Category: Daily Life

It has been a full year since my last post. There has been so much going on that I’ve had no chance to stop and write any of it down here. Overall we’re doing very well, but the past six months have been challenging. My dad got a prognosis of 2-3 years to live 3 years ago. He lived his normal life right up until October. At that point his heart started to fail quickly and he passed away in March at the age of 83.

Update: I’ve had people asking about the estate sale, it will be May 30-June 1. Pictures to the thousands of items at EstateSales.net

Update 2: The estate sale was huge, but there’s still so much stuff! There will be a live action June 28th! The motorcycle and Honda CRV are sold.

If you knew my dad, you know he loved cars, especially convertibles. As our families are not in a 2-seater phase of life, all the cars are going on the block. Here’s what’s for sale. Keep in mind my dad wasn’t big on preventative maintenance so these are as-is. The convertibles both had new tops put on last year by someone in south county, they look great but need to be garaged as they are not so weatherproof that you can drive around in a storm.

2000 Honda S2000 – asking $19,750 90k Miles, 4-cyl VTEC 2.0L, Manual 6 Speed

Literally the stereotypical “little old lady special” that was his favorite car. You can read all about the S2000 here. It doesn’t look like a race car but it’s absurdly fast. It has cult status as it held the crown for power/liter until Ferrari took the title in 2010. I would say it is in average condition, not bad mileage, needs some cleanup, like the Z the top looks great but is not as weathertight as it should be. I just had Carpinello’s give it a look and it’s running well and has a new battery. I’ve cleaned this one up since it came out of storage, but wanted to get these pics up immediately for Memorial Day.

email wallbrothers@gmail.com or text/leave vm at (413) 770-2840 if interested.

2013 Honda CR-V – asking $11,500 Sold

130k Miles, 5Dr AWD EX-L

Dad was hit by another driver in October and totaled out that car and just bought this CR-V in November 2024. All cleaned up by a dealer in Pittsfield and in great shape except for a tear in the driver seat.

email wallbrothers@gmail.com or text/leave vm at (413) 770-2840 if interested.

2007 Nissan 350Z – asking $8,950

76k Miles, V6 3.5L, Automatic

My dad got a deal he couldn’t refuse even though he already had a silver convertible (eyeroll). This runs well and we just put 4 new tires on it. Same deal with the top as the other convertible, it’s new, but not watertight in extreme weather. Low mileage but the previous owner must have had a small dog or something there’s a lot of scratches on the interior plastics (Updated – Andy figured out that the previous owner was a big fan of jewelry, anywhere their hands went there are scratches.) They were also a big audio fan, there’s cutouts in the back passenger side storage box and it’s still wired for an amp. It looks like they took their stuff all out and put the stock stuff back in. They were pretty good about it, one speaker grill is loose but otherwise it all works and still sounds great. Bose 6-CD changer if you can find your CDs in the attic (or I can throw in some vintage from my collection!)

email wallbrothers@gmail.com or text/leave vm at (413) 770-2840 if interested.

2012 Honda CBR250 Motorcycle SOLD

4,500 Miles

He bought this in October, a friend of a friend is helping sell it. I’ll see if I can get some pictures if it’s not already gone. Thanks to Scott at Corrupted Concepts for moving it, check out his shop! Stock photo if you’re not familiar with it:

email wallbrothers@gmail.com or text/leave vm at (413) 770-2840 if interested.

Another year in the rear view mirror. So how did it go? The interesting thing to me is the halo effect – looking back at all 12 months it’s been a great year, but the wonky economy has made Q4 and the Q1 outlook weak, which is disappointing.

As part of the sandwich generation, keeping track of kids and elders went well. The only big miss was not going out to visit my family in Michigan at some point. I had a weird lockdown rebound, I thought that I’d be itching to travel once things were open again, but instead I just wanted to take advantage of everything here and rest. The Berkshires is a tourist destination so I was sold on the idea of a vacation where I didn’t have to spend any time driving. And it was great. We got a family pass to the town pool and I really enjoyed taking a couple hours after the work day to swim and then chat with my neighbors. The kids are both healthy and doing well at school, which is very satisfying, especially with H moving up to Greylock for Grade 7.

There was one home improvement project that we didn’t get done but the scoring on that is a little weird – we thought it was going to be a massive project but it turned out foundation work was not required, so even though it’s not finished we are farther ahead than we thought we’d be at this point without doing much of anything. So with that, just over 80% complete for family stuff.

Given the insanity of the past handful of years I had beefed up the mental health and fitness goals and then got it all done. Some points off for coming up 5 bike rides and 7 yoga classes more than I wanted, but I joined the local gym last winter because I was tired of not running as much in the cold and I more than made up for that excercise, including putting lifting back in the rotation which even with The Ultimate Warrior telling me I had to do, I never got around to it until this year.

I also managed to hit my weight goal as part of Falmouth Road Race training. The race was part of our Cape vacation which looking back was probably our best vacation ever. Bonus for getting to grab ice cream with Sarah, Mike and Lachlan! Concerts, gaming with cousins and skiing were all fantastic last year.

I’m not sure if I’m in for Falmouth again, Michigan may be the big summer trip but we’ll see.

Financial goals also went very well, the wrinkle is that I could have hit the investment goals but I’m keeping the cash on hand with all of the current weirdness.

And the financial goals are 99% dependant on the work goals. It was another growth year for MoC listeners but the ad market for Q1 is the shakiest I’ve seen in more than 6 years. Trust Insights breaking growth records solves all ills, as usual for a growing business. Since I decided to take 2022 off from writing there was no miss there. The only problem was that I wanted to do a live event for MoC in 2022 and that was not feasible. I at least finally got back to MarketingProfs B2B Boston in the 4th quarter after missing INBOUND because I did not stop testing positive for Covid early enough.

That makes it an 84% year from the numbers. When the big gaps are because I should have taken one more vacation and save more money (and funny that these are counter to each other) I have to admit that I’m truly fortunate and grateful for all that I have.

So my first wish for 2023 would be that it goes as well as the past year. A book has to go back on this list this year, as well as a Michigan trip. I do need to pick a road race so I don’t get lazy. I’ll spend the rest of the week kicking around some ideas before putting them on paper.

I hope your year went well, and all the best to you in 2023!

Here’s the latest: Marketing Over Coffee continues to roll along so that’s the majority of stuff that I’m putting out in the world. The format is basically me and Christopher Penn talking marketing and tech, and then every second or third week interviews with authors and business leaders doing interesting things. I had a great interview a couple of weeks ago with the team from The Mailworks, it was a lot of fun to talk direct mail which was a big part of when I was at DCI, which is just a bonkers story.

The Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter underwent a major upgrade, and that’s where I’m posting a lot of the interesting links that I come upon. If the stuff here is to your liking definitely check that out.

For the past year I’ve also been playing around with a text service. I’ve learned a lot of interesting stuff about how it’s different from email and some pitfalls to avoid. The thing with this is it’s the fastest way to get things out there so this is where I’ve been doing all the giveaways of audio gear and books that come from doing the show. If you’d like to get real time alerts when things are happening, and the chance to win free stuff just send a text to 617-812-5494

Trust Insights has been doing very well, we’ve been busy providing analytics and actionable insight to our clients. I’m thankful to be working with a team that I respect and we share the same dedication to improving both the tech and personal strengths for our clients and ourselves.

If you are on social I’m always on LinkedIn (who’s been a fantastic MoC sponsor over the years – get $100 in free ads here), and it’s been an insane year for twitter but I’m still there as of today /shrug/

That’s the latest, just wanted to get the update out there so I can now start working on my annual holiday gift post! Happy holidays to you, and if you’ve seen Spirited “Good Afternoon!”

I got a batch of NFC stickers and I’m playing around with that. The first use case is setting it up so somebody can tap my phone with theirs and they’ll download my contact info. After that who knows, but it’s cheap and easy to play with. The other killer app there is Apple supports passing WiFi login via NFC so tapping to get on the network is a whole lot easier than somebody typing nectarinem0nkey5785.

At the recommendation of Tom Webster I started looking at the Jabra line of earbuds when I was looking for full Bluetooth and checking out the latest from Bose and Apple Earpods. The Jabra 75t won, pushed to the head of the pack by great microphones and an Equalizer so I can tweak the audio so it sounds best to my ears. And it works, they’re the most fun I’ve had listening to earbuds.

Earlier this year I had a fantastic discussion with Joshua Cohen of TubeFilter. If you want to know how people are making piles of money on YouTube it’s worth the listen.

I don’t watch much TV, Carin and I usually have a single show we’ll watch a couple nights a week. We’ve never watched a season of anything more than once. That is until we found Ted Lasso back in the spring. It looks like it’s a sports show, but in reality it’s a workplace comedy. The producer of Scrubs brings a mountain of experience to it and the rapid pace is just a touch of Gilmore Girls. If you feel the world has been lacking kindness in the past 5 years, it will calm your mind and heart.

For the past 4 years I’ve been waiting on a recession. I thought it would be just the normal Wall Street shenanigans or something, I never expected this.

I hope you and your family are safe and healthy, that’s our first order of business.

While it’s frightening watching the pandemic spread and not knowing when it will let up or how bad it will be, we will get to the other side of this and I’m hoping that we’ll look at things a bit differently. Maybe our healthcare system could put the health of all and more capacity and distributed supply chain ahead of just in time profits at all costs to “maximize shareholder value.”

I wrote a piece last week on the Trust Insights website about why this could be a defining moment for us, a time when everyone around the world can work together to build a better future. Please check it out, I would love to hear your opinion on it.

With our normal daily routines gone be sure you’re doing things to keep your brain healthy and minimize stress. Here’s a list I swiped from Christopher Penn:

1. Endorphins – get some exercise
2. Dopamine – play some games
3. Serotonin – foods rich in tryptophan
4. Oxytocin – Barry White time

If you’ve read any great books or seen any good movies feel free to chime in this Friday on the #FriLearning tag on twitter and tell us what you learned. Feel free to tag me in @johnjwall

Jeremiah Owyang had a post asking why tech has not solved homelessness in the bay area. The obvious snark that’s far below me would be “Yeah, that’s shocking, tech people having difficulty handling social situations.” I know, here I am talking about compassionate stuff and opening being a mean jerk. It’s still funny.

It’s cliche (but still true) to say there’s no easy answer, but there are a couple of things I’ve been thinking about (and I try to write up the lessons of the week as #FriLearning – Garry encouraged me to do this).

One problem is that homelessness is a bundle of many things. People having economic difficulty are a different problem than those with mental illnesses, substance abuse is another massive issue. AND, these are not mutually exclusive and a cover a wide spectrum from a little trouble to hazardous. Everybody I know that’s spent time on Market Street has a story about somebody doing something crazy and threatening others. I’ve seen law enforcement struggle with maintaining everyone’s safety and rights, doing all they can to negotiate with the irrational. I can’t give them enough credit for dealing with that daily.

Our country was created as a land of opportunity – you have a chance to go out and get it. I used to think that now a small amount of people have most of it. Having done more research, it’s been that way for most of human civilization, this is not new. I used to think that putting more effort into “helping the poor” was the answer. This divides us and it creates a real problem at the dividing line. The democratic party got a rude awakening this election from voters in the middle class that weren’t excited about paying more to make healthcare more affordable for others.

Maybe it’s not about “the poor” but trying to find a way to make food, shelter, medical care and taking responsibility for others part of who we are. And you can help, there’s no reason to wait for an ambitious government official to figure it out.

 

Things that guide my opinions: HandUp is has been trying interesting things. The Guardian on the homeless offered trips out of town. Our local food pantry.

Notes: Searching for “FriLearning” in twitter brings them up in chronological, searching on #FriLearning orders them some other way.

Trial and Error sounds so clean, so clinical. Picking yourself up off the ground for the 10,000th time requires a lot more soul than just “starting the next trial”. In many ways I rate this blog as a failure (which sounds much more imposing than “an error”) having not taken the advice many successful bloggers did take of “think of it as working on a book, not a diary.”

But, I like having a bit of my own writing out there that’s fun for me. It may not be a big crowd, but if you do read this, you’re probably into many of the same things I am and I’m happier to have a few kindred spirits reading about things they want to, rather than feeling like I have to post something here seven times a day to “feed the beast”.

So, I’ll ignore the trial and error results and let’s get back to the diary! What’s going on that has kept me away from posting about audio or Christmas Tree ornaments here?

I’m working on a great project called Stack & Flow with Sean Zinsmeister of Infer. Sean’s opened up his rolodex to get Sales and Marketing leaders to talk about the sales and marketing technologies they are using to drive results. It’s just been fun to find a place for Marketing Ops people in the podcasting world.

Marketing Over Coffee has been growing like crazy thanks to all the excitement around podcasting. We’ve decided to launch our first events for listeners to work together in groups limited to 10 people. I’m hoping we get to take it on the road as our audience has grown to around 50% outside of the US which opens up the chance for some foreign travel which would be fantastic.

EventHero continues to grow, doing badging, lead retrieval and session tracking. We’ve been doing a bunch of the Salesforce.com Dreaming’ events which keeps me in touch with what’s happening on the SFDC front. It’s always a thrill for me to see the app in action. I’m thankful for the privilege and trust of my co-workers.

The kids are off for the summer and doing a few weeks at camp, and in my spare time I’ve been helping Carin remodel 5 apartments. Currently working on bathroom 4 of 5 so I can’t wait for that to finish, not that it means I’ll have any free time…

I hope your summer has been relaxing, or at least fun!