Todd Mintz: Brain Serial Blog

I’m not quite sure why it took me so long to talk about something that really struck me as powerful and moving when I witnessed it occurring…but here goes…

I spent last Halloween at a Richard Thompson concert, seeing him for probably the 7th time (one of my favorite artists and an amazing live performer). During this concert tour, one of his gimmicks was that he’d write the name of each of his albums on a little piece of paper and drop them in his hat. He’d select someone in the audience to pull out one of the pieces of paper from the hat and whichever album was picked, he’d would play three songs from that album.

I went to see “The Artist” yesterday and I saw a behavior that I’ve seen many times before that I find curious and rather strange.

The line to buy tickets was about 20-25 deep. 2 cashiers were on duty selling tickets.

On either side of the ticket windows sat a Regal Automatic Ticket Kiosk. Nobody was using either.

The weather outside was brisk, windy & rainy (if you weren’t under the overhang). Yet people universally decided that they rather stand in the ticket line exposed to the weather instead of using the kiosk.

This post is in a similar vein to Google Street View 1968 (Model Shop).

I was watching another random 70′s movie this weekend. Entitled “Zig Zag” w/ George Kennedy, it was from 1970 and was filmed around Los Angeles in many locales that were either somewhat or very familiar to me (and FYI, the movie was WAY better than most of the IMDB reviews).

My wife wanted the new Kindle Fire…so I got her one.

Tried to reigster it. Didn’t work…couldn’t get past the registration screen. So I contacted Kindle Customer Support via chat.

After a long conversation with the first support person, they told me I needed to update the operating system. They sent me (free of charge) a USB Cord that allowed me to attach the Kindle to my computer. They gave me instructions on how to update the operating system, which I followed.

That didn’t work.

My last water bill was probably $50 more than it should have been…likely because I had a kitchen sink leak during the billing cycle. I used 33 units of water compared to 21 units the same time the previous year. According to my water bill, on 10/6, the meter reader read the meter at “1408″. Being the careful guy I am, I went out to check the meter (see picture above). It showed 1441…which means I had used 33 units in almost 2 weeks.

Autumn has begun. And as most people notice the cooler temperatures and the leaves falling from the trees, what occurs to them is that they must get ready for winter. So, they go out to the stores and get things like winter clothing, firewood, snow tires & chains, etc. Stores know this and they are packed to the brim with merchandise designed to fit the consumer need.

When I notice the cooler temperatures and leaves falling from the trees, what occurs to me is that I must get ready for next summer. So, I go off to the stores and pick up all the leftover summer merchandise at a small fraction of its original cost.

So, out of the blue, my friend Scott Hendison sends me the following tweet:

Had my email been hacked again? It already happened once before.

A little investigation did not show evidence of a new hack…in my Gmail spam filter, there were only a couple spam emails similar to what Scott received, meaning what Scott received either had some connection to the last hack or perhaps somebody we both knew was hacked & my name was used to send a email to him (since my email address wasn’t in the email he received).

We all know that it’s a total crap-shoot as to whether your airplane trip will stick closely to the scheduled itinerary or if you’re going to end up getting stuck waiting for hours with many thousands of other stranded travelers. Clear 4G can’t do anything about airport delays but it can make the time pass a lot faster.

I recently took on the challenge of optimizing Cari McGee´s (who is Matt McGee´s wife and a real estate agent in the Tri-Cities area of Washington) AdWords account with the implied assumption that I would use it as a guideline for how a small business should setup and manage their own AdWords efforts.   This is the second post of the series…the first post is here.

I’m a movie addict and I use the Netflix on demand service regularly. I don’t travel nearly as much as many folks but the value of being able to call up a Netflix movie in the evening while being stuck in a hotel room (instead of being limited to what’s on TV at the hotel) would be a real benefit. Unfortunately, without strong Internet access, a Netflix movie becomes unwatchable.