Back to Work

Some random stuff today that I wanted to put out on my first day back. I completed our first Griswold-style road vacation, logging 2,000 miles in less than 2 weeks driving from Boston to Torch Lake, Michigan.

1. Aside from some podcast editing I was able to get by with only my iPad for the entire trip. It does everything I needed, and it was great to spend the half hour in a line of cars trying to get through customs watching Ricky Gervais in Extras.
2. The iPad is fantastic for managing photos. I was able to plug in 3 different digital cameras, review photos and delete the ones I didn’t want. What was normally at least an hour going through photos after a trip was eliminated, and everybody got to see photos real time.
3. I was issued a new Dell at work today, it was sort of stuck between off and on, the keyboard and power button were lit, but I couldn’t get it to wake up without doing a 10-second hold of the power button. It’s disappointing when the first experience with a tool is “Geez, is something wrong with this thing?”
4. While getting to the podcast backlog this morning during my commute, I picked an episode of Manager Tools randomly out of the pile, and was surprised to be mentioned in the show. That was very cool, I’ve never heard these guys give out a plug and they have an blue chip brand that is doing very well.
5. Bill Green mentions Update: I had this all wrong, the term “Auto-Downloading” for podcasts was created by Bob Knorpp, host of the BeanCast. This is the most profound thing ever said about podcasting in its history. The fact that it took 5 years for someone to connect the dots and come up with this shows why marketing is so difficult, and by extension, why Bill Bob could be the best marketing guy on the planet.
   Addendum: So I wasn’t clear on this – It’s nothing big, but hugely profound. Bob has shown his ability as a gold standard copy writer when he coined “Auto-Download”. For five years podcasters have been saying “Subscribe to Podcasts” which has no intuitive meaning. “Sign up for Auto-Download” is intuitive (Zyman refers to this as “Cup of Soup” Marketing, a triumph of usability where the name tells you everything you need to know).
6. Travelling with a baby is not really a vacation.

Ok, I still have a lot of stuff to clean up, I hope you’ve had a shot at a summer vacation this year. I’m going to be running the Falmouth Road Race this weekend, please DM me if you are doing the race.