I’m in Fort Frances, Ontario for a day’s consulting work tomorrow. I got there in a rather unusual fashion: Victoria to Seattle, Seattle to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to International Falls, Minnesota. From there I caught a cab across the border to Fort Frances (here’s a map showing their relative positions). I’m not sure why I’m so pleased by crossing a border in a taxi, but I think it’s the first time I’ve ever done it.
I was also amused by this sign at the International Falls Airport:
According to Wikipedia, they make a rather fraught claim to be the coldest city in the US:
International Falls long promoted itself as the “Icebox of the Nation”, however the trademark for the slogan has been challenged on several occasions by the small town of Fraser, Colorado. Officials from Fraser claimed usage since 1956, International Falls since 1948. The two towns came to an agreement in 1986, when International Falls paid Fraser $2,000 to relinquish its “official” claim. However, in 1996, International Falls inadvertently failed to renew its federal trademark, although it had kept its state trademark up to date. Fraser then filed to gain the federal trademark. International Falls submitted photographic proof that its 1955 Pee Wee hockey team traveled to Boston, Massachusetts with the slogan. After several years of legal battles, the United States Patent and Trademark Office officially registered the slogan with International Falls on January 29, 2008, Registration Number 3375139. Only a few days after announcing its success in the trademark battle, International Falls had a record low temperature of −40°F (−40°C), beating a previous record of −37°F (−38.3°C) in 1967.
As I write this, it’s about midnight local time, and a balmy 11°C.
On this site, I prefix client-related stuff with ‘Client Plug’, or indicate something similar in the opening paragraph. I also try to make it clear that I was invited to an event for free or received something for review. This whole blogger disclosure discussion became particularly important with the advent of sponsored posts and links.
But what about Twitter? There are plenty of reasons to like the 140 character limit, but it hardly encourages transparency. There’s rarely enough space to disclose one’s interests. On more than one occasion, I’ve witnessed people tweeting about projects with which they’re affiliated without making that association obvious. The most common scenario is when Person A tweets about something, and Person B replies with “wow, that’s a fantastic thing, good luck with that thing” when Person A and Person B in fact work together.
I’m certainly guilty of retweeting client projects without disclosure. Here’s an example from today:
As I mentioned, we’re working with ActiveState on a new project. And you’d see their name on our client page on our company site. Yet a casual Twitter follower might have no idea of the formal, financial connection between myself and ActiveState.
Unicode to the Rescue?
A common solution here might be a hash tag, such as #clientplug or #disclosurepending or something. That would do, I guess, though it already takes up a fair number of characters. If you’re interesting in seeing a message spread, then space is already at a premium.
Here’s a silly idea. What if there were a generally accepted unicode character that you could add to tweets to imply that you had a personal stake in the message? A kind of disclosure shorthand that people could follow up on if they had questions. Maybe it’s â˜Â, as in “I have strong connections here”? Or maybe â˜Â, as in “I’m promoting this organization”? Or maybe just ♟, as in “I’m a tiny pawn in this giant corporation”?
What do you think? Does disclosure on Twitter even matter?
Today I saw this ad on TV. It’s for Jack in the Box smoothies:
It seems pretty offensive to me, particularly given that it describes menopausal women as ‘street rat crazy’. When I compare it to the Motrin ad that caused all the furor back in November (I wrote about it here) it seems much worse. Sure, criticisms of the Motrin piece focused on insidious details, but the sexism of this Jack in the Box seems both overt and, well, nasty.
I found a few blogposts criticizing this ad, and some complaints (as well as some support) on Twitter. There’s nothing, though, that matches the uproar that the Motrin ad earned.
So what gives? Why isn’t this ad causing the same fuss? I have a variety of theories, but I don’t want to bias anybody’s responses.
As the days grow longer, the movie budgets grow bigger. Here are the latest movies I’ve seen, to add to the big list:
State of Play – 8/10 – Another byzantine screenplay by Tony Gilroy, who also wrote Duplicity (and, it turns out, The Devil’s Advocate). Russell Crowe plays yet another shaggy, heroic loner, this time with Rachel McAdams as his wing-man. All poor Helen Mirren does is spout British curses as the weary publisher worried about bankruptcy, but she’s as watchable as the rest of the cast. Journalists have gotten a lot of bad press lately, so I didn’t even mind this overly rosy depiction of their work.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine – 3/10 – Hugh Jackman works out! That’s really the best takeaway from this maudlin, plodding movie on Wolverine’s creation myth. Why are so many superhero movies so utterly without fun? I guess a lot of comic books are the same way: way too serious for their own good. From the score to the cinematography, everything in this film trades on a silly, tired stereotype.
Star Trek – 8/10 – I reviewed it here, so I’ll just say that it’s a rip-roaring space opera in the style of Star Wars and Serenity (this video highlights how much the plot owes to George Lucas and Joseph Conrad). It’s the first good, fun blockbuster of the summer, and rarely has a dull moment or an off-key scene.
Angels & Demons – 5/10 – As mediocre and muddy as The Da Vinci Code, with an equally implausible plot. By ‘implausible’ I don’t mean that it couldn’t happen. I mean that there isn’t much rational causality between plot points, and the thing has more holes than the IIS in a meteor storm. The plot, for example, has a ticking time bomb plot. Yet the bomb itself is this obscure, bizarre device which depends on a draining battery for its timer. I felt particularly sorry for Ayelet Zurer. She’s the Euro-arm-candy replacement for Audrey Tatou. She’s lovely, but utterly pointless.
While living in Morocco last year, we made a trip to the Sahara Desert. The last town before the desert was a scruffy little outpost called M’Hamid. Because we’re self-employed, we needed to check our email. Happily, even M’Hamid had a (small, grungy) internet cafe:
Farflung travelers know that, wherever you are on the globe, there always seems to be an internet cafe nearby. I remember admiring one cafe owner in the small South African town of Hermanus. His lazy life of surfing and occasional tech support for young, hot Australians looked pretty appealing.
I got to wondering about where some of the most distant and remote internet cafes around the globe. Off I go to the Flickr.
To begin, here’s one from the other side of the Sahara, from Siwa Oasis in Egypt (photo by Jeff Werner):
A worrying backup power suppy in Manali, India (photo by alles-schlumpf):
I randomly happened upon this little technology demo from Last.fm. It’s called Boffin, and, using Last.fm’s metadata, it generates a tag cloud out of your music collection. You click a couple of tags, click play and it provides yet another way to slice and dice one’s sprawling music archives. Here’s what mine looks like:
The top half of the cloud is more accurate than the bottom half. I’m not sure how much of my music is “hair metal approved”, and I’m pretty sure it’s over-representing the fraction of my collection that is Norwegian.
But that’s not really what I want to talk about. When you install and first run Boffin, it needs to scan your music collection. I have about 10,000 songs, so that took quite a while. During this process, however, Boffin displayed this lovely visualization of my music:
The YouTube-hosted screencast video is a bit sketchy, but you get the idea. It’s a totally unnecessary feature–actually useless, as it happens. But I found the cascading images of bands kind of hypnotizing. I really appreciated that the app designer when that extra step to make a very ordinary process–scanning your hard drive for music–a little remarkable.
We’ve been involved with some interesting client projects lately, and I’ve been meaning to share them:
ActiveState recently announced a public beta for Workspace (not to be confused with the excellent, local co-working space), something we’re calling ‘instant infrastructure for managing software development projects’. It’s a set of hosted, customized tools–source control, project management, issue tracking, wikis, blogs, and so forth–aimed at small teams and individual developers. In addition to the collective wisdom and experience that ActiveState brings to the project, Workspace promises to spare developers the pain of manual setup, integration and the apparent endless tweaking associated with managing tools of this sort.
Our longtime client Nitobi announced a couple of exciting bits of news this week: they sold their session recording tool RobotReplay and became shareholders in BookRiff. Nitobi built BookRiff (we’ve done some work with them as well), and it looks pretty sweet. They haven’t gone public with their tool yet, but we’re psyched about it.
In other Capulet news, our first social media marketing bootcamps in Victoria and Vancouver sold out. So we’ve added second sessions for both Vancouver (June 23 – just one spot left) and Victoria (June 4).
As the days grow longer, the movie budgets grow bigger. Here are the latest movies I’ve seen, to add to 
