Tag Archives: BenSpark’s Big Box of Awesome

Photo-A-Day

Edward G. Lambert Insurance Christmas Party

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Edward G. Lambert Insurance Christmas Party
Photo-A-Day #1349

Allison has been doing some working three days a week. She works for my best friend Neil at the Edward G. Lambert Insurance Agency. Ed passed away nearly a year ago and Neil has taken over the business. A couple of months ago Allison was brought on to help out with a large data updating task. I think this has worked out very well for all parties involved.

Tonight was the company Christmas party which we celebrated at Cafe Porto Bello in downtown North Attleboro. It is important to keep things local, support local businesses and the local economy especially in these ever increasingly difficult economic times.

We had a wonderful meal. I actually got the same dish I had the last time I was at Cafe Porto Bello which was chicken wrapped around prosciutto and mozzarella in a mushroom sauce. It was delicious and Allison got the same thing. We also had great conversation and many entertaining stories about everything. Stories about Ed, stories about finding boats in insurance salvage yards and so many other things. It was a very nice evening.

The Sears Gift Card promotion is in full swing. I cannot believe how many people are entering this contest. I thought that BenSpark’s Big Box of Awesome! (winner to be announced tomorrow) was a big contest but this Sears one is a BIG contest. And so many people are entering with such great things that they would do, even people who have fallen on hard times themselves are looking to help others. They are really getting the spirit of the season as well as spirit of the contest.

The Nokia Chronicles folks asked for my feedback today. Oh I had feedback to give. Be on the lookout for a thought provoking post on that subject. Weigh in and let me know if my statements yesterday were based in reality or not.

Here is another shot I took on the way out of the restaurant.

Lights and Statue

I was playing with the lights again.

Also I read this interesting article on LifeHacker today about an Easter Egg on Flickr where you can add a note to someone’s photo that adds a Santa beard or Santa hat. All you do is create a note on the image that says ho ho ho hat to get the hat, it is resize-able and ho ho ho beard to get the resize-able beard. I did this to two of my photos from this past weekend. One of me and Transformers, and one of Allison, Eva and Santa.

Photo-A-Day

Fa La La La La

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Fa La La La La
Photo-A-Day #1348

Today was another really crazy day. I have a new project at work and I am pretty excited about it. But I don’t like talking work here on this blog or on any blog. This is a blog about me and my stuff for you like my daily photos.

With it being the Christmas season and my not being able to get home while it is still light out I end up taking many photos in the house. I am experimenting with the settings on the camera so I get some interesting, not great, shots. Here are a few that didn’t make it for today’s Photo-A-Day.

Eva and Winnie-the-Pooh
Eva in Warp Speed, or warp speed around Eva as she stands still?

Eva enjoying her book
Eva reading a book.

70's photo
Eva circa 1976. It has a 60’s or 70’s feel to the photo I think.

Today was also a major day because today launched a huge promotion on this blog. The promotion was with Sears. I have a sponsored post below that details an outing that Allison, Eva and I had at Sears. We had an wonderful time and did pretty well getting toys for Christmas is for Kids. I got the idea because of a post on Facebook by my college and high school friend Sarah. Her family’s auto shop sponsored a toy drive that I went to about a week or so ago.

Some people may think that getting toys is frivolous especially with people out of work and needing so much more, but I firmly believe that toys are so important to children. I see kids growing up way to fast and not having proper childhoods. Toys are powerful things to spark imagination. Overdoing it with toys is possible to so there has to be moderation. But I can’t see kids missing out on getting toys on Christmas, I just can’t. So, you may read that in my post I will be socking away $10 a month to do another shopping spree next year. That isn’t bullshit. I have already created a payee called Christmas is for Kids in Microsoft Money and each month when I am paid $10 gets put towards that payee, that way I know the money is spent. We should have a good sum of money to use next year.

I think that this is very important to do as a family and to show Eva that we can strive to help others.

So the BenSpark Grants A Wish contest is running till December 23rd. I have a contest to give away a Silver Pass to Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas, that contest ends this Friday, December 19th. So far no-one has entered. So if you decide to Enter you have a pretty good shot to win. The big contest however is BenSpark’s Big Box of Awesome. That contest ends tomorrow at 12:00pm EST. And there are a ton of entries. I have a very special thing planned to announce the winner too! Here is the last thing that is in the box, right now. If I have room I will maybe put some secrets in there too!

Car Shaped Carabiners Found in BenSpark's Big Box of Awesome!

Tonight I had my first ever IZEA Inisders meeting online. It was great to chat with all the insiders at once. And also great to chat with Ashley as well. That guy rocks! I may push him and give him a hard time but I love the guy.

Does anyone in my readership know of an affiliate opportunity with Rosetta Stone? Please leave me a message through my contact page. Thanks.

Our Christmas Tree

This is our Christmas tree. I keep trying different shots with it, this was decent, standard and all but it shows much of the tree. I had to crop the dining room table out of it. I have another photo of the tree up on the Nokia Chronicles site. If you load up the site and see the crappy picture of a floating Christmas tree, that would be mine. Lesson: Don’t give a blogger a craptastic 2MP phone to take photos and post to a site that should be a multimedia site but is just a sucktastic sucky site for sucky photos, it does not showcase the lives of the 20 diverse bloggers in the program. We should have gotten Nokia phones with full qwerty keyboards and unlimited usage for our 2 week trial periods. The bloggers deserve more from the program, the program deserves more for their expense as well. What they got was a glorified flash page that shows random pictures of things bloggers took pictures of. My Phone was recharged today with $25.00. I sent about 4 pictures to the site and I’m down to $21.00. I hate this phone (Nokia 6650), the plan and so much about this whole thing. I am embarrassed that my name is attached to the project as well. Before I finally got my refill I constantly got this message over and over.

Seriously!

So damn annoying. The site is terrible, there is no way to interact with the bloggers or comment on their photos. I have no memory card or cable for the phone so I can’t even pull up the images to share with you, they are on the site and that is that. (Wait, Oh I think I can, I may get them off the phone tomorrow and write what I should have been able to write in the 1st place. Okay I’ve ranted about this too much, but expect a full on rantfest when the project is over. I’m taking and sending a photo right now of my displeasure at the whole thing.