Me Like The Interweb

A friend was kind enough to recommend this blog on Facebook, calling it “amusing”. I think he meant the other blog, though. Working on adding more of my “amusing” traits into this blog, of course.

And on that note, I recently posted a guest piece on Netchick’s blog about an awful date I once had. If you are at all interested in my quirky side (and don’t get enough of that on this blog - hey, I’m working on it give a girl some time , feel free to check out that post and my Dose of Lunacy blog.

That concludes this episode of Shameless Self-Promotion. See you next week, when I’ll be dancing to Young MC’s “Busta Move” (hey, it could happen!)

Yipeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! I got my Zune! (Thank you, Matchstick!)

Here it is in it’s all its packaged glory:

Yummy.

I’m really psyched about trying the Zune out for a myriad of reasons, one of which is that I want to listen to more podcasts and watch more tech shows. Also, I take public transit (no, really…) and this will be a nice alternative to reading (especially since I’m presenting without a cool book).

I spent the better part of last night adding podcasts to my collection - including TED Talks, Twit, Epic Fu & Savage Love. I have now amassed over 500… - but know there is more cool stuff out there. So please let me know what you like (Tech, Comedy, Educational, Marketing etc.) - I’d love some recommendations.

The Zune also has an interesting social aspect - you can get other people’s downloads and people can beam things to your Zune. They even ask you to name your device for that reason. (My device’s name is “MrShiny”, btw

The inside of the Zune’s box reads: “Wel-come to the Social.”

I’ll talk more about the Zune and my thoughts as I use it. P.S. I am participating in Chatthreads research for this promotion, so if you want to talk about this post feel free to go to Chatthreads.com and type in Conversation ID 102 986 0287

A few of my friends are running cool contests.

You’d be a fool not to enter these - and I pity the fool!

Capulet: PutPlace - “Pull a Face”

PutPlace asks you to show your best “data disaster loss” face. Basically, the horror, the agony etc. of knowing you’ve lost your work/files…

I’ve entered - though I must admit many of my outtake pictures look more like “I need Metamucil badly!” than “I lost all my files!”

Memelab’s: Fan Trust - “I Know What You Did This Summer”

Memelabs wants you to show how your favorite TV characters are spending the summer/hiatus. Great idea! Perhaps someone will imagine a cure to the disease that makes women become contestants on the Bachelor…

I’d enter this one too, but as my Mr. T reference in this post demonstrates, it has been a mighty long time since I watched TV.

I still wonder what happened to Night Court…

I’ve been on a reading kick of late and am running out of books I’ve heard of that I want… Having gone through the Amazon “People who purchased this item also bought” tool and discovering little of interest, I Googled “Book Recommendations” and found the following:

What Should I Read Next?

You enter some books you like and it recommends other books you might enjoy (or you can see other people’s reading lists that have a few favorite matches to see if there is anything that may be of interest).

For what it’s worth, this tool actually recommended a book I had read and enjoyed, so that’s something. And it came up with another than someone else had recommended I read. But, so far, the books suggested seem a bit too technical for me. While I have been enjoying books on behavioral economics, it has mainly been due to their informal tone and wonderful writing style. So, What Should I Read Next, thanks for assuming I have the attention span for technical or theoretical business books. I don’t.

(Anyone know of other similar tools?)

But here’s something cool - the site then provides a link where you can swap old books/movies. Bingo!

chanceXchange

I’m just inputting the books I have now, but am very intrigued by the site. It appears to work like this: when someone asks for a book you have, you send it to them and receive a point for the transaction. Then you use that point to get a book (possibly from another user!)

Now, I think this would work even better with people you know. So here’s my request from Vancouverites - enter the books you want to exchange at chanceXchange and save your local peeps the postage costs of sending a hardcover clear across our expansive country…

You know when you read a book (or watch a film for that matter), and as you approach the end you feel a sense of sadness, because you know the experience is almost over? Well, I just finished Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational” and yeah, that’s how I felt. Basically: Best. Book. Ever.

As you might have noticed, besides my interest in marketing, I am also fascinated by psychology and sociology. Anything about how we behave and why we behave as we do is just great stuff.

The last book I read that was as compelling and completely absorbing was Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness (which, besides being brilliant, was also surprisingly funny).

Both books deal with our lack of knowledge/self-awareness with respect to our own decision making. Stumbling on Happiness discussed our inability to successfully assess what would make us happy in the future, while Predicitably Irrational dealt with irrationality of our decision-making and how predictable (scientifically)/consistent these strange responses are.

P/I through clear, non-clinical and engrossing writing describes behavioral economics’ experiments conducted by the author’s (and references a few of others’).

My only complaint about the book is its negative influence on my productivity: I had a difficult time focusing on work today - all I wanted to do was immerse myself in the related blog and podcasts….

P.S. Here’s a hilarious example from his blog. In one chapter of the book he discusses the tremendous influence “Free” has on our behavior (basically, that people will take things they want less for free and experience less satisfaction, rather than miss the “Free” opportunity. This article from the New York Times elaborates on that topic.) Here Ariely shows a fantastic bonus offer from a Brothel…. “Hmmm, I was only planning on getting 2hrs worth of sexual services, but when they throw in a free gas card, ‘cmon, I could go for 3…, no? Sure - pass the Viagra.”

No idea what you were thinking of (pervert!) - but I just wanted to mention how much I love this video.

I love people & I love stupid dancing.

So this vid is pure happiness.

Flock, Flock, why are you making this so difficult…?!

I really like you. You’re fun, open-minded, you connect with my friends - and overall, you really get me. In general, I think you’re great. You have so many qualities that am I truly looking for in a browser.

But… there some things that I am finding kind of … frustrating. I think we’ve been together long enough, so that I feel I can be open & given some more time we can find our way through this. Right?

OK. Sometimes, you’re a little erratic. No, please, just listen. Maybe you feel threatened when I look at some other sites, but crashing unexpectedly doesn’t make things better for either of us. And all it’s gonna make me do in the end is use another browser…. So, you see how this behavior can be pretty self-defeating?

Frankly, my boyfriend (oh, yes, awkward… Perhaps I should have mentioned him earlier, but I just didn’t know exactly when to…) is infuriated by the amount of RAM you take up. I try to tell him that you need that much, you’re just that powerful, but he’s unimpressed and creates new obscene monikers for your daily.

He thinks I’m a masochist for staying with you. I think you’re just misunderstood. After all, you offer a tremendous amount of support, you communicate when I need you to, you try to resolve the problems. Just sometimes, sometimes I just get frustrated with all the crashes.

So just level-out a bit, OK. Stop being so temperamental.

I want us to make it in the long-haul.

Lovingly Yours,
Monica

I usually reserve erudite titles like this one for my other blog, but sometimes you gotta go with your first instinct.

Upon seeing an article in The Province for the social networking/dating site Beautiful People, I felt nauseous.

If you’re frightened to look at the site (and you should be): it’s a site reserved for only beautiful people to connect.

Yes, looks matter. It’s a shameful aspect of how we are built. Undeniable, true. But shameful nonetheless. And, as the Province’s expert notes “Maybe they all just deserve each other”. Truer words have never been spoken.

But on a larger scale, it’s just very sad, for that dating pool as a whole. While we generally need to be attracted to people we want to date, people become more attractive (or less, depending) the more you get to know them. Most people can attest to finding their partner increasingly sexy as they discovered more of their strength/sense of humor/personality. And how many times has a friend told you about how hot someone was, and you think “Hmmm, not very conventionally attractive” - but that wasn’t what it was about: they were attracted to something about the person physically and/or personality-wise.

How we respond to someone is about so much more that objective attractiveness. But just like the sites for people who only want to date other people who earn x amount of money or a site where someone goes to date a millionaire specifically (e.g. The Millionaire’s Club, but I shouldn’t single this one out because it is but 1 of many, many such sites - and don’t even get me started on The Bachelor…) people are free and welcome to limit their choice in partners to absurd and specific qualifications.

And this is helpful for society as well. Extremely superficial people should associate only with their own superficial kind. Save everyone else unnecessary problems.

Win-win.

If you missed my insomniac guest post about truthfulness on the internet on the B5 network, feel free to check it out here.

So, if you’ve read my piece on “Pick the Brain” (and according to one frustrated commentator (see previous “post”), you may not) you’ll see that I hate fax machines. Oh how I despise them. But they were ultra-cool when they first arrived. Makes you wonder how uncool our current stuff might be in 20 years. I was trying to convince my 8 year old nephew that someday he’ll be uncool - he’ll sing along to by-then-retro songs he loved in his youth. (This began as a way of explaining why 80s music that youngsters think is sheer crap is AWESOME to me.) He didn’t believe me. And then I stopped tormenting the poor boy. He’s only 8, after all!

And I wonder which social networking sites/styles will survive in upcoming years? How long will Facebook, or Twitter be around? Yeah, I know I shouldn’t be asking those questions, being that I’m in this biz. I should have the answers. Well, I don’t.

I’m assuming they’ll be some futuristic network which will combine everything we use (Plaxo has the right idea seed, but not quite there) into one handy and efficient site. And I’m jonesin’ for that bad. ‘Cause between you, you, you and me (I think there’s only 3 people reading this blog, right?) I really need a way to have a life online that doesn’t involve, well, living online. Me Like the outside world too.