a blog about everything and nothing

By now, I hope everyone has seen the events of the Oprah season opener. Michigan Ave. was shut down with Oprah introducing the Black Eyed Peas to kick off the season. More than 20,000 fans gathered on the street to watch the free show. Little did Oprah know, but the BEP had organized a flash mob. They put out ads, messages, and tweets through Facebook and Twitter asking for people who wanted to participate in the event. Eventually, 20 professional choreographers were trained, who then trained a crowd of 800 who were interspersed among the 20,000 fans. The result was undeniably the coolest flash mob ever and an amazing performance.

I consider myself an entrepreneur at heart. I lie awake at night and think about the viability of different business models, the type of business I’d like to have, the way I would set up shop, etc. Here are a few of my thoughts as to the gear I’d use (in case any of you really want my opinion). Since there are so many different facets, I’ll try and keep each post centered around one idea.

Ideally, I would start a creative agency, basically a design firm. Let’s just say I love the pretty. I understand marketing (my boss would be glad to know this) and just as importantly, I understand the creative side of marketing. I know what you’re thinking, “everyone is a marketer.” Agreed, and moving on. A good campaign is just as much about strategy as it is about aesthetics.

So, without further delay, here are some of my picks for equipment and software.

Obviously Mac based. For people like me, the ones who do the meetings, supply the direction, etc., the machine of choice would be the 15″ Macbook Pro. It’s light, portable, easy to use, pretty to look at, and powerful enough to do just about anything your heart desires.

For the designers, something a little more bulky and not so portable, most likely a quad core and 30″ display. Each employee would need one of these as well:

For project management, the best choice is probably Base Camp.

I currently use a proprietary project management system, but if I had to go with one that was available to the public, I’d choose these guys. For one, they are big enough where they offer a lot of support. Also, with the new Base Camp API, the add-ons and extras are definitely a plus, and you can find a fix for just about anything.

On the road, in your meetings, on the train, etc., you never know about the internet connection. That’s why you would probably want something like the MiFi. This portable device allows you to connect to 3G and then share that connection with up to 5 devices via WiFi. Pretty Sweet.

Another thing that I think is crucial to have on hand is the Flip Mino HD. This thing is amazing. It’s about the size of your phone, records up to 1 hour in beautiful HD, and plugs right into your computer USB drive for immediate upload, no cables, not mess, just perfectness.

And for the last item in this post, a portable external hard drive. The Seagate Go is really nice. Portable and light with a docking station, you don’t need more than 500 GB for one of these things.

I’d also want a nice, solid camera as well, but since I’m not a photographer, I’ll let the experts chime in on what they would (or currently have) get.

That’s it for my thought for now, there will be plenty more where this came from. Feel free to to email or twitter me about any of this.

On the Lifehacker blog today you will find a link to view some of the new wallpapers that will be available in the new Snow Leopard release for Mac (The downloads actually come from the UNEASY Silence blog). At first glance, I’m not sure I’m entirely impressed, though I’ve never really been a stock wallpaper guy. Who knows, maybe this is a test run for Apple to gauge peoples’ feelings about the new looks. If that’s the case, they have a lot of ground to make up before the release which is impossible anyway and leads us back to the fact that these are the actual wallpapers being released. I tend to get most of my stuff from Veer (don’t say I never gave you anything). I’m also one of those guys who likes to read the comments below a post, even the first couple on a Youtube video. So, with that said, here is my favorite comment from the blog post:

It’s like, macs are for cool guys, and windows is for nerd guys, and they both get their wallpapers from the wallpaper guys. But they screwed up who got what this time!

Click on the image for the Lifehacker Post

For those of you who have been reading this blog for a while, thank you. For those of you who haven’t, welcome. This is the new site with some major upgrades. Please take a look around and let me know if you find any glitches, default type text, links that don’t work, etc.

Thank you all

And now its time for the long awaited District 9 movie review (Don’t worry, no spoilers here).

So, after seeing the much anticipated movie, I left completely satisfied. Except for one minor hole in the plot, I thought the story was excellent, the acting was spot on, and the plot was engaging. If you replaced the aliens with actual people from the human race, you probably would have thought and felt very similar emotions. The directors did a great job giving the aliens rights as beings (and also taking those rights away in sub-human, segragant manners).

Even more scary is how real it all felt, the reality of the events that happened within South Africa. You can’t help but notice the entire movie is a metaphor for a fairly big event in South African history, I’ll let you figure that one out. Outside of it being satisfying, the movie grows on you. A day or two after, you find yourself wanted to see it again because you find yourself forgetting some of the details.

Anyway, I would recommend you see this movie. The exception is this:

1) Don’t see this with anyone who would make fun of aliens, it will just ruin the movie for you and likely bias your judgment.