I don’t see it that way. My family has always been amazing at keeping my birthday festivities separate from Christmas, which I truly appreciate. Plus, I get to open presents like 4 days in a row, which rocks.

This year, the celebration of my birthday was on a level that is just about unparalleled. My lovely wife Alli and I started the 22nd by using our Groupon to Trezo Vino, where we dined on amazing bruschetta and I had a terrific pasta dish – trofie with lump crab and prosciutto, bread crumbs and chili flakes. It was as delicious as it sounds.

We saw The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (if you like the books, I’m assuming you’ll like the movie, but man, is it ever brutal.

On my actual birthday, Alli and I woke up and had breakfast at my favorite place in Olathe, Old 56 Family Restaurant. Seriously, if you haven’t been there, go if only for the hash browns. We then headed to the movies again to see one of my favorites of the year, The Muppets. After the brutal nature of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, it was fabulous for the second time. Seriously, it needs to win an Oscar for Best Song.

Had to run an errand, then after a quick nap and massage, we met my family for dinner at J. Gilbert for steak and family celebration. There, I was able to wear my new shoes from Alli and I got another pair from my folks.

The New Balances on the left are my new kicks from Alli. Old-mannish and retro-y, yet a little dressy…you know…because they’re leather. On the right, my new Muppet-inspired Kermit Adidas from my folks. They combine both my love of sneakers and my love of the Muppets. Plus, they are green. And they have the Kermit points around the tongue. So cool.

I also got a fancy new pen/stylus for my iPad and a bowtie from The Tie Bar from my brother and his family. Also awesome.

After dinner, we headed to another one of my favorite places, Christopher Elbow’s Glacé Artisan Ice Cream.

We topped it off by heading back to the movies to see the critically acclaimed silent movie, The Artist, which was completely charming in its simplicity.

All in all, my 35th birthday was freaking awesome. Family, movies, food, delicious food and rad sneakers. Yeah. I’d say it rocked.

Merry Christmas!

I saw this video from Mindrelic (via Cameron) and I just fell in love with it.

Last week, Alli and I saw Woody Allen’s latest film, Midnight in Paris, and I adored it. It was one of those movies that just makes you smile the whole time. During the movie, there is a conversation between two of the characters where they talk about the life of a city that is independent of its inhabitants — that a city lives and breathes like an organism does.

Now, I’m no fan of Woody Allen’s, but this idea was something that I really remembered from the movie. I thoroughly enjoyed the film (by far my favorite of Allen’s 586 films he’s made) and if I took anything away from it, it was this idea that we much like the blood cells of the living organism that is the place that we inhabit…we have a structure and life all our own, but we contribute to the life of something larger.

As an online marketer, I feel that it is a part of my job to be a part of the series of tubes that we call the internet. Initially, it was a writing outlet for me back when my career didn’t require me to write nearly as much (it doesn’t require that much writing of me now either). Blogging was a nice way to express the multitude of opinions on random topics that I have and continue to have. Over the years, I’m finding less and less time to blog, which bugs me (but frankly, it bugs me more when some people get on me for not writing enough but NEVER post themselves).

I never saw myself as a specialized blogger. If you go back and read my archives, you’ll find some pretty out there stuff from music to candy to television to social media to politics (like how I supported Bush in ’04 and Obama in ’08). Look, I never claimed it would make sense. The bulk of my readership has always come from a great group of Kansas City bloggers, many of whom I’ve met at some point in the past 6 years. Even when I wasn’t blogging about Kansas City, people like Meesha and Lane and Shea and Joe and Marie and Celeste and Darren and Erin and so many others (even Tony) were the core of my readership outside of the people that I knew or my family members.

Twitter is a different animal entirely. Some people use Twitter to merely point to the other things they’ve written or done online. I use it for a multitude of reasons from annoying personal over-sharing to unfollow-worthy live-tweeting of the Oscars to connecting with colleagues and peers and for reaching out to brands I use.

One thing that I continually struggle with is this concept of followers, following and friends. Derek Powazek, a community management consultant and web guru whose opinion I respect very much, wrote a post called Twitter for Adults that explores this very struggle and has some great solutions on what to do if you want to participate in Twitter, but aren’t sure how. It’s a good place to start, but I’ve always wondered if there was a generally accepted rule of thumb when it comes to who you should follow, who should follow you and why.

After all, what is it that motivates our behaviors online? I know that when I first began blogging, it was for me. Joining Twitter was an exploration of the next new cool thing online.

You could even say I initially joined Twitter way back before it was the cool, hip thing to do. Way back in 2007. I remember being a little confused at first. I didn’t understand it. None of my friends were on it. What was I supposed to do with it?

So I quit. Cancelled my account. A stupid thing to do in hindsight, but whatever. I rejoined at the beginning of 2008 and 14,000+ tweets later, it’s one of my primary forms of communication. Ramsey was really onto something when he wrote: “If the people you follow suck, Twitter sucks.” Most of my best friends are now on Twitter. My wife and her sister use it to communicate mass messages to the members of their dance team. My parents even have Twitter accounts, but they don’t get it yet (that’s on me to explain, I guess). But the bottom line is: enough people now use the utility that it no longer sucks for me.

But that’s not what this is about.

What I want to talk about is the strange obligation that some people have to follow or be followed by people they may only be connected with on the periphery. I do my best to stay connected and up-to-date on all the tweets and Facebooking that happens, but I’ve found as I’ve taken on more and more responsibility that it can be difficult to manage. In the days when I was pushing toward a rather large project completion at work, I didn’t check in on Twitter at all. I may have even missed a day or ten of actually sending out a tweet. And for some reason I felt guilty. Why is that?

My Twitter account is my personal account. I may talk about work on it, but that’s because I love my job. I talk about things that interest me and I do my best to follow people with similar interests. Brand accounts are a different story. The following/follower relationship changes if you are representing an organization online. But that’s for another post…

So back to the question: who should you follow, who should follow you and why…let’s start with the easy one.

Who should follow you…

Ultimately, it is anyone’s prerogative to follow you on Twitter if you keep your account public. I tend to because I’m a fairly public person. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t blocked people in the past who annoyed me or harassed me. Like Bobby B said, “It’s my prerogative.” I can do what I wanna do… There are a lot of reasons that someone might follow you:

1. They think you are super cool.
2. Twitter told them to in the “Who to Follow” block. Which means that you probably follow many of the same people. This is a pretty safe bet.
3. They run searches about what people talk about and follow people who talk about certain things. Often times, I get followed by random accounts and I can usually attribute it back to one random thing I said a week ago about a product or service.
4. They follow everyone and will try to insist that you follow them back, only to unfollow you the minute you follow them. I’m going to suggest that if someone asks you to follow them for any reason and you can’t recognize them from their profile, you can safely ignore them.

Who you should follow…

Twitter if for 140-character communications, not for long conversations. That being said, you should always follow people who you are interested or invested in in some way. The people that I follow fall into 4 categories:

1. Friends and family. I use Twitter to keep up on what they are up to and to talk about sports with my buddies.
2. Co-workers, colleagues and peers. I probably use Twitter more for this group than anything. It’s where I share and receive amazing insight about the latest thing. It’s a great way to share a link, a picture or a quick thought on a topic and get instant feedback. In a lot of ways, it’s replaced Google Reader as my news reader of choice.
3. Thought leaders in my industry and area of expertise. This is a tricky one because you often times have to sift through a lot of garbage to find useful, thoughtful people, particularly when it comes to the area of online marketing. Still, I’ve managed to find quite a few people that I trust.
4. People who pique my interest or entertain me. This is a pretty wide category containing comedians, actors, random people I’ve met or folks who were recommended by others. This is a difficult area to manage because there are a lot of these folks out there, but I don’t often seek them out.

Why you should follow people…

This truly is a personal decision. If you are looking to Twitter for news and current events, it might be helpful to follow news outlets or perhaps even reporters. If you want to use Twitter for personal reasons only, that’s completely up to you. You might think about marking your account as private, even. Ultimately, I can’t tell you why you should follow people and I certainly don’t like when people try to tell me why I should follow people or who I should follow or try to guilt me into following them just because we’ve “known each other online”. Shoot, there are people I’ve met in person that I can’t stand to listen to. If I can’t stand you online, why should I follow you?

I’ve found myself at times trying to justify why I should or should not follow someone or whether I should unfollow them because I spend an inordinate amount of time being annoyed by their opinions or the things they continue to share. What is it about our human nature that keeps me from just unfollowing that person the minute they start to annoy me? Is it because I have an “online reputation” to uphold? Hardly. If anything, I want my online reputation to be this: the same in person as online. That’s why I don’t believe in the concept of a personal brand. My personal brand is me. It isn’t calculated or cared for…it’s just me. That may irk some people and close some doors for me, but so be it. I’m not about to start pretending that I’m someone I’m not in order to please some amorphous collection of avatars on the internet.

Hope it wasn’t too rambling of a post. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Not very many, but they were there. Tiny glints of white in the chilly air that didn’t even have enough volume to them to leave a mark on my windshield. But I could see them. And they were glorious.

Like the snowflakes, I’m coming out of retirement

After a long sabbatical from this blog (I’ve mostly been posting over on my Tumblr), I’ve decided to try and resume some sort of regular posting schedule. Most of this is an attempt to justify a new design that I hope to roll out soon and to talk about some stuff that’s been swirling around for a while now and I haven’t spent the time to talk at length about it.

When I originally started writing my blog, I did it as an outlet for my numerous opinions about movies, politics, music, etc. For 6 years now, this blog has been around (although you can probably knock off the last 6 months, since they don’t really count). One of the main reasons that I slowed down my posting was that I began to consider the audience when I was writing every single time instead of just writing for me.

I thought that if I switched over to Tumblr permanently that I’d use it more, but even there, I’m struggling to find stuff to post and I find myself still catering to that audience as much, if not more than I did before.

Either way, consider this my statement of being “back”. I’m not going to commit to any sort of schedule. I just wanted to remind you that I’m still here. I’m still going to write.

But I’m going to go back to doing it for me.

Here are some of the topics I intend to cover:

• Matt Cassel and why he is completely overrated despite his inflated statistics
• How Google’s Android operating system is killing the economy (and a review of all major Twitter clients for Android, all of which suck)
• Why the iPad is the greatest device maybe ever
• How we need to reevaluate this whole follower/following/friends thing in social media
• What it’s been like being an assistant pastor for my church
• What’s been good on TV lately
• What our backyard looks like now that we’ve overhauled it
• What I’m thankful for this year
• What it’s like working with your professional idols on the web

So anyway…how have you been?

I have a sermon to write for this Sunday. I have work to do for Alli’s art show on Friday and Saturday in Gardner. I have yet to work out today. I have a new blog design that I could code, updates to the church website and A SERMON TO WRITE FOR SUNDAY.

But I’ve been staring at an empty WordPress text box for as long as it would take me to do each of those. Occasionally, I’ll pop over to my Tumblr dashboard and see what’s going on there and I’ve got Tweetie keeping me lathered in tweets. But for the most part, I’ve been sitting here. Staring.

It’s how I tend to get when Alli’s gone. Oh, did I not mention that? Yeah, she’s at dance camp. The one time every year that we’re apart. And I can barely function.

Well, I can function, but I don’t want to. I’d rather just sit here and listen to Glen Hansard.

There are lots of things to write about. I’ve got two really interesting (at least I think so) posts sitting as drafts. I could write about the travesty that is the Big 12 11 6? I could talk about the season finale of Glee (although I did that briefly over on my Tumblr). I could talk about how I went to play with the new Sprint HTC Evo tonight (impressive, but it’s not the iPhone). None of this interests me. Everything is very meh.

Even just writing this out is boring the crap out of me. I know that if I open up Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, I’ll never stop. So instead, I’ll complain to you, my fine Internet friends. I’ll threaten to move my blog entirely to Tumblr again (the only thing I can’t quite sort out how to do elegantly is archiving all my old WordPress content).

The lesson in all this? Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m just a miserable cur because Alli’s out of town.

• The Realtor, (who snagged the vanity URL from all of us a long time ago)
• The musician and author,
• The storm chaser,
• …and now the teenage fiction writer from Philadelphia (who is also on Tumblr)

Great.

Now I realize that I’m probably not doing myself any favors, since I’m currently fourth on the Magnificent Google List despite having been online for longer than all of them.

But I just can’t help myself.

(reposted from my Tumblr)

I lost my job on December 11th last year, was unemployed for the first three months of the year, which isn’t exactly the ideal way to start a year. Even so, I thought it was pretty fun. I got to hang out with my wife pretty much all day long for 3 months straight, save the times she had practice, mural jobs, or if I had an interview.

In March, I joined Cerner and I have been there ever since. The first couple months there were a complete blur and then it was summer. The family headed out (I wish I could say in the family truckster, Griswold-style, but alas, it was just an oversized van) over the Fourth of July to visit our good friends at their ranch in Wyoming. We rode horses, I almost died twice there, first almost falling off a mountain, then being bucked off a horse. It was a phenomenal trip and made me remember how much I love the outdoors, especially the wide open spaces of Colorado and Wyoming.

I wrote a post in August about sweatshirts and silverware that was one of my favorites of the year.

I saw a bunch of movies, several of them courtesy of two great sites: Lost in Reviews and Scene Stealers. But the best time that I had at the movies (maybe besides Avatar), was spending an entire Saturday in the Cinema Suites at the Olathe AMC watching the Best Picture Showcase the day before the Oscars.

In September, I attempted to take a picture of my dog everyday. It didn’t work so well.

I celebrated my 5-year bloggiversary.

Alli was the featured artist at our alma mater’s Homecoming (also my 10-year Honor Year). She painted the walls black and had one wall painted with just words.

I bearded up for the winter, just before I saw Rob Bell in concert, which was totally amazing, as I kind of expected.

Alli and I also went to New York, which was a great trip. I went for the Web 2.0 Expo, where I saw The Onion’s web editor Baratunde Thurston give an amazing talk called “What the Hashtag?”

On the same trip, we saw the Complexions modern ballet and ate dinner at Perilla, my Top Chef favorite (from the very beginning) Harold Dieterle’s restaurant in Greenwich Village, which was arguably the best meal of my life.

And then it was December and I started a huge project at work, turned 33, and celebrated Christmas and rang in the New Year. That was my 2009.

As for 2010, I have no idea what to expect. I didn’t think that 2009 was terribly exciting, but looking back, I’m more aware of how much actually happened. I’ve made a lot of new friends at Cerner and have actually met some bloggers and Twitterers this year.

2010 will certainly be an interesting year for me spiritually, as I begin work as the Assistant Pastor of the Olathe Community of Christ church, my home congregation for over 25 years. It’s not a full-time position by any means, but it’s certainly going to take a lot of my time and energy in the coming year. I’ll be preaching next Sunday, January 10th and again in February. I expect to be preaching a lot more in my home congregation this year.

I hope that your 2010 brings you joy.

Here are some of the pictures I took:

Alli and I were fortunate enough to see the premiere performance of Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson’s new Complexions Contemporary ballet while in New York. Alli had identified it as something that she really wanted to see and since it was opening while we were in the big city, we took the opportunity.

Amazingly, I found tickets for opening night at the Joyce Theater in Chelsea, a small modern dance theater. Even more amazing than that was that they were affordable.

The audience was treated to two brand new ballets from Rhoden and Richardson, Dirty Wire and Mercy (2 movements). The first ballet was set to an interesting ambient noise-like music and is described as:

In this complex world of communication, Dirty Wire looks at the advantages and disadvantages of being able to connect instantly; how those instant connections affect our relationships, what they do to intimacy and how negotiating distance becomes a new element in our bonds.

The entire first act consists of Dirty Wire…45 minutes of beautiful and innovative dance performed by phenomenal artists. It’s a powerful piece, but I felt myself more drawn to the second act, Mercy:

…an epic work with abstractions depicting passion and kindly forbearance with a yearn for grace and permanence in the sacred and spiritual deliverance of mankind. It poses the question: to what degree does humanity have to go in order for there to be some kind of relief? Mercy looks at the desire to advance without violence but shows the inevitable challenges in doing so. Although abstract in its format, Mercy hopes to provide a context for real images of pleading, forgiveness, indignation, grace and pity.

The description provided in the playbill is so apropos to this ballet and is somewhat unnecessary. Much of this is very obviously communicated in the dance, particularly when co-Artistic Director Desmond Richardson emerges and dances with the company. It’s powerful stuff.

After the limited engagement at the Joyce Theater in New York, the company will head out on tour in January, focusing on Southern states initially, then heading overseas to Australia (February 2010), Spain/France (March 2010), Germany (May/June 2010) and Israel (July 2010). There are periodic U.S. dates sprinkled in and performances in Pittsburgh, Portland and New Bedford, MA (April 2010).

If you are a fan of dance, particularly of ballet — and even more specifically, Alvin Ailey-esque ballet and Complexions comes to your town, I implore you to go see it. There are a couple different programs. We saw the one with the new ballets, but the others look just as compelling (particularly Rise, which includes the music of U2).

Unfortunately, the ballet is not coming to Kansas City, but if it’s coming near your city, go see it.

This post could not be possible without the help of the Complexions Ballet, who provided me with the high-quality pictures and information about the tour.

Having not seen the first one, I didn’t know what to expect.

It was funny, completely owned by Janet Paone, who originated the role and played Vivian Snustad, the uptight Lutheran matriarch of the kitchen.

The food at the New Theatre is edible, but extremely beige. It’s buffet food, so…well…I don’t really need to say anything else about that. The service is very good.

As far as value for entertainment goes, it’s a very nice evening out.