contrary to my kindergarten report cards, the new york times says i have self-control

I was forwarded this recent article from the NYTimes, "A Boy Named Sue, and a Theory of Names" because, not unlike the youth of Johnny Cash's famous song, I too have a predominantly female name.

Fortunately, research confirms that there isn't anything too detrimental about growing up with an effeminate name. Despite being named after a boxer (seriously), I've never been much of a fighter -- just don't call me "Alex" ;-)

Instead, I apparently validate the data:
“Researchers have studied men with cross-gender names like Leslie,” Dr. Evans explained. “They haven’t found anything negative — no psychological or social problems — or any correlations with either masculinity or effeminacy. But they have found one major positive factor: a better sense of self-control. It’s not that you fight more, but that you learn how to let stuff roll off your back.”
So if you're thinking of naming your son something a bit atypical, maybe this will encourage you. If I have a daughter, I'm naming her "Steve."


And here's a photo of me looking well-adjusted with Harper of Threadless.
Those guys throw a great party.

digg? i have no beef with digg


If Valleywag reports it, it must be true -- albeit blurry.

While getting a pre-flight, post-sxsw breakfast at the Austin airport with digg CEO Jay Adelson (no, we didn't spend the night together) I had no idea I was also chatting with a fellow rock band virtuoso.

Scoble and the gang should definitely take that act to the street. I think it'd do even better than the breadpig premier, which found its way to the digg front page today.

What's the only thing better than all the traffic from getting breadpig on the front page of a reddit competitor? Knowing it's lowering the intellectual rigor of their site by a notch or two :)

http://digg.com/xbox/Funny_Video_of_Guys_Playing_Rock_Band_on_the_Street

the alien never looked so good


This is the best photograph of a reddit shirt I've seen. Very professional stuff. I stumbled upon this flickr submission by sxld and couldn't help myself but blog about it. This was titled /psuedogeek, but I think this ought to have been /geek -- nothing psuedo about it.

sxsw update: there's lots of free beer in austin

team reddit is having a great time with Ben of Grooveshark

In 24 hours, I still hadn't learned a new facial expression. This was at the facebook party, which featured Michael Stipe, but no Zuckerberg -- or SugarMountain, as I call him. Valleywag dutifully covered the party and snapped the above picture.

Photos from last night's digg party will be going up as soon as I can find the USB cable. There should be some good pictures of Jay Adelson, Garrett Camp, and me floating around somewhere -- a nefarious triumvirate of sites wasting the Internet's time.

there's free beer in austin

Thanks for the free alcohol, Gawker!
As we prepare for our OpenFormat quasi-panel, I'm reminded of all the free alcohol from the night before.

The night went as expected (lots of free booze) and it ended with me sharing a queen bed with Chris -- also as expected.

I also had one of my ideas-of-the-month validated by Anthony of HypeMachine who uses stickers for business cards. The back (thicker than usual sticker paper) has all the important information and the front is an attractive sticker, because startups go through stickers like VCs go through souls.

just got to sxsw and i've already lost an hour of my life

Damn you, daylight savings! *shakes fist skyward*

I seem to remember the entire country of China doesn't have timezones at all. That's the way to live. One timezone, everywhere, no matter how wide your country is.

On an unrelated note, Guy Kawasaki was on my plane. No good story, though, it was just painfully clear that this particular SFO -> AUS flight was full of geeks.

Time to lose my SXSW-virginity!

the gawker empire is crumbling: I get two mentions in one day?

Woke up Friday morning to find an IM from an annoyed friend who found me in her daily news feed. You see, my friend Jenny 8 (the one who so graciously invited me to join her on the Colbert Report) had written an entry for the Huffington Post about how to "prepare for Colbert." (I just trademarked that rhyme, so don't even think about lifting it.)

In it, she cites an email exchange with an over-enthusiastic Colbert fan (me) suggesting some lines to use and hypothetical responses to expect:
After telling Colbert that Chinese food is more American than apple pie given how much we eat apple pie versus Chinese food...

Colbert : "I eat apple pie every morning - with a jack and coke - and a bald eagle egg omlette."

Jenny: Well, there are exceptions - and you are clearly an exceptional American - for most would say Chinese food.
Anyway, Gawker found this amusing, wrote a piece on it, and thus my name "Lee friend Alexis" polluted my pal's newsfeed.

And later in the day, Kotaku kindly plugged breadpig. Careful Denton, the readers of the vast Gawker empire are going to start revolting if you keep pushing such mediocre content...

Although, the quote of the day came in the comments section from a sage named fawrh:
the homeless guy = a good front man and a great insperation to us all...

the kids that made this video = should be sterilized...
On second thought, keep writing about breadpig, I hear there's a VH1 Behind the Music special on the way.

the breadpig soars, rocks

I started a company called Breadpig, Inc. last October to pursue some of my geeky design ambitions. I've been quite fortunate with the sale of reddit, so I'm not terribly interested personal gains from it; I'd rather donate the profits from the things I design. But I wanted to run breadpig like a business and create stuff that fellow geeks wanted to buy -- regardless of where the money was going.

My first project was aimed at the homogeneous greeting card industry. unHolidayCards raised quite a bit of money for Solving Kids' Cancer, a fantastic non-profit I've worked with in New York. The rest of the profits will fund breadpig prizes, the first of which will be announced March 14.

But the breadpig brand is a versatile one, so when I started a band last month with some childhood friends, there was no question as to what we'd name it. We've been practicing and jamming together for a long time now. Creating a band just seemed like the logical next step. Need proof? breadpigband.com

Here's a video from our first live show in D.C. last week:

A big thanks to the breadpig band for all the help in putting this together: Brian Femiano, Mike Scrivener, Adam Solomon, Jon Swyers, and Jacob Winthrop.