Category: Communication

Status Synchronicity: Sultanas

I have this weird fixation with Facebook Status synchronicity occurring between non-mutual friends. I’ve decided I’m going to post them as they occur (sans names because I respect privacy). If a random Facebook friends stumbles here and identifies themself I will give them a prize of the value of a Freddo Frog.

 

Here are the first two, from within 15 minutes of each other today.

Friend 1: just received a cheque for $3 because my sultanas tasted minty.
Friend 2: Just found a grape seed in a sultana. Wow, this is the best day eva…

Was this you? Claim your prize…

Godwin’s Law Nazis

Gerard Henderson typically annoys me. He’s from the Right Wing think tank the “Sydney Institute”. I don’t like him because despite agreeing with a lot of what he says, I think he sounds smug when he’s saying it.

His ivory tower takedown of Kyle Sandilands and his Megan Fox-esque grip on history and the significance of Hitler’s total evilness was right on the money.

He points the finger of blame at needless comparisons to the Nazi overlord made by politicians. It really does lower the level of political conversation.

If some opinion leaders use ”Nazi” or ”fascist” or ”communist” to denigrate political opponents, is it any wonder some demonstrators in the US and shock jocks in Australia will follow their lead?

Hyperbole has become a way of getting noticed in the never-ending news cycle. Exaggerated comments about the applicability of totalitarianism to contemporary democracies get a run because so little is known about the suffering of the victims of Hitler and Stalin.

Sadly it appears on the SMH website alongside a story featuring insidious current affairs style journalism snooping at its worst.

Hitler’s 39 remaining relatives have been tracked down. Somehow being related to the guy responsible for significant atrocities is reason enough to be named and shamed. Some of his family had been living under fake names – and these guttersnipe reporters have named them for the world to see. No doubt the people involved are incredibly thankful that these private eyes took the time to pick up discarded cigarette butts and McDonalds wrappers.

“Analysing forgotten cigarette butts in a small village in lower Austria, a used paper serviette in a New York fast food restaurant and the seals of letters sent over 30 years ago from northern France, Marc Vermeeren and Jean-Paul Mulders said they had traced all known living relatives of the Fuehrer for the first time.”

“…”The American relatives have agreed not to have children to extinguish the saga of Hitler and stop living in fear, but have promised to publish a book before they die,” said Mulders.”

Not having children seems a high price to pay for having an infamous great-great-uncle.

It occurs to me that I write about Hitler quite frequently. Or more specifically, I paradoxically write a lot about how writing or talking about Hitler is bad.

Fox Trot

There are lots of PR lessons we can learn from celebrities today. Firstly. Megan Fox has lived up to her name, biting the hand that feeds her. Or at least the hand that raised her from obscurity.

Director Michael Bay cast Fox in Transformers, and the starlet had some rather unkind words to say about him in a magazine.

In her interview with a British magazine, Fox had said of Bay:

“He’s like Napoleon and he wants to create this insane, infamous mad-man reputation.

“He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is.

“He has no social skills at all.”

Ouch. That isn’t very nice. Some of the crew responded with a letter via Michael Bay’s blog – which he contributes to, but clearly doesn’t run, because he pulled it a couple of days later and posted his apology.

I subscribe to Michael Bay’s blog with google reader – so it’s not completely lost to you. And the SMH has a story on the letter today. Here’s an excerpt.

He granted her the starring role in Transformers, a franchise that forever changed her life; she became one of the most googled and oogled women on earth.

… Wait a minute, two of us worked with Angelina – second thought – she’s no Angelina.

…We know this quite intimately because we’ve had the tedious experience of working with the dumb-as-a-rock Megan Fox on both Transformers movies. We’ve spent a total of 12 months on set making these two movies.

We are in different departments; we can’t give our names because sadly doing so in Hollywood could lead to being banished from future Paramount work.

We actually don’t think she knows who Hitler is by the way. But we wondered how she doesn’t realize what a disgusting, fully uneducated comment this was?

Hopefully Michael will have Megatron squish her character in the first ten minutes of Transformers 3. We can tell you that will make the crew happy! …

Nice. Firstly, let me say, Godwin’s law needs to be more widely broadcast – comparing anybody – particularly a movie director – to Hitler is just plain silly.

Secondly, if you’re working in a close knit industry like Hollywood – or a regional area, or a city, or the Christian community – don’t bag out people who you’ve worked with. It’ll no doubt hurt you more than it hurts them.

Print preview

The Internet is big. Remember those posts about what it would look like if you printed wikipedia – or just the featured articles.

Here are some infographics about what it would look like, and take, to print the whole shebang. Probably including my blog. It’s like, totally on the Internet man…

There are a couple more of those here.

Passive resistance

I get a little bit sick of people (particularly colleagues) asking questions that a little bit of googling will help with.

Seriously. Who doesn’t ask google first?

If you’re in this boat, then here’s a little passive aggressive tool I’ve been using lately – let me google that for you.

PR makes the glass seem fuller

That’s right people. PR is important. It adds gloss. That’s why I have a job.

More New Maths gives a nice little equation.

By the same token:

optimism = realism + good PR person…

pessimism = realism – good PR person.

Ring ring

Bluetooth headsets make people look like idiots. Talking to thin air makes a man look crazy. Talking to your hand is only marginally better…

But that’s what these little ring things are going to do

It’s just a concept at this stage…

“The color rings are an accessory for cell phones that are inspired in the gestural language of the use of the phone. It is conceived as an extension of the hand, which makes their use a more natural one, and more comfortable and more attractive as well. The rings are thought to be either an electronic component, or a fashion accessory. They were designed to be worn in the thumb and pinkie fingers, and work as a microphone and headset, respectively. These, interconnected wirelessly with the phone, allow responding calls only by separating the fingers and speaking, using distance sensors between rings to activate the call.”

Via the design blog.

The perils of oversharing

Facebook is dangerous for parents. I’ve covered that before. It’s bad enough when you’re not spared the gory details of nappy changing… but it’s worse when the parents in question are middle aged, trying to check up on their children, and not quite au fait with the technology… like this mother.

I lost a friend today

I occasionally notice the number of friends I have on Facebook reducing. It hurts. Well, not really.

Today was one such occasion. I looked at the number and thought “I’m sure I had one more than that yesterday, which one of my casual acquaintances or school friends could possibly have unfriended me this time?”

I got offended for a millisecond, and then I remembered I unfriended someone yesterday who posted the same status over and over and over again for the last three weeks. It was someone I didn’t really know all that well. I met them once. I think. I feel no regret. Or grief.

That is all.

Nine iPhone apps I like

  1. Google’s App – for the voice search.
  2. Commbank – for my banking.
  3. WordPress – for blogging
  4. AroundMe – for seeing what sort of businesses are nearby
  5. Bang Bang Diet – for my weightloss competition (a race to lose 8% of total body weight) with my wife.
  6. Checkers – I like Checkers.
  7. iSniper – the first game I downloaded that made me really appreciate the iPhone.
  8. StickWars – another fun game.
  9. The complete works of Shakespeare – because you need the bard.

For a bonus – here are some other apps I don’t use as much as I should, but would like to use more.

  1. Epicurious – recipe/shopping list generator.
  2. GVocab – Greek flashcard program.
  3. Facebook – I still prefer using the computer.
  4. YouVersion’s Bible software
  5. Tap Tap Revenge – Guitar Hero for the iPhone.
  6. Evernote – If only I could be bothered…
  7. iDork – kind of fun game.

Anything you think I really need?

Cereal Offender

I love cereal. I eat it all the time. I think that cereal companies should be most upset that they’ve been pigeon-holed as “breakfast cereal”.

I don’t think trivial rebrands solve any problems, so I don’t understand the NRL’s pitch to change their logo in order to resurrect its credibility.

If a lobby group consisting of Kellogs, Sanitarium and other major cereal players was to form in a bid to rebrand their products as all day things I would totally understand that sort of thing. And support it.

I am eating a bowl of Fruit Loops as I write this.

That is all. 

The father of all links posts

Ah, another week, another post chock full of links from the narrow sector of the world wide that I like to call the blogosphere.

I thought I’d get a little bit geographically specific with this little link edition. Just to give you an idea of the spread of blogs that I read (that you should too). This is by no means comprehensive – but here are some of the homes of regular commenters, people I know, and people I reckon you should discover (along with some choice posts from their sites).

Right-o. Lets go.

Starting with those in my own neck of the woods – the Townsville scene… (in no particular order). 

  1. Tim – doesn’t post often and when he does it’s usually a YouTube video.
  2. Leah – is the Andrew Bolt of the North Queensland Christian blogosphere, or perhaps the Tim Blair. She also covered North Queensland’s lost and found saga this week where a local lad from a local church went missing in the bush, and was found a couple of days later.
  3. Stuss – has picked up the pace a little, though most of what she’s saying is about gardening and decluttering. Which is fine. Because both are good things.
  4. Phoebe – hasn’t really said anything for 21 days. I just counted. But no list of bloggers from Townsville would be complete without her.
  5. Joel – if Leah is the Tim Blair of the Townsville blogosphere then Joel is the Piers Ackerman.
  6. Carly – is an education student and gives some interesting insight into the female psyche with pieces like the one she wrote last week about Oprah.
  7. Chris barely posts enough to rank a mention. But he’s a blogger. In Townsville. So he sneaks in.

If you’re in Townsville, and I’ve missed you, let me know in the comments.

Moving south, here are some of the notables in Brisbane…

  1. Kutz – I mentioned his new endeavour last week. It’s been trickling along. I’m sure more comments from nice friendly readers would keep his motivation levels up.
  2. Tim and Amy – The same could be said for these two. They’ve kept a pretty steady pace and you should go over, read what they have to say, and say hello.
  3. Simone – well, I’ve talked about her blog enough for you to know what goes down over there. She gets a prize for being the third blogger to mention my dad* this week. Her little piece of speculation about narrative in the new creation was interesting enough to get my hippocampus firing today.
  4. Will Henderson – gets the prize for being the first to mention dad*, and also for being the first Acts 29 affiliated church planter in Australia – a story that apparently hadn’t received all that much coverage before I mentioned it the other day (based on some posts like this one from Jeff Attack)… check out the website for his upcoming plant. Unfortunately it’s a bit grungy. And we all know how I feel about grunge.

Now, on to Sydney. The city of my birth and home of many good blogs.

  1. Izaac is back from a holiday and taking on the challenge of posting about Christian love and social justice.
  2. Ben celebrated his birthday yesterday – and I promised him a link. Then he posted a story about how the Governator has the Conan sword in his office – that I was all set to feature in my next little string of “Curiosities” posts.
  3. At the fountainside Soph asks the important questions about train etiquette – something we’ll have to (re)familiarise ourselves with next year.
  4. Ben (of the Bathgate variety) lists five things that made him tough(er). I score one on his list.
  5. Dave Miers managed to scoop Mikey Lynch by posting an interview with Andrew Heard, one of the Geneva Church planting crew (another post on the network from Dave), before Mikey could wrap up his series of similar interviews with church planting figures (including Will Henderson and Al Stewart).

Mikey (from Tasmania) was also the second person to, somewhat vicariously, mention dad this week because his name came up in one of the posts from the aforementioned series of interviews.

It has also become apparent – from what Andrew Heard said on Dave’s blog and what Al Stewart said on Mikey’s – that the Geneva portmanteau was only a vicious rumour, and that the name is actually a reference to Calvin’s work in that city. Which is a good thing.

And to conclude, here are my favourite ten posts from my blog this week (including bits from Robyn and Benny).

  1. Benny on Ministry
  2. Robyn on Grammar (PS – you should all encourage Robyn to blog more – she needs some comment love…)
  3. Good bad haircuts
  4. Bad relevance
  5. How to pick a cafe
  6. Cool stuff to do with your photos/iPhone
  7. Tips from a guru (my dad – since he’s the flavour of the blogosphere these days…*)
  8. The one about being wrong.
  9. The one about yawning.
  10.  The one about being a PK, and the follow up about being a PK being a bit like being Harry Potter.

* I should point out that these constant mentions of dad being mentioned are a mixture of patri-pride and because I think it’s slightly funny that he feels a sense of discomfort about being in the spotlight. It’s not because I think he’s super special (though he is). And if you want to join the fan club here’s the video I made for his 50th.

Photos without borders

Polaroids are dead. Apparently. They’re no longer being made. Which is sad. Who doesn’t like a bordered photo that you have to shake?

Turns out lots of people do. So much that you can get an iPhone app that turns your iPhone into a polaroid camera – you even have to shake it for it to develop. It’s called ShakeIt.

Then, thanks to the magic of the internet and the extensive collection of iPhone apps to cover every unimaginable possibility – you can mail it to yourself as a postcard. Using ShootIt.

Failing that you can jump onto Rollip – an online service that turns all of your photos into electronic polaroids. There are a few extra effects you can add…

Go with the flow chart

Diagrammr is pretty cool. It creates flow chart diagram things from sentences. I just used it to map out the logic of John 14. Because it’s a pretty layered little passage. It doesn’t quite get there… but it goes close. Check it out. It appears to save the stuff I’ve put in here – and I think you can probably change it all you like… which is a pain.

It only works with simple sentences. Here are the things I put in:

Jesus is in God
God is in Jesus
Jesus speaks words of God
Jesus is going to God
Jesus brings glory to God
God gives the Spirit
We are in Jesus
We are in God
We have the Spirit
The_World does not have the spirit
The_World does not love Jesus
We have seen Jesus
We have seen God
The_world does not see Jesus
The_world does not see God
Spirit comes in the name of Jesus
Jesus loves God

Unbroken breaks

Just in case you have previously considered commenting but were turned off by the lack of appropriate spacing in the comments to indicate paragraph changes… or for those of you who have been complaining about the long standing issue…

I fixed it. If you are here because you googled “WordPress Comments paragraph spacing” or something related to WordPress Comment formatting…

The offender was this little piece of code in the CSS:

.comment-text p {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

Just so you know. You should remove that if you’re having the same issue.