In November 2010 I had the privilege of travelling to New Zealand with my business partner Chad Mustard, his brother and another friend. We rented a car and traveled from Fiordland, in the southwestern part of NZ’s South Island, to Auckland in the North Island. I won’t spend much time here trying to put into words the incredible, jaw-dropping, spectacular scenery New Zealand blessed us with. The photos below speak for themselves. It was the trip of a life time, and we’re all dying to go back.

So if you’ve ever dreamed of venturing to a remote part of the globe, filled with lavish rain forests, magnificent alpine peaks, lonely valleys, quaint villages, sun-drenched beaches, ancient volcanoes and a penguin or two, I highly advise you to save your pennies and book a trip to the Land of the Long White Cloud. New Zealand is a nation of wonders, and you’ll never regret visiting.

Mt. Cook, NZ's highest peak, from the descent into Queenstown.

The road to Milford Sound, with thousands of other-worldly waterfalls cascading from the clouds above.

Milford Sound cannot be captured in a photo. It's truly epic.

Beautiful, remote rain forest trails are everywhere in Fiordland.

Lake Wakatipu in Glenorchy.

Paradise, New Zealand

Deserted beach in Abel Tasman National Park.

Rolling farmland just outside Matamata (near The Shire film set).

Google Maps would have made Christopher Columbus pee his pants.

This link takes you to a really cool site called Google Maps tips for life. It’s a user-friendly page that navigates you through all the cool things that Google Maps can do to help you find local businesses, addresses and directions. It also shows you Google Maps’ cool features like the Virtual Walking Tour, My Maps and Map Maker.

As our world gets smaller and online tools evolve, it becomes easier to explore the amazing places around us. In my humble opinion, Google Maps is one of the coolest Internet sites to come into existence. And it’s only getting better.

Ghostbusters is one of my favorite comedies, and Halloween is a great time of year to watch it. Here’s the classic scene when our phantasm-fighting threesome get their very first call to action.

I love, love, love this Steven Spielberg horror classic. Spielberg takes adventure elements from Indiana Jones and the “ordinary family under extraordinary circumstances” narrative from E.T. to create Poltergeist, a ghoulishly fun ghost story set in the scariest of all nightmares: Suburbia.

Disney’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow tells the favorite tale of Ichabod Crane and his fateful encounter with the Headless Horseman.

Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? used to terrify me back in the 90s, but I watched it anyway. I even made my little brother, who was probably more terrified than I was, watch it with me. The clip below features some of the spookiest villains in the series.

Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall provide us with truly Oscar-worthy performances in The Shining, the horror movie of all horror movies. It comes on TV all the time, so I would highly recommend watching this excellent film.

A woman cheated out of trick-or-treating is a dangerous prospect, as Linus learns the hard way in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

No commentary is needed for this next video clip. A Halloween classic, pure and simple.

Homer Simpson gives demonic minions more trouble than they bargained for in this “Treehouse of Horror” clip.

And finally, my favorite Halloween movie of all. Before it became over-commercialized and popular with emo-goth teenagers who like to pretend they’re dark and depressed, The Nightmare Before Christmas was an obscure, light-hearted holiday treasure to me and my family. Without fail, the song “This is Halloween” is stuck in my head throughout October. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Well I hope I scared you silly with my chilling clips. Happy Halloween to all!

I love Pat’s face at the 44 second mark.

This is probably my favorite one

Earlier this week my sister reminded me of the genius show Animaniacs. When I was growing up this was one of my favorite cartoons to watch. I still crack up watching these hilarious clips.

I hope you enjoys these, have a great weekend!

Maybe this edition will expose my nerdy side a little too much, but I just love how far technology has evolved. Check out these cool/remarkable robot videos:

This robot is amazing. One of the biggest challenges engineers have in making a truly mobile robot is balance. When you balance you’re using hundreds of muscles just to stay upright. When someone pushes you or when you walk on ice or any type of uneven or abnormal terrain, you use another set of muscles and brain functions just so you don’t fall over. With that in mind take a look at this incredible robot:

The fluid and quick motions of these robots is pretty amazing:

This is just cool. Look out Wall-E:

No post dedicated to robots is complete with out seeing some classic robot fighting:

What are some cool videos you like?

Cozy up to social media more often.

Using social media all of the time can get a little tedious. When you’re using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blog, or other forms of social media, it’s easy to get bogged down. You get wrapped up in making sure you post to your blog, that you tweet or that you check your Facebook News Feed. These online activities are all important (particularly for your business), but you need to make sure you’re having fun with it!

Take a few minutes today to rekindle your love for one of your social networks. Get on your blog and write about something different and exciting. Go on YouTube and watch some videos that make you laugh (click here and here to see a few of my favorites). Get on Twitter and try to connect with someone in your industry. Don’t just follow them, connect with them. Log onto Facebook and really get in touch with an old friend. Actually message them and start a genuine conversation. If you’re only seeing their updates from time to time, then you haven’t really re-connected with them.

Have fun, do something meaningful, renew your love!

What do you do to keep your social love affair going?

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I love The Christmas Story. Such good writing:

The latest Christmas great:

I can’t believe this movie ever happened, but it still hilarious:

I’m always grateful when Heman explains things like Christmas to me:

This is a Classic:

What are some of your favorite Christmas movie clips?

Here’s username RickyMartin

Here’s username Ricky_Martin

If you guessed that RickyMartin is the real superstar, you should go hang your head in Twitter shame.

It just so happens that I am friends with the owner of the RickyMartin username. And no, my friend is not actually Ricky Martin. My good friend Michelle Burnett, who is quite the jokester, signed up for Twitter about nine months ago and made her user name RickyMartin. Why? Because she’s hilarious. When the real Ricky Martin decided to get on Twitter he tried to get the name from her, but ended up using Ricky_Martin instead. Michelle has never tried to pretend that she is the real Ricky Martin, her name says she is Michelle Burnett, her profile picture is of herself, and her tweets are definitely her own. Here are a few samples:

“Loved your work on Hannah Montana @donnyosmond!”

“Got my hair did. I feel totally fab.”

“short hair is sad hair.”

“I’m pretty sure you’ve had a nose job.”

“After sitting in the library for about 30 minutes, I noticed that someone in the area smelled a lot like breath. And not the good kind.”

If you took even a moment to look at her profile, it is very obvious she is not Ricky Martin. Yet somehow, hundreds of Ricky Martin fans are following her, and actually believe she is Ricky Martin. In the past week alone, over 28 people have mentioned @rickymartin in their tweets, most of which are re-tweets from the real Ricky Martin. Multiple people have sent messages to Michelle in Spanish hoping to connect with the real Ricky Martin. Someone even nominated Michelle for “Mr. Twitter Puerto Rico” and she subsequently received hundreds of supporting votes.

So what does all of this mean? It means there are still a lot of people out there who are confused about how Twitter works. Or they just don’t care enough to look carefully at the people they follow or re-tweet. I can’t count how many people I’ve talked to who have signed up for Twitter and just give up because they can’t figure it out or see no value in tweeting. The average person isn’t going to search Mashable or other blogs for ‘How-To Twitter’ instructions, not to mention researching why Twitter is valuable.

I’ve always thought Twitter could do a much better job at introducing people to their product. When a new user signs up for Twitter, there should be helpful videos and instructions available on how-to use it. They should have links to articles that explain how to use Twitter for a business, individual, professional, music lover, etc. Don’t make the customer search for this stuff. Give it to them when they sign up.

What do you think? Why are there so many people who don’t know how to use Twitter? Why are there so many people who sign up for Twitter, but stop using it? And why do Ricky Martin fans have a hard time distinguishing a male pop icon in Puerto Rico from a female college student in Utah?