Rob Jearls

Cycling Facts for the Masses

rob jearls — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:26:35 +0000

Despite my recent cycling accident, I want to ride more then ever. In fact, I’m probably going to buy a new bike.

The following is a short list of cycling facts:

25% of all trips are made within a MILE of the home
The average person loses 13 lbs. their first year of commuting by bike.
The U.S. could save 462 million gallons of gasoline a year by increasing cycling from 1% to 1.5% of all trips.
Between 1960 and today the average weight of a 6-11 year old has increased 11 pounds.
64% of adults in the U.S. are overweight or obese.
You can park 14 bikes in the same space you can park one car.
Each U.S. rush-hour auto commuter spends an average of 50 hours a year stuck in traffic.
Just three hours of bicycling per week can reduce your risk of heart disease and stroke by 50%.

Facebook Status: Epithetic

rob jearls — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:00:50 +0000

Facebook is good for very few things. Social networks, in general, are a waste of time. But admittedly, I do enjoy knowing what people are… thinking. Is that how you’d classify the status updates?

Although the quick and dirty read-through’s have been satisfying, what was once a simplified “What are you doing right now?”, has become the mind numbing question of “What is on your mind?”. This new question sounds more like a self-conscious college teen queen type who asks her boyfriend what he’s thinking every time he’s silent for more than
5 minutes.

This is an existential crisis! The old formula was simply a declarative statement: ‘Rob is hungry‘, ‘Rob is listening to the Beatles‘, ‘Rob is no longer submitting status updates via FB, because the new question has triggered his angina‘. So if I am hungry, and asked ‘What’s on my mind?’, do I type ‘grilled cheese sandwich’? Then my status update would read, ‘Rob grilled cheese sandwich.’

If people were honest, the Facebook news feed would consist of either grammatically incorrect, 1-word edicts or a series of uncomfortably intimate affirmations. ‘My girlfriend needs to lose a few pounds‘. ‘Tommy is a jerk‘. ‘Wall outlet‘.

I liked it better when we were all just hungy.

Sony’s Latest Piece of Shit

rob jearls — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:34:40 +0000

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work

Next to The Daily Show with John Stewart and the Huffington Post, the Onion has some of the best writing of the 21st century.

If you’ve had any experience with Sony products, then the clip to the lefl will be very familiar. Since Sony’s root-kit debacle, they have been a bit more in tune to the consumer voice, but still have been unable to manufacturer a product that the community can actually rally around.

Anyway, make sure you’re in an appropriate place to view this ‘report’, as it contains a variety of curse words… It is fucking hilarious, though!

Conspiracy in Spain

rob jearls — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 04:23:10 +0000

With 10 miles (16 kilometers) left in the first stage of the Vuelta Ciclista Castilla y Leon, Astana rider, Lance Armstrong, crashed with 7 other riders and shattered his collarbone. This was the first time he had suffered such an injury in his 17 years as a professional cyclist. Lance commented on this injury by stating, “It’s pretty painful.”

Needless to say, he will be returning to the states where he will be seen by a proper doctor to determine if he needs surgery. The conspiracy entails seven riders being involved in a pretty horrific crash, and only one of them sustained an injury. And a serious injury it was. It’s certain to end his hopes for riding in the Giro d’Italia, one of cycling’s more renown races.

Now I don’t want to say it’s worse for Lance, or worse for team Astana, but it’s especially worse for me. See I was planning on traveling to Georgia for the Tour de Georgia. I was looking forward to seeing Lance, Floyd, a couple French-ies, and other professional riders peddling the southeastern country side. What a hassle this is…

Stress Coaster

rob jearls — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 05:01:16 +0000

The stress roller coaster starts with a bracketed, pulley system linking my to-do’s with my must-do-today’s. And every locking, chain linked notch is THE priority.

My relentless climb to the top is met with a one man request for a webinar setup, a produced email marketing campaign, and published e-newsletter in… and now I’m quoting, “an hour”. It is, in fact, ridiculous!

It was the best of times. It was the worst of time. It was not too much to ask for a few days notice. I do, however, have a 3 crisis situation, including America’s largest wireless telecom company having metaphorically set fire to my office. Curiously, this please-and-thank-you has been a work in progress for 2 weeks (with an apparent launch date), and the person needing to deliver the good word is left without warning.

One Love

Never Rely on a Media Hosting Service

rob jearls — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:30:45 +0000

Do NOT depend on another company, or media delivery service, to host important content!

First of all, we are not stealing images by directly linking to someone’s site/blog/whatever. These were our images hosted on our email marketers’ servers. The HTML had been copied and currently resides on our company’s servers. About 2pm today, the hosting provider decided to update/shorten their location script leaving all of our e-newsletters image-less.

The images can be recovered, and updating the e-newsletters will be fairly easy, but unfortunately time consuming.

I do not like busy work!