Sam enjoying the Old Town Court House fountain before dinner. More soon... 

Momma, Dylan, Sam and I went down to Old Town for dinner and to see the LST (Landing Ship Tank) 325 that was in harbor today. This is one of the very last LST's that assaulted Omaha Beach in WWII still floating. It was part of the Greek Navy for the last 40 years but was recently sent back to the US, restored and making the east coast tour this summer.

Here are the losers of the 10th annual Irish Open, played at Poolesville today. Jud and I spanked the young twosome by three holes even with a hard charge at the end. Better luck next year boys.... 

The boys got bubble mowers yesterday before we went to Wendy's Memorial Day party. Wendy lives accross the street and has a new fountain in the back yard. Sam and Dylan figured it was more of a baby pool and got soaked. We went to the pool today but the water was a little chilly for Mommy and Papa to get in. The boys loved it. I'm going to put a bunch of shots up from this weekend in my flickr account. You can access it by going to www.durpenters.org and clicking on one of the pictures on the right side of the site. More soon..

Haircut

Sam

Haircut

Dylan

Happy hour

Fado

So I'm back from WSJ conference in Carlsbad and pretty recovered from the 6am flight I had yesterday. I definately feel refreshed with ideas on how to continue moving AARP toward the future of digital publishing and service. Lots of great information and innovative thought. Scott McNealy talked about how he felt that the computer of the future will be a thin client (nothing more than a screen, keyboard, radio) and the network itself will have the power. This would mean small light weight devices with universal, super fast network connections with unlimited storage and shared applications. While Negroponte is saying each computer in the world will be a client and a server making up a "mesh" network. It'll be fun to see who's right. 

The grounds of the Four Seasons. 

On my way home

I'm on the plane at 6am California time and really tired. The conference was great and I met a bunch good people. Barry Diller was very entertaining and insightful yesterday as he talked about the companies he buys and how he determines value. I think the big theme of the three days was that technology is finally causing big changes in the mainstream media businesses and dis-intemediation is give consumers more options and the traditional media companies heartburn.

Still lots of hurdles to "being digital" to steal negroponte's book title but its getting closer.

I haven't had much luck uploading photos to the blog this week. I think it was a bandwidth issue at the hotel. The Four Seasons is a great property but I have to dig them on the broadband internet issue.

More soon

Mark Carpenter
General Manager and Director
Web Strategy and Operations
www.aarp.org
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Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld (www.BlackBerry.net)

Session on Blogging

This morning we had a lively discussion on bloggin with Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette), Mena Trott (Six Apart), and Dan Gillmor (Grassroots Media). Great discussion about how blogs are a great alternative to main stream media while some in the audience felt they were mostly a irresponsible echo chamber.

I thing the truth is that good journalism is drowned out by all the noise on the Internet. Their seems to be a battle going on between the traditional media outlets and the low barrier to entry blog space.

Mena noted that their has been an explosion of blogging but while their are some big, well read blogs, the average blog has six readers, just like mine.

They talked a little about pod casting and all agreed that it is probably not going to take off. Video blogging could turn everyone into John Daily or Walter Cronkite down the road. The covergence of huge amounts of open bandwith, cheap technology and disatisfaction in traditional media is causing big problems for the big media guys.

More soon.

Mark Carpenter
General Manager and Director
Web Strategy and Operations
www.aarp.org
--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld (www.BlackBerry.net)

Here's Bill Gates at the reception for D3. He was very nice and acknowledged that he will soon be joining AARP. I guess the tech industry has come of age. While Bill may be the richest man in the world, Steve Jobs is still more interesting. He was interviewed by Walt Mossberg at dinner tonight and had some facinating things to say about digital convergence as if it wasn't even and issue to him. Basically, he was saying that the future is was apon us, it just hasn't been uniformly distributed. Really good stuff. Bill is being interviewed at 8am so I must go to bed.. I met up with Ellen Levy from Stanford's Media X group at the after hours party tonight and talked about all the great innovative things going on with AARP right now. Things are looking up... More soon. 

Flying toward the setting sun made this engine look all glowing. Below is New Mexico or West Texas. Beautiful weather out here. Nicole and the boys need to come next year. 

Inside all day

Wrestling

We went out to celebrate the aarp.org site launch at the ESPN Zone, down the street from AARP. Good times all around and this is the last of the crew to toast this huge accomplishment. We had roughly 45 WSO'ers and other special client and associated guests. A much needed break from all the hard work the staff has been doing to launch this thing. More soon....

Metro

Going home

Here I am with my brother and cousins in the mid 70's sometime. I don't know why we are posing in grasslands and what the heck I'm doing. It kind of looks like a 70's rock band album cover. Rock on... 

In case I run out of time tonight, I wanted to get this post up with the link to the photos from yesterday. http://www.durpenters.org/Day%20at%20the%20Races%20-%20Potomac%20Hunt%20Club/index.html

Some good shots of the boys, Nicole and some old familiar faces and some not so familiar ones. It was a good day but we got all tired out chasing the boys around the field for 4 hours. We didn't have much time to catch up with our friends but hey, they were chasing their own kids.

More Soon....

Super hot.. 

Ok, here's an important reason why you should never pick your nose in public. That's me on the left in this newly discovered photo from my uncle Tom's collection. My cousin Tony recently took a bunch of his slides and had them digitized for all to enjoy. Joining me on the steps are my Mom, my brother Jeff and sister Rachel as well as Grandma Mae. Going to the races today. More soon....