erratic

Hey! Old school stuffy shirt monolithic corp types! Breaking news! Tech is cheap. Content is easy. In most cases you already have the goods flowing down other distribution channels. It's not expensive to find the means and motivation to mashup what you already have in the pipe for new avenues of delivery. The time when there was a clear differentiation between delivery mediums is gone. Cell phones do video and your refrigerator can play mp3s. You can put wireless webcams on your dog and watch over the internet all day to see what they see (and make sure they aren't digging under the fence). We live in a world without wires. 3 inch screens play mega-million dollar movies. 2 kids with a camera and a spare 3 hours a week can go from hare-brained scheme to worldwide sensation in 24 hours - or less. Yeah, yeah - you worry about brand integrity, public perception, image management. After all it is the name that justifies the hard earned profit margins. In step the small and nimble media specialists. 1-3 person teams of multidiscipline creator/producers who work fast and deliver top production values without the 10k a day charge. They capture, compose and convert for transmission across the spectrum of consumption channels. Nothing new about this concept. History provides ample evidence of small teams doing huge things. Bloat is bad. Consensus kills. Meetings suck. Most important: All three cost more than they are worth in the long run. Another thing: If you set out with the intent of being seen as innovative, you suck. Innovation sells itself. The motive should be to do those things that people pay you money for better. If it's good for them, it's good for you. So making a podcast so you can say you have a podcast like the cool kids = bad; Opening new channels of communication with your market to give them more of what makes you valuable to them = good. Original content doesn't have to be expensive. It doesn't need to be all that original in fact. Use what you have along with a little refinement and focus. Lastly, if your business isn't making cool things for the web, get a guy like me to do the heavy lifting for less than a grip truck a day. *Something to think about* A corporate annual report can cost upward of $80,000.00 just for the art direction and design. You still have to pay for writers, printing, mailing etc. How many of these are read? Who carries these bound volumes with them as they travel? Who besides VP egos gain lasting value from these things? How about bookmark capable, taggable, searchable PDFs with web links to AUDIO or VIDEO of the important people in the organization delivering the message intended by these documents. The hot shot analyst or tech savvy investor will open your PDF on the plane while listening to the audio of the CEO explaining the details of the companies growth strategies. They then tag and bookmark the parts that matter to them. Landfill turns into a frictionless, accessible resource. Here's the sweet part: This would cost a fraction of a boring printed booklet, provide boatloads more value, and would take 50% less time to produce. How you like them apples?

This is awesome! I foresee a future where we can aggregate ill will and pettiness and envy/jealousy and have it delivered while it's still steaming. [this is good]

For years I thought 'teh' as a spelling for 'the' was some l337 speak hackerism but it dawned on me last night that if you're typing really fast like they teach you in 10th grade you're fingers will already be poised over the top row so slipping the 'e' before the 'h' would be very common if you're thinking faster than your typing. Kind of like how I always type 'of' instead of 'or'. It's a very persistent defect in my self-styled 4-finger hunt and peck mannerisms.

Say you were to start compiling data meaning to form qualify-able value measurements. During this effort you may surmise certain characteristics of _ambitious laziness_. One time when these dudes in suits and shiny smiles tried to get me to carry rocks for their amway pyramid one of them used this play on words in his argument to convince me to get everyone I know to buy cleaning products and this awful chocolate-oat-wallpaper-paste snack food. There were other products, but that really doesn't pertain to this story. His oratory kicker was the revelation that riches where apples on the trees of our orchard of friends. We could be _rich_ I tell you _*rich*_ if we would sell some soap, get some people to buy some soap and then convince them to sell some soap and before you would know it you'd have a suds army you could admire from atop your big 'ol pile of money. That my friends is the ambitiously lazy story. Now the actual post: When rapidly developing an application you might, say, rapidly mock up an interface in photoshop to gain the confidence in transmutability of your concept to actual reality and approval from the client of your direction before code is written. Usually these mock-ups include screens of forms and other pretty things. Being how I be I've created a psd of generic form elements as they would look in a few major browsers with the default styling. I made a html file with the form mark up, opened it in a few different browsers, captured the screen, and compiled all of them into photoshop file, chopped, diced and pureed. TaDa! Screenshots are awesome! Generic reusable form elements for rapid screen mock-up/pre-prototyping Just the basics. Nothing fancy. These will be useful as a quick and dirty source of stock generic form elements. By no means is it a comprehensive compilation of all the available styles and/or elements and their multitude of configurations. Garrett has some sweet documents for streamlining/standardizing other aspects of a project life cycle.

Don’t break the law in Dallas or any other city in the metroplex. After 3 officer shootings in 2 weeks cops are going to have itchy trigger fingers and any sudden hand movements may get you plugged full of lead. I’m waiting for the story to break of a 14 year old kid getting shot 40+ times because he reached for his wallet. Happy Holidays from the Murderplex!