Enjoying late night hockey

I love watching hockey at night. I run a fantasy hockey league and there is nothing better than closing out the evening with your guy scoring the game winning goal!

Watching the Dallas-Chicago game and they just assigned a second assist to Mike Modano when he never touched the puck. That phantom assist tied Modano for the all-time points lead for U.S. born players, which put the crowd in a frenzy. Now do you go back and suck the wind out of the fans' sails by saying "whoops, sorry, false alarm folks"?

Interesting side note about Mike Modano: he used to play pond hockey with my sister and her friends back around 1980-81. Small world, huh?

Jessica, my niece and flute player

It's nice to have extra time to spend with family you don't get to see often enough. I have been in Georgia visiting my sister Sandy and her family this week, and it has been a pleasure.

It seems the older I get the more I appreciate family more, and the more I look forward to seeing those that live out of town.

My niece Jessica is fifteen and is quite the softball pitcher. This year she made the decision to focus her attention on her flute playing, and it is really starting to pay off. Jessica performs with her school marching band and practices often, making sure her performance is just right.

In this video here she is working on a new piece she received for her school's annual Christmas performance.

Talent is something that many of us take for granted, myself included. What may seem easy for one, is difficult for many others. I might think it is nothing when I pick up the harmonica and blow out a few blue riffs, whereas someone else can never see themselves puffing out more than a few unorchestrated sour notes.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with giving ourselves a pat on the back for our abilities now and then, and Jessica certainly deserves to toot her own horn a bit for all her hard work in her flute playing.

"What would Uncle John say?"

My brother Randy and I flew in to Georgia on Friday night, and with that I owe a thank you for the 11 mini-bottles of whiskey and 6 beers that AirTran provided us in first class on the flight.

If you ever fly AirTran, they offer you the ability to upgrade to first class at the time you check in, and it usually varies between $40-$85, depending on how far you're flying. If you like leg room and drinking, it is well worth it.

We're in town visiting with our sister Sandy and her family, and to partake in her annual Halloween party this past Saturday. But the trip took on a more somber purpose: we found out Saturday morning that our Uncle John passed away.

Uncle John was my dad's brother and my favorite uncle. He was probably one of the best men I ever knew, and I don't make that statement lightly. I have two nephews and three nieces myself, and whenever I'd interact with them I told myself I wanted to be just like my Uncle John to them. That's the kind of profound impact this man had on my life.

This news took all of my family by complete surprise. Uncle John was living healthy, seemed healthy when we saw him this summer, and to find out he was suddenly gone one night in his sleep completely boggles my mind and frightens my heart.

So as we digested the news and contemplated plans for going to Florida, we remembered that we had a Halloween party planned that night. How do you party after hearing news like this? So my sister Sandy put the question out there: "What would Uncle John say?"

Without any hesitation we all had the same answer: "Have that party!"

And we did. I went out and got my costume: a "Big and Tasty" pickle barrel with a convenient hole cut out of the front for "pickles" to be dispensed. (Pictures will eventually make their way to this blog.) Then we had an awesome time with a great group of people. It was wonderful to see friends from when I used to live in Georgia.

During the party I stopped for a moment and thought that somewhere my Uncle John is sitting with my Grandpa looking down on me and saying, "look at Bob's boy. That has to be the most ridiculous looking costume I've ever seen." I can't argue with that assessment.

I will miss you terribly, Uncle John. Thank you for showing me how a truly awesome Uncle should be. I could not have asked for a better gift.

Andy Beard Linked to Me: How Cool is That?

I absolutely love total surprises. Positive surprises, of course. I'm talking about those surprises where there's no hinting, no build up, just *plop* - there it is. I got one of those today.

Now last night there was a contest going on at Problogger.net to see who could come up with the best slogan to apply to all the sites affected by this recent Google PageRank tomfoolery.

So with a little time to kill I fired up Macromedia Fireworks and began to play around with a couple of concepts until I came up with this:



As I looked through my Google Reader this morning, I came across an interesting headline in Andy Beard's Niche Marketing blog: Google PageRank: Joke of the Blogosphere? With all the serious discussion about the topic, it begged a look (as most of Andy's stuff does).

As I read through the piece, I found my contest entry featured with a few other contest entrants along with a link to the KeenDad site!

So as far as the contest on Problogger.net goes, I don't know if I'll win as there were quite a few worthy entries, but thanks to Mr. Beard, I have already won a great prize... exposure!

Organic Traffic and McDonald's Monopoly: Didn't see this coming

A couple weeks back I posted an article on KeenDad about the rare pieces for the 2007 Monopoly game going on at McDonald's. I didn't think anything of it; it was just some good information I stumbled upon via Google (and not "Stumble Upon" this time) and wanted to share it.

So I wrote the post, linked to the original source of the information and published it. Two days later as I was looking over my Google Analytics statistics, I noticed a gigantic spike in visitors. Looking into it a bit further I noticed all the traffic was coming from one place: Google.



I wish I could tell you I learned some magic formula for making pages pop up to the top for particular keywords, 'cause if I did I'd be rich. As far as I can tell it was simply luck of the draw, as the keywords I ranked highest for were both in the URL of the blog entry, and sprinkled throughout the page as well.

I've never had this much organic search traffic come through for any page I've ever had, so this was a thrill to see some instant results from my blogging work.

6,408 page views may not seem like much to someone like John Chow, but to me and my little hobby blog, it felt pretty spectacular. Of course it would have been nice to see more a little more monetization from the traffic, but hey - it will come with time.

Welcome to my blog!

Well, you've stumbled across it. My own personal blog. I don't believe there will be any rules to what I will or won't write; just whatever comes to my mind at the time.

At the moment I have 3 other blogs going:

• KeenDad: a blog dedicated to finding the coolest free tools and sites on the Internet!
• Goobaga: a blog dedicated to everything funny on the Internet.
• SpinBee: a common sense approach to the news.

I have always enjoyed writing, and with the power of blogging and the Internet, I have an audience!

Thanks for reading!