My Writings. My Thoughts.

Chile, Interviews, and Life

// January 21st, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Brad's Life, Butler, House, Travel

The trip to Chile was absolutely amazing.  I had such a good time and had so much good wine. :)

You can see my ~500 pictures from the trip on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bradjward/sets/72157612120022247/

On Monday I did an interview with the CBC (Think NPR, only for Canada) about the FacebookGate situation.  What’s FacebookGate? Get the full story on my other blog:  http://squaredpeg.com/index.php/2008/12/18/facebook-pay-attention/

The story spread all over the internet, with over 50,000 visitors to the post in a week.  It hit sites like Mashable, TechMeme, Reddit, CNET, Wired, Conde Nast, and many more.  I tried to bookmark what I could find, here are 101 websites about the story: http://delicious.com/bradjward/%232013

Here are some photos from the interview:

And here is the interview!
‘Spark’ Episode 63

The coolest thing for me was that I’m on the same episode as Seth Godin, my favorite business author. (Remember the book cover?)

Hmm…. let’s see… what else is new……………

oh

yeah

i

almost

forgot

to

tell

you

.

I quit my job at Butler. :)   As of Feb 1st I’ll be working out of the house on a new startup called BlueFuego. It’s a consulting company that will help colleges and universities use the internet to market and recruit students and connect with alumni.  I’m really… REALLY excited.

More information is on my other blog if you’re interested:

http://squaredpeg.com/index.php/2009/01/21/big-news-leaving-butler-university/

Hope things are going well for you, everyone! (all 10 readers? haha) Give me a call sometime to say hi.

2009

// January 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

First, I can’t believe I forgot to post our 2008 Christmas Card video.  Here it is!

http://bradjward.com/holiday2008.html

2009 has been great so far.  I just got back from 9 days in Chile for an MBA class.  It was a blast. Lots of plans ofr 2009 and it’s all coming at me pretty quick.  I’ll share pictures and some more about 2009 later this week.  Gotta get unpacked and caught up on being away from work for 23 days.

Holiday Snacks

// December 17th, 2008 // No Comments » // Brad's Life

I love this time of the year.  Jen made chocolate-covered pretzels and cranberry pumpkin bread. Yum. :)

(PS – I did the sprinkles.)




Tonight our small group delivers gifts to our ‘adopted family’ for Christmas. They are from Jen’s school. A mom and 5 kids. We had fun picking out the gifts and wrapping them!


Graphs of life

// December 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Brad's Life

The analytic side of me has been pretty active lately. Looking at numbers and trends of my life. Here are a few that have peaked my interest lately.

1) Miles per gallon. I talked about FuelFrog back in July. I’ve been using it for 7 months now, and here is the interesting trend. As the cost of gasoline decreases, so does my miles per gallon. I become less sensitive to the cost of driving efficiently, and it also costs less to not worry about it. My tanks of gas have been around $16 instead of $40 lately. So if I get 20 less miles on a tank, it’s costing me $1.80, not $4.25. I can justify the few extra minutes at home every day to drive like that. :)

MPG vs. Gas Cost

2) My word cloud from Twitter.  Twitter is pretty much engrained into my life.  Chatting with friends, updates on what I am doing, etc.  I’ve updated about 15 times a day through 2008, so this is a pretty good look into my life through 2008. The bigger the word is, the more it was used.  I’m glad the big words are things like “good”, “great”, “think”, “thanks”, “love”, “time”.  Better than “hate”, “sucks”, etc., right? :)

Oh hai, Blog.

// December 12th, 2008 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

It’s cold out and I haven’t blogged much here lately. Sorry.

Over Thanksgiving we went with Jen’s family to Mexico and it was extremely warm and awesome. Here are some photos.

Last weekend Howard came to visit us.  More on that here.

Life is good.  Need to survive one more week of work to make it to Christmas Break, then I have about 23 days off.  I need that.  Lots of exciting stuff going on in life right now, but breaks are always good.

Talk to ya later. :)

PS – Jen and I started dating 6 years ago tonight. CRAZY! Crazy awesome, that is. Time for a date night!

Twitterers: Cut your text messages in half!

// November 22nd, 2008 // 9 Comments » // Brad's Life, Technology, Uncategorized

(Are you following me on Twitter? Join today!)

(This is my personal blog. Didn’t want to send it to my regular subscribers, but you should check that out too.)

With my iPhone, it KILLS me to pay $5 a month for 200 texts, with email/twitter/etc at my fingertips.

I finally brought my wife into the 21st century this week and signed her up for a text messaging plan. BUT, I didn’t want to upgrade my plan and pay more.  Since I use Twitter so much, I turned to it to handle this issue and serve as the middleman for text conversations between my wife and I.

Here’s how you can get your non-tweeting significant other to utilize Twitter and cut the amount of messages you have to send to 0 while you use the web instead.

10 Steps to Twitter Texting

1) I set my wife up with a twitter account and linked it to her mobile device, a Motorola L2.

2) I set a new contact in her phone called ‘Brad Text’, with the number as ‘40404′.

3) I then send ‘off’ ONCE to ‘Brad Text’. This shuts off twitter updates via text. Otherwise, she would get every single update I send. Not only would that blow her 200 text limit and the point of saving texts, but would be information overload… even for my wife.

4) Now that I have sent ‘off’ to ‘Brad Text’ once, the phone will then only receive direct messages.

5) I set her Twitter account as private, so only I can see her twitter updates.

6) I taught her to send a text message to ‘Brad Text’ whenever she wants to send me a text message. This ‘text message’ goes to her twitter page, where I then see it in my regular stream.

7) If you follow LOTS of people and don’t want these important messages to get lost in the stream, or if you don’t want those tweets to be public in the event this person eventually ’sees the light’ and begins to utilize Twitter for what it’s mainly for… teach them how to direct message you.  We’ll get there, but for now… baby steps…..

8) When I teach her how to DM me (which also sends me an email notification, so.. double alert!), it is as easy as her sending a text message to her ‘Brad Text’ contact that says ‘d bradjward hello you are great.’

9) Whenever I want to send her a text message back, I just send a direct message to her.  ‘d username hey, you’re pretty awesome too.’

10) She gets the text message on her phone. The DM doesn’t go out to my followers. Just her, on her phone. (She would get the email too.) And then when she responds, it starts all over.

There you have it.

It’s kind of cool because it also archives our text messages.. not that it’ll be fun to look back on emails of…

‘what is for supper?’
‘porkchops’
‘again?’

…but hey, you never know.  So that’s how we do it, and that’s how our conversations count as half as many text messages on our AT&T plan.

Leave a comment if you have questions!

@Bradjward

Recharge

// November 14th, 2008 // No Comments » // DIY, Indianapolis, Uncategorized, Web Design

Florida was great. Jen, Tyler and Jess flew in on Friday after my presentation and we enjoyed 3 days of sun and fun.  Very relaxing.  Great times.

Presentations ‘08

// November 11th, 2008 // No Comments » // Brad's Life, Travel

‘Conference Season’ is over for me for 2008, except for a few webinars.  [Geesh, I did a lot this year.] I did a talk in Florida on Friday and it went great.  I felt so good about it, and thought it went well.  And it was even better to see what everyone else on Twitter thought as well. (This reads bottom to top.)

Phew.  Glad it went well.  If you want to watch the video, just click below.

Vote.

// November 4th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

I don’t care who you vote for.  Just vote.

And tomorrow… we’ll see which direction this country is going to go.

It’s not about 1 issue. It’s not about you. It’s about America.

Overwhelmed.

// October 30th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Uncategorized

Life is moving fast. In a good way.

I did a presentation downtown on Tuesday for IACAC, followed up by a podcast recording with Innovative Educators in the afternoon. Last night was a Bloggers chat from 8-10pm, where I met a journalism professor at Butler by chance.  She invited me to guest lecture her class next Tuesday, and we started talking about the possibility of me teaching a class on social media here at Butler. Today I did an interview with CASE Currents magazine on the Butler Blue II video and got 2 more interview requests in email.

Tonight we’re doing a halloween party for the small group.  Tomorrow night we’re participating in Lighthouse with WRCC. Dad’s coming to see us while he is in Indy Friday too.  Homework all weekend.

Wednesday I leave for Florida to speak at a conference, and Jen joins me on Friday.  I cannot wait.  Going to sit on the beach and do nothing for 3 days. And it’s going to be great.

Sometimes being busy is fun and exciting.  But after 7-8 weeks, sun and sand is just the presciption I need.

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