You can always count on Verizon for a completely useless ad campaign. The latest episode: the billboards celebrating that the yellow pages are now available online and via your mobile phone, in addition to the outdated print edition I promptly put in the recycling pile.

Why direct ad dollars to high margin services when you can launch a huge campaign for a dinosaur? That's the Verizon way. At least Verizon competes with other companies--Con Ed still wins the award for the company whose marketing and advertising departments most deserve to be eliminated. At least the new slogan "The power behind everything you do" is a nice way of admitting it's a bureaucratic monopoly.

Why do these companies launch ad campaigns? My theory is that people who work there want to feel good about themselves. Imagine you're working for Con Edison. Your company's reputation is poor, and you have absolutely no distinguishing value proposition besides whether the lights go on when someone flips a switch. It would be depressing. Why should Continental Airlines have all the witty ads?

Except someone has to pay for those useless ads, and payment comes in the form of a three-digit air conditioning bill. The very existence of Con Edison ads (along with ads for Verizon's yellow pages) is one of the most senseless phenomena of our time.

Located on the west bank of the St. Lawrence River approximately 55 miles northeast of Quebec City, the charming town of Baie St-Paul is fascinating geographically and meteorologically.

By the time you're that far up the river, the St. Lawrence has become an estuary of several hundred miles up to its merger with the Atlantic. The river dramatically widens at Quebec City, but the width at that point is disguised by Ile d'Orleans, which spans almost the entire waterway. Baie St-Paul is one of the first towns along the river where you can really feel and see maritime effects. It's like Long Island Sound on a good day, but much prettier.

Walk the 1.5 miles from the town center to the quay, and you encounter a salty onshore wind. The temperature drops 5-10 degrees as you get closer to the river bank. Swampy grasslands and sea gulls provide a Cape Cod-type feel. But there's also a farm right on the river, with cows and dogs roaming right up against the water. Behind this farm is a mountain range. This far north, although a quick trip to the southeast would put you in northern Maine, it's cool to sense that behind those mountains, for thousands of miles, there is basically nothing up to the Arctic Circle.

Here's what La Guardia Airport gets that Newark does not: we don't just want restaurants with reasonably real food (Subway is fine for this purpose); we want those restaurants to be inside security. That way, we can get done with waiting on security lines and then sit down to a somewhat plausible lunch.

Terminal A at EWR (otherwise known as Continental International Airport) offers some nice food selections, but they're all before the security checkpoint. Once you're inside to Gate A21, you're doomed: you can opt for a $7.50 pre-made sandwich at Starbucks or a greasy concoction at someplace serving fried chicken sandwiches and chili fries.

AirTrain Newark is great, but LGA still gets my vote as the area's best airport.

Over the last several years, The Weather Channel has become more of a lifestyle channel--showing you the connection between the weather and your day-to-day activities. It's not just about the low pressure system; it's about how the low pressure system affects you. This seems to have resulted in continual restatements of the obvious on its Web site.

You can enter a city name or ZIP code to retrieve a local forecast, but the site also says you can enter an airport name or golf course. OK, maybe you don't know what town the golf course is in, so this should be helpful.

Now there's a mosquito forecast, showing mosquito activities in your area. For New York City tonight, the mosquito index is "very high," because of light winds.

But the best improvement has to be the new "Indoor Heating and Cooling Forecast." If outdoor temperatures are expected to be hot in your area, it is shown to have "high" indoor "cooling needs." Really!

Coming soon: the umbrella forecast, because a map telling you where it will rain is not enough.

I thought I would save time by arranging for delivery suspension for my newspaper by using the Times online service. Here is how this played out:

1) I had to create a new account using a cryptic account number and password emailed to me two months ago by a person I had to contact. This person's email address is at "pcfcorp.com."

2) In the process of creating the account, coming up with one secret question and answer (e.g. "what street did you grow up on") was not enough. You had to have three.

3) I tried arranging for two delivery suspensions since I know my next two vacations. This request was rejected because my account was "inactive." (This is plainly false, as I both logged in and received the paper today.)

4) I tried sending feedback to the site and requesting delivery suspension that way, but this message was rejected because of "invalid" characters in my message. I have no idea what those were. I tried removing all the quotes, but some characters were still "invalid." (Maybe it was the letter "e.")

5) 1-800-NY-TIMES, at a much higher cost to the company. Good business model.

Spam--it only comes from sketchy, unreputable companies, right? Wrong. You can throw prestigious companies like Michael C. Fina in with those vendors of magic pills. And it's a disturbing trend of marketing mismanagement among supposedly well-respected companies.

Five years ago, I ordered a wedding gift through Michael C. Fina's online registry. Soon after, the company consistently sent unwanted marketing e-mail, even after phone calls and a fax to the CEO. The other day, I looked in my spam filter, and there was yet another message from Michael C. Fina. You'd think such a high class company would do whatever it could to avoid irritating customers--especially one whose customers one day may have to pick out a wedding registry themselves.

Add Office Depot to the list. I ordered something from them once, told them I did not want any marketing announcements, and have not been able to get off their list since. The company's unsubscribe procedures don't work. Also, there's Bloomingdale's. And Pottery Barn--although in that company's defense, the e-mail I received from their marketing person was profusely apologetic and comprehensively illuminating. Seems like the marketing people just couldn't understand technology well enough to make sure their e-mail list administration worked.

In fact, I think that's what's going on here. These are reputable companies. But they're launching widespread electronic marketing campaigns without being attentive to the impact on their reputation. Ignorance of technology may explain a mistake, but it still means the marketing people are dropping the ball. When it comes time for the CEO to evaluate the performance of these marketing professionals (or those that subcontract e-mail marketing out to e-marketing companies), this blunder should be counted as an absence of competence.

One of the most significant upgrades in consumer food packaging history must be the new generation of crouton zip-top bags. Unlike their cardboard box counterparts, these bags keep croutons fresher even days after you open them. Also, croutons don't get lost in the canyon between the inner plastic bag and the box itself. The wonder is that it took so long for packaging engineers to come up with this simple but colossal success.

5) "New Jersey: only the strong survive"

4) "I'm blogging this."

3) Internet World '98

2) PSINet: The Internet Starts Here (and it wasn't mine)

1) "It's all about me."

Everything at Whole Foods is meticulously arranged for perfect neatness and branding. Except for the bags in which the store's "bistro meals" are placed.

These bags are different than the classic light brown Whole Foods plastic bags. They are large white bags--and an ergonomic disaster. Because the bag is too large, the extra space allows the enclosed tray to flip sideways. Fortunately, the checkout clerk secures the tray top with masking tape, but nobody should have to come home and find that dinner is now vertical.

"Cold" in July can mean temperatures around 55 or 60. How about the mid 40s? The unheralded weather event of the last two days has been the raw conditions in Marquette, Michigan.

Over the last 2 days, with a prevailing northerly wind off 42-degree Lake Superior, temperatures have hovered between 45 and 50 under a dense layer of fog with drizzle. High temperatures this time of year should be in the 70s. It must have been fun to celebrate the 4th of July and dig out the wool sweater the next morning. Indeed, with the exception of parts of extreme northern Alaska, Marquette has been the nation's ice box over the last
48 hours.

Ten years ago yesterday was my first day of work at a small Internet service provider tucked away in suite 1710 of 150 Broadway. I had no place to sit. I didn't have a computer (except my own Powerbook, which I occasionally brought in). The company had 2,000 customers, each of which was enrolled by telephone and then by manual handwriting of contact, username and password information. They were told they could start using the service "between 8 and 10pm" that night, in some cases a delay of 14 hours. And this was perfectly okay.

Over the next few months, most of my work involved explaining what electronic mail was, how to use FTP to download files (at 14.4 if you were lucky), and how to chat with people in online discussion boards. We didn't offer a Web browser and hardly anyone asked for one. "It's coming soon" usually sufficed. (Netscape wouldn't make waves until early 1995. Our own browser launched in December 1994 for Windows and May 1995 for Macintosh.)

This was the wild frontier of Internet time. By the time I left The Pipeline in May of 1996, we had 105,000 customers on two continents and gone through acquisition, IPO and downsizing. But the service, started by James Gleick, left an indelible mark in Internet history. Even today, in remnant form as some elements of EarthLink (whose merger partner, MindSpring, wound up buying Pipeline from PSINet), Gleick's vision of an ISP as a hub for sharing common interests has withstood the test of time. This was the hook that brought the Internet into the living room and not just into the cubicle.

After what he called the "biggest commercial stiff" of his career, Bruce Hornsby has changed labels--from RCA to Columbia--and is releasing a new album called Halcyon Days in August. But welcome to the new era of music marketing: a pre-release single, "Gonna Be Some Changes Made," besides being played on radio stations, is available at the iTunes music store.

This is intelligent. It allows Columbia to double dip--Hornsby's fan base is unconditionally loyal, and thousands of people will both purchase the single and the album when it comes out. It also gives new listeners a chance to put something on their iPod right away.

"Changes" features Sting, just one example of the new album's all-star lineup. Eric Clapton and Elton John also appear. It's the logical next step for a pianist and songwriter that has teamed up with everyone from the Grateful Dead to Shawn Colvin, from Phil Collins to Pat Metheny, from Branford Marsalis to Bela Fleck and Bonnie Raitt. Now that Bruce has a competent recording company on his side, Halcyon Days should mark an exciting rebirth of his career.