“[I]t is a common observation here that our cause is the cause of all mankind, and that we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own.” –Benjamin Franklin
Monthly Archive for July, 2005
Carlton Draught’s Big Beer Ad. Great execution on a WOM marketing campaign. I’d try Carlton today based on this effort.
(Hat-tip to Scoble)
I sat in the Admiral’s Club at O’hare airport for 4+ hours today… rediculous how a little rain can totally screw up the air traffic to Texas for that long, but anyways…
I was quite impressed by the paper quality of the New York Times here in Chicago… Amazing paper quality, and I used to work for a newspaper, so I know these things…
If I could get this good of paper with my local paper, I’d think of subscribing again.
It’s funny how the little things matter when you’ve been stuck at the airport bar for this long.
Just taking the opportunity to point out one of my favorite italian restaurants in Houston, Texas (I’m going to eat lunch there next week) to the good folks out there on the internet.
Birraporetti’s used to be a place my dad took my kid brother and I when we were really young to have Shirley Temple and Roy Roger’s drinks… it was always a treat, and lots of fun.
I’ve rediscovered Birraporetti’s again in the past 6 months, and I have to tell you that I still love it… it still reminds me of those old days, and serves great food and drinks.
If you’re in Houston looking for a good place to eat in downtown Houston, stop by Birraporetti’s .
This past weekend, I decided I needed to clean up my Powerbook hard drive.
I was down to 500 MBs of space free on the machine when I booted it up… this meant that after regular usage for a day or two, I was out of space… I think because of how Mac OS X claims virtual ram space from disk space, though, don’t quote me on that…
So, I downloaded WhatSize which is a neat little utility that’ll tell you what directories are taking up the most space on your hard drive… I sort of guessed that my MP3 collection was the major culprit on my laptop, but wasn’t 100% sure.
After running WhatSize, I realized that two directories were taking up the most space:
~/Music/ and
~/Pictures/
I had 40 GBs of MP3s and 14 GBs of photos, so I set about cleaning them out.
First, I made a back up of my entire 80GB drive using SuperDuper! (fantastic disk cloning utility).
After that process was complete, I opened iTunes, and sorted by play count. I methodically looked at each band that had been played once, but that didn’t have a rated song, and deleted those bands that I just didn’t like (I’ve got a back up of their music, so I can always re-copy the songs over to iTunes if I find myself wanting it) … bands like Disturbed, and Dio, and Britney Spears all got the axe… that freed up about 10GBs of space on my machine… just throwing out the trash…
Then I looked at songs that I’d played once, and started rating those that I didn’t want to lose with at least one star… I promptly started deleting crap I didn’t need to keep, on a song by song basis… for example, I’ve got a lot of Eminem live stuff that is just utter crap at the end of the day… him on stage, talking random stuff that I’ll never listen to. Lots of Beatles tunes that I’ve got three or four copies of, and I really don’t need 4 copies of “Hey Jude” from four albums… etc.
Then, I looked in iPhoto, I deleted a bunch of photos that somehow got duplicated.
At the end of the weekend, I’d deleted a little over 15 GBs of music and photos (most of it music)… and my laptop now feels considerably lighter. It also acts nicer again, and doesn’t complain about running out of disk space like it was doing for the past couple of weeks.
Dave Hamilton posted an interesting comment on Branding online with this memorable quote:
“Lose sight of branding, and you lose that customer.”
Read his entry for the whole story behind that quote. Good post Dave.
I was reading Iceberg by Clive Cussler last night, and came across a new word, so I looked it up today:
bon vivant means “A person with refined taste, especially one who enjoys superb food and drink.”
Good word that I’ll have to use more often in the future:
“My best friend Josh could be considered a bon vivant.”