Happy Mother’s Day
I just spent the last hour online looking for a florist that can still do a Mother’s Day delivery tomorrow. Finally found one, so I can go to bed without leaving notes all over the house for me to call florists in Rochester (Minnesota) tomorrow morning. I probably would have forgotten to research tonight except that while we were watching the Spurs-Suns game 3, I noticed some flowers on top of the cabinet in the family room, hiding in plain sight. After arguing with me for a few minutes that it wasn’t Mother’s Day yet, Jason got up and gave me the flowers. I figure flowers have a limited shelf life so I may as well enjoy them as long as possible.
It’s a good weekend around the Gurney household for several reasons:
- The Warriors had a spectacular win over the Jazz on Friday night with an amazing performance by their own human highlight reel, Baron Davis. There is now a decent chance that Jason won’t have to explain his hair to the neighbors or to potential business partners.
- Site traffic is really picking up. We have Baron’s dunk over Andrei Kirilenko, some incontinent Brewers fans, and Amanda Beard’s upcoming photoshoot in her birthday suit to thank.
- And, this is not insignificant, Jason remembered Mother’s Day.
Posted by Erin 
12.May.07 
Relationship, Other 
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Chagrined
I was going back through my messages from early April looking for the Ballhype member who had asked where he could get a tshirt. I told him we didn’t have any yet but that once we did, I’d mail him one since he was the first to ask. (And now, thanks to the multi-talented Howie, we have a Ballhype tshirt store set up on Spreadshirt.com.) Well, while looking through my inbox, I found a message from another new member who offered to help us out. Here’s the terrible part - I had replied with my email address so that he could send me his resume, which he did, and then I never followed up! It was right when we got slammed with all of the post-launch activity, so I didn’t get to it right away and then it got buried. I gave up on filing my email in mid-April and as a result my inbox is now at 2338 items. Clearly unmanageable, so I will devote some time this weekend to getting it sorted out.
I’m not blaming this on anyone but myself, but part of the problem was that Jason and I were switching between laptop and desktop computers for a while, and when I worked on the laptop, I was using gmail. The thing I cannot stand about gmail is that there are no folders, so if the next work session was on the desktop, my inbox was out of control. And then the next time I’d check gmail, it was difficult to tell which emails I had already read or not.
Anyway, I emailed the guy tonight to apologize and see if he still wants to talk. It doesn’t appear that he’s been active on the site in a while, so my guess is he decided I was too flakey and/or rude. I wouldn’t blame him, but I do hope he gives me — and Ballhype — another chance.
Posted by Erin 04.May.07 Other Read more Comments (0)
Write something, anything…
It’s been a while since I published a post, but I need to stay in the practice of writing otherwise it gets harder to come up with anything relevant. Since we started Ballhype and this blog, I walk around with random tidbits in my head all day. Most of them don’t seem important enough to bother writing an entire post, so I accumulate them like loose change in a tip jar. I guess this is why bloggers have those posts once a week where they just link to a bunch of different stories that they find interesting. Here’s my take on the past week:
- It’s been two and a half weeks since we launched. We had the inevitable drop in traffic after we launched, plus there was Easter weekend. You can get pretty stressed out if you think about the numbers all day so we are trying to focus on what we need to do to build and sustain organic growth. Still, we do need to track stats to make sure we’re trending in the right direction and to document patterns. Weekends are slower both in terms of visitors and site activity, including blog posts that are tracked and found. Nice to know that people value their weekends for family and personal time away from the computer, although employers would probably prefer people not to be reading Ballhype on company time.
- After having our phone and therefore DSL connection go out for the third time in the last few weeks, we finally installed cable high-speed internet so that we have backup service. No more walking around outside trying to pick up a neighbor’s wireless signal. Fortunately, the neighbors on our street are all friendly retired folks who enjoy having us borrow anything from a network connection to power washers to poker tables.
- Two entrepreneurs, Kareem Mayan and Jon Bischke, are documenting the experiences of their startup at Education Revolution with incredible transparency. They’re sharing information that I’ve been hunting down myself - very useful and a great read.
Posted by Erin 19.Apr.07 Other Read more Comments (0)
Another reason to stay healthy
One consequence of quitting our jobs for Ballhype is that we’re on our own for health insurance. We’ve both always worked for companies that had generous health plans, which I’d never fully appreciated until now. Since COBRA is ridiculously expensive, I looked online to do some research and ended up on Health Insurance Plus. Shopping for insurance was very difficult despite the helpful services of Morgan, one of the sales reps. The definitions were not intuitive to me, and the only way I was able to figure out which plan would be best was to create an excel model with scenarios of different incidents that would land our kids in the hospital. Thinking about our children being sick was depressing, so I had to reassign the catastrophic illnesses to Jason and me, leaving the kids in the hypothetical situation of having incapacitated parents.
In the end, we chose an Aetna plan. Here’s our experience so far:
- The fact that our son has been treated in the past for eczema is going to cost us an additional $14 per month. I’m not opposed to insurance companies making a profit but it makes you wonder what they do to families where someone is really sick.
- Our cards haven’t come in the mail yet even though our coverage is effective April 1.
- Aetna sent a letter saying I could print temporary cards from their web site, but when I logged in, the links in the header were not visible, there was no search box, and no indication that you could even view your card on the site.
- The customer support phone line is only open 8-5pm EST.
And so, I’ve paid for two prescriptions out of pocket this week. At least they weren’t that expensive. The pharmacist told me if the cards arrive in the next week or so they can reimburse me at the store, otherwise if it’s later I’d have to go through Aetna. Looking forward to that one…
Posted by Erin 10.Apr.07 Other Read more Comments (4)