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This morning I thought I would stretch my weary creative soul and attempt to make beautiful what I’ve always felt was a bit ugly.  I grew up in northern Indiana, where lots of snow in the winter is still pretty common, so I love snow and what it does to a landscape.  However, the part of lots of snow that always got a little ugly was when the roads were salted and cars started driving over them, defiling the pristine blanket and turning it into a ruddy, grey, and sloppy urban slosh-fest.

So here you are…part abstract art, part creative exercise.  And I still love snow!

…we just got an offer on our house! Sure, you tell yourself, “this happens everyday”. And it does. But you see, my wife and I are victims of the mortgage crisis. No, we didn’t take a ridiculous ARM that got hyper-inflated and then we had to foreclose; instead, we got a great rate on a 30 year fixed mortgage, bought a house we could afford within our budget, and were very responsible with payments, maintenance, etc.

However, we decided to move after only being in the house for a little over a year, and right as we moved (in March of 2007), the bottom of the housing market fell out where we were living. We listed the house on March 1, 2007, and from March until July or so we got about a dozen showings. From July 07 to December 07 we had only 2 showings. So an offer is a very big deal to us.

We’ve been shelling out mortgage and rent payments now for over 10 months, and although we’ve never been wanting for anything, it has been very frustrating. What a relief to know that the end may be near.

So, the next time you’re thinking about being fiscally irresponsible, or that mortgage fraud is a victimless crime, think of us. Every bankruptcy by an irresponsible person is paid for by responsible people, just like bogus healthcare claims are paid for by responsible people.

That being said, I can’t help but be a bit cynical at the idea of the federal government sending checks to everyone in the country as a reward for being irresponsible, but hey, that’s probably because I’m not in the government. And that’s probably because I don’t have any MySpace friends.

Thanks for your thoughts and prayers. I’ll let everyone know how this turns out.

What will Gates do next?

So, if you were the richest man in the world, knew lots and lots of famous people, had virtually unlimited resources, and had spent the last 50+ years of your life being completely serious, what would you do with your last keynote speech at the company you started? Check out what Bill did (or rather, Bill’s PR and Marketing departments?)…it’s pretty funny.

And yes, for the grammatically inclined, you do place an apostrophe “s” after singular nouns that end in “s”.  I looked it up.

…and go spend your precious time with family and friends.  Merry Christmas!

Please be patient with me…upgrading the look and feel of the blog over the next couple of days, and getting my Wordpress upgrade completed. Feel free to comment and read on, but not everything may work from a navigation or presentation standpoint. Thanks!

Oh, and yes, I do know that I should use a test URL for doing this, but that’s just too much work.  Thanks for understanding.

Who can forget LeVar Burton, with his inspiring, chop-block haircut or his famous “you don’t have to take my word for it” toss to elementary school students’ review of popular children’s books? While LeVar will always be with me, my parents are both avid and voracious readers of their respective interests, and I’m afraid I must credit them, rather than LeVar, for my insatiable desire to read anything I can get my hands on. But still, it did feel really good to track down an 80’s version of their logo and put it on this blog. Thanks Wikipedia!

I’m currently plowing my way through 1421: The Year China Discovered the World by Gavin Menzies. It’s another installment in a fascinating run of historical books (by a variety of different authors) that are gradually turning what we were all taught in elementary school about pre-Columbus times into unfounded, Anglo-centric fantasies. 1421 asserts that magnificent, imperial China discovered the New World and was the first to circumnavigate the globe; Columbus, Magellan, and De Gama were all just following in China’s footsteps. Another great read, 1491, makes the case for the pre-European Americas brimming with advanced civilization and culture, rather than being sparsely populated with savage tribes.

So why the post on reading? The answer is simple. In a world where, as Steve Newton often laments to me, “no one reads long blog posts anymore,” reading across a variety of subjects is one of the things that keeps me successful at my job. Account Directors and Executives, unless they are assigned to one giant account, typically have to deal with a large variety of clients, and within those clients, a large variety of personalities and interests. Being a broad reader helps me to better relate to everyone I come in contact with, and I have to believe that it makes me a better writer as well. Plus, I’m gradually coming to terms with the fact that I am, indeed, a huge nerd (more on that later), so reading for me is just plain fun.

Given China’s booming economy and history of being a resurgent global power, I’d highly recommend we all brush up on our Chinese history and culture. I have more to say on this subject, but I’ll keep it brief this time in order to keep my twittered audience from information overload. Thanks for reading.

I got this timely image from wikipedia, although I was tempted to steal one from Flickr for my commercial gain.

I have a question for you businesspeople out there: do you ever salute a fellow businessperson in the hallway going to or from a meeting? I do. In fact, I counted myself doing it over 5 times today, and I received 3 salutes this morning. Where did this come from? I’ve noticed it in small business as well as in massive corporations. While I’ve noticed that mostly men salute each other, I have been saluted by women as well (although I don’t recall ever saluting a woman…must be some repressed misogyny in there somewhere).

While admittedly strange, I think this behavior has a rational explanation to it. Let’s begin with the hallway, the most likely place one would receive or give a salute. A hallway is never a destination unto itself. A hallway is, by its very nature, a pathway to somewhere else. Therefore those in a hallway are transient and unable to engage one another in a meaningful (time consuming) way, because the very purpose of being in the hallway is to go to someplace else.

Naturally, exceptions abound, especially if the water cooler, photocopier, microwave, or vending machine happens to be in the hallway. But I digress.

So my theory: eventually, saying “What’s up?”, “Hey, how’s it going?” and the like become somewhat meaningless, because, being en route, you don’t really have the time to listen to the answers to those questions. Or worse, someone might ask you to do something for them, or tell you about their bad day.  In the hallway of all places!

This leaves you with only a few options. First, you can briskly walk by the other person and look down at the floor, your papers, or your watch, basically demonstrating non-verbally that you have more important things to do than to engage another human being gliding down the hallway. Or, you can wait until the last possible moment to make your move, connecting with a brief smile, a head nod (up, or down? which is better?), and a barely audible “Hi”.

OR, you can salute! This gesture, borrowed from our military, simultaneously acknowledges someone’s presence and gives them a certain measure of respect. It says, “Hello there, fellow hallway dweller, I see you there and recognize your duties within this hallway are the same as mine, to move on. And while I’m happy to see you, we both agree with this gesture that we have other things to do. I’m being short, but man, I’m being friendly.”

Now that I’ve done a little comm theory dissection on the salute, I will probably feel too self conscious to use it again for awhile. In the mean time, I’m going to start leaving for meetings a few minutes early, and spend some quality time in the hall.

Have you ever had the experience of working on a project or presentation, and you can’t really get any momentum until you get a draft of the document done first and can “shoot holes in it”? For me, this book has summed up what I’ve always felt but haven’t been able to express succinctly: “form follows failure”.

I’m about 3/4 through this interesting book, which as a history junkie, I initially picked up to satisfy my need to read something fairly dry before heading to bed. What I discovered is a rather entertaining essay on the evolution and science of design. Henry Petroski uses case studies on how common objects (the paper clip, zipper, fork, masking tape, etc.) have been developed over time as a background for his overall thesis, which is that form does not follow function, but rather failure.

What he means by this that rather than necessity being the “mother of invention,” failure of a product or service to perform in some way is what drives an innovator to develop a solution. In short, being annoyed with stuff that doesn’t work is what motivates us to create something new that fulfills our personal or collective expectations.

What’s exciting to me about this argument, although penned by Petroski in 1994, is that it absolutely supports the “always in beta” development model that is the current standard for progressive web sites and applications (such as Gmail, iStockphoto, etc.). You throw something out there, listen to people complain about what doesn’t work, and then you innovate, and repeat the cycle ad infinitum. What is fantastic about the internet age is that this cyclical development process can occur in real-time, and the benefits to clients and users are conveyed at the same lightning speed.

I can’t mention this topic without paying homage to David Armano and Critical Mass for their inspirational “always in beta” website and experience at the 2007 Forrester Consumer Forum (I had the privilege of being interviewed live by David at the event). The website is now evolving (who would have thought?) beyond it’s original intent of a “new idea” at the Forum into a real-time communications portal for Critical Mass.

To tie this all together, offline projects, and really all design challenges that an agency tackles, are subject to the rule of “form follows failure”. At an agency, we listen, we create, our internal reviews and client feedback tell us what’s wrong with our creation, and we continue to hone and refine until the final design accomplishes all that it can.  I guess adding “routinely and adeptly fails on all initiatives” is a great line to my resume after all.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am almost always drinking water from a plastic Nalgene bottle. It’s good to stay hydrated at work, and in my opinion it’s really good to do so from a reusable container.

I read something on CNN.com this weekend that really excites me: the mayor of San Francisco has signed an executive order banning city deparments from buying bottled water. The mayor cited the overall financial costs and the subsequent environmental impact as major reasons for the ban…I think this is really a great initiative and should be applauded. In fact, in America and other developed countries, I hope that bottled water will one day go the route that smoking is today - banned in most places.

Does that seem a little extreme? Americans already have some of the cleanest water in the world. In fact, the water discharged from waste water treatment plants must meet stricter guidelines for potability than municipal water supplies in the developing world. I’ve read in several places (but can’t find them currently to cite them) that if the world spent on international aide what it spent on bottled water each year that we would be able to provide clean drinking water to everyone on the planet.

And then there’s the environmental impact. Just take me for example. I’ve been using the same bottle for the past 4+ years, and it’s still going strong. Let’s say I had instead used a throw-away bottle every day for the past 4 years. That would mean that I would have placed over 1,400 bottles of plastic into the landfill by myself! Americans buy enough bottled water in a year to give an 8-ounce serving to every man, woman, and child in the country. But that’s really nothing compared to all of the other costs. Check out this Wikipedia article (it’s properly cited and footnoted) for more information…it’ll blow your mind.

I’m glad that Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco is taking such a bold step forward. I hope other towns will see the cost benefits and follow suit.