Growing up, many a Saturday morning was spent walking to the neighborhood store with my younger brother with a little more than a few dollars in our pocket. As regular as Saturday morning cartoons, we were on our way to get our fair share of 1 cent PAL bubble gum, 5 cent Atomic Fireball cinnamon candy and 16-ounch Pepsi Cola (which I preferred to Coke back then).

For some reason, while most adults passed that particular stage in their lives, I never really have. I still have a sweet tooth, and it's uncommon to not have something around the house or at work to fill that craving. And recently, I happened upon a brilliant site that helps not only fill my need for sugar, but nostalgia too. OldTimeCandy.com has a diabetes-inducing array of candy available for individual sale or in bulk, and aids the cavity creation process by offering sets of candy from particular decades, from the 1950s through the 1980s. In many cases, you'll see names of candy you remember fondly, but haven't seen in stores for years.

It may still seem strange to buy food or candy from the Web, but there's really no other substitute for getting all these candies in one place, from the aforementioned Atomic fireballs to bubble gum cigarettes, Chuckles, Fizzies, Gobstoppers, Hot Tamales, Jujubes, Mamba, Mary Janes, Necco wafers, Pop Rocks, Razzles, Violet Gum, Wax lips and Zotz.

And that's just part of the list.

I bought the 80's mix a few months ago, and absolutely enjoyed it. The only debate was to what I would consume first and how quickly. Now, the 70's mix is set to arrive this week, and I'm seriously looking forward to it. Before you hit your holiday shopping, this just might be a great place to find stocking stuffers, or just to give you a follow-on to Halloween. But you really don't need a reason any more than I do. Enjoy yourself and try some Old Time Candy!

With about 14 hours of airplane time over the last week, I had plenty of opportunity to catch up on books I've been neglecting. One of those I took in was Emanuel Rosen's "The Anatomy of Buzz", which aimed to capture the concept of word-of-mouth marketing, analyzing how some products take off (see: the iPhone and Nintendo Wii), while others stagnate despite tremendous advertising (see: Microsoft Vista).

One of the most important elements of getting a product launch or news popularized, according to Rosen, is to influence "hubs", defined as people who act as references to friends and others, and who, if influenced, can help to spread the word to many people, helping your cause.

Rosen defines these people with the acronym of being "ACTIVE", namely:

* Ahead in Adoption
* Connected
* Travelers
* Information-hungry
* Vocal
* Exposed to Media

This, to me, defines a great number in the tech blogosphere, who are obviously unafraid to share their opinions, reach many people, and suck down as much information as they can, whether from the mainstream media, or hundreds of RSS feeds from fellow bloggers. There's also no question these ACTIVE folks are connected to others and ahead in adoption. It's the tech bloggers who first adopt (and later dismiss) new Web 2.0 technologies, who are the first to download (and later uninstall) beta products, and they are all too eager to announce having gotten their hands on something new.

While this is true, The Anatomy of Buzz amazingly already seems seriously outdated since its writing in 2000. The book tries to talk about how the Internet impacts buzz by mentioning newsgroups, shared opinions sites like Epinions.com and comments on Amazon.com (including his book), but has zero discussion of those hubs that influence buying decisions now - blogs and social networks being the obvious omissions. It's also amusing to see the word Google is nowhere in the book. As a result, I found myself a little less than impressed with some portions of the book, which as a whole does a good job explaining how the Palm Pilot took off, how Nintendo drummed up excitement around the launch of Super Mario Brothers 3, and how Cold Mountain became a best-seller.

Part of being a blogger is knowing that by being ahead in adoption, information hungry and vocal, that through your connections, you can act as an ACTIVE hub. Though authored in 2000, Rosen describes this phenomenon in an offline way but rings true in today's even more fully connected world. If you don't mind the occasional rolling of the eyes over Web 1.0, it's definitely worth a reminder that it often doesn't matter just how many advertising dollars you throw at a product if the end users don't extend your message to their friends and others.

Macs sometimes break.
Macs sometimes crash.
Mac applications sometimes don't work they way you think they should.

Apple doesn't always have the best strategy (in my opinion) for promoting its lesser-known features or less-adopted product lines.

They're not perfect.

• I returned my new MacBook Pro less than two days after I got it for repairs. (1 | 2 | 3)
  
• My last PowerBook had its keyboard repaired once and its logic board replaced once.
  
• I bought 4 or 5 power adapters for my last PowerBook because they kept wearing down.
  
• My wife's iBook was repaired at least twice for Logic Board issues.

Going back further in time, I once had a devil of a time upgrading from Mac OS 8.6 to Mac OS 9. Installing Mac OS X Public Beta was not without its issues. My first iPod's battery life didn't seem to last all that long. My iPod Photo occasionally craps out and seemingly is trying to die.

That's all true. But while someone with an agenda could say this is all great evidence that I should ditch the platform, or that Macs aren't as good as I say they are, it's rubbish.

In June, I wrote on The Apple Blog a note stating "Five Lesser-Known Tips on Being an Apple Fanboy". The first tip? "Never Admit Fault With Apple Around Non-Mac People".

The reason? People love to pile on and are looking for any excuse they can to show that their decision was right and yours was wrong.

With Apple's increasing market share, new converts to the platform, like Robert Scoble, are finding what we all know. Macs are great, but not perfect. And sometimes, they're not happy about it, and they're all too ready to call Apple out for issues they've found. Robert, in a missive posted today, says when Macs fail, that Mac users tend to blame themselves instead of the platform. (Dave Winer backs him up)

I don't agree. What I believe is that when Mac issues arise, their irregularity makes it more acceptable than the day to day challenges of Windows. Also, in most cases, I can figure out the issue myself, instead of being forced to live with it. For the above hardware issues, I obviously couldn't, and I made Apple fix their problems.

So while Robert likely believes he's helping Apple and their users to "expose" the problems he's had with his Mac, it doesn't do all that much. Instead, what it does is give potential switchers a good reason to not do so if they were on the verge of finally leaving Windows behind. I'm not saying be absolutely quiet about issues. I know I haven't. But recognize all the positive things that are gained from moving to the Mac platform and all the innovation coming from Apple, and imagine how dismal the computer industry would be without it. It's stark and cold.

Maybe Robert didn't get his Apple fanboy membership card yet, or maybe he didn't apply, but I do believe he's sending the wrong message. That Apple won't publicly respond to him doesn't help either, but they've yet to figure out a great relationship with the blogs. Maybe some day that will change.

When traveling to the East Coast, I don't often get the luxury of adjusting to the time zone differences. In most cases, I'm expected to start my day bright and early on Eastern Standard Time, and act like any other good local. Today kicked off at 5:30 a.m. Eastern, which my body still tells me is 2:30 a.m. Pacific. (You might have noticed my odd 3:10 a.m. timestamp on this morning's blog post)

After a full day, we headed to New York's Kennedy airport to fly to Boston, in what should have been a simple puddle jump. Originally targeting a "wheels up" time of 7:00, we first saw the flight delayed until 8:25 p.m., for arguable weather-related issues, and later, upon boarding, endured a delay on the tarmac of more than an hour, without updates from pilot or crew.

As the natives grew restless, and some threatened to leave the plane regardless of consequences if things didn't turn around in "the next five minutes", one of the flight attendants broke in to announce a further delay of 20-30 minutes, as our little flight had been pushed in a lengthy queue of planes set for international destinations. At number 45 on the list, we weren't going anywhere soon. This was met with further complaints. The lady next to me demanded to write a complaint to the airline about the "inexcusable farce", while others turned on their cell phones or Blackberries in protest, updating loved ones who were likely waiting at Logan airport, assuming normalcy.

Regardless, we eventually took off, arriving in Boston after 11:00 p.m. at night, when we should have gotten in a full three hours earlier. The flight in between? Not all that easy either, with moderate turbulence throughout, and a canceled cabin service, as we were all on lockdown, banned from leaving our seats or access the overhead bins. Super fun, let me tell you...

So now 18+ hours into the day, I've come home to a mountain of e-mail, more than 500 RSS items in Google Reader, and a world's worth of news to take in, ingest and review. Sure would have been nice to already be done with it all.