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Daily Life

5 Greatest Foods Ever

One of the many reasons I hate the holidays is that invariably I’ll be sitting around doing nothing, except for maybe my conscience asking me “Why the hell aren’t you writing now?”, and probably end up eating. As I look forward to this inevitable event that made me think of some of the things that I have found over the years that I thought are worth sharing.

Garrett’s Cheese Popcorn – is astoundingly good, better than any other cheese popcorn I have ever had, by a long shot. You might want to eat it with chopsticks though because the cheese will stain your fingers. Once, while in Chicago on business my friend Tom had some and then went to the Sony story and played the PS2 demo units, leaving the controller covered in orange goo.

Stam Chocolates – Jim from Podcasting News brought us a box of these a couple of years ago and they are better than anything else I’ve tried, even stuff from Germany and Austria. These chocolates are so good that our dog when berserk when we bought a box as a Christmas gift this year and he ate the whole 27 piece box.  There’s a lot fewer gross ingredients, it’s kind of like the difference between fresh squeezed OJ and all other OJ, except for….

Orchid Island Juice Company – I am an OJ snob, but Orchid Island is very good and available at Trader Joe’s and my local supermarket, Roche Brothers.

Strawberry Hill Povitica – Fantastic bread, make french toast with this and you’ll never go back to regular bread.

Blues Hog BBQ Sauce – I used to work with Chris, who is a BBQ Jedi Master with the trophies to prove it. My nephew has said he can no longer use other sauces because everything tastes like a sad excuse after Blues Hog.

Enjoy!

Categories
Daily Life

New Addiction

This week I have become hooked on Mahalo Answers. It’s the crack of websites…

The business week is over, and snow is coming down fast and furious here.

Speaking of other addictions – my 64GB SSD arrived today. I’m making an image of my old school hard drive right now and on Monday the brain transplant for the fastest Laptop in the fleet will begin. Geeks rejoice!

Categories
Daily Life

Coltrane and WebInno

You are now looking at a 2.7 WordPress blog (codename Coltrane). With this forced update it appears that I have vanquished the spammers that had taken up residence down in my footer, sending my Google juice to hell. Why didn’t I upgrade before switching domains you ask? Only so many hours in a day unfortunately.

Last week was WebInno 20, the new tech showcase that is a great way to find out what’s happening in tech in Boston. The sad part is that I still have paperwork on my desk from WebInno 19 that I had yet to write up. Sadder yet, I signed up for 20 and for some reason thought that it was on Wednesday, so when I checked my calendar that morning, it was too late, it had happened the night before.

Regardless, there are two things to take away from this  – one for David (as he usually keeps a good eye on who’s writing about the event) – if EventBrite could send a reminder email the day before that would help idiots like the man at this keyboard right now. We’ve had a lot of success doing this for webinars, I go so far as to send the reminder at the same time the event will be the next day so that it has context.

The other is that even though my feedback is late, that doesn’t take anything away from the fact that I was impressed by RunKeeper, an iPhone app that uses GPS to track your time and course. As a diehard Nike+ user (actually off the wagon now with the cold weather), this is very impressive. Since I don’t have an iPhone though, I’ll stay +.

Categories
Daily Life

WordPress Upgrade in Progress

I’m going to 2.7 to fix some spam problems, who knows what I’ll break.

The best part is one Doug Haslam has pointed out before – if I really break things, you won’t even see this!

UPDATE: Things are moving nicely, Technorati is giving me a shot at probation!

Technorati Profile

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Daily Life

6th Photo Meme

Mike tagged me on the 6th Photo Meme – the idea is that you go to your Flickr account and grab the 6th photo on your 6th page. It’s a great reason to talk about photos (and probably something out of the mind of the Marketing department at Flickr). If you are a flickr fan at all, please click through and friend me up.

This photo is from my cousin’s wedding this summer, these are my cousins Jenny and Chris. Their Dad Jim is my Mom’s brother. I really enjoy spending time with them, but they’re out in Michigan so I usually only get to see them once a year. The rest of the shots are up there if you like trolling photos as much as I do!

To pass it on, I’ll tag Chicago Mike (are you on Flickr?), John from ODM, Chip Griffin (although he doesn’t blog about much personal, he is a Flickr Friend), Jason – who is doing a 365 project and taking some great shots, my Marketing Over Coffee co-host (and new camera owner) Christopher S. Penn, and Julia Roy.

Categories
Daily Life

New Laptop

I tend to hold on to laptops a lot longer than most people because I have to install a lot of software for everything I need to do at work. Last week my IT guy put a new machine next to mine and when I saw how dim my screen was I knew it was time for a refresh.Even worse, when my last machine died I just pulled the hard drive and put it into an older spare rig that was lying around just to spare myself the days of labor to build a new machine from scratch.Even for average users, an annual reinstall of windows can speed up a machine, it’s been over 3 years since my last rebuild. Some crazy stats:

  • My Windows (XP) folder was 5.8 GB, the new fresh install is 2.6 GB
  • Programs Files went from 6.3 GB down to 3.0 GB
  • I lost another 3 GB cleaning out the My Docs folder

But the news gets better – I’ll be doing the final tweaking this week and then the 64 GB SSD I ordered will arrive and I’ll put the fresh image on that. SSD is a Solid State Drive – instead of the normal hard disk drive with spinning platters, this “drive” is flash memory. No moving parts means a huge boost in speed and battery life, it’s silent, and runs cooler. Speed report to follow!

Categories
Brain Buster

Newspapers and my $100 Dollars

Jay has $100 of mine, it’s just a matter of when I can go pick it up. At the beginning of the year I put a line in the sand and said that Newspapers (and the 6pm News) would be gone by 2/26/13. Thanks to the comments of some readers, notably Chip who reminded me that AM Radio has yet to die, and Jay who put up $100 to say that he won’t see a day in his lifetime with no papers, I was convinced that although things will not get better for this medium, it wouldn’t die.

But then last month, I learned that what I consider to be Boston’s most iconic newstand is closing up. I had been convinced that it was a behavioral issue – and too many people enjoy reading the paper -  but what about the economic side? Printing news on paper and having people drive it around on trucks is a business model that can’t survive compared to delivering it online? Maybe I do have a shot at the cash by 2013…

Categories
Daily Life

Stuff Worth Reading

A few pointers today to some things that I’ve been really impressed with:Curt Schilling has moved his blog, if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to decide what major league team to play for check out his latest posts.

Scott Monty talks about using social media at Ford. They’ve also some Ford Video, and I’m going to have to dig deep find a photo of our vintage Fiesta, which looks nothing like the new Fiesta.

That reminded me of a GM post from Will,  which reminded me to post a new link of video on the Lincvolt.

Lastly in auto if you need a GPS I have a one-time code I can use to get a Navigon 8100T for only $299, which is half price . You have to see the 3D image to believe it, but tell me ASAP as they will probably go in the first few hours. (update, my offer has expired and it doesn’t matter, Pogue from the Times says it stinks)

Jenny outlines some gift ideas for the fairer sex. And that’s it for the linkbait,  except for Marketing Over Coffee, the best marketing podcast.

Categories
Brain Buster

Lightroom 2 Half Price from Amazon

I normally don’t pass shopping stuff, but this is a killer deal. Amazon has Lightroom 2 for only $125 US at 10am PST today for 2 hours only:

http://tinyurl.com/6houqw

Categories
Daily Life

Technical Issues Resolved?

I think everything is working now, the feeds are coming through and all the old posts are still accessible. The M Show is also working, but all on it’s own domain.

If you could, please leave a comment if you got here from a feed reader, and if you had any problems. Thanks!