What’s GM / Cadillac up to in DFW?

This Thursday Morning? 19 Dallas-Fort Worth Celebrities? 6 Charities? A bunch of Cadillac Escalades? Meeting up at the GM Plant in Arlington.

Ok, so GM’s Southwest Communications office sent me an email asking me to be part in a Cadillac Escalade event this Thursday morning. It’s a drive-away event with “19 local celebrities” to help raise awareness for some good charities. I’m gonna be riding along in one of the Escalades – hopefully I will at least be shotgun.

Gonna take my camera and hope to get some good photos. Will keep everyone up to date on what goes down.

Read more here: http://www.gmtruckclub.com/forum/f17601/very-cool-event-cadillac-team-escalade-texas-event-week-75199/#post401977

Google+ is suffering from lack of the following. Agree or disagree?

Not that we need to compare Google + (or Google+, Google Plus, or G+) with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn and any other social networking site, but hey they came out first so why not?

Now that I have a good month or two under my belt on Google+, here are some of the issues that I think are holding it back from being the best social networking site out there – period.  Like I said, I do borrow from my experiences with all of the other social sites, but that can’t be helped.

Features that Google+ is seriously lacking:

- Real Search Ability
- Branded Business Pages
- Fan Pages
- More direct ability to IM
- More direct ability to PM
- Update apps for blogs/forums/wikis

Social Networking sites that I use at least semi-frequently:

- LinkedIn for business networking – don’t see any replacement for this.  (It’s how I keep in touch with people I know from work)
- Facebook for personal contacts from grade school to my new neighbors.  (I love the website integration tools the most)
- I never got all that into Twitter, sorry. (Never had that much time to get involved – it all moves too fast)
- YouTube for videos – this can be improved but I’m starting video soon.

Among everything else that I am doing in life, I really don’t have time for yet ANOTHER social networking site, I hope it becomes clear who’s gonna win the battle.

https://plus.google.com/u/1/115278167179260830467/posts/gQJz6fVJxJc?hl=en

I HAVE A COBRA HEADACHE!

GRRRR, it’s been 28 days since I separated from my company (August 19) and I STILL have not gotten my COBRA paperwork from them. I’m a pretty patient guy, but this is ticking me off. I might have to start sharing some juicy inside secrets to put the pressure on them.

So after calling and emailing at least 20 times in the last three weeks,  I guess there was some type of issue where the HR person put in the wrong SSN for my account. I’m gonna file that under the “Things that aren’t my problem!” section of my round filing cabinet and hopefully this will all get straight by monday (which is 31 days).

How long does an employer have to get my COBRA handled?

So, from what I have learned, this could be different from state to state, but in general the employer has 30 days from the policy qualifying event date (termination date) to submit the paperwork to a COBRA provider.  That firm then has 12 days to provide you with notification and you must make payment before 60 days of no-coverage (not necessarily the same at the policy qualifying event date) to get your COBRA started.

So, why is it frustrating?  I’M TRYING TO PLAN A BUDGET HERE!  It’s been a month now and I have no clue if this is going to cost me $1,000 per month or $2,000 per month or more.

Ok, so not much I can do right now.  Just have to wait to see if this comes through for next monday and I can see what the COBRA is going to cost me.

NORTH TEXAS DROUGHT PHOTOS

I took a walk in the park today, it’s something that we usually do all year long – but this year was crazy hot. We ended up with 71 days over 100F and actually set the hottest average June-August record ever.

Due to the heat that just would not stop, we didn’t go the park at all – today I ventured out with my camera and snapped a few pics and was pretty shocked at what I saw. If a local park could get hit this hard, I can’t imagine how hard those in farming & ranching have been hit.

This will be the first set of photos in a series on the Texas drought, I’ll venture out again to other areas in the region and snap a few pics to see what I can find.

https://picasaweb.google.com/115278167179260830467/NorthTexasDrought

In-Store Warranty with Purchase – To Buy or Not To Buy?

Just wondering if you people buy the “store warranty” when you go shopping. I did when I bought my Nikon D5000 at Best Buy because it protected against total failure for $150. I also did when I bought my sweet office chair at Staples that was a demo unit back in 2010.

Looks like my Comfy New Office Chair from Staples is having some issues, so I’m gonna call them up to see how much of a hassle getting this repaired/replaced.

Background

Product: Cool heavy-duty vinyl chair made by Lane, bought as pre-assembled demo unit in June 2010.
Chair Price: $109.90 (originally $199.99 ~ clearance online at $125)
Protection Plan Price: $16.99

Issues: The gas strut is starting to fail and there is a structural problem with one of the arm sides
Hoped for outcome: I get me a new office chair.

I’ll post a followup for how well it goes or not.

Remember earlier this year when JC Penny got caught with it’s hand in the SEO cookie-jar  (see overview of the jc penney seo blunder)?  I wonder what the long-term damage of that was and what Penny has in story for the 2011 holiday season.

Looking back – after a semi-technical/semi-slam story of blackhat SEO tricks was published with Penny as the target of an “investigation”, their website did lose some SEO juice and many SEO geeks had a good laugh as their rankings began to plummet.  However, it should be noted that JC Penny did not fall away, they went down and then came right back up.  In a word, they got “corrected”.  There is a big difference.

When a smaller company engages in a link-spam campaign (with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of paid links placed across sites on the interwebs), like JC Penney had when they earned earned 2010 Holiday season website traffic from keywords like “pillow cases”, they usually go away and never are to be seen from again.  Oh, a site owner can write Google a love letter claiming to have learned from past mistakes, but more  often than not they will be thrown into the vast Google site graveyard with all of the true spammers.  This is for good reason – true spam sites dilute the quality of search and cost legit Adwords advertisers $millions annually.

Now, what happens with a large company get openly popped for engaging in these same black-hat SEO practices?  Well, they get their hands slapped but they don’t disappear, they get corrected.  Why?  It’s a mix of both strange-bedfellows that still do need each other and very often the company has some type of Google Adwords campaign, and they might be spending $$millions with Google.  JC Penny falls into this category – so they did not fall away to zero.  They got corrected back to more normal levels and got a warning.  In fact even today I can find organic JC Penny links on any number of household goods products on Google.

As a side note, this type of campaign is something that Penny’s marketing managers and directors might not have even had a clue was being done, just as we said before, they were probably hoodwinked by a bad SEO firm.  Moreover, anyone can get tools like Advanced Link Manager and see exactly where any website is holding links from so there is not any real ability to hide bad activity, so you’re better off with a legit link building program and stick with it.

Now, what is Penny likely to do this holiday season?  Answer?  They definately are going to keep their noses clean and make certain to stick with white hat SEO techniques.  They’ve got thousands of wanna-be journalists watching them and don’t dare get back in the hotseat again so there isn’t much chance of them doing anything foolish.

What’s the ironic part to this story?  JC Penny has now earned a significant amount of links from sites like mine over this whole controversy.  Those links are indexed by Google and will help boost the natural organic ranking of the entire JC Penny website.

Wow, go figure they got some positive links out of this after all.

Just a quick note on some of my experiences on Google Plus.

So I’ve been on Google Plus for about a month now?  First off, I’m not sure if it’s Google Plus, Google+, Google +, G+ or Google Circles.  I think they should think a bit more about that.  My first impression is that it’s something like the company that puts the cutsie “4″ in their name, like DogMats4URpooch.com, or something like that.  You then have to explain to everyone that it’s the number 4 and not “four” or “for” or “fore”.  But that’s just semantics.  How does it work?

(I’m upading this now ~ Be ready in 30 minutes)

Thanks to everyone for your kind thoughts, words and prayers over the last three months.  As I mentioned on here before, my wife’s water broke when she was 22 weeks pregnant back on the morning of April 7.

Giving birth on then would have meant a dead baby.    But, we were able to keep her in the hospital for a greuling 9 weeks and 2 days, in which she was on strict bed-rest.  Often she didn’t get up in a given day except for maybe 15 minutes total time to walk to the bathroom and back to bed.  She got a 30 minute wheelchair ride each day as well.

Labor started once, and she took a big dose of Magnesium, which stopped the labor (I think at 29 weeks), but labor started again at 32 weeks (8 weeks early) and the little guy was born on June 10 at 1:34 in the AM.

So today is July 9th, and he’s been up there for a full month now and we just got word that he’s ok to come home!

I’m packing up right now to drive up there and bring the little guy home!

I’m not alone with feeling pressure on the WLB (Work/Life Balance) equation, am I?

In fact, I feel it right now.  Should I blog about the WLB, or should I get out and actually do the family stuff that I say is what really matters and stop this post?

I think I’ll get off and go clean up.  Good news, the baby will probably come home today.  Need to have a clean house!

This should be a lot of fun for the boys.  LEGOLAND DISCOVERY CENTER!

Not sure what to expect, just hope to have a good time.  They were booked for the day already so I have bought annual passes online and we will hopefully get around all of the lines and can get our tickets and get right in without too much of a wait.