Archive for October, 2007
This entry was posted October 31st, 2007 and has 1 comment.
I just took a quick trip to Giant to get some Halloween candy for tonight’s trick or treaters. Today is absolutely beautiful. 65 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, and a nice breeze.
Since I work out in the country a bit, and not in downtown Baltimore, I actually get to see trees on my way to and from work. It’s days like today that make me especially glad that I live in the mid-Atlantic where we get to experience four seasons. It’s been unseasonably warm so far this fall, but leaves on the trees are finally starting to change.
This weekend is the end of Daylight Savings. I cannot stand when it gets dark early. I’ll have to sit outside for at least 15 minutes every day this winter or I’ll go insane. At least this means that it will be cold enough to snowboard soon.
Continue reading The Perfect Fall Day
Posted in Baltimore, Chris Walbert, life
This entry was posted October 31st, 2007 and has 2 comments.
At this time 2 weeks ago, I was impatiently anticipating the arrival of my new MacBook. For the past 5 years or so, I had been using an eMac. Sort of a less-expensive cousin to the much more popular iMac, the eMac was a rather short-lived product for Apple. I believe it only saw one generation.
So, back to waiting for my MacBook. I ordered it online on Sunday. I know, I could have easily gotten in the car, driven 10 minutes to my local Apple store and not have to wait, but for whatever reason, I decided to order online. So on Tuesday, a few days ahead of schedule, a package arrived at my office. I was obviously very excited and thanked the FedEx driver. To my great disappointment, the box I opened only contained the MacBook case, not the MacBook itself. Quite ironic, don’t you think?
So, after 4-5 calls to FedEx and another to Apple, I figured out that the shipper (Apple) did not label the box properly and my MacBook had been sitting on the FedEx truck for 4 days. The second box finally arrived on Friday, and Apple was even good enough to credit me $50 for my troubles.
Continue reading New MacBook with Leopard
Posted in Chris Walbert, life, technology
This entry was posted October 24th, 2007 and has 3 comments.
That’s right. The Wall Street Journal announced this afternoon that Microsoft has agreed to buy a 1.6% stake in Facebook for a cool $240 million. This values Facebook at a total of $15 billion. This move has been highly anticipated and talked about for months, but no one was sure whether Microsoft would win out over the likes of Google.
It is absolutely amazing how quickly the value of social networking sites have risen. Just 2 years ago, News Corp bought all of MySpace for $580 million. Even more recently, Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo just last summer. While many thought he was either crazy, or just an egomaniac, that move is looking quite brilliant today.
So, what could make a social networking site like Facebook possibly worth $15 billion? First, as nearly every media outlet has documented, advertising on TV, radio, and in print continue to decline while digital media has been growing tremendously. Most analyst expect this trend to continue as the internet and other digital technologies become more and more a necessary aspect of our lives. This means that large companies will be spending big bucks online.
Continue reading Microsoft buys a Piece of Facebook
Posted in Chris Walbert, advertising, business, marketing, technology
This entry was posted October 23rd, 2007 and has 3 comments.
If you’re looking for a way to spend a little bit of time today, be sure to check out the new site FreeRice.com. Not only will you be killing some time at work, but you’ll also be building your vocabulary while helping feed people around the world.
The basic premise of the game is this: The game gives you a word and asks you what it means. You have 4 possible options. For every word you get right, 10 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations to help end world hunger. Also, when you get a word correct, the game gets more difficult. If you get a word wrong, it eases up on you a bit.
The site is rather addictive, especially if you’re on the nerdy side of things. I’m up to level 37, but now it’s time to get back to work.
Posted in food, life
This entry was posted October 16th, 2007 and has no nomments.
After all of the drama surrounding the Chicago Marathon last weekend, it was a welcome sight to wake up to a beautifully sunny, chilly Saturday morning. The heat and humidity left Baltimore just in time for this year’s event.
I joined over 14,000 people, from other countries, 48 states, and of course throughout Maryland, for the 7th annual Baltimore Marathon. The weather was perfect, which helped fuel the tremendous energy that you could feel just walking (or running) through downtown.
Continue reading Baltimore Half Marathon
Posted in Baltimore, Chris Walbert, life, running
This entry was posted October 15th, 2007 and has no nomments.
Today has been designated as Blog Action Day, with the goal of increasing awareness about issues involving the environment. 15,000 blogs have registered and large companies like Reddit and Google are supporting this effort. Basically, the goal is to get people thinking about the environment in a different way.
I’m sure there will be many excellent posts today about easy things you can do to benefit the environment or about the effects of global warming, and so on. So, instead of rehashing some of those ideas, admittedly with less research and information, I’d like to start a different kind of conversation.
Caring for the environment is not as much a political or national issue as it is a spiritual issue.
Continue reading Blog Action Day
Posted in Chris Walbert, life
This entry was posted October 12th, 2007 and has no nomments.
If you’ve made it here, you obviously are aware that chriswalbert.com is the new home of my blog. If you are new here, thanks for checking it out. Hopefully you’ll find something that interests you. Leave a comment, and start a discussion.
A huge thanks and shout out goes to my good friend of many, many years Dustin Pfeifer for designing and implementing this site. As you can see, Dustin is a top notch front-end web designer. Additionally, he is a mastermind when it comes to CSS.
Dustin now runs a web development and marketing company. If you or your company need any work done, I highly recommend you talk with Dustin.
I’m very excited to have this new, more personalized blog up and running. Not that there is anything wrong with a Wordpress template, but it’s nice to have something that reflects me a bit more.
It is a beautiful fall day, so go out and enjoy it. Be sure to check back here regularly and update your bookmarks, links, etc. to chriswalbert.com.
Continue reading New Blog Site
Posted in Baltimore, Chris Walbert, advertising, business, marketing, technology
This entry was posted October 10th, 2007 and has 4 comments.
As pretty much everyone knows by now, Radiohead released their new album, In Rainbows, today. The album isn’t available in stores or on iTunes, only directly from Radiohead. The band basically shocked the music industry when they announced on October 1st that they would be releasing this album themselves, without the backing of a label. A much bigger deal was the fact that there would be no set price for this album. Instead, Radiohead believed that people, when given the choice, would pay a fair price for the album.
This is genius, and actually works, for so many reasons. First, they didn’t release any promotional copies to radio stations, stream new songs on MySpace (they don’t even have an official page), or allow the album to leak in any way. They merely announced 9 days ago that they had a new album coming out and told you where you could get it.
Continue reading In Rainbows by Radiohead
Posted in Chris Walbert, advertising, business, marketing, music, technology
This entry was posted October 9th, 2007 and has 1 comment.
That’s right. The best show on television can be viewed on Comcast On Demand right now. Season 1 will be available until October 28. Then, hopefully they will continue playing the other seasons up until Season 5 premieres in January 2008.
I watched episode 1 last night. Even though I’ve seen it before, I still love watching The Wire. This show is just so well written and real. So much so that it can almost be hard to watch some times. Season 1 is really focused on the drug game and the battle between Avon Barksdale’s crew and the police. The most notable quote from this episode is when Carver, a detective, says this about the drug war. “You can’t call this a war.” Why’s that? “War’s end.”
Continue reading The Wire is On Demand
Posted in Baltimore, Chris Walbert, life, television
This entry was posted October 9th, 2007 and has 1 comment.
Last night, I ran my fastest 3-mile run to date. My overall pace was 7:57 per mile, finally breaking that 8-minute mile time. Yesterday was a beautiful, hot, humid October day. After a somewhat trying day at work the run was exactly what I needed.
I decided to run to the song Let Down by Radiohead on repeat. It’s a beautiful song, but not something you’d think of as a running song. For whatever reason, I just wanted the repetition of that song over and over. And each time the song restarted, it was just as good as the first time.
Continue reading Fastest 3 Miles
Posted in Chris Walbert, life, music, running
