Here I am delivering my lecture on April 17, as described in this earlier post. The crowd was large and responsive, and the email followups I received later indicated that a good time was had by…many.
Category Archives: Random
Take that, winter!
‘Tis winter now; the fallen snow
has left the heavens all coldly clear;
through leafless boughs the sharp winds blow,
and all the earth lies dead and drear.
–Samuel Longfellow*
So let’s say you are not dismayed that Longfellow’s sharp winds are blowing (“the skies are chill, and frosts are keen”). In fact, you’re nicely bundled up, wearing insulated mittens, among other accoutrements of the season.
And your iPhone alerts you that someone has just texted you.
So now those nice, thick mittens are causing you a problem: to respond to that text after you fumble for the phone, you’re going to have to expose your electrically charged fingers to the keen frost.
Admittedly, it hasn’t been all that cold around here since about 1986 – well before the era of capacitave touch interfaces. But for those of you in Fargo, Flin Flon, and Fairbanks, I would like to alert you to a solution that appeared among my Christmas gifts: the Pogo Sketch from Ten One Design in Montclair, N.J. (average low in January, 19 degrees; record low, minus 14 degrees, 1985).
This battery-operated aluminum stylus, the size of a small pen, transmits an electrical charge through its cushioned tips, so you can keep those pinkies toasty when using your iPhone, Droid, Storm, or similar labor-saving/time-wasting device.
So grab your phone, your Pogo Sketch and your mittens, and head for Frostbite Falls. Minnesota is lovely this time of year, don’t you think?
(* younger brother of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
What was lost is found. But lost was fun, too.
So you can't find your content? Maybe you'd like to read about something else that is lost. Like Amelia Earhart. Or your luggage.
Early this morning I was scanning my incoming Google alerts and found one I wanted to investigate at NPR.org. It was one of those funky links that breaks over about three lines and includes accidental carriage returns, however, so where I wound up was my favorite 404 page of all time: both funny and smart.
Sure, my content was lost. Naturally I would want to read about lost content.
Naturally I tweeted it:
To my extreme interest, it got retweeted quickly and often, and then re-retweeted, and re-re-retweeted, spreading virally just the way one would hope if it were actual journalism.
In fact, my bit.ly link to the bad URL got clicked on so much that somebody at NPR must have wondered why a specific nonexistent address got 450 clicks in a couple of hours … figured out where I had wanted to go … and fixed it. Wow, they know what to do about 404′s both on the front end and the back!
So everybody wins. Other people actually looking to read about Marc-André Hamelin will get to. Lots and lots of extra ads were served, even on those 404 pages. Hundreds of people got an extra smile today.
And I learned that my own 404 page is an unexploited opportunity.
For now.