Have A Good Weekend

I will be on call the next couple of days and may not take time to blog. After back-to-back business trips, a few piles of laundry call out for my attention as well. Oh, yeah, I have to work at a baseball game tonight and perform parental duties.

If you haven’t seen it yet, head on over to The Scholarly Kitchen for a 10 minute video on the power of time perspectives. The real-time drawing is cool on its own; the information presented raises the cool factor to ice!

What are you waiting for? Click the link already!

Image courtesy of PhotoXpress.

Poken Fun!

Faithful readers know that my daughter is majoring in Communication with a focus on public relations. Friday she went to a conference, and mid-morning texted me from the social media session:

We need pokens! Google it, and order!

Really, it takes much less than that to get me shopping.

Pokens take the place of business cards (click here for great video explanations). These electonic gizmos, when you click the hands together, will exchange all electronic contact information and maintain a timeline function as well. So if you are trying to remember someone you met at a meeting 2 weeks ago, you can scroll back to that date to pull up their information.

Another cool feature: the poken information is updated every time the person in question updates it. So if I change my email address, my poken contacts automatically get the new one!

Of course, choosing a poken must be the hardest part:

After much deliberation (accompanied by a fine Malbec blend from Chile), my offspring and I made our choices. She went with the dragon (It's hard tell if he's a good boy or bad boy. He's got the horns, but the smile, too.), while I purchased the pink alien (A recent addition to the Zoo's Area 54, we think she's a she), although it was a tough race with the green alien and voodoo pokens. 

They also sell less “cute” pokens:

In addition to serving their poken function, they act as flash drives with up to 2GB of storage. The colored versions are sleek and cool, although all are black with just the poken 4-fingered hand to give them away when capped. The plain one can be custom branded as well.

I may get one of these plainer devices for my more “professional” online persona. My snarky “personal” online self will be the pink alien for now.

So snap a poken on your lanyard. It makes adding online friends and acquaintances easy. If you see me and my alien, let’s do the “high four" to exchange data!

Winter Can Be Beautiful

This morning I awoke to an ominous announcement on the radio:

Warning: Freeze Fog

I was pleasantly surprised to back out of my garage into a true winter wonderland (ignoring the filthy piles of plowed snow that still line all of the streets and parking lots, of course). My father sent me this picture of his backyard and the protected stream behind it.

I got a closer shot of our crabapple tree with the camera built into my Blackberry.

Each branch is coated with ice. More delicate ice forms spikes along the branches, each resembling a stack of the snowflake nonpareils  sold to decorate baked goods. The effect inspires and requires no plowing. I suspect it will be gone by the afternoon.

I vote that we replace snow with freeze fog in upcoming winters.