Today was the Krewe of Barkus in the French Quarter. I walked in from Armstrong Park and got a great spot on Dumaine at Dauphine. The dogs were parading by and here are some of my favorites. When the dogs in the final picture came by, they had a US Marines emblem on their air boat, and everyone applauded. So much fun, and so many cute dogs!

Playing with Photoshop CS6, animated gifs and low-light/high ISO shooting at City Park with the girls.

On Thursday, January 31, 2013, I am slated to lecture at Tulane University in New Orleans on direct response marketing and measuring sales processes. Degan on my team at Tech Guys, who is a professor, told me that universities don’t teach students “how to make money”. I think that’s an important insight, and I recorded this 37-minute video to try to shed some light on how a student can use LinkedIn to increase their changes of getting hired for a job. Since LinkedIn is a totally different social network than Facebook or Twitter, it has its own system to rank profiles. Optimizing a specific LinkedIn profile for a specific keyword will allow that profile to rank higher in the global index. As of today, I am ranking #4 across the world for the keyword “Account Executive”, even though there are many with more experience than I have. My intention in recording this how-to video is to give students (and professionals) a better understanding of how LinkedIn ranks the millions of users for different search terms, and what you can do to get your profile to show for a specific keyword. This optimization should lead to more listings in the search results, and the higher the profile resolves, the higher the click-through rate should be.

After headhunter eyes are on a profile, it becomes the profile owners job to figure out how to engage them and “sell” themselves for the position.

Video coming soon. Whoops!

Big props go to Nathan Kievman and his Linked Strategies team for giving me the insight on how to tweak my profile. I hope this video helps students as much as his videos helped me as a professional.

I headed down to the beach today and found the waterline lower than I’ve seen it in 14 years.

The view, however, is still as beautiful.

Just Pepper, being sweet.