I think I’m the last business person in the world (certainly the last CEO) to not have some sort of PDA. That will all be changing this week when my new 8gig iPhone arrives!
I’ve never been an early-adopter of new technology, but when I first saw images and info on the iPhone when it was first announced, it was love at first sight. I was too scared to get it right away as it was very much untested, so I figured I’d wait awhile to see how those who first got it liked it. By most accounts, it appears that people love it!
Still, I wasn’t in a hurry to get one, as I’m never very far from my laptop anyway. But a few things happened to spur me into action and let me know that the time was right. The first was that my husband’s cellphone bit the dust. He doesn’t use his very much, but it comes in handy so he really does need to have one. Since my daughter Corie uses hers a ton and is always complaining that hers doesn’t work great, we figured she could give him hers and she could get a new one as his was ripe for an upgrade from ATT and hers wasn’t. However, when she went to buy a new one, it appeared that due to Cingular changing back into ATT and our account being a Family plan, we were going to have to all upgrade to new phones. (We just did that last time when ATT turned into Cingular!) That sounded like way more trouble than it was worth, especially because one of our phones is in Hawaii with my daughter Jamie.
So I thought, hmm…if I have to upgrade phones anyway, it would be silly for me to get something other than the iPhone that I was eventually going to get anyway. Plus, I thought it might be possible to keep our current plan and not have to switch all our phones if I got the iPhone as it works somewhat differently than their usual phones. (I called them and this appears to be the case.) But, the other thing that told me the time was right was when I read that the price came down $200! Between that and everything else, there was just no way I couldn’t get one!
Corie’s not thrilled that she won’t be getting a new phone, and my husband isn’t too thrilled that he won’t have a flip phone, but both of them can live with it for now. And meanwhile, I’M GETTING AN iPHONE!!!
It still feels like somewhat of a frivolous purchase to me, as I rarely buy anything just because I like it or want to (other than my Mini Cooper!). But what the heck? It’s only $20 more a month and a business expense. Plus, I believe I may be able to cancel my ATT wireless card that I use for my laptop once I have the iPhone, and that’s about $60 per month. So in the end, I will actually be saving myself money. 
Anyone know Meg Whitman, president and CEO of eBay?
My sister Beth, CEO and President of a niche HR Software Company, Nobscot, Corp. is on a mentor-me-meg-mission! She didn’t tell me about this, I just stumbled upon it when reading her blog today.
But I do think it’s a cool idea, and I needed to post to my blog here at some point in 2007 anyway!
Beth is experimenting with a variety of social media during ther quest, and is going to be chronicaling it on her blog.
So if you know Meg or are Meg, or just want to help get the word out, please contact me or Beth immediately!
I’ve been tagged by Karl Ribas!
I didn’t think that there would be anything to say that you haven’t already heard since I generally tell all in my newsletter, and have been for years. But I did manage to come up with a few tidbits you may not know.
So without further ado, here are 5 facts you didn’t (hopefully) know about me:
- I’m not a copywriter, nor have I ever been one. For some reason, people think I am, so I just wanted to clear that one up — again! (Copywriting is way too hard for me.)
I’m a moderator at Steve Pavlina’s forum in the Psychic and Paranormal category.
I collect toads. Stuffed ones, plastic ones, glass ones, etc. (Most are actually frogs, but I pretend that they’re toads.) Oh, and they have names too, but sometimes I forget who’s who!
Lately, I seem to attract lawyers into my life. It’s not as bad as it sounds! You probably already know that my husband is a lawyer, but over the past few months it seems that everywhere I turn and every email I open up is from a lawyer. Thankfully, only a couple of them are ones I’ve had to pay. Some even pay me! Plus, my daughter is probably going to go to law school when she graduates college, and her boyfriend is applying right now to law school, so I suspect I’ll be surrounded by lawyers for quite some time!
I’m so bad at making plans that my kids never had any birthday parties (or even friends come over when they were little) unless they planned it for themselves. Which basically meant that only my oldest who is a go-getter, had any birthday parties!
That’s it. Nothing very exciting here!
Seems that everyone and their brother is already tagged, but I found a few untagged bloggers. Take it away Erin Pavlina, Randy Cullom, Shel Horowitz, Laura Young and Gurtie. Let us know 5 things we didn’t know about you!
Over at SEOmoz, Rand’s mystery guest writer has blogged about 10 Signs You’re Dating an SEO. However, it seems to be written only from the perspective of being with a male SEO. How old-fashioned can you get? Guess what mystery writer? There are female SEOs too, and they also are dating or have spouses, and even kids! Surely their spouses and kids are just as neglected as the male SEO’s spouses — maybe even more!
So in an effort to balance the gender scale, here’s my 12 Signs Your Wife — or for those of us with kids — Your Mom is — an SEO.
- Dinner is burned because she’s been running back and forth between the computer and the stove, but got wrapped up in a very “important” forum post about cloaking.
- The entire house is woken up at midnight by the sounds of her laughing hysterically on MSN messenger with her other SEO women friends.
- You miss your school bus because SEO Mom was too busy deleting the morning spam to get you to the bus stop on time.
- She pays friends and relatives to chauffeur you to your various school activities so she doesn’t have to leave her computer for more than 10 mins. at a time.
- Your friends think she’s cool because she talks on IM all day like they do, and she is also up at all hours of the night.
- She’s always saying, “If you work hard in school, one day you may grow up to run a Search Engine!”
- She insists her friends provide her with links in exchange for her advice.
- You come home from a hard day at the office and want to go out for a drink with your SEO wife, but she’s still in the same sweats from 2 days ago and it would take her way too long to get cleaned up to go out.
- She spends more time in bed with her laptop than in bed with you.
- When you go out to eat, she mentions that a restaurant review would make great content.
- Instead of calling your name when you’re having sex, she calls out “Take me to #1 Google!”
- When she goes away to speak at a conference, she puts a cardboard cutout of herself at her computer chair, and nobody notices she’s gone until day 3 when her husband can’t find his keys.
[Special thanks to Scottie for some help on a few of these when I got stuck with only 7 done!]
I received a hard copy, glossy Internet magazine in the mail this week. As I was flipping through it, I recognized many of the writers’ names from articles I’ve seen in various places online. I stopped at one that was about SEO, and attempted to read it, but found it to be so poorly written, that I couldn’t get through it.
I’m used to most online SEO articles being very hard to read because they’re not written by professional writers. But, for some crazy reason, I was astonished to see the same poor quality writing from an actual magazine! I would certainly expect a glossy magazine to have some sort of editing process before they publish any articles, but apparently they don’t.
I’m not even talking about the content of the articles being poor. The content may or may not have been good — I’ll never know, because I couldn’t read them!
Has the Internet by its very nature of allowing anyone and everyone to become a “writer” killed good writing?
I’m starting to wonder.