Shine A Light

Kelly's asleep and I'm watching "Shine A Light" - the new Rolling Stones concert documentary directed by Martin Scorsese.

I can't believe how well Mick Jagger looks, sounds, and moves.  The guy is an ageless wonder.

I also can't believe how unintentionally hilarious Keith Richards continues to be.  He looks like an undead pirate.  You have to wonder if he actually knows what's going on around him.  He doesn't really "play" the guitar on most of the songs - he just throws out a few stabs and noodles about every now and then.  Yet - when coupled with Ron Wood, et al - Keith's sloppy guitar sounds absolutely awesome.

Also - Keith's "harmony" vocal on "Faraway Eyes" - one of my favorite Stones songs - was so bad that I laughed out...and so did he.  Great shot where Mick seems to shoot him a dirty look after a sour line and Keith just laughs.

Best part of the film has been the clips from old Stones interviews:

Reporter:  "What's the last thing that you do before you play a show in front of 100K people?"


Keith: "I wake up."



Great film.  Amazing set, cool photography, and the best rock back of all time in redongo form.  I highly recommend it.

Forever/Never, Fire/Desire

"Summer of '69" came up on my iPod on the way home from work today and this lyric caught my attention:

"Standin' on your mama's porch,
You told me that you'd wait forever.
Oh and when you held my hand,
I knew that it was now or never."

...and it made me think - just how many songs have rhymed "forever" and "never"?  Or used the phrase "now or never"?  Can't we find any other words that rhyme and offer an interesting contrast in meanings?  Is forever/never the most overused couplet in all of song lyric history?

...which made me think that "fire" and "desire" have probably been rhymed more.  Ugh.  I'm pretty sure I dislike fire/desire MUCH moreso than forever/never.

So here's (the start of) a list of all of the songs I can think of that make use of these well-worn lyrical devices. Feel free to chime in with your additions in a comment.  There's gotta be lots more cheesy Michael Bolton-type pop songs to add to the list.*

Forever/Never/Now or never


"Summer of '69" - Bryan Adams
"It's My Life" - Bon Jovi - (Embarrassed that I thought of that one so quickly.)
"Jamie's Crying" - Van Halen
"High Enough" - Damn Yankees
"Right Here Waiting" - Richard Marx - (Even more embarrassing.)
"Live Forever" - Oasis

Fire/Desire

"Fire" - Jimi Hendrix
"Ring of Fire" - Johnny Cash
"We're Gonna Groove" - Led Zeppelin
"Stand Up and Shout" - Dio
"Misfire" - Queen - ("misfire" is close enough to count...)
"Fuel" - Metallica - ("Give me fuel, give me fire..." - such a terrible song.)
"You Are My One Desire" - Buddy Holly
"Desire" - U2 - (Submitted by Michael.)
"I Want It That Way" - Backstreet Boys - (Ha!  Submitted by Tristan.)
"I Got The Blues" - The Rolling Stones
"Strange Desire" - Black Keys - (Great song, lame lyric.)

---

*There are.  I know of several, I'm just too embarrassed to admit it.

Shoeboxed

I recently picked up some part-time work with Shoeboxed.com - a Durham-based start-up aiming to become "Netflix for receipts".

The idea is a smart one:



I like the company for several reasons, the chief of which is its simple solution to an otherwise painful problem.  Until now, receipt solutions have ranged from expensive desktop receipt scanners (that require tons of time and effort to operate) to paying someone else to deal with the receipt mess to doing nothing at all.

Shoeboxed simplifies things by doing all of the scanning dirty work and giving you the tools you need to organize your receipts online - all through the power of your friendly neighborhood mailman and the Internets.

The company has quite a few customers now and I think that we'll find lots more love from traveling salespeople that need help organizing receipts for expense report, accountants that need help managing client receipts, and small businesses that need help separating business and personal expenses.

...and also from OCD "receipt people" that keep every receipt they've ever acquired.  (These are our favorite customers.)

Give the service a look and let me know what you think.  If you're interested in giving it a go, I'll make sure you get a great price.

What To Do When Your Dog Eats A Sock

20 minutes ago, Tyler Dog was sitting at Kelly's feet playing with one of her socks. Then the sock wasn't there anymore.

After a few minutes arguing about whether he actually ate the sock or just hid it somewhere when we weren't looking, we finally decided that we should call the vet. The friendly lady that answered the phone suggested that we induce vomiting by giving Tyler a few tablespoons of hydrogen peroxide.

So we did. Kelly held him and I poured a shot down his throat.

3 minutes later - success! Completely disgusting success:

Eric - (just walking back outside) - "Has he puked yet?"
Kelly - "Yeah - but I need something to poke through the massive blob."
Eric - "OK." (picks up a stick from the yard that Tyler thankfully hasn't swallowed.)
Kelly - (staring at the vile, foamy mass in the grass) "Oh geez - is that it?"
Eric - "Ugh...I can't believe that's a sock."

Plugging away...

Despite the lack of activity on The Boggs Blog, summertime is chugging along. Some things have ended up about like I expected:

- The online media start-up I'm working with is showing promise.
- I continue to try to plug myself into the local technology entrepreneurial scene.
- I'm not very productive working from home, but getting better.
- Our backyard gardens are awesome - more herbs and veggies than we can eat...
- Lots of good down time with Kelly, Tyler Dog, and friends.
- I started sweating around June 1 and haven't stopped since.

...while others haven't. Namely - getting laid off from an internship. Yes. I was laid off...from a 10 week part-time internship.

Of the many insights I've gathered - and will probably continue to gather - from the experience, these two are near the top of the list:

1.) Do your due diligence before accepting a job - no matter how short the contract.
2.) Be wary of joining companies that recently botched a $30MM acquisition.

I feel like I've done a pretty good job about keeping a positive attitude about the whole thing.  As the "I have an ulterior motive for buying your lunch..."conversation unfolded, I very quickly decided that I wasn't going to be a jerk or a whiner baby. I laughed openly about the situation, explained the irony, etc. that caused my laughter, asked some thoughtful, candid questions, and left on great terms with my supervisor - whom I actually really liked.

I certainly don't harbor any grudge toward the company - these things happen. Integrian is a good company with good people and exciting technologies - it's just facing a tough market in a tightening economy.

Plus, I'm pretty sure that I was one of many lay-offs company-wide. So there are other people with children, responsibilities, etc. (read: not part-time 10 week interns) that are probably in a pretty tight spot right now...

I've filled the spare time with more work on the other venture and accelerated efforts to find a new solution to a problem...or a latent problem to solve...or any company/idea that gets me beyond the first couple steps of consideration. It's slow going, but steady and strangely exciting.

On an unrelated note, my brother Evan comes home from 6 months of military training this weekend. I haven't seen him since Christmas, so I'm looking forward to the family time...and sucker-punching Evan while we wrestle in my parents' swimming pool...and then running away because he's a much larger/stronger man than I...

I (heart) Compete.com

Wow - such a great tool.  It makes benchmarking sooo easy, at least in instances in which site traffic characteristics indicate market strength, engagement, etc.  I've found a few inconsistencies between Compete.com and Alexa.com, but the data usually seems on point.

The search analytics feature is especially interesting.  It's pretty funny to see the strange keywords that actually drive traffic to a site...

In Praise of Nerf Herder

iTunes just serendipitously shuffled to "Nosering Girl" by Nerf Herder, my favorite song from one of my most favorite bands from high school. Such a great song and great lyrics:
Yeah she had pretty hair and beautiful eyes.
and a dalmatian jacket...a dalmatian jacket.
And she was the kind of girl who you would give up eating meat for,
No more salami, no more steak or potatoes.
Yeah you would walk on down to the health food store
And buy hummus, and tabouli, and baba ghannouj, and
Ricecakes ricecakes ricecakes!

Nosering girl! I love you!

My high school band, The OHT, could pull off a pretty hot cover of "Nosering Girl" and "Annalee" - another great Nerf Herder song. Jacob - who sang lead on "Nosering" - always cleverly altered the lyrics to say:
As it turns out, she was the cousin of the ex-girlfriend of my good friend Eric, my very good friend Eric.

"Eric" instead of "Steve"! Lyrics and phrasing be damned!  Yes - We. Were. Awesome.

Though "Van Halen" was Nerf Herder's most "popular" and probably their best song, we never covered it because I wasn't good enough to pull off the two-hand tap guitar solo at the end.

Back in the Saddle

Kelly and I returned from our trip this past weekend. Photos with C+ captions here.

The trip was fantastic in every way. We spent 3 days in Munich, 3 days in Vienna, and 6 days in Prague. In brief, the highlights include:

- Amazing beer and delicious meats with every meal for 2 straight weeks.

- Easy living in Munich, inspired in part by the naked people in the English Garden.

- A harrowing and gut-wrenching visit to the Dachau concentration camp.

- The view from atop the Schloss Schonbrunn gardens in Vienna.

- A day in Okur* outside of Prague with Lee and Emily. (Pronounced kinda like "O-korjsh" - there should be a little tick over the "r" that WP doesn't allow...)

- A ridiculous night of beer cheese, spare ribs, fried minnows, beer, potato rum, blistering Czech bluegrass, learning Czech slang, and teaching Lee's friend to say "fannypack". (Hate that we didn't take our camera. Highest of high international comedy...)

- The beautiful vistas in Prague at night.

As much as Kelly and I would like to still be in Prague, sleeping on Lee's communist era foldout couch, we're glad to be home and I'm ready to get to work.

I turned around some interesting work pretty quickly since my last post. I'm working 2 part-time gigs this summer. I started at Integrian this week. The company develops intelligent mobile video solutions for public safety and transit. I'll be working on product specs for a couple fascinating applications that originated from the company's R&D arm, Signal Innovations Group.

Next week, I'll start spending some time with a pre-launch online software/media start-up that has a great team and an interesting idea.

I had hopes of brute-forcing a software idea into existence over the summer, but cooled on both of the ideas I was carrying once I started thinking hard about them. So it goes...

All in all, I'm excited about the summer. I'll work a relatively normal schedule and Kelly will have a ton of time off. This should translate into lots of grilling out, lots of basketball, lots of time spent with my KFBS friends that are in town for the summer, and a bountiful harvest from my vegetable garden.

Meet Tyler

Kelly and I took another step toward completing the "suburban couple without kids (yet)" cliche' by getting a puppy this weekend. He's a 6 month old retriever/collie mix named Tyler:


We found him online at a collie rescue in Winston-Salem. They named him Doodle, which I guess makes his full name Doodle Tyler Stowe Boggs. Kelly picked out the name, by the way. I'm not the only ridiculously obsessed Tar Heel fan in the family...


He's been great so far. He can "sit" like a champ, he's crate trained, and he's learning to fetch. He isn't very good on a leash yet, but we practice every day.

Tyler Hansbrough and Fathers and Sons

A year ago, I was feeling pretty crappy. Today, I still feel pretty crappy (from the post-MBA Gala malaise), but couldn't be happier.

Kelly and I watched the game with ~300 of our closest friends at Spice Street in Chapel Hill. We screamed like idiots when Tyler made the game-clinching jump shots down the stretch and happily chirped "Carolina Victory" with my friend EJ after the game ended. And then I called my dad, as is the post-game custom.

When I called him, I felt a surprisingly startling emotion beyond the excitement of having just won the big game. I've written before how, when I was a child honing my game on the driveway, my dad would coach me by describing how Tar Heel legends Phil Ford and Bobby Jones did it this way or that way. I obviously knew who these people were, but I didn't get why he referred to them with such reverence.

For a split second after my dad picked up the phone, I remembered those times on my driveway and tried to imagine the touchstone Carolina basketball moments in his life, realizing that I was in the midst of one of my own.

And it made me realize how lucky I am to be able to call him after the game.