About half-way through. This book is funny, smart and scary/exciting. I’ll post some excerpts tomorrow. If you’re counting on media and advertising (as we now know them) to be around in five years, do NOT read this book. (Amazon)
This PBS program on design has stuck with me for a couple of days. In one of the segments, a designer said something about removing everything that is not essential until all that remains is the essential. (This MacBook is a very nearly perfect example of that aesthetic.)
The same, I suppose, could be said of the theme I chose for this blog (the theme… not my execution). Thesis is the creation of Chris Pearson. More creative types have done all sorts of wonderful things with Thesis but I like the way it looks “right out of the box.”
I have gone through phases where I thought I could add a little “pizazz” to a site. If you have that designer gene, you can pull it off. If not, more is less. Knowing that –and lacking the gene– I shoot for simple. And let’s face it, nobody comes to a website twice because it looks cool.
I just finished a book by Deepak Chopra in which he says something about simplicity as an element of happiness. I’m paraphrasing here: If you acquire something, give something away. Sort of, “stuff neutral.” I’m going to give that a try because I clearly have too much stuff.
PS: So much for “less is more.” Got to playing with Thesis options and figured I’d play around with a header image for a few days.
I attended my first “time management” workshop back in the early 70s. I got the bug pretty bad. Read and listened to countless books and cassette tapes (before CDs) on productivity. I think there was a recent resurgence under the GTD (Getting Things Done) banner. Somewhere along the way, my passion waned but in those 35+ years, I’ve tried lots of tools and systems.
To-do lists have always been a challenge for me. I tend to put too load them up with too many items and they stay there too long. I recently came across the notion of identifying three things you really want to accomplish during the day and writing those on a 3×5 card. Portable, focused… might work.
My current favorite is the Tasks applet in Gmail. Small, simple and available everywhere. Supports multiple lists. About as close to that 3×5 card as I can get.
Joe Bankhead was there when radio station KBOA went on the air in 1947. One of the original employees. He recently retired (at the age of 92) and set down at his manual upright and banged out 17 pages of memories about the early days. My thanks to Joe (and his son, Jimmy) for allow us to share them here. You can hear some of Joe’s recollections in his own words (recorded in 1982)
After a few misstarts, my Internet service was restored yesterday. The problem was a tiny broken wire and as I watched the tech repair it, I marveled at just how much flowed through that gossamer thread (come on, when will I get another chance to write “gossamer thread”?).
Movies, photos, TV shows, audio, conversations from a world away. It makes a boy think about the “digital divide.” Every child should have high-speed access to the net. And I believe they will. Mobile access to the Internet will continue to change the world. And for the better.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a newspaper advertising salesperson. Given that (until recently?) newspapers are jammed with ads, doesn’t that seem odd? During my Radio Years, I wrote countless commericals and it was common to start from an ad torn from the local newspaper.
My sense back then was that businesses “bought” newspaper ads rather than having to be “sold.” A grocery store HAD to have the weekly specials in the local paper.
I suspect far more time an effort went into the layout of the ad than the selling.
If we have any current or former newspaper sales people reading this, leave us a comment. I’d love to know more about the sales process and how it has changed or is changing.
When I first encountered the concept of tagging, it seemed a little… obsessive? I’ve always been pretty good about organizing things into folders and the idea of “meta data” was mostly lost on me. In the last few years, however, I have become a believer. As good as search has become (on the desktop and in the cloud), there’s just too much stuff.
And that’s not much stuff compared to many others. Which brings me to mail. I use Apple Mail at work and here on the MacBook. Compared to Outlook, it’s very lean and basic. Has a notes and to-do feature (that I don’t use), but basically just does mail, with a spare, clean interface.
When it comes to email, there seems to be two schools of thought:
Where was I headed with all of this? Oh, tags.
I don’t have all that many emails but now that I have the tagging bug, I find myself wanting to tag my emails, so I’m trying out a little Apple Mail plug-in called MailTags. It’s not very pretty (which is unusual) but works pretty well. And it gives me the option of editing the subject line of an email. Don’t get me started on clueless subject lines.
If you’d like to know more about tagging, I recommend Everything is Miscellaneous, by Dr. David Weinberger.
My friend John just called report the Dunklin County courthouse in Kennett, Missouri (where I grew up), is surrounded by TV satellite trucks covering the trial of Heather Ellis. I posted on this a couple of weeks ago and have no idea what what really happened at the local Wal-Mart. I guess that’s what the trial is deciding. It sounds like CNN’s Anderson Cooper might have already have a verdict:
“… Kennett, Missouri has created both a pattern and practice of disparate treatment toward people of color. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the police of Kennett, Missouri search African Americans more than twice as often as whites (14% vs. 6%) even though they possess contraband at roughly the same rate (25% vs. 20%). Across the state of Missouri, African-Americans are searched almost twice as often as whites (12% vs. 7%), even though they are LESS likely to possess contraband (17% vs. 20%). Attorney General Eric Holder should get involved by conducting a thorough investigation of the entire Southeast Missouri judicial system.”
“My simple contention is this: Had Heather Ellis been a Duke Lacrosse player getting a little rowdy on spring break, I doubt very seriously that she would be facing this kind of prison time. America has a two-tiered justice system, where people of color are being given the bottom rung of the justice ladder. Our inability to let go of our racially horrific past is causing us to destroy our future. The Heather Ellis case is merely a symbol of a much larger problem.”
Story from yesterday on the Daily Dunklin Democrat website. I’ll update this with a verdict if and when there is one.
The one quote that jumped out at me was attributed to Alex Bogusky, Co-Chairman, CP&B:
“You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in social media… The old media paradigm was PAY to PLAY. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You’ve got to be willing to PLAY to PLAY.”