My life: One big, long loop… (See also: Ouroboros)
I was writing the About page for this hear site, and somewhere in the stream of consciousness ramblings this little gem came out that I felt deserved its own post:
Back in university, around 1991, as part of one of the new-media/hyper-media classes that I managed to con my way into[1], I created a project using Hypercard that was intended to be a kiosk that would sit in a motorcycle dealer’s showroom and allow a visitor to rotate various bikes, change the color, add options and see how the bike looked.
Even back in 1991, as a business school student, I was working with Photoshop (version 1!!!) creating what today would be considered a Rich Internet Application (if the Internet was around then) for the motorcycle industry. Holy crap! After all the schizophrenic darts and weaves my career and life has taken, I’ve essentially ended up pretty much where I started.
And none of this has really been intentional. It’s just happened because I’m a geek and I like motorcycles.
Now what’s kind of depressing is that even with all of this insane early technology adoption and awareness, I’m not even close to being rich from any of it. I managed to to an amzing job of dodging lucrative opportunities during the dot-com boom (and even now during the Web2.0 mini-boom). While somewhere there’s a 25 year old bozo that droped out from Standford and because they know the right sugar-daddy on Sand Hill Road they are multi-b/millionaires. Sigh… Now I’m depressed…
- I’m still working with Photoshop
- I’m still working with new/hyper-media a la the Interwebs
- I’m back to working on motorcycle stuff
If I don’t believe in fate, I think maybe I need to look into it.
[1] It should be noted that I was a business school student, yes, but I was a semi-closeted computer graphics geek (geesh in the endless bifurcation of memory that writing this is causing I now realize I need to spend some time on writing about that some day). A friend of mine who started out not quite as devoted, but ended up way more devoted , was in the communications college and told me about this really cool class he was in taught by Carrie Heeter (who is
about[nope, I tried… She’s the only one. Again, this is made even more odd in that I wasn’t even supposed to be in her class, college, or program!] the only professor that I can even remember the name of). I don’t recall what the class was called but it was something along the lines of Hypermedia something. After writing what I’m sure was a pathetic plea to the professor, she took pity on me and let me in. It’s amazing how one’s life is formed by such seemingly random things. Or I guess viewed another way, you’re going to miss out on a lot of shit if you don’t leave a lot of options open and follow them when they come along. Is there a record for the longest footnote in a post?
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Possibly more time in the future for ranting and raving here!
Yea! I’ve recently managed to pawn off the marketing chores that I was handling for my day job to the poor girl that I hired a few months ago as my Community Relationship Manager. It’s a win-win really. I get to go back to just dealing with the website and the e-commerce business, and she gets a promotion to head of marketing.
I’m happy as it clears up a lot of mental capital for other, more productive things. First and formost is a complete and total overhaul of the site’s design. For the last two years there’s not been any thorough or comprehensive design work done. There’s been new features, functions, or section added to the site, but no real cohesive plan on making it all fit together.
It’s also going to give me more time and more importantly more attention to work on: my consulting business, my research, reading, and writing about various topics of interest, and a new art project that I’ve got simmering on the back burner.
Tags:check-back-often,keep-an-eye-out,more-time
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Facebook… What the hell do they use all that money for?!
Considering the resources at Facebook’s disposal, why does it suck so bad? My latest gripe is with their weak implementation of getting RSS feeds into the mini-feed area. Unless I’m retarded or missing something obvious you can only have one feed from one blog! Once you set it up, the RSS icon is gone and you can’t add another one. So I can’t have a feed from this (what is supposed to be my personal blog if I ever got around to writing anything on it) site and my company/siteblog.
What could possibly make it so difficult that they don’t allow more than one RSS feed to stream into your mini-feed?
Let’s say that Facebook wants to be my SNS of record. Essentially a hub that represents what I’m about, what I’m up to etc. Well, it can’t! Not the way it’s set up now.
Facebook gets all this press about its platform and so on, but it’s still a walled city.
The more I dive into this social networking stuff the less impressed I am by it all. It seems that only Plaxo makes any sense in terms of being an actual platform (at best, at worst they could at least be seen as the bondo that can kind of hold together a bunch of other social networking entities) for social networking.
Tags:facebook,needsimprovement,rant,suckage
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A new site, a new business, and a change in focus around here
You will no doubt notice that all of my Dealernews articles are no longer on this site. The reason for that is that I have created a new site for the new company that I’m starting up: Radical Powersports Sales and Marketing. Radical is going to be my vehicle to work with dealers, OEM’s, and distributors in the powersports industry to start really embracing what the internet (and its related technologies and offerings) represents as an opportunity to radically change how they work. That means: more detailed work on how to leverage e-commerce and other multi-channel retail opportunities, how to use the internet and other alternative channels to do effective marketing and advertising, and finally how to leverage the power of bits over atoms when it comes to the supply chain challenges that plague the powersports industry.
The genesis for me to finally make this transition was the overwhelming turnout (even more than last year) at my Dealernews Live! seminars at Indy this year. So many dealers desperatly need someone to help them understand what’s possible and how to make it all work, and there’s just no one out there better positioned, better informed, or better equipped to help them than I am.
So head on over to Radical and check it out.
This site is going to live on as my purely personal blog that will hold random thoughts, musings, and other stuff as I find time to write it down.
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Brilliant Print Ads For Lego
I just came across some truly awesome print ads for Lego. Found them on Tribble’s site. The work was done by FCB Johannesburg (after a cursory Google, I can’t even find a web site for them! A lot of mentions of them and these ads, but I’ll be damned if I can find their website! How weird for an ad agency to not have an obvious pretense on Google for a search of their name!)
Obviously the idea is to present Legos as a child sees them. I grew up thinking that Legos (and all the much less expensive varieties like LocBlocks, etc. that I was typically playing with as Legos were and are priced at a pretty steep premium and my folks didn’t have a ton of money) were basically the best toys a kid could have. I still remember creating my own little play computers, complete with plug in memory cards, folding screens, etc. In my mind, I can see a very direct connection between my playing with Legos as a kid, and my fascination with technology (both hardware and software). Building pretend portable computers out of Legos had to have some impace on my later attempt to design and market a tablet form-factor computer (I called it the X-Tend… There’s still a reliquary of my work on it buried deep in the catacombs of my company site). If only working on the X-Tend was as easy as working with Legos. But I digress.
Having a 16 month old boy now myself, I’m fairly adamant that he’s going to have lots of access to Legos. Hopefully he’ll take to them like I did. Without the blowing them up with fire crackers and using them as pop-up targets for my BB guns of course.. 
That said, I do have to voice an opinion that Lego has been making a pretty big mistake for last few years. They are producing way to many specialized kits that are loaded with overly specialized pieces. You buy a 150 piece kit and you can essentially make the two or three things on the box and that’s about it unless you combine it with three or four other kits.
All of those specialized pieces essentially for kids to think about them in only one way. With the “old” Legos, a simple 4×4 block could be anything. A head or a tail. Now they have pieces that are heads or tails, and it’s pretty hard to use them for anything other than what they actually are, and not what they could be.
Thankfully you can buy pretty much any combination of pieces from Lego directly, but I still think that all those pirate ships, Star Wars, and racing car kits lining the shelves of Target and Toys-R-Us are not really giving kids the true advantage that Legos really could be offering when it comes to priming the pump of a kids imagination.
Full Credits of the work (as far as I can tell):
- Agency: FCB Johannesburg
- Photographer: Gerard Turnely
- Director: Brett Morris
- Copywriter/Art Director: Lance Vining
- Art Director: Charles Foley
- Awards: Grand Prix-Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival
Tags:Advertising,imagination,legos,toys
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I’m spending too much time working on my blog and not working with my blog…
Since I’m new to WordPress, and I’m a tinkerer, I’m finding myself spending too much of the free time I have trying to understand everything, comb every plug-in and widget on the WordPress Extend section, fiddle with .php pages and the CSS instead of actually writing about anything.
I guess most of that comes from having worked with technology, and most notably web technology for so long. And having worked with so many new things that, well, just didn’t work the way it was supposed to. Unfortunately most of the time this happened after I had invested far too much time into it. You never really understand the potential of something until you hit the limits, and unfortunately you never hit the limits soon enough. It’s only after you spend enough time to get 80% into something that you realise that you’re never going to get to where you want 100% to be.
Fortunately it looks like WordPress is in fact a pretty decent system that is extensible enough and customizable enough that I should be able to fix things or add things in the future as I need them or want them without having to start all over.
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Monk-e-mail
This is just too damn funny… Or stupid… Are they really that different? Give it a try…
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