I know I shouldn’t have a favorite, but I do. I can’t help it. I mean, just look at her:
More puppies - just waiting to be adopted! - over at Newscoma.
Originally published at Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed. You can comment here or there.
By somewhat popular request (OK: two people), I’m capturing the Twitter song here in my songwriting blog.
I’ve been trying to do better about keeping the content of this blog related to Honey Bowtie Music, meaning Karsten’s and my writing, our pitching & publishing, and our life at our home office & studio, so I wasn’t planning on doing any kind of post PubCon follow-up here, but hey! this is relevant to songwriting. It’s some of the only writing I did while I was in Las Vegas, so it counts.
The story is: on Wednesday afternoon, I was taking a break in my hotel room, watching the #pubcon search feed in Tweetdeck burn up while everyone chatted about the “5 bloggers and a microphone” session, when I noticed that Kate Morris tweeted:
#pubcon someone needs to write a country song about losing love for twitter!
Fearing that there might not be too many other songwriters in the PubCon crowd, I felt it my duty to respond to the call.
Only the rest never ended up crowdsourced, since everyone was caught up in what was going on the session. I mean, how wrong is that? Paying attention to the panelists instead of Twitter?
So if you attended PubCon and you end up here after searching for blog posts about it, here’s your chance: take a swing at writing additional verses in the comments. This is not limited to PubCon attendees either. My Nashville buddies, long-time net-friends, and songwriting colleagues are all encouraged to play along. I’ll update the post with the song’s progression, and it will be ready for performance by March in Austin.
Everyone who comments with additional verses gets songwriting credit. As we say in Nashvegas, “add a word, get a third.”
So who’s up for some cowriting?
Originally published at Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed. You can comment here or there.
Even the bathroom icon people are pretty sophisticated.
Originally published at Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed. You can comment here or there.
Sweet carving job on a pumpkin at Sitening HQ.
Originally published at Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed. You can comment here or there.
I hate to copy the post outright but it’s so short, and the whole quote is just hilarious. Because it’s so true.
And how.
Believe it or not, it gets better. In the linked interview, he goes on to say:
Instead, just do it. Go fast, get where you’re going. The odds of getting stopped are small, the price of the ticket is small and if you’re doing the right thing in the first place, it’s worth it.
The only quibble I have is that the “price of the ticket” may not be all that small; it could well cost a great deal. I can vouch for that. But I certainly agree that if you’re doing the right thing, it’s worth trying to get where you’re going anyway. One of my favorite quotes is from Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker:
Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
There’s nothing wrong with sobriety, responsibility, or caution; in their place, they make a great deal of sense. But they’re no guarantee of success, and they certainly aren’t associated with many of the great long-term success stories. They’re good tools to have at one’s disposal in times of difficulty, but should not be the default position. Otherwise, what fun is anything?
Originally published at Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed. You can comment here or there.
Seen this?
It’s Yahoo’s SearchMonkey program. Hmm. “Searchmonkey.” That’s kind of cute… and very familiar! Where have I heard that before?
Oh yeah! Here:
I’m not bitter, though. They can have it. What with Yahoo’s current difficulties, it’ll probably do them about as much good as it did me.
Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.
You know all those articles I’ve been linking about Maghound? Well, in case it wasn’t obvious, it’s an initiative I’m keeping my eye on. Time Inc. is launching this online magazine service in late Q3, and oh by the way, Time Inc. happens to be an investor in an online magazine service called Magazines.com, too, so… I guess that’s a little weird, right?
Anyway, last week at this conference I was speaking at, I got chatting with Dave Ventresca, president of Maghound. We’d met once before and were having a nice enough conversation, and then… someone approached us with a camera.
Quick: what’s the best thing to do when someone wants to take what they think will be a caption-worthy photo?
Why, make it MORE caption-worthy, of course.
Your caption suggestions welcome here.
Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.
I’ve seen some cool wordles, but it wasn’t until a friend posted one she created using a recent research paper that I got inspired to create one of my own. This wordle uses my “manifesto,” which was a 37-page, 6,889-word document outlining a proposed strategy for how we at Magazines.com interact with our customers to optimize lifetime value.
No surprise that “email” and “customers” are the prominent words for a visualization of a document describing, essentially, how best to communicate with our customers.
Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.
My colleague pointed me to a letter a friend of his wrote to American Airlines, “breaking up” with them.
Dear American Airlines,
I don’t think we should see each other any more.
I know that’s hard to hear. But you’re not the same airline I met a few years ago. You’ve changed. And not for the better. Sure, you say you love me… that you’ll take care of me… that I am “Elite” in your eyes… but those words just seem empty now. I need you to show me that your love is genuine.
There’s more. Lots more. And it’s brilliant. Check it out.
Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.
Originally uploaded by Kate O’
My coworker Andy told me a sad story about a coyote killing a cat, and then left me a little chin-up note to counteract it. This place is nutty.
Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.
My work day today consisted of almost 6 hours of driving, an hour and a half of meetings, and two hours of watching a minor league baseball game. (Our team won.)
Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.
From Macleans, a poem in memory of John Oates’ mustache.
My favorite stanza?
Hall was tall, he was blond
He could sing in falsetto
But John Oates’ soup strainer
Helped fill up his bed-o
Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I’m going to some shindig on Thursday featuring “microroasted artisanal coffees.” Really? “Microroasted?” I was aware of the home roasting trend (I started to call it a craze, but I think that’s overstating the case) but hadn’t run across the term “microroasted.” I’ve actually largely given up coffee (truly, you wouldn’t believe how much caffeine I’d been consuming and for how many years of my life) but this I just gotta see.
Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.
After reading Mike and Jon’s laments about being “off the grid,” I did a little ego-surfing on Google Maps street view, and, hey whaddya know, we’re on it. They must have driven by before our transom and sidelights went in on our doorway, so it looks a little unfinished, but we’re there!
So, um, yeah. That was really important to determine. And now back to work.
Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.
I can hardly believe it, but I saw Emo Philips live last night.
No way. Way.
No way! Way!
NO WAY! WAY!
And yeah, so obviously, here’s where I reveal myself as the nerd fangirl I grew up as. ‘Cause I mean, seriously, how many other teenaged girls did you know who were into twisted absurdist silliness? I bet they, like me, were all mathletes too. Right? Yeah. I rest my case.
It’s true, though, and if I may reflect for a moment: my friend Walter introduced me to Emo Philips’ “E=MO
Twenty-some years later, I finally got to see him perform live at Zanies Comedy Showplace here in Nashville, and it was indeed worth waiting for. The man is a freakin’ comedy genius. His character is so well developed and his material so carefully written that you eventually just start taking his bizarre affectations in stride — in other words, his writing is so good that if he didn’t act like a mental case on stage, his comedy might seem too polished to be funny. (Which is probably why most of the people I’ve met later in life who’ve found out I was an Emo Philips fan have reacted with surprise — their only familiarity with him were quotes they’d read online, and although the jokes hold up, they’re just not the same without that spastic, tortured delivery.) Taken as a package, though, his work is pure gold.
Anyway, back to my being a fangirl: we hung around after the show to buy CDs and get Emo’s autograph, and — why not? — take a picture, too. So check it:
Whee!
Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.
I’m not one to take glee in others’ misfortunes - schadenfreude just ain’t my style. But there’s something about this email mishap from Amazon in my inbox this morning that just made me giggle, and it’s not the likelihood that someone in Seattle has just lost a job. Maybe it’s the idea that even in a company as big as Amazon, where the job functions are no doubt as specialized as insects in the rainforest, where filling in a few lines of text in an email is probably the bulk of what someone is paid to do on a daily basis, that this kind of thing can still happen. It amazes me.
(In the words of long-lost Brittney, click the image below to embiggen.)
Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.
Originally uploaded by Kate O’
This is the handiwork of my coworker Heather, who gave my glow-in-the-dark collapsible tiger a suit made of Cherry Cordial Hershey’s Kiss wrappers. I think I speak for us all when I say “awesome.”
Originally published at The Bee Hive. You may comment here or there.
Over at Music City Bloggers, we’re debating choice and levels of wrongness, among other things.
Meanwhile over at the Onion, they get it half-right — well, mostly wrong, but still funny.
(That last one reminds me of a postcard I found one time that was captioned “San Francisco Parenting,” in which a parent was calling out to a child “Don’t forget to go both ways before crossing the street!”)
HT: Jon
Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.
Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.
Originally uploaded by brittney
Brittney (a.k.a. She Who Is Soon To Be Leaving Us For The City By The Bay) took this picture of the awesome handiwork of one of our colleagues who didn’t happen to have Visio handy, so she made do with Post-It notes. I’m pretty sure she has Visio now, but this is way more fun.
All of this effort is in the name of streamlining processes to improve the customer experience. As, ya know, the person who’s supposed to be managing said customer experience, I heartily approve. 
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