Back on the Internet edition!
Anyway, here’s the light and heavy reading from this week:
Shockingly violent coffee commercial – Digs up an old collaboration between Wilkins Coffee and Jim Henson
Etymology of video game character names – Be warned, quite long but also quite interesting
Help Wanted – An Esquire magazine editor tries to find a new job in the current climate…pretty depressing, really.
Not much time for proper updates since I’m getting ready to move, but here’s some good reading for the weekend:
Tech vets aim to save Nortel - A plan so crazy, it just might work
Choose hyperlocal over content sites - For my fellow writers, a good piece from the WordCount blog on choosing to write for hyperlocal news sites instead of content sites (or as I like to call them, dumping grounds.)
Reasons to be terrified of Google Wave - Once again, Google announces a cool new service, but I agree with this Fast Company piece (especially #5)
My latest piece for The Escapist is now online, a profile of the Ottawa-based video game and training company, Distil Interactive.
Enjoy!
It appears a company called Environmentally Conscious Organization has built a better pizza box, as demonstrated in this video:
As someone who both worked in pizzaria and an avid consumer of pizza, this is a great idea. Hopefully a lot of restaurants decide to use their design.
Jarrad Farbs, creator of the fantastic indie games ROM CHEC FAIL and Polychromatic Funk Monkey also had a day job at 2K Australia.
Recently, he decided working in a large company was no longer for him and it was time to pursue independent video games full-time. But, in true gamer style, simply saying the words “I quit,” would not suffice.
No, in true gamer spirit, Farbs created a video game to announce to everyone that he was leaving. Possibly to coolest way to leave one’s post I’ve ever seen.
Now that he’ll be working his own magic full-time, I can’t way to see what else he comes up with.
With all the whining in the past 48 hours about how Oprah and other celebrities are going to kill Twitter, it seems that the Internet still remains the Internet, no matters who is making the noise.
The freelance writing work has mostly dried up for me these days which didn’t bother me since I still kept my part-time gig at the call centre to see me through but as most of you know by now, I’ve been laid off from there, so really, it’s time to consider a new career path. Here’s a list of options I’ve come up with:
1. Death of Newspapers Blogger
I’ll face heavy competition from the likes of Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky on this front, but the Huffington Post recently ran a nice How-To guide on getting started in this industry.
Of course, I’ll have to write a book to really get going with it, but after that, I’ll make big bucks going on speaking tours and get plenty of opportunities to really lay out my bitterness toward the industry I’m trained to work in.
2. Ghost Twitterer
Twitter is hot! Even big-time celebrities are getting into micro-blogging, providing bite-sized 140 character updates on what they’re up to at any given moment. But of course, not everyone has time to enter a whole 140 characters at regular intervals and that’s where Ghost Twiterers come in. I could make some decent scratch by updating Twitter on someone else’s behalf, informing everyone that they’re in the process of consuming and ham sandwich and then later posting that the ham sandwich was tasty.
3. Social media expert
I could get paid to teach business types how to sign up for free Facebook and Twitter accounts so they can grow their brand and take advantage of the "social graph."
(No offence intended to all the actual social media experts I know, I’m trying to be funny here. Plus, I’m drunk.)
4. Lexicographer
I read an article about this profession today. Apparently you get paid to make up words. It’s a growing industry thanks to the economic crisis we’re in that desperately needs new words added to our lexicon to explain what’s happening. Stuff like "Ponzimodium" and whatnot.
I can do that!
5. Web 2.0 .com start-up founder
Finally, I could always start my own web business, creating an interactive AJAX web-app that’s a mash-up of various open-APIs and provides Twitter integration (it HAS to integrate with Twitter!)
I have no idea what it does, what purpose it serves and definitely have no clue how it’s supposed to make money, but I’ll just aim to get round after round of venture capital funding to keep myself fueled with beer and cheeseburgers so I can…I have no idea.
So, those are the options so far…
Ah, the End User License Agreement, (EULA) those pages of incomprehensible legal jargon that pop-up when installing a new application that no one bothers to reader and everyone just clicks “I Agree” to get on with the installation.
Well, Anne Loucks has an interesting way to deal with them. When it comes time to agree to an EULA, she’s rigged up a cardboard contraption that allows her cat to push the “I agree” button.
Thus, should anyone ever try to enforce something in all that jargon (say, collection the first-born) she’ll insist her cat agreed to it.
No clue how that would work out in court, but it’s certainly amusing.
Word is spreading that 52 days of misery are now over for residents of Ottawa.
Could it be? I try not to be too optimistic.
Lets check IsTheBusStrikeOverYet.com
So we’ll be riding the red and white limo again before we know it!
Of course, the question remains: Who do I submit my taxi receipts to for reimbursement?
