Category: General

After Michael Phelps won his seventh gold medal, tying Mark Spitz’s record, Visa (one of Michael’s sponsors) immediately broke out a congratulatory commercial.We’re sitting here eagerly waiting for the relay where Phelps could win an unprecedented eighth gold and wondered what the Visa commercial will say if he achieves that.  I hope it has fireworks.I…

My cousin’s step-daughter Shalane Flanagan won the Bronze medal in the Women’s 10,000 meter race.  Let’s all wish her good luck on the 5,000m!link to DayLife via email from Alan Lord , Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:26:05 -0700

Yesterday, I listened to episode #293 of This American Life, “A Little Bit of Knowledge”, they talked about mistaken beliefs that exist in childhood and somehow escape into adulthood.  The first part show is really amusing.  However, they of course didn’t interview Mrs. Wingnut, who even until we started living together, when she was in…

Contrary to Joel Stein’s belief, in his commentary in todays Star-Tribune, that this year’s race was, “the lamest Tour de France ever.”  Mrs. Wingnut and I thought that this actually was the most interesting of the three that we had watched.  There was no clear leader until the last couple of stages, because it kept…

The article includes a case study of Febreze, a furniture spray that almost failed until Procter & Gamble figured out how to manipulate customers into making it part of their daily routine. Great quote from a P&G psychologist:> we realized we needed to create new products.  So we began> thinking about how to create habits…

In reading Michael Saine’s column in the August DDJ today he talks about Marshall McLuhan’s forecast that “The age of automation is going to be the age of ‘do it yourself’.”  Quite timely since I was talking with one of the other project managers yesterday who was typing up a storm on a document when…