Daily?

If I were going to get a flu shot (which I'm not - I don't get sick often and when I do it's mostly right after getting flu shots), I'm not sure this deal from Walgreens is very appealing?  Every day?  Yikes.

And ow.

My Lose It! Hack

So Lose It! is awesome.  I've lost a lot of weight using Lose It! and gained some weight when I stopped using it.  (I'm again trying to be pretty faithful.)  Running has helped, but a big key was realizing just how many calories I was consuming compared to how much I was burning.

One thing that can be frustrating at times, though, is entering in all the stuff I've eaten.  Especially if it's not in the database or it's not something I'm going to eat often enough to worry about putting in.  For those instances, I have a hack - zGeneric10 and zGeneric100 - these are items for which each serving is 10 or 100 calories, respectively.  So when I know the size of something but I don't really care to get specific, I just use the required number of servings (a 425 calorie entree becomes 42-1/2 servings of zGeneric10.)  Helps me stay on track, but save time.

You'll also notice "zCoffee" and "zCreamer30," two other items I enter on a fairly regular basis.  Coffee Mate (and Fred Meyer and other generic) offer some very good low-fat creamers (French Vanilla and Hazelnut are the most commonly available ones).

What Not to Email

I can't decide if this is a work-related post or not.  But, it's the case of two emailers who FAIL.

Exhibit A: eBay
According to the email (in which the most commonly repeated phrase is my username), I could win an iPad or a $500 AMEX card.

But, if you've already got an iPad,

#EEC12: Discover (A Work-Related Post)

#7 in a series

How Advanced Segmentation Can Improve Targeting and Metrics
Jeff Teitelbaum, e-Business, Discover
Jared Chase, Client Services Lead, e-Dialog

• Engagement Pyramid (relevancy and specificity)
• * One single customer
• * Segmentation and modeling (Web Analytics, CRM)
• * Demographics
• * General/mass population
• 
  
• "We are not order takers, we provide insight.".....

More For Me

I reject this nonsense.  You go right ahead and unplug.  That'll make the internet faster for me.

Or, to quote Animal, "Plug in! Plug in!"

#EEC12 Kansas Speedway (A Work-Related Post)

#6 in a series

Customer Connections: Using Social & Customer Data to Improve Email Relevancy
Stephanie Miller, VP, Digital Messaging Solutions, Aprimo
Julie Brown, Consumer Marketing Manager, Kansas Speedway

• Your customer is learning about in a lot of new ways, a lot of them you don't control or pay for
• Their research will lead them to you eventually
  .....
• (1) Customers don't want more email, they want relevant email
• (2) Communicate on the customer's timeline and urgency
• (3) Where do we go from here? (checklist)
  .....
  

Free Therapy

It's been quite fascinating learning about our children's diagnose, a kind of free therapy. for instance, i learned that autistic children sometimes make use of a weighted blanket at dinner or sleep time - that it's comforting and heko them feel secure. So i've lately been adding extra blankets on the bed (this doesn't work in the summer) and been sleeping far more soudly. Or when in a meeting with our daughter's neurobehavioralist, he asks "Who lived in a house with boxes?" my wife quickly raises her hand, remembering the constant moving around they did when she as growing up. Or when he asks "Who uses lists as a coping mechanism?" and we both quickly raise our hands. Even though the sessions are about her and how she's doing at home or school, he will often drop these massive nuggets that are just so helpful to us. Like how Lori and I have different levels of tolerance for clutter. Lori's coping mechanism is to spread things out - it allows her to survey and know where things are. Mine is to consolidate into action piles.

And it makes sense because when it's time to attack an action pile, then I spread it out so that I can survey it, which at work manifests itself in two interesting ways - a box-lid of stuff i'm working through and the extreme measure of sometimes completely ignoring a thread in email if there starts to be too many people talking all at once - I have to wait until I can set aside some time to go through all of them (sometimes printing out all the emails) and synthesize a summary of everything I know and don't know so that I can go and get the gaps filled in and understand what needs to be done next. It is a coping mechanism that has really served me well in most case, except when the matter is more urgent and I'm begging to be able to step back and be left alone to look at the bigger picture and understand all the players. That must be a bit of aensory overload.

But this has all been beneficial to us - Lori's adopted some new techniques that has allowed her to spread things out a little less (file folders, etc.) and I've learned to be more careful about how I move piles of things (coupons, receipts, recipes) to protect the sanctity of their arrangement and relationship to one another. Mid-week, the dining room table is often Grand Central for stuff in and out - from mail to clean laundry - so we're always looking for space to work and so these realizations about each other have just made that all the more harmonious.

I know he prefers to work with children, but man, if we could send the children to a friend's house and then have him come over and just hang out with us for a few hours we'd learn so much about our own quirks and coping mechanisms and brains. But for now, we'll just have to be content with being alert and observant and picking up every lttle nugget that falls our way.