Russell Dicker

Going to Etech

Next week I'll be flying to "overcast with possible showers"¹ San Diego for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference. I'll be one of a number of Amazonians attending and, in some cases, presenting.

My track record on getting value out of conferences is pretty poor; the last conference I attended laid an 8 hour (plus two days of travel) egg on my schedule. Etech's anecdotal track record is pretty strong though, so I have faith it will beat the curve.

My belated planning has also left me with a dearth of information about extracurricular activities during the week. Chris Butler, my good friend and Microsoft hack, was planning on attending but informed me tonight that he won't make it. That's bad news since things to do generally find him. My hope is that my rank and position will get me into all the hottest Geeks Gone Wild after hours parties, but it is also possible I'll be eating cold pizza alone.

Regardless, I plan blogging about anything that captures my interest while down there. I also plan on doing most of my writing with my Mac. Since I won't need to be connected to the company network during the day I'll enjoy unshackling myself from my Dell, whose design is so defective that it is larger than my PowerBook but still requires an external DVD drive. Besides the overwhelming design superiority, having my Mac will allow me to make sweet and smug eye-contact love with the other hip Mac users. One would imagine that Etech will have disproportionately high number in attendance.

[1] I'd link to accuweather.com for this but apparently linking to an exact date is a $79.95/year premium service. Hey, big spender!

My other blog

One great thing about having a journalist girlfriend who lives with you is that she blogs about things that we both did, so I can just link to her stuff. Is this internet thing great or what?

The Throwdown

My best friend, John Stafford, was talking trash on me yesterday for not updating my blog frequently enough. This will be my sixth post since I officially started on January 28th, 2006 - that is one post every four days. Admittedly not the most active blog in the world. But at least I now know there is a market, however small, for the content put forward here.

Talksbig von Deliverslittle, on the other hand, promises to post at least once a day once he gets his blog started. You see John's blog, disintermediate_us, hasn't really gotten off the ground yet. John is still waiting on the professional designer he hired (yes that is jealousy in my words) and his programmer to finish configuring his MovableType installation. Of course given that he is in Stanford's graduate school for journalism, we would hope that John would take the time to write once a day - it is probably for course credit.

One beautiful thing about the blog format is the permanent record of events. So I'm going to call it out here, WWE style: I will have 31 total posts on my blog before John does.

It's go time little man! BLAARGH!

Reputations Job

One high priority for me at work right now is recruiting a new manager for the Reputations team. Since it is in the social computing space, I've been playing with some less traditional ways to get the job post out there.

First, I've been telling everyone who asks me what looks good in the cafe or to "please press seven" in the elevator about it. After all, Amazon already has a number of really talented managers who might have the right tech/business/analytics/socialigy mix for it, and if not they might know someone who does.

More interestingly, I posted the position on LinkedIn and sent it out to a selected set of people in my network. That hasn't gotten much direct response yet, but I did get some nice e-mails from people who I haven't spoken to in a while. The one totally cool indirect action is that Jeff Barr, a fellow Amazonian blogged about it which inspired Dave Taylor over at intuitive.com to blog about it as well. Very cool.

I don't have the readership that those two undoubtedly do, but I now am blogging it as well.

Ruined by poor planning

I’ve often lamented that one of the great urban resources that Seattle seems to lack is a large park similar to Central, Golden Gate, or Stanley. In the spirit of using what I have and as part of my goal to explore the city I live in, Lia and I decided to visit Discovery Park.

This was partially inspired by the unseasonably nice weather we had in Seattle for the past week, but also served as a nice excuse to get a burger at Red Mill in Magnolia since you pretty much need to drive right by it.

I marked Discovery Park as worth it for a number of reasons, but there is one strange caveat. In the park’s favor is the reasonably leisurely walk around the loop and the path down to the south beach. The view from the south beach is a unique one. It is unusual to be so far west into the Sound without needing to cross it. Seattle has some of the best views of any city I’ve been to but new vantage points are always welcome. From the south beach you could see Rainier with the West Seattle Bridge and docks beneath it, a quaint (I hate that word, but nothing fits better) little lighthouse, and the Seattle sewage treatment plant.

That’s correct. Right at the westernmost edge of the beautiful park is where all of the sewage that goes down your toilets and sinks ends up. How does that seem like a good idea?

Now in their defense, it doesn’t smell too bad. I mean if I were in charge of thousands of pounds of raw human excrement, I couldn’t make it not smell like this. But no one is going to confuse it with a basket of lilies either.

This probably has something to do with the park being a former military base, but it really is a shame that in Seattle’s largest outdoor park we also put our waste facility.

See more progress on: Discovery Park

McNaming

Building a brand is big business, and in this business there are few brands stronger than McDonald’s. In fact, since 2001 McDonald’s has been consistently ranked as one of the top 10 world-wide brands by BusinessWeek. The only food-like company to beat them is the undisputed king of brands, Coca-Cola.

McDonald's so ingrained in our culture that the brand and its products have grown beyond mere food. From product placements in The Fifth Element and The Sims to their own Douglas Copland coined term (McJob), the McDonald’s brand has reached a level of almost unreal ubiquity. Even The Economist chose the Big Mac as its reference point for cost of living between different countries.

Say what you will about the nutritional value or taste of their food, from a branding perspective, this is a company that is doing something right.

So why can’t they name their breakfast menu correctly?

Everyone knows that the flagship, the crown jewel, the piece de resistance of the McDonald’s breakfast menu is the Egg McMuffin. Wendy’s may have a lock on the square burger, but McDonad’s owns the squat cylindrical egg. When it came time to merge the magnum opus of breakfast sandwiches with the relative also ran Sausage McMuffin, this titan of branding had two choices for name:

- Egg McMuffin with Sausage
- Sausage McMuffin with Egg

Any first year MBA could get this right, but for some strange reason McDonald's dropped the ball, scraped it up, and served it to customers.

If I...

...were to found a hip-hop group, we would call ourselves March of Rhymes. Our first album would be Born Lucky.