I’m not making this up. There is a SPORT for grilled cheese sandwich (or ’sammich’) makers. The Grilled Cheese Invitational is on Saturday (April 19) in LA (where else?). There are four categories: Missionary Position (plain old cheese & bread), Spoons (other than white bread and other than orange cheese), Kama Sutra (extra ingredients) and Honey Pot (dessert-style). They have a website and rules and everything. Amazing.

 

My communication hero Steve Crescenzo held a haiku contest this month. Corporate communicators (you know, the PR flack people) did the profession proud! Steve started the ball rolling with some directs at I.T. departments, but it was interesting to note that most of the haikus were about supervisors, CEOs and the profession in general. No matter, there are plenty of gems. Like:Issues driving change!

Profound culture shift ahead!

What a crock of shit 

 

Time for a meetingTime for another meeting!

Can we meet on that?

 

Ding, eyes are rollingAnother corporate message

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah 

Steve’s blog 

Nothing burns my eye sockets faster than Comic Sans WordArt with some tasteless clipart inserted haphazardly. Lucky for me I can now join the Design Police and sticker the offending piece with a note alerting others to the faux pas.http://www.design-police.org/ 

I read several blogs. I guess it’s just a side effect of needing information. I use RSS feeds in my web browser’s bookmark menu bar to see at a glance when something new has been posted. Depending on where I am and which stack of bookmarked feeds I’m accessing I may see the number of new posts and most of the title (Safari, at home), a portion of the title (Firefox, mostly news sites with a few work-related blogs, at the office) and a handful of dismal offerings on my laptop (Firefox).

Most of the posts are mundane — the latest gadget or software, a socio-economic situation somewhere in the world, the latest way this hour to save the planet. Most posts are worthy of more thought but given the medium they are presented in a quick glance at the headline and the occasional peek at the lead-in or comments are usually all the time I give them. Call it information grazing.

But today there was gold in them thar blogs!

On Boing Boing was this: [citation needed] stickers for graffiti — better known as wikiffiti. Based on the practise on Wikipedia of asking for a citation for a dubious claim or fact, except these stickers go underneath graffiti. Culture jamming at its finest.

The WebUrbanist posted a collection of the Top 5 Unusually Green Vehicles from 2007. I was expecting the latest-greatest electric vehicle (that will save the planet) or the latest-greatest bio-fuel cell (that will save the planet). But the vehicles here are closer to art projects than science fair projects.

Treehugger features recycled hotels around the world. Recycled, as in made out of other things. Like drain pipes. After I trek to this swank tent hotel in Chile and make a stop at Amanwana in Indonesia I’ll book a room, er drain, at this place. The Unusual Hotels of the World website has hundreds more.

And finally this on Digg (where else?). Pancakes. In a spray can. You spray the pancake batter out of the can. Just like cheez. And it’s organic!

Noticed this post and link on Digg today. Basically it means that Norwegian government agencies (federal, state and regional) will be required to publish documents in an open format, that is in a format that uses software that is free and accessible to everyone. And that means *not* Microsoft.The formats covered in this regulation, which goes into effect in a year, are:

• HTML for all public information on the Web
• PDF for all documents where layout needs to be preserved
• ODF for all documents that the recipient is supposed to be able to edit

ODF is the one most people won’t recognize. It’s stands for Open Document Format and is essentially the generic version of MS Word. It is available as part of the OpenOffice project suite of freely downloadable office programs. The suite includes Writer, Math, Impress, Draw, Calc and Base.I’ve been using OpenOffice on my Mac for a little over a year now. After forking out a bundle for Adobe Creative Suite I was a bit cash-strapped and wasn’t ready to fork out another bundle for the Microsoft office suite. OpenOffice works beautifully, though I also had to install X11 to my operating system. I still can’t quite figure that out, but it all works and that’s all that matters.  With OpenOffice you can open Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other MS-specific documents without any problem. One issue I found when I first got my Mac was there were no PowerPoint viewers (the free app that allows you to view a presentation) for my operating system. But with OpenOffice I didn’t need to wait for Microsoft to come up with a new viewer app that works with Tiger OSX.I hope this new regulation is the start of a broader movement that will make electronic documents accessible for all. 

• Open Office website 

 This is more of a snapshot of a subject opportunity than a photo that took skill or talent. It has a sort of surreal quality to the composition. The photo could have been taken 30 years ago. Maybe it’s the kitchen table, which has been around for quite a while.

 Earlier this month I did the Christmas crafty thing. I went into the woods (with large bag and snips in my pocket) and came out 20 minutes later with an assortment of greenery. Then an hour or so with a wire wreath frame, some wire-on-a-spool, the snips and some dodads from Micheals et voila! Wreaths!

Reflection, 2007/Nov/25 I’ve worked with Photoshop for about 10 years now. And I still don’t get it. I’ve taken a course, downloaded reams of tutorials, tried new things. Nothing seems to click. It’s like my brain just isn’t programmed for layers and masks and selections and gradients and stuff. So in the spirit of embracing a challenge I will try a new Photoshop technique every week (or so), until I either ‘get it’ or die trying. This colour-adjusted photo that looks like it’s a snapshot with a shadow is the first. The tutorial sucked: the trickiest steps were so vague I had to improvise. 

 According to this site my real age is 31.7. If you know me (and have taken a close look at my face) you’ll know this to be a bit of a stretch. A dozen or so years are missing.The questions in the short quiz ask about general health, your relatives’ health, sleeping and eating habits, lifestyle, stress (I lost a few years there) and various sundry medical questions. Start with your real age and work up or down, depending on what’s good and what’s bad. My birthday is about two weeks away. I’m looking forward to turning 32. 

  Long Beach, near Tofino, at sunset. July, 2007.