Do Your Clients Act Like this in Real Life?
Nothing really needs to be said about this. If you have ever worked with clients who always question your estimates, do you wonder if they act like this in other parts of their life? Hat tip to Koroberi for posting this.
Memorial Day Questions by Grace
We went to a friend’s open house over the Memorial Day weekend, and my 8-year-old daughter Grace interviewed partygoers with a series of questions. This video is the result.
Here’s a link to the YouTube version if you have trouble playing the Vimeo one above.
The Bain Project
The Bain Project was a site specific artwork created in the deserted and decommissioned waterworks plant south of downtown Raleigh. In the late 1930s, as Raleigh was growing, the city built a new plant to handle the water needs of the area. Here’s a link to historic information about the Bain Waterworks. This artwork project combined found objects in the plant, organic materials like branches and grass with a deteriorating industrial building. I was more interested in photographing the aging machinery and peeling paint than in the artwork, but some it made interesting photographs.
Here are the rest of my photos on Flickr and here are photos from other local photographers.
One of the most creative endeavors was a musical piece played by creating sounds on the building itself. A plant buzzer sounded, and a corps of white-coated employees marched down the main aisle and took their positions in the water holding tanks. They proceeded to shake, shudder and pound out the sounds of a working plant. Here’s some video of the piece.
Lunch at OnlyBurger
The OnlyBurger Hamburger Truck travels around Durham, North Carolina and serves burgers and fries. Read more
Social Media and State Government
Brian Long is the Director of Public Affairs for the North Carolina Department of Agriculture. He talked about the challenges of implementing social media in a state-run agency. Read more
Twitter Alert: Your Lunch is on the Move
Thanks to this post from Dave Delaney, I was pointed to this article from Serious Eats about street vendors using Twitter to announce their locations, specials and other information important to their mobile customers. The South is not generally known for their proliferation of street vendors, so the only listing is for OnlyBurger in Durham, and it was added when suggested in the comments. They are a perfect example of the kind of mobile business that can thrive using Twitter. Their mobile kitchen tweets their location as they drive around Durham.
I have read many reviews of their burgers on various Durham food blogs, but haven’t sampled them yet. I will take this opportunity to seek them out over the next couple of weeks and try their burgers.
Amazon Remembers Peter
An iphone application that I downloaded but haven’t used was the Amazon.com app. I recently opened it up and took a look at it. I was especially interested in the Amazon Remembers feature. You take pictures, using your iphone, of things you would like to remember, through the application. And if Amazon offers a similar product, they will let you know.
One of the things I like to do when I test applications or services is to do things with them that the developers did not intend. So in this case, I took a photo of my son Peter. He is not someone I would soon forget, but I would like to remember him, nevertheless.
Soon after uploading the photo, Amazon sent me an email with a link for a boys size basketball t-shirt. The results also show up in the application. I was pretty impressed. I did not pay attention to the shirt he had on, but it was a basketball related shirt. My first question was how did they know to recommend a boys size? How could they tell he was a boy?
After I received the email, I read more about the service and discovered that a community of real people review the photos and make recommendations from Amazon’s products. Now it made perfect sense how they knew to send a boys sized shirt.
One problem I have with the service relates to what the application does with the photos. The photos are not saved to my iphone photo album. It only lives in the Amazon application and on the Amazon website. As someone who obsessively keeps all my photos, especially ones of my kids, I have no way to access this photo. Other applications, like Brightkite, save photos to my iphone album as well uploading it to the places I indicated.
The other problem I have would actually improve the accuracy of the recommendations. There is no way to tag a photo or note what item you are interested in. This would not have helped in my example, because there is no telling what the response would have been if I tagged my photo 11 year old boy. That is not part of Amazon’s current product offerings.
Even with these shortcomings, this is a great way for Amazon to continue to chip away at brick and mortar businesses. If the email comes quickly enough, as others have in further tests, this is a way for consumers to price shop on things they don’t need immediately. Snap a photo in the store and know Amazon’s price before you leave the aisle. If you have used it on this free app, it’s worth a try.
Dave is Learning to Play Guitar
Nashville’s Dave Delaney has embarked on an online journey to learn to play guitar on daveislearninghowtoplaytheguitar.com. I caught up with him at the Mashable-Regator Mixer in Atlanta. Follow Dave on Twitter at @DaveDelaney.
The Tarantino Mixtape
The Tarantino Mixtape from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.
If you are a fan of Quentin Tarantino’s film, this video is a classic mixtape of songs from his movies, but the visuals mix the movies up with split screens, jump cuts and sliding boxes to highlight similar themes and shots from the director of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs.
Today’s Rant about Twitter @Replies
Last night Twitter changed their functionality in the way they served tweets from one’s followers. Before you could choose whether or not you wanted to see the @replies from your followers to people you did not follow. Read more