DodgyPete.com

About a month ago I was having a lunch with a few SEO guys and it’s no great surprise that the topic of marketing came-up. In particular, the technique used by many businesses that involves creating a positive brand impression to children so as they grow-up, they will subconsciously prefer one brand to another due to the experiences with that brand from a young age.

Incidentally, this is also the same reason we tend to enjoy the music we do – research shows that music heard at different times of our lives will have different levels of impact. Particularly music heard in our prime phases of development – such as babies (even back to when we’re in the womb) and then again music heard in our teenage years (as we’re starting to develop our own sense of individuality and identity) will tend to stick with us for the rest of our lives.

I’m not saying that it will be the exact bands or songs, but the rhythmic patterns, nuances, timbre etc. will often be recognised in new songs that we hear on the radio and think “hey I really like that”… so if you’ve ever wondered why you like the music you do, that’s one possible explanation. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff too, but that’s really not the purpose of this post…

So back to the marketing story… I made reference to how I remember that BP Service/Petrol/Gas Stations used to sell small Smurf figurines at the counter. I can’t remember if I ever owned any and I can’t say that I have ever been a huge Smurf fan… but I do remember those little figurines.

Now selling Smurf’s at a Servo may sound pretty pointless as it has nothing to do with petrol – but the idea is that (as an adult) if you need petrol and there are 3 places all with the same pricing and roughly the same distance away, you’ll go with the brand you feel the closest association with. So if that means choosing BP because of the $1 Smurf figurines that your Dad would buy you to keep you amused on those long car trips when you were 5… then BP end-up being the big winners.

So, as I mention this, the guys at the table start making some jokes about why I remember that specific example and before I know it, one of the guys has pulled-out his iPhone and twittered that I have a “thing” for Smurf’s.

This creates a humorous short-lived twitter conversation between myself and a few friends when I get back to the office and once that was done, I figured that would be the last of it.

A few weeks later, I’m chatting with someone else online and through a completely unrelated chain of events, the topic of Smurf’s come-up and I make a passing comment “don’t get me started”… and presto… my apparent Smurf fetish is reinvigorated.

I have come to the acceptance, this probably isn’t going away anytime soon… so while I don’t have a genuine fascination with little blue people in white floppy hats, online rumours may suggest otherwise. It’s just lucky that I quite like those people responsible for starting and circulating the rumours and I figure a Smurf fetish isn’t as bad as rumours going around that I’m gay (which I’m not… but.. arrr crap, here we go again).

Share This

Wow, I just re-read that title and it sounds jam-packed with goodness, so I thought I should add this disclaimer before you read the rest of my post: I do not guarantee, or even make any claim that the following text will be as interesting or informative as the title… there is however a good few paragraphs of waffle with a few vids inbetween to break-up the monotony… so that being said… enjoy (or don’t – it’s entirely up to you).

So it’s been a week of surprises – my weekend in the mountains (without mobile phone or internet coverage) was really good. My sister, Karen introduced us to a game where you take a random object and pretend it’s something else. For instance, you take a shoe, hold it up to your ear and everyone has to guess that you’re pretending it’s a phone. Although simple, the game actually gets rather interesting once all the obvious scenarios are done.

Karen explained to us that the game was introduced as a study to identify how lateral a child’s mind is and to some extent, gain an indication of their overall quick-wittedness and intelligence. Sort-of like a word association game, but instead with objects. All I can say is that my family (and myself included) are rather inventive, quite funny but I’m not so sure about intellectual

Then on Monday night I did my first-ever public speaking gig which also, surprisingly, went really really well. I’d go as far as to say that it went so well that I’d happily do it again. If you’re interested in reading some of the geeky SEO things discussed, you can check it out at my work blog.

Then in other news this-morning I hear that Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett are both dead… not related and their deaths don’t really have any impact at all on me personally – sure I liked some of Jacko’s music and think his title of ‘King of Pop’ is justified considering his career… although he also is the King of Crazy amongst other things, but I won’t go into that and I’ll avoid making any jokes [for now] as I think that anyone who passes deserves at least a little respect for them and their loved ones (yes, even the crazy ones).

So in honour of his death, here’s a homage to MJ via Darth Vader:

While we’re on the topic of music (how was that for a segway?) PlayStation have just launched a new, free, music video service VidZone which looks pretty cool. Now if you’re as geeky as I am, you’re probably thinking that since PS3 has a web browser and supports media servers, why would you need a dedicated music service when there’s YouTube and other streaming options via your PC? Well, I agree, it isn’t necessary, but from a quick play lastnight the quality seems good and it’s easy to use, so it ticks all the right boxes… and I imagine that it’s targeted to people who probably don’t use their PS3s to stream YouTube so with that in mind, it looks like a good little service.

Last thing related to music… the following clip was sent to me via a Twitter buddy and I have to say I really like the song and the filmclip is awesome:

Moving away from music and onto photos… This is photo bomb – a website devoted to the delicate art of inserting ones self (or finding someone or something distracting) into other’s seemingly legitimate photos. Or if you’ve got family snaps like those found on this next site, you don’t even need photobombing: Awkward Family Photos.

And finally, last photo-related thing, I stumbled across a project started by Ze Frank called Youngme / Nowme. The site is dedicated to replicating old photos, so you get a photo of you riding your first bike, or sitting on the potty or something typical of kids, and then you try and replicate that photo by wearing a similar outfit and get a snap of you trying to ride a kids bike… it sounds a bit silly, but I love the concept and some of the photos are pretty funny.

Do you like coffee and robots? I certainly do, so if you’re like me, then check-out this super terrific Japanese coffee making robot thing (I think that’s the correct term for it if my translation skills are accurate):

And last, but certainly not least – I like obscure comics / cartoons and years and years ago I was a big fan of the short-lived series The Maxx. Much to my delight, I just found you can watch full episodes of the show at MTV’s Maxx website.

That’s it from me peoples – have a good weekend if I don’t post anything beforehand!

Share This

Over the past week I’ve been trying to prepare for a little public speaking gig that’s coming-up on Monday night (22nd of June). I’ll be on a panel with two other search marketing guys speaking to an audience of about 100 – 150 small-medium sized business owners, marketers and other professionals. I haven’t done any proper public speaking prior to this, so it’s a bit daunting but I’m pretty comfortable with the topic (which is link building) and since it’s in a ‘panel’ format, it will hopefully be a little easier than having to do a full solo pressentation… but all that aside, I’m still crapping myself. So if you’re in the Brisbane area and are keen to see me make a total goose of myself learn more about search engine optimisation, then come along. You can book online here and if you mention the promo code ‘purplecow’ you can bring a friend along for free.

Ok… that’s enough shameless self promotion…

Tomorrow I’m heading-off for a relaxing weekend away with the family at Bunya Mountains. A few years ago my brother discovered this beautiful relaxing holiday spot and decided to share it with the rest of the family. So for the next few days, I’ll be off-line in a huge log cabin, drinking lots of red wine, sitting around a fireplace playing board games and other crazy shenanigans with a dozen people I proudly call my family.

Over the last few days I’ve only found a couple of random internet finds interesting enough to share…

For those who like to apply mathematical formulas to every-day situations, then click through a bunch of the quotes/equations on the New Math site.

And here’s a little video I found a while ago, but really liked it (I know it’s long for a YouTube clip, but if you have the time, watch till the end):

If you’ve got the time to watch another long YouTube clip, then here’s another one that always makes me feel good:

Share This

I can’t believe another week has just disappeared and I barely noticed it. Ok, that’s a small lie – I had a small freak-out earlier in the week over some work stuff (nothing amazingly critical, but I like to keep a calm and level head about most things and due to a few challenges I was struggling to do this) but all is good again now and ticking along again nicely.

Last weekend I spent a lot of time playing PS3 with Caleb and one of the demo’s we downloaded was for a game called inFamous and it was awesome. So I was quite pleased when one of my fav game reviewers gave it a thumbs-up (or at least what could be best described as a thumbs-up since this guy would struggle to say something nice about his own mother)… here’s his review:

We’ve also had the coldest day this year and it hit zero degrees at my place. There was ice on my windscreen this-morning when I left for work. ICE! Now I’ve seen ice before, I’ve seen snow… I’ve even been snowboarding (or more correctly I had a snowboard strapped to my feet as I rolled down a ever so slight hill in the ‘childrens practice slopes’ a few years ago in Switzerland)… but here and now I’m in Queensland – a place affectionately referred to as the sunny state of Australia. The place where it’s beautiful one day and perfect the next… and I had ICE on my windscreen. This certainly isn’t perfect, it’s not even good… ICE!

Even now as I look out the window it looks like a beautiful warm day, yet it’s not… sure the sun is out, but it’s not hot, it’s not even warm. My fingers are like little frozen sausages as I try and type. Normally I bitch about the heat and how hot, humid and sweaty it gets in summer time and I’ve said more than once how much I like the colder weather, but ICE… in June… in Queensland? C’mon people… where’s the global warming now? I should start burning tyres using an lighter and as many aerosol cans as I can strap together (and as a side-note kiddies, I’m not condoning the raping of our environment just because I’m cold and I’m certainly not suggesting that anyone tries to create a mega flame-thrower by strapping a dozen aerosol’s together… but if you do, can you please upload the results to YouTube as I’m sure it’d be funny and definitely put you in the runnings for the next Darwin Awards).

Anyways, despite being cold and bored and not wanting to do work, I don’t really have anyone to delegate my daily tasks to and if I don’t get them done, I’ll have twice as much to do on Monday, so I better get off my ice-cold butt-cheeks and do something productive.

I’ll leave you with this one final thing I read about a few days ago which sounded pretty cool: The MP3 Experiment.

Share This

This weekend Kristy is helping-out at a local dancing eisteddfod so I’m taking this opportunity to chill-out, not think about work and basically vegetate for a couple of days.

Being the geek that I am, part of this whole ‘vegetation’ process involves dicking around on the internet and in doing so, I’ve made some more random finds.

For starters, I discovered that today is the iconic computer game – Tetris’ 25th birthday. To celebrate, I wasted some time playing this cool little free online version and found this homage on YouTube:

Whilst on YouTube, I also stumbled across this ‘literal’ version of Bonnie Tyler’s song – Total eclipse of the heart:

And this cool Nintendo Wii preview of their game Wario Land – Shake It. It’s probably best if you view this on the YouTube website itself for the full effect. Very cool.

On the topic of cool stuff, this guy made a whole song only using iPhone apps. The song itself isn’t fantastic, but considering the only instrument used was an iPhone, it’s pretty impressive:

Hidan – Timeline Music for iPhone from Paul Higham on Vimeo.

A couple of days ago Simon sent me a link to some cool computer programming-related web comics. You have to be a bit geeky to get most of the jokes… ok, you have to be geeky to get all the jokes (I especially liked the guide to understanding flowcharts… in flowchart form).

Something else you’ll need to be a little geek to appreciate is Despair’s latest social media t-shirt (so true, and I think I want one).

And last, but not least, something you don’t have to be geeky to enjoy (simply a little juvenile.. like me)… but here’s a site dedicated to Things I Did Lastnight.

Now I’m going to go and watch some TV and chuckle to myself as I imagine your response when you click on that previous link.

Share This

I realised that a small milestone had passed about a month ago that I completely overlooked – I’ve now been a home owner for one full year. Within that time interest rates have increased at record-breaking speeds and then dropped just as quickly, house and land prices have followed suit.

Completely unrelated to the local and global economies, over the last 12 months we’ve also had some of the heaviest storms and rainfall that has happened in nearly 20 years and to top it all off we’ve even had a couple of burglaries that unfortunately targeted ours, and the surrounding, suburbs. But what was even more troublesome than the break-ins was the painful process of sorting-out the insurance claims that followed.

Fortunately we used this as a learning experience and improved the security on our home and purchased a fearless guard dog – George. Ok, perhaps he’s not entirely fearless… or more accurately he gets scared by most things that move (including his own reflection). And given the fact that he’s not much bigger than a Rugby ball with legs, he wouldn’t intimidate someone suffering from acute paranoia. But all that aside, bringing him into our family was one of the best things we’ve ever done.

So in our first year of home ownership a lot of crazy stuff has happened, but to be honest, I wouldn’t change a thing. With each financial, environmental and personal challenge (and everything in between) we’ve learnt some really valuable things and everything has always worked-out well in the end.

Now that I’ve gotten that heartfelt story off my chest, let’s move onto a bunch of meaningless links and other random internet finds…

The New Scientist has launched the first ever Scientific Twitter Experiment to determine if random users from around the world can accurately guess a location using nothing but mind power. The concept sounds a little crazy, but also quite fascinating, so it’ll be interesting seeing the results once the study is complete.

Last year a street-art project was launched where miniature hand-painted people were placed in various locations around London and then left to fend for themselves. The project, titled Little People is very cute and cool and the collection of photographs collected from the experiment have been collated into a book, you can purchase prints or go and view the photographs (and possibly even some installations) at the Andipa Gallery in London.

If you work in an office environment it’s difficult to make it through a day without being inundated with countless facts and figures, reports, spreadsheets, graphs or other (seemingly) important data. Now I don’t know about you, but I always find data a lot more appealing when it’s presented in an aesthetically pleasing way, like these 50 Great Examples of Data Visualization.

And on that note, I’m going to check my email, web-stats and have a quick skim through the latest updates on Twitter and Facebook, then I’m off to bed.

Share This

Last weekend was Kristy’s birthday and for the first time in ages I managed to actually get her a gift that she liked. I must give full credit to Vicky for her advice, assistance and ongoing badgering, for without it, the gift probably would have sucked.

The gift was a Pandora Braclet and a charm that Caleb picked-out for her.

From this, I’ve learnt a very valuable lesson – when buying gifts for females, the gift doesn’t necessarily have to serve a functional purpose (often avoiding such things is best), the gift is best if it’s completely unappealing to us guys and if you can demonstrate the reason for purchasing the gift was inspired by something they said you’ll get extra brownie points for paying attention.

In previous years I’ve opted for gifts that I think are pretty cool and rather functional (such as MP3 players, DVD recorders and other completely unromantic items). I even thought I was demonstrating my ability to listen because when I purchased my MP3 player, Kristy said “hey, that’s pretty cool” so my brain stored that away as a present idea and subsequently ignored all other comments she made about jewellery, perfume, handbags, shoes and all other things that I cannot understand the appeal of.

Incidentally, Kristy has used each and every one of my previous gifts on a daily basis which, in my head, reinforces how good the gifts really are. But none of them ever seemed to make her glow or say “oh wow, a DVD recorder.. just what I’ve always wanted” (or at least not without sarcastic undertones).

But this time, it was all smiles and happiness. Now I just have to wait and see if my new-found female gift-giving knowledge works again this time next year (which is going to be even harder since I think I’ve just unintentionally upped the anti by doing well this year).

Share This

A few weeks back, it was Skye’s 21st which she celebrated by having a vampire party. Now I’m a big fan of vampires (and zombies and pirates and ninjas… and many more things that only young children and geeks should enjoy), so this was a really fun party.

Whenever there’s a celebration that requires some costume planning and preparation, we always end-up turning to DVDs for inspiration, so we had a vampire weekend… and no I don’t mean the very cool band Vampire Weekend (although I’d be quite happy to listen to them for a whole weekend as well).

Since Kristy isn’t as big a fan of vampires as I am, I did a little bit of solo research which started with a recommendation from Con – a Swedish vampire flick called: Let the right one in. It was a very sensitive drama about a little kid that had no friends and was always bullied until a new girl moves in next door… they form an interesting and somewhat dysfunctional relationship as she’s a vampire… and without wanting to spoil things too much, they live happily ever after.

I also watched Twighlight and that too was surprisingly not bad along with some other old fav’s (Bram Stoker’s Dracula etc. etc.)

As well as watching movies, I researched YouTube on how to craft realistic looking vampire fangs and had a few different ideas as to what I might wear, but in the end, I took the easy way out and purchased a cheap cape, some plastic fangs and a bit of white make-up… and here’s some pics of the night to show how it all turned-out:

Another interesting and somewhat unfortunate thing happened that night – Skye and Scotty’s toilet overflowed due to some piping-related issue rendering the lavatory off-limits. Given the copious amounts of alcohol being consumed, as always, necessity became the mother of all invention and some rather creative solutions were established (which ranged from the boys helping water some of the plants to the girls opting to drive to the nearest McDonald’s or use a bucket).

Much to everyone’s surprise, this one minor issue didn’t seem to disrupt the night at all – if anything, it made the evening a little more interesting. Overall was a really good party and I can’t wait till the next one.

Share This

I’ve been meaning to do a proper blog post about stuff that has actually been happening lately, but everytime I sit down to write something I get distracted. So for now, I’ll just copy-and-paste a bunch of things that I’ve been sent recently.

During the week Vicky sent me a couple of things that were funny and useful.

The first one is Stuff White People Like, which is a site written by a white guy who points-out all sorts of things that white people like. In some respects, it’s kind-of-like reverse racism without any racial under-tones (other than the name and the constant mention of ‘White People’) but the guys quirky approach and accuracy with a lot of things that white people do generally like, well… it makes it somewhat accurate and an interesting read.

The other one she sent me was Run Pee – a site tells you the best times during popular block-buster movies to run out of the theatre / cinema to go and pee.

This dude can do some awesome acrobatics:

We all know how much I’ve been talking about Twitter lately, so here are a couple of fairly accurate clips of what Twitter is really like… although I love these clips and think they are sooo true, I still like Twitter:

Share This

I’ve mentioned that I like Twitter… but sometimes, people just Tweet Too Hard – a site where people’s self-obsessed tweets get the recognition they deserve. While other’s provide much more useful info.

If you’re as geeky as I am, you might also find this pretty funny – http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/. I don’t spend my days playing Halo, but I have had similar phone calls and it’s just painful. Webguy – I feel you’re pain!

Oh, and talking about Geeky, it doesn’t get much geekier than this: http://konamicodesites.com/ – a website that won’t let you access it until you successfully execute a Konami code.

Moving right along – so, you’re in love with one of your friends, but she has a boyfriend and probably wouldn’t have sex with you anyway. Sounds like you could use an easy-to-follow guide to getting her to have sex with you.

You are probably aware of those ‘capcha’ codes that are used on websites to stop spam bots filling-in web forms. Those little boxes that display some random text that you need to enter before being able to submit the form… well here are some of the best/worst: 15 of the Meanest CAPTCHAs ever.

Last week there was a brutal shooting in Sydney and the police interviewed some eye witnesses. As a result, one of the girls interviewed gained some instant popularity, but then it went pear-shaped when it was discovered she had made-up the whole story. You can read the full article here or just watch the clip (cause despite the atrocity of the event, the clip is kinda funny):

And last, but not least – please DONT PANIC, and set aside a moment of silence with your towel (and no, I don’t mean that in a dirty way) – today is International Towel Day. An annual celebration on the 25th of May, as a tribute to the late author Douglas Adams (1952-2001). On that day, fans around the universe proudly carry a towel in his honour.

Share This