Read... Think... Do... Share...

So it is the first day back from vacation and the first day at HubSpot's new office in the Davenport building.  Check out the new office below before people move in and make it their own.

Tomorrow I head back to the Upstate (SC) for a short visit with the family before heading back up to Boston and a hopefully "The Hangover" style Vegas vacation with some old college buddies.  It has been a great relaxing week.  I've been able to do some blogging, think big picture strategy and of course lots of sun.  It feels like I have gotten a years worth of Vitamin D this last week if you know what I mean.

This week has also been an opportunity to see some old friends.  Enjoy the video and pictures below.

Here is another funny little HubSpot video for you with me playing a little role. 

Yesterday was the 4th of July. While in Boston might as well walk around town and snap some pictures and shoot some video right?

We also went back out that night to watch the firework show. If you have ever seen Boston's Independence Day firework show on TV hopefully you won't be disappointed by these pictures and video from the event.

Nothing to really say about this one.  Watch it or don't watch it...  I don't even care anymore.

If you do watch it, I hope that you like it.

Yesterday we took a trip to New Hampshire Motor Speedway.  It was a good time with Brian Whalley, Jason Allgire and Heather.  I had these grand dreams of taking lots of pictures this year to make all the people who didn't go jealous.  At the end of the day I only took a few, below.  Great weather and great racing and another Kyle (Busch) won the race for the second year in row.

To say that I've been busy lately is an understatement.  I've been crazy busy.  Things are starting to get exciting with our little interactive campus map project and HubSpot continues to grow at hockey stick clips.  The one interesting piece of content I can share is a couple of the recent videos that HubSpot has been putting out in which I've made appearances.

Foursquare Cops Episode #1: "How do you like this badge, B*TCH?"

Last I checked, this first video had over 30,000 views on YouTube and was picked up by mashable and the foursquare blog. 

Just HubSpot It - Episode 1: Batman Voice

This second video hasn't seen quite the press that the first one has, but it is still really funny. 

Maybe you notice a little trend in these two videos.  Yes, that's right...I got manhandled pretty badly.  Maybe that is just my role in life?  Hopefully it's because I can fake a good funny beat-up with the best of them. Enjoy the videos.  There are a few more to come so stay tuned, and I'll try to share them when they come out.

Also, a special shoutout to the producer and director of both of these videos, Woody Tondorf.  Woody, thanks for believing in me...  or at least believing in me enough to be your go to beat up guy.

I've been playing around with foursquare for a few weeks now and have to say that it's quite addicting little game.  What makes it so much fun is because of all the reasons that twitter was initially fun.  It's not overpopulated, yet, and all the people that I follow are mostly in Boston so it's people that are local.  The most addicting part of the tool is the badges that you can acquire by doing certain things and checking into certain locations. 

Think of these badges like achievement points that you would get while playing games on your Xbox 360.  The more badges that you collect the more locations that you have been to and bragging rights that you have.  One way that I'm a little anal is that I want to be the best at whatever I do.  So part of this is collecting all the badges.  it's actually incentive to get out of the house and go do certain things to unlock new badges.  

The problem is that you really have to dig around on the web to get accurate information about all the badges and how to get them.  So I've started putting together a foursquare badges website with some of the other guys at work.  On this site we have started collecting certain interesting information like swarm locations, a list of all foursquare badges, and how to get specific badges as we acquire them and the specifics around them.  For example if you were wondering how to get the Ziggy's Wagon Badge you would proably want to check out our page on that. 

So checkout www.4squarebadges.com and we'd love feedback and help compiling all this information into one central location.  This is also a great test for us to build a website that can rank for lots of heavily searched keywords in search engines!  :)

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

I first learned about this book on Time Magazine's Best Business Books of 2009 list.  While reading through the short write-ups of each book this one really stood out as something of interest.  One thing we all have heard before is that history repeats itself.  Well we are currently working our way out of a difficult global recession.  It isn't as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930's, but it's the closest we have gotten to that time in a long time.  If you want to understand the present then a great place to start is by understanding the past.

Lords of Finance focuses most of its page telling the story of four central bankers who combined held much of the financial power in the 1920's and how the decisions that they made led us into the Great Depression.   The book was extremely interesting learning about these individuals and their paths to power.  I did think that the book could have been a few hundred pages shorter and did go through stretches of being hard to follow with all the details of a past age, but you do not lack for knowing all the details.

I would recommend this book for someone who has an interest in either history or economics.  The Great Depression was one of the most defining times in the last hundred years and learning the mistakes that we made to get there provided a telling tale.  Also our current financial circumstances made the reading all the more interesting.  So give the book a look if this is of interest to you, but just be warned it's not a short read for those not interested in the details of financial policy and international diplomacy.

The first week of February, Heather and I took a much needed vacation.  If we have to live in the COLD weather that is Boston, at least we can get away in the middle of winter for a trip to warmer weather. 

So we took a trip on the Carnival Liberty cruise ship to the Western Caribbean.   We stopped in Cozumel, Grand Cayman and Jamaica. We took plenty of pictures, so here they are...