Entries Tagged 'General' ↓
March 29th, 2008 — General
“We may not always get what we want, we may not get what we need, just so long as we don’t get what we deserve.”
That quote (from the movie True Colors starring John Cusack and James Spader) has always amused me. A friend of mine and I used to quote it to each other when one or the other was frustrated about not having something we felt we “had to have” and it usually brought a grin and bit of a reality check. Yesterday was my birthday and not only did I not get what I deserve I got something I truly don’t deserve - a Canon 40D.
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January 23rd, 2008 — General
In response to a couple of commenters on my David Caruso post I am following up with a picture of my wife and I from the same conference. This picture was taken at the GHOSTBAR at the top of the Palms hotel and casino. This is later the same night we met Mr. Caruso, the conference was over and we were relaxing with people we had met earlier in the week.
So scottb and Sue here’s the picture I promised.
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January 21st, 2008 — General
You can say just about whatever you want to me but these days you have to follow it up with the title “coach”. I’ve been wrangled into coaching my son’s 3rd and 4th grade co-ed indoor soccer team and while I’ve assisted with past teams this is my first time being “the man”. Continue reading →
December 3rd, 2007 — General
Day 3
8:15 am
We started off the day getting a picture with Santa for the “wee keg tour - southern style”. Many thanks to the desk worker at the hotel for taking the picture for us.
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December 2nd, 2007 — General
Day Two - Junction, TexasÂ
9:00am
We survived the night and there is great rejoicing. “Yeaâ€.
Almost nothing compares with a beautiful West Texas morning!
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December 1st, 2007 — General
Austin to Vegas Day One
A few less than notable moments from driving the PubCon Conference materials to Las Vegas from the WebmasterWorld office located in Austin Texas. Adam Young (jatar_k) and I spend 24 hours on the road over 2+ days. I make no claim that this is anything but boring and is meant only to highlight how mind numbing the actual event was.
3:30 pm
It’s time to get on the road since we have a mission. The eventual mission is to get to Vegas but the more immediate concern is the Dallas vs.Green Bay game that is scheduled for 7:15pm tonight. This is the game that has caused a stir because of the fight between the NFL and cable companies over the inclusion of the NFL network amongst the general cable offerings. The majority of the U.S. population with cable cannot see the game making any home or business with satellite an instantly popular location. We tried to map out stopping place options that were large enough to have at least one sports bar where we could watch the game. The trouble with West Texas is that “stopping places†are very limited and you usually have to take what you can get. We decided Junction Texas was our best choice given the number of hotels that were in the area and the fact that a college was located there. Any place with a college must be large enough to offer several bars and at least one would must have the NFL Network. We were off.
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October 17th, 2007 — General
I have been awol here for the last 6-8 weeks and there’s a pretty good reason for it. Okay actually there are 3 good reasons.
- Kid’s soccer takes an amazing amount of time for parent’s who choose to help the coach during practice.
- My wife’s grandfather went into the hospital because of a brain tumor 6 weeks ago. This was a very slow growing tumor that they knew about but it suddenly started growing quickly and created pressure on his brain. He survived surgery (he was only given a 15% chance of making it) but until just recently has required a lot of help from family members even while he was in the hospital.
- My wife’s mother was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer within a week of her father going into the hospital (he with the brain tumor). She was operated on immediately and has recovered fairly well from that but now comes chemo therapy.
Needless to say the above took a lot of time away from my normal day to day life. I am just now coming out from under a siege of emails, etc… and finding time to relax just a bit.  Granted, our family won’t be too relaxed for some time as grandpa and mom are going to be longer term concerns.
 Speaking of health concerns. Given the tough news we’ve had in the last couple of months I have spent some time trying to research what we’re up against and/or just what the heck those doctors were saying. In general I found that medical information on the internet fell into one of two general categories.
- Useless superficial information - This is the most prevelant brand I found. What made it particularly irritating was finding multiple high ranked sites with essentially the same information, sometimes verbatim. Apparently Google has put it’s “trust” in a few of the wrong sites as there is a plethora of very basic copied information residing on medical pages/sites.
- Useless technical information - Not nearly as prevelant as #1 but no less useless to me. I’m researching colon cancer because I didn’t fully understand what the doctor said when he tried to dumb down the explanation to an average joe (me). That probably means I’m not prepared to read research papers on colon cancer written by doctors for doctors.
Yes, I’ve seen the commercials for WebMD and looked at a ton of other supposedly great health sites as well. But in my experience they came up lacking, seriously.
June 23rd, 2007 — General
While you might be tempted to think I am advertising my own line of shirts it’s just not true. What is true is that I will be picking up a couple of these shirts for the kids. Continue reading →
May 25th, 2007 — General
When I was in college I worked the last two years for the school in the “Admissions & Marketing” office. As you would suspect from the name it was focused on bringing students to the college and the work seemed easy to me since I liked to talk and was reasonably good at it. About 9 months before I graduated the Vice President for that department asked me to consider working as a full time employee, an offer that I accepted. Two things immediately happened:
- I began furiously searching the college bulletin trying figure out how to graduate as quickly as possible regardless what my degree would be in - hehe.
- I was graced with a 3′X6′ table set into a corner with an uncomfortable “task” chair and my own phone. I thought I had hit the big time, for the first time in my life I didn’t have to hunt for someone else’s empty desk to steal for an hour or two.
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May 16th, 2007 — General
So the kids and I had so much fun that the wife decided that we would all do it again the next day. Just because she didn’t get up early on Friday (like I did since I’m such a good parent) she decides to punish me with another 6:00 am morning. I’m actually glad she did as this was a completely different experience than the day before. As I mentioned in the previous post the Friday morning launch was just two balloons at a nearby school. Balloons were launched at schools all over town making it a truly city-wide experience. On Saturday all of the hot air balloons were in one location meaning that we got to see 40 balloons lanuch from one field over the course of an hour! It was really something to see! It’s late and I’m off to bed soon but I’ll share a couple of photos so you can get an idea of what it was like.
This is the sight that greeted us when we arrived!
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