Now and then I think back to an old song, a not-quite-as-old television commercial, and a little league baseball "career" that happened years before. In each of our lives there's that song, that toy, that event, or what have you - Something from our past that somehow pulls us back, and returns our minds directly into a piece of our past that has some real meaning.

For me, one of those timeless reminders is a song and a Pizza Hut commercial from the early 90's. I recall seeing the commercial on TV, and it's on the old VHS video tape of the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. The song is called "Right Field," and it was originally performed by Peter, Paul and Mary (here's an iTunes link for ya). I'm not sure who's singing in the Pizza Hut commercial, but the combination of the visuals and the music is priceless, and it just takes me back.

I think when I was much younger, I even looked a bit like that kid. Maybe a somewhat skinnier head, but close. Watching that commercial truly takes me back. I wasn't a great baseball player by any stretch of the imagination, but I truly enjoyed the game. I remember taking a couple fast pitches to the face, and standing in right (or left, or center) field, the ball high in the air and coming down at me. I was always at least a little amazed when it landed in my glove. I remember my best friends with me on the team and out on the field. The cottonwood fluff floating in the air, just like in the commercial. Lots of rubber bands, oil and a ball wrapped in a new glove, crammed under the truck tire overnight. And I remember, quite clearly, our dads (who were also our coaches) taking us to -- you guessed it -- the local Pizza Hut after games, where we pigged out (that's the term we used back then), belched a lot of soda bubbles, and generally had a great time. I remember playing Space Invaders and Asteroids and Missile Command on the table games there when they were brand new.

Years later as an adult, when the Pizza hut commercial was created I remember watching it with a couple of my foster sons. It was baseball season for them, and they loved it as much as I did. Of course, the fact that it was on the beginning of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video tape helped (since they loved that, too). I was helping coach by then. When the kids weren't around, I sometimes played the commercial over and over a few times. I know it sounds weird, but like I said - Each of us has those little things that truly take us back.

A lot of people don't realize the original song is one of many great songs by Peter, Paul and Mary. I have no idea who recorded the actual music used in the commercial spot. Many people also often don't realize there are additional verses. The final verse and chorus, with a minor modification, if what they used in the commercial. That's my favorite part, but the whole song is great and I think anyone who's a fan of the song would like to hear it or read the lyrics. Here's an iTunes link. The original lyrics appear below, and I've added a bonus YouTube link -- video of PP&M performing the original song.

Saturday summers, when I was a kid
We'd run to the schoolyard and here's what we did
We'd pick out the captains and we'd choose up the teams
It was always a measure of my self esteem
'Cuz the fastest, the strongest, played shortstop and first
The last ones they picked were the worst
I never needed to ask, it was sealed,
I just took up my place in right field.
Playing...

Right field, its easy, you know.
You can be awkward and you can be slow
That's why I'm here in right field
Just watching the dandelions grow

Playing right field can be lonely and dull
Little leagues never have lefties that pull
I'd dream of the day they'd hit one my way
They never did, but still I would pray
That I'd make a fantastic catch on the run
And not lose the ball in the sun
And then I'd awake from this long reverie
And pray that the ball never came out to me
Here in...

Right field, its easy, you know.
You can be awkward and you can be slow
That's why I'm here in right field
Just watching the dandelions grow

Off in the distance, the game's dragging on,
There's strikes on the batter, some runners are on.
I don't know the inning, I've forgotten the score.
The whole team is yelling and I don't know what for.
Then suddenly everyone's looking at me
My mind has been wandering; what could it be?
They point at the sky and I look up above
And a baseball falls into my glove!

Here in right field, its important you know.
You gotta know how to catch
You gotta know how to throw
That's why I'm here in right field
Just watching the dandelions grow!

A simpler time, not a worry in the world. Just a ball, a bat, a group of kids, a field and a few dandelions to distract some of us. We may never get back there in real life, but it's fun to revisit it from time to time in our minds.

I'm also reminded, strangely enough, of something that happened many years later. Several years ago I was in a conference room with my IT team, assembled as a panel to interview a candidate for a position on our IT help desk. We'd asked the common technical and background questions of the candidate, whose name was Aaron. We then threw a couple behavioral questions at him, including the classic, "Why are manhole covers round?" A semi-blank look came over Aaron's face, and after several moments he blurted out his answer: "Because Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles like pizza???" I turned to the guy next to me and declared, "He's the guy." We hired him the next day. His other interview questions and excellent answers had a lot to do with that decision, but the pizza answer was really what made it stick for me. Anyone can answer technical questions. That answer was a classic. And for the record, he turned out to be a great hire, too.

Whether it's a song like "Right Field" or a movie ("Stand by Me" comes to mind) or something else, each of us has our memory triggers. I'm just glad YouTube has that old commercial online, so I don't have to buy a VHS player just to load up this old TMNT video tape that I still have on my shelf. I'm not even sure if it would play anymore, but one thing's for sure: I won't be getting rid of that old tape any time soon.

LinkedIn has started sending owners of certain LinkedIn Groups email letting them know that on Friday they'll be enabling a new discussions capability for group managers and members. A friend received the information for his LinkedIn group today, but I have not yet received it for the one I co-manage, PDX Tech. So, it's not clear whether this is rolling out to all groups or just some.

The addition of this new Groups functionality is a great move. To date, people who manage LinkedIn groups have had very limited options in terms of how to enable networking and communication among their groups. One can manually export a delimited-text file in a few formats to let you send emails, but outside of that the group interaction model has been short-featured, and required use of outside services - a sloppy model at best.

In addition to the group discussions, they plan to release an enhanced, searchable membership roster capability. Earlier this summer they introduced a searchable Groups directory. Positive changes appear to be happening.

Below are the details from the LinkedIn email.

Dear #####,

First, thank you for managing your group on LinkedIn. We sincerely appreciate the time and effort you devote to your members, and we know they value it. Together you have made Groups one of the top features on LinkedIn.

This Friday, we will be adding several much-requested features to your group:

• Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and your members. (You can turn discussions off in your management control panel if you like.)
• Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.
• Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics which your members may choose to receive. (We will be turning digests on for all current group members soon, and prompting them to set to their own preference.)
• Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.

We're confident that these new features will spur communication, promote collaboration, and make your group more valuable to you and your members. We hope you can come by LinkedIn on Friday morning to check out the new functionality and get a group discussion going by posting a welcome message.

Sincerely,
The LinkedIn Groups Team

A couple of small, independent evaluations of the iPhone 3G's performance, which has been much maligned by many of it's customers (including me from time to time), have been published in the past day or so. The results are interesting to consider, especially side-by-side.

In the first test, Swedish tech site GP took their iPhone 3G to a super-fancy antenna test chamber at a company called Bluetest, where they ran the iPhone through the highly technical paces along with a few other 3G phones for comparison purposes. Results are available on the GP site.

In the second test, Wired asked readers to participate in testing from the field, where they gathered and submitted speed and other connectivity data with their own phones. Wired then analyzed, mapped and posted the results as well as the test data in complete raw format at their site.

In the end, what did the tests yield? Well, you should read them for yourself and draw your own conclusions, of course. But in a nutshell, here's my take on what they found:

• GP's antenna test found that the iPhone 3G's antenna performs as well as any of the other 3G phones tested.
• The Wired real-world network test found that the networks are often woefully underperforming, and that while speeds are typically faster than EDGE, the ability to connect to a 3G tower might be problematic at best.

So, does this mean Apple-provided software fixes may not be able to solve the iPhone's 3G woes? It seems that in the case of network performance where the number of "bars" showing on 3G is at the bottom of the scale yet a EDGE network has a strong signal, trading off could be done better by the phone. But what really needs to happen to solve the big-picture problem is better 3G coverage. My experience in several cities has been that 3G coverage is poor in many cases, and inconsistent at best. In fact, if the AT&T EDGE/2.5G network was not available as a fall-back (or maybe "call-back" is a better term, given the dropped call rate), AT&T would never be able to sell their service. The effective 3G network coverage just isn't good enough to stand on its own. And poor coverage combined with all those handoffs and network drops just mean more and more battery power being applied by the device to keep re-establishing it's 3G connectivity.

However, any software fixes for lockups, freezing and app crashes will require Apple taking action. One thing I've wondered lately: Are device/software hangs and crashes causing or somehow related to network connectivity issues? Could one be causing the other, at least part of the time? I have noticed locking/hanging in several apps while the iPhone tries to connect to the AT&T network (as evidenced by the simultaneous flurry of AT&T radio-speaker-dance noise that we've all become familiar with over the past several years).

I like to listen to my Pandora "stations" in the background while working on my laptop. I get frustrated when I accidentally close the web browser (often its in a hidden tab) or, even worse, click on a link soewhere and Safari, in all it's awesomeness and wisdomness, re-uses the window and kills the audio feed.

In hopes of finding a better way, I started searching for a Pandora widget for the Mac Dashboard (the layover-page that you can put any of a number of downloadable mini-apps on). Unfortunately, I didn't find anything. (Update - turns out there is a widget out there, but it's a memory hog and apparently has a few issues). So, rather than looking for someone else to do the work for me, I started to actually think about a solution I could build on my own.

After about 10 minutes, I remembered the nifty capability in Safari to define a "snipped" portion of a web page and make it a Widget on the OSX Dashboard. You use the little scissors icon in Safari to accomplish this. I started thinking about the Dashboard and how it works, and wondered if there was any way to have Pandora play in the background using a system (the Dashboard, that is) that appears to reload each app every time I launch it.

What the heck, worth a shot, right? Well, I found I could create a web-clip of Pandora's music player that would play my music. No big surprise there. Click on the image to see the widget full-size.

But when I exited the dashboard to go do some actual work, the music would quit.

Bummer.

I got curious though. Maybe someone had thought about the fact that web pages constantly change and play music and whatever else. I did the obvious: I clicked on the little (i) button in the lower right corner of the widget and it took me to the page where I can choose to make the widget look like it's torn from a piece of paper, or whatever. And, lo and behold, right there in the lower left, is a box that makes it appear you can uncheck it and make the audio play in the background, even when dashboard is not active. I've highlighted that box below.

Would it work? I unchecked the box, exited Dashboard, and the music kept on playing in the background. Problem solved! It turns out the default setting is to play web page audio only when Dashboard is active, so you have to toggle the setting to get what you want.

Any other ways to do this? My method works great, but I wonder if someone else came up with a different solution?

Boy Genius says iPhone software v2.0.2 is on it's way out the door this afternoon. In fact, I just checked in iTunes, and there it is.

All 248.7MB of it. The description in the iTunes UI says it contains bug fixes, and that's it. Here's hoping the performance and stability issues - especially related to 3G network performance and switching - are what they fixed in this release. I almost returned my phone the other day out of sheer frustration, and that's saying a lot, really.

Update: After a couple hours of on/off use, apps are notably more stable/snappier (at first I wondered if it was just my imagination, or a fresh restart effect - time will tell), and network performance is better. Where a 3G network with poor or broken signal would be selected before, now a strong EDGE network is selected by the phone. Apps don't seem to hang in places where they reliably (or maybe the better term would be "predictably") hung before the update. For example, the volume controls in almost every app used to not respond for periods of time. Now they work every time. Much less frustrating. There are no real changes in terms of ourward appearance and functionality.

I just made a change on the blog, so my main RSS feed links now point to FeedBurner. You should not need to do anything to use the new feed - it's automagical. As a result of this change, some people might see duplicates of past entries. It's a one-time change (I hope), so thanks for putting up with it.

If you happen to subscribe to the feed for any single posting category here, that feed URL is unchanged.