In January I replaced my 30 year old couch with a home-made window seat/day bed. This is the one I’m tyring to cover with bumper stickers to hide my shitty paint job. Boing Boing points to a much cooler solution. A “computer bed” that starts out as a hinged desk with room for a PC, printer, and so forth. When you’re ready to sleep, the whole desktop swings to the floor and a bed with matress swings down from the wall in its place, converting it to a bed.
I moved the link to my email address. It was just under the masthead on the right. I moved it down to the My Stuff area on the sidebar. And I switched from my Hotmail account to my Gmail account. Hotmail just aint getting it any more. More and more sites won’t accept email from Hotmail users because it’s eat up with spam. This has always been my throw-away account and I’m about to throw it away. I’ll keep it for now, just because it’s difficult to get your name (SteveMays@anything.com) anymore. If you want to reach me you can use the Gmail accsount or just post a comment and mark it personal. But know that I won’t be checking the Hotmail account very often.
I’m sitting in my room at the Fairfield Inn in Indianapolis, cruising down that old Information Highway via their free (and speedy) wi-fi. I keep flashing back to the mid-90’s when even sending an email was agonizing at 16.2. And I was uploading audio files and images. It was tediouss beyond all description. And now I’m blazing along as though I were sitting at my desk at Learfield HQ. I know, I know… it’s like the Aboriginal tribesman standing at the kitchen sink, turning the water off and on. Amazed at this mirical. I will NEVER take a fast net connection for granted.
If you also missed the careerbuilder.com chimp ads in the Super Bowl, you can see them here. I’d pay a hundred bucks to spend the day watching those commercials being made. Nothing on god’s green earth is funnier than a chimp in a coat and tie.
Did I mention I’m all registered, booked and reserved for Gnomedex 6.0? It’s five months away and I can hardly wait. For three days I won’t have to explain or defend blogging and podcasting and RSS and all the rest. I will be be among believers. Not just believers, but those who are creating and applying these revolutionary technologies. I have no idea who the speakers will be or what they’ll be talking about. But everyone in the room will have a clue.
“SpoofCard calling cards offers you the ability to change what someone sees on their caller ID display when they receive a phone call. SpoofCard offers the ability to select a Male or Female voice when making a call. The feature works in real-time and allows the caller to speak in a normal tone while the person on the other end will hear the changed voice.” So, if you receive a call from a nine-year-old girl talking dirty, it’s me.
I only go to one technology conference a year: Gnomedex. It’s small, as such events go. Just 300 attendees and sort of a tough ticket. I’ve been going since Chris Pirillo started holding them in Des Moines back in the late 90’s. I’ve gushed about it here so I won’t bore you with why I love this conference. This year Chris is doing something unheard of: No press release.
This year’s conference has sold one-third of its available seats since opening registration a mere week ago. Despite having not yet unveiled speakers or sponsors, the conference is well on its way to being sold out for the second year in a row.
If you’re planning on attending, let me know.
We’re just days away from “relaunching” our corporate website. I added the quotation marks because what we’re really doing here is applying a new template to a few thousand existing pages. Our current look is more than three years old and it’s time for a fresh face. And the nature of our company has changed a lot in those three years. I think the new look reflects that nicely. Andy Waschick and his development team at Gestalt have done a fine job of giving us just what we asked for on this project. My role has been that of the stock dog that runs around yapping and nipping at the cows legs, hearding them in the right direction. In order to do my job, I have to be a little annoying. But I’m pleased with the result and will post here when the new look is up.
A few years ago, a sale rep for our company asked to have a commercial written and producted in a ridiculously short period of time. My advice was something along the lines of:
Go down to the basement where we keep the Time Machine. Set it for two weeks ago. When you get back there, submit this work order and it’ll be ready by tomorrow.
Since then it’s become something of a running joke for a few of us at the office. Yesterday it occurred to me how much fun it would be to have a Time Machine in the basement. It would be the highlight of every tour. I don’t have the skills to build such a device but I have some ideas on what it should include:
And I sort of see this on a platform sitting on some huge coil springs, so there would be the slightest movement as you climbed into the seat. Which should be either an old dentist chair, or one of the old metal tractor seats with the holes in it.
What started as a gag could be a great marketing tool. A fun way to review significant moments in the company’s history. But we could also look into the future. This would be huge. I predict we’d have so much word-of-mouth on this, customers would be calling us, asking if they could visit and take a ride in the Learfield Time Machine.
So who could build such a thing? I have no dought some artist or sculptor has already created exactly what I’m looking for. But it’s in a museum or art gallary and damned expensive. My childhood friend RP could have built this in his prime. Not sure about today. He has the imagination and technical skills.
Joe Browning could design it but I’m not sure he could build it. He’s an architect in Santa Fe so he probably knows someone that could make this real. If you know of someone that could pull this off, put me in touch. Hell, I might even be able to get the Grownups at our company to come up with some dough. If not, we’ll have a series of car washes or ham and bean dinners and raise the money.
I’ve been invited to be on a panel at a meeting of PR professionals next month. It’s the “January Joint Meeting” of CSPRC/IABC/PRSA. I’m hoping to be able to pronounce the acronym by January 10th. Maybe it’s just me, but I find it interesting that none of these big public relations organizations are using RSS, blogs or podcasts. But they’re talking about it and that puts them ahead of the pack. Depending on the sound set-up, I’ll record it and post it here.