House Closing Tomorrow

So we're closing on the house tomorrow and I'm a bit nervous. I just got one of the agreement docs tonight from the lawyer and to be honest, I don't think much of the protection it offers me. To be honest, I'm less concerned about legal tangles with my own family and more concerned with missing some critical detail at the last minute. I think I should have received at least a draft of the agreement at least a couple days in advance, just in case I wanted someone to take a look at it for me.

At this point, unless I want to cause a major stink, delay the closing and create a mess for everyone in the name of protecting myself against the extremely unlikely, I'd better just sign off on everything. 'Tis a shame, though, because I feel like the bad guy raising the prospects of worst-case scenarios to my family and asking them to share in the expense of having the lawyer clean up little details and such.

I hope this all works out. Fingers crossed.

Jupiter vs. eMarketer - Response Somewhat Lackluster

I got some favorable responses on the Spin Board, but folks didn't really have any sort of strong reaction one way or the other. I've been watching Alan Meckler's blog, too, just to see if he's seen the piece or wants to address it. Nothing's crossed my radar screen yet. I also searched with some of the blog search engines I referenced in my column a couple weeks back. Nobody's picking up on the article.

Not that I wrote the column to get a rise out of anyone in particular, but I expected that folks would be a bit more passionate about the issue. If there's one thing I can't stand in this industry, it's the filing of silly, purposeless lawsuits, and I definitely consider the Jupiter suit to be just that.

Jupiter vs. eMarketer

My latest Online Spin went out this morning. No reactions on The Spin Board just yet...

I expect this one is going to ruffle some feathers, but I couldn't let the filing of the lawsuit pass without comment. For seven years, eMarketer has been aggregating statistics and publishing its own analysis and commentary on those statistics for the benefit of the online marketing community. I believe strongly that JupiterResearch has benefitted from eMarketer's publicizing its stats over the years. That's one of the reasons why Jupiter's lawsuit baffles me.

Scanners Rule

Just for shits and giggles yesterday, I popped into Radio Shack and bought a police scanner. While I was working yesterday, I plugged in some earphones and listened to three frequencies that the NYPD uses for crowd control. It was total chaos for a while, with lots of chatter and activity about protestors, re-routing traffic and all sorts of other stuff.

Last night, I took the 12:37 AM train from Penn Station to Ronkonkoma after W's speech. Even as the train cruised out to Long Island, I could hear the cops back in the city coordinating the removal and placement of barricades and allocating personnel to different areas to keep crowds under control. One thing I noticed was that cops tended to ask one another to call them on their cell phones if they had to discuss things in detail, so the fact that I didn't hear much about the processing of protestors who had been arrested was probably due to cops having private conversations with their wireless phones.

Just after 1 AM, the dispatcher broadcast a pre-recorded message from the police commissioner congratulating officers on a job well done. Afterward, the dispatcher had to shout down several officers for making "inappropriate transmissions" on the channels as they hooted and hollered.

All for $99 at Radio Shack, although I bet you could get scanners cheaper online...