shit my blog says

Edited Songs on the Radio – bleep

Out on a drive with Aly to retrieve some ice cream from Captain Sundae, I turned on a rock station because Aly likes rock music. Well, she says she really likes rock n’ roll, but what she always asks for is Fat Bottom Girls by Queen because she thinks it’s hilarious.

Anyway, 101Fox is playing Ted Nugent’s Cat Scratch Fever, a song I’ve heard eleventy billion times since I grew up in the Detroit area; Ted Nugent and Bob Seger playcounts must be the top of the list over the last 30 years of Detroit rock radio. I’ve never been under any delusion that this Nugent song had anything to do with felines, but I was a bit shocked when the word ‘pussy’ was blanked out of the song in the line ‘I make a pussy purr with the stroke of my hand.’ I’m sure I’ve heard this song on the radio at least 500 times in my life, and that word was never bleeped out before. Did the word ‘pussy’ only gain a naughty interpretation recently?

It reminded me of the edited-for-TV version of Blazing Saddles where farts were replaced with horse whinnies – though the blatantly racist slapstick remained. The ultimate irony was that the song that followed Cat Scratch Fever was AC/DC’s Rock & Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution, which includes the non-bleeped “So get off your ass and come down here” line early in the song.

I’m so glad we lived through the PC movement.

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shit my blog says

The “Ted Algorithm”

During a requirements gathering session in June, our team was working on what the search experience would look like for one of our ecommerce websites. I mentioned that maybe we should create some sort of intelligent sort order to use the as the default, similar to what Amazon does: factor in sales velocity, category relevance, user search history, product availability, etc. This was a completely “blue sky” suggestion on my part, but was recorded along with the notes of the session. I was tasked with coming up with this algorithm, despite my being more marketer than searchologist.

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Life in Holland Michigan, Strawberry Loves The Great Outdoors

Saugatuck State Park in Winter

We dragged the girls out to SSP this weekend for a hike to the beach and back. Well, Rachel carried Leah most of the way, but we all got there and back to the car.

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Life in Holland Michigan, Photography, Strawberry Loves The Great Outdoors

Hemlock Crossings Natural Area in Winter

I wandered around Hemlock Crossings for a few hours on a cold rainy day recently, but there were many semi-frozen droplets hanging from branches, which provided a great opportunity to use my new macro lens.

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Life in Holland Michigan, Strawberry Loves The Great Outdoors

Holland State Park in Winter

Holland State Park is very different in cold winter months than the summer fun. The first hundred yards or so of water freezes into balls of ice that form high hills. It had been rainy and warmer the past few days, so the hills along the water’s edge had become cliffs, and the waves were spraying high into the air as the impacted the cliffs.

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Photography, Travel, Walt Disney World, WDW Feb 2013

DisneyWorld Feb 2013: EPCOT at night

Monday morning kicked off a workshop day at the Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability Conference (IRWD), about 20 minutes from Disney at the Omni hotel. My iPhone turn-by-turn voice directions got me to the show with no problem, and the SEO workshop day was pretty good. I connected with my friend and co-worker Neil, who was also attending the conference and had brought his wife and son with him for some Florida relief. At the end of the conference day, I gave Neil & family a lift to Magic Kingdom, then headed to EPCOT. I would have joined them, but I had a dinner reservation at Via Napoli that I could not cancel. As it turns out, I would not have wanted to, either.

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Travel, Walt Disney World, WDW Feb 2013

DisneyWorld Feb 2013: Magic Kingdom at night

These pictures were taken in the new Fanstasyland, during Wishes and the Main Street Electrical Parade, and a few other locations around Magic Kingdom.

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Travel, Walt Disney World, WDW Feb 2013

DisneyWorld Feb 2013: Ted rendered speechless

After two quick days in Florida, Rachel headed home Sunday morning to return to work and motherhood, so I dropped her off at the airport before 7am and headed back towards DisneyWorld. I needed to swing by a drugstore to pick up new insoles for my shoes, so I pulled up to a CVS just outside WDW shortly after 7. There was a young woman standing outside the door, which I correctly interpreted as an ominous sign. She identified herself as an employee, but said she was waiting on the assistant manager to open the store. The reason that he was late is that the police had detained him on the way to work, according to the employee. I decided to seek out another store in the area and then headed back to Beach Club to check out.

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Travel, Walt Disney World, WDW Feb 2013

DisneyWorld Feb 2013: Beverly

In which fashions collide

We ventured into EPCOT shortly after the park opened and made our way to Soarin’, as that is the only appropriate way to start a morning in the park since that ride quickly backs up, similar to Toy Story Midway Mania at DHS. We had almost no wait, but the few minutes we did have to wait introduced me to a new fashion trend: Resort Formal Casual. I’m certainly no fashion maven and I got once rejected on What Not to Wear because they said there was no hope, but this was awesome:

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Travel, Walt Disney World, WDW Feb 2013

DisneyWorld Feb 2013: 16 miles

We always wondered how far we walk in days at WDW. In the pre-kid days, we thought were were logging days with mid-to-upper teens mileage, as we hopped from park to park nearly every day we were at Disney. Thanks to technology, on this trip we figured it out definitively. I bought the iOS app Cyclemeter a few years back to track my bike rides, and I’ve been using it lately to log my camera hikes. It tracks distance, time, and pace, along with GPS route mapping that tracks everything. You can use it to create regular routes and measure your performance against historical bests and averages.

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