A Good Beer Year?

Due to a number of factors: drought, increased corn production, increased demand – there’s a serious hops shortage going on. If you’re unfamiliar with hops, it’s overly-pronounced flavor in Imperial IPAs like Surly’s Furious, Bell’s HopSlam. The most approachable and comprehensive article I’ve found on the subject is from Chris Colby’s “The Bitter End: The …

I’m Covering Nat’l Conf. for MEdia Reform 2008

The 2008 National Conference for Media Reform will be held here in Minneapolis a weekend from now June 6-8. I’m excited to have a press pass to the conference. These 3 sessions that jumped out to me immediately: Minnesota Model: Countering Corporate Media (while I’m concerned we’ll be beating a dead horse, I can’t miss …

FailBox: The Broken State of Email Clients – Part 3

“Last week a friend send me an email, while I was traveling. So he got my ‘out of office reply’.”- Wolfgang Luenenbuerger Wolfgang goes on to describe how – in an age of instant messaging, mobile devices, and wifi – the ‘out of office’ reply is as anachronistic as the busy signal. Both signals assume …

FailBox: The Broken State of Email Clients – Part 2

I realized I had completely taken for granted the life-changing innovation that is near-infinite email storage when I received the following message Your mailbox has exceeded one or more size limits set by your administrator. Your mailbox size is 75286 KB. Mailbox size limits: You will receive a warning when your mailbox reaches 75000 KB. …

Failbox: The Broken State of Email Clients – Part 1

If you’re of a certain age, as I am, your first expose to email was probably in college or at work. Processing messages daily wasn’t difficult; the number of people that had access or reason to send you messages was low and messages arrived fairly infrequently. So quaint and last century. Today, I’m tracking 8 …

Planting Flying Meat Acorn Near Photoshop Elements Grave

Like most professional graphic designers, my career was measured in versions of Adobe Photoshop. v2.5: I decided I wanted to be a graphic designer. The dad of a high school classmate was one. I went to talk with him about it. He worked out of his basement home office with a view of the lake, …

Did Twitter Kill This Blog? No, Cullect Did.

No, despite my activity on Twitter, I don’t blame it for my barely bi-monthly postings here. And given Twitter’s uptime (ba-dum-bum) you shouldn’t either. There’s a far more guilty party; Cullect.com. Writing posts on Twitter is easy – have a passing thought, write it down. Done. Writing more than 140 characters is more time consuming. …