Marc’s Musings

There’s a great article about Boot Camp for New Dads in TIME Magazine.

The link is: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812052,00.html

The next one at Inland Hospital is this Saturday, June 21 at 9 a.m.

Here’s a picture of Inland’s management team. We got to serve lunch to around 400 employees.

The best part? The take away gift was a squirt gun so most of us got soaked!

Last weekend, I helped my parents set up their NetZero dial-up internet access. (It felt so 1990’s!)

The process went pretty smoothly…much to my mother’s irritation. (She’d spent 4 1/2 hours the night before trying to do it. Mom, you’ve gotta plug the phone cord into the laptop!)

But it also had example of the current (dismal) state of customer service.

NetZero noticed the program I was using was out of date and IE wasn’t loading properly. So they had a helpful screen showing me the link for the updated version and telling me how to install it.

But down at the bottom of the screen that shows up if you are having problems connecting to the internet, they said something like, “Need help? You can reach our free customer service by emailing us here at FabulousCustomerService@netzero.com.”

Sheesh. If I’m having trouble with the internet, how am I going to email!

It’s like when your internet connection is down so you call your ISP. Why do they have to point out that “most of the answers” to my questions are conveniently located at their website.

It doesn’t even feel better to yell, “If I could get to your website I wouldn’t be calling you right now!”

I sure am glad most of my life goes much more smoothly than this!

Have you heard of hypermiling? They claim they can get about 40 mpg without a hybrid.

After hearing a brief NPR story on hypermiling yesterday, I tried driving with one shoe off. Weird. But effective.

Here are some tips from Wired.com.

There’s even a www.hypermiling.com complete with a CafePress store.

We have primaries here in Maine tomorrow. We have an incredible privilege in getting a say in how we’re governed.

So vote.

For information on the referendum on tomorrow’s ballot, go to:
http://www.maine.gov/sos/cec/elec/upcoming.html.

There are other great resources at: MPBN.net.

I’m loving using Twitter.com!

It’s so much fun being limited to just 140 characters per blog post. And it’s really neat connecting with people on it.

If you’re on Twitter, feel free to follow me at: http://twitter.com/marcapitman. (You can also go there to see the micro-blogging I do, like my pre-church and during church tweets!)

We’re having a blast at WDW.

Our vacation blog is: http://pdv2008.blogspot.com/.

Photos, commentary, and more!

Yeah, I know we’re supposed to be vacationing. But we’re blogging because we want to try the “blog slurp” feature of Blurb.com to make a book of our vacation.

Okay, so I’m realizing merely joining the Romans8movement group on Facebook didn’t make me memorize the chapter.

It didn’t even help to print out the chapter from Biblegateway.com.

So today I’ll start reading Romans 8. I bet that will be an important step toward memorizing the chapter!

Kivi Miller tagged me on a meme passed on by Jeff Brooks.

I don’t usually play these. In fact, GMail knows to automatically delete forwarded emails.

But something about this intrigues me so here it goes.

Here is what I am supposed to do:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

The nearest book is Katya Andresen’s Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes.

Here are the appropriate three sentences:

And it cost us nothing.

Q: What’s a favorite example of your work in forging unusual partnerships?

A: The Union of Operating Engineers wanted to improve minority recruitument for jobs in the field and to raise the profile of the union and its members in our community.

Delightfully out of context, isn’t it? She goes on to tell of a partnership with them and Head Start.

Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causesis one of the best books I’ve read in a while. And I read a lot of books! Katya knows marketing and this book can help all fundraisers do what they do even better.

Like Kivi I think I’ll tag a couple Twitterati.

• Chad Norman
• Lisa Downing

I’ll also tag:

• my wife Emily
• the book’s author Katya.
• and my guest on today’s Ask Without Fear radio show, Gayle Roberts.

IE isn’t “remembering” my Google settings anymore. I’m having to log in each time.

Other programs are remembering my cookies just fine.

Can anyone help me figure out what I should change?

And can anyone tell me if I can get my IE tabs to be on the bottom of the screen?