Willy Loman

Welcome to my 400th post. Hitting a 100th mark gives you the opportunity to pause and reflect on how the blog is progressing, where you're taking it or where it's taking you. Similar to other addictions posting regularly does seem to affect your personal life or lives (I happen to have two and try to keep them separate). Anyway August and September were a bit rough when Prog Blogs was having server problems and only one in five posts were getting through. It's a bitch posting and not getting any feedback, but in keeping to our motto of consistency over relevance and quantity over quality we blogged on. Hey if you want the good stuff check out the sites on the right. Besides focussing on site visits and ProBlog votes really screws up your choice of topics and the rest, so I'm really trying hard to ignore the numbers, which is very difficult for an old salesman. The original idea was to go after the hypocrisy of it all and leave the big stories for the pros on the blog ro...

This is one of the problems with being old, you sometimes miss the obviously cool shit. I had no idea what a Viral Video was until today, or that a video could go viral.  Or that You Tube is the DVD market for Ads. And just like some movies are released straight to DVD, some ads go straight to YouTube. However unlike the movie scenario, the ads that go YouTube are funnier, racier and better. Who knew? Anyway here's the Pulled Heinz Mayo Ad about two men and a family " which went viral a couple of weeks ago and is now probably old hat" to  speak the speak. Heinz got 188,000 views on 113 blogs by pulling the ad. And here's the new History Channel online ad for their Ax Men series. Hasn't gone viral, with just over 500 views but is now being promoted by Unruly Media, one of the leading seeding specialists. Funny ad. The things you learn on a Saturday morning. About the posts title, that's was my attempt at a gotcha. Not really inaccurate once you view the videos...

The Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest Great Lakes freighter of it's time and the last and largest to be lost on the Great Lakes. The only thing I knew about the ship was from Gordon Lightfoot's song, which I actually learned to play back in the day. Until I read this   article  about a ceremony that is planned to mark the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The famed 222-metre ore freighter that sunk on Nov. 10, 1975 during a Lake Superior storm killed all 29 hands. The ship was originally launched in 1958 and the accident was huge news back in 1975, with conflicting theories on the cause. The Original Theory for the accident A Coast Guard investigation postulated that the accident was caused by ineffective hatch closures. These devices were unable to prevent waves from inundating the cargo hold. The flooding occurred gradually and probably imperceptibly throughout the final day, and finally resulted in a fatal loss of buoyancy and stability. As a result, t...

When you can't write like pogge (come on, a one word title, twenty one word article and more hits than I get in a week) or actually have an informed opinion and some background knowledge about what you are going to write about (like these guys here , here , here , here or here ), you end up picking a topic from the 1,500 RSS feeds you receive each day. Then to hopefully grab the readers attention long enough that they might actually read your article you need to come up with a great headline. But it appears all writers must have the same problem. Here's one from the business feeds that caught me tonight: Home Depot earnings hammered Besides the fact that Home Depot's profits actually dropped by 66% for the quarter, that is a very funny title. I think I want to become a staff writer for the Globe business section. I could write articles about mundane topics and then through humorous titles send subliminal messages to corporate Canada. Yep, I want to do that. Here's so...

From the Jeff Beck album Truth Truth (1968) was the first full-length album by Jeff Beck and his backing group. The album featured three original songwriting collaborations between Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart, "Let Me Love You", "Blues Deluxe", and "Rock My Plimsoul". Highlighted by a re-recording of the Yardbirds' "Shapes of Things", Willie Dixon's "I Ain't Superstitious" and the traditional "Greensleeves", it is considered by many to be one of the first heavy metal albums. Both Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones played on "Beck's Bolero", originally recorded in 1966 with Keith Moon on drums and Nicky Hopkins on piano. I owned too many copies of this album (4 albums and 2 CDs). I kept lending it to friends or apparently giving them away. The above listing from Wikipedia calls it the first Heavy Metal album. There was a lot of confusion with genre back then. I have many memories about Truth (not necessaril...

According to a report published by the CBC, Blog reading become a habit, study says. Apparently, the regular reading of blogs has become an "internet ritual". The study found that: The usefulness of the blog is less important Routine act of checking is more important Date & frequency of posts doesn't matter Missed posts are not missed opportunities Reading blogs a form of "chilling out" or "wasting time" Readers feel pressured to produce worthwhile comments Date & frequency of posts doesn't matter Well according to our site monitor, there are no internet rituals happening around here