no one can deny the tsunami that social networking and media has become. from tweeting every move you make to the iPhone allowing us to snap photos and upload them to our MySpace/Facebook/Friendster/Etc…we all, to an extent, are generating content (which is a completely separate blog post).

that being said. the digital “paper trail” that we leave with this massive output of content can potentially backfire. take the following example.

Ashley Todd, a McCain/Palin supporter caused a flurry of interest and scandal when she reported that she “was attacked by a 6-foot-4 black man Wednesday night”.
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Gordon Gekko, the iconic hero of the Reagan era told us “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good” You can see the context of this quote below if you are unfamiliar with the movie or the character.

The problem with the quote, as is with most things that get quoted and passed along, that it gets simplified and boiled down to the basest idea possible. In this case, the phrase itself was modified and pulled out of context. What we all are left with is “Greed is good”
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So we all know that i am an ardent fan of NPR, despite the fact that they have not had one iota of coverage of Bret Favre. Well, i have now decided that Fridays are the coolest, because they are SCIENCE FRIDAYS!

So this Friday I was listening at lunch and there was a discussion about “negative refractory materials”. Now I am an admitted, nerd/geek/dork whatever you want to call it, but even i had to wiki this one. But, through the conversation (as i came in halfway through) i realized that a material had been created that would bend light around itself. Translation: IT’S INVISIBLE!!!!!! I was so excited. Can you imagine the posibilities????? Other than Harry Potter’s famous invisibility cloak, there has to be an unlimited number of applications for this technology. I tried, but every time i did there were some negative consequences.

Imagine this, Invisibility covers for your car, No one would know it was there and wouldn’t break in or steal it! Downside, people don’t see its there and might smash into it…..not good.

I am sure that there will be great applications for this stuff, but i just couldn’t think of any that didn’t have the downside of a possible, smashing, crashing, scraping, bumping, tripping, losing of some personal item….

UPDATE:
Jana recently placed a post-it on my desk with her comment on how useful the “invisibility clothing will be once perfected”. It was just to good not to share. Enjoy!

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Ok, so there are a few things that I am slightly superstitious about…nothing crazy like jana’s “left before right rule”, but I do have my quirks.

In this particular case, I AM VINDICATED!!!! It looks like there are a collection of people who think the world is going to end on December 21st 2012, based on the merging of the Mayan and Gregorian calendars.

A quick explanation in case you don’t have time to read the entire article. The Gregorian calendar (the one we use) is designed to be a repeating calendar. We start January 1st, go all the way through to December 31st and then repeat. The Mayan calendar was a 5126 year long calendar that ENDS. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. The calendar just ends.

There is a lot of interesting things that happen on that date. The article lists them all, but there is one that they are not aware of that all of you might want to know about, THE PARTY AT MY HOUSE!!!!! So as the world burns and the Mayan calendar ends I have just one question. Who’s bringing the guacamole?

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I don’t know how many of you listen to NPR but I do on my way both to and from work, it is a nice break from the over-stimulation I get everywhere else…but I digress.

What I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention is a feature they had today on strange interview questions and how they are becoming more and more prevalent in interviews these days. Someone called in and said they were in charge of hiring at their business and they always ask “which superhero would you be and WHY?”

My response was immediate, I have known which superhero I would be since my youthful eyes first fell upon the pages of his AMAZING adventures. If you are unaware of my superhero of choice you can see who I am talking about here. But I was interested in the rest of the office and who they would be and why….

Have at it!

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there are a few things that bind designers together and self deprecating humor is one of the marks of a true designer. recently i found one example of this and would like to share it with you. It is a webcast of a television show called “You Suck at Photoshop” it outlines a bunch of tips and tricks that are fairly standard, but it does it in a very condescending sort of way. And the “host” of the webcast is very down on his luck with a failing marriage, (another thing that we designers joke about is our lack of social lives and inability to keep relationships due to our “affairs” with out computers….). So if you would like an insight into the humor that we

Click here to see how much “You Suck at Photoshop”

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I can’t believe it! There are more out there, i got an email from Google after setting an alert for the words “space” and “whales” and earlier this morning it came into my inbox!!! This one was even more exciting because it has an entire pod of space whales. I really think someone should be looking into this! If there are whales out there who knows what else there might be.

Now i know there might be some of you out there who are disbelievers, but you probably also don’t believe in Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster, Area 51 or anything else that takes a little bit of faith…So i propose a challenge, set a Google alert for “space” and “whales” and see what comes up.

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seeing as it is a holiday weekend coming up, and since the last holiday that came up i stood on my soap box about the origin of the holiday and i am pretty sure everyone knows why we are having this holiday, i figured i would post something that was a little more light-hearted. (man that was a run on sentence)

so i figured most of us would be celebrating, having fun at barbeques, seeing people we so rarely get to see in our busy lives, and yes, imbibing a bit (maybe a lot for some of us) of alcohol. after that i am sure we will have some amazing stories to tell, or gaps in memory to try and recover, but i am sure that NONE OF US, will do anything nearly as cool as this…and this guy was totally sober.

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ok, now i know you guys aren’t going to believe this, i didn’t when i first saw it, but i got this image from the NASA website. they took it down shortly after i downloaded it, so i wanted to share it with you guys. This is truly unbelieveable.

LOOK! in the lower right hand corner! LOOK!!!! it s a SPACE WHALE!!!!

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forgive the tounge-in-cheek title, but in this case it seemed VERY appropriate. earlier today my colleague, and co-nerd Jana, you know the one with the IMPOSSIBLY long category name (did she read our website?) sent me a link to a “website” for a business that had a copyright date of 1996. now, i will spare the business from any more humiliation and will not link to or display the address here. I am sure you all have seen the type though, looks like it was put together in Microsoft Publisher (now there i will name names because it is VERY DESERVED, but i will withhold the rest of my vitriol towards microsoft for a day when they really get me steamed) it has a repeating tile background, and more than a handful of animated gifs, rainbow bars and the default settings for all the text and links on the page. that lead to a brief discussion about AOL, online chatting, and angelfire which could be considered the precursor to social networking websites.

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