When I was a child, I had a fleeting glimpse of my future. My mother used to tell me to “pay attention” as my brain wandered off to something else. Little did I know that – according to Dave and Seth – I was training for my current gig. My training went so well that when Amy says, “Brad, have you been listening to me?” I can repeat back the last few sentences that she’d said. This continues to be one of my favorite marital party tricks.

I love books (I know, hard to tell). Yesterday, before we saw Serenity, Amy and I ended up in the Strand Book Store at 828 Broadway (and 12th). It was unbelievably great – 18 miles of books, lots of old stuff – some dusty, some yellowy, but all delightfully full of paper. And – most remarkably – there wasn’t a chair or a latte in sight. Just like your father’s bookstore used to be.

Amy and I saw Serenity yesterday, along with $10m worth of other people. We loved it. This morning, while I was running over the Brooklyn Bridge with Matt Blumberg, I asked him what he thought of it (he saw it yesterday also). He was unambiguous – he didn’t like it. I probed a little, found out he hadn’t seen the TV series (amazing show, but cancelled after a dozen episodes or so) and it was clear that he didn’t understand a lot of the movie.

On August 4th, Greg Reinacker – NewsGator founder and CTO – announced NewsGator Enterprise Server and stated that it would ship in Q3. On Friday night, September 30, at 7:28pm (Mountain Time) Greg sent out an email stating “FYI – build 3202 was declared “gold” at 7:13pm tonight.” In my first company, we had an enormous amount of scrutiny on releases as we shipped them all the time. Since we wrote custom software, we often updated our customers’ systems and – as a result – were releasing software for clients as frequently as daily (although typically we tried to stay on an approximately once a month cycle.) Since we usually had more than 20 active clients at a time, we could have a half a dozen releases in any given week.

At dinner last night with Scott Moody (the founder of Throw – which was acquired by Excite in 1998), we began talking about the difference on the web between groups and individuals. While we slurped down our intensely spicy Vietnamese soup, Scott suggested that much of the current generation of web software has a conceptual design flaw – namely that it has been created for individuals (one) rather than groups (many) even though it is used by many (and the great utility of most of the software is when it is used by many).

Bob Gentry – the CFO at Finali (now Convergys) – suggested that this reminded him of me. Thanks Bob – after Amy saw this she suggested that I start using this as my email footer.

Most of the customer support stories I read on the web are about lousy experiences. Tonight – I had an awesome one. After dinner, Amy treated me to 30 minutes at Best Buy in Soho to buy a Verizon Wireless EVDO Card for my October Life Dinner gift. The folks at Best Buy did a good job even though they ended up setting me up for the wrong version of the service. My laptop doesn’t have a CD-ROM drive, so I had to download the software from the Internet.

I spent some time at lunch recently with Chris Sacca – one of the business development guys at Google. Chris just put a post up on his blog with hints about how to get his attention if you are a company that wants to do a deal with Google. It’s instructive, useful, and full of Google style.

Jeff Jarvis – who has written extensively on his terrible customer experience in Dell Hell – doesn’t have a monopoly (nor does Dell) on stupid customer experience moves. Ryan McIntyre – who I work with closely and has been a huge Apple user (and fan) for as long as I can remember – has a delicious post on his absurd experience with Apple, at the Apple Store, and with the Apple Customer Support Immune System. Painfully funny.