Stop Hiding Your Unsubscribe

Posted on October 13, 2011 by admin

[ This is a post somewhat related to work - and I apologize for that as I try to keep my work and personal blog separate ]

Dear Email Marketers,

Stop hiding your unsubscribe links in small, strange to find locations. You’re not helping yourself. If I like or respect you enough to actually open your email – when I want to unsubscribe and I can’t find it, I’m going to do 2 things.

Why is This Text So Small!?

Report you as spam on my Gmail Google Apps.
Consider reporting you for spam on https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov

This means for you – that if I don’t want your email – I go through the task of opening your email – and I can’t unsubscribe gracefully:

You will get blacklisted (spam complaints are not good for your reputation)
Your next email will hurt your list health when you get bounces back from me
You are subject to a $10,000 fine (from my one case, not counting anybody else like me)

It’s really not in your best interest to make that unsubscribe link as small as possible now is it? Try the following:

Put your unsubscribe link in the bottom center of the page.
Make it reasonably sized.
Put it in some fun context. (could be your last chance to save me as a prospect)

At work I have heard of way too many clients asking how to do this. Some even made / tried to make their unsubscribe links white to blend in with the page background. Stop doing it wrong! If people don’t want your email, you want to be the first to know (you can make your lead gen / marketing better in the future) not the last.

MARTA Rider

Posted on September 23, 2011 by admin

The secret to enjoying MARTA, or most any transit system is to learn how it works and to accept that you are not in control. Once you accept that Marta runs on time tables, it’s actually a GREAT public transit system.

My Station

Now that I am familiar with the system and have Google Maps (which is 75% accurate) and ride the same routes every day, Marta is super convenient for me (as long as I am on time) and I’ve even found that driving doesn’t make my trip to work much short, and almost always makes it longer.

At work (Lenox Station) the train comes every 15 minutes on the hour during commuting hours. After 7pm, it switches to 20 after. The train on the Buckhead line is set to reach Lindbergh 3 minutes before the the Gold line after commuting hours, etc.

Every year, the legislature and Marta advisory board hold meetings trying to use their limited budget, which basically always results in a price increase around the first of September. The prices aren’t bad – especially coming from me w/ employer paid and discounted passes – but until this upcoming fee hike, I can travel to and from work in ~8 minutes (station to station) for the cost of a parking pass.

What I have found very interesting though, is that Marta has their KPIs available on their web site. So we can see exactly what the target and actual costs per rider trip on a train and bus are. Trains are very cheap and busses are a bit more expensive. Here are some charts / stats from the recent month and more can be seen at http://itsmarta.com/kpi-home.aspx

Train Cost Per Passenger Trip

This is frustrating then, that they are increasing the “per trip” cost for trains from $57 / month (or $2 a trip ) to $92 / month (or $2.50 a trip) as I take 40 total trips every month. This means that my per trip payment will literally be completely covering my short trip and subsidizing some of the bus ridership. All of this combined means that Marta should not have non capital expenses that aren’t covered by budget IF an equal number of people ride the train as the bus.

My experience also suggests that more people ride the trains than the bus. Everybody that I work with that rides Marta rides the train for their trips. One guy that has experimented with Marta road a short bus trip. When I started, I would ride the bus for 13 miles and then ride another 13 by train. [ That bus was very much on time and often connected well with the train]

Marta Bus Cost per Trip KPI

In the past 6 months, I have both hosted and stayed in the San Francisco Metropolitan area, this provides for some interesting comparisons.

Marta is cheaper – Going down a tunnel costs almost the same as driving in San Francisco!
Marta trips are standardized at $2 a trip ($2.50) San Francisco Bus trips are standard, train trips are not. [Ironic because the variable costs of bus trips vary more]
Marta data is better available online – despite Bart bragging about their API access and being in the valley – their usefulness on the train was limited.
Marta is Smaller, but easier to figure out. Two (and a half) lines seem to make it easier to navigate in Atlanta.
BART has express trains! I hope Atlanta will consider something for this.
BART has signal repeaters in their stations so that I had full 3g access all of the time on the train.

Cohosting Atlanta BarCamp 4

Posted on November 1, 2010 by admin

This Friday will be the 4th annual Atlanta BarCamp , hosted at the Atdc and hosted by myself and Sam @samsm.

I challenge anybody reading my blog to come with some new ideas to teach me more, and most of all show up. We have almost 60 registrations so far and expect many more Friday night.

Challenge one : setting a date was difficult, the things to avoid were home gt football games and big Atlanta events like taste of Atlanta.

2. Sponsorship seemed a little difficult to gather this year, and while the Atdc can help ponsor the location, air conditioning and other fees apply. Luckily, I\’m a perfect business case for.Microsoft as I started a company with their Azure incubation week after hearing about it from the sponsors last year. Then we got in contact with Core Commerce which has products some attendees might use for payment processing. We\’re still looking for more sponsorship though to pay for more food and drink.

3. Letting go. If we don\’t have a final sponsor, I\’ve got to realize that this is an un conference with creative idea people. They won\’t kill me if something doesn\’t quite go right.

——-
I\’m going to attend bar camp too though. Which means I need to prepare some talks.

1. I really want to talk about my experience auto racing with the sports car club of America and how it provides a good way for everybody to learn how to handle during loss of traction. How could we institute it as privatized required education?

2. Cloud. Anybody with a web app has some issues with scalabilty and the ideal cloud structure is to use only what you need.

3. Believing ideas are worth $1 to $15 and your time to try. How to start that simple idea or business. Not saying i\’ll make you any money, but at least the idea is out there.

I also plan on taking my sleeping bag so that I can hang out with all of the attendees Friday night.

Glenn hotel @mashable meet.

Posted on July 28, 2010 by admin

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Last night was the mashable meet celebrating their anniversary on the rooftop bar of the Glenn hotel. The scene was great, open air above the CNN signs, with people mingling too.

I also got to meet some other entrepreneurial people with rankem, ehire.com, apartments.com and some developer friends (sam).

I didn\’t know about it until I went on Twitter after dinner, and last minutely decided to go.

New Puppy : Midnite

Posted on December 7, 2009 by admin

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To join the ranks of many other 23 year old guys out there (I\’m thinking Waterski and Startup.)

Well, technically he is my parents\’ puppy (which I made sure to clarify,) but he is more attached to me. Really attached, like if I get 10 feet away from him he either wimpers or runs to catch up to me.

I\’ve never had a puppy before, all of my previous dogs have been 3 years old before we got them. This is also my first male dog.

$\"Puppy$

The first week has been challenging. As the one person in the house that he reports to the most, sometimes I want my space. And he can\’t stand to sleep too far away from me (we\’re moving his crate a few inches every night.) Similarly, as a puppy he has some instincts that I have to work on curving, such as his need to bark back at any strange sound he hears (raking the leaves) and to remember to go to the bathroom outside and not go on the carpet (too often… I spoil him sometimes or the good sofas.)

He also likes chewing on my toes, and recently, my socks. Tonight I was putting my shoes on to take him for a walk and my sock went missing between the time that I picked it up and put one shoe on.

Midnite is the name he got from his previous owner (shortened to the geek Midi — well, maybe when his bark gets to sounding better — is Dog a midi synthesized instrument? It\’s appropriate because my mom can\’t see him at all. He has a distinct black lab look, with a small white chest hair area. He\’s 6 months old… has big legs, but I can still sprint faster than him.

So far he doesn\’t pick up tennis balls, but plays with a squeaky toy. He tore up a guitar chew toy, but loves socks (black socks.) Eating a carpet is something to train not to do as well.
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Rivalry Weekend Football

Posted on December 4, 2009 by admin

I\’m not sure why, but I seem to view football games, especially Wins and Losses, differently than most people. Maybe it\’s because I played football, or maybe it\’s because my parents had no one team when we were growing up.

As you probably know, Georgia Tech (#7) lost to the University of Georgia this weekend, and it was a reasonably unexpected upset. Upset is a good word to move on from here, because some fans get REALLY UPSET when they lose or don\’t do as well as they had hoped.

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Some people get too emotional though. I don\’t really understand how cursing loudly does anything but disrespect your team. I don\’t understand why you would throw something because your mad (unless you just have an abusive personality.) Heck, I don\’t know why you\’d really be mad or upset at a game, but especially a good game.

All a football game is for fans should be entertainment. You are paying to be entertained. The players really don\’t care how much you care as long as you can be that 12th man on your home field by yelling loudly. A loss hurts your ranking a little, and so ?maybe? your pride in your team or what you might think it stands for, but it really doesn\’t.

To throw it out there, this last weekend\’s rivalry game was great entertainment, well, at least with 3 seconds left in the first half (most of the first half seemed hardly like there was a game going on to the Georgia Tech players.) The end was nail biting. There were great hits. There were amazing plays. By both teams, on both sides of the ball. I felt like I got my entertainment value out of my ticket!

It\’s great to have a friendly rivalry (and maybe fun bets like having to change a facebook profile image) and having to tell your friends Congratulations. It\’s not fun to get arrested like the fan who threw a cup at the UGA player who was waving a flag around. If you lose a game, chin up, hopefully it was a good game – you should congratulate the other team or talk about what you wish would have happened differently (not passing 4 times in a row on the last possession) and you can accept a little ragging from some other fans or a flag waving (but hopefully not a goal post removal.) If you\’re on the winning team, GREAT, go celebrate, your team is the best, calculate how you will move up in the rankings, talk about the greatest plays. In the end, just be a good sport – after all, the players weren\’t killing each other on the field, no they were coming together (in prayer.)

As a player who lost in regional playoffs on his high school football team I can tell you that losing sucks for the seniors because it means it\’s over and that you missed achieving your goal – but you\’re not mad at the other team (unless they downright cheated) and in any case, that\’s the way the world turns.

By The Way: Nice Win UGA. It was entertaining, see you next year.

In other news, the only other great game on last weekend was Auburn vs. Alabama. Runaway games aren\’t any fun.

Microsoft Incubation Week Review

Posted on November 18, 2009 by admin

As I mentioned, I was really busy last week with the Windows Azure Incubation week held at Microsoft in Alpharetta. The event was a week long event from Monday until Friday.

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The first major surprise that we learned was that the Microsoft people wanted us to use ASP.net coding and not use the offshore development team (Thank You Dmytro@ Soft Serve) for primary development.

The project that I worked on was Chris Stuckey\’s FandomU, a social networking site focusing on conventions, fans, and vendors to extend the connections you make at the actual event. Hopefully FandomU will be able to launch with the MomoCon Japanese Anime convention in March 2009.

$\"fandomu\"$

The week was quite the experience. Microsoft brought in a handful of advisors and consultants to teach us about the Azure platform and (particularly for us) to use Asp.net technologies. Jeremy Likness from Wintellect taught me the basic asp.net connections between the ASP and C#.

Here is the front page of our part of our prototype site, in the 4 days that we had to develop, we developed a few key features, registration, the beginnings to shopping, and the introduction to an idea of things like sharing images and videos on the cloud.

In addition to knowledge, Microsoft provided a great overall experience. We had nice co-working space with brand new \”beta\” style windows 7 computers at the MTC. We had 3 meals provided 5 days of the week, and not just fast food pizza, but some pretty classy changes including Indian and Thai food.

Thursday, Microsoft spokesman Larry Gregory came and introduced us to all of the great features that Microsoft offers to entrepreneurs and startups. They have a lot of features that I\’m sure will be great. We also did an interview regarding our progress that will be posted on Channel 9 – spoiler: I somewhat

$\"Taking$

embarrassingly spit Microsoft Marketing for the PHP community.

Speakers came in throughout the week, and on Friday, these speakers, and other startup voices in Atlanta sat as a judging panel for all of the startups. This was really valuable, as we all got a chance to practice our pitching abilities.

Because we sucked up more than a little to Larry Gregory by mentioning that we could expand from a conference like Momo Con to others like Dragon Con, or his interests like Farscape and Motorcyles, he presented us with our \”incubation\” week diploma.

$\"Presented$

My group thought that the week would be more about coaching and less about technology, along with better planning for working with the offshore team as opposed to us needing to be incredibly familiar with Microsoft products. It was slightly awkward to find that only 3 of 7 companies there had only just reached an idea and planning it out.

I\’ll post later about some of the teams that I met.

What do you think about Korea?

Posted on January 24, 2009 by admin

I was supposed to have an interview with North Western Mutual Callaway Black for a Financial Management position this morning at 10am, but actually sort of got lost on the way and then just decided to call and tell them that I already had a position. Honestly, though, I was very much less than interested in the position after my experiences at JP Turner and my last landlord who ran his own branch of NWMF. The old landlord was in an investment that he knew nothing about (when we moved out he and his assistant were mad that we had the utilities in our names disconnected.) JP Turner had was based on retail commissions and effectively poor advertising techniques to both get new customers and convince new customers to trade (instead of calling old customers with suggestions we sent a mass mailing saying call us.) Anwyay, if i wanted to become a financial representative I see no reason why I wouldn\’t do it on my own and charge on performance instead of commissions.

But I am really considering going to Korea to teach ESL.

I get to travel to korea and asia
New experiences
Make a ton of new friends (be forced to)
The salary is very decent ($2-2.5k) with 20-30 hours considering housing is free and food is cheaper

But I am afraid that I would set myself up to retire if I did that. My covered call option strategy would in theory work pretty well if I used current and ~1.5k/month capital in the covered call strategy. By the time I got back I may never need to work again.

Otherwise, with 20-30 hours there is nothing that says that I can\’t contract (web program?) for my spare time.

I\’m still thinking that I want to just keep it simple and be a server manager in Cali though.

Great Music at http://thesixtyone.com

Posted on January 22, 2009 by admin

So for the last three days I\’ve been listening to great music from http://thesixtyone.com and it is really great music. I started listening when I went there from my friend\’s twitter. But it\’s high quality music with popularity ratings that you can nudge and favorite. I particularly like some of the acapella type covers like Don\’t Stop Believing and Hey Ya. Take a listen you might really enjoy it!

This is the first time in a long time that I haven\’t kept Amarok open with a random populated list.

Also, the songs seem like they\’re pretty high quality, possibly better than most of my mp3s. Which, by the way, one of my new favorite songs t yell out to is Crystal Baller from Third Eye Blind from their Greatest Hits Album. I found it in November, but it\’s a good one to sing out to… and I like the words.

Sleep Cycles

Posted on June 10, 2008 by admin

I think that we all know that our lives follow cycles. SOme are good cycles some are bad. I suppose it\’s like \”there is a season turn turn turn\” but to a more micro level.

I\’m trying to come out of a laziness and up late cycle right now. This summer I have been waking up at eleven or noon and barely making it to classes — wasting time reading the news (or facebook) and the staying up until three or four a.m.

I don\’t feel very good about myself when I consider this a waste of some life, so I\’m trying to get back on the good cycle.

I feel best about myself when I sleep very little (Garrett may laugh at this) but really, last September when I was arranging the Water Ski tournament and living a full life iwth a 9:30 am class I felt great about myself. I would sometimes nap for an hour in the afternoon – but I was going nearly 20 hours of the day. This is much like last Summer abroad (more on this later?) but work had me working from 8am until Midnight at minimum and often until two in the morning — meaning that I was getting 16 to 18 hours out of the day in work (I played some too.) This reminds me of Atlanta Fest two years ago where I worked full time (12-8am) napped for two hours and then went to Atlanta Fest at 6 flags (12pm-12am) — and it didn\’t really bother me in the least until long after where I tried to keep up.

Maybe being sleepier or less flexible in the cycle is a sign of my age. But I doubt it.

Anyway, my goal is to start waking up at 8 and I\’ll probably stay up until midnight or one. This will put me on the most human schedule. I really need to master the 30 minute nap again.

By the way, hats off to Amrit for working out with me, that\’s how I\’ve realized I\’ve been getting weaker in the current cycle. I\’ve been waking up so late that I haven\’t need a lunch between noon and 5pm.

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