Ali Bytes: Bullet-sized strategies for modern living

June has been a rough month. This weekend will be my first weekend in DC in six weeks. Most than any summer past, I find myself pondering the proverbial and cleche “where did the time go?” Combined with a rough economy and skyrocketing unemployment, I figured today is appropriate to unveil a blog post that I’ve sat on for oh probably close to a year.

I’ve found that asking for help isn’t easy and delegation is probably the most underrated difficult skill to learn. Most of us are taught from an early age, directly or indirectly, that independence is a virtue and that saying “yes” to everything is the best way to advance your career. Well, a while ago I read an article about when to hire someone to do a job you can do. It came at the exact time my friend Sara recommended a cleaning service. I bit the bullet and hired someone to clean my house, which I highly recommend by the way. This sparked lots of thinking and discussions about what other jobs I could hire someone to do.

So after a half dozen very funny and creative conversations on this awesome conversation topic, here are job positions I’ll be opening some time around 2028 (or sooner if I get applicants). What job would you hire out if you could?

1. Senior Concert and Event Watcher: I am an avid concert-goer and have frequented most of the major venues in DC - Jammin Java, Wolf Trap, DC Improv and 9:30 club being my favorites. While I get all the weekly emails from these places, I usually only spend 4 seconds scanning for a name I know. Unfortunately, this means I probably miss lots of up-and-comers which are usually the best shows. For example, three years ago I saw Eric Hutchinson open at Rams Head Tavern (after which he signed a CD for me) and now he has the theme song for this summer’s hottest movie Away We Go. My Watcher would know my taste and budget and make recommendations on which concerts - or comedians, performances, musicals, etc. - I should go see.
2. Associate 100 Calorie Snack Packer: Have you noticed that candy like M and Ms and Swedish Fish are now being packaged in 100 calorie packs? WTF? It’s still candy. But I must admit that I think it’s marketing genius since these are simply Halloween packs decorated for the other 11 months of the year. It seems like every food is being sold this way - Pringles chips, granola, hummus, etc. Of course I buy these for weight control and convenience, but I feel like I’m being consciously tricked into ruining the environment and paying a premium for being too lazy to look at serving size. My Packer would ration out my snacks for me into reusable tupperware containers so I could buy economy at Costco, save money, be green and watch my waistline at the same time.
3. Facebook Statustician: Not to be confused with a statistician, my Statustician would monitor my friends on Facebook and keep me abreast of key life changes, interesting articles posted, pictures worth looking at and birthdays. (Plus, he or she would know which friends are friends and which are “friends.”) Imagine the time savings of someone filtering information overload to only what you might actually care about and not being sucked into the ‘book on a daily basis. Maybe I could spend the extra time reading a real book.
4. Director of Smoothie Blending: There’s little more refreshing that an icey fresh fruit smoothie (with an immuni/fiber/vita boost mixed in of course). But smoothies require having fresh fruit on hand, making a mess and knowing the right combination of juice/ice/fruit which I always get wrong. Robeks makes a tasty light, banana mango but they are expensive. I would like someone to be on hand to whip me up a healthy breakfast smoothie every day.
5. Executive Googler: My EG would follow me around and every time I had a question, he or she would provide me with the answer. In some ways, this is sort of a 21st Century personal librarian so skills may be transferable. Of course, I didn’t know about kgb, ChaCha or Aardvark when I first thought up this and they all provide a pretty similar function. You should check them out if this is a job you’re also looking to fill.
6. Home Florist (with possible promotion to Gardener): I want someone to help me take care of my plants, put fresh flowers around my house and, possibly grow me some basil and tomatoes. This profession might in fact already exist since these people work in office buildings all over the city keeping live plants looking glorious in lobbies. It would probably be a part time job and I’m pretty easy when it comes to flowers I like - can’t go wrong with gerbera daisies and purple hydrangeas.
7. Efficiencist: Speaking of limited time, are you like me trying to squeeze more out of every day? My Efficiencist would shadow me and every week would make recommendations on how I could do things faster. For example, these could be as simple as keyboard shortcuts or readjusting my schedule like doing laundry before going to work. This highly skilled professional would then monitor my progress and help me readjust habits to implement the recommendations.
8. Personal Tailor: Have you ever gotten a pair of pants taken in? It costs a whopping $14. Wouldn’t it be amazing to pick out what you want to wear and have someone there to make sure it fits you perfectly all the time. With all those pounds you’d shed from your new portion control thanks to your Packer, you could drop LBs and not have to worry about buying new clothes, or alternatively, come back from Fourth of July BBQing and not feel guilty that things are a little snug.
9. Blog Poster: If you’ve gotten this far, you’re a super fan of this blog so you’ll understand this one.  I’ve sort of fallen off the wagon on posting.  My BP would be like the BP across the street - I could just drive up, plug in and get a fresh dose of inspiration and fuel to keep AliBytes going strong.

Honorable mention jobs others have mentioned they would hire: Ironer (I second this but dry cleaners serve this function), Pool boy trained in lethal arts, Baker, 50s-era House Wife, Match maker, Cleaner (which of course I told them is pretty affordable), Laugher and Masseuse. Very belated shout out to Geoff, Tim, Sara, Dave, Elizabeth and Lisa for their contributions to this post.

I just bought a new computer. It’s a tough thing to admit in these hard economic times, but I’ve been wanting a machine to try some video editing for some time now and having spent five days in Austin, TX last week at SXSW Interactive with some pretty amazing people, I was inspired to take the plunge (like the people in yesterday’s Washington Post article). As a first step to setting myself up, I looked for new Firefox add-ons to make my life easier and was reminded how many solutions are out there - web companies, iPhone applications, Firefox add-ons, people I know - to problems I didn’t even know I had.

But it also reminded me how many “solutions” are out there like strangers with candy trying to lure me into new problems. For example Twitter. It might seem like blasphemy to return from SXSW and bash the tool that essentially was birthed there (or at least reached adolescence) but let me explain why I’m not going to use Twitter even if I do see how it could be useful for others.

1. Twitter doesn’t solve a problem for me. As Lev Grossman put it so well in a TIME article two years ago, The Hyperconnected, “Like any good pusher, services like Twitter don’t answer existing needs; they create new ones and then fill them.” While I like my friends, both real and virtual, enough to occasionally page through Facebook status updates to see what’s going on, I simply don’t want any more information to process on a daily basis. To put this in perspective, if I follow just 25% of the approximate number of people I am connected to from my other social networks and each of these people tweets just once per day, that is more than 90,000 more pieces of mostly useless information per year that I’d be compelled to research, react or respond to.
2. Interesting things should be heard and not seen. Clearly I’m not a purist since I’m writing a blog post about something I hope at least someone will find interesting, but I do think most interesting comments should be made aloud and ignite a live dialogue. It seems that too often conversations never make it to traditional discourse, staying instead short-hand in an email chain, on a Facebook wall or back and forth on Twitter. I wonder what this is doing to the quality and growth of our thoughts. Plus for every interesting comment, there are likely ten other really, really boring comments. As Brian Unger reported on NPR, “Most people are surprised to learn that friends don’t care when you are showering, gardening or working out. There’s a good reason these activities are hidden. Because they’re boring and no one cares.”
3. I don’t want to follow or have followers. Twitter language reminds me of the now infamous 14 year-old Volkswagen ad campaign: “On the road of life, there are passengers and there are drivers. Drivers wanted.” I don’t want to “conform, comply, copy or come after” anyone else and I don’t really want other people to do that to me either. As a huge proponent of collaboration, I’d rather search for ways to construct commentary and ideas with other people. To quote Brian Unger again, “It’s like stalking someone but without the inconvenience of sitting in a car outside their house on cold rainy night with a loaded gun in your lap.”
4. I like my real friends and my life too much. After finishing part-time school which ate up most of my evenings for 2.5 years, I found myself working most nights until 8:30 or even after. Now, three months later (also inspired by SXSW), I’m on a quest for balance and to relearn to “be present,” or live for the people and experiences of the moment. The idea of thinking of everything in terms of what to post to Twitter for a group of people I’m not currently in front of, or worse to get a fix about someone else’s experiences (like Lev talked about in his latest TIME article Desperately Trying to Quit Twitter) seems short sighted to me, though I am totally guilty of this every once in a while with FB. Unlike John Mayer, I’d rather, and am trying hard to, experience life as it was before their were all these “solutions,” a time when people got by just fine without cell phones or email. I’ll see how it works. This paradox is captured in this short post by Shane Gibson, “Rapport Building it’s about being totally present…You can also follow me on Twitter…”

Michael Arrington recently wrote on TechCrunch that music is the reason that Facebook, the world’s largest online social network, still lags behind MySpace in the U.S. I would argue that Facebook holds its position because of its picture sharing functionality. It’s fascinating how much music and pictures open up new business opportunities on the internet. These are four great examples of websites that have capitalized on our craving for more music.

1. You’ve likely already heard of this site with 1 million listeners daily but in case you haven’t: Pandora’s mission is to “reward the musically curious among us with a never-ending experience of music discovery.” Started way back in 2000 as the Music Genome Project, the site offers a streaming radio that allows you to create “stations that play only music you like.” What’s unique and awesome about this site is the range of music and deep research behind it. They’ve unpacked “the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics.” Not only can you actually listen to music without paying for it, you can also read everything you could want to know about the artist and find similar artists and songs. Now that you’re sold on it, the sad news is that they might have to pull the plug very soon. Last year, the per-song streaming media royalties that Web radio stations pay doubled, resulting in 70% of Pandora’s $25 million in revenue going to fees.
2. TourFilter.com was founded in April 2006 by Chris Marstall, a guy I feel like I’d be buddies with. What I love about it is the incredible simplicity. The minimalist interface offers only a search field and city drop down with the instructions “find concerts in 60 US cities.” Results, which are pulled from more than 1300 venue websites (as opposed to the artists’ schedules like other sites do), appear in a list detailing date, band, club, and city with links to ticket purchasing sites. The about us page says “we used to miss too many shows - we’d hear about them after tickets sold out, or worse, read about them in the Globe the day after. Maybe even in the Metro (oh, the shame!) So we wrote a program to download all the area club listings daily, search for bands we liked, then send out email.” I’d recommend you check it out and sign up for a weekly concert calendar for your city. Oh and for those of you who know LiveNation.com, from what I can tell TourFilter is better.
3. “At MyTracks.com, Indie is our mainstream.” For a modest monthly or annual fee (subscriptions are $7.95 per month or $69.95 per year with student discounts I’ve just discovered), you gain access not to an unlimited number of artists but an unlimited number of song downloads. It’s a great way to discover new music of emerging bands. Unlike iTunes or Lala which allow you to “buy” songs on a restricted use basis, MyTracks is not governed by RIAA so you get full ownership with a major portion of the membership fees goes to the artists. It’s a great site I’d recommend. The only thing I they should reconsider is their value proposition which makes no sense to me: “Think of it as ‘MP3′ TV, minus the TV.” Oh and maybe their right aligned About Us page.
4. I’m mildly obsessed with TuneGlue , a site backed by Last.fm, which is like the visual thesaurus for music. Like all these others, it’s simple: search for a musical artist, click to expand and you’ll see about four to six artists that are similar. You can follow a path you like and the tool will keep making the connections of what music sounds similar. You can also drag thenodes around the screen and click to see the albums by each artist. Then once you find music you might like, you can go plug the music into Pandora and if you like it, look to buy it on MyTracks.

I was working on a post about creative websites and got a little carried away with this one: YearbookYourself.com. Though I can’t remember where I learned about it to give due credit, I thought I’d at least share the amusement. The site is a combination of Facebook and ElfYourself complete with music accompaniment.

It’s simple: upload a photo, pick your mall and scroll through your yearbook photos from the last 5 decades. The only thing I can’t figure out is the point. They highlight the fashion trend of the year with tips to “go get yours” with specific store suggestions, like Bloomingdales and H&M, but no links to the actual stores. Successful marketing campaign or not, it’s worth at least 20 minutes of entertainment (and a new Facebook profile picture of course).  And yes, I realize this is a little creepy.

1. This one is from 1966, a year known for knee-high-go-go boots.
2. In 1984 neon colors were hot, though you can’t tell from this black and white picture.
3. This one is from 1996 when doc marten combat boots were a symbol of fashion.
4. The year is 1952, a time when many women sported pearls.
5. All trends come back around as have oversized sunglasses originally popular in 1968.
6. Apparently overalls went out of style after 1990.
7. And finally, saving the best for last, my favorite and the most realistic looking, 1960, the era of the “little black dress.”