Andy Boyer

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Category: Personal (Page 19 of 48)

A Story For Those of You Who Gutted Out Time at the End of the Bench

November 10, 2010 /

If you’ve had conversation with me lately, you’ve probably had to hear me tell the tale of Niki, the Senior JV player who got called up to varsity for the last game of her senior year for Senior Night, and got in a fun 15 minutes of play at the end.

Well, the story gets better.  Here’s a story from the Seattle Times from last night’s Girls High School State Tournament:

Defending Champs Skyline Advances | Girls 4A State Soccer

SAMMAMISH — Fresh off its ascent to the No. 1 spot in the nation, top-ranked Skyline immediately went out and validated that status.

Emphatically.

Two quick first-half goals and stout defense propelled the Spartans one step closer to their third consecutive Class 4A state championship with a 5-0 win over Mount Rainier in Tuesday’s first round of the state playoffs at Skyline High School.

Junior forward Michelle Bretl scored her first high-school hat trick and has four goals in the postseason for Skyline (17-0). She leads the team with 15 goals this season.

The Spartans’ depth showed, as well. Reserve Niki Gerlach, a senior playing in her second varsity match after a last-minute roster switch when Nicole Candioglos came up ill, booted in a rebound shot in the 78th minute. Gerlach, listed on the roster as a team manager, had been playing on the junior varsity.

“With Niki, it’s kind of a fun story,” said Skyline coach Don Braman. “On Senior Night, she had an assist and nearly scored a goal and was kicking herself, so it was fun to see her stick one in the net. She has worked hard.”

….

If you’ve ever sat on the sidelines and wondered why you are putting in all that effort for no guaranteed payout, this should remind you.

Support Prostate Cancer Awareness with “Mo-vember”

October 26, 2010 /

Sometimes over here at AndyBoyer.com, we get to turn our pages over to someone else, espcially if they have a compelling story to tell.  So, we’re handing the content reigns over to our friend Luke Lawson, with a special article about Mo-vember.

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What is Movember you ask? No, it’s not a political site or get out the vote pledge. While both are great motivators to visit the Movember site (and I encourage you all to vote Nov. 2nd!) Movember’s purpose “is to change the face of men’s health”.  How and why you might ask? Please read on! Taken from a great recent article written by Dan Zenka, Vice President of Communications for the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF).

In ten countries around the globe, men will soon be letting their hair out to support awareness and raise crucial funds for finding better treatments and cures for this disease that affects more than 16 million men and families around the world. Since 2004, Mo’ bros and Mo’ sistas have raised more than $40 million dollars to support research for men’s diseases. What’s more, in the U.S. they are changing the way prostate cancer is viewed.  The Prostate Cancer Foundation and LIVESTRONG are the beneficiaries of Movember efforts in the States. In its first three years in the U.S., Movember raised $2.3 million to support prostate cancer research through PCF. This year’s goal is $2 million. That’s a whole lotta mo’s and mo’ola.

Literally and figuratively, Movember is definitely living up to it tagline: Changing the Face of Men’s Health. The teaching moment starts the moment anyone asks a participant, “What’s that on your face?”

The annual Movember campaign is fun, quirky and purposeful. It’s also proof that one should never be too quick to dismiss a good idea that might arise on a weekend afternoon while having a few beers with your mates. Interested? More information on Movember can be found at www.Movember.com.“

For me, it’s personal. I lost my father to Prostate Cancer when he was only 51. That’s too young. My father stood a near 100% chance of being cured had he gone in for a check up earlier in life. If growing a mustache for a month or, posting to my Facebook page, or continuing to fund cancer research, or writing this email helps just one person- I will be satisfied. Please consider joining me and/or my team “El Bigote” (the mustache) at: http://us.movember.com/mospace/534202/  make a donation or help spread the word further by directing your friends and family to the site. You don’t have to grow a mustache to join (or donate) and we need Mo’ sistas just as much as Mo’ bros!

Thank you for your time,

Luke

Trying to Cheer Up Kasey Keller

October 23, 2010 /

I felt bad for Kasey Keller for botching that easy shot on Tuesday, which led to the Sounders losing their final Champions League game 2-1. Then I remembered this famous YouTube clip, so I hope he feels better and realizes it could have been worse.

Commitment to Content

October 14, 2010 /

I have a confession for my few loyal readers who I’ve been neglecting lately.  In the spirit of true transparency, I have an admission…….. I have been cheating on you with another blog.

Yes, it’s true.  

I did a little test last month.  In addition to the places I write for professional purposes, I developed a side project as a psychological experiment.  There were a number of reasons for the exercise, but one of them included measuring how much content I could produce, if I was doing so in true anonymity.  And the answer is that I created quite a lot.  More than 50 posts in fact.  

There was something freeing about writing without anyone knowing who I was, on one of the simple 33 million blogs out there that will never be found.  Now that content has been hidden away, and I’ll roll it over to a new url, just to make sure I can control who sees it.

But, I learned a few things that will make this blog better.  1) Writing quick posts about everyday life is probably a good goal.  2) There’s really no way to write interesting material without at least sharing a little personal feeling and insight.  Sure, there are some ugly people out there who you don’t necessarily want to see inside your life.  But, you might as well just be transparent and honest online as offline, and just let people make their own decisions.  And there’s kind of no way to avoid it, so you might as well ignore them and say what you want.  3) It’s time for a whole new look and feel to this property.

So, I’ll make a commitment to content.  Starting 7 days from today (So starting Thursday 10/21), I’ll write one post per week for a week.  If I see 25% growth in traffic that week over the previous one, I’ll keep it up.  If I don’t, I’ll scale back to 3x per week.  We’ll see what kind of community develops.

14

September 20, 2010 /

From ESPN.com: 

Arizona is coming off one of its biggest wins in recent seasons, 34-27 against No. 9 Iowa.

The Wildcats were ranked for a few weeks last season, but before that it had been since 2000 that they last made the Top 25.

The last time they were ranked this highly in the regular season was 1998. Arizona finished that season No. 4 in the nation and was in the top 10 for the final six weeks of the season. 

From Arizona Daily Star

“Those are character-building drives,” UA coach Mike Stoops said late Saturday night. “Those are perception drives. Those are program drives.”

Bug Wright caught a 4-yard touchdown pass from Nick Foles with 3 minutes 57 seconds remaining to give No. 24 UA a wild victory.

The Foles-to-Wright connection capped a 9-play, 72-yard drive and put an exclamation point on a game that included a blocked punt, a blocked extra-point attempt, a 100-yard kickoff return and two interceptions returned for touchdowns. 

2 Weeks with the iPad

September 3, 2010 /

(Reposted from the Social3i Consulting blog.)

I’m not necessarily a gadget guy. I like the toys, but I’m generally towards the tail end of the early adopters. For me to spend a lot of money on something, it needs to be good enough to justify replacing the time and energy I’ve already invested on something else.

I usually get pushed over the edge when I see that someone I respect has adopted the technology into their everyday life. So a few weeks ago, after I watched one of our clients taking notes on his slick little tablet, I went forth and joined the iPad nation. 

 Here are some notes now that I’m two weeks in:

  • Super solid notetaking device. Easier and less intrusive than a laptop. Easy to share notes with everyone in the room.
  • Love Keynote. Easy to make presentations on the fly. In fact, I was even able to build a quick soccer field in order to diagram some plays and show my youth team the starting lineup and subs.
  • Love Flipbook. Super cool app for turning my Twitter and Facebook feeds into a mini-magazine.
  • Haven’t downloaded spreadsheet apps yet. This is a glaring hole so far, as I’d love to quickly run numbers.
  • Netflix is fantastic. It’s the easiest way I’ve ever seen for me to just quickly turn on a device and catch up on whatever series I happen to be watching all the way thru.
  • Also, when I’m at my desk I find myself just using it for monitoring email and Pandora, so I don’t have to bother with having it open on my desktop. 

I haven’t really gotten into games or anything yet. Also, I can’t say I use the browser or email any differently that I’d use my iPhone, so that’s not a real differentiator. And I’m just starting to get into the speech recognition stuff, but I haven’t really nailed that yet.

 Overall, it feels like there’s a decent learning curve between making the device a really cool photo album and a fully functional work device. More to come.

 

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