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On Monday afternoon Sarah and I took a trip to Dover to enjoy the snow. She did a good job of not crying too much when we climbed to the top and she fell in the snow without gloves on. We met a black Labrador who was running through the snow with a giant stick. It was good to get out of the city to appreciate the snow.

Yesterday I spent a good deal of the day at VMS events. At lunch there was a very interesting presentation by a company based out of research where they have a patented way to produce stem cells from adults by amplifying them with the right cocktails. It piqued my interest more than usual as I am always looking for the potential tipping point discovery that will lead to the fountain of youth. While this may not be a fountain of youth, the potential applications of having abundant stem cells for therapy could be huge. The initial targets are for blood factors but they could repopulate an aging body with a new set of stem cells and make it young again, or add stem cells that have been genetically modified to resolve a core problem with the body (either one that is inherent in all of us that causes us to age) or problems that are specific diseases related to aging like heart disease, muscle loss, bone fragility, and neural degradation. The team is only 5 people right now. I was tempted to stop in my tracks and offer cash, time, sweat, blood and potentially bone marrow. It could be that the fountain of youth is the media filled with the right cocktail of proteins to make a shaking petri dish shaking grow an infinite supply of each person's own stem cells. I’ll be following what they do and maybe will need to involve unqualified self in some way.

Sherwin gave some good advice to a group regarding luxury products. Basically the idea at Bose has always been that you can’t expect the channel to effectively create value for your products. So you need to do direct marketing. But in order to afford direct marketing you need to have more margin in the products. Customers will complain that a product is more expensive and luxurious but they will buy them anyways. If people only cared about price then everyone would be driving Kias because they are the cheapest cars on the market. Purchases are emotional decisions and having the lowest cost product doesn’t help that emotional decision – having the clearest message and a way for the consumer to appreciate the value in the product does. It has made me think about how to position any product in markets where there are free products. Maybe free isn’t the killer price point? In Sherwin’s quick diagrams the perfect price is at the elbow of value where any more cost doesn’t add to the value and the price is beyond what the user is willing to pay for the value. It was an interesting lesson at least. We were talking about rechargeable flashlights.

Today I have been combing the Internet for press contacts and bloggers who would have a potential interest in the smart organizer. It has led me to discover lots of odd products and sites that I otherwise wouldn’t have been using. I started using feedster and pluck in order to find bloggers with comments on desktop search. I also took a look at some odd organizer tools like grouper, an application that I thought would be useful for sharing videos but thought it was rather complex and required me to invite friends. I have the same problem with hello, I don’t want to invite my friends to do some sharing thing. I barely want to use the IM tools like Yahoo IM and I installed the Microsoft one again today just to chat with Aaron. I promptly uninstalled the grouper software. I also found a site called 43things where people all list what they are doing. I posted my new years resolution to it. There were some other interesting things like Neville Hobson’s weblog where the most striking thing is a gadget on it that shows who has been there and where the people currently looking at the page are from called Geoloc. The sidebar in the blog now has it included. I also played around with the new video search tool from google. It will show you every television show that mentioned Johnny Carson last week. I somehow got connected from one site to 43things, a site that lists people's goals and objectives. It is very overwhelming, like a buzzing of humanity crying out their goals and proclaiming them when they are achieved. I'm not sure I can look at it without having a panic attack. The interesting thing about it is that it allows you to find other people trying/hoping to do the same thing as you or those who have done it and can speak from the other side. The only thing that might allow me to relax is that thought of eternal life so that I could have more time to do all the things I would love to do. So I added that as my 11th thing was to "become immortal". My final discovery was the cheesus site. It was 30 seconds of entertainment.

At lunch today I read a bit of the Sports Illustrated article about the Patriots win against the Steelers. I was surprised to learn that Brady had a fever of 103 the day before and was attached to an IV. That information wasn’t in the news at all. It makes the win on Sunday all the more impressive. It would be great to go to the Superbowl but I don’t think it will happen. As season ticket holders I figured my dad and I would get some kind of information like an invitation to participate in a lottery for tickets. But as of today we are still waiting for our golden invitation. My fantasy of it was something out of Charlie and the Chocolate factory. I reality checked on Stubhub. The Stubhub ticket range is already $1695-$9000 per ticket. That is way out of the price range I am interested in paying. Oh well. I guess it is time for our second annual Superbowl party. Included below is the press release issued for the first one.

Sarah and I watched the movie Code 46 recently. It was great from a cinematography standpoint. They were mixing Gattaca, Lost in Translation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Rather than spending money on creating futuristic sets they went on location to Shanghai so things looked like the future but were all present tense scenery. My problem with the movie is that it lacked the strengths of any of those other movies and ultimately didn’t make enough sense or leave a completed feeling. Some of the problems came from this futuristic vision where IVF and cloning is everywhere but people get pregnant when they have sex once and then get arrested if they have sex again and it is genetically not a good idea. I saw it in sharp contrast to the end of an episode of ER where Dr. Green dies of a brain tumor that Sarah and I watched while eating lunch in Brookline Village the other day. In less than a minute they had Sarah's tear ducts working in overdrive and mine spilling some tears. The big difference is that you don't care what happens to Tim Robbins' character because he has a wife and cute child and then he screws around with some woman for one night. So what if he can't love her. At least Lost in Translation showed problems with a relationship. If they wanted to show a situation where two people get stuck they should have studied Miss Saigon. That was a successful tearjerker. Code 46 is worth a watch if you want to see some good cinematography of foreign futuristic buildings but it gets a C for story and the characters in it.