My friends were fantastic, here’s what they had to say: (oh, and by the way, the video of the on-air segment can be seen at the bottom of this post)

I’m out of words, now.

TGIM! - Spring Break When You're 38

We’re taught early in America, that March carries an oasis of irresponsibility. From our first day of school until our last we’re trained to expect a break from the norm just as the weather begins warming up. It’s awesome, really…until you get a job. Then brutal reality hits. Sure you practiced the hiatus for at least 13 years, some extended the workouts through grad school tacking on another 6-8, but now the party’s over.

But it’s never really over, is it? I mean, the hope of Spring Break always lingers, right? It has to, I’m 38 and I still get antsy as February ends. So, last week as my kids were enjoying legally skipping class I decided to join them for the last two days of their Spring Break. We loaded up the family truckster and headed out to the Ozark Mountains. It was awesome and I’ll post about the full trip later on, but this post is about the essential ingredient to any Spring Break’s success: The Spring Break Mixtape.

Because we pulled the trigger on the trip at the last minute, I didn’t have the time to properly produce a masterpiece. We hit the road empty handed, save Sarabeth’s Indigo Girls / Shawn Colvin / David Wilcox mix & my Littlest Goonie’s Dr Dre / Jackson 5 / Zac Brown Band concoction. Once we settled into our cabin in the woods and I began grilling our dinner, I remedied the situation with a stream-of-consciousness-songs-on-my-iphone-only production. Friends, I give you:

Thank God It’s Mixday – Spring Break When You’re 38
1. Light of the Morning / Band of Skulls
2. Howlin’ For You / The Black Keys
3. How You Like Me Now / The Heavy
4. We Should Fight / Erza Furman and the Harpoons
5. There Goes My Love / The Blue Van
6. Flathead / Fratellis
7. Everlasting Shine Blockaz / Wick-it the Instigator
8. At 1 AM / The Subways
9. Post Acid / Wavves
10. Someone’s Daughter / The Whigs
11. The Whip / Locksley
12. Life Coach / Fang Island
13. American Music / Violent Femmes
14. Lonely Is The Night / Billy Squier
15. Everybody Wants Some!! / Van Halen
16. Finest Worksong (Mutual Drum Horn Mix) / R.E.M.

[download the .zip file]

I’m out of words now…

The NBA has canceled the Dunk Contest and is instead moving forward with a NBA/Kia commercial.

I would have loved to have had a warning like that instead of wasting any emotion thinking that there was actually a competition in Saturday night’s nonsense. Here is the punchline:

All of the build-up to see the league’s favorite new star (kind of) jump over the Official Car of the NBA. That stunt has been done to death, and I do mean the product placement as well as the dunk. Here’s a flashback from 2005:

Did you see that Skywalker actually jumped over the car instead of the front bumper of the Official Car of The NBA? The most imaginative competitor of the night, in my opinion, was clearly The Washington Wizards’ Javale McGee:

Oh well, at least the infomercial the NBA conned us into watching was entertaining. Now if you want to see a real dunk competition, here’s a one man dunk competition named Kadour Ziani:

I’m out of words now….

For some reason there are now 300+ people following me on the Twitter. Alas, only half of them want me to buy Viagra. Here is a quick snapshot of the poor unfortunate souls who’ve chosen to listen to what I have to say:

…

Get your twitter mosaic here.

Get your twitter mosaic here.

the dramatic and the dude

It was almost a decade ago when the dramatic and I had our great expectations realized when we broke away from our little ones for a date night with the beautiful Moulin Rouge. We were huge Baz Luhrmann from the moment we saw Strictly Ballroom and when we heard that he was making a flick with Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman we counted the days until we could see this epic. We loved it. In fact after the credits rolled, we left the theater, strolled into a nearby Target, and bought the soundtrack so that we could enjoy the moment a little longer as we re-entered the real world. Great love story. Great soundtrack. The most lush visuals we had ever seen on film. We really loved everything about it. …

Tonight, we had the same movie going experience with Slumdog Millionaire. Intrigued by the awards earned at the Golden Globes and enabled by willing grandparents, we ditched the Little Dudes and the Little Dudette and ventured out with high hopes.

Truly worth every penny and more. It was a two-hour journey through another world. Given the chance, we’d go again…right now. With a script as well crafted as The Usual Suspects and a selfless love story rivaling WALL-E (and if you laugh at that, you’ve obviously not seen Pixar’s masterpiece) Slumdog Millionaire is what a night at the movies often hopes for, but rarely delivers.

What I’m trying to say here is that if you love the cinema, I encourage you to see this jewel – but don’t dig up any inside info before heading out. Let it be a wonderful surprise. Enjoy the film with another film lover. Willingly suspend disbelief for a little while, and immerse yourself in the journey laid out before you.

Then go home and download the delicious soundtrack. I just did, and just as with Moulin Rouge, I’m enjoying the trip all over again.

I’m out of words now…

I should've worn the mask

This week, I’ve spent nine hours in meetings preparing for a presentation…in which I was alloted one minute and thirty six-seconds (00:01:36) to speak.

I’m out of words now…

Obviously, these folks aren’t texting me. I follow Shaq, Dooce, Hodgman and about 80 other folks on Twitter. It took a while for Twitter to win me over, but through the course of the ’08 Presidential election, I grew to love it a little. It has a place. It serves a purpose. And now, this dude is throwing Twitter his endorsement as a valuable platform for communication.

follow me: twitter.com/bryanjones

I use Twitter to learn, to share and to laugh… a lot. If you’re still unclear of why Twitter would be worth your time, try these analogies:

For IMers, it’s Instant Messaging on a grand scale.

For you FB fans out there, think of Twitter as Facebook on a diet, displaying only status updates.

For bloggers, think of it as blogging boiled down to 140 characters. (Ah, the whole brevity thing!)

For you Tumblrs, think of it as Tumblr-lite with a slicker community interface larger community.

Twitter is a unique tool for sharing ideas, and it has reached a tipping point of sorts with media outlets of all varieties jumping into the game. A few weeks back, Arkansas Business’ Lance Turner (he of the steady Little Rock media takeover) assembled his thoughts on Twitter via his blog, and his other blog, and then again on his blog. Lance kindly included me in his list of local Twits, and a couple of days later, i had an additional 50 folks subscribe to follow my Twitter updates. Insanity. That’s a way larger number than the number of folks who abide with me here on wholebrevitything.

Twitter will evolve, just as Facebook has, but it is here to stay. It’s time for you to join in the fun. So, go on then, Tweet away.  Srsly.

I’m out of words now…

(and you MUST follow Shaqtastic!)

Update: Lance has posted the Arkansas Twitter Guide. It’s doable, we have a small state

flairification is the latest addition to this little of blog consortium I’ve been building over the last year or so.

Here is the rundown:

wholebrevitything.com – just one dude’s slice of life.
extraawesome.com – my collection of cool found on the interwebs.
adfeed.extraawesome.com – OPP (other people’s posts) about advertising.
flairification.com – truth well flaired: a place where I can write about advertising, thereby saving wholebrevitything from shop talk.

I hope flairification turns into a place where lots of folks can post, and add thier perspective on advertising. Like SB’s appreciation of Target’s latest 30 second spot. So feel free to be a guest writer of the flair.

It’s after 3AM now, and I’m out of words…

“carpooling with 150 of my closest friends.”

For the past few months I’ve been working in Dallas about once a week. Run through the Little Rock airport security at 5:30 AM. Return landing at the Little Rock gate around 6:00 PM. It’s a pretty short and sweet trip, and I’ve always been a fan of Big D, so I’m lovin’ it.

There is one part of the trip that always nags me. The loud speaker clicks on, and the familiar refrain of “…at this time please turn off all electronic devices…” Look, I’ve seen the Mythbusters episode – I know that it really doesn’t make any difference – but, still,  I oblige. And during that 15 minute window climbing to 10,000′ I indulge myself with the glorious nonsense that is SkyMall. …

I had no idea there were so many things that I didn’t know that I didn’t need. The existence of SkyMall can only be attributed to the fact that there are people in this world who have already bought everything else. When Wade and I fly together, we like to play: “Find the most pointless product.”

So that you can share in our amazement, here are a few of the offerings from this month’s issue of SkyMall:

NECKpro Traction Device

Finger Drums

Edge Baking Pan

And here is August’s Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner:

Pet Observation Dome

I’m out of words now…

I’m very sad to report that the employees at the main office do not have the same passion for their work as their counterparts at the legendary dinner theaters… NOT ONE person was in costume!

However, there was a knight in the reception area, and just maybe there was a dude in all of that metal.

I’m out of words now…

Over the weekend, I came across a fascinating post out of Australia, and I simply have to share it here. Usually, whenever I come across something cool, I post it on extraawesome.com, but this little slice of goodness is worth mentioning here.

Take a moment to read the post and check out the visualized perspective of a self-professed data head.

Visually speaking, here is some more information on the dude:

I’m out of words now…

Unfortunately, I was off of my pay attention support program that day, so we packed about 60 minutes of logical thought into a 30 minute pinball ride through the intenets, followed by 20 minutes of Q&A to unravel the mess that I had just created. It wasn’t that I was unprepared, the bumper car presentation was born out of my commitment to not stand up at a podium for an hour of PowerPoint Karaoke.

Looking back, I so wish I had presented via PowerPoint Karaoke… this kind of PowerPoint Karaoke. It seems that the wacky folks in Germany have come up with a brand new bar game. It works like this: download some random PowerPoint slides from the web, then find a few bold souls to stand up and enthusiastically deliver the presentation of their life… all from a deck of slides that they’ve never seen before.

Or maybe I should have just given an Interesting presentation. Interesting2008 took place in London a month ago, and I am fascinated by the idea: gather as many interesting people as you can from a wide variety of interests/fields and have them spend 3 or 20 minutes telling the world all about something that is very interesting to them. Here is a link to Roo Reynolds presentation (slideshare here) I love it..

ReadWriteWeb has more about geek efforts to Make Public Presentations Fun Again.

Time for me to work on my presentation about my love for donuts.

I’m out of words now…

42K comments on a single blog post begs attention. In the world where I work, it demands attention. So, the extraawesome Dooce broke through to my adfeed.extraawesome.com last week. Adfeed is a library of interesting advertising news stories/observations that I’ve bookmarked as I’ve wandered the world-wide-interweb. Dooce’s comment overload was definitely interesting.

My wife has been a Dooce fan for a year now. Her connection with Dooce and her writing style was pretty immediate. Dooce makes Sarabeth laugh, and if you know SB, then you know that her laughter is whole-hearted and infectious, so even though I hadn’t ever read her work, I’ve enjoyed Dooce a ton.

The reason so many folks were interested in commenting and commenting again.. and again… and again… on this one blog post: a Wii and Wii Fit give away. The kind folks at Nintendo recognized the persuasive influence earned by Dooce, so they found a way to work with her, and produce a huge benefit for them both. Dooce gave away five sets of this entertainment glory, and to be eligible all one had to do was leave a comment… or 20. There was no comment limit, just a time limit of roughly 48 hours. At that time Dooce’s mom picked 5 numbers between 1 and 42,232, producing 5 very happy, wii fit owning, Dooce fans.

Interesting, don’t you think? Newsworthy? I thought so, too. It also made me want to give away something, just for fun, via wholebrevitything.com. Logically, my thoughts went to lawn care. Alas, there is only so much dehydration a person can pack into a weekend. So, looking for a more climate controlled option (to be read, “sitting on the couch in my air conditioned den”) I’ve decided to give away a blog.

My give away will work like this: Leave a comment here on this post beteen the time of its publication and Sunday 6 p.m. cental time and you will be eligible to win a WordPress blog produced by me. So that we can stay legal, there will be no financial value placed with give-away, just one dude helping out another dude with a blog, perhaps your own domain name and some coaching/customization, that’s all I’m sayin’. Sweet Sarabeth will draw a number out of a hat, and we’ll post the winner here on wholebrevitything.com Sunday evening.

Oh, and just for kicks, all comments need to contain a movie quote to be eligible for the drawing.

I’m out of words now…

At the house where the dude abides, we are in the heat of the mow-ment. Yesterday’s bush-whacking welcomed me with 100+ degrees of love and affection.

As I’ve said before, I learn a lot from lawn care. It’s definitely not the pacing back and forth that molds my mind, it is the company that I keep on this journey to and fro. Summer school is back in session for the dude. …

More to the point, the first semester of Briggs and Stratton University’s summer term has wrapped. The recently completed course work focused on my current major: Commercial Persuasion. There were 21 hours of lecture in all, and for the most part, that time flew by.

The first eight hours were dedicated to Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.” I’ll admit, that I’m about two years late to the Long Tail party, but I’m glad that I finally journeyed down this trail blazed by Wired’s Anderson. Much like Freakonomics and Blink, The Long Tail is a book that is not easily categorized. It could easily find itself at home in the Cultural Anthropology or Business/Marketing section of your local Barnes and Noble.

There are many things that I could say about this book, but this is what resonated with me the most: This book provides a lens that allows the reader to see markets and societies as complex inter-woven independent tribes that are brought together by common interests and values. These tribes are born out of “and” not “or”, meaning there are significant amounts of overlap among these indie, affinity-based groups. I think “mainstream” is becoming no more. I highly recommend The Long Tail.

The next five hours of enlightenment were guided by Seth Godin and his “Meatball Sundae.” Seth was the first author with whom I identified when I became a marketer. Here’s why: Seth is smart, and he thinks that people are smart, too. He’s against black hat marketing (lying about bad products so that suckers will be duped into buying junk) and he serves as a great advocate for authentic storytelling.

Meatball Sundae is an excellent primer on the “new” marketing. Very early on in this book Seth clarifies life Before, During and After advertising. To be clear, we now live in a time After Advertising. To read free samples of this book, follow this link.

The final eight hours of lecture were delivered by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff via “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.” Admittedly, ownership of this book puts me in a very small circle of friends… a circle with a lot of pocket-protectors and red, Swingline staplers.

Over the last three months, I have given away more than a dozen copies of Groundswell. Way more. For me, this book is like cheating. Case studies, practical applications and road-tested theories are the backbone of this book. There is jargon, and considering that the book was published by Harvard Business School Press, it can leave some folks behind, but for the most part this book will open the eyes of business leaders to the opportunities that are bouncing all over the internets.

Following an hour long tour of Audible’s library, I have chosen the next 18 hours of lecture for my second semester: “Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You” by Sam Gosling and “Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are” by Rob Walker. Both of these books are fresh releases, May and June 2008 respectively, and after a few more miles across my yard, hopefully I’ll be able to share some of their insights.

Finally… I’m out of words now…

i’m out of wordles now…

(get it? it’s funny, right?)

I’m out of words now…

Re-living the late 80′s, I decided to play stump the Super Duke one afternoon at the office.

Dry the Rain – nice try.
Way Away – he had it in 5 seconds.
I finally got him with At Midnight…. but then he volleyed with Whisper to a Scream, and for the life of me, I couldn’t come up with Icicle Works.

It turned into an extraawesome muxtape.

I’m out of words now…

(at least i’m not 37)

( via ThinkGeek )

“From your 585 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 4,485 items, starred 23 items, shared 204 items, and emailed 0 items.”

I’m not an addict it’s cool, I feel alive… you remember that one, don’t you? …

Aight den, about that addiction, it’s not one… it’s the J.O.B. A few weeks back I decided to start a feed aggregator for interactive advertising newsy bits and pieces that I roll across throughout the day. I thought that it would be less annoying than the constant emails/ims that I rattle off to my cohorts.

So I set up a feed reader to gather all of this nonsense and the feed collection quickly grew to that garish number of 585. It wasn’t so out-of-control until i stumbled across this, and then I lost my mind and added them all.

It has turned out to be a pretty cool tool for busy folks who need to keep up with emerging trends and opportunities in advertising… but who don’t have time for all of the spam that I throw their way.

To see what I’m rambling on about, here is the link: adfeed.extraawesome.com

I’m out of words now.

—————-
now playing on dude tunes: Tokyo Police Club – In A Cave
via FoxyTunes