Matt Bernier

I often get emails that the very last sentence says “please advise” and it drives me up a fucking wall.  It is something so simple, but it totally reminds me of words that make you sound dumb.  The reasons for this are not as simple as the fact that some people have the bad habit of adding ‘please advise’ to every email. It is because it makes me feel like the person who is writing me the email thinks that I am going to just file their message away and do nothing with it. The difference between me and this assumption, is that when you send me an email asking for help, I am going to respond!  Yeah, seriously. I… » Read More

My Grandma is an amazing lady who I am able to have some amazing conversations with.  I look forward to times when we get to chat, whether in person, on the phone or even over email.  BTW, my Grandma was the first person I knew to own a Mac and who, even though she pretends to not know, I think secretly knows more about Macs than me. Recently, she asked me a question which I figured I would pose to you, Have you ever been overwhelmed with life & going through a time of extreme distress when getting engaged in a book was the only time you could get your mind off of what was traumatizing you? I would love… » Read More

According to FTC rules, I have to disclose that I was given this product by Ergotron for the purpose of doing a product review. When I was at CES in January I noticed a booth from a company called Ergotron, who I had never heard of (this is actually not true, as you will find out), so I jumped into the booth and started looking around. Immediately, my eyes were drawn to a poster talking about the possibility of winning an Ergotron product for tweeting a picture of myself in their booth.  The result: A couple weeks later, I was contacted by Ergotron announcing that I had won! They gave an email detailing the items that I could choose from…. » Read More

Truth be told, I was not going to go to StartupWeekend-Boulder last weekend.  I was going to go camping with my Fiance.  However, the weather worked out so that was a bad idea (wet tents and apartment life mean lots of mold).  Not only that, but my friend Jason was all over me about StartupWeekend.  At one point he seriously said, You MUST go if you are serious about startups. My first reaction to this was that Jason was just being obsessive. Turns out, my gut reaction was way wrong.  I thanked Jason probably three different times for harrassing me (about 12 emails… seriously) to go. Why did I thank Jason?  Because, not only did I go, I pitched an… » Read More

I haven’t written a blog post in a long time, but someone suggested I tell this story. I have a bunch of stuff I need to sell, so I figured Craig’s List was the place to go.  Things like, a 5DVD change, a Vacuum, a desk, and some movies.  Simple, easy, 5 minute transactions.  “Here’s your stuff, thank you for the money”.  Seriously, this is what every transaction I have ever been a part of has consisted of. This however has not been the case for the last 3 days. I posted the items on Sunday night and sold some of the movies right away, like within an hour.  I didn’t hear anything else until the next day. This is… » Read More

This post is a continuation of my post about managing my tasks, projects, and responsibilities.  There are links to the other posts at the bottom of this post. Lists In Notepads Recently, I found myself writing everything down in a notepad.  I was writing all of my personal to do items as well as my client and work to do items in the one list.  I quickly realized that it was getting to be too much in one list and maybe even too much for a single notepad. My solution was to run to Target and get some new stronger notepads that will withstand the wear and tear of being transported in my backpack to and from work and all… » Read More

I was replying to a friend on Twitter using trim, and I had a <script> tag in the post.  I realized when I submitted that the tag made everything after it in my tweet dissapear. If you want to see the actual tweets, you can find them in my twitter feed here: Matt Bernier’s Twitter Feed First thougt was, “No Way!”.  Second thought was, “What Else Can I do?”. So, I tried basic HTML with this tweet: <h2>Testing whether HTML breaks tr.im</h2> B/c my <script> tag did earlier</script> <span style="color:blue;"> ScreenShot coming</script> This got me this result: Then I tried an alert: <script type="text/javascript"> alert('does this work?'); </script> That got me this result: Then lastly, I tried a little more… » Read More

This post is a continuation of my post about managing my tasks, projects, and responsibilities.  There are links to the other posts at the bottom of this post. Email I have clients that insist on using just email to communicate, which is fine with me because I use GMail, which lets me keep emails in threads instead of as individual emails.  This makes keeping a conversation in control very easy.  However, my inbox is constantly full.  For the last couple of weeks, I have noticed that when I empty my inbox out before bed I have between 20 and 50 emails waiting for me in the morning.  Most of them are status updates, automated messages, or twitter messages but it… » Read More