Stuart’s Blog

“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound…”

I was moved by this story, recently. The words were written by John Newton, who was born in London, July 24th, 1725, the son of a commander of a merchant ship which sailed the Mediterranean. He led an awful life on the sea as a young boy of only 11-years old (being impressed into service on a man-of-war; his life then led to desertion, capture, public flogging, and exchange into service on a slave ship; and then he even became a servant of a slave trader where he was brutally abused; he was finally rescued by a friend of his father’s, where he ultimately became captain of his own ship, and he eventually plied the slave trade himself).

Although he had some early religious instruction from his mother (who had died when he was young), on one harrowing homeward voyage, where he thought he was going to die, instead he lived. He experienced what he called “a great deliverance.” He continued to ply the slave trade for several years after his “deliverance”, but he began to treat the slaves more humanely (slaves routinely perished along the journey and were usually harshly treated).

About 7-years after his “great deliverance” he quit the slave trade altogether. He learned Latin, Greek and Hebrew, all self-taught. He was subsequently ordained by the Bishop of Lincoln and accepted the curacy of Olney, Buckinghamshire where he became an ordained Minister. Newton’s church became so crowded during services that it had to be enlarged.

As many of you know, I’m Jewish. However, I found it fascinating that here was a Christian man who wrote a beautiful prayer to the Old Testament God… my God. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches me, as a Jew, to read Christian literature, so I’ve opened myself up to their writings and their prayers. And by doing so, it has helped me to find My God too. My Old Testament God who seemed so hidden to me all of these years, among the ritualistic Hebrew prayers; but My God has become revealed to me, as I’ve read the heartfelt hymns, such as those of John Newton. Click here for the entire hymn: excerpt

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)

That sav’d a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see.

-John Newton, Olney Hymns (London: W. Oliver, 1779)

I also find it fascinating that this hymn has mostly been sung at funerals. But, very occasionally it has also been sung at weddings. Weddings and funerals. For myself, I would prefer it to be sung at my wedding! Wouldn’t you? Personally, I find it incredibly uplifting. Accompanied by bagpipes. Totally awesome!

As an author’s footnote, I can remember that Judy Collins (one of my favorite singers) recorded a version that spent 67-weeks straight on the Singles Charts between 1970-1972! It’s been recorded by Rod Stewart and The Faces, Aretha Franklin, Phish, the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, Hootie & the Blowfish and quite a few others, all documented for you on Wikipedia.

Humbly Submitted this day, April 5th, 2008

Stuart Liroff

It was really too bad Sarah Lacy made herself “the story” albeit for 15-minutes!

But, Mark was ready for it, and he ably brought his points home (points that are persistent, and will emerge in the more stable, weekly and monthly press (which are more analytical)).

I think Sarah’s story will end up being a “side bar” and Mark Zuckerberg will end up being called a “Genius Geek CEO”:

· “Help People Communicate More Efficiently”

· “Help People Connect”

· “Launched Internationally”

· “Macro Effects”

· “Helps People on a Micro Level”

o Examples

§ Launched in Spanish in Columbia

§ Being used to revolt against the government of Columbia! … Wow!

§ Terrorism

· Mark gave this great impassioned talk about how “Terrorism comes…from a lack of empathy and understanding….there are people who are at a point in their lives, a crossroad, deciding whether they’re going to pursue terrorism. And people have told me that Facebook has helped them maintain connections with friends in Europe, in America, and maintain that empathy.” … Wow!

Build Out the Social Graph and Monetize it

Support the 200,000 3rd party developers (some news/blogs are reporting 300,000 developers) who are using Facebook’s APIs to develop Applications

On Data Portability: He remains “above the fray” by focusing on “data sharing”

Robin and I visited Tod Sacerdoti and Dru Nelson at their new startup, BrightRoll, in downtown San Francisco. Led by a team of Internet advertising veterans and engineers, BrightRoll has served billions of advertisements since they got started in 2005.

BrightRoll helps major brands execute “smart video campaigns” across the industry’s leading publishers, including over half of top 100 online media properties in the United States. Dozens of advertising agencies are using BrightRoll to execute campaigns for their leading brands such as Hewlett-Packard, Sony and Wal-mart. In the past year BrightRoll has served Billions of “smart video ads”, making them the fastest growing video advertising company.

Their primary focus is on building an accurate, reliable system. They’re building a modular platform, not a monolithic system. They use a lot of open source and prefer to keep things simple. Every engineer writes code and gets to express their opinion. They tend towards agile processes, releasing weekly and pushing up one feature at a time.

• Tod Sacerdoti, CEO. Tod is a great deal maker and leader for BrightRoll. In 2005, Tod was responsible for revenue at Plaxo (I recruited Tod into Plaxo ). In late 2005, Tod saw that changes in bandwidth and consumer interest were beginning to drive massive shifts in online video viewing behavior. Dru joined Tod with the mission to make “smart video ads” for branded advertisers. It worked.
• Dru Nelson, CTO, is a really cool and interesting guy. He’s been “acquired” by Yahoo! twice in his career: once when he was a Founder at Four11 (which then became RocketMail, which then became Yahoo! Mail) and then a second time when he was a Founder at eGroups which then became Yahoo! Groups.
  
• BrightRoll closed their Series “B” round of $5M in December, bringing their total venture funding to $6M since it launched in July 2006. Their original investor was True Ventures, General Managed by Jon Callaghan. I’ve known Jon since my days as Plaxo’s Recruiter, when Jon was one of Plaxo’s early investors. In those days, I had the only hard-walled office. Jon used to come in an visit with me, so I got to know Jon more intimately. Jon’s portfolio is truly astounding: Meebo, Plaxo, Automattic (WordPress), SendMe, SingleFeed, and quite a few other fantastic properties.

For my purposes, I’m recruiting:

• Server Side Ruby-on-Rails Engineer
• Client Side Flash Action Script Engineer

Humbly submitted,

Stuart D. Liroff

Robin and I visited Ephraim Luft and Mike Greenfield on December 20th, 2007. They are Co-Founders of my new client, and their new startup, Bantr, based in San Francisco, California.

Their first product, Circle of Friends, is one of the fastest growing applications on Facebook. Launched in September, 2007, Circle of Friends has over 6.5 million users, and is adding over 100,000 new users per day.

Ephraim and Mike first became friends at summer camp and then met up again as teammates on the Stanford Men’s Ultimate Team while students at Stanford University, where Mike graduated with a B.S. in 2000 with Honors in Mathematical and Computational Science. Ephraim graduated from Stanford at the same time with a BS in Computer Science.

With a strong background in bringing products to market — most recently leading product management at Massive Incorporated (acquired by Microsoft) — and an MBA from Harvard, Ephraim takes on the role of CEO at Bantr, the force behind Circle of Friends. “We want to evolve Circle of Friends to create a tighter community, so that our users can discover roles that people play in their lives,” says Ephraim.

With his experience leading LinkedIn’s analytics team for the past three years, and Sr. Fraud R&D Scientist at PayPal, Mike takes the role as CTO at Bantr. “We’re taking viral marketing to the extreme right now,” says Mike.

Their business model is evolving, but will most likely require sponsorships through advertising.

Look for new products, new interfaces, and new announcements very soon.

For my purposes, I’m recruiting AJAX/LAMP and LAMP/Server engineers.

Humbly submitted,

Stuart D. Liroff

Good evening. I just checked my Google Analytics page. And there it was; my site has just past 4,000 unique visitors. 4,057 unique visitors to be precise, which is a 305.7% increase in readership in 1 year.

My blog’s Readership has increased by over 100% in just the last 7-months, and by over 35% in the last 120-days. 4,057 visitors, 5,406 visits, and 8,439 Page Views in the past year. Thank you for the comments, which many of my readers have sent directly to me via e-mail. As I’ve said, I read them all !

When I passed 3,000 unique visits, I made the observation that it appeared the slope was increasing logarithmically. Looking at it this evening, I can’t detect much of a change in the slope. Any thoughts?

Humbly Submitted,

Stuart Liroff

I visited Mike Agnich and Parker Barrile on July 26th, 2007. They are Co-Founders of my new client, and their new startup, Predictify, based in Menlo Park, California. They had asked me to keep this information “stealth” until now.

Predictify is developing a “predictions platform” to harness the wisdom of crowds. They are a small team (7 people) and are technically-minded entrepreneurs who want to revolutionize the way information about future events is collected and analyzed.

Predictify is a “predictions platform” for information seekers of deterministic events. Their system is used to collect samples, aggregate the data (about politics, sporting events, business intelligence, hedge funds, government, etc.), find patterns, and then create data sets (which are private and proprietary).

Parker Barille is “Business Lead”. Parker was Project Manager, Business Operations, at Google for 3-years. Parker is also a student at Stanford’s MBA program while multi-tasking as Co-Founder at Predictify. He holds a math undergraduate degree from Stanford (in Mathematics).

Mike Agnich is “Head of Engineering”. Mike spent 5-years at Zazzle as Vice President of Product Technology. Mike and Parker met at Stanford’s MBA program, where he, too, is multi-tasking as student and Co-Founder. (Hey Seth Sternberg, why didn’t you do this? ). He also holds a Stanford Undergraduate degree (in CS).

Their business model is transaction based i.e. clients will pay for data sets based on transactions. Users will query their database, based on the demographic datasets they gather. Data will be kept private for clients. The whole essence of Predictify is a data driven model. They went “live” with their first public Beta around August 15th.

Predictify’s product isn’t that they’re going to make predictions! They’re not like “Jean Dixon” (Do you remember her?) Rather, they’re going to get opinions about a question.

Why is their system better than others? They will have a system of financial incentives to participate. The better your predictions, the more money you can make (i.e. you will get paid for the correct answers!). Predictify is a “social network built around a reputation system”, says Mike. Groups of friends will compete, and earn recognition (i.e. peer recognition) to get the “right” answer.

Target markets: • Sporting Events • Politics • Hedge Funds

For my purposes, I’m searching for Server Engineers who are able to make highly scalable, high performance systems with experience scaling web applications to millions of users. You know where to find me.

Humbly submitted,

Stuart D. Liroff

Spider-in-the-Afternoon,
originally uploaded by stuartliroff.

I’ve been watching this spider for about 2-weeks now. He’s been growing fatter every day. It rained for 24-hours; the sun came out and the spider seemed to be saying “take my picture”. I held the camera steady with my tripod, so, if you click on the picture, you can go to my Flickr site, and get a larger format of it; you can actually see the web glistening, and there’s even a rainbow effect, with the sun shining on it too.

Namaste,
Stuart

Nikon D40X
2007/10/13 00:51:23.6
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I went to ZendCon Lunch 2.0 10/9 last night with local writer Thaisa Frank. She had never been to an Internet gathering and I was able to introduce her to Mark Jen & Rose, and Terry Chay. We had fun talking and taking pictures and we were treated to a demo by Anand Iyer from Microsoft who showed us a very impressive implementation of PopFly from Microsoft implemented under the banner of SilverLight.

Here’s an excerpt from Thaisa Frank’s book Sleeping in Velvet:

“In truth, she thought Laurel Moonflower had problems of her own: Last summer, in La Paz, she claimed to have fallen in love with an enormous black-and-white bull who lived near the hacienda where she stayed. She didn’t call it falling in love. She called it a soul connection. I have a soul connection with that animal. And it has cured me of my bitterness concerning males of every species. Not that the love would ever lead to anything. But it was real.

Sometimes the midwife wrote the bull, care of the owner, in Spanish. The bull’s name was Flacadillo. Little lazy one. The owner said he had a deep heart and promised her he’d never be slaughtered.”

– Excerpted from Love in the Hour of Haniel, by Thaisa Frank, published in Sleeping in Velvet Copyright © 1997 by Thaisa Frank. ISBN 1-57423-043-3.

Good morning. I just checked my Google Analytics page. And there it was; my site had just past 3,000 unique visitors. 3,085 unique visitors to be precise.

It has increased by 54% in just the last 90-days. 3,085 visitors, 4,166 visits, and 6,594 pageviews. Thank you for the comments, which many of my readers have sent directly to me via e-mail. As I’ve said, I read them all !

My friends, Joseph, Terry, and Adam, would look at this chart, and say, hmmm, that appears to be growing logarithmically. Although, I was trained in Sociology, with a minor in Math, and although I have 25-years in engineering as an engineering manager, they have way more experience in plotting such things than I. But, if I step back, and look at it, and use my intuition, I’d have to agree. It does seem to be tipping up a bit. What do you think?

Humbly Submitted,

Stuart Liroff

MaunaKea,
originally uploaded by stuartliroff.

That’s Mauna Kea, from 100 miles away, in the distance. You have to look closely, behind the clouds. We were on the Odyssey, a Pacific Whale Foundation research vessel. I was holding on for dear life because the boat was rocking on the seas, and Mauna Kea was way off, gleaming in the distance, like a golden beacon in the sun. It was about 7am. The captain of the boat said that he almost never had a sight like this. The clouds just parted and we suddenly saw Mauna Kea, standing really tall. It was a fantastic. It suddenly became totally clear; it was an awesome sight to behold; 13,796 ft of a majestic volcanic mountain in front of us, rising from the sea. I tried to capture how huge it felt.

Nikon D40X
2007/08/08 00:30:32.1
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I visited Rikk Carey, and his wife Heather, last Friday, July 6th, at their new home in Miramar, just outside of Half Moon Bay.

Rikk was #4 at Plaxo, after Cameron Ring, Todd Masonis and Sean Parker. I’ve been fortunate to know Rikk for 17-years, since our days at SGI, when Rikk was the Project Manager of Cosmo and various other 3D projects for SGI. Rikk and I sat near one another in SGI’s “open cubicle architecture” (all the project managers sat in cubicles and all the engineers had closed-door offices). One of Rikk’s trademarks is his laser beam ability to focus. Sometimes it is scary, especially when he points his focus at you . Rikk is fun to be around, and there is practically not a sentence that comes out of his mouth, that doesn’t have a joke attached to it, so you really have to pay attention. And, if it doesn’t have a joke, it usually has a caring phrase or point of concern. Plaxo just released their 3.0 product, and Rikk was the driving force behind it.

The new Plaxo is a fantastic product. I am proud to say that I was one of Plaxo’s alpha and beta testers. I worked many late nights with Cam, testing the synch feature, sending Cam my log files, when it failed. I have over 2,000 people in my address book, so I guess I must be a pretty good test case.

One of the coolest features of Plaxo is the synch feature. Plaxo synch’s between all of the popular address books (Yahoo, Google, LinkedIn, Outlook, AOL/AIM, MSN Hotmail, etc.). My BlackBerry synch’s with my Outlook, so I’ve literally got all of my 2,000 contacts completely synchronized and backed up on Plaxo’s servers automagically. The other cool feature about Plaxo is that anyone who is a member of Plaxo’s service automatically updates their data into my address book the moment they change any of their contact data, instantaneously. This is a little known feature of Plaxo. For instance, the other day, I was notified that a recruiter friend who I wanted to contact, had just joined Plaxo, and had entered her new contact info; I was notified of this new contact info immediately, via Plaxo’s alert feature.

Another really cool feature of Plaxo’s product is the DeDuper. The DeDuper gets rid of duplicates in your address book. Not just duplicate records, but duplicate data. Some of you know that I was an engineer way back in my past, at H-P. In fact, I worked as a Configuration Management Engineer. So I can truly appreciate what scientific engineering went into the DeDuper. The engineer who worked on this, Huy Nguyen, did an amazing job making this tool usable “for the rest of us”. Most of the consumers who use this tool won’t ever really appreciate how easy it is to use the DeDuper, but really; try it; you won’t believe how easy it is to clean up your address book.

Plaxo 3.0 implemented a really neat new feature called Plaxo Pulse. What this does is to allow you to publish “feeds” of your Flickr sites and your blogs and other sites you would like to publish to your friends and family. It also allows you to receive feeds of publications from anyone in your address book. This is a really interesting new way to communicate and Plaxo is breaking ground, here, I think, stepping into Facebook, Flickr, Tagged and LinkedIn territory. I really like this new feature.

I remember the day, in 1994. I think it was April, 1994, standing outside David Henke’s cube, with Rikk, looking at our first glimpse of the Netscape Navigator browser. We were looking at our friend, Robert Olson’s website, Virtual Vineyards, and wondering if it was going to make it or not. Next door, in their offices were Jeannine Smith and Eva Manolis; down the hall were Anil Pal and Pete Orelup; and across the way was Craig Upson. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some important people. Each of these engineers have gone on to become famous, in their own right. But, Rikk was the one who influenced me the most because I became a recruiter, and I learned how to become a great recruiter because of Rikk Carey. He taught me that “you will always be known for the people you hire”. I never forgot that quote, Rikk. And Rikk gave me a set of principles that I use every day as I recruit and that I have taught to my other recruiters at work. These principles have helped to make me an extremely successful recruiter. I want to say “thanks, Rikk”. And, to anyone out there reading this blog, please go to Plaxo’s website, and download Plaxo 3.0. It is fantastic, as Rikk would say.

Humbly submitted,

Stuart D. Liroff

I just checked my Google Analytics page. And there it was; my site had just past 2,000 unique visitors.

In fact, 2,177 unique visitors. It has doubled in 6-months. 3,034 visits and 4,925 pageviews. That isn’t anywhere near the 100,000 unique visitors that some of the pundits get, but, I’m impressed. Thank you for the comments, which many of my readers have sent directly to me via e-mail. I read them all !

In 1985, I became a Software Engineering Manager for Hewlett-Packard. I thought I had “arrived.” My career had become “complete” as far as careers go. Ten years earlier, I had worked on the fastest computer in the world at the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Lab (The “Rad Lab”), which was the CDC 7600 in 1975. At that time, I thought I had reached the pinnacle of my career.

Today, 22-years after becoming an engineering manager, and 32-years after working on the fastest computer in the world, I am proud to announce that I have decided to join my old friend, Alan Shapiro, at Technology Search International, as a recruiter. I think I’ve found my sweet spot.

Technology Search represents companies which are leaders in:

If you are open to making a move, we should talk. Please send me your resume and we can go over the list of companies we represent and discuss the opportunities we have for you.

Humbly submitted,

Stuart D. Liroff

As a leading provider of direct to consumer mobile entertainment, SendMe offers the broadest selection of mobile subscription services currently available online in the U.S. Whether it’s interactive mobile trivia, the latest ringtones and wallpaper, mobile sweepstakes or one of the many other services they provide, SendMe is focused on delivering the best wireless content and experiences straight to your pocket.

Last December, I got together with Russell Klein, the CEO of SendMe, to go over the possibility of my recruiting for SendMe. However, my overtures preceded their revenue by several months! But as my friend, Dane Santos recently spoke into my ear, “Never give up,” [and I didn’t], I called Russell back; before you knew it, we were fast and furiously writing up a recruiting contract.

By the way, SendMe is a True Ventures backed company. Backed by my friend, Jon Callaghan, True Ventures is a venture firm for early stage entrepreneurs. I know Jon from his investments in Plaxo, Meebo, and BrightRoll. Of course, True Ventures backs Automattic , Toni Schneider’s and Matt Mullenwegg’s most amazing product, WordPress. which powers my blog (last November, while having lunch with Jon, I met Toni and Matt, and I was so stunned, with glitterati in my eyes, I forgot to take their picture. Oh, BTW, for SendMe, I’m searching for

• Java Spring Software Engineers
• Java Spring Server Software Engineer
• An Operations Manager
• A Hands on NetOps Manager
• A Software Test Automation Engineer

Please take a look at the SendMe Careers website for details; if you wish to chat, you know how to reach me.

Humbly submitted,

Stuart Liroff

The thing I love about S.V. is that there’s always a 2.0, even for us old folks. For instance, I visited with Gina Bianchini, CEO, and Diego Doval, Lead Architect, at Ning, which powers over 30,000 social networks worldwide, in January 2007. They didn’t hire me to recruit for them back then.

A couple of weeks ago, I sent them a note, to follow up. I had re-invented myself, as we all have to do from time to time, in order to stay afloat, and Gina, replied with a “We would be happy to do this [my new proposal].” Don’t you just love S.V. ? So, my string of part-time work continues!

Oh, BTW, I’m searching for PHP Application Developers for Ning. So, if you are exceptionally strong in PHP, and are consumer oriented PHP Application Developers, please contact me. We are also searching for a Director of Application Development and a totally hands on QA Manager. And please stop by and check out Gina’s really cool Ning Demo Video as produced by Robert Scoble and as presented by Michael Arrington; and you might want to read Michael’s nice write-up about Ning while you’re at it. And of course, check out Ning too!

I ran into my friends, Pete, Tawheed , Rikk, and John, from Plaxo, over at Chipotle’s on Charleston Road in Mountain View the other day. They invited me to take a look at Plaxo’s new 3.0 release. Wow! I was allowed to take a peek, and here’s a sneek preview at their splash page. Pretty nice guys. I won’t show what’s inside, but I think you will be impressed when you get to take a look too; it is everything and more than what they have promised. You should sign up and register soon at Plaxo, because it’s going to be a very useful application for you to use.

Humbly Submitted,
Stuart Liroff

I think I’ve finally found my resting spot: Vimo, Comparison Shopping for Health.

I’m only working part-time these days, but what a part-time gig this is! Founded by Chini Krishnan, CEO, and my old friend, Shankar Srinivasan, Vice President of Product, Vimo is a ground-breaking comparison shopping website for healthcare where consumers shop for doctors, dentists, hospitals, health savings accounts, and health insurance plans.

I’m totally having deja vu from my WebMD days. This place is so much fun. You should come and see their blog. Check it out. Do your own comparison shopping, or review your own doctor or dentist, or search for a doctor and find out what others say about your doctor. It’s a very useful site.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been playing with Ning. It’s an interesting site for average people like myself, to bring up their own photo sites, and other types of Web Sites, and I wanted to show you that I was able to embed my Ning photo site in my WordPress sidebar.php (see, on the right)? Pretty cool, huh? Also, developers should go to the Ning Developer Site and take a look around. More, later.

Humbly submitted,

Stuart

Ok, I know I’m getting in way over my head here, but I synched my Shuffle last night with a whole R&B “playlist” with about 200 songs in it; then, I changed my mind, and changed the playlist, and I could swear that the algorithm did some kind of check with what was already on my shuffle to see what “actually” needed to be updated (i.e. a cached feature) and only updated what actually needed to be updated.  Pretty cool, huh?  The update went REALLY fast.
Stuart

I’ve discovered “personal music” over the past few months.

I must admit it is an “eye opener” for me. I’ve been watching engineers hacking away on code while, at the same time, they’re listening to their own personal music. I watch my daughter and all of her friends plugged in, and never can get what is so neat about it.

But, it wasn’t until I heard Bob Dylan sing “I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More”* (which he wrote and sang in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival) that I finally “got it”. I could hear the instruments so clearly, I could hear the musicians joking amongst themselves as if I was sitting right there with them; I could literally hear the floor boards creaking!

Anyway, the point of all of this is that I finally “got it”. I have WinXP Pro running on one of the nicest and most loveliest Linovo T60 portable laptops on my desk, running Apple’s superbly implemented version of iTunes on my machine, with my Shuffle plugged in, and my MOST INCREDIBLE Shure E3C earbuds stuck well into my ear, playing that song really loudly; it reminds me that I, too, don’t have to work on Maggie’s farm no more. And I’m not. And I won’t. It’s a liberating feeling.

I hope you, too, are enjoying your own personal music and getting your own personal feelings of liberty out of it too!

Ok, there’s a message here. What’re you going to do? Are you going to continue to work on Maggie’s Farm? Or, are you going to go work on one of these incredible small startups that are popping up like daisies all over the valley and S.F.? What are you going to do?

*the footnote is that there’s lots of debate over whether it’s “I Ain’t Gonna…” or “I Ain’t Going To …” Also, apparently Pete Seeger and others had some sort of fit because they were playing that type of music (others claimed the issue had to do with the “mic” and that the “mic” wasn’t setup correctly for the electrical blues guitar approach to the music) and others complained that it wasn’t strictly folk music; instead, it was pure Rock & Roll (actually, there is also argument over this; is it Rock & Roll, or Rhythm & Blues, or a synthesis of the two. I’ve even heard it called “Electric Blues”. Bob Dylan had gone outside the box and it really threw some people for a loop. The whole point of “not working on Maggie’s farm no more” was that he was going to sing Rock & Roll now, and if they wanted him to come to the Newport Folk Festival, well, they had better put cotton in their ears.)

Humbly submitted,

Stuart Liroff