Those who know me, know that I love New Hampshire. This is an awesome parody. Having spent almost every summer vacation for many years in Franconia Notch, I knew quite a few of the jokes. New Hampshire tourism should pick this up and run with it.

Absolutely beautiful. I’m looking forward to watching the Olympics there in a few days. Vancouver has been on my list of places to visit for a while. Someday we’ll make it out there.

More than 130,000 advertising professionals have lost their jobs in this “Great Recession.” Lemonade is about what happens when people who were once paid to be creative in advertising are forced to be creative with their own lives.

Craig and I have talked often over the years of the “what if I lost my job” scenario. Both of my last two jobs had layoffs, and I grew to understand in my first job at a dot com, that at any moment it could be you. Don’t take it personally, you’re a number in the end, not in a bad way, just a salary and when budgets are not being met, it comes down to numbers. To me layoffs have become a fact of life, I’m always some what prepared in my head, a box under my desk and trying to stay one step ahead.

The advertising industry to me feels like the canary in the coal mine. The arts always take the first hit of being the “unnecessary” expense businesses cut in tough times. The irony there is with good marketing and imagery your product will continue to be successful.

It’s wonderful someone is making this movie. As creative professionals I think we generally have the ability to bounce back quicker than others and start off in new directions. Many times, happier directions more in line with our true callings.

This year, after everything that we’ve been through this year, I could really appreciate this song.

This year, I ended up getting very sick after only one day up there and spent most of the trip attached to tissues, DayQuil/NyQuil and chapstick.

Craig drove me around and I shot video. We first headed up the Kancamagus Highway out of Lincoln. Oh, I just remembered we also got to see the Venus, Jupiter and Moon alignment very clearly from up in the mountains.

The next day we drove through Franconia Notch, where my parents used to vacation for 20 years. The area feels like a second home to me.

I love it! Go Steph and team Plaid.

Visit the The Denver Danbury Egotist.

Timelapse video of a cross country flight at night, flying above clouds glowing with city lights. My advice to you is to make the video full screen, put in your headphones and enjoy the soothing ride. (via migurski)

(Via kottke.org.)

This is so beautiful. I flew from New York to California during June of 1990 on an evening flight. I was mesmerized by the patches of dark and then the cities that would light up from below. I remember Las Vegas really standing out, and when we landed in Los Angeles it seemed to be even brighter. The music is so soothing. Enjoy!

(Via Corrie Haffly.)

This is so incredibly cool. I applaud the person who made it because I would never have the patience to create this.

This is from the agency AKQA. I have no idea how much planning goes into getting these in the right order. Very cool!

While I’ve never had to work at an agency that this high pressured about a holiday greeting. I’ve been on other projects with the same intensity.

Not sure who made this little parody but it’s pretty funny and good.

(Via swissmiss.)

so bad, it made me laugh: stackthememory.com.

Have to agree with Tina, this was so bad it’s funny. Office Space certainly has inspired lots of people.

(Via swissmiss.)

Work:

This week at my job we launched a national ad campaign website (not my design), completed the collection of a large amount of materials for a multimedia project, and 3 email campaigns sent out including one which had 27 unique pieces of content that were not dynamic. And in comparison to my boss and co-workers I think my load was lighter than theirs. Even up to Friday night at 6:00 we were still finishing up projects. Wow! I kept saying to people, the weather got nice and the projects just came rolling in.

Personal:

Well I didn’t have much of one until Friday night. Wednesday I took on waking up early. Thursday was semi-successful and Friday, well Craig and I both slept in thinking it was Saturday.

On a fun note. Friday night I met up with a fellow knitter who was thinking about buying a MacBook or MacBook Pro. We met at Starbucks and I showed her around the operating system, answered questions and had her try mine out. She was pretty excited, I told her to think about it, don’t rush. She was making the switch over from a Dell laptop to Apple, and it is a big decision.

This morning I got an email at 7:40, “I’m ready let’s go!”. We met at the Apple store in Danbury at 10am, and purchased her a MacBook Pro 15″. We left it with them to transfer over her files from her old Dell. I headed home and later in the afternoon we met at Panera to go through setting up her email, transferring bookmarks, importing photos to iPhoto and making sure iTunes was all set and running. She’s really excited and I got an email tonight that she’s having a lot of fun.

I’ve successfully switched 7 people from Windows to Macintosh. No complaints.

Goals:

I’m still working on getting up early. Might kick back my wake up time so it’s not quite as aggressive. I want to be successful not insane. As Colin reminded me, “Never give up”. Absolutely true! There’s no time table, no one’s going to punish me and it’s truly a win-win situation.

And… I will be posting on Tuesdays a Weekly Weigh-In, as part of TheDiet. In the sidebar I’m going to keep track of my exercise on Traineo.com. This week I made some much better choices food wise than I have in a while. All in time.

Last but not least, we watched the Transformers movie tonight. It was pretty good, dialogue sucked, but the effects were amazing. I’m such a sucker for cars and driving scenes. Speaking of I’ll be at the NY International Auto Show on Friday for the opening. Drop me a line if you’ll be there that day.

Over the summer, we embarked on transferring a bunch of old VHS tapes to DVD. Talk about a trip down memory lane. This shot is from me driving around during the summer of 1994, learning to drive in Craig’s parent’s 1986 Mercedes 190D. We had so much fun, but as I watched an hour of so of driving around town I was like, ok what the heck was I was thinking, that anyone would want to watch this.

I still need to go through and pair down the footage. Recently my hometown has expanded the main road to 4 lanes, and there is more shopping malls than ever before. Now this footage we took is pretty unique.

Another project…

I’ve been looking forward to seeing this movie for a few months. I’m hooked on Peter Townshend’s “Let My Love Open the Door” song, it’s been on repeat in my iPhone for a while.

We went to go see it last week on opening night. The showing sold out, which surprised us. I had read movie reviews in the morning that blasted it for being anything but “real” life. I was getting a little worried, but everything I had seen in previews it looked good.

It was just as funny as the previews showed. It was very real to life. If you don’t have a family member(s) like this, count yourself one of the lucky. Steve Carrell was great, he does a great job as the self-deprecating character who you love. There were several scenes Craig and I were laughing really hard.

The moral of story, to follow your heart, not be too hard on yourself and take risks were conveyed very well.

[rating:4.5]