Bahamas-Bound

For my girlfriend's birthday next month I am taking her to the Bahamas for 5 days and 4 nights of relaxation and fun. I normally avoid tourist-laden locations and go places like Siberia and Malta but somehow I doubt my girlfriend would be happy if I told her we're going to Tibet or Nepal in January -- two places still on my to-do list.

Since I've never been to the Bahamas, but I know a lot of east coasters have, I'm taking recommendations for cheap or off-the-beaten path activities in the Bahamas. We're staying at the Radisson Cable Beach Resort in Nassau on New Providence Island.

A tip: I learned a few years ago that the best time to travel is the two weeks in January after the Christmas and New Years holidays. Most Americans don't like to travel again so soon, so airlines are typically half-full and you can find some amazing package deals. For instance, we're staying in a four-star hotel/resort for 4 nights for $600 per person (including RT airfare!). The added bonus of traveling in early January is the hotels will be less full of annoying tourists and you'll find better service because there are less guests to take care of.

Overheard in the Airport

At LaGuardia airport last week my girlfriend and I were waiting for our flight to Detroit. There were several delayed flights departing from gates near ours. Sitting behind us was a college-age woman whose flight was delayed, talking on her cell phone to her brother.

College Girl: Yeah, I called mom and dad and left a message on their machine. I've been calling their cell phones too but they never pick up. They just don't understand. (pause....) Yeah, they don't get it -- cell phones are supposed to be carried around with them.

Announcing Snowboard-Mag.com

The latest project I've been working on has finally launched. My buddy from college, Aaron Draplin, is the Art Director of a new snowboarding magazine called SNOWBOARD Magazine (3rd issue currently in pre-production). Aaron was the Art Director of Transworld Snowboarder for a few years and at that time the Editor-in-Chief was a guy named Mark Sullivan. Sullivan recently decided to start up a new snowboard magazine and hired Aaron to do the design. I met Mark back in July when I was out in Oregon and we've talked ever since about building a true community-based web site to accompany the magazine.

Snowboarders have always had a strong independent community spirit about them so no other type of site would do. The last thing this audience wanted was yet another brochure-ware web site with no interaction. These are consumers who are extremely loyal to the brands they buy and the site needed to reflect that. By opening up the web site to give them the ability to drive the discussion in whichever way they wanted it to go and providing them with the tools to create their own content, snowboard-mag.com is their web site.

The site could never have been developed as fast as it was without the amazing back-end that is Drupal. I've come to truly love this community framework, and now choose it over any of the other community management platforms. Much thanks to Matt Westgate for finishing the Authorize.net Drupal module which powers SSL-enabled credit card transactions. Look for this module to be rolled into the Drupal E-commerce project in the very near future.

Even if you are not a snowboarder, check out the site and see it for what it is: a powerful community-driven site that caters to a pre-defined niche market audience. This is the future of the web and the smart marketers know it and they are the ones who know that its the loyal consumers that own the brand. Ad agencies take note: adapt or die. No amount of brute-force advertising can compete with brand loyalty and catering to the influencers and persuaders.

Resources From My Bookmarks

I've pulled out some of the links I've bookmarked in the past few months. Enjoy.

• Beer logos redrawn in Illustrator EPS format (wow!)
• Best Software Essays of 2004 (many hours of reading material)
• Default password list for lots of various hardware
• Onload Image Fades Without Flash (Excellent)
• Arrows and Bullets and Icons!
• The Best of Still Photojournalism 2004
• Airline Logos
• How to turn off current page links using CSS

Explaining My Silence

Several friends have asked me over the past few months why I've stopped blogging as much as I used to. There are a number of reasons, most of them good -- some of them great.

The truth is that I made a conscious decision a year ago to stop blogging when I joined the Clark campaign because I refused to let myself become a target for the right-wing smear campaigns. Sadly, my efforts failed and they found a way to smear my name and reputation anyway. When I moved to the Kerry campaign in March I continued my blog silence since I was willing to do just about anything to help remove Bush from office -- even work for a politician I didn't really like. Unofficially, this was the reason I left the Kerry campaign after four weeks; apparently some of the staffers did not like the way I talked about Kerry internally (on principle alone, I dislike all politicians who can be described as career politicians. Yuck.). I disagreed with a lot of the online strategy being managed by Josh Ross, who focused mostly on the email campaigns and raising money and ignored most of the efforts being staged to bring politics back to the people by offering robust online community tools.

Now that the campaigns are over and we get to look forward to what's likely going to be four more years of ugliness from the Bush administration I have no excuse to not be blogging more. The truth is I'm rusty and focused on other things right now but I recognize the value of my blog and should get back into the habit of keeping it updated.

The other reason is that soon after I moved back to NYC from Arlington I met someone very special who has become a major presence and influence in my life. We recently decided to move in together and look for a larger apartment. To protect her privacy and respect her wishes I am not identifying her or giving her name here on my blog. She is a private person and wishes to remain that way. But I cannot deny that her presence in my life is one of the reasons I have not been blogging as much. Such is life, and it is good.

I'm keeping busy with freelance projects, which I will continue to announce on CamWorld when they launch. I will also try to update more often, and I hope that it's just like riding a bicycle. Here's to scraped knees and banana-seats.

Kottke, Ken Jennings and Sony

It's pretty disturbing what's happening to Jason Kottke. Sony's lawyers clearly are missing the whole point and are abusing their rights to sue. While I understand their desire to protect Sony's copyrights it seems a bit short-sighted to take this particular tack. I stopped watching Jeopardy a few years ago (I used to be a huge fan), but because of Kottke's posts about Ken Jennings I started watching it again. It was Kottke who got me interested in watching again, not Sony's marketing or advertising of the show.

Related reading: You can Blog, but You Can't Hide