Goin' Back to Cali

I've been in LA for 4 days now and frankly I'm loving it. The sun makes a HUGE difference - I'm happier, the people around me are happier, it's a great scene. I'm here as part of the Kellogg Media and Entertainment Club's LA trek, essentially a 3-day learning and networking opportunity for those interested in the media biz.

So I arrived Wednesday, checked into my deluxe accomodations ($70/night for a double with internet, certainly did the job) and grabbed a couple of cocktails with my classmate. Good times, but for some reason I remember Westwood being more interesting. Anyway, when we stepped outside the next morning, it hit me - sun shining, birds chirping, rollerbladers, joggers, rice rockets, silicone loveliness, $200 t-shirts, and bentleys - the East Coast has its advantages and will no doubt be a broadening experience, but Cali's definitely home.

Most of Thursday and Friday was spent meeting with various media companies - Warner Brothers, Sony Pictures, Disney, NBC Universal. Although I've always been interested in music-nightlife-digital, I've never managed to get a solid grasp on how traditional media firms actually operate. The meetings confirmed several of my hunches:

• The proverbial divide between the creative and the business is not just a myth. Some functions play in the middle (i.e. business affairs, the guys who approve budgets and contracts pitched by producers) but not many.
• In most parts of the business, an MBA is not all that valued and possibly not even that valuable. The most promising entry points seem to be corporate development, digital strategy, and home entertainment. The latter essentially functions like packaged goods with a heavy retail component. If your goal is to run a media company, however, you'll need to get your hands dirty on the creative-operational side of the business.
  
• Success in the industry seems largely driven by relationships. That's probably true of all industries but it seemed even more so here. This impression solidified when we met the president of Sony Pictures Television. Successful, welcoming, charismatic guy who grew up in the business. Lots of sales experience and it showed.
  
• Even though the product is sexier, at the end of the day a big company is a big company - lots of divisions, lots of titles, free beer on fridays, blah blah blah. As much as the content of the jobs would be interesting to me, I'm not sure that the context would be.
  

Foneros!

A buddy of mine just sent this to me - FON is attempting to build the world's largest WiFi network by selling a router that splits a broadband internet connection into two wireless signals, one private and one public. The public signal essentially acts a hotspot - owners of the router choose wheter to make the connection available for free or for a small charge ("the linuses" vs. "the bills" in Fonero speak, clever). The company's goal is 1million "hotspots" by 2010. User generated hot spots - brilliant! (ahh no more user-generated anything, please!)

Apparently I missed the big hoopla over the 10,000 free routers they were giving away. Bummer. Let's see if I can convince Lisa to get one anyway. This is cool.
http://www.fon.com/en/

I Heart Uncle Sam

Lisa and I went to get our taxes done today. What a fantastic morning! As students we made out like champs. All of the income from my internship and Lisa's research work was deducted so we got everything back. Not bad for two slightly hungover hours with Paula (our tax advisor at the H&R Block in Wilmette, we highly recommend her).

There were a couple of things I found particularly interesting:

1. Apparently long distance telephone companies have been charging a tax that they shouldn't have been. The IRS decided that the best way to refund the money was to give long distance telephone users a $30-$60 tax credit on this year's return (so we don't have to dig through our old phone bills to see how much we actually paid, thoughtful yeah?). It may not a be a lot of money, but it did pay for the port I just ordered. More info.
2. So what's the deal with New York City taxes? It's got the highest tax burden of any major city in the US by far (it can get up to 3 1/2 percent). I wasn't aware of this when I worked there this summer although I really should have been. In any case, my immediate reaction was "man this is downright obnoxius," so I did a little digging and found a nice article describing the reasons for it (NY Times). More services, aging infrastructure, heavily unionized. Makes sense. I can't wait to move there this fall.
   

Will Roomba Bring Happiness?

OK onto post #2! Of all the things to write about in the world, I decided on the Roomba robotic vacuum made by iRobot. I just ordered it from Amazon last night ($170 for a refurbished high end shceduling one) and should receive it in a few days. For those of you who don't know what this is, it's a tiny disc shaped robot (13 x 4 inches, 11 pounds) that vacuums your house automatically. You just put it in the center of the room, press clean, and watch it go. The one we bought comes with a base station charger and a scheduler - essentially we program it to run at a certain time everday, it leaves the charger, cleans the house, and then returns back to the charger so that it's ready for the next day. How sweet is that!


Honestly, this vacuum may change my life. My wife and I live in an old vintage apartment a few blocks from Northwestern University. In some ways our pad is quite beautiful - old style moldings, hardwood floors, etc. The unfortunate truth, however, is that I basically forced the place on Lisa. She really didn't want to live in a place this old and she HATES hardwood floors (they get dusty and grimy very easily). As a result, she's obsessed with sweeping and vacuuming - seriously, 3-4 times a week - and she curses me each and every time! It's really caused me a disproportionate amount of grief. BUT NO MORE! Once we put this puppy to work, our floors should be dust free everyday. It should be here in about a week, and man do I hope it works how it's supposed to...

Hello World

Hey All. I've finally decided to get modern and start blogging or at least give it a shot. I wonder how dilligent I'll actually be, but regardless I think it's time I started capturing my thoughts -- if not for anybody else, at least for myself. I have this hunch that putting my thoughts in writing will actually help me refine my thinking. You know, the whole "we only retain 20% of what we read, but 80% of what we write" or some nonsense like that. Well let's see....