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!

Blog From Firefox
ScribeFire is an add-on for Firefox that lets you seamlessly blog from any page you happen to be on. Easily drag and drop images from a web page into ScribeFire to republish; saves time switching to an external image editor and FTP client.

Blog From Your Desktop
Ecto is a full-featured blogging desktop client for both Mac and Windows. It makes posting to multiple blogs incredibly easy. It's compatible with Wordpress, Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger, Drupal, and more. A great way to compose blog posts while offline for easy upload later. Ecto also integrates with NetNewsWire so you can easily create a draft post from an item in your newsreader.

Easily Convert Text to HTML
Markdown is a text-to-html conversion tool that works similarly to TextExpander and Texter (and can be used in conjunction with these tools). It allows you to write more naturally and later convert your text to properly-formatted HTML. You can even use Markdown as a script within BBEdit or Textwrangler (Mac) to easily convert text to HTML, and Markdown filters are also available in the compose window of Wordpress and Movable Type.

Quickly Copy Web Links as HTML
CoLT adds two menu items to the browser's context menu when you right click a hyperlink. Right click a hyperlink on a Web page, and the menu adds "Copy Link Text and Location As" to the menu enabling users to copy the text and its link in either HTML, plain text, BB Code, FuseTalk, or Wikipedia formats. Options can also be customized.

Automagically Create Roundup Posts
Lifehacker created this roundup maker to be used in conjunction with CoLT. Simply enter link and text from CoLT and add a description on the same line for each entry, then click "Generate Roundup," and you have a perfectly HTML-generated post.

Resize Images on the Fly
Photoshop, well CS3, too expensive? Gimp too complicated? If all you really need to do is resize and rotate your images, then ResizR is the tool for you. Browse. Upload. Convert.

Share Images Effortlessly
Using Skitch is super easy for quickly manipulating screenshots and found images to publish them elsewhere without resorting to using multiple applications. It also offers features like resizing and annotating.

Turn del.icio.us Bookmarks Into Daily Posts
Sign in to your del.icio.us account and select settings. In the section titled "Blogging," select "Blog Posting." Click, "Add a new job posting blog." Give it a "job name," like "Daily Link Blog," and then add your credentials for your del.icio.us account and your blog. Then set a time for your saved del.icio.us links to post to your blog every day.

Submit Your Posts to 20 Social Sites, All at Once
Onlywire is a tool that lets you easily submit any of your posts to about 20 social bookmarking sites for easy "social promotion." The plus, you can submit to all the sites simultaneously, which makes Onlywire different from other blog post sharing tools.

Add Super Search to Your Blog
Lijit is a tool that allows you to put a search widget on your blog that will search an aggregate of your created content from your blogs, Flickr, digg, del.icio.us, etc. It also gives you some nice result statistics about what your users are searching for.

Read the story here.

In November 2008, Facebook drew 200 million unique worldwide visitors; more than 1 in 5 people who accessed the Internet that month visited the site. When sites are that big growth generally stagnates, but in Facebook’s case it’s still skyrocketing. In December, 222 million people visited the site says newly released Comscore stats, a 10.8% month over month growth rate. 22% of the total Internet audience went to Facebook in December.

Facebook now has nearly 100 million more worldwide users than MySpace, which added 4 million new users in December to 125 million total. The page view difference is more dramatic - Facebook had 80 billion monthly page views in December v. 43 billion for MySpace. Just six months ago the sites were about the same size.

Facebook, still a private company, is the world’s default social network. MySpace is still the king in the U.S., but trends suggest that 2009 is its last year on top. By January 2010, at current relative growth rates, Facebook will overtake MySpace as the largest U.S. social network as well.

Pictured above is Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and the cofounder of Revision3 and Pownce. Kevin, who has over 88,000 followers on Twitter (making him the second most followed after President Obama) took some time out to offer 10 insightful tips to increase followers to your account.

1. Explain to your followers what retweeting is and encourage them to retweet your links. Retweeting pushes your @username into foreign social graphs, resulting in clicks back to your profile. Track your retweets using retweetist.
2. Fill out your bio. Your latest tweets and @replies don’t mean much to someone that doesn’t know you. Your bio is the only place you have to tell people who you are. Also, your bio is displayed on Twitter’s Suggested Users page. Leaving it blank or non-descriptive doesn’t encourage people to add you.
3. As @garyvee says, “link it up.” Put links to your Twitter profile everywhere. Link it on your Digg, LinkedIn, Facebook, blog, email signature, and everywhere else you live online. Also, check out the great feedburner-like badges from TwitterCounter for your blog.
4. Tweet about your passions in life and #hash tag them. Quality content coupled with an easy way to find it never fails. If others enjoy your content, they’ll add you. Learn more about #hash tagging here.
5. Bring your twitter account into the physical world. Every time I give a talk, speak on a panel, shoot a podcast, present slides, or hand out business cards, I figure out a way to broadcast or display my twitter account.
6. Take pictures. Pictures are heavily retweeted/spread around. This one from US Airways Flight 1549 has been viewed 350,000+ times. For mobile pics use iPhone apps such as Tweetie or Twitterific, both which support on the go uploading.
7. Start a contest. @jasoncalacanis offered a free macbook air if he reached the #1 most followed spot. That never happened, but Jason added thousands of followers…brilliant.
8. Follow the top twitter users and watch what they tweet. Pay attention to the type of content they sent out and how they address their audiences.
9. Reply to/get involved in #hash tag memes. search.twitter.com lists the hot ‘trending topics. Look for the #hash topics and jump in on the conversation (see #4 for links to #hash instructions).
10. Track your results. TwitterCounter will show you how many new users you’re adding per day and Qwitter will email you when someone unfollows you after a tweet.

If Anheuser-Busch parent InBev is looking to save money, rival MillerCoors has a suggestion: Skip the Super Bowl. Miller High Life's series of one-second ads mocks A-B for owning the big game.

The brewer's Miller High Life brand is using a series of one-second ads airing during the pre-game festivities on 25 local NBC stations to mock A-B for owning the big game.

"Miller High Life is all about high quality and great value, so it wouldn't make sense for this brand to pay $3 million for a 30-second ad," High Life Senior Brand Manager Kevin Oglesby said in a statement. "Just like our consumers, High Life strives to make smart choices. One second should be plenty of time to remind viewers that Miller High Life is common sense in a bottle."

Or, as the intro on Miller's website featuring the spots puts it: "Paying $3 million for a 30-second commercial makes as much sense as putting sauerkraut on a donut. Actually, even that makes more sense."

High Life still lagging
That not-at-all veiled barb at A-B, which boasts four minutes and 30 seconds of ad time during a game that commands about $3 million per 30-second spot (although A-B pays less than that due to its long-term deal), comes at a time when consumers are trading down from pricier beers such as Heineken and Corona to cheaper ones such as Busch and Keystone.

High Life, which is priced below "premium" beers such as Budweiser and Miller Lite but above the sub-premiums, has yet to fully benefit from that trend. Its sales as of late have lagged many of its bottom-shelf colleagues.

The spots from High Life agency of record Saatchi & Saatchi, available on 1SecondAd.com, feature the brand's delivery-driver mascot, played by actor Windell Middlebrooks, making brief one-second exclamations, such as "bean dip" and "Miller Time." Some have an outtake feel, showing him getting makeup or asking for help with his lines.

Read the story here.

With the expanding space of social media tools, websites and the Internet, URLs can become a mouthful with an array of odd numerical and letter combinations. To the rescue we have URL shortening services, which were initially popular because web addresses started to get long and links would break when sent in an email. However, as microblogging services like Twitter have become popular, an increasing number of services and applications, including tracking & metrics, have been added to the basic URL shortening features. There are a few dozen services out there, of course, but I narrowed it down and picked the top three that I liked.

Zi.ma offers bulk URL shortening, customizable URLs and tracking. Also, registration is not required to view statistics of Zi.ma links.



Cligs also offers tracking, which are real time and very detailed, however unlike Zi.ma you have to register to utilize those tools. They also offer geotarget URLs based on the country of visitor.

Tiny URL is utilized by Twitter and the links you create never expire. You can customize your URL, however they don't offer tracking. They also offer a toolbar button that can be integrated into your browser. It was created by Kevin Gilbertson who launched the service in January 2002 because he wanted to be able to link directly to newsgroup postings which frequently had long and cumbersome addresses.

We all know brands are using Twitter — whether or not you want them around. Some of them don’t quite get the medium and just tweet self-serving links or marketing speak, but you won’t find any of those brands on this list. Mashable has handpicked 40 of the best brands experimenting with the micro-blogging platform, and asked them a few short questions about how they’re using Twitter.

If some of their responses seem short, well that’s because they are. They asked each brand correspondent to answer their queries in 140 characters or less. Most of them got the point, a few rambled on a bit too long, and only asked if “u” was acceptable in lieu of “you.” All in all, they have found some amazing people, doing some pretty powerful things at big companies, and all via Twitter.

Smart brands use Twitter in meaningful ways, and most of them use their brand name as a way to make sure customers can find and recognize them. This piece, and the knowledge learned from the incessant hours invested, demonstrate why brands do belong on Twitter. No other medium gets you inside a business or brand quite like Twitter.

In no order, the list follows:

1. Chevrolet
2. Ford
3. General Motors
4. Honda
5. Jet Blue
6. Southwest Airlines
7. Luxor Las Vegas
8. Marriott International Hotels and Resorts
9. Carnival Cruise Lines
10. Hertz
11. Chicago Bulls
12. Detroit Pistons
13. Portland Trail Blazers
14. San Diego Chargers
15. 92Y
16. The Travel Channel
17. Comcast
18. Marvel Entertainment
19. DIRECTV
20. PopCap
21. TV Guide
22. Wachovia
23. H&R Block
24. Intuit
25. Best Buy
26. The Home Depot
27. American Apparel
28. Rubbermaid
29. Whole Foods
30. Zappos.com
31. Starbucks
32. Burger King
33. Dunkin’ Donuts
34. Popeyes Chicken
35. Tasti D-Lite
36. Dell
37. EMC
38. Kodak
39. Hoovers
40. Red Cross

Read the story here.

It took about half my day, but I'm finally done with the redesign of my blog. I forgot how long creating images and programming took. I wanted to keep it simple with a visual interest, but still having friendly usability as the main focus. I think I accomplished that. As for the header, it was something quick and dirty and will probably be redone after I figure out what image/typography I want to represent this blog.

Facebook and CNN have released numbers for their live streaming partnership today, which allowed Facebook users to provide live commentary on the CNN feed.

The stats released, as of noon ET:

• There were 200,000+ status updates through the Facebook integration on CNN.com
• at that time, 3,000 people commented on the Facebook CNN feed per minute
• Obama’s Facebook Fan Page has more than 4 million fans and in excess of 500,000 wall posts

As of 11.45am, CNN:

• had served 13.9 million live video streams globally since 6am
• had broken its all time total daily streaming record (from Election Day) of 5.3 million live streams.

Afternoon Numbers: Facebook sent fresh numbers for the period up until 1.15pm ET. These totals include the morning figures:

• 600,000 status updates posted through the CNN.com Live Facebook feed
• Facebook averaged 4,000 status updates per minute during the broadcast
• 8,500 status updates were posted during the first minute of Obama’s speech
• “Millions” of people logged into Facebook during the broadcast

The team at Mammoth Mountain have some creative people doing their billboard ads. It sparked my interest enough to share it. Enjoy.

After my entry about what the marketing team at Burger King was doing on Facebook I decided to give it a go and see how it actually worked.
The landing is a nifty interactive page where you can pick the friends you want to sacrifice and they'll animate their profile picture going up in flames. The text that follows the burning is, "You liked xxx. You love the WHOPPER."
As you can see, the "friends" that you decide to sacrifice will show up on your newsfeed and those unfortunate enough to be sacrificed will also receive a message saying they have gone to the way of flames. However, unlike how the marketing team at BK intended, to un-friend people you hardly talked to, I actually sacrificed close friends because I thought that would be funnier since they would receive a message saying I did so. Of course I only did this for research and will re-friend them right away...maybe.
After you complete all 10 sacrifices, you will land on a submission page where they ask for some personal information. After you fill in the goods, they state you'll receive a coupon for a free WHOPPER in the mail in about 2-4 weeks time.
I think this was a success for BK overall. It was fun and light hearted unlike the controversy they had with their WHOPPER Virgins campaign. I'll post up the coupon once I get it in the mail alongside a picture of me enjoying my free WHOOPER. Happy eating.

When Ron Culp started out in PR, the profession had a simple 2-prong focus–media relations and internal communications, mostly the former. Although both remain important, the PR mind today should be divided into at least 10 sectors as depicted here by John Bell, head of the 360° Digital Influence team at Ogilvy PR.

John says the next generation of PR pros will need to be strong in the following 13 skills, and he provides additional insights on six of the points through expanded “how to” posts. Just click on the underlined skills. Check back with his blog or here since he intends to eventually expand on all 13.

13 Skills of the PR Pro of the Future

1. Create integrated marketing and communications strategy
2. Deploy live ‘listening posts’ online and offline
3. Design and deploy an advanced search engine optimization program
4. Plan and run a new media relations program inclusive of head-of-the-tail and long tail “media”
5. Identify & engage with influencers online and offline
6. Manage communities
7. Integrate new technologies into their own lives
8. Model measurement and performance metrics including new “engagement” metrics
9. Run quick pilot programs and evaluate on-the-fly
10. Train staff and clients continuously
11. Participate in conversations, not just ‘messaging’
12. Create and execute content strategy including video programming (hifi and lowfi)
13. Use digital crisis management

Read the story here.

It's the dream of every angry customer — sending a bill to the company that wasted your time. Well, it's finally happened.

Howard Schaffer, a PR professional by trade and the owner of Howard Schaffer Media Marketing, was having such an awful time with his phone company that he alerted the local media — who ran a column about the debacle. That happens all the time, but what makes this case interesting is that Howard was keeping a record of the time he spent dealing with the phone company (One Communications of Rochester, NY) as well as the expenses that he was racking up while the phone company apologized over and over, but didn't fix the problem.

“I’ve received nine apologies,” Schaffer, whose phone bill is usually around $500 a month, told the Times-Union. As time dragged on, he was forced to have employees use cellphones and to borrow a phone from his landlord. The phone company promised at least $2,000 in credits, but no phone service.

After the column ran and his problem was resolved — Howard tallied up the expenses and sent One Communications a bill. For $5,481.16. And the company agreed to pay it.

You can learn a few things from Mr. Shaffer. Follow his example by taking detailed notes of all the time and money you spend dealing with an issue. You might not be able to get a check for your expenses, (unless, perhaps, your story gets published in the newspaper like Mr. Shaffer's did) but it certainly can't hurt.

Read the story here.

Burger King has once again jumped into marketing on Facebook. They have created an application that allows users to delete 10 friends in exchange for a free WHOPPER and those unfortunate to enough to be sacrificed will receive a message that their friendship was anything but stronger than a free burger.

Taking Klondike's "What would you do for a Klondike Bar?" motif to the next level, Burger King invites Facebook users to sacrifice 10 of their friends on the social networking site for a coupon for a free sandwich:

"What would you do for a free WHOPPPER? Now is the time to put your fair-weather web friendships to the test. Install WHOPPER Sacrifice on your Facebook profile, and we'll reward you with a free flame-broiled WHOPPER when you sacrifice 10 of your friends."

The effort crafted by Crispin Porter + Bogusky came about after agency creative staffers confronted the too-many-friends scenario themselves on Facebook.

"We thought there could be some fun there, removing some of these people who are friends [but] not necessarily] best friends," said Jeff Benjamin, executive interactive creative director at Crispin, and friend to 736 on Facebook. "It's asking the question of which love is bigger, your love for your friends or your love for the Whopper," he said.

The app also adds a box to user profile pages charting their progress toward the free burger with the line, "Who will be the next to go?"

The application is available on Facebook and at WhopperSacrifice.com.

Brand applications have a spotty record on Facebook, with few enjoying more than a temporary jolt in popularity before quickly fizzling. Some brands have begun rewarding consumers for installing their apps. One example is Kraft's current campaign that includes donations of meals to needy families when users get their friends to add the Kraft Facebook app.

"We always look at these social networks and think of what tool or thing we wish was here," Benjamin said. "A lot of times, brands force a feature or an application that I don't think people ever want. That's when you can waste some money."

Read the story here.

By now, most PR pros know about blog monitoring tools and search engines and likely use them to understand some conversations in social media. There are a host of other ways besides a general blog search, however, to turn up some interesting data points and information about brand reputation, who is talking about your brand and what they are saying. Here are just a few tools worth a look.

1. Summize - Rapidly growing in popularity, the easiest way to describe Summize is as a search engine for Twitter. The simple fact of Twitter is that there are millions of conversations taking place every day and many involve mentions of brands. For a real time snapshot of brand discussions from individuals on social media, Twitter is the place to be and Summize has the best interface to help you track it.
2. AllTop - If you haven’t been watching the rapid growth of Alltop, you need to start. It is essentially an aggregation of blogs by various categories, but there are a few things that set Alltop apart. The first is that the simple interface means you can really skim headlines for many blogs in a particular category quite easily. The second is that you no longer have to rely on relatively useless Technorati Authority figures to find top tier blogs. Alltop doesn’t have all the answers, but to see a quick view of what top bloggers are talking about in a particular category, it’s a great place to start.
3. TinEye - Though still in beta mode, this site is getting lots of attention because of the pioneering way that they are focusing on the next evolution of image search. Put frankly, image search is notoriously bad because it seldom reads an actual image and only reads elements like the file title and description around the image. TinEye works when you give it a URL location of an image, or upload an image of our own (like your brand logo, for example). Then the site goes to work, finding all instances of use for that particular image, giving you a great snapshot of how your brand is being remade and used across the web.
4. BrandTags - A brilliantly simple site from Noah Brier, this is a game-like site that asks visitors to share the first word that comes into their minds when faced with a brand logo. The resulting words are then shown in a tag cloud format with the most common words appearing largest. It offers an interesting visual snapshot of what people think about your brand, though it is still somewhat limited to only larger brands. If your brand logo is not in there, you can always submit a note to Noah to ask to be included.
5. YackTrack - One of the big problems with keeping up with Social Media is that people can comment on content that you upload in so many different ways on so many different sites that it becomes nearly impossible to track and respond to all of it. YackTrack offers a useful tool where you can enter a URL and see a list of comments made on various sites about it (including the closed wall of Facebook). It’s a great way to track comments on a particular piece of content across multiple channels.
6. TimeTube - This mashup site offers a way of plotting all YouTube videos that match a particular keyword against a timeline to see when they occurred. If your brand inspires a lot of videos discussing it, this tool will give you a great overview of when these videos are typically posted and offers an engaging way to bring them together in a chronological format that few others can offer.

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!”

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, although 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 online
• Dive deeper into social media and discover more ways it can be integrated into pr
• Become my firm's 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 year's end. For now, it shall be my bench mark and motivator.