Rick 02 Mar 10 In 2000, my company was gearing up for an IPO so we hired marchFirst write up our business plan (wasn’t my idea). And they did it for the low, low price of $250,000! All they did was take our existing business plan and add in some boiler plate dotcom jargon. I still can’t believe they got away with that, and even worse, I can’t believe that companies like mine were brainwashed enough to think that was money well spent.

via marchFIRST – (37signals).

Genius! I am going to start a business plan writing business right away. I had no idea you could charge $250k.

If you find yourself absolutely unable to replace the cart, after your best effort, just ask me for help. I'm very good at putting them back. I'm kind of strong. I can push the whole row together tighter. I've practiced and I can often roll a cart into the back of the last cart in the corral from a distance of 50 feet. It's great sport, and if a cart sails wide on me, I just laugh at it while I chase it and put it back like it goes.

via Shopping Cart-iquette « sharbrough.net.

Yeffett: We must look at the qualifications of the candidate for security jobs. He must be educated. He must speak two languages. He must be trained for a long time, in classrooms. He must receive on-the-job training with a supervisor for weeks to make sure that the guy understands how to approach a passenger, how to convince him to cooperate with him, because the passenger is taking the flight and we are on the ground. The passengers have to understand that the security is doing it for their benefit. via How the Israelis do airport security – CNN.com.

This sounds exactly like TSA to me…

“We’ve got to figure out how to break the cycle of poverty, and the way we’re doing it now isn’t working,” said Hank M. Bounds, the Mississippi commissioner of higher education and, until recently, the state superintendent of schools. “An affluent 5-year-old has about the same vocabulary as an adult living in poverty.”

via Milestones on Minorities and Poverty in Southern Schools – NYTimes.com.

This just kills me. So horrible.

COMBO a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis (2 times loop) on Vimeo

via Peter

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ‘tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

I think this is one of Cummings’s most accessible poems, because he avoids some of his punctuation tricks that scare people. The concept is simple: The poem is a strangled jingoistic line delivered by a sweating politician following American deaths. What’s incredible about this poem, what made me spit beverage when I first realized it, is this: Despite having a very modern, unique feel to it, this poem is a perfect sonnet. Fourteen lines, very nearly iambic pentameter (though it’s broken, some passages here fit the form splendidly), and the lines all rhyme, yet it goes unnoticed because the poem works so well within its form. It even followers the slightly more obscure sonnet convention of having a “turn” on the ninth line: The first eight lines are merely regurgitated political lines mashed together into a poem, then on the ninth line the topic turns to the dead. The rhyme pattern mirrors this, by going from an ABAB pattern to an ABCBAC.

via Rory Marinich’s journal.

Not sure who did this originally, but I love it.

But sign-up free posting is also great for group sites. When you setup a group Posterous site, you add contributors by adding their email address in site settings. Those people can now email post@sitename.posterous.com with no account. We do see these people engage with Posterous in the long term with no account, especially users who aren’t tech savvy.

Using Posterous without an account isn’t just some gimmick we did with email, it’s something we believe in through and through. Registrations forms and other hurdles slow down adoption. We want to prove to you how valuable our service is before we ask you to sign up. That’s why we allow this flow not just through email, but through our Twitter posting API and even our iPhone application.

When generating ideas during brainstorm and sketching sessions it’s sometimes hard to inspire people to get started. A solid framework would help us get the stream of ideas coming. At Concept7 we often use a framework which is based on MBTI methodology.

Almost everything that makes graphic design work can be found in a set of laws and principles collectively known as the Gestalt principles of perception. There is no more powerful tool at a designer’s disposal than a comprehensive grasp of these principles. By the same token, those who don’t have a good grasp of them are lost when faced with design projects and often go “fishing” on design gallery sites, being relegated to cliché motifs and layouts. But clients deserve better than our vague understanding. If you haven’t already, resolve to learn the Gestalt principles of perception.