Jaminfrog

I’m glad finals are over tonight. These tests have turned me into a real Scrooge!

At SMU, we wanted to send out a year-end reminder to ask non-donors to make a gift before Dec. 31. We’ve tried the tear-jerker with the alma mater playing in the background and boring stuff like that before, so this time we were able to stretch the boundaries a little bit and speak to why people really give this time of year (besides the goodness of their hearts) — the tax deduction!

I never thought we’d see a day when I could work Britney Spears into a giving solicitation, but I had to jump at the chance while I could.

Check it out and let me know what you think! Everybody in our e-marketing department had a big hand in this — James played the part of Professor E.Z. Deduction, Katy designed it, Bill worked the Flash magic and Cavin helped pull it all together in the end. Oh yeah, and I supplied the fake professor accent using a little hand-held voice recorder.

With the $100 iPhone “Sucker Bonus” that I received from Apple — thanks to the fact that we bought an iPhone on the second day it came out when we could have waited three months and paid $200 less — we got Chel a little iPod Shuffle of her own. For one thing, it’s about the only thing you can buy from Apple for less than a Benjamin…but Chel’s use of the iPhone this summer convinced her that having a little music player of her own would be kind of fun. Now if I can only convince her not to fill it with Enya and George Winston…

After launching BuyBenaniPhone.com and receiving more than $10 in donations (although I really only got $6.56 because of PayPal transaction charges), I decided on the day they started selling them to go with some work friends to the mall during lunchtime to see if people were actually lining up outside. At that point it was 100 people and counting.

To razz Chel about her persistent denial of my iPhone dreams, I called her (on my non-iPhone) and left her a message that we were stopping by the Apple store. She called me back and told me I should go ahead and get it.

“You’re yanking my chain,” I said, or something to that effect.

“No, you should get it. Congratulations on a great first year of law school!”

Suffice it to say that much of the rest of the afternoon was spent coming up with my purchase strategy. We had to go somewhere that night, so I knew that joining the line outside the store wasn’t the way to go. I decided to order it online promptly at 8 p.m. when it became available. With all the hype I just knew it would be sold out in a few minutes. But I got through, and my phone would be delivered within 2-4 weeks.

The next day while I was out running some weekend errands, I happened to drive by the Apple store again so I decided to stop in and see if I could try it out. There was a pretty big crowd milling about, but no line or anything, so I figured the store had to have sold out their allotment for the day. After a friendly Apple store rep gave a few of us a guided tour of the iPhone, the guy next to me announced that he was going to go get one, walked nonchalantly up to the counter, and checked out.

Huh. So they’re not sold out! I nonchalantly walked up to the counter and purchased my own birthday-slash-Christmas-slash-anniversary-slash-first year of law school gift. (And yes, I did cancel my online order.)

So the iPhone is great and probably the coolest gadget I’ve ever had (and that’s saying a lot). But it’s too bad we got one, because Anne let me know yesterday morning that the Kidd Kraddick morning show was giving away an iPhone to one lucky man. The catch: the wife had to call in and simply give up something of value to the guy. I called Chel (this time, on the iPhone) and left her a message that we missed out…that she could have won me an iPhone by giving something up.

She left me a joking message back that she did give something up. She gave up her dining room table!

That may not sound like much, but if you’ve talked with Chel about home decorating lately, you know that she wants nothing more than a nice dining room table. We had almost saved up for it, and then I came along with BuyBenaniPhone.

The cool thing I’m learning about marriage is that it’s full of opportunities to give and to serve. I’m blessed — beyond the iPhone — that my wife gives so much to me every day. I hope that I can find ways to give and to serve her even half as much. Hopefully that will include a dining table and chairs sometime soon.

But in the meantime, you can play with the iPhone if you come over for dinner — you just may have to sit on the floor.

So the little Apple iPhone is coming out on Friday.

I’ve tried several angles in a quest to get one. In the budget process at work, I put one in the budget — you know, for completely legitimate mobile Internet-browsing reasons. The poor thing stayed in the budget about as long as it took my budget spreadsheet to be emailed from my computer to my boss’s computer.

I tried talking Chelsea into it. I even considered creating a spreadsheet showing how getting an iPhone would actually save us money compared to our current cell phone plan. Didn’t work either.

So since the big 3-0 is coming up in September, last night Chel said I should tell my family and friends that I wanted an iPhone for my birthday and asking them to contribute to my iPhone fund. And thus, BuyBenaniPhone.com is born. Although I made the site primarily for my own personal amusement, the giving page really would enable you to contribute to my bona fide iPhone savings account. So check it out, and if you were going to get me a birthday gift anyways, think about making a small contribution to the fund.

Perhaps even more disturbing than the sight of the baby that Chelsea and I made online is the sight of us disco dancing. I have asked the gang I work with whether there’s some way we could make use of this magic of the Internets here at SMU. We’ve just gotta come up with a plot that would be as entertaining and as disturbing as the sight of me in pink spandex while staying true to the educational mission of the university.

I’m about to celebrate my two-year anniversary with SMU. I really love the people I get to work with, and I’m learning a lot about marketing, Web geekery, managing people, working with vendors, and navigating the higher education environment.

Today was a big milestone because we launched a new alumni section of our Web site. This project has been going on in some form for three whole years…in other words, a year before I became a pony. It’s had various stops and starts due to changes in staff, changes in direction, roadblocks put up by vendors — you know, the usual work stuff.

The blessing and the curse of working in online marketing is that the good projects are never really done — they just keep evolving. So we’ll get up tomorrow and keep making little changes. But it was a proud moment today when we actually flipped the switch.

Mom and Dad, thanks again for the weather radio! We had big storms come through Dallas tonight and the sirens went off, so the animals and I huddled in the bathroom while everything blew through. (Chel is ok in Fort Worth at a client dinner and is waiting out the storms there.) They’re reporting a lot of trees down in Oak Cliff and our problem tree from last May lost another big branch that fell on the same power line, so I’m waiting on our friendly neighborhood tree service to take it out again.
 

Along with the handy weather radio, I also watched the news on my computer. I was at a conference last month where they reported that 20% of Americans have used the Internet in the bathroom! I thought to myself at the time that I would never be that guy. Any port in a storm I guess!

Kath forwarded me Google’s driving directions from New York to Paris. Pretty funny!