Category: Uncategorized

David Crow (sort of pictured to the left — that’s actually a figurine of Fred Sanford from Sanford and Son) has written a blog entry on starting a DemoCamp in your town.

Remember, the DemoCamp concept needn’t be limited to the topic of technology — if a topic can be covered in a “show and tell” format, it can be DemoCamped. Consider Eli Singer’s creation, CaseCamp, in which the DemoCamp concept is applied to marketing cases. Robert Ouelette, architect and all-round creative guy, mentioned to me that he’d like to apply the DemoCamp concept to design (probably architectural, but likely for graphic and urban design as well) and start DesignCamp.

The DemoCamp concept can be applied to just about anything — the trick is to have people who love “show and tell!”

A lot of nerds (myself included) believe that marketing is pretty much as the image below shows:

Click the image to see the comic on its original page.

Yahoo! Answers is one of those sites where you can post a question and other users will provide their own answers. I’m aware of two celebrities who have currently active questions:

• Bono: What can we do to make poverty history?
• Dr. Stephen Hawking: How can the human race survive the next hundred years?

The prize for “Answer of the Day” may have to go to a troll going by the name of crazy s who replied to Bono’s question with:

  Hey you all. DOnt you feel privileged being here?

  First comes Al Gore and then Bill Clinton and now

  Bono is asking a question.

  These people are millionaires being paid by all of us

  from our tax dollars to do their job. If we are going to

  answer the questions and they implement them,

  look who is the beneficiary. We became a little more

  poor sitting here for free giving away our ideas and

  they earn millions.

  Strange but true. THis is the business to be in.

  One more poor person speaks out.

  

Somehow, I don’t think a half-baked idea posted on the internet in response to a question is worth charging money. If that were the case, at nearly 5000 entries on this blog alone, I should be lighting cigars with flaming $100 bills and eating lobsters stuffed with tacos every night. [75K MP3]

I didn’t know that the late Aaron Spelling was the executive producer of a show called My Daddy Can Lick Your Daddy. Ewwwwwww.

One of my friends from Crazy Go Nuts University, Stacy Dillon, is now a teacher in New York City and does book reviews on her blog, Booktopia. She’s recently started a new blog in which she reviews books for the tween set (that’s ages 9 through 12) called Welcome to My Tweendom.

One of the books she recently reviewed had a title that made me laugh out loud: You are SO not Invited to my Bat Mitzvah!

(I see an opportunity to rip off this title and write books like You are SO not Going on my Blogroll or You are SO not Getting in on My IPO.)

Maybe I’ll buy it for Wendy for some airport reading. We’re booked for at least three flights in the next six months.

The device on the right is a Thingamagoop — a simple handmade electronic synthesizer made by Bleep Labs. Unlike the synths you see at music stores, it’s controlled not by a keyboard, but by a photocell. The more light the photocell receives, the higher the pitch of the sound it emits.

If the design of the Thingamagoop looks familiar, it’s because it’s done by the fine folks at Goopymart.

The knob acts as a frequency control. One of the switches determines whether the Thingamagoop emits high or low sounds, while the other determines whether the sound output is continuous or switching on and off.

That dangling thing with a light? That’s the LEDacle (Light-Emitting Diode tenACLE), which you can move to affect the sound produced by the Thingamagoop. Its blinking is affected by the controls, and you can point its light at the photocell to change the pitch.

Thingamagoops have built-in speakers and a 1/4″ jack so that you can route its output to an amplifier or through effects boxes.

My only complaint about these beauties: the price is a little steep — it sells for $100. Perhaps Make magazine will do a piece on building your own.

Chris “Turner” Turner, my fellow DJ at Clark Hall Pub back in my days at Crazy Go Nuts University, is currently touring the globe with his wife Ashley Bristowe and daughter Sloane, doing research on his next book, titled The Geography of Hope: A Guided Tour of the World We Need. The book, from what I recall of Chris’ description last summer, is a guided tour of things that people are doing to create healthy, sustainable places to live with a sense of community. Being a believer that progress and good planetary stewardship needn’t be diametrically-opposed mutual exclusives, a guy who likes to think about communities and being an optimist in general, I find the idea of Chris’ upcoming book fascinating. I look forward to getting a copy once it comes out next year.

In the meantime, Ashley’s been dutifully blogging their research trip, which has included:

• Berlin, where he caught up with Ian Conacher, whom I knew from the late Shift magazine, where he’s shooting a documentary about solving the plastic problem (made from oil, takes forever to break down, and yet we chuck it at an incredible rate).
• Staying in an Earthship in Taos. Earthships are houses that are designed to be as self-sustaining as possible while keeping environmental impact to a minimum.
• Restaurant recommendations, should your travels take you along paths near theirs.

In addition to the Geography of Hope blog and Ashley’s personal blog, they’ve also got a Flickr photoset that covers their travels.

Safe travels, Ash and Turner, and I’ll be reading!