Neil World

All the buzzwords in one email…

TO: Neil
DATE: Oct 17, 2011
SUBJECT: Pinging you for a quick touchbase

I’m going to get some face time with my resources to see if we can drill down and benchmark the deliverables without too much efforting.

The we can ramp up, circle back and interface with the rainmakers to ideate with around the endgame and see who has the bandwidth to do the heavy lifting.

We’ll whiteboard some action items during our braindump and if we’re not able to find the magic bullet, then we’ll table it, take it offline, and I’ll take off my account manager hat so I can leverage my core competency to become the change agent.

Hopefully then we can level the playing field, get you on board, and eliminate the disconnect.
There’s no time to facipulate at the granular level because I have a hard stop at the COB so we can calendar this and recaucus later.

I found a plastic container of dried pineapple in the kitchen and decided to check it out.

Among the ingredients is “artificial pineapple flavoring.” Really? I know that stuff goes in candy and other manufactured foods, but now we’re putting artificial pineapple flavoring in actual chunks of pineapple? I would’ve thought that’s one of the few things around that wouldn’t need a shot of artificial pineapple flavoring.

The only theory I have is that they juiced the pineapples in Thailand, sold the fresh juice at a premium, dried and shipped the [much lighter] fiber to the US, and then reconstituted it with the artificial flavoring liquid stateside.

How much of a piece of fruit can you remove before it can no longer be sold as one? If I take all the water and most of the flesh out of a coconut to sell elsewhere and replace them with cellulose and some inexpensive liquid, can I still sell what’s left as a “coconut?”

And that’s Safeway’s “Select” version. I’d had to see where the economy pineapple comes from.

It looks like this site just helped me secure a seat in the press section at Dreamforce. It’s pretty chill over here too. Instead of a cramped bleacher seat with your jacket and bag on your lap, you get a desk, power outlet, and a bunch of elbow room. Next to me is a Japanese journalist who has a lot of gadgets and is one of the most serious looking dudes I’ve ever seen.

I will actually blog about the event though—I wasn’t lying.

It’s the main keynote and it’s a discussion between Salesforce’s CEO and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. They sent the first few minutes congratulating each other on various achievements and each proclaiming the other to be awesome. I’m not a fan that style intro.

I think it it’s ok to throw out one compliment when you introduce a guest. If the guest wants, they can reply with one as well, but one each is really all we need. Those of us in the audience know who you are and why you’re on stage. I saw another presenter this week start his presentation with my second lest favorite way of starting a talk: he listed off stats about his firm and its growth. Number after number, each followed by a pause as if he was expecting us to clap for them. None of us knew or cared about his firm- he was supposed to be telling us about how he used Salesforce as a small business.

They’ve taken a trip down memory lane and while it’s kind of a review for those of us who read about the tech industry, its still interesting to hear it from people like Schmidt.

Now they’re getting to the good part. The conversation has finally reached the future. They touched on mobile computing for a minute, but now they’re back to talking about the past. Its always interesting to hear people that successful speak, but I like hearing visionary insights into things and discussions about the future that really broaden my view of everything. This one seems a bit light on that type of talk.

This is actually kind of hard work though. I’m going to publish this and then sit back and enjoy the rest of this without typing.

For the most part, I don’t consume much crappy food. I’m not fanatical about my health, but my diet primarily consists of plants and pretty good meat and dairy products. Thanks to a co-op and a farmer’s market within a few blocks of me, I have my pick stuff that’s organic, local, grass-fed, etc. Usually not many of the snacks that you find in the middle aisles tempt me too much.

With one exception: Goldfish. Since they started appearing in my office, I’ve been eating hundreds of the little orange bastards a day. A co-worker suggested that there may be a problem when she saw that I’d progressed from leaving the kitchen with handfulls of them, to fashioning sacks out of paper towels, to using large coffee filters as bowls for them. Another said that the two weeks I was gone recently marked the only two times that the Costco guy had ever shown up with his weekly order to find some still left over from the last one.

As far as I can tell, they’re devoid of any real nutritional value. They’ll provide you with plenty of sodium and possibly make you fat, but they won’t nourish you in any way. They also never really fill you up the way real food does- even if you eat a huge coffee filter full of them. They’re actually a lot like cigarettes in that the addict consumes them knowing full well that they’re crap and it’s a lousy idea, but is still unable to stop.

I was trying to figure out why any other food with no nutrients and a million ingredients that I don’t understand the purpose of would never appeal to me, yet I can’t stop eating these, and I got it. I think they got me young enough to program me to like them. They’re the only junk food that I think I was given regularly for a significant chunk of my childhood. I think they actually planned it that way too. No rational adult would choose to experiment with these things any more than they’d decide to take up smoking. They’d either buy real cheese made from cream or real fish that used to swim, but not fake cheese flavored, fish-shaped cracker things.  It’s essential to hook people pretty young to convince them to eat things like that.

All this time that I’ve been reading about fast food and soft drink companies marketing more and more effectively to younger and younger children, while they and adults get fatter and fatter, I never really got it. Instead of being puzzled by the whole thing or feeling self-righteous about my own good decisions, I should be thankful that due to some combination of my parents’ stinginess and the shite-food purveyors not being as adept at hooking kids on their products back then, I managed to escape with only one addiction (that I’m aware of).

The NeilWorld is finally up and running. More to come later.