Every day since October 1st

San Francisco gives me the hiccups.

One. Each. Hour. (hic)

Sometimes they're really (hic) loud.

Usually they are (hic) followed by "he he he."

There are hiccups in the grocery store. There are hiccups at 80 mph in the car. There are hiccups in the shower. There are hiccups during coffee drinking. There are hiccups everywhere. (hic)

no...no...no...yes!

I was just going through my older emails, and one that you sent me with a great sales resource made me think of something:

Dave (XPLANE founder) Gray's book - Selling to the VP of NO - is by far the best book on 'sales' that I've ever read.

I know you're not doing that kind of stuff right now, but I wanted to pass it along while I'm thinking of it, in case you're ever looking for some 'getting shit done that the decision-maker is waffling on' tips.

The thing is, the book is barely about sales - it's more about how people make decisions, and uses excellent info design to get the ideas across. He's the first one that I've seen convincingly take the 'sales is NOT manipulation' slant - it's more like creating a dialog that leads the other person to realizations through understanding (like our design presentations in school). If only I'd had this when I was taught sales the first time around and going, 'but...no...%#$!' to the other approach in my head... It's just a great resource - one to add to the library of keepers, I think.

Yay for more stuff that's good! :D

Right writing (oi)

I ran across another great writing resource yesterday: Word Usage

One recent post is about commmonly misused or confusing words, like the old Lay vs Lie dilemma (I know it keeps me up nights...)

Lay/lie: Lay is a transitive verb and means to place or set down. Lie is an intransitive verb and means to be or stay at rest in a horizontal position. Use lay when you place the object down, lie when the object is already down.

Or the always devious:

Differ/different/vary/various: To differ is to be dissimilar in quality, amount, or form, or to be of opposing opinions. Different means to be dissimilar in quality, amount, or form. You say that something is different from something else, not different than. To vary is to make or cause changes in characteristics or attributes, to modify or alter. Various means to be of diverse kinds, unlike, or different—various is more similar to the word different than to the word vary. So when you propose that someone select from among thirty options, they are selecting from various options not different options. Oh, you might say differing options and I’d let you slide. But I would hope that the options were all different from each other. It would be silly to offer thirty options that were all the same, wouldn’t it?

Tricky, tricky, this language of ours...

The Right Tool for the Job

From a discussion about the Hipster PDA:

"I remember a bit on West Wing where they were talking about all the years of work put in to design a pen that would work in space…
“And what did the Russians use? ”
“A pencil?”
“Yup, a pencil.”

Genius.

This is how I feel today.

Opinion cloud?

THIS is awesome. Now, I have a place to send all the opinions I have hanging around, gathering dust!

To add to the list of ~40ish 'social' 'web 2.0' and now 'Ajax' services and apps that I've tried out in the past few months there's now Riff, which is the most fun so far.

Riff exists simply so people can share opinions about stuff - whatever they like. It also includes the usual suspects - tagging, a blogroll, integration with del.icio.us, and topic, music, and friend recommendations. Since it uses an Ajax approach, it's fast and you can move the 'mini-windows' around in your browser - which is still totally novel and fun.

I think this one's going to be around for a while...

...to do good is my religion.

Words by Thomas Paine

Hello measure|map

I just added Adaptive Path's Measure|Map to this blog - and I'm really excited to try it out.

Let's see what this post looks like in their tool...

More thoughts on this soon!