Learn something every day
My father gave me some great advice many moons ago. He said “son, never stop learning“.
As the years move on, I have slowly began to realize how important these few words are. To learn, is to keep your mind active, to keep your outlook on life fresh, and to prevent becoming a stale and dry like an old piece of pita bread left in the cupboard for a week (if you’ve ever seen my pantry you’ll understand the relevance of that comment).
Sometimes you get caught up in routines and occupations that are so process-driven or time intensive that opportunities to learn new things are placed out of arm’s reach. After all, you need at least a few minutes spare each day to learn something new, right?
Wrong! Learn something every day allows you to quickly absorb an interesting and valuable fact every day of the year, through it’s visual and entertaining layout, pictured below. And if you are absolutely smitten with any of the facts you learn, you can even buy a tshirt adorned with your newly learned fact!
So now you can follow the advice of a wise man, and learn something every day without interrupting your day job. Live long and prosper my friends!
Managing unrealistic client requests
Working in a digital agency provides constant challenges, particularly when dealing with client expectations. On occasion, one has to exercise extreme caution and develop a profound ability to bite their tongue , in order to maintain relationships while also trying to convey that a request may be unreasonable.
However, sometimes there is no option but to be blunt when responding to unreasonable client requests. Being a creative industry, being blunt can be also be a little bit of fun, as this hilarious example of an unreasonable client’s email interaction with a potential service provider illustrates.
Here’s a little snippet as a teaser:
You can read the rest of this email chain here (a word of warning, some of the language is as colorful as the slices of the pie charts).
Time Magazine’s 50 Best websites of 2009
Time has just released their top 50 websites of 2009.
When I first glanced at this list, I was immediately skeptical that the list was more of a “top 50 sites that the author of this article owes favors to”, as coming at number at #2 was a site I have never heard of before, California Coastline, with hugely popular sites such as Facebook nowhere to be seen within the top 30.
On closer inspection, after investigating sites such as the aforementioned California Coastline, I realised that the author has done a great job of thoughtfully collating a list that not only contains mainstream high-usage sites, but sites that represent great value to users.
California Coastline, for example, contains thousands of helicopter images of the Cali Coast, indexed through a searchable interface, as well as integrated with Google mapping technology. This site is like a private extension of Google Earth, the difference being the entire project is funded out of an individual’s own pocket, which is really great to see ( … and not only is it great to see that, but now I can spot all the best surf breaks in California thanks to this great aerial photography! ) . There are other sites likes this within the list too, sites that are the hard work of private individuals, rather than just a bunch of links to high profile, high budget corporate-backed websites that are over-hyped and offer little long-term value.
My only criticism, is that the Best 50 Website of 2009 list is quite U.S. centric, which I assume is because Time Magazine is of course a publication hailing from the Unite States.
To give you a bit of a taste, here is the top 10 websites of 2009, as nominated by Time Magazine.
- 1. Flickr
- 2. California Coastline
- 3. Delicious
- 4. Metafilter
- 5. popurls
- 6. Twitter
- 7. Skype
- 8. Boing Boing
- 9. Academic Earth
- 10. OpenTable
You view the rest of the top 50 here.
