slamboard

This is great software marketing, I think.

FF3 is coming out today and Mozilla has decided to try for a World record. As I write this, 1,540,366 people has ‘pledged’ to download.

SpreadFireFox.com has a dynamic map showing the numbers for each country. The numbers in Iraq are surprisingly small. I wonder if military personnel are prohibited from downloading new browsers.

I have actually taken a course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I chose my title based on my experience. People who are learning English as adults generally love idioms. This post is mostly a shout out to a school with a very cool advertising campaign. I first saw this video on something called The Pop Culture Translator. This thing is a promotional tool for the Canadian College of English Language.

Tom Cruise was back on an Oprah set. The audience of the taped interview has been sworn to secrecy. I suspect that some of them will anonymously blog about it before the show airs.

Tom is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the movie in which he played a minor living of the avails of (heterosexual) prostitution and occasionally dancing in tighty-whiteys.

The music industry has changed a lot as the information age has come to fruition. 25 years ago, this Florida band would not be have music available to everybody on the planet free of charge on Myspace. 25 years ago, you probably would not hear about a band like Megaphone outside of their local market. I say ‘probably’ because there was always that faint hope of getting a major record deal and cashing in/selling out. The silver lining in today’s music industry is the death of the power ballad. Band’s like Megaphone are not being pressured by suits to record a sappy song that makes them feel like cutting off their own air supply. Rock on, dudes.

You can, at your own discretion, buy Megaphone music online.

I have ratcheted down my blogging frequency quite a bit as other aspects of my life and work demand more of my time and energy. I was surprised to see that my blog still ranks quite highly for the search term ‘Kimkins‘ after I have been mostly out of the loop for months.

I guess Google algorithms don’t discount you for being out of the loop.

I am considering outsourcing some of my blogs to my children for the summer, but I will probably hold on to this one because of its relative seriousness. Are there any other bloggers out there who are trying to get their kids into blogging? I have a vague memory of the Family Circus guy getting his kid to draw his daily comic. I don’t know if he really did that or if it was just a creative device design to conceal the fact that he had the shakes.

Seafood like Gulf oysters are a great way to make a low carb diet interesting. Six raw oysters add up to about 57 calories. They contain 5.9 grams of protein, 2.1 grams of fat and 3.3 grams of carbohydrate. They are also an excellent source of Zinc (76mcg), as well as Vitamin B12 (16.3mcg).

So what is stopping us from enjoying these slippery dudes on a regular basis? Well, some of us may be in the at risk groups for exposure to the food borne bacteria that is commonly in oysters. The bacteria that we are talking about is called Vibrio vulnificus and it does not make healthy people sick. However, people who suffer from conditions such as liver disease (from hepatitis, cirrhosis, alcoholism, or cancer), iron overload disease (hemochromatosis), diabetes, cancer (including lymphoma, leukemia, Hodgkin’s disease), stomach disorders or any condition that results in a weakened immune system are at risk. Go to BeOysterAware.com for more details.

If you want to minimize the risk, you have options. The easiest thing is to opt for fully cooking your oysters. If you prefer the raw experience, you can buy oysters that have been processed in such a way as to reduce the bacteria to non detectable levels. The industry has developed a few ways of doing this. Individual quick freezing works and so does a heating and cooling pasteurization method. They can also use a heat and pressure pasteurization method. I have to assume that there is a detectable difference in taste. Roughly 10% of the oysters sold in the USA are subjected to either individual quick-freezing (IQF), low heat pasteurization or heat-cool pasteurization (HCP), or high-hydrostatic pressure (HPP). I have purchased IQF seafood before and I was satisfied with the product.

I used to work for a Fair Trade Coffee company. I think labeling is vitally important to that business because they had to effectively differentiate the product from all the conventional coffee on the shelf. Since part of the branding was environmental responsibility, packaging decisions had to preclude any of the wasteful, gimmicky stuff. When I worked there, they were opting for unlabeled bags from a large domestic manufacturer. They then had a local printer mass produce self adhesive labels in huge quantity and they contracted a workshop that employs mentally disabled people to put labels on bags on a weekly as needed basis.

Labelworldusa.com can make your Wine Label or other label in large quantity. If it makes more sense for you to print your own, they have solutions of various capacities for that as well. They have design services and they know about branding.

I like the idea of insert labels made with FDA approved food safe inks. They allow for more flexibility with your food packaging decisions.

The seven figure sales at Kimkins.com were due in no small part to the favorable coverage in Woman’s World Magazine. This publication has huge circulation, and the print versions will often sit in waiting rooms and salons enjoying months or years of repeated perusal. People seeking to expose the Kimkins fraud did not get very far in trying to convince Woman’s World to make any kind of reversal or apology. We personally received no answers to our questions last year and instead got a cease and desist order. In response to the letter, I made changes to the cover image that I was using to make it arguably transformative. There was no follow up from the magazine. I didn’t send any further correspondence to them. Many, many interested people did.

After a long wait, the magazine has finally apologized in detail, on their website. A print apology is also forthcoming. I thank them for it.

There are several third parties who are standing up and condemning the actions taken by Anonymous against scientology. Many of them point to the fact that they are giving scientologists the perfect opportunity to claim that they are experiencing religious persecution. I agree with this argument, and I would like to point out that many countries do not recognize scientology’s claim to be a religion, choosing instead to view scientology as a business enterprise.

In some respects, scientology is very much a multi-level marketing scheme. I was hesitant in writing that because I don’t want to give MLMs a bad name.