My new measure of how busy I am is how many unread blogs I have.
Yep, I’m swamped.
Part of the reason I’m swamped is because I took a long weekend last weekend. I went to Austin, TX for golf and a football game. I thought my beloved Cornhuskers would be losing so badly at half time that I could head back to the bar, but that wasn’t the case. They actually played well until the fourth quarter. Then they lost. Defensive Coordinator Kevin Cosgrove just can’t figure out that zone read option play.
When I returned home, my wife said she saw me on TV. If you were watching ABC at 2:48:15PM CDT, and you live in the correct region, you saw me too. I can’t get video off of my DVR, so I tried to take a photo of my TV. You can see it on flickr. I’m on the right. Starting from the left, it goes black shirt, white shirt, guy clapping with hands in front of face, then me wearing a red cap, dark glasses and looking to my right. Ah fame.
In Austin, I played golf at Wolfdancer. It’s a resort course, which means it’s a tough looking course that’s maintained in such a way that guests score well. I scored 84. They require a forecaddy – someone who tells you where to hit and then goes and finds your ball for you. We suspect that our forecaddy was foot-wedging some of our shots while we weren’t looking. If there really is a resort/forecaddy conspiracy then I say “kudos”. It worked on me, because I had a great time.
Last night was Halloween. Some people were putting their business cards in my son’s treat bag. I’m sure they took a marketing course at the community college or read Guerilla Marketing and are quite proud of themselves. I read the cards. You can be sure I won’t be buying from them even if I’m in their market. Some parts of our lives can be advertising free.
My cell phone has been ringing off the hook from the number 800-835-4431. Normally, I simply ignore telemarketers and they go away. This number was calling me three times a day. I googled it and discovered that I’m not the only one. This morning I finally answered it. It was Real Software, makers of RealBasic the VB6 replacement. They want me to pay $750 to go to their conference. I downloaded RealBasic a couple of years ago, but I never used it. Now they’re calling my cell phone to sell me stuff? Three times a day? While I’m registered on the National Do Not Call list, I really doubt that helps since I have “prior dealings” with this company. I no longer have nice things to say about them.
I think I’ve got a copy of real basic somewhere, I remember signing up for it, but I’ve not been called once :-( Even telemarketers don’t love me.
Great picture Dick thats one to show the grandkids :-)))
The course looked hard in the 3 photos they had of it, mind you not sure I’d be willing to pony up the 85 quid for a round! It’s 10 nicker where i play, foot-wedging players own!
12 over though, pretty good!
Dick, please don’t let this moment of fame go to your head, OK?
By the way, see that guy with the mustache who’s to the left and above you? Is that me? It sure looks like me. I don’t think I was at that game, but sometimes my memory isn’t so good.
In any case, I’ll see you at the RealBasic conference!
By the way, Bloglines is NOT a good measure of how busy you are. I’m not busy at all these days, and I have 3,170 unread posts in 91 updated feeds.
I’ve got RealBasic too somewhere. I couldn’t work out if it did COM add-ins before I got distracted. If I gave them a phone number it would have been made up (or Ross’s).
Hey Dick,
Great blog, man. I’ve subscribed to your feed for quite a while, and even click on the ads now and then! I’ve searched your blog, and the web, but can’t seem to find the answer to this. Is it possible to change the title of a pivot chart based on a filter? So if I am only showing one item of a list in a category field, can I put the name of the item I’m showing in the title of the pivot chart? Example: I have a list of items, associates, and dates. I want to show which items each associate worked on each week. I’ve removed the associates name from the bottom of the pivot chart, because it was obscuring my date, but I’d like the title to change to show which associate I’m showing, like “Tom’s Items”, etc. Anything you have on this would be very helpful, man. Thanks!
Try a google search for 800-835-4431. That number is used for all kinds of junk calls. At least we know where RealBasic stands. I’ll chalk them up as a scumbag company. But they’d probably defend their action as “getting the word out.”
Click the link below, and maybe they’ll notice the hits and come here and explain:
http://www.realbasic.com/
Sorry, but I have ZERO tolerance for telemarketers.
Dick I had the same problem about 2 years ago with a siding and windows company. I was getting about 6 calls a day on my cell phone. I did some legal research to find out what my options were. Basically once you get their address and send them a certified letter stating that you wish to be placed on their do not call list they must quit calling you or you can sue them for every call that they make to you after that. Also of note the telemarketer must give you their address. Once I ask them for their address and informed them that I was sending them a certified letter of intent to sue I never heard from them again.
Charles
My name is Dana Mason and I am the Director of Marketing at REAL Software. I understand some people are having problems with calls from this number and I wanted to let you know that these calls are not coming from REAL Software, but they are, in fact, coming from a telemarketing company in Austin. We used this company for a call campaign about our user conference in November, but our users complained of the same problem – too many calls. Once this was brought to our attention, we immediately stopped using them a few weeks after.