Archives for 2010

I went to my cousin’s wedding yesterday. It was probably the most fun I’ll ever have at a wedding which is due in large part to the fact that my cousin and his wife are really fun people. And while their friends were nice enough they were a little to focused hockey, but when a large number of the friends at a wedding have a particular context for connecting with the bride and the groom lots of emphasis on that context is to be expected.

It was a short ceremony; from the bride’s entrance to “I now pronounce you man and wife” took all of 12 minutes and they’d only actually slotted 15 so scheduling was good on that. What was also good was how they structured the pre-wedding and after wedding events. Five words to make your pre-wedding time less painful for your guests: cocktail hour and open bar. [Read more…] about Tip like you mean it

I had a conversation with my friend MW the other day about online networking and social media during which she remarked that she saw absolutely no use for Twitter. It was kind of an odd remark given that she’s Finance Director for a U.S. Representative who was just re-elected. Despite that, I allowed as how if you didn’t have a use for Twitter it really was just a lot of blateration.

When she asked me to elaborate I explained that I had two Twitter accounts, one for my personal blog (you can see my hugely engrossing tweets over there in the right hand column) and one for my professional life. The one for my professional life, I told her, I use like a private news feed.

I follow other people who do the same day job that I do, designers who are doing cool and interesting stuff, a couple of web design and development magazines, some outfits that specialize in WordPress, and a few other interesting people. Doing this ensures that the links and updates that come through my Twitter stream generally have intrinsic value. I, in turn, put out updates that have the same sort of content value and many of the people I’m following are also following me. But just because I’m using Twitter and getting that level of information out of it doesn’t mean that everyone is either getting that value or putting that value back into it. [Read more…] about Technology doesn’t equal content

I could blather about the midterm elections and how it’s not as bad as it could be, or about how maybe the change in the legislature will make it so Obama actually gets off his ass and does something about the one thing that all Americans can (likely) agree needs fixing. Instead, I’m going to say that apparently the first week in November is the week we should all worry about our jobs.

The first thing I did Monday morning was send a note on behalf of my employer’s Board of Directors letting staff know that BigBoss had “resigned” effective the previous Friday. I’m using quotations because from what I’ve heard from my new officemate, his resignation was a surprise to BigBoss. In some ways it shouldn’t have been and in some ways it was undeserved.

True, he did drive us into a financial ditch by spending a ton of money on things the organization didn’t really need or couldn’t make use of. Did we really need a $60,000+ all staff meeting in the spring of 2008 five months after the National Bureau of Economic Research, the organization responsible for these things in the U.S., had already declared us in a recession? On the macro level, it probably did something for staff cohesion to have everyone meet everyone else, and I’m sure the workshops were useful to many me included, but from a financial standpoint it wasn’t the smartest expenditure ever. [Read more…] about Leadership transition

I’m not normally one to pull out the political correctness yellow flag but it really annoys me when supposedly progressive groups demonstrate a certain level of thoughtlessness when it comes to their assumptions about roles in society.

I got an e-mail this morning from Breast Cancer Action, a well meaning group based in San Francisco, letting me know that they’d made the finals for “National CLASSY Award for ‘Most Effective Awareness Campaign'” for their work on pinkwashing. Pinkwashing, in case you don’t know or don’t live in the U.S., is the use of pink on their labels or the creation of special pink products made available for sale during October, which is breast cancer awareness month in the United States, by companies whose products are linked to an increase risk of breast cancer. This use of pink erroneously implies to the average, harried consumer that the company selling the product is contributing to eliminating breast cancer, or helping breast cancer patients or survivors, in some meaningful way when very often the company is doing nothing but adding a pink ribbon to a product’s label.

Breast Cancer Action is running pretty high profile campaign against KFC and the Susan G. Komen Foundation in reaction to KFC’s “Buckets for the cure” sales of fried chicken in pink buckets on the basis that unhealthy food, like KFC, is a contributing factor to developing breast cancer and that by taking KFC’s money Komen, which runs the largest breast cancer research fund raisers in the country, is allowing KFC to make a profit while giving KFC an undeserved reputation and a lot of profits they wouldn’t normally have. [Read more…] about Stay classy Stay Classy

The people at the Oxford English Dictionary always manage to surprise me. This time they’ve done it with a little campaign they call Save The Words (requires Flash).

Save The Words encourages you to adopt obsolete words to make sure they don’t become extinct. The interface for the site cleverly combines the ransom note collage concept with a lot of the same principles employed by interactive DVD menu designers. A frame that scrolls with your mouse highlights a number of words that appear to have been pasted onto a wall which, sometimes randomly sometimes when you mouseover them, by getting larger and saying phrases like “Yes, yes! Me!” “Choose me!” “No, pick me!”, a distinctly British “Oy! Oy!”, and even a plaintive “Hello?”  among others. A click of the mouse opens a definition window to tell you what your exotic word actually means and to provide you with an opportunity to register, adopt your word, and, of course, buy a t-shirt emblazoned with your new vocabulary term. [Read more…] about Save The Words