I’m loving it… I just got an official jury summons.  What can I say?  They’re hospitable – offering free soda!  They pay well – $19 a day!  whoo!  I’m sure I’ll be in a comfortable chair all day, listening to something exciting.  But alas, there is a downside 😐  I have to pay for parking… fuckers…

I am now experiencing the true beauty of the voting process…

In my estimation, the average shelf-life of a beer commercial is about 3 to 6 months.  By that, I mean that beer companies tend to go with a specific marketing campaign for about 3-6 months… sometimes it goes longer, sometimes shorter.  It doesn’t seem, however, that the beer companies recognize a previously successful marketing campaign all the time, though.  For instance, I recently stumbled across the Budweiser wassup commercials.  They made me smile.  It’s rare for any commercial to make me smile, but in this case, I smiled and wanted to watch more of them.  I remember smiling the first time I saw them too…

So what am I getting at here?  Not a lot…  except that now I’m curious what the rotation period rules are for beer commercials… Say they have a successful marketing campaign such as the wassup commercials.  Eventually, say after 6 months, the commercials get old and just aren’t as funny as they were originally… How long needs to go by until they could play the same commercials and get a nice response again?  I’m guessing 2-3 years at a minimum…  Tricky thing, though, playing older commercials.  Trends change and marketers need to be conscious of that.

Enough rambling… here our the links to the commercials that made me smile tonight:

I enjoyed this… maybe you will, also.

I closed a chapter of my life on Friday…  I am no longer an employee of Edstrom.  I left under good terms and provided them with a two week notice.  I can say that I will definitely miss the team (Jayme, Dave L., Dave M., Sean, Mike, and Harish) that I worked with there. 

As for me, the only thing I can say about my future plans is that they should prove to be interesting.  I have a couple things lined up, but I will wait to elaborate on the specifics for now.

In the mean time, I’ve been repaving my machine.  I wanted to start out with a fresh Windows install to go along with my change in life.  I got rid of Windows XP64 and just installed regular Windows XP.  XP64 just doesn’t get the support that it should.  So many programs don’t recognize it as Windows XP and thus it’s not a valid OS.  Maybe vista will give 64bit computing the attention it deserves. 

I decided not to install Newsgator and instead have been using RSS Bandit.  I haven’t used it long enough to have a decent opinion about it, so we’ll see how it goes.  I can say that the little bit that I’ve used it, I’ve noticed some pretty cool features that Newsgator didn’t/couldn’t offer.  It feels both nice and somewhat foreign not using Outlook/Newsgator for my RSS joy. 

As far as development environment goes, I decided not to install Visual Studio 2003, but just go with 2005.  Again, it seems that MS rushed that product through QA, but hopefully the benefits outweigh the random crashes/bugs.  It’s nice not having to install IIS on my dev box.  I plan on installing some alternative technologies (Rails, Python, java?, etc) on this box, to expand my world a little. 

During my stint in Baltimore, I took a (free) massage class… Actually, it was 8 classes at the Loyola student health club and I ended up being the only guy in them… this had two major bonuses.  The first is obvious, all of my partners were good looking girls.  The second advantage was that because I could take my shirt off, the instructor always demonstrated on me.  So I always got double massages per night. 

The method that I learned was Swedish massage.  The massage strokes are generally pretty gentile and most of the time, they flow in the direction of the heart.  The core strokes are effleurage, petrissage, friction, tapotement, compression and vibrations.  We also experimented with oils too.  Overall, I have to say that the experience was great.  I would do it again anytime, if given the opportunity.  But as always, I prefer to receive them over giving them.

Kazu goes through the steps involved for making the cartoon Copper a reality.  This is pretty amazing to me, since I dno’t really dabble in that side of computers. I also have to admit that it surprises me that a mac is not used…

If you’re interested in blowing glass? If you want to find out what it takes, tools used, or the basic course of action, then check out this blog.  Gnat illustrates his journey of glass blowing.  Man, reading that is really making me want to blow glass again.

I don’t really know how to start this, so I’m just going to dive in and
see where it takes me.  I’ve noticed something about the social
interaction that goes on when I venture back to my home town.  I
have some great friends from high school who I, unfortunately, only get
to see a handful of times per year.  It seems that as more time
passes between each visit, the amount of time to get “reacquainted”
gets progressively longer.  I’m sure there could be a handy
equation, but I’m not feeling that adventurous yet. 

Currently, that time is about 1 night (about 4 hours).  This
varies depending on how many people are involved, but that’s the
current general estimate.  Meaning,
it takes about 1 night of bullshitting with each other (usually at a
bar) until we feel comfortable to just “hang out.”  It takes that
time to go through all of the crap going on in our lives… After we’re
done with that part, we hang out like we did when we were growing up
and just getting to know ourselves.

Now, I’m guessing this could be avoided if we all talked more.  But that just doesn’t happen…

The scientist in me wants to relate this to brain waves… I’d like to
think that since we’re all coming from different places, our brains are
all going at different frequencies.  That first night is like a
buffer.  It allows us to all get more in sync with the brain
waves.  So the following days, our brains are operating at similar
frequencies, making interaction more fluid.