Bnpositive's Blog

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to head on out to Vegas and attend the Blog World & New Media Expo. It was my second foray into a serious social media conference and it was absolutely loaded with more information, tips and suggestions than I could honestly even attempt to digest, and trust me… digesting what I’ve eaten has never really been an issue for me!

Since then, I’ve had a couple of years to try out a little what I’ve learned and to develop and expand the friendships I made during all the networking and hallway chats that go on at these events.

I WANT TO GO BACK!

The problem has been being able to afford to go back. I’ve got friends that live in Vegas and I can stay with them for free again, but trying to pony up the cash for the airplane ticket and conference pass was just too much to attempt this year. On top of that, my family did have a trip to Disney planned over the same period. Daddy sure wasn’t going to be absent on a family trip to Disney, that’s for sure!

Lately I’ve been seeing and trying to participate in a bit of a movement among the blogosphere for “Daddy bloggers”. Sure “mommy bloggers” get all the cool press and media exposure, which they deserve. I even know some great mommy bloggers like Casey Mullins, female blogger phenom and The Queen of Free herself, Cherie Lowe. You can follow the activity on Twitter with the #DadsTalking hashtag and participate on their official website at www.dadstalking.com.

I recently saw that they’re giving away a free conference pass and airfare from Southwest Airlines to the Blog World Expo & New Media Expo 2010.

WOOT!

Here’s the rundown:

1. Find out about #DadsTalking activity
2. Family trip to Disney got cancelled and rescheduled
3. Find out Dads Talking is giving away prize to go to BWE10!
4. Loves flying Southwest!
5. Loves Vegas
6. Friends in Vegas
7. Wants to go to BWE10, with Dads Talking on Southwest

That about covers it right?

Now I’ve got to convince them to pick me as their winner! Aside from the giant, yellow smiley face, what more could you want? No, I’m just kidding. I’m really excited about the Dads Talking movement and love the new dads I’ve met in such a short time. I’d love to head out to Vegas and make some in-the-flesh and face-to-face connections with more dads and do everything I can to help increase the momentum for all involved.

Of course, it’s Vegas too, so who knows, I could be convinced to get a tattoo promoting the wonders of fatherhood in Vegas at BWE10 thanks to Southwest Airlines somewhere on my body!

One of the great features of social media is the conversation that’s available between real people. One of the earliest benefits of a “social media” was word-of-mouth advertising. You hear about a great new place to eat, or a cool place to have fun, you’d tell your friends.

The Yelp website takes the word-of-mouth function we’re all familiar with and just web-enabled it. When you find a great restaurant, write a little review about it and let people know. Have a favorite small business you like to support? Why wouldn’t you tell others about it.

Here’s a few of my reviews on Yelp, hopefully I can discipline myself to write more of these on a more regular basis.

Recent reviews by Jason B.

What’s this?

Check out this story and photos a friend of mine shared with me.

Accident (apx. 9/10 or 9/17/2010) north of Deer Lodge, Montana on I-90. The driver was approximately 22 year old guy heading east to College. He had left central Washington early in the morning. He fell asleep at the wheel and drifted off the shoulder hitting the end of the section of guard rail.

The guard rail came through the right headlight, engine compartment, firewall, glove box, passenger seat, rear seat and exited out the driver’s side of the rear window. That is 120 LF of guard rail that threaded through the suburban.

No passengers and the driver was not injured.

Click images to enlarge

If you’ve ever had an interest in making money by investing in real estate, you need to plan on joining a client of mine in Martinsville this Saturday at 10:00am. They’ll be joining the team behind “Flip This House” on A&E.

Rams Investing is hosting their Rehab SubGroup to share their system for finding a property, investing in it and making all the other decisions to ensure that you’re doing everything you can to ensure success and a return on your real estate investment.

Visit their Rehab SubGroup website for more information about this Saturday’s event, and their main website for more information about Rams Investing. Once you register, this is what you can expect to learn on Saturday.

• How to analyze deals & estimate repairs
• How to locate & manage good contractors
• Learn how & where to generate funding for your deals
• What are "sizzle features" & how they will help your houses sell
• How to Determine layouts & maximize space
• Room additions – When & how to add them
• Network with actual investors and contractors on site
• Marketing and pricing your properties for sale

If you’re wanting to get started in real estate investment, then this Saturday should give you everything you need to know to get started.

In 1972, Joe Miller was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Tulsa Community College.

On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Joe approached it very carefully. He got down on one knee, inspected the elephants foot, and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Joe worked the wood out with his knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot.

The elephant turned to Joe, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments. Joe stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled.

Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away. Joe never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.

Thirty years later, Joe was walking through the Tulsa Zoo with his family. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Joe and his family were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Joe, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.

Remembering the encounter in 1972, Joe could not help wondering if this was the same elephant… Joe summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing, and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Joe’s legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly.

Probably wasn’t the same elephant.

I have a trumpet. Perhaps I need to remember this little trick for a future parade in my area.

Now that the NFL regular season has started, it’s time for us to have a little lesson in civility and respect. Be civil and have respect for the people around you. Don’t be like this guy who decides to boast by the lack of intelligent use of language and grammar he chooses to flaunt in public.

I’ve been in public places where there’s been someone around me and my family that’s been using some choice words I’d rather not hear; especially if my kids are around.

Not sure I’d normally recommend you get in somebody’s face like the older guy did, but since he appeared to be defending and protecting the other lady. I say kudos to him.

You may be aware of the availability of email aliases as a way to organize emails related to different groups or functions into a single email inbox. Aliases are also sometimes referred to as auto-forwarders.

All an alias does it serve as a pointer for one email address to actually be sent to another email address automatically. For example if you sent an email to [email protected], that address may not actually exist, instead it may get forwarded to some guy named Bob ([email protected]) to respond to instead.

Email Aliases after a Red Bull

After playing around with the Gmail filter trick I mentioned in a previous post, I decided I could accomplish basically the same thing while using my own domain name and the use of email aliases.

I use my Gmail address as my “working” email account. It’s the one I’ve always used to manage my social media activity and the one I’d usually give to someone if they asked me for my email address. Since I upgraded to an Android phone, keeping my Gmail account cleaned up and organized for appropriate contacts has become more of a priority and requirement.

I decided to go gung-ho and implement my email filtering program as much as possible, while at the same time protecting my actual email address as much as possible. In doing so, I ended up saving myself a ton of time that I hadn’t actually expected as a fringe benefit.

There were a couple of steps I needed to take to get things going:

Setup a Catch-All Account for My Domain

Normally I don’t prefer to use a catch-all on a domain. If an email address doesn’t exist, I’d prefer it be rejected an identified as not existing to whomever sent the email. In this case though, I needed one.

I setup a new email account of [email protected] and configured it as a catch-all account. Now any email sent to an address @bnpositive that doesn’t actually exist will be collected by this account. I the configured Gmail to collect email from this account using Gmail’s mail fetcher access functions.

Setup Gmail Filter for [email protected]

I quickly setup an email filter in Gmail to automatically label any email received at [email protected] with a label of “Newsletters” and to auto-archive it so it doesn’t appear in my Inbox.

Update My Email Address for All Current Subscriptions to A New Alias

Anytime I receive an email into my Inbox that’s some kind of subscription I’ve signed up for, I quickly look for a link to update my profile or change my email address. When I change my email address I’ll set my address to be some variation of the domain of the website I signed up for the email subscription from in the first place. For example, I’ve signed up to receive emails from The Nature Conservancy at the domain www.nature.org. When I updated my email address for them, I specified my address as [email protected].

Use New Email Alias for Any New Subscriptions

Now, anytime I need to provide an email address somewhere online, I’ll use an alias instead of an actual address on my domain.

The Results – Even a Surprise

Initially, my goal for setting up these filters was to help me identify when my email address may have been sold to Company B after being shared with Company A. If I started to receive spam at one of these addresses, then I could assume the list has been sold or compromised in some other fashion.

The process of auto-archiving all of these emails received was initially just my attempt to try and simplify and organize my Inbox. That worked. What I didn’t expect to gain was all the time I used to spend reading all of these emails. You see I thought I’d go into the “Newsletters” folder/label in Gmail and catch-up on them every now and then. Instead, I find myself hardly reading them at all. It’s not that they’re not loaded with good information, it’s just that in the scheme of priorities, reading them is very low and I usually just don’t ever get to them. Every now and then I’ll scan through the folder to see if anything sticks out, but other than that I’m not reading them.

The only reason I haven’t deleted all 2574 messages already is because I’m not even close to my Gmail storage limit.

What email tricks do you use? One of the more popular tricks I’ve written about was Robby Slaughter’s suggestion of reversing your email composition routine.

I’ve been trying to get a laptop reimaged and reconfigured but one of the software installations I’ve been having challenges getting reinstalled is Microsoft Security Essentials.

I’m not interested in hearing everyone’s opinions and suggestions for what software I should be using instead of Microsoft Security Essentials. I’ve been happy with it and the computers I support that have it installed have been safe and secure with no problems.

What I’m curious about is if anyone else has seen this error and if so, what you did to get around it?

I’ve been using Chrome more and more as my working browser. Mainly because I spend much of the day with Gmail open in my browser and Chrome should obviously do a much more efficient job of running Gmail.

I’m sure there’s a reason for it, stability perhaps, but why do I regularly see a host of Chrome apps running in my Task Manager?

Is this something I should be concerned with or is it just the way Chrome works?

Let me know if you know the answer or just have an opinion one way or the other.

I’m also curious, is Safari still the #1 browser for Mac users? Is Chrome gaining much at all?

Did you know you can have an almost unlimited supply of Gmail addresses to use in a variety of ways? One of the little tricks I mentioned recently when speaking at BlogIndiana 2010 was the ability to make a simple modification to your Gmail email address and then use that change to add another level of filtering to your email rules and labels.

When Google parses the email addresses for it’s Gmail system, it ignores everything following a “ + “ symbol and before the “@” symbol.

What this means is that you can add suffixes to your email address that appear valid to another service, but is completely ignored by Gmail. This gives you the ability to have disposable email addresses to use as needed.

Scenario: Sign-up for Email Newsletter

How many times have you wanted to sign-up for some kind of email newsletter, but were worried about the junk mail you might start getting by sharing your email address?

With this Google trick, you could accomplish the following:

Sign-up for the email newsletter and specify your email address as [email protected]

Now anything sent to this email address will come into your Gmail Inbox as normal, but you can now also setup an email filter in Gmail to look for this address as the recipient and automatically move it to another folder and archive it so it doesn’t clog up your Inbox.

If perhaps you start getting spammed at that email address, you can just change your filter to automatically trash the message so you never have to worry about it again.

I use a variation of this kind of trick with my own domain and the use of alias/forwarder addresses. I’ll cover that in an upcoming post.

If you’d like to easily create a quick image to display your email address like I did above, you can visit the E-Mail Icon Generator website.