The Rise and Fall…

One thing you learn studying ancient and medieval history – nothing is permanent.

Well, except for human nature. We’ve always had greed and compassion and fear and hope, and we probably always will.

But empires…they come and go.

It’s easy to forget sometimes, especially in our ADD-riddled, “ooh shiny!” existence. We see things a day, a week, a quarter, maybe a year out, and quite literally miss the forest through the trees. Just look at politics. Right now everyone’s focused on the mid-term elections and maybe, just maybe, 2012. Which is part of the reason, I think, why America sucks so bad at tackling long-term problems until they rise up and punch us in the face.

The thing is, though, most change is gradual. It isn’t like you’re going along and then BAM, the world changes. It creeps up on us bit by bit, until it’s already happened.

So everybody just…chill out.

Want list

Back in college, I once remarked that I couldn’t wait to graduate so I could enjoy free time instead of spending my nights and weekends studying and writing papers.

Looking back, I think that’s probably the single most naive thing I’ve ever said. It may have been true for a year or so, but nowadays, between work and family and dogs and laundry and dishes and bills, free time is a rare commodity that must be guarded ferociously. And even then it’s all too easy to get lost in the day in, day out grind. Things pop up, projects get put on hold, and time flies by.

With Nolan not yet two, and little Lola not yet zero, I know I’ve got some time to go before I can indulge in hobbies and whatnot, but one day they’ll be old enough that I’ll be able to venture out to the garage to tinker, or take them places without keeping one eye open for a meltdown.

What follows is a list of the things I want to do when that day comes.

How to let go

I have a mind like a steel trap.

Not in the sense that it catches everything, because it certainly doesn’t.

Instead in the sense that, once my mind seizes on something, it doesn’t…let…it…go.  Not until the itch has been scratched, the curiosity indulged, or the mystery solved.

For the most part, this obsessiveness serves me well. It helps me focus with a single-minded intensity that can drive the wife crazy.

But every so often, my mind will seize upon something I’d rather not dwell on. And that’s when it gets tricky. Because I can’t push it aside. I can’t not think about it. It’s always there, a low-level buzz in the background. And when I try to push it down, it pushes right back.

I’ve been caught in one of these thought traps for the past couple of days. Dwelling over something I can’t set aside.

Perhaps it was fortuitous, then, that Trizle posted this quick article on How to Clear Your Mind yesterday.

The basic gist?

To become fully-focused at what you do, you must clear your mind such that the only thing that bothers you is that motherbuffkin task in front of you.

To clear your mind, recommends productivity guru David Allen, simply do this:

Write down what you’re thinking to stop thinking about it.

Call me suspicious. I know full well how stubborn my mind can be, and I don’t think writing down my latest obsessive thoughts will somehow magically let me stop obsessing over them. But what the hey, I’ll give it a shot and report back…

Adventures in video

I’ve been into photography since childhood. Over the years I’ve gone from point-and-shoot to SLR, from film to digital. But for all my interest in photography, I’ve never been able to get into video.

Top 20 Social Media Buzzwords of 2010 – diyD Edition

I’m a fan of plain english. Calling a spade a spade and what have you. As such, I tend to react violently to cutesy bullshit marketing terms. So when I saw this list of 20 Social Media Buzzwords for 2010, I was immediately reminded that my gag reflex does, indeed, still function.

Now…it’s easy to point and laugh at this particular brand of stupidity. But as Joe Jaffe says, that’s just perpetuating the status quo. So in the interest of being part of the solution, I’m going to go through the list, item by item, and offer plain, unadorned alternatives. Or in some cases where we don’t need a word because the behavior described is so random and pointless, pointing and laughing.

Let’s begin, shall we?

SPURNED MEDIA: Just like it sounds, earned media that goes horribly negative, invades otherwise pristine search results or bleeds into traditional media. Bad customer service is a top driver of “spurned media.”

Otherwise known as…drumroll…bad PR. Or bad press.

My Completely Arbitrary Highlights of the 2010 Detroit Auto Show

The 500-pound gorilla of auto shows, the 2010 Detroit Auto Show, is unfolding this week in Denver Detroit, and with it a lot of interesting metal is getting the old dog and pony.

To copy and paste from my post on last year’s Frankfurt show, I’m not about to cover everything, but I wanted to highlight a few of the new rides that grabbed my attention. If you want full coverage of every ugly-ass supercar mod job and retarded city car concept, be my guest. But this is my blog, and hence, my list.

The one part of my job that just got easier…

I’ve posted before about how difficult it can be to tell people what I do for a living:

I always get a bit flummoxed when someone asks me what I do for a living. Unless you’re in the industry, my job isn’t the sort that lends itself to easy explanation. I’m sure there’s a happy medium between telling people I’m a writer and telling them I’m an associate creative director at asocial media marketing company that specializes in branded online communities, but with my tendencies toward social anxiety, the answer usually comes out sounding all garbled and retarded.

Well today the difficult just got a lot easier. Earlier today, Powered announced the acquisition of three leading social media companies (crayon, StepChange and Drillteam) to form the first full-service social media agency. In other words, we’re now positioned to help brands navigate the new waters of social media, from Twitter and Facebook to full-blown brand communities and even offline events.

And now I get to tell people that I’m an associate creative director at a social media agency. Which is still way more complicated than saying I’m a doctor or something, but at least I can shove it into one sentence…

If you want to read more about the acquisitions – http://twitter.com/#search?q=%40poweredinc

Where’s Detroit?

The 2010 North American International Auto Show (aka Detroit Auto Show) kicks off next Monday, January 11th.

Typically, by this time, we’d have been treated to extensive media kits on pretty much every single big debut, complete with rambling press releases, scores of high-resolution photos, and maybe even a few videos.

This year? Nary a peep.

Okay, we’ve seen the Mini Beachcomber concept. And we’ve seen the Audi A8. The Cadillac CTS-V Coupe concept dropped yesterday. And we’ve seen the Chevy Volt running around for a couple of years now.

But for the most part, the big reveals remain in the shadows, with not even so much as a teaser to whet our appetites.

What gives?

The Unofficial Catalog of Dirty Diapers #3: The Great Escape

For all the upsides of fatherhood, there are certainly some drawbacks. Chief among them the seemingly endless variety of dirty diapers one encounters from day to day. This is an unofficial catalog of selected specimens.

The Great Escape

A particularly dreaded specimen, The Great Escape entails the contents of the diaper escaping the confines of the diaper. While this can be loud and raucous, it usually prefers to operate by stealth, only to be revealed at changing time or, if you are wearing good clothes, when you hold your child and feel something warm and moist seeping through your now-ruined garment.

As one would expect given its penchant for stealth, The Great Escape seems to prefer working in the dead of night, though it curiously shows an affinity for making itself known in extremely public places.

Random thoughts on the iSlate

Unless you live in a hole somewhere, you’ve probably run up against rumors that Apple is developing some sort of tablet computer thing. And if that’s as far as you’ve got, Gizmodo has posted an exhaustive guide to the various rumors floating around.

As per usual with highly anticipated Apple products, pretty much everything is open to conjecture at this point, but everyone seems reasonably certain about a few things:

1. The tablet will possibly be called the iSlate
2. It will be unveiled toward the end of January, and ship in March
3. Expect a multi-touch screen, a la the iPhone. Probably 10-11″.
4. It may run a version of the iPhone OS or Mac OS X. Or a hybrid.
5. Expect multimedia capabilities. Music, videos, and some sort of e-reader functionality.
6. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are all but certain. 3G is a possibility, as are physical USB ports.
7. Everyone is assuming it’ll cost in the ballpark of $800.

Wait, a Tablet? Huh?

That’s the big question everyone is asking. After all, tablet PCs have been tried before, and they mostly suck. What could Apple possibly bring to the table(t)?

I don’t even pretend to know. But what I do know is that Apple has a knack for rethinking product categories. Consider the iPhone. It seems silly now, but back before its unveiling, people were asking similar questions about what Apple could bring to the smartphone that other’s hadn’t. Well…now we know.

So what’s the tablet all about?

Nothing less than the rethinking of the personal computer

Now…all this is pure conjecture. I have no idea how much – if any – of it will come to pass. But I think Apple took a look at the rise of the netbook and the race to the bottom in the lower end of the computer market, and decided to do something about it.

That something is not a netbook, for two reasons. First, the risk of cannibalizing MacBook sales. Second, the risk of being mocked for a too-high pricetag (see the $800 Sony Vaio P).

Instead, I think Apple is looking at how people use their netbooks, laptops, and yes, iPhones. And I think the tablet/iSlate/whatever is going to be their answer to casual computing going forward.

What do I mean by casual computing? Simple. E-mail, browsing the internet, consuming multimedia content (music, videos, e-books), and light productivity work (word processing and such). Basically the stuff most of us use our computers for most of the time.

And to do that, I see the tablet taking two forms, in a way.

The first form is just the tablet. You carry it around with you, operate it via multi-touch and type on a virtual keyboard, pretty much the way you do with an iPhone. Only you’ll have a lot more screen area. I’m not sure what other software enhancements we’ll see. Tablet specific apps? A specialized, battery-saving e-book reader? Who knows.

The second form is the tablet combined with a keyboard, turning it in to something akin to a laptop. Apple already makes a wireless Bluetooth keyboard, and I’d guess that’s a possibility, but imagine if you will a dock of some sort that includes a keyboard, trackpad, and maybe some beefed up hardware…additional RAM or disk space or something. You seat the tablet into this dock, and all of the sudden you’ve got something resembling a small MacBook.

So basically…the iSlate as I see it could act as either a standalone tablet, or in conjunction with optional peripherals could be rigged up as something of a pseudo-laptop.

How this all works for Apple

The iSlate as I’m envisioning it would be a pretty flexible little device. But it’s important to remember Apple’s angle here – profit. What’s in it for them? Wouldn’t a tablet/pseudo-laptop cannibalize their MacBook sales as surely as a netbook?

Yes. And that’s exactly the point.

Right now, the MacBook is the red-headed stepchild of the Apple lineup. Sure, it got a recent warming over, but it’s also got the 13″ MacBook Pro sitting right on top of it.

I think this iSlate thing is the reason the MacBook line has been neglected. Think about it. The iSlate will almost certainly be cheaper to build than a MacBook (cheaper chips, cheaper case, no keyboard, fewer pieces, etc). And while it will be priced lower, too, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up having a higher profit-per-unit. Now add the keyboard/trackpad dock peripheral thing and charge an extra $150-200, and you could feasibly create a product that costs more than a MacBook, but yields a far higher profit margin.

When looked at that way…who cares if the iSlate cannibalizes MacBooks? Or replaces them completely? Power users will still have the MacBook Pro models, casual users would end up with a more flexible – if not quite as powerful – device, and the standalone tablet could offer a brilliant complementary computer to someone like me, who’d love to switch to an iMac for intensive photo and video editing, but still have something I could lounge with on the couch or take to a coffee shop or whatnot.

Of course, my prediction for this thing could be WAY off. Heck, it probably is. Either way, we’ll see in a few weeks.