It’s okay to call a foul.

I’ve already talked about this twice on my Obama blog. But I just can’t get enough of this video, and had to share it. I must watch it once a week.

Come on. Seriously.

[via TechCrunch]

That is This Week’s New Crack.

photo credit: islands are forever

I’m putting the finishing touches on this list of bloggers to contact for a promotion. I love this part of my job, I meet the greatest people…

Anyway in doing that I found a post hailing this product line called Lush as a form of crack – and since I blog about found gems in the parlance of the new crack, it seemed like destiny.

I mean really. Who can resist this?

You are cruelty-free. You use a minimum of packaging. Your Dreamcream eradicated the hideous itching I had throughout the winter, when my skin was so dry I could scratch my name in the flakiness of my legs. The natural, often organic ingredients you use make me smell sexy, and my husband, sexier.

My name is Tracie, and I am a Lushie. It’s been two weeks since my last Lush purchase.

So I went to the site, which has bath and beauty type products and I think I’m in love.

I have no idea what it smells like, but it sounds like it’s heavenly. That isn’t what impressed me though. I’m fasinated by this product they have called a Bath Bomb. It’s a solid block of good smelling stuff you drop in the tub that’s supposed to erupt into a lovely bath experience. Yay.

Here’s what they say:

Pop a LUSH bath bomb in a pre-run bath and it erupts in a mass of fragrant fizzing, sometimes launching flower petals, leaves, natural butters, and even confetti into the bath water. After a mad frenzy it calms down and gently scents the water with natural essential oils.

Someone like me who uses de-stressing as part of my daily healing treatment doesn’t look at the price tag on things like that. It’s $6. Yeah, I can buy a bottle of decent bubble bath for $4, and use that bottle over and over again. But it won’t give me a unique experience like this one. And they don’t have names like “The Sex Bomb” or “The Happy Pill”. For an aromaholic, stuff like that is irresistible to me.

The lesson?

You may think you have no use for social media, but no matter how big or small your company is, if you have even one fan, you should be at very minimum, enabling your fans to submit your site to social media with as much ease as possible. Stay in touch with them. Give them freebies. Because that willing fan can reach hundreds of people who could also become raving fans. One thing Lush could do better is rally those bloggers and organize them into a force that spreads their message. They have a customer forum… great start but they could do so much better. It is massive profit waiting to happen.

Maybe I should write a book about the system I use to rally fans and fanatics to spread the word about a company?

Nah. I’ll save it for the membership site. It’s not really a whole book…

PS- Free tip. If you have a product that people are fans of, add pictures of all your stuff to Flickr. Why?

Because many bloggers use sites like Flickr for royalty-free art. There’s even a plug-in that automatically adds attribution to the person who created the photo. Then from your page you could even look up everyone who ever linked to that page to easily find that subset of your fans.

I came to Austin to be with my fiancee. I’ve been having issues with my back, and have just been in need of emotional support and closeness. I have some business to do in Houston and this looked like the perfect opportunity for us to have some “us time” before we start with the business of getting married.

I love hotels, but since my love already owns a house he recently inherited, it seemed like it was a better idea to go there and stay with him. And we could put the money we saved on doing that in our nest egg.

We were on-again, off-again too many times, and marriage is supposed to be for life — I don’t want to be thinking about changing my mind in ten years, you know? So we’re making an effort to be sure, and part of that is being around each other full time for a while.

When we got to my new home, I actually reconsidered my decision to marry him. The house is painfully cluttered. And I don’t mean like, dirty – there’s no bug problem and rats don’t live in the walls. I just mean there is stuff EVERYWHERE. There’s barely a place to sit down and I’m basically afraid to poke through boxes if I’m in here by myself. It’s not far from this:

photo credit: blakespot

Every room is like that. But it’s not like my man is a pig or anything. His car is a bit junky but it’s not like this house. Let me give you a bit of the back story before I move on.

My darling was left this house by his mother, who he had a really close relationship with. Before he actually got the place, relatives came in and ransacked the place, taking whatever they wanted and basically leaving the place cluttered and nearly unlivable. My fiancee has his own company that he is still building and while he sleeps here sometimes, the timing of getting the house was such that he hasn’t been able to get all the stuff out of here. It just wasn’t happening.

Add to that how hard it is to throw out what you have left of your mother?

In fairness, he told me that I was probably going to see the house and want to run away. And he was right. But I just love him so much…. so I stuck it out.

I’m very freaked out about the house, and have started putting the systems that I can in place. It’s a small house, 10 rooms including the bathrooms, but it’s just wall to wall clutter. One of my main goals while I was here was to start a creative project and I just can’t even think. So I thought, hey, I’ve got pretty good cash flow going on right now. What can I do to get someone to help me deal with this?

I searched and searched the internet to see if I could find a service that was a cross between moving out, removing junk, organizing, and house cleaning. I Googled my situation to see if I could find out what other people do when they inherit a house that is full of things they don’t want. But the problem was that every site I went to didn’t have details on whether they could do the job I wanted, and no way for me to ask a question online.

Then I found a gem. In my search, I came across a site called Service Magic.

The way service magic works is that you go to the site, pick the type of work you think you need done, when you’re going to be doing it, and the site hooks you up with contractors who call and/or email you. In addition, their information gets put into a personal area you have on the Service Magic site that tells you whether the business is insured, what other clients had to say, and gives you a way to email them or go to their web site.

The very next day people started calling me. It was the people for the cleaning part of the job so I wasn’t quite ready for them yet. Later the same day an actual real live representative of Service Magic called me to discuss the job. Her name is Erin, great lady. I was able to tell her the work I needed to do specifically and she had a personal recommendation for me in the Austin area, right off the top of her head!

I love people who do their homework. She sent me all her information so that when I get the first part of the job done, I can go back for her advice on who to talk to next.

Did I mention that I haven’t spent a single red cent yet?

The person she suggested was Barry from Arranging It All. He called me the next day, right at the requested time. I told him what I needed help with, he quoted me a VERY reasonable hourly rate, that is really flexible with my budget. I have about a grand to start with and estimated that I’d probably need about five to finish up. Turns out I can probably finish the whole thing for more like three, including the people I will have come and haul stuff away, as well as the people after that who I want to clean the place.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes from here.

Hey, I’m sorry if I called you The Name but this particular occasion calls for it. Oh, and that clip has nothing to do with this post. It’s from 40 Year Old Virgin and I think it’s funny.

I simply must inform you why Hulu is a top supplier of crack. First of all, let me clear up what type of mental crack we’re talking about. Basically, Hulu takes TV and movie content, some really recent, some old but classic, and lets you watch it free online, in a streamed Flash format.

This is cool for many of us who
…work on the web and find ourselves bored out of our skulls while we, say, submit links to directories…
…… or do other types of cut and paste functions for hours,
… or wait for someone to come back from IM,
…….. or work swing shift and need time-shifting resources for TV,
… or gave up TVs to have fancier computers or laptops…
… or are waiting, bored, with our laptops, in a location that has a wireless connection, etc.

So, back to why this particular brand of crack is amusing:

1- Three full seasons of Arrested Development on Demand.
2- Two seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on Demand.
3- Lots of other tv shows and movies with high replay value that you can watch when you’re bored, or are online waiting for something to finish or someone to show up.
4- Customizable, embeddable clips of those shows.
5- Alternate versions of shows that are available online but work with more browsers or aren’t as buggy as the version on the network’s site.

As I did in my post about It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I wanted to embed a clip from the show that wasn’t in their clips section. I was planning on embedding the entire video when I realized that you can choose any start and end point in the video, and get a very precise clip of the show to embed in your blog.

For someone who has at least three blogs in development on the topic of media, entertainment and online video, this is a Godsend. I’m happy to promote Hulu and the embedded video is beautiful, sleek, bug-free and professional looking.

There are only two downsides I see to Hulu right now.

1- Not enough content.

I’m a web warrior. What little content that is on their site that is re-watchable and I haven’t already seen, I’ll have consumed in one slow week. But I expect that to be remedied as new content comes out – even with the recently ended writer’s strike there’s some pretty recent stuff up there. Meaning this seasons.

That’s right. You can catch up on some seasons of shows that you missed in a day.

2- The TV Clips Section, Also Known as Cock Tease. (Or Pussy Tease if you’re a chick).

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the TV Clips section. It’s just a bit of bad juju marketing and I’ll tell you why.

There you are, innocently browsing the site. You skim like most web readers do and a gem like Nip/Tuck jumps out at you.

Excited because you saw a really good episode that you didn’t quite get, and so vowed to watch from the beginning, you click through to the page, hoping they have the first season up.

Not only do you find out there’s no first season, there aren’t any seasons at all. It’s clips only. Mother. Fuck.

It’s not the end of the world, but just like having the promise of sex, right up to rubbing naked genitalia, and then Not actually having the sex, it’s kind of fucking annoying. To avoid that, you can go to the Alphabetical listings page, where it’s clearly marked which TV Shows are full features.

But it would be much, much better to have a TV Full Episodes section, a full Movies section, and then a separate clips section divided into TV and Movies that is cross referenced on the full listing of each. To a brand new person, even one as somewhat net savvy as myself, it leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth, like Hulu is trying to look like they have more content than they actually do.

Not to knock the TV clips themselves though – I can see where they’d be really useful to bloggers, or to forward to friends in the process of making an argument for watching a show or film. In fact, if Hulu really wants to grow at the speed of light, they should pull a Kyte.TV and include in the embed a way for each embed to automatically generate a link back to each site displaying the video from the listings page.

So the TV clips section isn’t bad in and of itself. But it shouldn’t be mixed in with regular content.

And if you’re thinking I should stop whining and enjoy the free TV and Movie content, fuck you. I smile sweetly as I jokingly say that, but seriously? Like the dude in the vacuum commercial, I just like things to work properly.

Or at least as advertised.

Also keep in mind that this is part of a blog post about why Hulu rocks, so I’m still a big fan. They just need to fix those two things and I’m all theirs for life. I even forgot to mention the commercials, they’re that unobtrusive.

So. If you want to watch some old classics like What’s Happening, or Welcome Back Kotter, or watch some new series that you missed on TV this seasons, go over and play at Hulu.

I feel like there’s something wrong with everyone who doesn’t love how awful the characters on this show are. They are the Seinfeld quartet on crack with the Arrested Development mentality. If you watched the clip above without absolutely laughing your ass off, consult your physician to have the stick surgically removed from up yonder.

To set it up for you, if you’re the type to read the text before playing the clip, as I am, these four folks from Philadelphia run a bar in same city called Paddy’s. (Very poorly, I might add. Which tells you something. How do you go broke selling alcohol, America’s most accepted vice?) Two of them, Dennis and Dee are brother and sister. Dennis, Mac and Charlie own the bar.

They have an on-going feud with some people who decide to take them hostage. I’m not even going to get into that back story because the beauty of this show is that each episode is funny on its own even if you don’t know the deeper layers.

So, as any four best friends would in a hostage situation, they completely turn on each other. Charming. The only thing better than this only slightly unexpected, but more true-to-life trick, is the dialogue employed as they stab each other in the back.

Since 1992 I have had problems with my back. And it’s hard for people to understand that I have tried just about every treatment under the sun, and that the thing that works for them when they throw their back out won’t work for me. The nearest thing to a diagnosis that I’ve ever had was spinal degenerative disorder, which to me is just a fancy way of saying that whenever I resolve a problem with my back it will creep back up again in three years, so don’t bother having surgery.

On top of that I have nerve damage that affects my extremities.

I don’t have health insurance, and even when I did I spent a considerable amount of time doing a little something I like to call “sucking it up”. Medications that are strong enough to take away my pain leave me unable to do anything else. Most aren’t even strong enough to do more than take the edge off, and since I build up immunity so quickly, I only take medications when I’m absolutely, completely desperate to stop the pain.

And I have been. On more than one occasion, I’ve considered ending my life just so I wouldn’t be in pain anymore.

Since I’ve taken such a stiff upper lip attitude towards the daily pain, most people, especially my friends and family, forget or ignore altogether that I have a chronic pain condition that limits my ability to do certain things. The one consistent exception is the sister who I’m visiting now. She’s always looking out for me, period.

Anyway. Living in constant pain, but looking normal on the outside has been an ordeal that has made me feel really alone sometimes. Today I was doing some Facebook research for a client when I found a group on Facebook called “But You Don’t Look Sick“.

And reading the description… felt like… have you ever been driving through a fog that came on suddenly, and the road turned, and suddenly the fog lifted? It felt like that, like suddenly I could see again, I was awake again, as if my black and white life was now in technicolor.

It was a group for people who have chronic conditions, disabilities or what they called “invisible” diseases. And if that wasn’t enough…

There’s also a website. ButYouDontLookSick.com is frequently updated with tips for all types of different ailments that fall under the invisible heading, from relaxation techniques to Spring Break ideas for the Chronically Ill College Student, it’s a wonderful site.

Even if you’re blessed with good health, it’s worth going to read to peek into the lives of people who aren’t. I guarantee you know someone who is sick but doesn’t look it, and you’ll understand them so much more if you read the posts on this site.