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Monday
Aug302010

Art in the Age of... Snap

Ok... So I have been a little busy over the past few weeks, but how I missed the launch of SNAP but Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is beyond me.  It is quite likely if you have spent any time with me in past few months you would have heard me mention ROOT.  It took me some time to track down the bottles that currently occupy my shelf, but now I have a new hyper local concoction to lust over. 

Check out the introducing video...

As soon as I manage to procure a bottle I will share my experience and what I think here.  I have a number of cooking ideas for this and will try hard to get a bottle.

 

Thursday
Aug122010

Seattle Geek Week and upcoming speaking events

Well I am still sorting out all the issues with my server, but a move back to wordpress will probably have to wait till after Seattle Geek Week.  The next two weeks are just jam packed with the geekiest of activities and if you are in Seattle you should definitly participate.  You will be able to hear me speak or talk to me at the following events:

I am one of the organizers and acting MC for BarCamp Seattle and I am going to be talking about OODA loops and Digital insurgancy at what is one of my favorite events every year.  This event takes place at Adobe on Aug 14-15.

 

The good folks at Trada and Search Marketing Now have reached out to me to do a webinar on Cost Per Aquisition calculations.   You can listen to me pontificate on why spending a buck to make a buck is stupid and how to calculate your CPA and important it is to a successful campaign.   If you want to listen to this presentation you can register here:

Demystifying “Cost Per Acquisition” and its Impact on Search Marketing Campaigns

Also I need to thank Peter Chee and ThinkSpace in Redmond for allowing me to present from their facility and use their phone.

 

The Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) is a semi-annual gamer festival held in Seattle and Boston. I will be working the booth for Logitech and generally enjoying watching all the cosplay.  You can find me there and I might be doing some giveaways so keep an eye on twitter. PAX 2010 is Sept 3rd-5th.

The Houston Internet Marketers Association has foolishly invited me back to speak again this year.  I will be discussing the effect of other search engines and future search engines on your marketing campaigns and strategies.   If you are in Houston check it out; Sept 16th.

There are more events coming up later in the year and I am participating in a number of events as a citizen over the next couple of weeks here in Seattle so please feel free to reach out if you want to connect at a upcoming event.

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday
Aug082010

Malware, Wordpress and Moving Forward

So I hope you didn’t notice, but my blog got hacked.  The initial attack that locked me out of my site occurred about a couple of weeks ago and was while I was on the road for Logitech.  I didn’t notice until I got sent emails from a few good friends saying the site was spitting out Malware warnings.  I admit this is a pretty shameful thing given that I have preached about securing your wordpress and checking for tell tale signs of Malware.   But Friday night I set up a Squarespace account and moved my site of my server to buy me time to fix my server before relaunching the site.  

I consider myself pretty lucky the move from wordpress to squarespace to only a couple of hours. This is the big advantage of hosted solutions and I am thankful because I am on the road and the one thing I didn’t want to deal with was sending someone to a site that might infect or damage a computer.   If you visited my site in the last few weeks I am sorry that I may have poised a security threat to you.

Moving forward, I do have plans to continue move back to Wordpress and probably thesis. I remain a huge fan of the Wordpress community and I have a number of other sites that are running on Wordpress. I do have a number of sites on squarespace as well, but I find the environment a little limiting. So I will be looking at my site in the next few weeks and I will work out a plan to get the server back on line.  Thanks for the support!

Saturday
Jun052010

Hipster Diptychs: What’s in your bag.

Julia Diptych

One recent voyeuristic obsession I have had recently is to look through the “What's in your bag?” flickr pool.  Given how much I travel I tend to obsess just a bit with how can I carry everything I need while still traveling light.  What does traveling light even mean?  So I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled on Jason Travis Persona’s collection which combined two of my favorite things; Hipsters and “What’s in your bag” photos.  

I am not sure if I saw this on Gizmodo or Notcot, but to the best of my knowledge here is the best description I could find of the project:

Pictures of what (extremely similar) Atlantans carry around in their bags". Once you get over your wish that the photographer had cast his net a little more broadly, there's still a lot of interest and wit here. The things these people carry at once offer us a view of people's public personae and a peek into what remains hidden. There's a whole gigantic "What's in your bag?" photo pool on flickr, a reminder that this sort of hiding/sharing/defining is by no means limited to hipsters in Atlanta.

The Morning News

So I if you are at all curious about the insides of peoples bags you should check it out but be sure to have plenty of time on your hands because it can be a real time waster.

Jason Travis Personas

Friday
Jun042010

ROOT: Hyper Local Liquor

L1040607

I can’t remember when I first read about ROOT but the idea has intrigued me for a while.  A small batch liquor made by by the fine artists at Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.  I think my interest began with the simple design of the glass bottles or the maybe it was the story behind the liquor which is a revival of a pre-prohibition recipe root tea that eventually became root beer when alcohol was “out of fashion”.   It doesn’t really matter though because in Washington state you can’t get it.  In fact out side of Philly it can be tough to find.   As a part of a new breed of organic, hyper-local small batch liquors, regular and large distribution is hard to come by.  

During Maker Faire last week I sent one of my co-conspirers to Cask in downtown San Fran where they specialize in small batch liquors and fine bartending kit to look for a couple of bottles.  After a few days on the road myself I came home to this lovely 80 proof alcohol.  I have all sorts of ideas about how I could cook this down and make syrups to poor on various foods but more than that I have enjoyed sipping it over a little ice.  If you ever get a chance to try some I highly recommend it.

Also be sure to check out Art in the age of, they are a lot more than some hipster urban farmers.

 L1040606

 

Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction firmly believes in empowering artists producing high quality work marked by fine craft and intellectual rigor. We do so by applying the fruits of such labors to the cultural forms of everyday life, granting those who wish to engage the opportunity to do so in his/her own environment. Rather than exist at a distance in the white cube of the gallery space, we weave our offerings into the collective surface of myriad personal contexts. In this troubling epoch of industrial commodification, standardization of reproduction, and fomentation of a society of shallow spectacle, Art In The Age issues a challenge and rally cry. We fight fire with fire, subsuming the onslaught of watered down facsimiles and inaccessible displays with thought-provoking products of real cultural capital