lechtanski

Happy Mommy’s Day
05-09-2010

Happy Mother’s Day to my beautiful wife…

… my fantastic Stepmom and my incredible Mom.


lechtanski
(1)

A Couple of Raves
04-15-2010

Two pieces of technology I wanted to gush about for a few minutes.

First, Skype. I feel like the last guy getting on the Skype train. The last hold out. Listen. It’s not worth it. The holding out part, I mean. Skype is pretty fantastic!

We just had a baby, yadda, yadda. My Mom was in town for a few weeks to help us get settled. Having her go home was a big, big change in our little guy’s life. But check this out. Two days later, Evan got to see and hear his Grandma again. Even better, he also got to see and hear his Nanna; and his cousins Kali and Kaitlyn got to see and hear Evan for the first time.

You can only say so much about the video phone concept, and I was still on the fence until we actually tried it. I’m sold. It is intoxicating.

Second is Netflix, again. I’m an old school Netflx subscriber. I left for a while, but came back for lots of reasons. I was bummed for a while that the Watch Instantly feature wasn’t available for Macs for a long time, but they finally came around.

So, last Tuesday I got a surprise Netflix disc in the mail. When put in my Wii, I get to watch all this stuff instantly on my TV. All this content right there to browse and watch. I’m a Dish Network subscriber and have a few minor complaints. The On-Demand stuff is slow; the broadband connection has never worked right with multiple customer service calls. In general we’re happy, but the Netflix/Wii system worked flawlessly within 5 minutes of the disc being taken out of the mailbox.

The timing of these is great, what with the baby leading to us continuing our homebody trend for a bit longer.


lechtanski, movies, technology, tv
(0)

More photos of the boy
04-07-2010

We have launched a page for Evan. Photos will be added as he does more and more impressive/adorable things.


lechtanski
(0)

Welcome to the World, Young Master Evan Lechtanski
03-17-2010

Born March 17, 2010. Weighing in at 10lbs, 2oz. 23 inches tall.


lechtanski
(2)

Technology-Induced ADD
12-20-2009

Let’s start with this. I am connected. I have a Blackberry. I blog. I tweet. I’m on Facebook. I’m LinkedIn. I have my own domain. This is all for both work and personal reasons.

I’ve found myself opening my Blackberry RSS reader at red traffic lights. I’ve had my lovely wife pull the Blackberry from my hands during dinner with friends. I’ve found myself watching TV while being logged onto Facebook, clicking through emails on my Blackberry and talking on the phone.

Frankly, I’ve hit a wall. It’s OK to be connected, but I have made the decision to not live my life connected moment to moment. Two things led to this decision.

  1. A few years ago I was on a whale watching boat ride. Camera in hand, and hearing the oohs and ahhs of other passengers, I would swing around trying to capture the jumping whale on a memory stick. I was not very successful. And I didn’t get to actually see many of the whales because I was too busy staring at the LCD screen of my camera. Finally, I gave up on the camera and just started watching nature.
  2. More recently I went to a marketing automation seminar a couple of weeks ago. Participants were encouraged to tweet the event in real time… during presentations. This seemed like a good idea, but I noticed that in order to tweet I needed to stop paying attention to the speaker. And then to follow the Twitter event feed, I was staring at my Blackberry, not paying much attention to the event itself. And to top that, most of the tweets were simple regurgitations of some of the key points of the person currently speaking.

I’m done. It’s over. I check my email when I have a second. I’ll tweet when something comes up (usually when I’m traveling).

As a marketer, I’ve been curious how these hyper-connected tools will be monetized. There is more to think about here. I’ve had my toe dipped in this water from a business perspective for a couple of years, but still, I’ve got to marinate a bit more on this.


lechtanski, marketing, technology
(0)