Originally published at Life With Pho. Please leave any comments there.

I’m really excited to be speaking at the 20SB Summit in August and if you take a look at the speaker list- there’s some pretty big names that’ll be there too. Thanks to the conference organizers, I can offer a lucky person two passes to attend the summit in Chicago!

All you have to do is leave a comment below that completes this sentence:

“Gen-Y is…”

that’s all you have to do! You have until Tuesday August 2nd at 11:59 PM to leave a comment.

Now for the fine print:

The winner is responsible for their own travel and lodging, and show confirmed plans to A Squared Group, who are providing the free passes.

The winner will be randomly selected on Wednesday August 3rd and will be contacted via e-mail that you leave in the comment.

Good luck!

Tags: blog

Originally published at Life With Pho. Please leave any comments there.

Awhile back Penelope Truck announced she was coming out with a new book. Of course since she is my blogger crush I didn’t think twice about purchasing a copy. It finally arrived at my home last week.

The last time I was excited to see a package from Wisconsin was a couple of years ago when she sent me a copy of her first book for my birthday. I opened the book and was surprised to see this message inside:

Patrick! I am signing 1,000 books. Or 100,000,000,000. I don’t know. And your name comes up and I love that I know you and also I am sick of writing Good Luck with your career. I will write something else for you. Hmm… I love your spark. I hope this book encourages you to keep your spark through everything.

A day later she blogged about the long process of her signing her books where she wrote, “So unless you have talked with me in person about 20 times, I probably didn’t recognize your name as your book came up.” I’m really humbled and thankful she has remembered me despite only meeting once at a mixer where she hid in the kitchen in order to sign my book.

Penelope has always been an inspiration as I try to figure out my life, my career, and my future in social media. Through the past few years I’ve come to know many talented people with wonderful stories. I look at their success with aw and wonder if I could reach their level someday.

I know bloggers who have written books, started companies, and are now recognized writers and columnists. Will I be there someday?

All I know is that I love to tell stories, geek out about stuff, and analyze things to best of my abilities. I know my passion is often the one thing people notice about me and I’m working on the other parts as well.

I know this spark will propel me to greater things down the road- I just need to get through “everything else” first.

Thanks Penelope for the encouragement.

Tags: gen-y, penelope trunk, social media

Originally published at Life With Pho. Please leave any comments there.

Hi friends.

My jet-set summer is well under way, I have everything from business trips to weddings to my very first speaking engagement lined-up this summer.

That’s right- I’ll be speaking at the 20SB Summit in Chicago next month! I’m really, really excited! Now I just need to find something intelligent to say.

I’ve recently created a profile on TripIt to track all of my crazy travel and it’s amazing to see where I’ve been in the past year (and where I will go):

For those that can’t read the top line I’ve traveled over 27,000 miles- and it’s only going up! I know this doesn’t compare to the Ryan Bingham‘s in the world but I’m really excited to get out and see different places of the country. Maybe one day I’ll even leave the continent!

I’ve been up to some writing as well- it’s basketball and theatre off-season for me but I did a recap of the Wizard’s NBA draft and I managed to see a couple of shows this past month. I have a Fringe show to review this weekend but besides that I’ll be happy to take it easy this summer.

There have also been a couple appearances I’ve made that I’m really proud of, over at the Brazen Life blog I contributed a piece on the future of viral video.

Also over at NBC Washington I talked about my first thoughts on Google+:

Of course my big dream is to get on CNN or MSNBC one day, and that day maybe coming sooner rather than later- but that story is for another post.

Have a great weekend!

Tags: travel, we love dc, weddings, work

Originally published at Life With Pho. Please leave any comments there.

This year I changed over my hosting to the lovely folks at bluehost. The rates were lower and they were recommended in conversations with fellow bloggers. So far I’ve been more than happy with their service.

My prior hosting provider, Jumpline, has done little to convince me to stick with them and this latest incident is just icing on the cake.

They still had domain registration rights to this site and I was waiting for the term to lapse so I renew with bluehost and have everything under one roof. However when the domain was up for renewal, Jumpline was more than happy to auto-renew and lock me in for another year of crappy service at an outrageous price.

Of course I wasn’t too pleased with this move.

I called customer service who told me I was out of luck, the domain was already renewed and I couldn’t do anything. I was not happy that they were using my credit card for auto-renewal without telling me, and I asked to remove my credit card from their files since I was absolutely never going to use them for anything ever again. The rep told me I couldn’t do that until I got a renewal notice next year.

Great.

So I did what most people online when they encounter terrible service: I bitched about it on Twitter. I wasn’t surprised to see a quick response from their Twitter account. They also did their homework once they saw the tweet- because later that day I got an e-mail from them saying they went ahead and removed my credit card information from my account before I could even reply back with my story. Good job to Jumpline for catching that, but they still have my $30 which I did not want to give them- it would of been nice for them to issue a refund.

Bottom line Jumpline did what most businesses are trying to do: stay on top of social media customer service. They did a good job in jumping on top of my tweet, before I decided to go on an anti-Jumpline Twitter tirade.

However instead of treating the symptoms, businesses need to cure the disease. If they did the right thing when I called them I most likely wouldn’t have sent off a 140 character piece of hate mail.

Social Media Customer Service doesn’t start with a tweet- it starts with better customer service.

Tags: blog, bluehost, forces of change, jumpline, social media, webpage

Originally published at Life With Pho. Please leave any comments there.

(Photo Erin McCann)

I’m generally not a fan of the term “Quarterlife crisis.” I would traditionally dismiss such a notion as “that’s just growing up, deal with it.” However, I think there are significant milestones as we reach adulthood where we come to understand just what it means to be on our own and making our own way.

For a very long time, I spent my life being uncomfortable with myself. In high school, I was very successful academically, and was involved in all sorts of activities. But, I never felt like I belonged. I was not particularly outgoing. I did not have a many friends. I was not at peace with myself.

I came to D.C. for college, and after school I floundered even more. I made some terrifically boneheaded mistakes in my personal life, and I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself after graduation. I bounced around several jobs, at times working for a temp agency, a hardware store, and a rock club. I quit my first salaried job to go on tour with a band to take photos. I ran out of money many times, and could not seem to find satisfaction in my own life or with a career.

But, it wasn’t until last year that I truly faced my crisis moment. I had spent the last several years feeling like I was trapped, but I didn’t know why. I had been making decision after decision based on the faulty assumption that I could not do the things I really wanted to do. I was often embarrassed by my experiences, falsely believing that I had missed the opportunity to do anything important with my life.

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Tags: dave stroup, gen-y, quarterlife crisis

Originally published at Life With Pho. Please leave any comments there.

Do you ever wonder what your eight-year-old self or even your fifteen-year-old self would think of you now?  I read an article last fall about this idea, and I thought it was an interesting concept to think about.

Are you in a place you always hoped to be?  Would your younger self, full of dreams and hope be proud?  Or would she be disappointed?  Would she be thrilled?  Would she wonder how you got to where you are?  Would she think that you stayed on course, or are a completely different person on a completely different path?

I was reminded of this idea a few months ago when my mom called to tell me that she stumlbed upon my high school yearbook and laughed when she read my response to the question, “where do you see yourself ten years from now?”

My innocent response in the year 2000 at age eighteen was, “I see myself living in a small town raising my family with my loving husband and writing for the local newspaper.”

UM, WHAT?

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Tags: gen-y, quarterlife crisis

Originally published at Life With Pho. Please leave any comments there.

I am the only child of a blue collar, working class Southern family. It’s not an uncommon label, I’m sure, but it has born much significance in my journey to adulthood. As a kid and teenager growing up, I was acutely aware that much hope was being heaped upon my shoulders: hope that I would succeed in college and have a successful career that didn’t involve the hard, 80 hour weeks of manual labor my father had and will work his whole life, hope that I would meet an equally successful, educated man to marry and take care of me (yes, yes, my feminist soul hurts at that statement too, but I did say I was Southern..), hope that my success would ultimately make the end of my parents’ lives comfortable. Now, for me, this wasn’t in the least bit oppressive. I’ve been a naturally driven person my whole life and I loved learning. But, I think that we all leave home with much hope and anticipation around us from loved ones, and for me, that hope and those plans have been the unexpected, but dominating players in my quarterlife crisis.

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Tags: ashley parker, gen-y, quarterlife crisis

Originally published at Life With Pho. Please leave any comments there.

In most senses, I’ve avoided the Quarter-Life Crisis. As I approached 25 I was concerned, as I was about to be laid off, had not yet applied to grad school, and was dating (mostly unsuccessfully) just about everything that moved. Stability seemed far off. But just over halfway to my 26^th birthday, everything is different. I have a career and long-term plan that excite me, a bunch of fun hobbies (including knitting; it doesn’t seem to get much more stable than knitting) and I’m looking forward to fantastic summer full of new and exciting experiences with a great guy. But I’m having a Quarter-Life Crisis I didn’t expect: it’s about friendship.

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Tags: gen-y, kate schindler, quarterlife crisis

Originally published at Life With Pho. Please leave any comments there.

Ah…the Quarterlife Crisis.  It was something I struggled with when I turned 25, because like so many 20-somethings, I didn’t feel like my life was where it was supposed to be.  Luckily for me, 3 months later, I got a promotion, and was so busy looking out the window of my shiny new office and trying not to screw anything up TOO bad, that I thought I’d avoided the worst of the crisis. In fact, my recent 26^th birthday was one of the few that I’ve truly celebrated in the last few years.  So professionally, I don’t feel I could say there was a crisis—it was more of a hiccup.

Socially, life’s good.  I have friends—I’m never without something (or 3 somethings) to do on a Friday night.  My friends seem to think that I’m OK, and I think they’re pretty great too.  I also manage to spend time going out and doing things that I enjoy.  As a young, single professional, I’m able to do pretty much anything that strikes my fancy.  Basically, life’s good based on the checklist.

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Tags: gen-y, kendra keller, quarterlife crisis

Originally published at Life With Pho. Please leave any comments there.

Just recently, I entered the “real world.” That mystical place we know, really, as simply “after college.” The part of life after we’ve outgrown the frat parties, campus events, free pizza, and dormitories. That time when, perhaps, we finally get to enjoy life as it should be.

I hear over and over, “Just wait, in a couple months you’ll miss college.” I’ll be frank; I don’t believe them. All those nonsensical notions of “missing the college days” sound like flat-out lies to me at this point. There’s one simple reason for it: I finally get to be just a little bit selfish (in the best kind of way).

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Tags: alex priest, gen-y, quarterlife crisis