Cool Marketing Thoughts

Last night I woke up and it was still dark outside. I usually don’t wake up early. I was staring at my ceiling and saw the last fractions of a dream replay. I was a little boy, standing out in the fields and looking up to the sky. At the horizon I saw a light, an ignition of a rocket that was launched into the black, starfilled sky. I saw a beautiful stripe of light go up and make a bow as it went further and further away from me.

I went to sleep again and woke up later this morning, started doing some e-mails and such. Then I got a phone call from a colleague to inform me that David Boschmans had passed away last night. David was the guy that wheeled me in at Microsoft. He was my mentor, my trusted colleague and friend. We shared dreams and hopes. His insights and advice will always guide me.
I could never have dreamt of getting a better mentor.

I’m lucky to have met him. I feel lucky, even when I’m typing this and tears drip on my typing hands. David, My Dearest David. I will never ever forget you. I’ll miss you. I’ll miss you so damn much. There is no explanation possible for all the why’s I’m feeling, no person that can fill the empty gap you leave behind.

May God watch over your family and take care of them. Sweet dreams, David.

In a few hours I’ll be heading for Brussels airport to travel to Orlando, Florida. I’m going to an event called MGX, which is short for Microsoft Global Experience. MGX is an internal Microsoft conference for Microsoft’s global sales folks and the evangelists. It’s the occasion to meet A LOT of other employees, since about 14.000 will be attending, and I’m really looking forward to hook up with some people I haven’t seen in while.

I’ll be in the US until the 23rd, counting the timezone difference it’ll be the 24th when I get back. I’ll try to post from the hotel or from the conference, in between sessions.

For updates, clips and thoughts, check my other blog… since I try to keep this hobby and my work as separated as possible.

Yey. I’ve been to Las Vegas last week and I’ve had an awesome time! I actually won quite some money with blackjack and I got to pretend being a lucky winner. I’ve always wanted to be a lucky winner :-) It was soooo cool sitting at the table for six hours in a row and walking away with at least three times the money you started with. I’m sorry for the lack of updates, but I needed to work myself through a huge pile of email when I got back, I needed to finish two websites for an equal amount of friends, and I had a jetlag from here to Tokyo. That said, I’ve been uploading a stack of images to Flickr, and I’ll post them below so you can have a quick glance. I’ll be back on track as of today. Thanks for reading.

Some pictures were taken with the Nokia N95, a device I have received recently to test it out. I really like the quality of the images and the 5+ megapixels really delivered great quality, for sure, but uploading the snapshots to Flickr through the web browser was really time-consuming. I probably should plug in a USB cable and get the pics to the laptop to upload them in batch, but since I was on the move in Vegas and depending on wireless for the phone I had to do it like that. I do have to say that the wireless connects very easily for the Nokia N95, and that the uploading, once you’ve navigated to the right folder, was very fast. It does consume a lot of battery power though, but hey, it looks cool and it works great. I’ll tell you more about my mobile experience later.

First suggestions for Nokia:

• Have the phone remember the location of the images, it saves about 4 clicks I think, per image (+ moving the cursor to the right link every time). The images are stored on a micro SD card, so navigating to that time and again… that’s just way too hard.
• Need more battery power, for real
• Have the phone remember password settings in the browser. If you have a strong password like $TR0ngPaSSw0rd!, typing it again and again every time your wireless connection drops… Awch
• Need more battery power, for real

I’m back from Switzerland where I’ve spent my two-day planning meeting with the EMEA team to set up the programs for fiscal year 08. Things became much more clear and it was really productive. I think I’ve found my drive again. Let’s blog some. :-)

Sorry for the lack of posts. I had a few serious issues to deal with… and the last thing on my mind was this blog. I’ll pick up the wire where we left and I’ll start writing again. Bad things happen every once in a while. Luckily I live in a town where you can take extra long walks along the river side without meeting people so the wind can clear my thoughts.

Cheers.

Okay, entries are closed… If I trackback all of the entries that have been sent in between March 24th & April 4th, the list of the coolest entries is shown below. That means that I expect you readers to do a very small effort and vote for the post you liked the most in the comments of this post. Just say which one it is that you think deserves the Ultimate Warrior Keyboard, and I’ll get in touch with whoever sent it in and mail the prize to him/her. Thanks a lot for participating and providing me with all those links and campaigns. Please continue doing so, a lot of them where totally worth it and I loved checking out the tons of links I got and those I’ve posted even more.

Top:

1. Roxorloops (5 comments) by Arnaud De Geynst
2. Boobs Gone Wild (3 comments) by Johan Van Oeckel
3. Sticky Colors (2 comments) by Tim Willems
4. Personal Trainer (2 comments)
5. Information Revolution (2 comments) by Claudia Schiepers
6. Lost & Found (2 comments) by Alejandro La Torre
7. Don’t Pee In The Pool (2 comments) by Tanguy De Kelver
8. Nerd Alert (2 comments) by Dwergs
9. Exam Night (1 comment) by Tanguy De Kelver

So, go ahead and cast your ‘ays’ in the comments. I’ll leave this open for a week. Saturday, the best ad gets the prize.

To kind of celebrate the fact that this blog has been around for two years already, I decided to put it in a new template. I still need to tweak it a little here and there and make a new header… but most of the things are done. I can live with this design for a little while. I hope you guys (and girls) like it as well. You damn well better :-)

Some stats from the last 12 months of blogging:

• 33,959,591 hits
• 7,270,868 pageviews
• 2,196,785 visits

… and from two years of producing stuff:

• 4,000 backlinks in Technorati
• 1,662 posts
• 2,452 comments
• 67,674 spam comments blocked

I can’t thank all of you, readers, enough for making this work, for contributing and sending me campaigns and cool links, for sticking to the blog, even if I sometimes let it slip a couple of days because of travel or work load. I hope I’ll be around for a long time, with all of you, somewhere at some point. First one to catch me in real life after seeing this post gets a beer.

I’m off for a couple of days to Switzerland. I’ll try to post from the hotel if I have wi-fi or some other form of connection to the digital world. Back on Wednesday evening if all goes well. Keep sending in those entries and suggestions for the contest. The Wolf King keyboard might be yours very soon! :)