Bailey at about 8 weeks old:
(the banana toy was about 6″ long)

Bailey around 4 years old:

Bailey about 4 or 5 years old:

Bailey tonight:

Picture “Video Killed the Radio Star” playing in the background…  I am hardly a star but it is what I thought of yesterday while hearing people discuss Twitter at the AIMWest Social Media Confab yesterday at the Grand Rapids JW Marriott.

In my case, it seems increased usage of Twitter has led to decreased blogging and the trend seems to have spread to others in my office.  Maybe I’ve had less to blog about, less time to blog in general, or perhaps less interest…but in any case it usually comes down to the redundancy between what I might blog about and what I am talking about on Twitter.  The “What I’m Doing” widget on the right captures just about everything I am up to via a Twitter feed so is it at all helpful or interesting to summarize or rephrase it here?

The other issue of late has been my desire/need to separate work and personal life.  I equate this to taking two distinctly different groups of friends out to the bar and then watching the awkwardness that ensues.  You know some old friend is going to tell the most embarrassing story or pick the most inappropriate youthful indiscretion to relive…

As my professional contacts grow on my previous largely personal social media outlets I find myself censoring or at least very carefully considering what I post for general consumption.  For instance, my trip to Key West, FL during Fantasy Fest was an amazingly fun time with a group of friends that I’ve known since college, but most of the photos I took “documenting the madness” are hardly safe for work. As I’ve told people, the most popular Halloween costume was just plain nude with a little body paint.  (Don’t worry, me and my group of friends remained clothed at all times) I tweeted about it, but I resisted all temptation to “twitpic” the events. Maybe a year ago I would have posted pics on flickr, blogged about the craziness and shared more realtime with Twitter.  It’s not like I have a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde dichotomy going on between my work and personal/social life…its just easier not starting meetings with Deans or the President with a conversation about something crazy I see/say/retweet outside of work.

I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts on this, any solutions, insight, best practices would be appreciated! I know from conversation yesterday others are in this boat as well!

I was able to help with a couple projects around the farm – the first of which was to move the “hunting camp” from a spot by the river to higher ground.  The original camp was also built on tree stumps which had moved so much over the years that the structure was no longer stable.  A river also runs about 50 yards from the camp and the water often rises so much that someday the building could float away.  For those wondering what a hunting camp is, it is basically a shack with a wood stove and cots where people go and don’t emerge until they run out of food, beer, or until they shoot a deer.  Here is a picture from ‘05 showing the camp in its original glory.

The process of moving the camp took many hours and its a sheer miracle that we were able to complete the process.  Essentially we had to back a trailer under the building, secure the building to the trailer then cut the building from the tree stumps and supports that were securing it about 6 ft in the air.  Its also a miracle that we all walked away with life and limb considering we were using a 3 ton automotive floor jack and logs to support the place while cutting the supports with a chain saw.  I wish I had more pics documenting the madness.  Well into the project, once the camp was on the trailer, the trailer sank into the thick U.P. clay/mud and the tractor couldn’t pull it out.  So, we hooked one, then two, trucks up the tractor, which was in turn connected to the trailer and pulled.  Finally after jerking the tractor and camp loose with the truck and tow straps we moved it 1000 yards to its new location.  Here is a picture of the tractor and camp on the move, not in the picture are the trucks connected to the front…it was something to behold

While in town for breakfast we stopped at the local thrift shop we jokingly call the “shit shack” they have everything you never knew you wanted until someone else was ready to throw it away.  While looking around I came across this unique display holding all varieties of condoms.  Upon close inspection I found that they had all expired last year…  They seemed to be a good deal, but the population of Pickford may accidentally increase by a couple more this year!

Later that day I snapped this pic of someone who came to the farm to pick up an old bed off a pickup truck.  You can’t see it very well in the picture but he brought his old truck out hooked up to a boat trailer which now has another old bed on it…  Again, only in the U.P.

Finally, this morning after breakfast this morning we noticed a unique shed in someone’s backyard.  It was an ingenious design and so well put together that you could barely tell that it was nothing more than a couple walls made out of 6 foot fence segments with an aluminum truck topper on top as a roof.  Amazing!

So, that was my last 24 hours…can you top that?

A lot has happened in the last month.  Holly and I found and bought a 4 acre parcel of land between Ada and Lowell, Michigan.  We actually looked at this a little over a year ago and it was just outside our price range, well since then the owners got motivated and dropped the price by $20,000!  It is very similar to the place I grew up, minus the 150 year old farm house…  It is a rectangular lot backing up to a farmer’s field and horses on the land next door.  I’m trying to convince Holly that raising chickens and having a big garden would be the best use of the land but she isn’t fully on board yet.  I’m not sure where the desire to have a small farm is coming from given the fact that I didn’t always (if ever) enjoy “working the land” as a kid.  I guess it is like going to church…I never liked that when I was forced to go, but now that I get to choose to go I get more out of it, when I go (of course, I don’t do that very often either).  Not sure exactly when we’ll build a house on the land but it certainly won’t be until we can sell our house without losing our pants.  The next challenge will be finding a house that Holly and I both want to build…as we’re discussing it we’re finding that we have a lot of different ideas on what to build, but no surprise there.

Speaking of gardens, I decided to forgo the small garden across the creek this year and opted to plant a couple pumpkin plants over there while downsizing the tomatoes to a big pot on the deck.  Hopefully flooding and animals won’t take all the tomatoes this year.  The pumpkin “vines” are growing pretty rapidly so I’m optimistic that we’ll have a couple pumpkins come fall.

This past 4th of July marked the 12th annual canoe trip with our friends from college.  We’re all getting older but you wouldn’t know it by how we all act when we get into the woods and onto the river.  We drank (some more than others), played washers, sat by the fire, smoked a lot of pork in the smoker, and spent a long day in the sun on the river.  This is also the first year we’ve gotten a keg – and boy was that a lot of Oberon.  We came so close to emptying a 1/2 barrel but had to dump the final gallon or so.

The highlight of this week was finally hanging a photo in my office that Holly and I bought in Key West a couple years ago.  Holly spent a lot of time at Hobby Lobby, and a small fortune, getting frames for many photos/painting/pictures we’ve bought over the years and we’ve spent the days since hanging things all over the house.  Maybe I’ll snap a couple photos and post those next if I get ambitious.

So, now you’re caught up…we’ll see if I can post something more regularly from here on out.

Last night after a long day of celbrating (aka euchre & beer) my cousin’s graduation on my part, and entertaining & babysitting on Holly’s part we decided to rent a pay per view movie – finally settling on Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino.  Despite some interuptions from a “fussy” baby and a “chatty” audience I was thorougly enthralled with the movie and surprised that it didn’t get more buzz when it was in theaters.  I really like Clint Eastwood and thought this movie, where he plays a gruff, racist, war veteran who softens up as he adapts to “diversity” moving into his neighborhood, just added to his repotoir of fine movies.  If you get a chance I would highly recommend seeing this. I gave it a 4.5 on the Rapin scale!

I find that I am not posting very much anymore – probably because I put everything on twitter…  I guess I will post this helpful shopping tip for those interested.

If you shop online you should look into using ebates.com – it is a site that you visit before going to the site where you make your purchase.  The site you are shopping with pays ebates a commission for sending you there, and they in turn give you a cut of that money.  I signed up a little over a year ago and have earned so much more than I would have thought and it is very little effort.  I usually find what I am looking for, then go to ebates to see if the site I am shopping at participates.  I only wish Amazon was on there!

Anyways, if that sounds like your cup of tea click the link below or the image above to sign up.  By referring you to the site we both get an extra bonus.

http://www.ebates.com/rf.do?referrerid=q9pedvtbw0VOgDJok3%2Fmrw%3D%3D

On a related topic…I had a support related issue where a purchase didn’t credit to my account.  I emailed their support group and didn;t get very far.  I scoured the net for a support number (it was hard to find) and finally found one…  So, if you want to call ebates, their number is (415) 908-2200.  They quickly took care of the problem and continue to prove an impressive site/company in my book.

I quickly found out there isn’t a straight-forward way to do this, and to complicate the matter I switched from a phone running Windows mobile to a Blackberry Curve mid-stream.  While on the Windows mobile phone I was able to sync Entourage with my phone’s calendar using PocketMac for Windows Mobile ($30, running on the mac) and GooSync (free, on the phone), which in turn updated Google calendar – this is how I managed the process with Outlook as well.  GooSync isn’t freely/easily available for the Blackberry so I set out to find another option.

First I tried the Google Sync app for Blackberry to sync the phone/Google calendar and switching to the PocketMac for blackberry to sync the phone with Entourage.  The PocketMac app worked like a charm, all my contacts and calendar entries synced just fine, but Google’s Sync app won’t sync events from other calendar back to Google Calendar.  This meant that the process only worked if new events were added to the Google calendar first as events entered in Entourage would never make it to Google.

After a week of trying, wiping out my calendar several times, creating wild duplicate events with all my testing I finally narrowed in on a solution.  Here is what I found to sync my Google, Blackberry, and Entourage calendars, allowing me to enter an event in any of the three and trust that the others would be updated.

1) In Entourage go to the Prefernces and select the Sync Services item under General Preferences.  In Sync Services you will need to check the second box for “Sync Events and Tasks with iCal…”  This all happens behind the scenes and you don’t ever have to do anything with iCal – we’re just using iCal as a conduit to CalGoo in this case.

2) Download and install CalGoo Connect (Free) on your mac.  Once installed you will need to setup a new connector in CalGoo – choose the first option to “Snyc an Apple iCal Calendar with a Google Calendar.”  You will next be promped to select the calendar in iCal to be used as the sync source – select your Entourage Calendar.  You’ll also need to select your Google Calendar which will be sync’d in case you have more than one.  In the settings for CalGoo you can choose to automatically start the application at startup and automate the sync process, and even better, there is a feature to remove duplicate events from your calendar.

3) Download Google’s Sync app for Blackberry (http://m.google.com) and install that on your phone.  In the settings for the Sync App you will need to enter your Google account info, and optionally, you can automate the process and select any of your Google Calendars to sync with.

By doing these three steps I was able to automate the entire process and I never need to connect my phone to my mac to sync calendars.  I haven’t tried yet, but I suspect I can also automate my contact syncing using the Google Sync app as well.

I searched and searched for a way to do this without find a great soltution.  Hopefully if you’ve stumbled across this it helped save you a bit of time and frustration.

Brian Oberkirch (www.brianoberkirch.com), Deborah Schultz (www.deborahschultz.com)

Again, I focused on the content and found a good summary
posted by someone who could type AND follow along…check that out here:

http://www.change-management-blog.com/2009/04/its-people-stupid-new-marketing.html

Thanks, Holger Nauheimer!

http://blogs.zdnet.com/feeds/?p=887

Good takeaway in the first couple minutes: “A site without links pointing to is doesn’t deserve to rank”

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) vs SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – SEM covers SEO and adds to that paid placement (ppc), not to be taken as SEO is free – it is not.  Doing SEO correctly may necessitate the purchase of keyword tools, or vendors/contractors to assist.  Cheaper approach: If someone is doing it well – embrace and extend what they do.

86% of clicks on Google are from organic search results, only 14% are from paid search (based on eye tracking studies). However, people clicking on a paid ad are more likely to convert.    In either case, when someone is doing a search they are primed and ready to act so placement pays.  Clicks for the number one result are about 40% – this drops to 10% for the #2 result.  Ranking in multiple areas doesn’t hurt either – natural results, paid placement, image search, content network search, etc.

Yahoo is no longer the #2 search engine – more people now search via YouTube, which has moved into the #2 spot

Keywords – the word the CEO searches for each morning may not be the best (except for your job).  Pick the right keyword for your site, and speak your customer’s language.  Kitchen electronics is a common product category, but not what customers search for.  Baby products can attract more clicks via “baby names” than other keywords. Bottom line, keyword research is needed to identify what your market is searching for.  Tools: Quintura (Free) or Google Suggest / Keyword Tool / Trends / Insight.  Wordtracker is a paid tool, but based on less than 1% of the search market (dogpile and metacrawler users). Keyword Discovery is another paid service ($70/month), which shows historical trends and based on a larger user base. Advantage of Google tools is the large user base.  Check out Google Insight for Search, extends the data found in Google Trends – can see top rising search terms

Getting crawled doesn’t mean you’re getting indexed.  Getting indexed doesn’t mean you’re getting ranked.  Getting ranked doesn’t mean you’re getting clicks and getting clicks doesn’t mean you will convert.

7 steps to ranking:
•    Get your site fully indexed
•    Get your pages Visible
•    Build links and page rank
•    leverage your page rank
•    encourage click through
•    track the RIGHT metrics
•    follow best practices

Complexity can kill the crawl – Search engines are wary or dynamic pages (fear or spider traps)
Avoid:
•    stop characters (?&=)
•    session ids or long numerical strings that look like a session
•    unnecessary variables
•    frames
•    redirects
•    popups
•    navigation in flash, java, javascript, pulldown boxes

Hurdles to indexing:
complex / long urls that add no value to the page keywords
content duplication
non-canonicalization
too many links and not high enough ranking (crawl equity) Higher Page rank at the top will allow more crawl equity for pages 10 clicks down.

Canonicalization: gvsu.edu/ should 301 redirect to www.gvsu.edu for all pages (no content duplication) same for / vs. index.htm.  Use server header checker to verify 301/302 redirects and use google google webmaster tools to enforce this or live http header firefox extension.

Key word prominence is so much better than keyword prominence.  Use a descriptive paragraph at the top of the page to introduce the rest of the page using important keywords.  Title tag is the most important copy on a page and the homepage is the most important. Don’t dilute the title with your brand name – stick with the content keywords.  Title tags and descriptive link text are will remain important SEO best practice.

Random things:
•    seomoz.org – link scape
•    Get more links – link baiting.  Put out funny / useful content that others are baited into linking to – the SEO perspective of viral marketing
•    use rel=”nofollow” to tell google to not index certain links on your site (use this to give less importance to login pages, etc.)
•    seobrowser.com – tool for viewing a site as a crawler
•    siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com – check links into your site

Each Friday night after work, Bubba would fire up his outdoor grill and cook
a venison steak. But, all of Bubba’s neighbors were Catholic. And since it
was Lent, they were forbidden from eating meat on Friday. The delicious
aroma from the grilled venison steaks was causing such a problem for the
Catholic faithful that they finally talked to their priest.

The Priest came to visit Bubba, and suggested that he become a Catholic.
After several classes and much study, Bubba attended Mass…and as the
priest sprinkled holy water over him, he said, “You were born a Baptist, and
raised a Baptist, but now you are a Catholic”.

Bubba’s neighbors were greatly relieved, until Friday night arrived, and the
wonderful aroma of grilled venison filled the neighborhood. The Priest was
called immediately by the neighbors, and, as he rushed into Bubba’s yard,
clutching a rosary and prepared to scold him, he stopped and watched in
amazement. There stood Bubba, clutching a small bottle of holy water which
he carefully sprinkled over the grilling meat and chanted:

“You wuz born a deer, you wuz raised a deer, but now you is a catfish”.

I’ve shifted topic areas/conferences over the years so I’ve yet to find a group that goes to the same conference as me every year like others in the office. Maybe this will be the one that I want to attend every year…but I am already more interested in SXSW next year based on the topics and excitement my coworkers returned with a couple weeks ago.

Holly’s spring break starts on Thursday so she is flying out to SFO that night to meet me there – so far our plan is for me to pick her up after I pick up a rental car so that we can head to the second half of our trip once my conference ends on Friday. We are heading from San Francisco to South Lake Tahoe where from what I’ve seen will be equivalent weather to Michigan or colder. We’ll stay there for 2-3 days before heading to Yosemite to take in a bit of nature and a lot of scenery. This is the first year in some time that we haven’t traveled to Key West with friends over Spring Break – I will really miss the warm weather and cold Coronas by the pool… Don’t get me wrong…I am excited about this trip too, it will just be different. I’m honestly looking forward to seeing new parts of the country, and seeing amazing scenery that I’ve only seen in photos before. Sadly, I won’t be able to visit the Ponderosa Ranch from hit TV show Bonanza, in Lake Tahoe, as it was closed and sold several years ago…bummer. No matter what, I am ready for a break!

In other news…I was able to pull together a trip to Key West in October with some of my friends – sort of an extended guys weekend. This will be my first time in Key West during Fantasy Fest and from what I’ve been told it is a crazy party, like Mardi Gras on steroids.

I am going down there with a unique group and our diversity is something only rivaled by MTV’s The Real World. We have a police officer, an IT guy, an MBA/sales guru, a City Administrator and a University Student Affairs specialist – all with more degrees and masters degrees than we know what to do with. The chances of this trip coming together were slim to none (which may explain why our wives said we could try to plan it) but everything fell in place last week. We found a house with a private pool and 5 beds in our price range, which was nothing short of amazing. Airfare has been booked and now all that is left is for everyone to start working out again before we head south.

Holly and I still want to plan one more trip around July/August for our anniversary but we haven’t made any plans yet. Let me know if you have any suggestions! The idea of going back to Middle Island was thrown around but I wouldn’t mind camping a bit more this summer. Hopefully we’ll have plenty of time to spend at the cabin as well – I have a long list of projects I’d like to start on up there!