For example, this blog, A Soviet Poster A Day, has…well, a example of someone of the finest Soviet posters of the 20th century along with a description of what they represent. Anyone interested in typography, poster art, or 20 century history deserves to pay a visit.

Peter Bregman at Harvard Business Publishing has a good article on the smart way to look for a job. It is a smart and effective approach to job searching. Better yet, it is a wise way to find something better than just another job. Find new contacts, find new (or forgotten passions), find what you really want to do. Those are some of the ideas in Need to Find a Job? Stop Looking So Hard.

It’s good to check out, even if you have a job.

Recently, there has been much talk about U.S. politicians using Twitter. I assume most of them like the service.
It will be interesting to see what happens next, as organizations like the Sunlight Foundation ask people to Help Lobby Congress on things like S. 482. I can see this happening more and more. And politicians may find themselves getting alot of feedback this way. This is not a bad thing, depending on how well they are able to deal with it. And it is a good story to follow for any organization considering the use of Twitter or any other  social software or social media.

According to dshort.com, compared to other bad bear markets, it’s pretty bad. See for yourself:

Now, my belief is that it can also turn around faster, largely due to improved technology. Supply chains can gear up faster, news spreads faster, money moves faster. But it all depends on something which may not change quickly, which is: people’s minds.

Let’s see. You might start seeing people short those betting on the Great Depression II.

I’ve been listening to EBTG since the 1980s. They’re timeless, and I never get tired of listening to them. Twenty years ago I heard her singing on a casette tape with The Style Council. In another twenty years, I hope I can still here them on whatever format music comes in. In the meantime, here is a more recent version of them singing Rollercoaster:

And here is Tracey Thorn and Style Council from the 1980s (or is it the 1940s? 🙂 )

Enjoy!

Amana has an interesting experiment going on: it is allowing viewers to help them pick which design to go with first.  In exchange, they will use your selections to help determine your personality (apparently mine was too eclectic for them to decide!)

This is a simple and smart idea. They get feedback from potential buyers, potentially get some viral marketing (a link to sites like Facebook or other social networking sites would be helpful), and get to promote their ideas. Plus, they also get to see which ones are big hits and which ones are big misses. (Speaking only for myself, my most favourite was Green Tea and my least favourite was Mojo).

If you have wanted to engage your clients more, consider what Amana has done:

How colorful is your personality? / Amana’s New Color Refrigerators

Jonathan Dillon was a watchmaker fixing Lincoln’s watch at the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War. He wrote an audacious and secret message inside the watch. A message just discovered now. CNN has the details.

I have seen many public art works, but I think one of the finest is not really an art work at all. Instead, construction workers in Boston are writing the names of children on steel beams. They get the names from the children at the cancer hospital nearby, who write their names on paper for the workers to see. The Boston Globe has the story here.

Project Gutenberg has been around for along time, relatively speaking. They still have lots of great books online, totally free (as in free of charge and you are free to do what you want with them), and continually being updated. The new ebook sites are all fine and good, but this classic site is full of ..um…classics! And much more. You deserve to pop in and take a browse.

You likely know the tips for getting over a cold: Drink Plenty of Fluids, Get Plenty of Rest, and Take Medicine. What I liked about this article, Tips for Getting Over a Cold at Associated Content, is that not only did they have these tips (and some other good ones), but they explained why it is good to do these things.

Bonus: I didn’t realize pineapple juice is good dealing with a cold. See the article and you’ll know why.

If you’ve been blogging for awhile, you have likely gotten the hang of it, but would like to move on and get even better at it. If you do, consider this article in Lifehacker: Top 10 Tools for Your Blog or Web Site. It’s a great source for people who may have been using sites like WordPress.com or blogger.com but who would now like to see what else they can do.

It’s a collection of tips: you still will want to consider learning more about how to set up your own domain name, installing WordPress yourself, etc., to take advantage of all the tips. But even a few of them will give you a leg up.

Over at Wired is a really good rundown on netbooks: what they are, how they came about, and why they are so popular. I was just at a conference and a number of people were showing their netbook off. I expect to see more and more around.

I think this comment at the end of the article is key:

“In the process of creating a laptop to satisfy the needs of poor people, she revealed something about traditional PC users. They didn’t want more out of a laptop—they wanted less.”

I heard this before, but I came across this on the very good Happenupon’s Weblog.

Based on searches people do for flu-like symptoms, Google can predict flus. Here’s a chart comparing Google’s data and that from the Centre for Disease Control (CDC):

Pretty cool. Now can they predict when this recession will be over? That would be good.

As seen as USAtoday.com, ‘one month after her surgery for pancreatic cancer, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Thursday she expects to be on the Supreme Court for several more years. In an interview, she also vividly recalled why, on her second day back on the bench, she attended President Obama’s televised speech to a joint session of Congress.’

“First, I wanted people to see that the Supreme Court isn’t all male,” the lone female justice said of the evening event Feb. 24. “I also wanted them to see I was alive and well, contrary to that senator who said I’d be dead within nine months.”

Ginsburg was referring Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., comment, which he later apologized for, in which he said she would be dead from the pancreatic cancer she had within nine months. Bunning’s comment was awful. Good for Justice Ginsburg. See more here.

CARNET DE DESSINS/Bénédicte’s blog. Lots of lovely drawing, sketches and other works. Go treat your eyes.

Skittles is known for their unusual approach to advertising and media. I think they are quite inventive and noteworthy. However, as reported on Mashable.com, Skittles unusual approach with social media this week, while innovative and noteworthy, also, as a result of “Bad Jokes”, were forced to retreat from twitter to Facebook. (“Bad jokes” is Mashable’s term: as they say later, the comments were much worse than that.)

I thought this lesson had been generally learned from the previous bad experiences at Chevrolet and the Los Angeles Times, but apparently not. As Mashable says:

“It’s important to point out how nasty (insults, racial slurs) things can turn out when you give control of the content on your site to users, some of which can be completely anonymous.”

Anyone developing a social networking service like this needs to have a strategy for dealing with trolls and other antisocial behavoir on your site. Otherwise…well, you might end up with something similar happening.

Mashable.com has a good rundown of the story at the link above.

That’s the premise of this article in Fast Company, Made to Stick: Set Smaller Goals, Get Bigger Results.

In order to overcome problems and difficulties that you face, the article recommends setting strict, short time limits on taking action that can lead to improvement. Whether it is tackling a big cleaning job, doing expenses, or praising others, this article has recommendations on how to deal with it in short bursts.

To this I would add a few things:

1. Be prepared to actually quit after your time limit. For example, on days when I dread going for a run, I tell myself: just go for 10 minutes, and if after 10 minutes you want to quit, then quit. 99% of the time, I will get outside and once I get going, I will keep going. But there have been times when it has been too cold, or I am too tired, and I do quit and I am ok with that. You should be too. Otherwise, you might talk yourself out of starting in the first place. Hey, sometimes you have to know when to retreat and regroup before you resume the charge.
2. If you know the job is never going to get done in 5 minutes, do this: take the 5 minutes to list the things you have to do. Now you have a plan. Great! The first thing on your plan should be a short activity. For example, if the big job is clean out the basement (or garage, storage closet, etc.), perhaps the first task should be: take 5 minutes to throw out as much garbage as possible. I find when taking on a big job, the more you can eliminate unnecessary things, the simpler the task at hand will be, and the easier it will be for you to focus on what is next.

(Photo of man getting a free five minute massage courtesy of Rasmussen College – Green Bay’s photostream on flickr. See, you can even be more relaxed in just five minutes! 🙂 )

There’s a good Op-Ed Contribution (The Great Solvent North) in the NYTimes.com by Theresa Tedesco, the chief business correspondent for The National Post (a Canadian newspaper) in which Canadian banks are being praised for their conservative and disciplined nature., among other things.  They do deserve praise for this.

However, this man should also be praised. Praised for such things as  keeping the Canadian banks in check when they were wanting to merge in the 1990s. I remember at the time that Canadian banks and their supporters were bemoaning that if they didn’t merge, they wouldn’t matter any more on the world banking stage. It was people like Martin who saw the risks there, and at one time, when the banks tried to do an end run around him, he slapped them down.

Now the banks are being heaped with praise. Yet if it weren’t for Martin, they might be in the same predicament that some of the other big banks they want to catch up to are now in. (Ironically, due to the decimation of the U.S. banking system, Canadian banks are now much bigger these days in comparison.) So, praise to the banks and the Canadian banking system, but praise also to the regulators and leaders like Martin who also played a big role.

There is a great Toronto Star article on Martin and what he accomplished here. It is well worth a read.

Lots of people come to this blog looking for BlackBerry tools. I feel bad, since this eclectic blog is anything but a source of software tools. But feeling bad is useless. Instead, I found this link on Mashable.com that IS useful. See this post: 15 Free Tools to Turn Your BlackBerry into a Communications Powerhouse for a source of useful BB tools. Let me know if you find any that are worthwhile and I will post that info here.

The venerable Mr. Buffet has taken a hit this year like everyone else, and according to this article, he  Accepts Blame and Faults Others (NYTimes.com), as he is right to do. Warren Buffett has been a critic of financial derivatives for some time (and with good reason). Sadly, even his criticism was not enough to curtail the use of these weapons of mass financial destruction, as he used to classify them. Perhaps if he had come up with this metaphor sooner, that may have helped:

“Participants seeking to dodge troubles face the same problem as someone seeking to avoid venereal disease,” he wrote. “It’s not just whom you sleep with, but also whom they are sleeping with.”

English artist Stuart Semple released “2057 pink smiley faced clouds float from the Tate Modern over Londons Southbank towards the financial district.” Why? To make people happy.

Nice touch: they were made to disappear after 30 minutes (so they are pink and “green”).

YouTube – Stuart Semple, Happy Clouds, Tate Modern, Southbank, London

(Tip to AndrewSullivan.com)

“In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus

It is easy to dismiss Lily Allen: she is cute, she is poppy, and she sings about shallow things. Don’t be deceived: she is really smart. Too smart, almost. And she is getting better and better.

Throughout Toronto (and likely Canada and many other parts of the world), stores are promoting “green” bags over plastic. While it is better to use these green bags versus disposable plastic bags, I am not a big fan of the design of the green bags. What I am a fan of and what I would recommend is something like these Oxfam Shop’s Jute String Bags. Unlike alot of green bags, they collapse into nothing practically, making them easier to carry with you than green bags. They are made out of a natural material (unlike alot of green bags). They are highly expandable. And they are super strong. I think they are superior to green bags. Plus if you can get them from a fair trade organization like Oxfam shop, you are doing some additional good.

I’ve had mine for years, and I have loaded it up so heavily I could barely carry it, and it shows none the worse for all that.

Brilliant. Infectious. Animal Collective.

Thanks to Tuneage.tumblr.com for the pointer.

David Pogue has a thorough review of Amazon.com’s Kindle at the NYTimes.com. There’s been alot written about the Kindle, but I like Pogue’s review for how he points out all little details you may want to know before you buy it. He’s a good tech writer.

But what I want to highlight is something he addresses towards the end of the review, where he asks and answers the question:

“So, for the thousandth time: is this the end of the printed book?

Don’t be silly.

The Kindle has the usual list of e-book perks: dictionary, text search, bookmarks, clippings, MP3 music playback and six type sizes (baby boomers, arise). No trees die to furnish paper for Kindle books, either.

But as traditionalists always point out, an e-book reader is a delicate piece of electronics. It can be lost, dropped or fried in the tub. You’d have to buy an awful lot of $10 best sellers to recoup the purchase price. If Amazon goes under or abandons the Kindle, you lose your entire library. And you can’t pass on or sell an e-book after you’ve read it.

Another group of naysayers claims that the Kindle has missed its window. E-book programs are thriving on the far more portable (and far more popular) iPhones and iPod Touches. Surely smartphones, which already serve as cameras, calculators and Web browsers, will become the dominant e-book readers as well.

The point everyone is missing is that in Technoland, nothing ever replaces anything. E-book readers won’t replace books. The iPhone won’t replace e-book readers. Everything just splinters. They will all thrive, serving their respective audiences.”

I put in bold what I think is crucial. Actors still act on stage despite movies and television, musicians still perform concerts despite recordings, radio and YouTube videos, and readers will still read books regardless of the quality and quantity of e-books that come out. The publishing industry will be affected, of course, but that is a different matter. When it comes to the printed page, there will still be people who long and look for that, and there will still be books to meet that demand and desire.

Ryan Lizza has a good profile of Rahm Emanuel in the New Yorker (The Gatekeeper).

The whole article is good, but I liked this part:

“They have never worked the legislative process,” Emanuel said of critics like the Times columnist Paul Krugman, who argued that Obama’s concessions to Senate Republicans—in particular, the tax cuts, which will do little to stimulate the economy—produced a package that wasn’t large enough to respond to the magnitude of the recession. “How many bills has he passed?”

It reminds me of Stalin’s critique of the Pope during World War II. (It’s both a very bad and a very good metaphor. 🙂 )

Emanuel will move the troops up the field, but he will do it in his own way. He knows how.

(RED)WIRE, as the site says,

“…is a digital music magazine with one very important difference. It not only changes the way
music is discovered, it provides medicine for people who need it in Africa.”

(RED)Wire states that it will provide you with weekly delivery of great music delivered weekly for a cost of $5/month. The best part is that half of that goes to buy medicine for people living with HIV in Africa.

If you are already buying music online, consider buying some via (RED)WIRE – an online music magazine that saves lives.

One of my favourite mashups is this cross of Run DMC’s It’s Like That with some (sped up) Russian soldiers dancing. You have to see it.

Brilliant.

Sure, LOLcats is still funny, but Яolcats, with its quasi-C0mmunist sloganeering, is a new kinda funny. For example, this supposedly translates to:

“Aaaaah… Pig iron, your musk is that of glorious industry …”

There are lots more, but this made me truly laugh out loud.

It may be that Hillary Clinton mugs more for photos than other politicians. But in the last year or so, I have had the impression that the media has used more odd photos of her than of other politicians. Almost all the photos that I have seen of Obama and McCain have shown them in a good light, but many of the photos of Clinton that I have seen have been unflattering. Like this one. I wish I had a way to determine if this is true or not. As she become more active as Sec’y of State, I will have to keep an eye out for this.

(photo from globeandmail.com : In Pictures)

Yahoo! Briefcase is going away. Google Notebook is getting shutdown as well. I have been using both of them, albeit sparingly, for some time. (I have files on Briefcase going back to 2003). I am not critical of either Yahoo
or Google: they offer a wide variety of services, and from time to time, they are going to discontinue some of them.

What this means to me, though, is going forward, I am going to be trying to apply some rules of thumb in determining whether or not I use such services. One such rule is going to be: how easy is it to retrieve or backup the material that I have stored there? If it easy, I am going to be more likely to use it. My second rule is going to be: how much of my rights do I give up in using the service? If the service provider is taking an aggressive or an expansive approach to my content, then I am less likely to use it.

It’s like due to the New Zealand Internet blackout protest against a new law there concerning copyright. You can find out more at this site: nzblackout.org.

Yes, you know you want one. Or more likely, all of them. And they are selling like hotcakes, it seem (for example, this is the Inbox Zero badge). Go to Nerd Merit Badges for more info.

It’s hard to know what to say about the blog, This is why you’re fat. It’s truly scary food. In fact, this…

…may not be the worst thing on the blog. When it comes to looking at it, it is similar to a car crash: even if you don’t want to see it, you also do want to see it.

(Found via Stephen Fry on twitter)

A very interesting web site that asks people to stand up and say, not “I am Spartacus”, but “I am a file sharer”.  Whether or not you agree with them, I think you will agree the approach is both new and ancient. Let’ see what happens.

Check out This is what a criminal looks like | filesharer.org