Category: Status

Whether or not this is “true” (does it really matter?), it’s an amazing story that reads like a Chuck Palahniuk book…

http://www.zug.com/pranks/super/index01.html 

Wow.

What a day.

I just got home from the SECSOR (South Eastern Conference for the Study of Religion) Annual Meeting in Nashville, TN.

I learned so much at the conference, and I’ll be including specific notes and ideas of things that plummeted me into deep bouts of thought and reconsiderations over the next few days.

At the conference, I purchased a few books… well… a lot of books from the small book show they set up in a hotel conference room. But (Anna), they were all for good causes. One book in particular struck me as something that was a “must buy” and I’m so glad I did pick it up. It changed my life.

Academic books are not read by many people. Most have readership numbers in the hundreds, unless a university class picks them up. So, they are incredibly hard to find if they are in a specific niche, and normally quite expensive.

One such book is Steven W. Holloway’s new publication form Sheffield Phoenix Press entitled Orientalism, Assyriology and the Bible. Sounds horribly obsucre and boring to most of you, I’m sure. However, my eventual PhD work is EXACTLY in that realm of study combining the history of Assyriology, the history of Old Testament scholarship and how the two collided.

So, of course, I bought the book. It was the only book that the publisher had at the conference, and they wanted to keep it on display for a little while, so I actually had to wait before I was able to pick it up even though I had already paid for it.

On our way out of town, I swung by the publisher’s stand (the SBL publishing arm) and picked it up.  As we started the long trip back to North Carolina, I started flipping throught the table of contents and realized that chapter 1 of the book (“The Beginnings of Assyriology in the United States”) was written by a former professor of mine, Benjamin Foster from Yale, who is a widely known authority on Assyriology and Near Eastern Archaeology.

I flipped a few pages and something caught my eye. I had been footnoted from my

work published last year by Yale entitled Asia Has Claims Upon New England: Assyrian Reliefs at Yale.

“Floods of joy o’er my soul, like the sea billows roll…”

I’ve had my ups and downs with my academic journey, but having a place in the footnotes of a text on Assyriology, from the widely respected figure of Benjamin Foster nonetheless, was a major major major moment of change in my life. It’s an incredibly small thing in the grand scheme of the Cosmos, but for me, it is a sign post in the middle of the Moabite plain pointing me towards the Promised Land of eventual life as a professor.

I’ve never felt this feeling. I’m overjoyed, excited and confident… and I’m still in shock.

Later, I went over to Barnes and Noble and my article on ShareASale’s experiment with Twitter at the recent Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas had been published in the new Revenue Magazine.

To channel Bono…

And I must be an acrobat
To talk like this
And act like that.

Thank you zo much, Ze.

You changed my life… one day at a time.

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2007/03/031707.html

Chik-a-quack-quack.

Just posted on the WSJ online is an in-depth article about Twitter (no subscription required) and it’s (ir?)relevance for all sorts of things.  The choice is yours on that relevancy scale.  Personally, I think it’s the greatest thing since sliced blogging.

Particularly fun to read is this interesting interchange between Tara Hunt and Robert Scoble…

Twitter’s expanding popularity has frustrated some users. “I’m a little annoyed by some of these newbies,” said Tara Hunt, a 33-year-old marketer in San Francisco who complains that many users seem to be focusing on quantity over quality in their updates. She blames the influx of new users on Mr. Scoble, a Twitter user who began writing frequently about the service on his blog earlier this year. She removed him from the list of people whose posts she follows, turned off by his frequent notes about the service itself. “He Twittered about Twitter,” she said.

“Twitter hate is the new black,” joked Mr. Scoble, who is linked to more than 1,000 friends on the site. “Some haters have already come around, but to tell the truth, they do have a good point. Do you really need to know that I’m eating a tuna sandwich for lunch? Probably not, although I’ve had more than one person come over and join me for lunch because I told where I was hanging out.” As a concession, he has created a second Twitter account, called “SilentScoble,” where he limits his posts to five a day. A recent dispatch: “It’s hard to post less than five posts per day…”

Can’t we all just get along?

Should I just merge CostPerNews with this site?

I’m tired of blogging in two places, then Twitterin‘ then keeping my Tumblelog going. Well, the last two ain’t that hard (and I really enjoy both of them), but blogging similar thoughts in two different places seems a little silly at this point in my career.

Maybe I should move all of my marketing stuff over to another place. Hmm…

Let me know what you think…

My Final Four?

• Florida
• Kansas
• Texas
• Memphis

Texas wins it all.  I hope. Where are my Iowa State Cyclones??

With all the recent Twitter love, it seems that Tumblr has been left on the side of the road.

I still love you, Tumblr.  Keep rockin’.

I get frustrated easily with close minded people.

Perhaps that is my biggest failing.

I’ve tried and tried to change it, but I don’t think I ever will accomplish that goal. I have all the tolerance in the world for religions, creeds, colors and nationalities. Yet, I cannot get myself to accept that people can become so smug and convinced of their own rightness in such a post-post-modern world.

Twitter has helped me to realize some important things about myself. That’s weird to say and I can’t really explain it beyond writing that it has pushed me further into realizing that some people just suck, no matter how hard I try to justify their thoughts, actions or intents.

Thanks to Tara for this post on Twitter and twitter philosophy…

Ugh.

Two weeks of scraping concrete off of hardwood and I’m sick of home improvement.  In 1992, the owners of our house decided it would be a great idea to tile both the kitchen and the hallway with blue tile that is reminiscent of the YMCA locker rooms.

Sadly, they put tile directly on top of beautiful oak floors.

So, we’ve been trying to get the tile and concrete off the floors and refinish them.  Today is the payoff as the floor professionals are here sanding and refinishing.  We’ll be staying in a cabin over the weekend while the finish dries.

Plus, we got a new sewer.

Details and pics are on Anna’s blog…

I’ve been toying with the NYTimes Reader.

I thought I would hate it, but I’m in love. I know there are missing features and functions and you can basically get all of this content inside of your RSS reader. However, this is a different experience.

If this is any indication of Adobe’s new Apollo platform or Window’s WPF function coming soon, then this could mean some serious challenges to the browser in terms of how we consume content. Layer that with desktop widgets via the Windows Sidebar in Vista, and things could change. I manage my email, Twitter, calendar and search engine searches through the sidebar. I exist in my browser, but if new apps like the Times reader are developed en masse, that could change… quickly.

Perhaps this is why Microsoft hasn’t put much friction in the way of FireFox’s advancement in the browser wars.

Interesting.

For more, check out this post on MS Mossyblog.

Last night I had a long conversation with a consulting client interested in what sort of web2.0 tools I used to advise people on affiliate marketing programs.

Here’s the initial list I came up with off the top of my head…

Zoho

30Boxes

Twitter

BaseCampHQ

Meebo

GMail

Google Reader

WordPress

FeedBurner

seriously… why would anyone put tile directly on top of hardwood. unbelievable.

scraping tile and concrete off of the hardwoods in our hall… previous homeowners were idiots

eating mellow mushroom pizza… food of the gods

weird… having a hard time uploading video to youtube in firefox, but works fine in IE7. darn vista

mistakingly took a nap for 2 hours… amazing how your body shuts down after a few sleepless nights of work. stupid biology.

        

I write a lot of documents.  Let me clarifity that…  I write a TON of documents, spreadsheets and even presentations.  However, I’ve always hated Microsoft Office, so I’ve constantly sought out ways to get around using that clumsy and inefficient piece of software.

Originally, I came across Writely and loved it.  I even had Anna using Writely for a few months.  Then, Writely was acquired by Google and turned into Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

I’ve mostly had a warm interaction with Goog Docs and Spreadsheets, but there have been a few times when the application just hasn’t been up to snuff or has fit my needs.

So, I’ve been testing out Zoho.

I’m still not sure which I will go with.  I have literally hundreds of documents stored at Google Docs and Spreadsheets (from my old Writely account) but Zoho has been quite impressive.

Thoughts?

I think I’m going Tumblr crazy.

After finding a compromise between my beloved blog here and my tumblelog, I’ve set one up to focus exclusively on affiliate markeitng…

Affiliate Fortune Cookies

Should be interesting to see if people use it.  But honestly… just like my blogs, this site is more for me.  I love the idea of a running and easy to use compilation that functions as more than a link blog.  Plus, I don’t want to foul up this space or CostPerNews with tons of posts that just point somewhere else.  Stupid aesthetics.

Anyways, get a Tumblr site of your own!  All the kool kids are doing it.  And then get a Twitter account because all the kool kids are doing that too.

Head over (and bookmark or grab the feed if you’d like) to:

tumble.samharrelson.com

Everything I twitter, digg, send to Flickr or bookmark on del.icio.us will be added there right away.  So, I’ll be using this space for extended ramblings, thoughts and paper publishing.  I’ll be using that page as an extension of this one to keep track of curious, interesting and relevant things I come across during my hours and hours of internet browsing every day.

So, don’t think of them as two different sites, but as one big meta-site.

If you’d like to see more example of tumblelogs like mine, check out:

Merlin’s Tumbamalog Merlin Mann‘s tumblelog

Tumbleo Leo Laporte‘s tumblelog

Ralph’s Blurbs Ralph Dagza‘s tumblelog

Go set one up to record your daily web browsing (and let me know if you do) at http://www.tumblr.com.  Let me know if you have any recommendations for how to improve mine!

So I think I’ve struck a happy medium between my blog that you’re reading now and my Tumblr page (http://tumble.samharrelson.com).

I’m going to use the Tumblr page for all of my social bookmarks at places like Digg, Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia and (hopefully one day) BUMPzee. I’m also going to direct all of my Flickr images to show up there and anything that I find interesting or amusing on YouTube, etc.

In other words, my Tumblr page will be sort of like a running scrapbook where I can quickly bookmark things as I run across them. If you’re looking for my pictures or my latest bookmarks, just click the link in the sidebar.

That will keep this page much cleaner and allow me to go link nuts in a dedicated space.

What do you think?

tumble.samharrelson.com