Category: ramblings

posted from twitter

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-05-25

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  • Pat LaFrieda's fav meal = boneless lamb loin w/ belly wrapped around underside of eye, rolled in thick mustard & breadcrumbs & roasted -yum! #
  • New "Dark Tower!" Read "The Wind Through The Keyhole," then test your knowledge of it & you might win something sweet: http://t.co/wzXeTBxQ #
  • A sign of the looming robot apocalypse: UPenn's Scalable sWarms of Autonomous Robots & Mobile Sensors (SWARMS) project: http://t.co/xRRy3anx #
  • Sofia Vergara can make even gross words sound sexy. Listen to her say gonorrhea, Rick Santorum and New Jersey: http://t.co/BoI6KfaJ #snl #
  • "From Love to Bingo" – 873 still pics stitched together & turned into a silent movie – sometimes words are not needed: http://t.co/UR7hpudP #

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posted from twitter

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-05-11

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  • This is what I look like when I realize I’m wrong about the grammar rule I’m arguing about: http://t.co/6CP82Q0Q via @andre_io #
  • For PC wallpaper I use a sick Nat Geo pic of the Statue of Liberty being hit by lightening. Here's the story behind it: http://t.co/QBQY4pep #
  • The Death Star would cost about 1.3 million time world GDP – a surprisingly cost-effective weapons system: http://t.co/rVEvz76v #deathstar #
  • "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet" ~Stephen Hawking #qotd #

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posted from twitter

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-05-04

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  • People who work 40 hours a week get more done than those who regularly work 60 or more hours. Crazy but true: http://t.co/TVSpmLSF #
  • Domaster & Tetrawing are Game Boy related Transformers made out of LEGOs. Julius von Brunk – you sir are a genius: http://t.co/CdA89FXx #
  • Fun fact: The distress signal "mayday" came from venez m'aider (come help me) because in 1923 most air travel was between the UK and Paris #
  • Silos, once used to store livestock feed, have become unlikely nurseries for trees. Pretty neat. http://t.co/S0oAaxaR – http://t.co/tM5uhZSk #
  • Shocker! LGA is the worst US airport for check-in & security, baggage handling, Wi-Fi, staff comm, design & cleanliness:http://t.co/W8dSKzDM #
  • "Let's try to play the music and not the background" ~ Ornette Coleman, saxophonist, innovator, iconoclast #qotd #

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ramblings

What I do

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I have been working in the Interactive space since I graduated from college, which is longer ago than I’d like to admit, and my job title has always been either producer or project manager, which means that most people in my life do not understand how I actually earn an income. Usually, when trying to explain my role to friends and family, I use a general contractor or a movie producer as examples.
For the general contractor example, I say, “If you are redoing a kitchen, you don’t care about the types of pipes being used, or the type of wires that are going into the wall. All you care about is what exactly is being done, how long is it going to take and how much is going to cost.” That resonates, especially with homeowners.
For the movie producer example, I say, “Think of the Oscars. Who gets the award for best picture, the most prestigious award of the evening? The producers. What did they do? Direct? No, that went to best director. Make the sets? No, that went to Best Set Design. So what did they do? Everything else, from securing and managing the budget and timeline to making the director and actor get along, when they really dislike each other.” That really resonates, because how doesn’t like movies?
Still, that doesn’t necessarily nail it and now, I can also refer these fine folks to the image below:
What does a producer actually do?
Via Kay

ramblings

On Information

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The reason why I have a blog is to provide information.
The Wash Post had an interesting point about the history of published information, and the point of the column is to talk about how our informational commons is for the most part built atop a latticework of advertising platforms.
In that way, it’s possible that no single industry — not newspapers nor search engines nor anything else — has done as much to advance the storehouse of accessible human knowledge in the 20th century as advertisers. They didn’t do it because they are philanthropists, and they didn’t do it because they love information. But they did it nevertheless.
An interesting point of view, and a good way to kick off the year considering that a single advertiser underwrites the hosting fee, and therefore all off the costs considering my labor is free, for this blog. You’d never suspect that one of the tiny text links on the left is a paid ad, would you?

politics

It's Better to Have Never Watched

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One of my favorite “glass half full” statements is from Alfred, Lord Tennyson who wrote, “It’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.” It can be considered trite but it is almost always true, at least when it comes to love.
It seems that the reverse is true though when one is talking about about current events and Fox News. Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind center is reporting that people who depend on Fox News are even less informed than those who don’t watch any news programming at all.
Yes, you read that correctly. You are better off learning about the news from overheard conversations in elevators and on the street than by watching channel 640 on your Verizon supplied cable box. To me, this information is more of a “duh – this simply confirms something I already knew!” moment as opposed to a “wow – I had no clue!” moment. That being said, I’ll be very happy to point this study out as a rebuttal to anyone who uses Fox News as source material during a future debate.
Please note that this is a separate study from the one that the University of Maryland ran last year that found that a s found that Fox News viewers were more likely to believe false information about politics.
In closing, Fox’s tag line is “Fair and Balanced” never ceases to make me think of the line from 1984 that says, “We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.” ‘Nuff said.
Via Jessie

food

Sushiactive is alive

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Back in 1999 when I was hitting my sushi loving stride (having started to eat it only a few years earlier) and starting my website at the same time, I decided to create a site that matched pictures of sushi with a Mortal Kombat style voice over / description feature – basically an interactive menu that one could use to make sense of this strange and foreign culinary world that I was in. The site was to be like the paper menus that one sees in sushi restaurants, the ones with the photos of the fish and rolls along with their phonetic Japanese name and English name, except again with that booming voice over. For instance, you might see a crab stick fly into the frame and then hear, “Kani! Crab! Delicious!” I decided to name it “Sushiactive.”
Like so many of my great ideas, this one never went anywhere, aside from living as a flash trailer of sushi flying around that I developed and which then lived on my site for the past decade, that is before the Sevensquared to Keymaster Productions move when I took it down. My friends would ask me about it from time to time and while I would always say, “it’s in development” that wasn’t true. I gave up on developing the idea years ago.
Like so many ideas that were spawned during Web 1.0, this one was ahead of its time, a little over a solid decade to be exact. With the rise of mobile computing via “phones that are really mini-computers that happen to also make phone calls,” this idea was one that many people had. “Order Sushi Like a Native, and Know What You’re Eating” published back on 6/8/11 reviews phone applications that all mimic my idea. The last one mentioned, SushiGuru, is also the only one uses my VO idea. From the article:

Unlike many other competing apps, SushiGuru also has audio pronunciations. If you ever opted for a California roll simply because it was easier to say than Aburasokomutsu, a kind of mackerel, this is a worthwhile feature.

I like being ahead of my time but at the same time I am wistful and rueful that others have implemented it. I’ll need to review what other ideas I’ve had that I’m not acting on. I think it’s time to revisit my nascent “Little Classics” publishing model.