Sunday, October 28, 2007

A Baltimore/DC Weekend

Just go back from a Baltimore/DC weekend. What normally takes 4 hours, took 6 hours to get home. PAINFUL

Diana and I celebrated my birthday Saturday night at Holy Frijoles in Hampden with Jon Alsop. Great dinner and some great artwork by Scott Fishpaw.

This was also my Johns Hopkins Second Decade Society weekend and for a few hours we reviewed various committee updates. There were some amazing donation statistics reviewed that completely blew me away. People just don't contribute to the school. Sure there is a percent that does, but the number has to be greater if we ever plan on growing our endowment. Something we'll have to work on.

This morning Diana and I stopped in the 7-11 in Hampden and sure enough I ran into a police officer who used to hassle our fraternity when we had parties.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Added the new Plaxo Pulse Widget

Reading TechCrunch through Google Reader this morning I read their post about the new Plaxo Pulse Widget. I'm a big Plaxo fan and this is another nice addition to their product suite - I've added it to my right rail.

One other observation I've had is that the Amazon widget always seems to take forever to load. I wonder if that has to do with my page or is it a Amazon problem? Of my readers do you notice that the black Amazon widget to the right takes forever to load?

Sunday, October 21, 2007

WSJ stops by the Art of Shaving

I tried AoS in Las Vegas.

Day of the shave - great

Day after - great

Two days after - my face was on fire

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Rawlings CEO's Secret to Success

This week's episode of History's Business on the History Channel had a great interview with Robert Parish, the president of Rawlings.

His secret for success?

First, success is something you don't measure over 3 or 4 years you measure it over a career.

Second, something I don't like seeing is someone putting self interests before the company's interest. Think first what's good for the brand, think first what's good for the business and act accordingly. I guarantee you that your personal and professional career will grow at a faster rate then it would otherwise.

Great advice.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Some thoughts for the week so far...

Much has happened this week, which made me think about an older post.

"What's Your e-slope?"

Something to think about.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Keeping in touch and staying in-sync

It is time for a fall clean-up of many contacts. I'm a Plaxo Premium subscriber and also a fan of Linkedin. Only recently I started using Facebook, but I'm not finding it that useful yet.

My general rule of thumb for me to accept an invitation on LinkedIn is that I need to know you and your work. My LinkedIn's contact count will never equal my Plaxo count. It'll always be less.

I'm amazed at how many invites I get from people I don't know. We might work at the same company, but we've never met.

Anyway, I want to make sure everything is up-to-date.

I decide to use the new sync feature on Plaxo that logs into LinkedIn and pulls in all of the data. Then I run the super duper de-duper which found a large number of duplicates. There were many instances where the same person had vastly different contact information.

It seems people have profiles on Plaxo and LinkedIn and they are different and that causes some indigestion for Plaxo.

Maybe Plaxo should have a feature that checks your profile on other sites it syncs with to help fix your own syncing problem.

Testing out mobile bloging from

Testing out mobile bloging from my cell phone.

Friday, October 12, 2007

32D was not the seat I was looking for

I flew back last night from Las Vegas having attended RAPT's annual summit. It was a great event and in an effort to get home quickly I took a Delta red-eye back to JFK.

I board the plane, find my seat, 32D, isle, last row, next to the toilets.

Awesome!

Next to me is a couple who proceed to complain to the flight attendant that their seats don't recline enough. The flight attendant replies, "one seat in that row is broken."

I look down and sure enough there is professional looking piece of duct tape covering the hole where the reclining button would normally reside.

First thing I asked for was a different seat, no luck - completely full flight.

They should have taken that seat out of service.

Thanks Delta - I'm exhausted today.

The only thing that could make the flight worse is someone is found to have TB on it.

Saturday, October 06, 2007

Two New Customers from Google Maps

Visited my stylist today to get my hair cut.

Yes, I did write stylist, with my melon head I need an expert to cut my hair. In Baltimore I frequented a chain and on many occasions I detected alcohol on my barber's breath.

Earlier this summer I wanted to experience the business registration process on Google's Local Business Center so I offered to setup Special Effects of East Hampton.

Today when I walked in Elaine the owner, stopped me and said she had gotten two customers from Google.

I asked how she was so sure.

"They told me."

What took 10 minutes, resulted in 2 known customers. Not bad.

In the last 30 days 80 people have viewed Special Effects.

Related Posts:
Replicating the army of yellow page sales people

The Rude Hamptons Makes the Long Island Free Press

The Long Island Free Press published a nice article on citizen bloggers on Long Island this past week and they featured my site - TheRudeHamptons.com

Thanks LIFP!

Monday, October 01, 2007

Had some minor surgery today

I'm not sure I would classify it as surgery since the podiatrist only used novacane to numb my big toe. It's a simple procedure to remove part of your toenail along the edge to prevent ingrown nails. In the interest of furthering the public knowledge I was planning on taking a video of the procedure. He didn't seem keen on it, so instead I found a video on YouTube.

Please note this is not my toe.

Also please note this video is graphic in nature and should only be viewed by people who can handle live surgery.