On The Road

This is my first post on the road.

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Posted with LifeCast

How growing your business can actually be self-defeating.

Skype is a service that lets you text, audio, and video chat for free. They make money by charging Skype users when they call non-Skype phones. Theoretically, the more people who use Skype, the fewer opportunities there are for SkypeIn and SkypeOut calls. Therefore, the more users Skype acquires, the fewer opportunities it will have to make money. I mean, we could all be on Skype one day, and we could all have stable, mobile internet access, and use Skype for all our calls for free and drive the company into the ground.

My Skype screen name is ************.

Good SEO gets you nominated for President of the United States of America

McCain and Obama had the best-run Search Engine Marketing campaigns. Coincidence? I think not.

Roommate or Room for Rent Needed Coeur d'Alene

I am looking to find my friend a room for rent and/or a roommate in Coeur d'Alene, ID. Call me @ (***) ***-****.

Convenient Recall Notification Alerts

Dave, Ralph, and I just launched recallbuddy&trade beta yesterday. Ralph has been sitting on this idea for years - a free site for you to use to get recall notifications delivered to you without having to go hunt them down because you heard about them in the news two weeks after they occurred. Why not just have one central location to go to, jot down the name of a few major products you use ("Toyota Corolla", "Apple MacBook", "Frigidaire Refrigerator", etc.), and sit back and relax, knowing that you'll get an email sent out to you whenever any recalls pertain to your products? recallbuddy&trade polls government recall data feeds every half an hour, which claim to be updated the same day that the recalls are issued, so notification to consumers should be pretty fast.

Part of our philosophy behind the site was to make it as easy as possible to sign-up, so all you have to do is type in your email address. You get emailed a link that temporarily logs you in and allows you to create a password. Then you're in! All you have to do from there is type in the manufacturer and product name of each product you want to be notified of recalls about. Whenever a recall press release is published to the official government feed, you'll get an email with a link to a copy of it on the recallbuddy&trade website. You can teach recallbuddy&trade that the recall notification alert is relevant to your product, or irrelevant to your product with up and down arrow flags, you can archive your recall notification, delete it, or email it to a friend. Soon we'll add sorting, filtering, and searching capabilities to your recall inbox and archive, as well as a place for comments and some forums.

For now though, we want news of recallbuddy&trade to spread a bit by word of mouth, so that the public can test it out and give us feedback before we lift the "beta" label on the project and start promoting it.

Click here and sign up for a free recallbuddy&trade account and register a couple of products that you use. Blog about your experience with recallbuddy&trade, and/or email me at ***** [at] recallbuddy [dot] com with your ideas for improving our special recall notification service.

2008 Coeur d'Alene Triathlon Results

So I am finally past the '08 CDA Tri. I had a lot of fun and managed a couple of PR's as well. Here are my times:

2008
Overall place out of all individual competitors: 192/669
Overall time: 2:43:12
Swim: 0:25:45
Transition 1: 2:28
Bike: 1:18:32
Transition 2: 1:10
Run: 0:55:16

Here are the times I was trying to beat:

2007
Overall place out of all individual competitors: 458/617
Overall time: 3:06:01
Swim: 0:27:25
Transition 1: 2:31
Bike: 1:34:36
Transition 2: 5:14
Run: 0:56:15

Additionally, I was trying to get my time under 2:45. So I met each of my goals. My swim, T1, and run were hardly improved over last year's however, so I know where I need to spend more time in training. It looks like most of my time came off of my bike.

I was late getting into the water because right when the whistle blew, my google strap came completely off! My bike chain also came off twice - once it was really bad, and I was on an incline, so I had to wrestle with it to get it back on, sprint to the top of the hill, then mount up and get back on track. But those types of challenges are part of a triathlon.

It was a lot of fun; thanks to my friends and family for participating in the weekend, and HUGE props to Daniel for setting his sights on this a year ago, going after it, and tackling it. His times were all better than my first times, his swim was vastly improved from when I saw him swim six months ago and even significantly over what I saw him do a month ago (only ten minutes behind me - and I have a lifetime of swimming behind me). He completely pwned the bike and run, gaining on me even during the final stretches of the race.

Thanks for doing this with me, Dan. I love you and look forward to a little "active recovery" with you this week.