GameStop’s PS3 Pricing Fail

August 26, 2008 · Filed Under Rants · 1 Comment 

Removed for inacurracy.

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Panera Bread Blunders, Borders Earns Business

August 23, 2008 · Filed Under Rants · 4 Comments 

Panera Bread is well known for one thing to every ‘net addicted, technophisticated blogger geek.  Free Wifi.

So what happens when you get a nice corner table? You fire up your laptop, plugin every accessory from a blackberry and usb optical mouse to a keydrive and iPod… Only to realize something is very wrong.

You look up and around and realize you’re the only laptoid there.  Unless the world has come to an end or another Star Wars movie is being released, this cannot be real.

But it is.

And magically, your laptop alerts you to a wireless connection that has limited connectivity.  Limited.  Who likes the word limited? No one.

A few minutes of trying led a Panera Bread Baker-Barista over to say, half laughing, that their WiFi wasn’t working and hadn’t been for days.

Fail.

So I did what anyone else would do.  Shut down the laptop.  Unplugged every accessory I just plugged in and wrapped up every cable.  Thankfully I never ordered a thing.

And I drove across the street to Borders.  The Borders in North Attleboro Massachusetts. Where I’m blogging this.  With an Asiago Sourdough Pretzel and a Seattle’s Best Iced Vanilla Soy Latte in hand.  And I PAID for my WiFi.  So, eff you Panera. Borders, enjoy the free link love, no condoms applied.

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Internet Marketer’s Charity Party at SES San Jose

August 18, 2008 · Filed Under Links & Resources, Search Related · Comment 

While I’m not out in San Jose I did want to send my best wishes along to Todd Malicoat and the organizers of tonight’s Internet Marketer’s Charity Party at SES San Jose.  The event is an absolute must attend for anyone at SES, as it combines a great networking opportunity with a great crowd of people — all interested in benefiting a wonderful cause.

A $40 donation is required for attendance into the party tonight - but if you’re not in San Jose, you can still make a difference.  Todd has set up a secure donation page online for the event where you can make donations in any denomination.

Please consider helping the IM Charity Party organizers in their efforts to raise money for The Children’s Hospital of Aurora Colorado and The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

I’ve made a donation and I’m challenging all three readers of my blog to do the same!  If you have donated and I failed to grab your name of URL below, please post a comment and I will add you to the list.

If you are attending tonight, I love you for participating and hope you have a wonderful time!

Special thanks also to the IM Charity Party Sponsors:

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Flickr Photos & Some New Computer Wallpaper

August 18, 2008 · Filed Under Odds and Ends · Comment 

I’ve been working hard to keep A Dad’s Blog updated.  In fact, it’s been much easier to update on that site than it has here on my regular blog. Part of running A Dad’s Blog though means carrying a digital camera with me everywhere I go.

Yesterday we took Camden for a walk. If you’re interested in watching an awesomesauce video of my little man, you need to go read the post and view the video now.

While taking the walk I also took some photos that I may be using for some new desktop wallpaper. I’m not sure they’re any good - but I did decide to start a new set for all of my wallpaper photos to hang out in on Flickr.

Here are some smaller versions.  To grab the higher resolution photos please head on over to Flickr.

Interested in your thoughts…

And these were taken with point and shoot Polaroid digital camera, so the quality isn’t spectacular.

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My 45 Sphinn Stalkers are Now Friends

August 18, 2008 · Filed Under Odds and Ends, Social Media Links · 2 Comments 

Sphinn is the Internet Marketing News & Discussion community run by Third Door Media.

As I’ve mentioned before, I use enjoy Using Sphinn as a Resource on Busy Days to check in on industry news and debates.  I probably don’t participate as often as I should as a community member which is a bit weak considering Sphinn: A Dysfunctional Social Community? - a post I wrote in May of this year analyzing the engagement of Sphinn users.

So this morning I’m checking Summize / Twitter Search for any references out there to my Twiter username.  Since Twitter is a bag of suck, they can’t show me replies or what I’d term a “mention” - an instance of when someone else on Twitter uses my name as a link (as in @ericlander).  Anyway, Summize found this status update from Tim Dineen:

@jillwhalen @ericlander @johnandrews gone from the network list too. Self-terminated? Dunno I’ve been away for a while. http://tinyurl.com/5fx48m

My Non-Twitter Translation: Jill Whalen, John Andrews and Eric Lander are gone from the Network List on Sphinn.

As soon as I saw this, I wanted to know if I suffered the same fate as Bill Hartzer. What happened you ask? Well, check out his former Sphinn profile and you will see bhartzer (This account has been terminated.)

Huzzah! I didn’t happen to think that was neccessary, did I?

Okay… I’ve rambled long enough, right?  So I log into my Sphinn account to first make sure I haven’t gotten a kiss of death and lost my user account.

Good news, I haven’t.

Next… I try to find myself in the Sphinn network.  Good news, I’m in there - just not listed prominently because I don’t use the system much.  That should’ve closed the book, right?

Wrong. I realized my avatar / user icon was out of date with the new one I’ve been using.  Since I willingly whore myself out for personal branding, I opt to change it.   As soon as my ADHD kicks in, I see that there’s a Friends link.

Well shit… I don’t really have many friends. Logging into Sphinn and checking my friends out would be a great boost to my self confidence, right? <click>

Damn. Zero friends…

Sphinn now mimics real life for me… Awesome.

The twist here is that there’s no obvious way to become friends with someone else on Sphinn. Again mimicking real life, Sphinn apparently wants me to become a stalker and stalk people I want to be friends with.  Then, if they find me stalking them - they can become my friend.  This is where the comparison to real life changes… Normally I would get slapped with a restraining order and then have to find new prey.

The next logical thing to do is to do what should be impossible.  Review the people stalking you.

Apparently I’m pretty cool.  Check out all the stalkers I had!

For those of you counting (read: ME) that’s a total of 45 stalkers. While it’s not the most impressive amount, it’s still infinitely more awesome than I thought.

And using those awesome checkboxes along with a couple clicks of the mouse… I had 45 friends.

Andrew Shotland (andrewsho on Sphinn) makes a great recommendation on the Sphinn Wishlist to see this whole thing improved:

Re Better Friending
Make the friending mechanism a bit more explicit.  I had no idea how to acquire friends so i just stalked people and then I didn’t know that they had suddenly become my friends.

And that’s all I’ve got. Well, that and 45 new friends on the Interwebz.  Happy Monday!

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Guilty as Charged [Eyetwitch]

August 7, 2008 · Filed Under Odds and Ends · 1 Comment 

From Yahoo Answers:

It appears most eye twiches are harmless, involuntary spasms of the tiny muscles surrounding the eye. Some causes are fatigue, squinting a lot, consuming too much caffeine, or working in a less than ideal visual environment, e.g., staring at a computer screens for long periods of time. Just like a muscle spasm at any other part of the body, an eye twitch can mean you’ve taxed your muscles and need to relax them.

Bold emphasis is mine, showing some items I’m entirely guilty of.

That explains it! Thankfully, I switched to some decaf tea after lunch (which totally included a 22 minute “power nap”)

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Officially Burnt Out

August 7, 2008 · Filed Under Odds and Ends · 5 Comments 

Sometime this morning my head broke down on me. I don’t know the precise time… But I stumbled across some evidence that’s pretty conclusive.

Before getting there though I should recap some oddities beginning last night when I got home from the office.

At about 6:15PM I’m lying on the floor playing with my son Camden. Next thing I know, I’m face down in the carpet and I’ve got a monster truck* on my head. I drank a Red Bull.

Later in the evening I was at Stop & Shop grabbing some groceries. I had a list of about 10 items and left home at about 8:00PM. I got home shortly after 9:00PM, at which point I realized that I completely forgot more than 1/2 of my list of items.

I found out yesterday that I had 17 different WordPress installs affected with some JavaScript injections (including this one, now fixed) because of some plugin and file protection issues. At about 3:15AM, I’m working on the sofa, legs up on the coffee table and laptop rocking and rolling… Cleaning up some MySQL and PHP scripting and making sure my WP installs are locked down… and I pass out. Just, head rolled back, asleep.

When I jolted myself awake, I immediately went to bed.

I got up this morning at 6:20AM. Later than normal, but I needed it. Took a lazy shower, threw on some incredibly unprofessional (read: über casual) attire, and hopped in the car. Everything was back and feeling good again… Until I rolled up to the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru and found my cup holder already occupied.

I couldn’t take a picture then, but I did once I got to my desk…

Yes, I apparently bought TWO coffees on the way into work today. From different places. Off of different highway exits.

So yeah, I’m going to finally concede on this one… I’m burnt out.

* Random Note: “Cranium Crusher” would be a great name for a monster truck.

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2008 New England Patriots Training Camp Video

August 5, 2008 · Filed Under Odds and Ends · Comment 

Apologies on this not being at all search industry related… But, I’m a Patriots fan. I’ve posted before about the Pats, so I get to do it again.  Here’s a video of last night’s training camp held at Gillette Stadium.

My favorite part of the night had to be Moss’ TD reception that I highlighted at the end of the video.  Still have no idea how he managed to get both feet down, but he did.  Perfect weather, perfect amount of people - and a great time.

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My Other Blog Got Hacked & Injected with Link Spam

July 31, 2008 · Filed Under Odds and Ends · 3 Comments 

Just a quick post completely unrelated to search or SEO but relevant to A Dad’s Blog… my other blog covering what it’s like in the every day life as a parent.

Seems the blog had been injected with a bunch of footer links. I’ve narrowed it down to an IP that’s reporting back to Santa Paula CA and coming from California based ISP. I’m guessing that only because there’s an insane amount of bandwidth consumption over the past three days from this source. The patterns were too fast to be a human and the bot was rummaging through with an old school UA as it ate up the wp-admin areas and made some changes to headers, footers, template libraries, etc.

It has since been cleaned up and was an easy fix, but an annoyance.

Major thanks to Chris Winfield of 10e20 for spotting this and hitting me up on Facebook with the info.

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Happy Birthday to Loren Baker!

July 30, 2008 · Filed Under Odds and Ends, Search Related · 1 Comment 

Happy Birthday Loren Baker!

If one person helped me get back on my feet in the past year, it’d be Loren Baker. So, it’s only fair that we recognize Loren’s birthday today and wish him the best!

Since sending me to SMX Social in NYC last October, I’ve learned to appreciate Loren’s commitment to the industry as well as his friends. He’s introduced me to a number of great people, he’s given me an author account on Search Engine Journal and also became a business partner of mine this past Spring.

Loren’s got a lot to celebrate along with his birthday, including his proposing to to Janna in mid June.

If you haven’t already done so, be sure to hit up Loren’s Facebook profile and wish him the best! And, don’t forget that Loren is speaking at Scary SEO in Fort Lauderdale this October along with John Carcutt of AgencyWeb who was innocently included in this blog posts photo :)

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