Like a fork on a chalk board...

Did anyone else see The Real Housewives of Orange County? Am I the only one that thinks Jo singing could be used as a serious form of torture?

Gitmo got nothing on Bravo.

Stephen P. (DAD) 1931-1992

My father's anniversary is this month. It's amazing. He's been gone 15 years. Random memories still pop into my head. Driving home this evening, I remembered when I was a kid and I would sit in the back of our gigantic brown station wagon and laugh as my Dad drove down the hill toward our house yelling "Look- no hands!" while my mother would scream "Steve, put your hands back on the wheel!"

It still makes me smile.

What a load of crap!!!

Has anyone seen this? Undergraduates get 6 tickets to the commencement ceremony but Graduates get only 4? Wh-wh-what??? And why do people who have not completed their degree requirements get to take up 4 tickets??? Why should they be allowed to walk? When space is that limited, they should have to wait until the next ceremony rolls around.

More Consumer Generated Content

I was reading an interesting article on consumer generated ads. The article talked about the wave of advertising being generated by consumers on the web. Like Doritos, MasterCard and Bud have capitalized on user generated ad content. Hopefully, this link to the article works. There, you can follow links to the Bud and MasterCard sites. Also, you can see the "Mentos & Diet Coke" ad- which was pretty entertaining. As the article describes, two guys "produce a cola version of the Bellagio fountain." The results: $100 million in free exposure and a 15% spike in sales for Mentos.

Pandora.com

This is one of the neatest sites I have seen on the web if you like music. You can enter in a song title or an artist's name and Pandora will create a play list of songs with similar musical characteristics. There is some advertising but it's limited and not intrusive. It's nice to put on in the background while you do homework. (And by "do homework" I mean surf the web.)

The Super Bowl Ads

Almost every class I have taken in the last year of my MBA studies talks about the YouTube phenomenon and other copy cat sites where people create and post their own video and content. Perhaps the most interesting manifestation of this phenomena is the Doritos add that was created for the Super Bowl. Doritos challenged consumers to create their own Super Bowl ad. The top 5 ads were chosen and aired during the Super Bowl. If you haven't seen the ads, they are pretty funny. http://www.doritos.com/