"Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be." Abraham Lincoln

"It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care." Theodore Roosevelt

Today's image: Abe by ~bear. Great shot. Thank you for sharing.

Happy Presidents' Day. Have an amazing week.

C-SPAN Survey of Presidential Leadership. Total scores/Overall ranking...

1. Abraham Lincoln
2. George Washington
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt
4. Theodore Roosevelt
5. Harry S. Truman
6. John F. Kennedy
7. Thomas Jefferson
8. Dwight D. Einsenhower
9. Woodrow Wilson
10. Ronald Reagan

Entire ranking here.

Bonus: Barry Schwartz @ TED. The real crisis? We stopped being wise...

Photo: Snowy Bike by DrStarbuck
Cool shot, thank you!


"Better three hours too soon, than one minute too late." Shakespeare

"Johnson well says, 'He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.' Life is made up of little things. It is very rarely that an occasion is offered for doing a great deal at once. True greatness consists in being great in little things." Charles Simmons

Congrats & cheers: Brian Kelly, the way-dialed-in programmer who first turned me on to the Gym Class Heroes and Cupid's Chokehold last summer - yesterday it was Top Ten on Rhapsody's All Genres List. Brian Lamb, the C-SPAN CEO, and all-around good guy, who told Sirius to forget it - the pay radio guys wanted rights to preempt C-SPAN for sports (FYI - C-SPAN remains on XM). Bravo Brian! Mel and his subs would be better served retaining Lamb's excellent PA product and preempting one of the Sirius music channels. Not too late to fix (might need a friend or two on the hill someday, someday soon).

Legend of legends: Gary LaPierre inducted into the WBZ Hall of Fame. Well deserved! Congrats Gary. Boston Herald item here.

Legend of legends 2: Marv Dyson is, arguably, the best dressed man in broadcasting, a mensch, and certainly A Great General Manager. CBS2 pays tribute to my pal Marv, the Chicago legend here.

Safe in Sydney: Ron Fell offers up the last post in his blog series - The Queen Mary 2 adventure here. Bravo Ron, well done! Hi to Kathy. Missed one or more of Ron's posts? You may find an index of Ron's posts from the Pacific here.

John Battelle: John posted a brief interview with Michael Wesch the KSU prof who did the killer Web 2.0 video. Video, via YouTube, here, interview, with comments, here. Kudos John, excellent post, thanks for sharing.

High-tech collides with low-tech: Elinor Mills of CNET News writes...

Google, which has a "significant sales force" that works with Fortune 500 advertisers on display and pay-per-click ads, has been hiring more sales staff and has account managers specifically allocated to radio stations, said Josh McFarland, a product manager for Google's Audio Ads business. The company has "a very high respect for what we call the direct (sales) side of the business," he said. "At the same time, we are committed to the self-service model."

Read Elinor's article, Google hears static on radio bid, here. Seems to me there have been seven changes in broadcast sales since 1965: fax, email, cell phones, traffic software, laptops, ppt and pdf, otherwise, just about everything else is pretty much the same. (Closed circuit to Josh: You don't need the major shops to get your product off the ground. Think "local" and "small retail." Consider "pairings" example: with coupons. One of the radio guys you should be talking to is Chuck Tweedle, he's in the bay area at KOIT)

Bonus: Infinite Thinking Machine, a blog devoted to teachers and students here. Which reminds me, perhaps because of the words thinking and machine, of a PBS series - The Great American Dream Machine. Killer satire on TV first brought to us by public television. If you want to know where the inspiration for SNL came from - look no further. Whatever did happen to Marshall Efron? (LATER - Marshall is doing just fine, still acting, more here. I love the internet!)

Video bonus: IT department "help desk" Middle Ages era. Great waste of bandwidth. Introducing "the book" via YouTube, here