Dixon Garett

Playing around with my new dSLR to generate a cool pic of my boy.

well I thought it was time to get back on the Blog Wagon. We’ll see if I can keep it up.

This ought to make you feel better about computer skills. Supposedly these are all true.

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Tech support: What kind of computer do you have?
Female customer: A white one…

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Customer: Hi, this is Celine. I can’t get my diskette out.
Tech support: Have you tried pushing the button?
Customer: Yes, sure, it’s really stuck.
Tech support: That doesn’t sound good; I’ll make a note.
Customer: No…wait a minute…I hadn’t inserted it yet…it’s still on my desk…sorry.

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Tech support: Click on the “my computer” icon to the left of the screen.
Customer: Your left or mine?

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Tech support: How may I help you?
Male customer: Hello… I can’t print.
Tech support: Would you click on “start” for me and…
Customer: Listen pal; don’t start getting technical on me! I’m not Bill Gates!

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Customer: Hi, good afternoon, this is Martha, I can’t print. Every time I try, it says ‘Can’t find printer’. I’ve even lifted the printer and placed it in front of the monitor, but the computer still says it can’t find it…

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Customer: I have problems printing in red…
Tech support: Do you have a color printer?
Customer: Aaaah…thank you.

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Tech support: What’s on your monitor now, ma’am?
Customer: A teddy bear my boyfriend bought for me at the 7-11.

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Customer: My keyboard is not working anymore.
Tech support: Are you sure it’s plugged into the computer?
Customer: No. I can’t get behind the computer.
Tech support: Pick up your keyboard and walk 10 paces back.
Customer: OK
Tech support: Did the keyboard come with you?
Customer: Yes
Tech support: That means the keyboard is not plugged in. Is there another keyboard?
Customer: Yes, there’s another one here. Ah…that one does work…

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Tech support: Your password is the small letter a as in apple, a capital letter V as in Victor, the number 7.
Customer: Is that 7 in capital letters?

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Customer: I can’t get on the Internet.
Tech support: Are you sure you used the right password?
Customer: Yes, I’m sure. I saw my colleague do it.
Tech support: Can you tell me what the password was?
Customer: Five little stars.

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Tech support: What anti-virus program do you use?
Customer: Netscape.
Tech support: That’s not an anti-virus program.
Customer: Oh, sorry…Internet Explorer.

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Customer: I have a huge problem. A friend has placed a screen saver on my computer, but every time I move the mouse, it disappears.

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Tech support: How may I help you?
Customer: I’m writing my first e-mail.
Tech support: OK, and what seems to be the problem?
Customer: Well, I have the letter ‘a’ in the address, but how do I get the circle around it?

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A woman customer called the Canon help desk with a problem with her printer.
Tech support: Are you running it under windows?
Customer: “No, my desk is next to the door, but that is a good point. The man sitting in the cubicle next to me is under a window, and his printer is working fine.”

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Tech support: “Okay Bob, let’s press the control and escape keys at the same time. That brings up a task list in the middle of the screen. Now type the letter “P” to bring up the Program Manager.”
Customer: I don’t have a P.
Tech support: On your keyboard, Bob.
Customer: What do you mean?
Tech support: “P”…..on your keyboard, Bob.
Customer: I’M NOT GOING TO DO THAT!

For those of you who remember Sesame Street from many years ago. Here is an amazing skit I recently re-discovered with my kids. Kermit the frog interviews Don Music while he is writing the Alphabet Song. Enjoy.

WTF [Read more →]

SO YOU THINK YOU KNOW EVERYTHING?

1. A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.
2. A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue.
3. A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.
4. A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
5. A “jiffy” is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
6. A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
7. A snail can sleep for three years.
8. Al Capone’s business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
9. All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill…
10. Almonds are a member of the peach family.
11. An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.
12. Babies are born without kneecaps. They don’t appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
13. Butterflies taste with their feet.
14. Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds. Dogs only have about 10.
15. “Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt”.
16. February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
17. In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
18. If the population of China walked past you, in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
19. If you are an average American, in your whole life, you will spend an average of 6 months waiting at red lights.
20. It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
21. Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
22. Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
23. No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
24. On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament building is an American flag.
25. Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
26. Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
27. Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
28. “Stewardesses” is the longest word typed with only the left hand and “lollipop” with your right.
29. The average person’s left hand does 56% of the typing.
30. The cruise liner, QE2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
31. The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
32. The sentence: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” usesevery letter of the alphabet.
33. The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.
34. The words ‘racecar,’ ‘kayak’ and ‘level’ are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left (palindromes).
35. There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
36. There are more chickens than people in the world.
37. There are only four words in the English language which end in “dous”: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
38. There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: “abstemious” and “facetious.”
39. There’s no Betty Rubble in the Flintstones Chewables Vitamins.
40. Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur…
41. TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
42. Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ room during a dance.
43. Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
44. Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks; otherwise it will digest itself.

..Now you know everything! Well almost everything. Do you have something you can add to the list.

YEP its true! AgencyNet has won the “Oscars of the Internet” for OWNYOURC.COM.

Check out the winner’s list over at The Winners Page on the Webby Awards Site.

This is totally cool…but if you don’t believe me…check the site out for yourself and see.

Every now and again something happens that makes you reavaluate the person/designer you are. Recently my wife gave birth to our third child, a boy, Eli. Well, let me tell you…He’s damn cute. But I digress.

The point is..sometimes something so great happens it gives you back your appreciation for art and design. Since my boy’s arrival, mind you its been 6 years since I’ve had a baby in the house, I have once again began studying the wold around me and taking notice of design again.

I also recently read a great article while messing around on DIGG. “25 Reasons You Might Be a Hardcore Designer”. It gave me a chuckle and made me start thinking about the big wide world around me. If you have a chance, take a read. Also if you have the chance, next time you are driving down the street look at the following and see if you can find some interestingly hidden design gems.

Recently I noticed a church in my neighborhood that had a really cool logo. Normally you wouldn’t think that a church could do much with the old “cross” branding, but their take on it was quite cool. The logo, which makes the cross, appears to be to pieces of ribbon running together and then twisting away making the form of the cross. I thought it was interesting because it was a bit different. I drive by it almost everyday…I don’t know why I took notice today…but there you have it.

So go out…drive to work, school, home or wherever you go. This time, pay attention to the buildings and area around you and see if you can find a piece of design you haven’t noticed before.

Cheers

Here is a little list a good friend sent to me about the essence of great ideas. Basically there are six (2) principals your idea needs to have in order to be considered “Sticky”. Here they are. Thanks Rich.

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY
How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.” To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission – sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS
How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day’s worth of fatty foods! We can use surprise – an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus – to grab people’s attention. But surprise doesn’t last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. How do you keep students engaged during the fortyeighth history class of the year? We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge – and then filling those gaps.

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS
How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions – they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images – ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors – because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY
How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former surgeon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-to-day situations we don’t enjoy this authority. Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves – a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas. When we’re trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers. But in many cases this is exactly the wrong approach. In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.”

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS
How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness. The statistic “37 grams” doesn’t elicit any emotions. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it’s difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it’s easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco.

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES
How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.

Yep….After winning at South By Southwest….We are up for what some would say is the Grand-Daddy of all interactive awards. Check out the nominees and don’t forget to check out the mad Dart Sound FX in the download section of OwnyourC.com

The Webbys

Content Husking is the process by which extraneous textual information is stripped away from marketing language in order to get to the yummy center of what you are actually trying to say.

For many years, people have been talking about writing for the web. But it seems to me that the more people talk about reducing the amount of unneeded copy on pages, more and more blogs pop up by people who want nothing more than to fill it back up with unecessary words (ahem). But if you are one of these wonderful people who have something truly interesting to say…you should remember one thing.

CONTENT-HUSKING: Take a page and cut it down to a paragraph, now take that paragraph and strip it down to one sentence. If you can do this, chances are you have the ability to quickly provide people with clear, concise informational content. Now…should you do this always? NO. Some content requires more text in order to get the point across, but in order to get people reading…you really should think about it.

Don’t believe me.

1. Take the copy on the homepage of your site…or any page for that matter.
2. Copy that content into a word editor.
3. Start husking away information that is “filler” (words like “that”, “in which”)
4. Are you able to cut it down to one paragraph? (if the answer is no…keep cutting)
5. Review the one paragraph, look for the essence of it and try to write it in one sentence.

Welcome to Content Husking. It may not be this cut and dry for every piece of copy…but anything you are writing to introduce your site visitors to additional content should be put through this filter.

Good luck and good husking.

Here’s a little video I captured at work the other day.  The dancer…for those of you not familiar with his work…shall be called nothing more than “Chainsaw”.

 Enjoy..DG

Well chalk this up as one more area where AgencyNet has done good. OwnYourC.com is a finalist in the South by Southwest interactive web awards. Established in 1994, the SXSW Interactive Festival consists of four days of panel programming, a Trade Show & Exhibition, plus a full schedule of exciting evening activities. This is a unique event where top-notch developers, cutting-edge designers and out-of-the-box thinkers share their inspirations about the future of the web.

AgencyNet is proud to have Own Your C recognized and we wish all the finalists congratulations.

PS…Check out the dart sound effect in the downloads section of ownyourc.com.

Hello All.

Own Your C has been nominated for FWA’s people’s choice awards. Please take the time and help us win this year…..VOTE.

Please click here to vote.

Well its that time again. Time for all of us to write down a list of things we hope to adhere to in the new year. I am wondering if there is a statistical measure for how many people actually meet their self-imposed requirements for being a better person in the upcoming 365 days. I will have to look that up and get back to you.

Here are my resolutions for this year…(in no particular order).

1. Learn the Guitar
2. Learn some Harmonica
3. Write my comic
4. Write a graphic novel/screenplay
5. Re-join the Mac World
6. Lose 15 lbs.
7. Be a better Manager
8. Spend more time with family
9. Be more organized
10. Enjoy life.