New York City- Bagels, Baseball, and Biggie

Notorious B.I.G. Action figure
Originally uploaded by steveboese

Spent the weekend with my 8 year old son in New York City, and have had a really excellent time sightseeing, hitting the American Museum of Natural History, eating some NYC classics like bagels, pizza, and Junior's Cheesecake.

Topping off the weekend was a trip to Citi Field to see the Mets square off against the Reds. Since the Mets old ballpark  Shea Stadium was such a dump, I decided to wait until Citi was open to make a trip here for a game with my son.

Big props and thanks to Robert Hans, RHHR on Twitter, who hooked my up with the Mets tickets, thanks again.

We had an awesome time, saw some fantastic things, but for some reason this Notorious B.I.G. action figure stood out to me. Only in NYC can you drop $40 for the

chance to have a Biggie figure on your shelf.

Regular HR Technology programming to resume later this week.

Dinosaur BBQ Book Giveaway

This week I was the fortunate recipient of a gift card for Barnes & Noble, a token of appreciation for a presentation I helped to give on 'Innovation in the Classroom'.  I attempted to preach the gospel of blogs, twitter, and networking to a very skeptical crowd of faculty members.

I am not sure that I won over any converts that day, but I hope that it was just the first skirmish in a longer campaign.

At any rate, I picked up a few books for the family, and with the remainder I wanted to share some of the spoils with a blog reader. Since I received the gift card mostly for talking about the blog,  I figured

it was the least I could do.

Rather than give away a boring technology or business book, I went for something I can unequivocally give my highest personal endorsement.

The book I will give away to a commenter to this post (selected at random) is the Dinosaur Bar b que, An American Roadhouse cookbook, hardcover edition.

I received this book originally about three years ago as a gift, and I have probably made over half of the recipes in it, and the fundamental smoking techniques and advice are the basis for all the smoking that I do today.

It is a fantastic book and an even better restaurant, so if you ever get to Rochester or Syracuse be sure to check it out.

So if you are interested in winning a copy of the best barbecue book around, leave a comment on the post, I will select a winner at random on Monday morning, July 13.

Thanks very much for reading and for helping to give me content for my little 'innovation' presentation, and I hope you enjoy the Barbecue.

SHRM Counter Programming - Women's Pool

Every year during the Super Bowl I take a quick look at the counter-programming that ESPN decides to run to 'compete' with the big game (which is typically on ABC or Fox). ESPN knows that pretty much every typical ESPN viewer is watching the Super Bowl, so they don't 'waste' any potentially interesting or popular shows in that time slot.

They typically run something from the potpourri of Lumberjack contests, cheerleading competitions, or my favorite women's pool.  So while the big SHRM shindig is going on, any HR-related blogger not in attendance and providing daily updates of the goings on is likely to find it hard to get noticed this week,

So in the spirit of ESPN's programming strategy, while SHRM is in full swing, I offer this gem: Women's Pool.  The video is actually pretty funny, check out the 'interesting' telestrator image about 30 seconds in, followed shortly after by what sounds like a huge fart and the commentator denying responsibility for said fart.

Pretty funny, no?

Anyway, later in the week I will resume my normally excellent HR Technology programming, and don't forget on Friday, July 3rd at 6 PM EDT the next Episode of HR Happy Hour, where Shauna and I will get the 'inside scoop' on SHRM from a panel of HR superstars.

A New HR Blog Search Tool

My friends at Halogen Software have launched a neat tool on their site, an 'HR Blog Search Engine'.

The tool does a custom Google search of the many if not all of the top HR and HR Technology Blogs for relevant content.  So if you want to know what the HR Bloggers are writing or thinking about on a particular topic, this is a tool worth checking out.

Just enter your search criteria in the 'Search' box and you are on your way.

For example a search on 'Leadership' brings the following results from some top HR Blogs like 'Great Leadership' and 'Fistful of Talent'.

And happily for me, a search on 'HR Technology' yields the following list of results:

Thanks very much to the good people at Halogen for building this neat tool for searching the HR blogosphere, and of course for including my HR Technology blog in the search results so prominently.

I will definitely make use of the search tool to help find information, insights, and when I find myself thinking, 'I know that the HR Bartender wrote about that, let me find that post again'.

If you are a blogger, or a fan of an HR Blog that you would like included in the search results, contact pr@halogensoftware.com and let the folks at Halogen know.

Carnival Time - Minion Style

One of the very coolest HR Bloggers in the world, the HR Minion, is your host of the latest Carnival of HR at her HR Minion blog.

The Minion is uber-awesome and she did a great job of assembling this edition of the Carnival, with some fantastic offerings from HR Bartender, Lisa Rosendahl,  Jon Ingham and more.

Even my little 'ol HR Technology blog is included, for which I say Thanks to the Minion.

Check out the Carnival for some great reads from some great bloggers.