Day 165

Sorry once again for getting this out so late, but it has been a very busy (and of course, awesome) day. Mostly filled with sleep.

However, when I did finally wake up, it was to go caroling. Yes caroling. You know singing Christmas carols to people? Yeah. And it was awesome. We ( a group from my church) went to an assisted living facility called Brooking Park. It really was awesome. You could tell by the looks on people's faces that they truly appreciated us coming.

That's all the time I have, I gotta get back to work.

TASK o' THE DAY: Bring some holiday joy to someone. You could put some money in the Salvation Army kettle, sing carols, or just be nice to the clerk while doing your Christmas shopping.

Have a great day!

Day 164 - Part 2, First ever "guest blogger"

So, I wrote about the awesomes of uneployment yesterday, claiming that a friend would write in. Well, he did. With no further ado, I give you the first ever guest blog on the awesome blog. Mr. Joe Elder:

Hello folks it gives me great pleasure to be a "guest blogger" on one of my favorite blogs. Now Ben may of mentioned that being unemployed is not very awesome but I completely disagree. Now I realize that I'm only into my first 48 hours of unemployment, but I must tell you that I experience many things that you "normal hard working folks" just wouldn't understand. Below I give you a list of ten items that make unemployment awesome!!!

1. Free Lunches from caring friends! yes that's right they came out of the woodwork saying "man that sucks can I buy you lunch" to which I replied "I'm broke and it's two weeks before Christmas yes you can!!!

2. Lunches with friends!! Now that I'm not plagued with the daily grind of being a commercial lender I have all sorts of free time to hang out with friends and get lunch. Which could be a daily awesomeness in itself, go get lunch with a friend! It beats the hell out of working!!

3. The ability to relate to the amazing 80's song Mr. Wendal by Arrested Development
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EefdFSrfhu8
Mr. Wendal has freedom, a free that you and I think is dumb

Free to be without the worries of a quick to diss society
for Mr.Wendal's a bum
His only worries are sickness

4. Updating your resume. You may say how is this awesome?!?! Often you sit at your job going man I should update my resume. well being jobless gives me the freedom to do that at anytime of the day!!!! Which I've been doing right now at home from the comfort of my couch while my colleagues are poring over financial statements and tax returns!

5. Who cares about alarm clocks!! Yes that's right I don't hit snooze because I don't set the alarm clock. Let me tell you seeing 9:30 on the clock and not having a suit and tie on! PURE AWESOME

6. Not knowing what day it is! Now this could be from shell shock of being let go on ummmmmm Wednesday? but as I was riding out to get a cup of coffee at burger king with my friends who are retired (also a form of unemployment which I aspire to reach one day) I couldn't remember if today was Thursday or Friday, but hell it didn't really matter to quote Ice Cube or T I can't remember, " it's friday (i think) I aint got no job, aint got sh*t to do....." that is another daily awesomeness watch the movie "Friday" which I might do this afternoon while all of you are at work

7. This list! yes it's just plain awesome really tell me the last time you got a list listing how awesome unemployment is??

8. Free MONEY FROM THE GOVERNMENT!!! Yes that's right unemployment baby!!! I can file for it and not feel like a leach because well, I was laid off so I can rightfully claim my unemployment that I have been so diligently paying for the last 13 years of my employed life!!

9. Having the time to be a guest blogger on the greatest blog in the world!!

10. Severance Packages. yes that's right for the next six weeks and 56 hours of vacation time I will be paid to search for a job! How great is that.

Now that the list is done go get fired!! Just joking but if you find yourself unemployed keep looking up it will get better and hell you might be able to write a list on why your keeping your head held high!!

Sincerely Yours,

Joseph Elder

A fully capable banker in search of a new job!!! Let Ben know if you need my resume ;)

Day 164

Do any of you remember a few months ago when I asked for some suggestions of awesomes? Well, I got a few replies and I have been saving them. Until today.

My sister-in-law, Adriane, is the very proud mother of my nephew and two nieces. And Ahren, the oldest isn't even 4 years old yet. I can't even imagine how challenging it must be to do anything. I mean, a grocery store trip must be a trip. Seriously. Think of the simplest errand you might run, say run out to Walgreens to pick up a prescription or something. For you (if you are single, or at least childless for the time being), it takes maybe 10 minutes, total. And that includes waiting in line.

Now, for Adriane to leave the house and go to Walgreens, I bet it takes longer than 10 minutes just to get all 3 kids ready to get in the car, much less go there and do the thing. I would estimate a simple errand is a minimum of half an hour. And then, if you are in a store, how hard would some simple tasks be? Like say, using the restroom? Well, for that, life has gotten a little easier. I give you the Babykeeper.

Doesn't that just look incredibly comfortable? I am not entirely sure if this was what Adriane was talking about, I don't think so. She had mentioned that there are stores that have places to put an entire baby carrier attached to the door. Either way, its a little creepy to have a child staring you down, hanging from a door while you "take care of business".

A side awesomosity to the creepy babyhanger thing is the website I first found it on. It's a blog. And it's called "The Poop". Jim, I think I have found your favorite site ever.

Task o' The Day: Send me something else awesome. If it includes babies hanging from a bathroom door, thats cool, if its about unemployment (are you ever gonna send that Joe?), thats cool, I suppose. Just send me some more awesomes.

Here I am chilling at the Coffee Cartel waiting for Sean to get out of a meeting. Have a splendid day!

Day 163

So, I'm not really sure about today's awesomosity. I know that in a previous poll, you all voted to not let others "guest post". I totally agreed with that, at least, until today. However, the person who said they were going to send me an email with their post has not yet emailed me. So, here is what I will do. I will write a little about the topic, which is slightly controversially awesome, and then add their post to it, if they ever send me that email. I'll let you decide if its awesome or not.

Unemployment.

That's right, someone called me today stating that I should make uneployment the awesomosity of the day. My obvious response was, "That's not awesome!" But, alas, he insisted that it was. That was when I offered to let him write the post.

I did some looking into unemployment, and as I have no personal experience with it, I looked to the people that know most about unemployment, the writers of WikiPedia. Here is what they had to say about it.

Wikipedia - Unemployment

The other obvious experts on unemployment inlude the government. So, here is Missouri's page about it. Surprisingly enough, they have had a serious spike in applications recently.

Now, for the obvious expert of all time on unemployment, I give you George Costanza, hoping to become a latex salesman for Vandalay Industries.

Task o' The Day: Get Fired. Just kidding! Share any experience you may have with unemployment, or losing a job, or a coworker being fired for a funny reason, or something like that.

Have a great day! Oh, and I'll update this as soon as I get the e-mail from my recently unemployed friend.

Day 162

So, Sean and I are hard at work today, working on things like getting business cards, putting up a website, trying to buy some gear and a whole bunch of other awesome things. One of the things Sean and I like to do is listen to music while we work (because whistling gets old after a while). Sean has a Rhapsody account, which allows you to listen (via streaming audio) to their 60,000+ song library. Now they have an offer for 2 weeks free, then its just $12.99 per month.

Well, I wanted to listen to some music on my own, so I Googled "free music online" or something like that. I came across this incredibly awesome site. Awesome enough that it is officially the awesomosity of the day. Check it out, its called GrooveShark.

It is very easy to navigate and it has every artist I've searched for so far (including DC Talk!!!) Right now, I am listening to "Hail to the Thief" by Radiohead and enjoying it immensely.

I highly recommend the website.

Task o' The Day: Create an account on GrooveShark. If you are going to do this, please let me know, I will send you an e-mail invite. They are giving away a Wii and some iPods for people that sign up a bunch of people, and that would be uber-awesome.

I hope you have a fantastic day, I know I am (so far, and I don't see it going any other way for the time being!) See ya tomorrow! And Go Blues!

Oh, and vote in the poll (LouAnn is my mother and is very definitely awesome, you should vote for her) and sign up to get these things by email!

Day 161

Some of you may know, and now all of you will, that I am going on a missions trip to Haiti in January. This will be quite awesome. And yes, I've already been thinking about how I am going to blog down there. I know I will have a computer with me to be working on videos (my main responsibility on the trip), so at the least, I will write everyday, and then post it all when I get back, assuming I will not have internet access, which is probably true.

Anyway, as it relates to being awesome today, I had a meeting of the team last night, and one of the things we did was start learning some basic Haitian Creole. As our team leader, Jay Knight said, we need to learn enough that shows we actually care and to get laughed at. We will only be there for 4 days, and most people there will know more english than we know Creole, so I don't need to learn much. Some of you may know that Creole is based on French, so those grade school French lessons may come in handy after all.

So, I was looking around on the interwebs for some help in learning Creole and I came across this awesome site:

New Missions

They've got a bunch of downloadable MP3s and a PDF to go with it, so that should all help me to learn some of a new language.

Task o' The Day: So, the awesomosity today is learning a new language. Therefore, the Task today is for you, yourself, to learn something of a new language. Go to the website linked above and get started on some basic greetings in Creole if you like. Or find yourself another language and learn some basic phrases. It doesn't count if you already know another language, it has to be one you have not learned before. As an alternative, if you would like some more information about my trip, fill out this form and I will gladly send you some info.

That's it for today! Have a great day!!

Day 160

As I drive back the rental car to the airport, jamming out to some Zeppelin, stuck in traffic at 170, I think about the awesomosity for today. Then it hits me! I've written about HD radio, but never satellite radio. And yes, XM/Sirius is very awesome.

They recently joined forces to make it uber awesome. When I used to travel with Mr. Video, we had a Sirius radio, which was very awesome, and I always thought XM sucked, but I am apparently wrong.

We have XM at Llywelyns, and now I got to drive a car with it for a weekend, so here are a few of my favorite stations (all on XM, numbers might be different if you have a Siruis): 49 - Led Zeppelin, 9 - 90s music, 54 - Lithium - alt. Music, 26 - the pulse - 90s and alt. Music, 47 - Alt Nation, which combined with Ethel (A.N. Was Sirius and Ethel was XM) - more, typically newer alternative music. They also have a great variety of sports, talk, comedy, and a bunch of other types of music. Its quite awesome.

TASK o' THE DAY: Tell me your favorite new song, I need some more variety on the ol' iPod.

Havea great Monday!!

Day 159

Well today sure is an awesom filled day! If you are a 15 year old girl that is. Yes, I'm at another cheerleading event. WooHoo!

This one's not so bad, there are only 53 teams. a typical cheer event may have as many as 200+ teams, and usually lasts 2 or more days. I'm a little short on sleep, but who isn't?

So, what's awesome today? Firestore. I know that means nothing to most, if not all, of you, but trust me, its awesome. Its this device that let's you record video in an editable format straight to hard drive. We use 300 Gig hard drives, which give us approxiamately 19 hours of video. And it makes the editors job way easier.

In the picture, the hard drive is on the left and the Firestore is on the right. They are incredibly sweet for the purpose we use it for, but most people could find a way better way to spend a grand.

TASK o' THE DAY: Given a budget of no more than (and preferrably less than) $5000, what video camera would you buy and why? Do a little research while you're watching football today.

Have a grrrrreat day!!