Stephen Bolen's Internet Awesomesauce

I mean, why else would they take out a 1:00 ad in the 3rd Quarter of the Super Bowl?

Sure, a minute of Super Bowl air time is the equivalent of a rounding error for Google, but plunkin’ down the cheddar to put some distance between themselves and Bing may not be a bad play. I’ll have to dig into some data and figure out how much GOOG’s search market is being eroded by Bing, but I’d venture to guess pulling the trigger on a Super Bowl advertisement is a good sign that Bing is gaining ground a little too fast for Big G.

Also worth noting: this video has been available for free on YouTube since November 19, 2009. It currently has 1,868,941 views. According to Nielsen ratings, 106.5 million people watched Super Bowl 44, making it the most-watched television event in history.

Money well spent.

Thanks for using TrueTwit validation service. When you sent me the auto-DM saying that you wanted me to validate my existence as a carbon-based life form by deciphering a captcha, I begrudgingly did it because I was legitimately interested in following you. When you sent me the second auto-DM without even so much as an @-reply, you lost me forever.

First, there’s nothing on the planet more annoying than unnecessary captchas (Chris at Rizzo Tees has expressed this beautifully in his anti-captcha t-shirt). I realize that all the text in the re-captcha project is to help digitize books, but c’mon. I’m trying to follow you on Twitter, not hack your mainframe.

Second, auto-DMs for new followers make me want to throw up in my shoe. Think about that. IN MY SHOE. I don’t even know you and you’re already telling me about how many “Fauxlowers” you have? Really? You just got your ticket punched for a one-way trip on the express train to unfollowville.

So heed this warning, Twitter-ers: If you want to screen your followers, that’s fine. But don’t use a service to do so. You’ll end up missing out on engaging conversations that you could have been having, if only someone could have cracked the captcha code.

Like me.

Selling a house is hard work.

There’s the obvious physical part – packing, painting, preparing – but the mental part is just as difficult. It’s hard for me to wrap my brain around leaving the house where I proposed to my wife (while she was waking up from a nap. Heh). Where we brought our daughter home from the hospital. Where we have so many great memories, all in 3 short years.

At the same time, though, I’m really excited about moving on to a bigger home that can actually accommodate my pack rat tendencies and piles of, well, stuff. And believe me, I have piles. I’m also looking forward to new home improvement challenges – I’ve done an awful lot to this house, and I finally feel comfortable with taking on larger projects and not screwing them up.

Plus, I’ll be a short walk away from Schlafly Bottleworks.

The biggest facepalm moment came yesterday: we finally started to update our kitchen, fully realizing that we’ll only get to enjoy it for the next (hopefully) two months or so until it sells. We ripped out the old butcher block countertops and replaced them with really nice new laminate counters. We also have a brand new drop ceiling in the basement room that my dad and I painstakingly framed in and I drywalled to help me pass the time when Rebecca was in the hospital on bedrest. It’s a knockout space that I was going to use for an office/media room, but now will need to be repurposed for whatever the new owners want.

My house craves attention

The coolest thing I’m doing is using social media tools to drum up interest in the property, pre-listing. I’m posing as the house itself on Posterous, where 7040 Lansdowne has a blog about being sold (acting as a proxy, I’m typing up what the house wants to say). The house also has a Facebook fan page (which I’ve quickly abandoned – nobody is looking for houses on Facebook) and a pretty cool Twitter account.

You can find my attention-whoring house here:

• 7040 Lansdowne (Posterous)
• Twitter
• Flickr (Photoset)

The year is 2010. Please update your copyright information in your site’s footer. It’s just embarrassing if you don’t.

*ahem* TurboTax *ahem*

I decided to do some Christmas shopping with Overstock – after all, I was to get 8% cash back on my order through Bank of America’s Add It Up program. My parents had been asking for a digital picture frame so they could have up-to-date photos of our daughter their granddaughter cycling through at all hours of the day/night.

I ordered a Kodak 8″ digital frame for $80 and thought that was that. I was guaranteed shipping by Christmas Eve, which was perfect. Done, right?

Wrong.

I was shipped a refurbished/open box item that did not have any retail packaging. I can’t give that as a gift – it looked like I was re-gifting. Not cool. I chirped about it on Twitter and was put in touch with the right people. I thought I was well on my way to having this problem resolved. The customer care representative was going to mail me out a replacement product immediately; unfortunately, it was not going to arrive until after Christmas. So I had to give my parents the picture frame “as-is”, with the explanation that I’m going to send it back once I get the new frame and just swap it out.

Well, the replacement frame came after the new year and was packaged even worse than the first one – a rubber band around the power supply, the 64MB SD Card in a small baggie, the frame loosely bubble wrapped… again, not acceptable as a gift. And this was after I was assured that it would be shipped in retail packaging.

I fired off an email to the customer care representative and was almost immediately contacted by someone to rectify the situation. I was “upgraded” to a $100 picture frame that they had in stock and was told that it would be shipped via 2-day air on January 4.

Something finally came to my door today – and you know what? It wasn’t even a picture frame at all. It was a Nikon CoolPix 10 Megapixel Digital Camera.

Have you ever had a run-in with Overstock? If so, let’s hear it in the comments!

A lot of people are saying that the aughts were a horrible decade. I think the past 10 years have been pretty rad, actually. I started jotting down a compilation of all of the stuff that’s happened and wanted to put it in list form for everyone to see. Plus, it’s really popular to write up stuff like this right now. So there.

Thanks for reading my banal minutiae — the decade in music post is coming this weekend!

Personal

Number of vehicles owned: 3

• 1991 GMC Safari Minivan (HELL YEAH)
• 1997 Volkswagen Jetta
• 2007 Mazda 3i

Number of jobs held: 8 (* denotes company/business I started)

• Halpin Music Company (Drum/Percussion Instructor)
• Police Productions LLC (Marketing Assistant)
• STAGES St. Louis (Marketing & Development Coordinator)
• Sports Lounge LLC* (Owner/Founder, Marketing & Web Development)
• Hunter Engineering Company (Web Designer)
• Sigma-Aldrich (Web Content Specialist)
• Gladius Communications (Web/Social Media Strategist)
• Gamma Ray Media LLC* (Owner/Principal)

Of those 8 jobs, there were really only 3 serious ones: Police Productions, Hunter Engineering Company and Sigma-Aldrich. The companies I’ve started have primarily been freelance endeavors. And really, at one point, I thought I’d be able to quit my job and run Sports Lounge LLC full-time. Then the bottom fell out of the internet. C’est la vie!

Years in College: 10

• Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (B.A., Music Business ; B.A. Music History & Literature)
• Fontbonne University (B.S. Organizational Studies/Management)
• Webster University (graduate school – going for a Masters in Management & Leadership and a MBA with an emphasis in Web Technology)

Places Lived: 6

• 426 Cougar Village, Apt. 2D
• 217 Gettysburg Rd.
• 3838 Connecticut
• 3220 Winnebago (lived in for 14 days before we moved out because of a robbery & assault on a roommate)
• 4045 Humphrey
• 7040 Lansdowne (we bought this one)

Computers Owned: 5

• Power PC G3 Tower
• Powerbook G4
• iBook G3
• Macbook Core Duo
• Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo

Cellular Companies I’ve had a contract with: 4

• Sprint
• U.S. Cellular
• Verizon
• AT&T

Travel

I left the United States 4 times:

• Canada
• England
• Scotland
• France

Travel inside the United States was also pretty awesome. Here are the states I’ve been in:

• Arizona
• Arkansas
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• Deleware
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Indiana
• Kansas
• Kentucky
• Louisana
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Mississippi
• Missouri
• Nevada
• New Jersey
• New York
• Ohio
• Oregon
• Pennsylvania
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Utah
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• Washington D.C.
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

In one year, I drove from Oregon to St. Louis, then hit the East Coast. Wild times.

Sports

It was a good decade for sports teams I follow: the Baltimore Ravens and the St. Louis Cardinals each won championships. The St. Louis Blues sadly did not. Even the St. Louis Rams got in on the action. That’s 2 Super Bowl victories and 1 World Series. Not too shabby.

Football Stadiums: 7

• M&T Bank Stadium
• Ed Jones Dome
• RCA Doma
• Lucas Oil Stadium
• Arrowhead Stadium
• LP Field
• Soldier Field

Baseball Stadiums: 8

• Busch II
• Busch III
• Wrigley Field
• Miller Park
• Great American Ballpark
• Koffman Stadium
• Camden Yard
• Citizens Bank Ballpark

Hockey Arenas: 4

• Keil/Savvis Center/Scottrade Center
• Gaylord Entertainment Center
• Joe Louis Arena
• Nationwide Arena

Quite possibly the world’s most famous drum break:

From the description on YouTube:

This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the “Amen Break,” a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music — a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison’s 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.

This sample has been all over the hip hop world – from N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton to Lupe Fiasco’s Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool. Even pop music has taken it’s turn – Oasis, Perry Ferrel (Jane’s Addiction) and Nine Inch Nails have all used this loop.

Sadly, because the Amen Break has been used so many times and cut up/re-sampled over and over again, neither drummer G. C. Coleman or Composer (copyright owner) Richard Spencer have ever received any royalties.

If you’re looking to play this beat, here is the notation:

I’ve got a top-whatever list of things this decade coming. I’m writing it out in – get this – long-form with pencil and paper. I know, right? Who does that nowadays?

Any-hoo. Stay tuned. There’s a crap-ton of stuff on this list… it may just be worth your while to read it.

Today we went to the Missouri Athletic Club for Breakfast with Santa. Here’s the best picture of the lot with Jane and Santa hanging out!

I know I keep saying that this is a personal blog with professional insight all the time, but how could I not want to show off my baby girl and her first Christmas?

Unrelated – Jane’s first Solid food experience:

Earlier this week I filed paperwork with the State of Missouri to organize a Limited Liability Company.

The hardest part of the process was picking a name. Thankfully, Wikipedia has a Random Article button.

The first spin went well – I managed to avoid the 437,000+ articles about Anime and landed on Gamma. I dug deeper and hit up Gamma Ray.

Gamma Ray Media was born.

I’m working on the website now and will have more details soon. Stay tuned!