Stephen Bolen's Internet Awesomesauce

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!

So I got my Webster University online access account set up. My email address is stephenbolen99 [at] webster.edu. Really? 99? There have been 98 other people with my first name AND last name who have matriculated to Webster University before me?

It just seems odd.

After 23 years of inactivity, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat re-launched today as an online-only publication. There are some slight stumbles out of the gate – as to be expected with a massive site-wide launch – and some even bigger miscues.

3 things the St. Louis Globe-Democrat is doing right

• Very clean, simple design. Contrasted with the abomination that we call the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website, the Globe-Democrat looks like a sterling example of the proper use/overuse of whitespace.
• They haven’t gotten anyone fired for posting an anonymous comment yet. A subtle dig at Kurt Greenbaum, the Post-Dispatch social media director who went a little too far… Also, there are only like 4 comments.
• Engaging social media tools to help promote/drive traffic/content. Aside from being a glorified blog, the Globe-Democrat has its content producers out pimping the site on Twitter and Facebook.

3 things the St. Louis Globe-Democrat is doing wrong

• Promotion. Outside of happening to follow the Globe-Democrat and some of their writers on Twitter, I haven’t seen anything about the site launch online in other locations. You’d think ad buys across other sites would be important, right? Hell, Facebook ads alone could drive hundreds of thousands of St. Louis eyeballs to the site on a relatively low budget. I’m not suggesting that they advertise on television or in a competing newspaper, but they’ve gotta get themselves out there somehow.
• Michelle Malkin & Pat Buchanan are columnists. Well, looks like the Globe-Democrat is still St. Louis’ right-leaning paper. But why launch a site with nationally syndicated columnists who self-publish a lot on blogs of their own? Why go to the Globe-Democrat to find content you likely already read elsewhere?
• No RSS Feeds at Launch. Uhhhh… how in the world do you launch a website – a news site, even – and not have RSS feeds active? That’s kind of a big deal, and a gross oversight on the web team’s part. In fact, I can’t believe that we’re on the verge of the year twenty-freakin’-ten and something as important as an RSS feed was overlooked.

Conclusion

While the Globe-Democrat is “back,” I’ll continue to get my news from the St. Louis Beacon, an online publication that gets it (and has fully functioning social media tools/active RSS feeds).

… and if you thought the racist comments on the Post-Dispatch were bad, just wait until the commenters come out to post on a right-leaning kissyface online ‘rag.

I’ve decided to switch gears and not complete my MBA at Fontbonne University. After careful review, I’ve determined that Webster University – for a measly $4 per credit hour more – provides a much higher level of education and will carry a much better reputation locally than Fontbonne.

Where’s the beef?

Not to sound like an elitist egghead, but I wasn’t challenged at all at Fontbonne for my undergraduate degree in Organizational Studies (Management). I cruised through classes, crushed presentations and rocked research papers. I’ll be honest: it was easy. Almost too easy. Easy enough where I feel like I wasted a lot of money getting student loans and putting myself in debt.

I had my fair share of horrible professors, but none worse than one early on who gave me a B-minus because I missed two classes due to my wedding and honeymoon (and wouldn’t let me make up the work I missed). I was livid — the B-minus was the worst grade I’d ever received in college. Because of that B-minus, I’m stuck with a 3.78 GPA (on a 4 point scale) instead of something higher. I complained, but it fell on deaf ears.

But I digress.

The advising experience, while friendly, was extraordinarily sub-par, as I found myself having to locate my own class schedule and satisfy all degree requirements with little help from the University. Honestly, at times it felt like the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. So now, after having completed the entire core group of classes in the B.S. program, I find myself having to “clean up” and take general education classes and requirements to satisfy graduation requirements. It’s very, very frustrating. Thankfully it all comes to an end on December 10 when I take (what I hope to be) my last class at Fontbonne.

Webster University MBA

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw Webster University’s MBA program information – and noticed that graduate tuition was only $4 more per credit hour than Fontbonne. Then noticed that I can obtain an emphasis in Web Services, which is right up my freakin’ alley. Talk about a program custom-fit for my career, eh?

I filled out the online application for graduate admissions and was accepted almost immediately to the program. I’ve been exchanging emails with 2 departments who are thrilled to have me; further, I’ve been “congratulated” for my decision on Twitter by the School of Business and Technology.

I have an advising appointment this afternoon and am looking forward to finding out more about the program and how a Webster University MBA can help me advance my career goals.