As technology advances, we have found ourselves to adapt our flirting accordingly to our online lives. I remember when Facebook enabled poking and it was the next big thing. I would poke people for the hell of it not thinking it was "flirting." Luckily, The Frisky has come to the rescue and has compiled the steps to flirting online successfully. I've also included a hilarious video of a Facebook parody of ehamony.com. Now go on and get your mac on!

A local hemp store in Calgary, Alberta in Canada called Grass Roots plastered their city with these stickers. As you can see, Grass Roots is clearly taking advantage to promote their company during Michael Phelp's marijuana controversy. I think it's quite ingenious, current and relevant, even though some could see this as taboo.

We have another classic case of something so absurd that there's no other word to describe it, but deliciously fantastic. I'm sure you all have seen the late night hit infomercial plenty of times. The Snuggie, described as a handy solution freeing your arms from the evils of the armless slots of a blanket is basically an oversized robe worn backwards. Snuggies went on sale in August, began TV advertising in October and started shipping to retailers in December. Already, 4 million have been sold.

So why is it such a hit? I think it's because the infomercials are so corny you can't help but love them. That along with their attractive pricing point (two for $19.95, plus free book light online and on TV, about $14.99 for one in stores) it makes it hard to resist, plus, what college kid wouldn't love to brag and sport his Snuggie around campus during this Texas cold front. He would be the big man on campus with all the girls fawning over him and thanks to the Snuggie he can now easily hug them all.

Indeed, Snuggies seem to be everywhere. See them on Facebook — nearly 250 groups, pro and con; one fan club lists 5,999 members. Watch them on YouTube — nearly 300 parody videos posted, including one titled "The Cult of the Snuggie," with 146,000 views as of Tuesday.

There are also snarky Snuggie-love sites on the Internet, such as SnuggieSightings.com, where fans post photos, videos and "news." Did you know that Snuggie drinking games are sweeping colleges? Students take a swig every time a Snuggie ad airs after midnight. How brilliant and ingenious is that, it makes me miss college.

As a disclaimer, I will not judge you if you are part of the 4 million who bought one. Actually, my arms are freezing as I type this entry and I know the perfect solution to my problem!

Is it so wrong that I get pleasure from these pictures? I love the media during game time, they sure do know how to pick out the criers. It's like a sixth sense and a waiting game. I would surely be honored to shake the hands of these talented camera men. Cry, kids, cry - your tears feed my appetite!

Tonight was the premiere of season 3 of 10 Items or Less on TBS. I've never seen any of the other episodes, so I thought I would give it a try. The commercials for the premiere looked funny. The show is a partly scripted and partly improvised comedy series. The series is about Lehr, who is a less than successful businessman, who returns home to run Greens & Grains, the family-owned supermarket, upon the death of his father.

Tonight's episode revolved around a game of turkey bowling in the supermarket. As amazing and fun as that sounds, what really caught my attention was the blatant and absurd product placement throughout the episode, which was so ridiculous that you couldn't help but find funny. Oh, I forgot to mention that the premiere was "commercial free."

For the season premiere, Unilever is presenting the 30-minute sitcom commercial-free and hawking its Vaseline Man and Hellman’s Light products. Star and co-creator John Lehr, who plays grocery-store owner Leslie Pool, is seen extolling the virtues of both products during key moments of the show with a self-aware, over-the-top delivery reminiscent of clueless boss Michael Scott, played by Steve Carell, on NBC’s The Office.

The common thread for all these real-life products is Unilever, the package-goods company that has partnered with Turner Entertainment’s sales and marketing group through the years on a series of commercial-busting branded-entertainment projects, including 10 Items or Less integrations and short-form series such as 2006’s Love Bites for Sunsilk hair products.

Since the premiere is also being presented commercial-free, Lehr appeared in a pair of network promos on TBS and TNT. In one ad, he’s seen with bottles of Hellmann’s and Vaseline Man strapped to his shoulders, exclaiming, “It’s such a relief to be able to do TV without commercials!”

Today I went to my local library to check out some books. I asked if I could get a library card and all I needed to present was my driver's license. I did so only to find out I already had a card that has been inactive for 6 years. Has it really been that long since I used it in high school?!?! Oh, the joys of growing older.

You need to deeply desire the goal or resolution. Napoleon Hill, in his landmark book, Think and Grow Rich, had it right. "The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat." So, your first step in goal setting and achieving your dreams is that you've got to really, really want to achieve the goal.

Visualize yourself achieving the goal. Lee Iacocca said, "The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind." What will your achievement feel like? How will your life unfold differently as a result? If the goal is a thing, some gurus of goal setting recommend that you keep a picture of the item where you see and are reminded of it every day. If you can’t picture yourself achieving the goal, chances are – you won’t.

Make a plan for the path you need to follow to accomplish the goal. Create action steps to follow. Identify a critical path. The critical path defines the key accomplish-ments along the way, the most important steps that must happen for the goal to become a reality. Stephen Covey said, "All things are created twice. There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation of all things. You have to make sure that the blueprint, the first creation, is really what you want, that you've thought everything through. Then you put it into bricks and mortar. Each day you go to the construction shed and pull out the blueprint to get marching orders for the day. You begin with the end in mind." He's right.

Commit to achieving the goal by writing down the goal. Lee Iacocca said, "The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen." I agree completely. Write down the plan, the action steps and the critical path. Somehow, writing down the goal, the plan and a timeline sets events in motion that may not have happened otherwise. In my own life, it is as if I am making a deeper commitment to goal accomplishment. I can’t fool myself later. The written objective really was the goal.

Establish times for checking your progress in your calendar system, whatever it is: a day planner, a PDA, a PDA phone or a hand written list. If you’re not making progress or feel stymied, don't let your optimism keep you from accomplishing your goals. No matter how positively you are thinking, you need to assess your lack of progress. Adopt a pessimist’s viewpoint; something will and probably is, going to go wrong. Take a look at all of the factors that are keeping you from accomplishing your goal and develop a plan to overcome them. Add these plan steps to your calendar system as part of your goal achievement plan.

Review your overall progress regularly. Make sure you are making progress. If you are not making progress, hire a coach, tap into the support of loved ones, analyze why the goal is not being met. Don’t allow the goal to just fade away. Figure out what you need to do to accomplish it. Check the prior five steps starting with an assessment of how deeply you actually want to achieve the goal.

This six step goal setting and achieving system seems simple, but it is the most powerful system you will ever find for achieving your goals and living your resolutions. You just need to do it. Best wishes and good luck.

As each new year rings in comes the traditional new years resolutions we create for ourselves. For me, this year will be different than the rest because I'm not in college anymore. With that, new goals will be set as I have different objectives in life now, though some will remain inline with previous years.

Some Goals For 2009

• Triple the amount of competitive races I participate in, where two have to be marathons
• Join a tennis league and get back into the game
• Read more pr/adv/marketing books
• Get my personal website up online
• Dive deeper into social media and discover more ways it can be integrated into pr
• Become my firms social media champion
• Create new relationships in top-tier publications
• Connect and establish strong relationships with other pr professionals
• Land my dream job in a new city, although staying in Dallas isn't bad at all

It'll be interesting to see how much I can accomplish by the years end. For now, it shall be my bench mark and my motivator.

An engineering student constructed a beer pong table with glowing LEDs, cup sensors, and a wireless module. It's one of the most advanced tables you could ever puke on.

The DIY project is powered by five microcontrollers and features 120 RGB LEDs, five per cup. The lights pulse and change color depending on the arrangement of see-through plastic cups, and is equipped with a wireless module to let it communicate with a scoreboard to be constructed later. The LEDs are under a sheet of glass to protect them from the cheap beer of choice.

Oh, to be an engineering student and in college again...why did I ever quit?

Gmail can't always prevent you from sending emails you might later regret, but recently they launched a new Labs feature called Mail Goggles which may help.

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?


By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend - as that is the time you're most likely to need it, genius. Once enabled, you can adjust when it's active in the General settings.


Hopefully Mail Goggles will prevent many of you out there from sending messages you wish you hadn't cause we know we all had them. Now to solve the problem of sending drunken text messages.

I just downloaded Beyonce's new CD I Am Sasha Fierce and when I heard one of the songs it sounded familiar. After some research, I discovered why the song "Smash Into You" sounded so familiar. I heard it live from the love of my life, Jon McLaughlin, when I saw him in concert on my birthday.

The song, originally called “Smack Into You,” was written for McLaughlin’s sophomore album Ok Now by Tricky Stewart and The-Dream. Though, the song was later scrapped from the album, Jon did perform the song live on his summer/fall tour. Not letting an amazing song go to waste, it was presented to Beyonce and changed to “Smash Into You” - that’s the part Beyonce must have “written” in order to receive that coveted writing credit because the two versions are practially identical lyrically otherwise.

In any case, I like both versions, but my heart holds dear to Jon's!

Last Thursday, I was invited to attend the Macallen whiskey tasting in downtown Dallas. Pictured above is the swag bag I got after the event. I RSVPed and invited along three other fellow longhorns to indulge in a night of alcohol. Upon arriving, the event was hosted in a museum and quite decadent to say the least. I was expecting more of a yuppie crowd, but there were some veteran whiskey drinkers at the event. My assumption was Macallen was trying to target the newly young professional who had not had an affinity for a certain whiskey brand and they wanted to be that choice. We started the night with a tasting of a two year old whiskey. The "brand ambassador" aka the night's presenter started the night with a presentation that encompassed a slew of topics from luxury cars, Scotland, Macallen distribution and anything related to whiskey. About every 10 minutes into the presentation they would serve another tasting of whiskey, a total of four throughout the night. Each tasting progressively was aged longer and was supposed to taste better, but to me all whiskey taste the same. The final tasting was aged 18 years old.

After the event, I jumped in my car and rushed over to Arlington for a friend's birthday dinner and for those who don't know where Arlington is it's the other side of town. I raced over and got there an hour late and and true fashion grabbed a drink and forewent any food. We finished eating, then decided we would hit up S4 for the drag show. It was a slow night, but I was having a good time with everyone and the drag queens were amusing to comment on. There were only four that night and all of them were obvious men and kinda gross. There was one with a busted mouth that seemed like it was perpetually stuck to the left side of her face. The MC even made a comment of how everyone with a drink should take a big gulp before she came out. She was buuuusted. Please sir, stay a sir. Throughout the night the MC was trying to get the audience involved and since it was a friend's birthday she kept getting dragged on stage. Each time she went up she was given another drink and let's say she's not the biggest drinker and a tiny asian girl. You can assume how the night progressed for her. One point in the night she was forced to make out with this rather large married lady who had six kids. Kinda grossed, but I laughed my ass off. Finally, a break from my normal Thursday nights!

How novel is the team at Weeds? Their team sent out bouquets of hemp plants wrapped up to look like a marijuana joint to the press and media agencies to promote the premiere of the series. Personally, I've never seen the show, but if I were to receive this I would definitely give it a watch. The clever tie-in between the show with something deliverable and visual is definitely worth mentioning.

History has been made and Obama is now the 44th elected president of the United States. Surprisingly, the election wasn't as close as people predicted. Way to go!

Looks like Starbucks is giving out free coffee to anyone who says they voted on Tuesday. Pretty smart marketing to me. Shows they care, or at least want people to think they do, for a nobel cause and it drives traffic and exposure to their business. Let's talk about the actually video - I think it's genius. It's simple and straight forward. The background music has a sense of urgency and reminds me of another cause video, but I can't remember it right now, maybe it'll come to me later. It contains text that moves dynamically throughout the screen with content that has one goal in mind: to get you thinking.

I'm definitely grabbing a free coffee on Tuesday.

**update** I remember which cause video the music reminded me of, the real beauty videos from Dove! Thoughts?

This morning I woke up in a hurried frenzy, I was late for work. I jolted up and immediately dialed my supervisor's cell phone number only to realize it's a Saturday morning. Funny what drinking does to you.

p.s. She didn't pick up.

Great game this weekend UT! Way to show OU what we're made of and rise to #1 in the ranks! Hook 'em!

I'm missing the belligerent and drunken debaucheries of college life - actually of life in general. This job thing is interring with my life way too much. I think it may be time to reconsider a vocation that will be more accommodating. Here's to sustaining a job only long enough to fund spontaneous adventures and bail money, who's with me!

Wow, I just got hit up by the alumni center from UT asking for donations on a Sunday night! What the heezie, do they not know I just graduated and can't even support myself. Those money vampires!

Crazy where this thing is headed and how far in it could go.