EchoDitto

I just flew in from Barcelona, and boy are my arms tired!

Well, not really - actually I got back about two weeks ago, but what with finalizing development and launching President Clinton's newest site and the Bears beating the Packers, I haven't had a lot of time to collect my thoughts and set them down via an interblag. Well, now that things have calmed down slightly, I figured I'd give it a shot.

First of all, Barcelona is an amazing city. It's incredibly metropolitan - sort of like New York on a smaller scale and with more spanish, although most people with whom I interacted spoke great English. It's really easy to get around, which was good since the conference was taking place at CitiLab Cornélia, on the outskirts of the city.

I recently assumed the mantle of Chicago Bears event coordinator for my local (well, sorta) pub, The Gael, which meant that, with the season quickly approaching, I needed a system easy to rapidly deploy for getting the word out to Bears fans in New York. After the (amazing, fantastic) NFC Championship game back in January, one of the pub's owners passed around an email signup sheet (wonderful forethought on his part!) and invited anyone interested to give us their email address.

Remember when Facebook first hit the scene? I sure do. I had heard about the MySpaces, and had in fact set up a profile, but I was peeved with not only the overall quality of the pages, but also the length of time required to get profile pages to load. This, kids, is what happens when people with no HTML skills try to use spyware-laden tools to be creative.

And then, there was Facebook. And it was good: MySpace, with its heavy-handed marketing focus, was the annoying, belligerent 13-year-old screaming at everything and everyone that walked past, begging for attention. Facebook was the 20-year-old wunderkind waiting patiently to meet the King of Sweden.

New York City is a BIG place.

Chicago, not so much. But I still miss it.

Sure, the Chicagoland area's population is ranked 24th highest in the world, but its paltry 8.3 million citizens don't get much of a word in edgewise compared to the NYC Metro area's 17.8 million people, ranked second in the world.

But Chicago - Chicago has hot dogs.

Hot dogs that look like they've been drug through a garden, filled with huge slices of pickles, tomatoes, peppers, and relish of a neon green color that could only be caused by green dye #3 or radioactivity. And not to cramp on NYC's style or anything (and I may inadvertently start a small war by saying this), but Chicago's pizza is much better.