Yes, in a heartbeat. But what I’m most looking forward to are the relationships that are going to stem from this initial weekend.

A million thanks to Andrew Hyde who is all-around awesome, intelligent, and talented and without whom Startup Weekend would never have existed.

TNT Planet Me (whatever that is) has a full-page ad in the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of Ode Magazine suggesting that wearing flip-flops (aka not wearing socks) can save up to three loads of laundry each year.

I bet this is a great example of someone mentioning an idea in a brainstorming session that was so boring everyone leaped onto the thought without thinking it all the way through, just to get out of the meeting.

(I hate brainstorming meetings. If you have no ideas, you shouldn’t have a meeting. Email an idea-seeking memo and if, and only if, someone has an idea, then hold an idea-fleshing-out meeting.)

Let’s think this through for a moment. When was the last time that sock volume affected your total number of laundry loads?

Maybe, maybe, if you have a big family, and you all wear extra-thick wool socks in the summertime (WHY?), you could accumulate enough of a sock pile to warrant its own load.

Socks are small. If your washing machine is full, you just stuff the extra socks in there, or you stick them in other loads. Are there really people who run sock-only loads (besides the Duggars)?

I’m all about little changes that contribute to a greater good (or decrease contribution to a greater bad, or just make life more efficient overall.) This is not one of them.

Basing your entire initial campaign on an ineffective idea is not a great start, folks.