On an unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon in February, my wife and I went for a free guided tour of the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. The hour-plus tour was guided by a man named David who volunteers his time giving these educational and fun tours. His community giving got me thinking as to how we all give back to our social communities each day.

How are you giving back?

It’s more likely that you will see someone bashing the domain giant online, but I would like to give credit where it is due. Now this post isn’t all out praising Danica Patrick’s sponsor, but rather a single employee named James from the support team.

Now James is on the customer service team and I am sure that he works on some kind of commission based scale, so I was pleasantly surprised when he did not try to sell me during my hour-plus conversation with him. Instead he offered free workarounds to a $150 fee to help rid of the site issues that I was having in the process he probably gave up some commission, but gave a great customer experience. A fair trade-off if you ask me.

So again, thank you James, you made a bad situation decent and did the decent thing of not tricking me into thinking I needed to pay an extra $150. Here’s to hoping you get a raise or promotion.

GoDaddy, I forgive you for the bad Super Bowl commercials this year.

Let me start out by saying thank you to everyone who has offered some tips to fix some of the issues that I have been having with my site in the past few weeks. Danny Brown and PRCog, I wish the solutions that you guys hooked me up with were the only issues that I had. As mentioned in the video above, my site was hacked via a link with phishing nasties on them – thanks to Aurora Meyer for first pointing this out to me.

As a flack, I am clicking countless links surrounding the company and also do some policing of policies, so my computer has had its share of issues, but nothing major. I am still trying to figure out if it was one of these links or the Twitter phishing issue that compromised the site, but needless to say it was a pain in the ass to get fixed. I also apologize if you had any issues with any bugs or Spyware pop-ups from visiting my site. I hope that your tools caught them and no harm came to you.

The hacker also compromised the RSS and email feed so if you were subscribed in the past, please click here for the new RSS or sign into the email above.

Thanks.

Jeff

This video is a response to Mike Schaffer’s vlog over the weekend on doing a snow angel for 12for12K. I am not sure of the bet he lost, but think it could be a fun thing to continue after young Cole made his first one for the charity earlier today. I kind of feel bad because Mike got all the snow we usually get in Boston, but hey I tried with the snow I have and made a snow smiley face.

Keep it smiling and help out a good cause here.

Click here if you can’t view the video.

It has been a few months since I read a book that was a.) fiction and b.) non work  career development driven. Many folks told me I simply needed to have fun and really relax. So I figured, hey what the hell, but couldn’t figure a book that I should pick up.

That was until walked into our building’s laundry room and looked at a book that was sitting on the free pile. It was Mitch Albom’s The Five People you Meet in Heaven. I have wanted to read this book for a while now, but never got around to it, so this gave me an excuse to check it out. Granted the book is pure fiction, but I took away an important thing from it that I am going to try to implement in my life both personally and professionally – stopping to enjoy the little things. One of my biggest problems is that I don’t enjoy the everyday successes and dwell to much on the losses.  So you could call it a belated new year’s resolution courtesy of Mitch Albom.