Archive for February, 2009

We got this spiffy new fridge at the office months ago, and every time I went to get water through the door, I had to  pause for a moment.  I finally figured out why.  Look at this:

The spout on the left dispenses ice, and you can select ice particles or ice wedges.  The spout on the right dispenses water, but it says “light.”  Sure, anybody with an ounce of common sense can figure this out, but is it too much to expect that buttons with similar shapes and positions will do similar, or at least analagous things?

Since the Davis Square cheese sandwich quest became a semi-regular feature back in May, I’ve been aware of Deli-icious but for whatever reason never checked out their cheese sandwich.  Until this week.

Yelpsters seem generally bullish on the place, and Chowhound offers an interesting bit of navistalgia around the former occupant of the space and the price of sandwiches.

I ordered the grilled cheese with bacon and tomato on sourdough.  About as traditional and comforting as you can get on a winters day.  They asked if I wanted American cheese, I asked for cheddar.

So almost perfect and yet a miss.

The bread was good sourdough, buttered and griddled just right.  The bacon was crispy and not overbearing.  The tomato was good, maybe a bit too thickly sliced.  But the cheese… the cheese was that bland deli loaf cheese that breaks my heart.  How hard would it be for them to stock a sharp vermont cheddar?

I recommend this grilled cheese sandwich for anybody looking for a nostalgic comfort experience, but not for anybody who really loves cheese.  The quest goes on.

Five weeks ago I blogged about LinkedIn’s API policy, and I also applied to develop an application with their API.  I had no illusion that my idea was earth-shattering, but I thought it was a good one, and one that LinkedIn might even be able to monetize.  It was no iFart, that’s for sure (meaning it’s not a simple but highly appealing app that people inexplicably want)  So, what was LinkedIn’s reponse?

So far, absolutely nothing.  No acknowledgment of my submission, and no answer positive or negative.

Seems like further evidence to Tangyslice’s critque of LinkedIn as being not quite connected enough.  How likely is it that they’re so swamped with requests that they can’t even send me a “thanks but no thanks”?  Is five weeks too soon to wonder?  Is their form busted?  Did they fire the guy in charge of reveiwing these apps?  Could they be arrogant enough to think it’s not worth responding?

Perhaps it’s a cold calculation that if they sent me a rejection letter, I would post it to the blog and mock them for it.  I suppose they’d be right on that one.

I’ll submit again just to make sure there wasn’t a technical glitch, but I’m not feeling too bullish on LinkedIn apps right now.  Has anybody out there had more success in being accepted or even rejected by LinkedIn’s API Decider?

I got on the T and sat down next to a seat occupied only by two copies of that free newspaper that I’ve been thinking too much about.  I picked one up and started reading it.  At the next stop, the woman sitting on the other side of the newspapers, who was herself reading yet another copy of that free paper, picked up the other copy from the seat as she exited.

She was already reading it, why did she take the extra copy?  Was she saving both of those copies for friends?  Who would bother to pick up extra free newspapers to share with somebody else?  (OK, I did once, but I needed cheap packing materials)

Did I steal a free newspaper?  Is that even possible?  Well, at least I recycled it.

Last Wednesday I had a double dose of interesting thinking about giving.  First, I talked at a Harvard Extension social media class about Firstgiving and Twestival, then I popped in at the Philosophy Cafe to hear some deeper discussion of the limits of altrusim.  And then it snowed.

Act I: giving for free

At the kind invitation of Professor, author, educator and consultant Mary Lou Roberts, I led discussion in her Harvard Extension class, Social Media Marketing.  First, I talked about my employer, Firstgiving, and how they do business serving nonprofit organizations and people who support them.  I’m sure you’ve heard plenty about Firstgiving, so it should be enough for now to say it’s a social enterprise and uses social connections to do business and to do good, more than using what’s commonly called “social media” these days.

The second part of the class was a case-style discussion of Twestival.  There are far better recaps of Twestival (notably Beth Kanter’s) so I’ll simplify again.  Twestival was a global, all-volunteer fundraising event that raised a huge amount of money in many creative ways, but fell short of its perhaps over-ambitious $1M goal.   There were pledge donations via twitter, charity auctions, direct donations to Charity:Water, benefit music sales, corporate sponsors, and parties with door fees.

Some of my questions to the class, robustly discussed but not definitively answered, were these:

• What was the true cost of this all-volunteer effort?  Was it really zero?  Could more have been raised by spending?
• What’s the level of commitment that volunteer efforts and small donations generate?  Is that enough?
• Of the $250k raised (at the time of discussion), how much came from “social media” like twitter pledges via Tipjoy, and how much from “old school media” like party cover charges and corporate sponsorship?
• Was the event damaged or strengthened by the lack of full-time professional organization?
• Did Twestival over-reach or under-achieve with the $1M goal?

One of my favorite comments towards the end of the class was one student who astutely pointed out that a charitably cause should optimize fundraising by taking advantage of all channels possible, even those with low ROI, as long as it’s all positive.  Indeed, why not do one more little thing, even if it’s little, if it brings a bit more funding for the cause?

Act II: freely giving

On the way home from class, I stopped by Harvard Bookstore where coach, workshop leader and author Hillary Rettig (and my former colleague and friend) was speaking as part of something called Philosophy Cafe.  I hadn’t paid too much attention to the event because I wasn’t sure I could make it after class, but I was quickly drawn in and stayed longer than I had planned.

The topic of discussion was “The Limits of Altruism: Why Do You Give What You Give–and Should You Be Giving More?” and Hillary was the featured guest presenter, discussing the story of her donation of a kidney to someone who was at the time a stranger.  To quote from the highbrow website description:

There are lots of explanations for altruism, or selfless giving, ranging from the mystical (karma), to the sociological (community standards), to the sociobiological (we “give” in ways that maximize our genes’ propagation). Whatever the mechanism, it’s clear that some people give a lot, while others not so much. Is there a proper level of giving, and how do we, as members of a wealthy society, justify not giving more to those in dire need, for instance in Nepal or Malawi–or even here in the U.S.? And what happens when a monetary reward or other incentive enters the picture?

I can’t do the intense and sophisticated discussion much justice, but I’ll summarize some interesting ideas that I heard during the part of the discussion centered on organ donation.

• The mortality rate for a healthy kidney donor is about 2.5 per 10,000, or .025%, one fortieth of one percent.  The mortality rate for someone in need of a kidney is pretty much 100%.  Does this mean non-donors are implicitly valuing their lives at 4,000 times those of others?
• In European countries where organ donation after death by road accident is presumed unless the person has opted OUT (unlike the US version where you must opt IN for post-mortem donation), there is generally a sufficient supply of organs for those in need of them, and little need for voluntary living donors.
• While there was broad support in the room for regulatory solutions like changing the decision for post-mortem donation to opt-OUT, there was considerably more controversy around market-based solutions such as allowing people to buy and sell organs.  Some said that a market for organs would disadvantage the poor while others saw monetizing an organ as a potentially valuable ladder up from poverty.

After that, the discussion moved away from organs to a more general examination of how much one should give.  I had to head home so I missed that discussion, but both parts of the evening made for real food for thought on giving.

The philosophers at the cafe generally agreed that there was no obligation to impoverish or unduly endanger oneself in the name of altruism, but that there’s plenty of room in the average American life to give more.  I wonder if Twestival and other volunteer efforts are impoverishing themselves needlessly by foreswearing any paid services.  As the wise student said, why not do a little more?