Instagram is pretty great
So the last three posts I had were all Instagram photos. And a few below it were as well. Instagram is just a great iPhone app. I love sharing photos on it. I will confess that the pace of my blogging has actually decreased because of it. It's so incredibly easy to take and then share photos on it that I find I'm having a lot of fun just playing with the app and I forget about posting them here. I'm trying to get better about sharing them here after I've taken them. The app has some great filters (you Read more…
3 Stories About Paying for News
The New York Times I was intrigued when The New York Times started their paywall. I thought the price was high, but I figured "well, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it." It's been almost two full months since they launched it and the thing is–I've never triggered it. I am a diligent consumer of news, including of The New York Times. I thought. Mostly I read their stories via Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader. And I read it on a variety of different browsers. Not only an iPhone or iPad browser, but the browser inside the Reeder Read more…
Square Up
Today City Club used "Square" to accept payments at our lunch. I wanted to post this because I was so happy with the service and I could see benefits to almost every non-profit or business in Tacoma. It was a free account for the iPhone, iPad, or Android. Easy to set up and easy to confirm the system. A week after I signed up, I got the white square card reader in the mail. Today we gave it a test-drive at City Club. Our lunch with Norm Dicks drew a lot of guests who paid at the door. We don't have Read more…
If you get your computer stolen …
So. You learn a lot when your computer disappears. Here are some things I'm glad I did beforehand (and then some things I wish I'd done). Sugarsync. I love this service. It's cross-platform (Mac and PC). I choose which folders to back up and any changes that I make in that folder sync to the web. Over the course of the last two years I've seen three hard drives fail (two Mac, one PC) and all of them had everything restored thanks to Sugarsync. Most users can probably get away with their free version, but I pay a few bucks Read more…
Unsubscribe
Every so often I purge emails from my inbox that I no longer use much anymore. Groupon got to that point. I started to feel like none of them were targeted towards me. So I unsubscribed and found this screen. Of course, I had to click to find out how to Punish Derrick. A funny animated gif played where he got some coffee thrown on him, and then they invited me back. It's a great example of how it should be done. One click unsubscribe, a funny little video, and an offer to join again. I almost did.
Tuesday’s gray
So I'm still feeling sunny about the week, even if the weather's not matching my mood today. One thing I've neglected to mention here is that Friday is the South Sound Technology Conference. I've been on the Steering Committee for the conference for the last couple years and I'm excited to go again this year. It's from 9:00 to 2:15 at UWT. Here's the registration link if you're interested in what's going on in the South Sound tech world. It's $15, which includes a lunch. Hope to see you there!
Social Media: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly …
… but mostly I want to talk about The Good. Yesterday I "interviewed" Andrew Fry for City Club's lunch program about social media. I thought Andrew talked about some great topics and his story-telling was really great. An all around great program. A lot of the topic was dedicated to the above questions: what's good, bad, and ugly, about social media. And that makes a lot of sense for a 45 minute presentation. But to me, the good waaayyy outweighs the bad. Since I didn't delve into it yesterday (and I shouldn't have, it was Andrew's program, I was just Read more…
You have died of dysentery
FORTY YEARS AND TEN iterations later, the Oregon Trail has sold over 65 million copies worldwide, becoming the most widely distributed educational game of all time. Market research done in 2006 found that almost 45 percent of parents with young children knew Oregon Trail, despite the fact that it largely disappeared from the market in the late ’90s. A recent frenzy of nostalgia over the game has yielded everything from popular T-shirts (“You have died of dysentery”) to band tour promotions (“Fall Out Boy Trail”) to humorous references on popular websites (“Digg has broken an axle”). via citypages.com Three Carleton Read more…
^