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Author: themshow
Today at 4pm I will be in Cambridge with Christopher Penn as guests on Hubspot TV. You can watch the show live on their site and I might even be able to keep the twitter stream open, so you can work the backchannel via @themshow
I’m also up for using Martinis as a defense for the sub-zero weather this evening. Tweet @karenrubin if you want to see the show at One Broadway in Cambridge, or hit me to reserve a spot at the post show cooldown.
So I thought I would have a decent post for you today. The M Show 200 had been recorded and I was going to include a link to the funniest thing I have ever heard, but alas, I have nothing.
Jenny has mentioned more than once that This American Life is a podcast worth checking out. I’ve heard this from a number of people but just never got around to actually listening. Around New Year’s I unsubscribed to a bunch of casts that I never listen to and was looking for some fresh stuff.
This American Life (TAL) had a cast about people who measure things with numbers that shouldn’t be measured. One of the segments had an artist who did a survey to see what people wanted in a painting. For the most part everyone in the world wanted the classic mountain lake with big blue sky, except for the Danish who like abstract art.
Better yet they took the concept further and surveyed people about what they liked in music. From that they made what should be the world’s most likeable song, and the world’s least. Hearing a Soprano rapping with a tuba in the background is proven to be appealing to less than 1% of the population. People also hate songs about the holidays, and hate to hear children singing. When they played the clip of the kid’s choir singing about Labor Day and Yom Kippur I was laughing so hard in my car that I was crying.
The bad news is that TAL does so much traffic that they don’t leave the files up so I have no link for you.
As far as The M Show I have found the curse of the hundreds. Show 100 was a huge problem, I recorded it no less than 5 times before I was able to finish it. I’m on my 3rd attempt at show 200 now. I’ve had trouble with maybe 5 shows total, the other 195 were in one take. It’s times like these that make me think the M Show may have to be shelved forever, with Marketing Over Coffee continuing to gain momentum it’s hard to come up with a reason why I should keep spending time on The M Show, but then every once in a while it’s a whole lot of fun….
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7 Things You Don’t Know About Me
Bob, the host of the Beancast, where I get to play 3rd rate John Dvorak, tagged me on the 7 Things Meme, so here we go:
- I’ve already done a “Hey! It’s me post!”, here’s a bunch of J-Funk trivia.
- I ran the Boston Marathon in 2002, and regret the fact that it’s far enough away that it makes me sound like a has-been. Just as important as running was getting to work with the Franciscan Hospital for Children.
- My 2 favorite restaurants are The Greek Corner in Cambridge by the Arlington Line, and Tlaloc in San Francisco
- I have only one first cousin on my Dad’s side of the family, 11 on my Mom’s side. The 11 are all out in Michigan, and when we go up north we go to the Dockside.
- The secret unpublished reason I created Marketing Over Coffee, the best internet marketing podcast, was to get books about marketing for free before they are published. This sinister plot has been working perfectly.
- I have almost no short term memory for random words or numbers, when tested I am in the bottom 5% for recall.
- I used to have the top corner office in the 2nd tallest building on the Seattle skyline, could see the Piers and Mt. Rainier.
One thing that I’ve found is that when I tag my friends they are about as likely to ignore tagging as anyone else, so I might as well shoot at the A-List – I’d like to see 7 things from Seth Godin, Jason Calacanis (it’s ok, you can do it via email), Adam Curry, John Dvorak (Channel Dvorak is what the future of Journalism will look like (how about some graphic design though?), and Chris Pirillo (if he has any secrets left after years of lifecasting). I’ll even throw in a meal at a good restaurant if anyone steps up.
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For Racing Gamers
If you’re into racing games at all check out the latest round of cars in Burnout Paradise….
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Hard Drive Turned to 11
Ok, I know I have been MIA for a while, I have a bunch of fun stories to tell and the good news is that they are saved as drafts so they will all get out eventually.
One item with a Geek Factor 11 for today. I’ve been working on the same laptop at work for over 3 years, you’d think I’d be the type begging the IS guy to upgrade every 6 months but the truth is that I have so much software, all tweaked for my work that it takes a good 2 to 3 days to build a PC with all the stuff I need (unlike a Mac where you string two machines together with Firewire and in 30 minutes you are done, but that’s another story).
For over a year Kevin, basically my Q, has been asking when will I upgrade and my answer has been consistent – as soon as there is a good tablet or when I can get a 64GB SSD. For those under Yoda level geekdom, an SSD is a solid state disk drive. Instead of the normal spinning platters in a hard drive (or laptop hard drive), the SSD has memory chips not unlike what you’d find in a USB flash drive.
Because there are no moving parts there’s a significant boost in speed, and a decrease in power consumption because you don’t have to keep this mini record player spinning at 7200 RPM.
About 3 weeks ago Q told me that there were some machines open and when I saw how brown and burned out my old monitor screen was compared to the new ones I wanted to change right then.
I went to ebay for price comparison and ended up looking at 3 drives. Once I had a fresh image I found that my windows install lost about 4GB of flabby middle and that I could get by with 32GB at around $180. There was a 64GB that I thought I could get for under $400 and then a wild card I didn’t expect, 80GB (or some other weird number) from Intel for $500. The CEO of WallCorp would serve up a huge helping of whupass if I spent 5 bills on my hot rod project and I knew the 32 would eventually fall short so I took a shot at the 64GB. In what I thought was an incredible win I got it for only $320.
I later learned that I was sort of screwed, this drive was a Samsung and was a microSATA, not a “regular” SATA drive so it would not fit in the standard socket (the drive is even smaller than a standard one). This really sucked because it was now December 23rd and Q wanted to leave at a decent hour on the 24th.
Here I give a shout out to Diane and the folks at Advance Computer Services in Ohio who had the Lenovo adapter and were able to overnight it. So the $70 I “saved” on the drive price was eaten up in the adapter.
Of course the fun didn’t stop there. The parts made it in but know the drive enclosure wouldn’t recognize the SSD Drive, which was probably a power issue since SSDs have some different requirements (for the non-geek: I installed all the programs I use on a regular drive and then wanted to copy that image over to the new SSD drive, this happens by putting the new drive into a box that it can plug into and then attach to the laptop via USB so the info can get copied over. Only there the box didn’t like the SSD.
Thanks to Mahalo Answers, the coolest damn site on the web (and part of another future story), a guy gave me a brilliant solution. The good news is that the PC did recognize the SSD Drive with no problem so I inserted it and booted to CD instead of the new hard drive and ran Acronis to copy the image across. It worked perfectly.
So here are the speed test results:
The test was to boot up, start word, close the doc and shut down.
My old Dell 600M – 2:37
The New Dell D630 with a Western Digital 100GB HD – 2:10
(17% faster, and it is running anti-virus, which was mostly shut off on the 600M)
D630 with Samsung 64GB SSD – 1:14, 1.76x faster than the 7200rpm drive, 2.1x faster than the 600M
Now that I’ve had it running for a couple of weeks a few things that I’ve noticed and that others have asked about:
- The drive light still flashes as it normally does, but just not as often
- It’s totally silent, if it weren’t for the fan kicking in on the processor now and then there’d be no noise at all. Living without the constant hum and clanking of the drive is very cool.
- Battery seems to be only about 10-20% better, I’ve read that there’s no huge gains there and my results appear to track that.
- Speed opening apps is the biggest thing – Outlook, Photoshop and Dreamweaver start a good 4x faster or more.
Thus endeth the geek prayer, may the force be with you.
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5 Greatest Foods Ever
One of the many reasons I hate the holidays is that invariably I’ll be sitting around doing nothing, except for maybe my conscience asking me “Why the hell aren’t you writing now?”, and probably end up eating. As I look forward to this inevitable event that made me think of some of the things that I have found over the years that I thought are worth sharing.
Garrett’s Cheese Popcorn – is astoundingly good, better than any other cheese popcorn I have ever had, by a long shot. You might want to eat it with chopsticks though because the cheese will stain your fingers. Once, while in Chicago on business my friend Tom had some and then went to the Sony story and played the PS2 demo units, leaving the controller covered in orange goo.
Stam Chocolates – Jim from Podcasting News brought us a box of these a couple of years ago and they are better than anything else I’ve tried, even stuff from Germany and Austria. These chocolates are so good that our dog when berserk when we bought a box as a Christmas gift this year and he ate the whole 27 piece box. There’s a lot fewer gross ingredients, it’s kind of like the difference between fresh squeezed OJ and all other OJ, except for….
Orchid Island Juice Company – I am an OJ snob, but Orchid Island is very good and available at Trader Joe’s and my local supermarket, Roche Brothers.
Strawberry Hill Povitica – Fantastic bread, make french toast with this and you’ll never go back to regular bread.
Blues Hog BBQ Sauce – I used to work with Chris, who is a BBQ Jedi Master with the trophies to prove it. My nephew has said he can no longer use other sauces because everything tastes like a sad excuse after Blues Hog.
Enjoy!
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Free Stuff! Holiday Beancast Giveaway
If you haven’t noticed from previous posts, I have been a guest on The Beancast a number of times. If you are into podcasting it’s kind of like TwiT for marketing people. If you’re not into podcasting it’s like the morning zoo with marketing and advertising people. If you still don’t get it it’s like me and the host Bob along with people like Steve Hall and Scott Monty talking about the stuff we usually talk about – and it’s on iTunes.
For the year end special being recorded tonight I’m giving away a copy of The Seth Godin Boxed Set – 4 DVD’s of video with him Live in Denver, with Charlie Rose, and 3 DVDs of Q+A. These DVDs are $800 a set and the winner will still be bound by the terms of sale (you have the right to resell, but not to post or to show to groups of more than 30).
I got this for paying for VIP level access to his Tribes event (and I forgot to get my book signed, which was also part of my ticket). I’ve watched them and they are great, but I rarely watch anything more than once on DVD and I’m pretty sure that nobody else in my family will watch them (don’t worry Seth, it’s not you, they don’t like my SEO videos either)… so why not use them for a promotional stunt rather than have them gather dust for eternity in my DVD bookcase?
“How to win?” you ask? I’ll give out the secret code during the cast, comment back here and the first one in wins.
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Site Redemption
When I first started this blog it was an experiment. Much like The M Show, I had no idea where it would go or if I would have more than a few weeks of things to write about. Fast forward a few years, and yes, I guess I do have some content.
Thanks to this lack of initial commitment I cut some corners. Rather than pay for two hosting accounts I decided to point RoninMarketeer.com to the same account that was hosting The M Show. Since Libsyn serves up 99% of the bits for that podcast the server had capacity to give.
The problem is that many tools that watch the web don’t really like this. Even with proper redirects any tactic that only a spammer or cheap bastard would use is not going to give you that extra glass of fresh Google juice. My domain started strong with a page rank of 6 (PR6 if you want to sound like a social media douche bag SEO consultant), but then dipped to 5 as the blog gained momentum.
I also noticed that technorati (hint – become a fan!) and lists like the Power 150 had me stranded out in Nowhereville. The final straw was when I hit PR4, not the web equivalent of hell, but definitely the neighborhood where the washer and dryer are out on the front porch and there are vehicles on cinder blocks in the front yard so you don’t have to mow the lawn.
So I had two options – flush it all and start new, which would have been the easy route, or try rehabilitation. Again, seeing this more as an experiment, it seemed like it would be a good case study to fix as much as I could and see what would happen. After all, it’s probable that I will run into people and companies whose online reputation has been screwed up, yet they will be unwilling to give up the current domain name in my future.
Results so far: The problem was deeper than I thought, my feed had been hacked with some hidden links that I imagine where what banished me to the ghetto. Having finally straightened out the domain name issues and cleaned up all the feeds (sorry to the M Show fans that had Ronin posts show up for a couple of days!), today Google shows me with a PR5! So rehabilitation is possible at least to get back to zero, the next question is can you go above the zero line?
What you can do to help: If you want to accelerate this case study (LOL) you could re-subscribe to the feeds over there on the left side of the page above my Lijit widget (I would tell Tara that I’ve finally got it in the template, but she would roast me since it’s taken me like 7 years to finally add it to my blog, but since she didn’t enter the 23rd Annual Marketing Over Coffee Awards, hell, we’re even). Anyway, for the price of less than a few clicks a day you can help feed this hungry blog.
Ok, I can no longer avoid shovelling snow… see you later.
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New Addiction
This week I have become hooked on Mahalo Answers. It’s the crack of websites…
The business week is over, and snow is coming down fast and furious here.
Speaking of other addictions – my 64GB SSD arrived today. I’m making an image of my old school hard drive right now and on Monday the brain transplant for the fastest Laptop in the fleet will begin. Geeks rejoice!