Tales of Hoffman

This Is Broken.com update

Mark Hurst's excellent This is Broken website has undergone a subtle change, taking on a much more blog-like format with archives, permalinks, places to comment and (Hallelujah!) an RSS feed. Take a look at what people have added recently. There are some really good bad customer experiences out there and the best way to avoid them in the future is to raise awareness across the board. I hope Mark's site continues to grow. It's entertaining and useful, or in the words of mid-70's advertising: "It's good, and good for you!"

WABC in NYC Broadcasting in HDTV

If you live in the NYC area and are in an HDTV-capable situation, you'll be happy to know that for the first time in over two years (since 9/11, in fact), you can recieve WABC in High Definition. Apparently, they are broadcasting from the top of the Conde Nast building in Times Square. According to this thread over at the incredibly great AVS Forum, people are finally getting reception. One big problem however...as of about 8:30 on Thursday night it looks like folks due North of the antenna (read: ME) are out of luck. I'll be monitoring the situation and will let you know what the deal is from here in Central Westchester, just as soon as my "honey" is done watching Survivor off the TIVO.

UPDATE: Apparently the kinks were worked out fairly quickly because by 9:25 I was tuning in WABC-DT loud and clear. What was my reward? Umm,....Extreme Makeovers and a 20/20 about the death of Princess Diana. Oh well, HDTV technology can't fix EVERYTHING...

This is NOT That Kind of Site!

Looking through my referrer logs, I see that this humble little site is the #10 result on the Google search: "watching live sex with windows media". I must say I am VERY insulted by this result. I would NEVER watch live sex with windows media....It's Quicktime all the way for me! ;-)

Medscape Gets its "Props"

It's always great to get unsolicited, positive feedback (especially from a doc), and that's just Medscape got today from DB's Medrants.

I consider it the best single source for medical stories.

Thanks, DB!

Medscape RSS Feeds Now Not Funky

If you are a user of the Medscape RSS feeds (over 25 different feeds, split by medical specialty), you'll be glad to hear that we finally fixed some funkiness that had snuck in over the last month or so. The feeds are now sorted in reverse chronological order -- as one would expect. So go on over with your aggregator and check 'em out. New and Improved, with "whiter whites and brighter brights."

Amazon Search Rocks

Very cool addition to Amazon Search, in case you haven't heard. You can now search the full text of the books they sell. That's right. It's a little too immense to even consider, but it seems to work. For instance, I know that there is really only one book in which I've actually been mentioned. If you do a search for "Steven Hoffman John Hagel McKinsey" you'll find Net Worth, a book written by then McKinsey Partner John Hagel for whom I worked. John was gracious enough to give me a mention in the preface to the book, so what else should be the first thing I searched for? Doesn't everyone Google themselves?

Get Back

Posting has been pretty light this week, what with dealing with the new puppy, plus I've been suffering all week with a bad back. About three years ago, I was having back pain and numbness down one of my legs when I went to bed at night. I went to a doc and had an MRI and was told I had a compressed disk near the bottom of my spine. "Basically, you'll want to live with it," said the doc. "You don't want to have back surgery unless it's totally ruining your life, and if you just lose a few pounds and watch what you do, you won't have to worry about it.

So that's what I did. I lost about 20 pounds last year (still proud to have kept it off...ok, well, most of it) and really haven't had a single back problem since.....

Then on Sunday, I went to my daughter's soccer game (btw, watching a bunch of 5 year old girls playing soccer? priceless!). It was really cold here in Westchester last Sunday. Typical blustery October day. So in order to keep warm, I jumped up and down once or twice. OK, more like 20 or 30 times. Gee, I wonder what gravity does to that compressed disk at the bottom of my spine when I'm jumping straight up and down as fast and high as possible?

By the time I got home, my back was feeling tight. By nightfall, I was in some pain. By bedtime, I had trouble getting into bed. By morning...I couldn't move. So here I've been all week. Trying to work from home while lying in bed with a pretty endless procession of heating pads. The only plus side to all of this has been getting to use my TiBook for work all week (it really is a sweet machine). I'm finally starting to feel close to normal. I can get up and down the steps with no problem and I've even been able to bend over and pet the dog. It feels good to be back...with a semi-healthy back.

Aggregators and Usability

Sorry for this duplicate post. I found out this morning that I was a victim of comment spam (and it was particularly off color as well). In the process of trying to delete the comments, I also deleted this entry from October 8. I guess this is what the Google Cache is for!

My one moment of cogent thought during Day 2 of BloggerCon has been "called out" by Jon Udell in his blog today. In a posting about the difficulty of pointing directly to a spot in a longer streaming media file, Jon points out what he terms "...the most animated five minutes of the whole hour-and-a-half session." That was my mini-rant followed by another attendee's Maxi-rant regarding how RSS and aggregators will never take off until they are somehow made easier to use for the regular user. By the way, I'm the guy who leads off the second clip...without the mustache.

When we launched RSS feeds at Medscape, it was up to me to create the page that explains to physicians what the heck it's all about. That's when it really hit home that it's next to impossible to explain how this all works to people who are not intimately involved in blogging or working on the Net in some other way. I still get emails at least a few times a month that basically say, "This sounds good, but what the heck do I need to do?"

I see three potential ways out of this logjam: 1) Wait for Aggregator vendors and RSS feed developers to come up with a better way to integrate their products so non-technical users can actually use them without getting buried in an avalanche of acronyms, right mouse clicks, and orange and white icons. 2) Wait for Microsoft to build RSS readers/aggregators into IE and/or Outlook. 3)Pursue an idea that came from Jenny at the BloggerCon aggregator session: "pre-filled" news readers/aggregators. I'd be very interested in working with a freeware news reader/aggregator vendor to distribute, through Medscape, a special version of of their software, pre-filled with Medscape's 25+ news feeds to as many doctors as want it (my main candidates? AmphetaDesk and NetNewsWire Lite. Morbus? Brent?).

Who wouldn't want to be able to say that more doctors use their software than any other? So what say you, aggregator vendors. Any takers?

Rebel Rebel

For the past three years, I've been using a simple point and shoot Kodak DX-3600 for my digital pics. Now, after reading some things on the Net, I've starting to get a serious jones for the Canon Digital Rebel EOS 300D. Anyone out there actually own this puppy and can give me some feedback? I miss the quality of my old Minolta Maxxum and would love to get it in a digital camera.

Authors Among Us

It's pretty amazing what you find out about your co-workers that you never knew. The other day I found out that there was a bona fide author among the folks that make sure that all the yummy medical content gets posted correctly on Medscape. Daniel Bukszpan sits quietly at his desk every day formatting and posting some of the best medical content on the Internet and, meanwhile, he's been taking the time to write the definitive reference on Heavy Metal. Admittedly, I don't know my Ratt from my Poison, but if you have any interest, check out The Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal.