Remember when you had a train set? Look at this one!

My brother Dennis sent me this link to a video of the doggonest miniature train setup you've ever seen:

http://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/exhibit/video/4-minutes-wunderland/

in Germany, covering nearly half an acre, at a cost of 8 million Euros (paid for by charging admission). 

My friend Mark Cappel remarked when I sent him this link:

"Have you ever had a train set? It's a maintenance nightmare. Any humidity at all and the tracks corrode and the trains halt or run erratically, which would be hell with the 46-ft train. They must have a humidity controlled room and a trapeze device for flying people in to clean the tracks."

But for most of us kids, the train set never got to the point where it was able to become a maintenance nightmare: It was everything you could do to get the engine to run completely around the track; the set never had enough power; you were always adding track in an attempt to make an actually interesting layout -but the more track you laid, the harder it was for the electrical system to drive the engine, and the slower everything went. My most common memory is of stationing a younger brother at the far end of the track to nudge the engine around the far corner when it stalled, as it did every time.

A few hours of that and we'd had enough for a few weeks. A few hours every month, over the course of a couple of years, then it sat in the basement for a couple of decades - until my mom threw the whole thing out one year -- to the shock and dismay of me and my five brothers. "But you haven't used it in years. In fact, none of you have been down into the basement since you moved away!" "Yeah, but you should have *told* us you were getting rid of it!" [Wives of same brothers, sub-voce to my Mother: "Thank you for throwing it out! He would just have stored it in *our* basement for the next twenty years!"]

Mac McCarthy

Editorial Director

Anti-Pied Piper: The Difficulty of Leading for the so-called Influencer

A discussion of the file-sharing utility 'Dropbox' reminds me of a nagging problem that is only slowly surfacing in my consciousness as an ongoing issue: the difficulty of "leading" people when you're supposed to be an "influencer."

It's wonderful to have friends, and followers, and club fellow members, and all the other relationships, but it can be disillusioning when you actually have a chance to test your influence over others, and get to see just how far it goes.

Or doesn't.

I subscribed to the Web file service Dropbox because it allowed me to send photos to an editor without worrying about file sizes. These days, even the simplest camera generates pictures that are two megabytes in size each, and attempting to email a dozen or so to friends and family can be a discouraging experience: Many people have emailboxes that fill up rapidly, and/or won't accept messages with more than a couple of megabytes in attachments.

But if you have someone you exchange pictures with regularly, if you both have Dropbox you can just drag as many files into a Dropbox folder, and after a while they can drag the same files out of their own Dropbox folder on their computers. It's easy, free, and painless.

Well, setting up a specific shared folder can be a little head-scratching, but it can be figured out eventually and only has to be done once for each correspondent.

Still, I have found it surprisingly hard to get my friends to set up on Dropbox. Even ones who download and install the software put off the folder sharing setup. And even those who have gotten that far can't necessarily be nagged into clearing out their folders of photos and videos and other documents you're sending them. I have two daughters and three other friends who have left their Dropbox folders sitting there with my offerings untouched for months. It's irritating.

Mainly because it underlines once again how little actual influence I have on the actions of others. I am a member of two winetasting groups, and organizer of one of them, with 30 members each. I used to do a wine-events newsletter to one of the groups, until after a year of piecing together the newsletters each month I finally realized that nobody was using the information. They were reading it, and often commenting on how they enjoyed it -- but nobody went to any of the  local events I listed! OK, once -- one couple came to an event, once.

Some Pied Piper I am!

When my consumer Web startup went into beta testing, I invited the same wine group members to sign up, to see if our site's group and events features would do a good job of organizing our monthly wine parties. Half a dozen signed up; the other two dozen didn't even respond. And I see these people every month at the wine event! I post wine tasting notes to my blog and manage to get only a small handful of my 400 Twitter followers to click on the link and go read a posting! Only three of the wine club members Follow the wine blog directly!

Our site will be launching in a week, and I worry that I won't be able to lure more than a small, guilt-ridden handful of my many friends will go to the trouble, despite my determined nagging, of visiting the site and considering signing up. 

Biblical quotes about voices crying in the desert arise unbidden as I consider my  status as the non-Pied Piper of my circle of friends.... Most discouraging.

 Mac McCarthy

Editorial Director

Le tour du monde en 80 secondes

tourdumonde80s — March 31, 2010 — http://www.tourdumonde80.fr
A tour of the world in 80 seconds. Directed by Romain Pergeaux & Alex Profit. A project done in only 3 weeks. The making of the video, pictures and an interview of Alex Profit can be seen at www.tourdumonde80.fr.
Our tour included stops in London - Cairo - Mumbay - Hong Kong - Tokyo - San Francisco - New York - London. This route is a tribute to the famous Jules Verne's book "Le tour du monde en 80 jours".

The Tragedy of Caffeine

I'm more of a night person, or I used to be. As I get older (old), I am turning into more of a no-time person.

My personal tragedy is that caffeine doesn't work on me. I am always trying a cup of coffee in the morning, or to rouse myself from my midafternoon nappytime feeling, but it never works. Finally one evening I had a hearty cup of coffee before going to bed -- and slept like a baby.

There are two tragedies here.First -- if you can't rely on caffeine to give you a kick when you are lagging -- what is there? Only illegal and dangerous drugs. I'm screwed!

Second -- I read once that caffeine's effects reverse with old age: It may pep you up when you're young, but when you're 80, it calms your nerves and, for many people, helps them sleep -- the opposite of the effect it usually has when younger. I am only 63,but the conclusion that forces itself on me is -- I'M OLD!

Sob!

mac

Ukelele Virtuoso Shimabukuro Plays George Harrison: While My Ukelele Gently Weeps

VIrtuoso indeed. By the end you'll be totally sucked in.



How the heck does he *do* this?

Wonderful

How To Achieve Inner Peace....maybe

My friend Steve Drace wrote me recently:

I am passing this on to you because it definitely works and we could all use a little more calmness in our lives. By following simple advice heard on the Oprah show, you too can find a sense of inner peace.

 

Dr. Oz proclaimed, 'The way to achieve inner peace is to finish all the things you have started and have never finished.'

 

So, I looked around my house to see all the things I started and hadn't finished, and before leaving the house this morning, I finished off a bottle of Zinfandel , a bottle of Tequila , a package of Oreos , the remainder of my old Prozac prescription, the rest of the cheesecake, some Doritos, and a box of chocolates. You have no idea how freaking good I feel right now.

 

Pass this on if you know anyone you think might be in need of inner peace.

--Steven Drace

Shock of the New?

A friend cited an article in the NYT, "The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s," By BRAD STONE (Jan 9 2010), which he called "thought provoking."

Another friends dismissed this as a couple of anecdotes supporting nothing (while conceding the quality of the writing).

I agreed, and in more detail, as follows -- along with another complaint about online newspapers.

* The generation gap thing may be overplayed; they've been singing that tune for twenty years - yet I don't feel, at 63, left behind by my 26-year-old twins who've lived with etc etc. If I weren't into all this stuff myself, I might be, but I'd equally be if I didn't follow their musical preferences or fashion sense (which I don't). Not much of a gen gap, if you ask me.

* If you want to see a more thoughtful take on speed-of-change and its impact on society and, more significantly, how people think, go get a copy of "The Shock of the New," the coffee-table version of the PBS TV series from the 1970s, where Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes did a fantastic job (despite the handicap of his Australian accent ;-) and a '70s hairstyle ) of conveying the enormous impact of change on the Western world of 1880 - 1920 era.

* When oh when will sites (even the NYT for God's sake) stop with the stupid, irrelevant, dumb, distracting, numbskull linking of random words and phrases? They link California State University, for God's sake, to "more articles about California State University," though this has zero to do with the article, or with anything any reader is likely to want to pursue -- a link to the quoted professor's research, OTOH, would have been valuable - but no. They don't even link to the specific school, Dominguez Hills -- there are several dozen Cal State Universities! It's like linking to "more articles about universities," and every bit as pointless.

This is what you get when some bright person creates a linking robot. Somebody please end the madness! Or at the very least, somebody at these pubs please look at your data -- I bet half your links get zero clicks! You simply add to a world of pointless distraction!

mac