Let the mocking begin. The Boston Red Sox have purchased the proud English franchise. And to commemorate the occasion, a T-Shirt company has already suggested a new uniform look and feel – “The Fenway Edition.”
Category Archives: Personal
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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.
“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
(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.
Why Not a Yo-Yo Clip?
I mean, do you have something better?
Turning Lemons into Lemonade – The Antoine Dodson Story
You may have seen parts of this saga, but just in case you didn’t follow it all the way through.
So FIRST, watch the new Huntsville Alabama clip that got the whole thing started…
Chilling, no?.
THEN watch what a few clever kids did to it..
It doesn’t end there..
The Huntsville TV crew goes to work, and does a follow up story..
And you know what’s coming, right. .
Antoine Dodson is basically now the new Old Spice Man…With an Ed Hardy T-Shirt no less…Go see http://www.antoine-dodson.com/. A lesson to Snookie and anyone else negotiating for reality TV duckets – characters are everywhere.
Domestic Transformer
Think you are being efficient with your home? Check out this 344′ apartment in Hong Kong. (content sourced from the social3i.com blog.
No Runner Left Behind Vs “The Bridge”
I’ll admit, going into this year’s Beat the Bridge race, I was worried. A groin injury, back issues, too much work, not enough exercise, and a diet in which banana peppers were considered a vegetable, all pointed towards an uphill climb.
This year, Team No Runner Left Behind got some late momentum, and by race day we were up to 20 runners. Our oldest runner was pushing 40 and our youngest not even 10. We supported Team Livestrong, and clad ourselves in Lance Yellow.
With 20 runners, a strict buddy system was implemented. Our goal was to reach “The Bridge” and wait, crossing in one uniform mass of yellow joy.
We all got off to a good start in a front wave. The announcer yelled, over a loudspeaker, “Don’t worry folks, we won’t start the 20:00 until the second wave gets going. We had at least a 2:00 head start, so no one would have to worry.
Team NRLB slowly separated from each other, but we all stayed close to a buddy. Our pace was good and strong. Kevin and I reached the halfway point at 8:45. Surely, we wouldn’t be the fastest guys in the group, so it looked good for everyone.
At the 1.8 mile mark, Kevin and I were in solid shape, under 17:00. 3 minutes to go and smooth sailing. We reached the Bridge and saw two teammates, and we all stopped. Slowly a few others assembled, one blew right by in some sort of adrenalin induced trance. We still had at least a minute, possibly more to get everyone across, and so we looked for our remaining teammates.
Then the Bridge cheated.
The Bridge decided it wanted to go up early. And suddenly bells, whistles, lights and moving parts were among us. A sudden thought – maybe our teammates crossed already. We should get to the other side and check it out.
But sadly, there were no more runners on the other side. And as the Bridge stretched itself to the sky, announcing its presence with authority to the throngs stranded on its south shore, we realized that Team No Runner Left Behind had indeed, left runners behind.
Going into 2010, Team NRLB had only left 2 folks back in 5 years. This year, we left 8. One one hand – success. We got 12 people across. On the other – failure. 8 broken souls. Heartbreak city.
Regardless, the champagne brunch afterwards erased all tears of shame. Let’s focus on the fact that NRLB surpassed 20 folks, which makes a 30 person goal in 2011 completely reasonable.
If we start training now, then it doesn’t matter how much the Bridge tries to cheat, we’ll get there in time.
See you all next year.
Baseball Milestones
It’s not often I get content for this blog from my softball cronies. But this article came across the kucklehead telegraph today and is full of great baseball trivia. My only question now is which one of these guys reads the Wall Street Journal. Here are some highlights.
- Marlins Jorge Cantu stared the season with at least one hit and one RBI in each of the Marlins first 9 games.- Never done before.
- A-Rod: 13 seasons; 30 HRs and 100 RBIs in each one; A-first
There have been 173,383 MLB games since 1903
- No player has ever hit 3 grand slams in one game
- No player has ever hit for the cycle in two consecutive games
- A game has never had two players hitting for the cycle
- In 49 years, the Mets have never had a no-hitter (Seaver for the Reds, Cone for the Yanks, Ryan for several, Gooden for the Yanks). In 18 years, the Marlins have 4
- 40 pitchers have throw the immaculate late inning (9 strikes to 3 consecutive batters). But No pitcher has done it two innings in a row.
- 26 batters have come to bat 3 times in 1 inning. But none of them made all 3 outs in the inning.
- Twice, not once, a game has ended with an unassisted triple play – Last year and 1927.
Coke’s Happiness Machine Draws Viral Chuckles
Congrats to Team Coca-Cola for pulling off a rare triple feat:
- Building a successful corporate sponsored “viral” video.
- Using an ad agency’s creative team (Atlanta-based interactive agency Definition 6), and not UGC.
- Generating a positive brand response that maps to an over-arching messaging campaign.
Going Once…Gone. Seattle Loses Legend Dick Friel
If you don’t know the name Dick Friel, well then you simply need to re-evaluate how much money you give to charity, because it’s not enough. There’s a small number of A-list auctioneers in this town, so if your event was any good, you had about a 1 in 3 chance of seeing Dick and Sharon Friel at the mic.
The Puget Sound Business Journal reports that Mr. Friel has passed away at the age of 76. I had the pleasure of working with him and his wife on the Cure Autism Now Auction back in the early 2000’s. He was a genuine professional, with a jovial smile and demeanor that was all about business – the business of making money for charity.
I was naive to how auctions worked when I first saw him prepping. He asked for the attendee list and list of items. He then ran through his mental rolodex as easily as I remember baseball stats. “Oh, Mr. Brown loves vacations. He’s good for $1000 every event so let’s save this Italy trip and focus on him.” “The Jacobsons would go nuts for this necklace, but they always leave by 9:00. Let’s move it to Item 3.” “I know Mike and John are Pearl Jam freaks. Let’s get a bidding war on that studio session and then convince Eddie to let them both in.” From a marketing perspective, it was a thing of beauty to watch. And the winners were always the charities.
Farewell, Mr. Friel.