Rinsefirst

I spend way to much time in the marketing industry. Afterall, the goal of most of the websites I build are designed to market a business of some sort.

Well today, for the first time in awhile, I had the radio on. Jack FM (104.1) to be exact.

What I was suprirsed at was how 3 or 4 commercials got my brain to pull away from the monitor. To be honest, most of the time, the commercials were just playing the background… I wasn’t even paying attention.

But there were at least 3 today that got me to go “Is that what they really said”. For example:

There was a McDonalds Commercial that said something like, “American’s built this nation on <something>. American’s gave <blah blah, I wasn’t listening close enough>. And Americans invented the McDonald’s Chicken Sandwitch.” it was one of those things where my brain was listening just enough to know that the last thing didn’t fit, and my attention got pulled.

There was another one where an ad said “it was included in the vip gift bags at the Sundance film festival”. Why did that pull my brain? Because I’m pretty sure (not 100%) that this was an ad for some sort of facial medicine… My brain thought, why would I care if the people at Sundance got this drug in their gift basket? It made no sense, and sure enough my brain turned to listen  (although in this case, I missed the brand, so it still didn’t do the trick).

It makes me want to run an Ad tomorrow that completely doesn’t make sense… Or at least contains things that dont make sense… Just to see how many heads it turns at the work place… Did he really say what I thought he said?

In any case, I have to admit, I like working the with radio on now.

Today, was one of those days.

I like my job. I really do. I like my life. I like how things are moving. I don’t like it when my phone rings non stop all day. Lets use my phone log to talk about my day:

• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 7:00 AM 3 Minute - Call to MSA about a folder that needed to be picked up before school started to make sure students didn’t get there hands on it.
• 4/28/08 INCOMING 9:17 AM 94 Minutes - Phone call to start the day talking about policy and upcoming meeting.
• 4/28/08 BLAINE, MN 10:51 AM 2 Minutes - Call to Joe to let him know it was ok to Work
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 11:00 AM 53 Minutes - Phone Conference with Client
• 4/28/08 WASHINGTON, DC 11:59 PM 1 Minute - Left Message for Client about website
• 4/28/08 INCOMING 12:05 PM 30 Minutes - Phone call with client I left message for about there website.
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 12:46 PM 2 Minutes - Call with client about a bug (brief)
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 12:51 PM 2 Minutes - Call to Amber not sure about what… Most likely about housing stuff.
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 1:37 PM 1 Minute - Call to Amber (No Answer)
• 4/28/08 INCOMING 1:38 PM 2 Minutes - Call from Amber to make sure I talked to the Banker.
• 4/28/08 BLAINE, MN 1:52 PM 3 Minutes - Call to MSA to get my first question answered about tomorrows testing
• 4/28/08 BLAINE, MN 1:56 PM 3 Minutes - Call to MSA to get a question answered about tomorrows testing
• 4/28/08 INCOMING 2:04 PM 3 Minutes -Phone Call with banker to give him the OK to talk to our real estate agent.
• 4/28/08 BLAINE, MN 2:07 PM 2 Minutes - Returning MSA’s call about email.
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 2:08 PM 3 Minutes - returning Ambers call about the banker
• 4/28/08 VM Retrieval 2:11 PM 2 Minutes - Voicemail Check… Blah
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 2:12 PM 17 Minutes - Phone call with WLC to help setup email
• 4/28/08 INCOMING 2:35 PM 1 Minute - Stupid solicator I told 6 months ago never to call me back.
• 4/28/08 INCOMING 2:46 PM 9 Minutes - Real Estate Agent
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 2:59 PM 33 Minutes - Client Phone Conference
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 3:42 PM 2 Minutes - Me Calling Real Estate Agent to find out if house was in fact still for sale (left a message)
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 4:30 PM 3 Minutes - Client call about opening a Google Checkout Account (which I was doing at the time)
• 4/28/08 INCOMING 4:39 PM 4 Minutes - Last call of the day of sorts from Amber… Just letting me know when I had to go look at the house we put an offer in on.

So yeah… my phone did not stop ringing… Over 2 hours (probably pushing 3 or 4 of talk time, with over 20 phone calls). The evening was much better though… In fact, if you caught on to the gist of what some of the phone calls were about… You might have guess what happened…

Amber and I put in an offer on a home!

It’s a townhome in Woodbury, very close to MSA, Church, City Center, etc. I would give you more details, but I have decided not to get my hopes up until the offer is accepted. More on it to come in the coming days.

So this is actually more a photo post than it is something I got for Christmas… but thats ok, I’ll continue.

I had what I would call my first business Christmas party this year. It wasn’t a party put on by JR, but by one of my clients. All in all it was a lot of fun, food, and friendship. The evening began though with what would best be described as a “Roast”. Each one of us (there are like were called up to the front, and embarrassed to some degree. It was all in jest, and I enjoy it immensely.

To let you know how I was roasted, it basically went something like this: Because of my hard word, and my ability to take charge and make sure things get to the way they need to be (not to mention my strong German heritage), I was dubbed “Commander Gehring”. The picture above is me being a fully decorated soldier.

I’m not really sure what else to say about the event other than that… It was good fun, good food, and I hope to be able to do it again next year!

There’s a part of me that really wishes I had a website as popular as some of the ones I work on. This morning, one of website I worked for launched a sign-up for a free webinar. They sent out an email about it to their list, and within 3 hours, they had maxed out the registrations at 1000. Over the next 30 minutes, they had already had 50 people sign up on the “overflow” list.  Those are impressive numbers for a saturday morning.

There not quite as impressive as the number of people who signed up on engadget yesterday for any of their various give aways… but still… very very impressive from my point of view.

I added twitter to my site. I don’t know how often I will use it (or if I will give up on it after a day or two). It’s nice to be able to update my blog with short quips simply by IMing something to a bot. I wouldn’t want to write full posts using AIM, but this seems to work well for my purposes. I’ll have to find out if there is a way to archive twitter.

I watched Numb3rs for the first time on Friday evening. The reason: Wil Weaton (Weasley Crusher) was on it. Wil, to some degree, puts out the persona of everything I aspire to be. Successful in arts, geekiness, love, and life. I think I’m getting there, although my art is no where near as cool as his writings and television appearances are.

Sometimes I feel I’ve lost my zanniness. I look back at some of my older blog posts and think, “what was I thinking.” Maybe this is all part of growing up. Maybe it’s part of being beaten into submission by society. Maybe I’m hiding some part of me.

Perhaps, I should do something zanny with my day. What better time than a time to do it than on a day that *should* be a holiday.