Friday April 03, 2009

A long week, this might help...

World, I'd like to introduce you to Goliath and Doogie. This should add a smile or two on a Friday. Goliath is a boxer/pit bull mix, a rescue dog that we were going to "keep until we found him a good home". That was 5 years ago. Doogie is a 140 lb (63.5 kg to my non-US friends) pile of pure stupid, formed into the shape of a yellow labrador retriever. Impossible you say? Labs are smart? This one took two years of daily "gotta chase the cows next door" running into the electric fence to learn (1) exactly *what* an electric fence is, and (2) running into it is a painful thing. Enjoy.

bill.

When good marketing goes bad...

Yeah. Goes bad... Like cottage cheese sitting in the back corner of your refrigerator for about a year until the power goes off for a few days while you are on vacation in the middle of summer. That bad.

I was looking through my drawer this morning for an old t-shirt to wear while welding some damage on my tractor's mower deck. Yeah, I live way out in the boondocks with a large yard for the kids to play in, and my tractor broke last fall.

I grab a random shirt from the pile, throw it on and head downstairs. All of a sudden, the message on the shirt hits me. It is an old Sun Education (AKA Sun Learning Services) shirt that says ".com your career". In 2000, that message was very cool, along with the "we are the dot in .com" on the sleeve. Unfortunately, the meaning of .com'ing has changed a bit. Back in the day, it meant taking your business online, exposing yourself to this new Internet connected world, and making Google money.

Oops. With the bursting of the .com bubble, to "dot com" something tends to mean something different these days. "Dot comming" your career would likely mean blowing it up, concentrating on fleeting opportunities, or other negative emotional responses. Especially if you lost some money on those high tech stocks in the past 8 years or so.

Oh well, the shirt keeps my winter-pale body covered, and I don't really mind if I get some dirt and crud on this one.

bill.