slamboard

Why isn’t this woman a celebrity? She has such a great personality. Her rant covers a number of topics to which overweight woman can relate.

Joy Nash makes one argument that really fits well with my business and marketing focus. She thinks that woman that are ‘plus-sized’ should boycott boutiques that do not carry good looking clothes in their size. I like her attitude about living an active, healthy lifestyle in which your weight is not being used as an excuse for not living. Her YouTube video has over 11,000 comments. I have not looked at them carefully, but I suspect that there are some mean ones, some cheerleading ones and probably a few that make reasonable arguments against some of what she says. Obesity is a condition that puts people at a greater risk for several adverse health conditions.

I write several blogs. The degree to which I insert my personality and my identity into these blogs varies.

In this blog, I am faceless but not nameless. If readers are interested in my face for some reason, they can go here. I participate with a dozen or more other bloggers in a meme where we publish a picture that we each take of ourselves every Sunday.

With Slamboard, I try to stick to topics that are at least tangentially related to business and technology. That’s pretty easy, everything tends to be about business in some way, shape or form.

First of all, thank you to everyone who voting for my Visa Gift Card design. Secondly, I have to apologize for wasting your time. I read over the rules for eligibility for this contest and it turns out that I do not qualify because I am not a resident of the United States.

I encourage any US residents reading this to try an entry of their own. The contest is very easy to enter. Just be sure to read the guidelines carefully.

Famundo provides free online calenders to families and organizations. The service is really more than just a calender.

I like the marketing strategy that this company is using. The free version is completely functional and it may well be all you would ever need. The version that you can purchase is basically the same thing except without ads and with some more space and a few little perks.

I am not going to explain the product at length because they have a great demo presented by the CEO of Famundo.

If you have a big, busy family, Famundo may be just the thing to make your life easier. The problem that I have with many scheduling tools is that I forget to look at them often enough. If you were to make use of all the functions of Famundo and you made it a fun and interactive place for your family or organization, you wouldn’t have that problem. Actually, the best strategy might be to designate your Famundo page as your browser homepage. Each member of your family can be given specific permissions with regard to editing the family calender. You don’t want your 11 year old to have the ability to delete dentist appointments, do you?

I clearly remember when I first met a person who directly benefited for the discovery that many stomach ulcers are caused by a treatable bacteria. That discovery was worth a Nobel Prize.

Now there is a recent discovery that a common virus plays a role in obesity. This is by no means as cut and dried as the cure for stomach ulcers. It seems to me that developing a treatment that would eliminate this factor would only be a small benefit to an individual. It could be worthwhile because of the overall benefit to the health of the entire population. Early research showed that 30% of obese people test positive for the virus while only 11% of lean people have it.

I enjoyed the time that I spent working in the specialty coffee business and I try work my experiences of coffee into various posts on business and marketing. I was saddened to read that a man who is essentially the Godfather of Specialty Coffee has died at 87.

Alfred Peet came to San Francisco in the 50’s and got a job as an importer of coffee beans. He was initially disheartened at the lack of interest in quality that existed in the USA at that time. He had learned the trade from his father in the Netherlands and he was accustomed to small batch roasting of select high grown coffees. He eventually opened one of the first specialty coffee shops. It was located in Berkeley.

In 1971, Alfred gave advice, training and coffee to the founders of Starbucks. Peet’s is now a publicly traded company with 182 outlets. There are just over 13,000 Starbucks in the World.

I met many people in the specialty coffee industry that were interested in promoting the idea and the craft of good coffee and they didn’t keep many secrets. When I was a roaster, my company produced a number of custom blends for nice restaurants. I got to know a few manager/chef types who liked to have a hand in everything. One of these chefs was quite perturbed to walk in and see the ‘recipe’ for his blend on my bulletin board. I’m not sure if he liked to think of it as a trade secret or if he liked to give the information out to his appreciative customers and he felt that my public display devalued it. I had it in plain sight because he had just changed his mind about the blend for the third time. If you want a great after dinner coffee, get a French roasted Bolivian coffee.

Sources: Blanca Torres for the Mercury, Wikipedia

The GotTrouble.com directory is a unique directory for legal services and other services like traffic schools and rehab. What makes it a great service and a great marketing model is that it is categorized by personal problems. There aren’t very many of us who go window shopping for lawyers because it is such a nice day and we just love looking at lawyers. We start a search for a legal service because we have a compelling problem.

On the lighter side, they are sponsoring a Sing Your Troubles Away Video Contest and the available prize money is a heart warming $5,000. I have embarrassed myself on YouTube for much less than $5,000.

Amy Winehouse is famous for a tongue in cheek song about Rehab. I hear she is in Rehab now. If that is how writing these problem songs works, I’m going to minimize my risk and choose a problem that I can handle better…

How about White Collar Crime? I have not actually committed one of these, but I read about them a lot. It seems like the tide has really turned in the way that judges view this problem.

Here’s a few lines that I have managed to think up on the fly…

“They say I did the crime,
So I should do the time,
But I’ve seen that State facility,
It has a horrible back nine.

I’ve got the blues,
I’ve got the white collar crime blues,
If I had used a shredder,
Things would’ve been much better,
I’ve got the blues.”

I may enter GotTrouble.com’s Video Promotion, but don’t worry too much about me as far as competition, I have a horrible singing voice. I wish you the best of luck, should you decide to enter this contest.

I did it to myself today. Anyone who cares to has already found their way from this blog to my irreverent, sometimes ludicrous personal blog. I have shielded my extended family from that side of me for the last couple of years. In the beginning, I just didn’t want my writing to be influenced by the recurring thought that my librarian aunt might be reading my blog.

I hope I can go on as per usual after letting my family know about my online writings. I do get to hide a little bit because I have the same first and last name as a somewhat celebrated playwright and comedian who lives in California. My mom does not have a computer.

Acquisitiveness is, simply put, the desire to own things.

It is the abundance of acquisitiveness in my children that has just now caused me to reflect on my relative lack of acquisitiveness.

I did have a number of musical instruments that I had accumulated over the years up until recently. I donated some of them to the music room of an alternative school before I moved away. The rest, save for one simple acoustic guitar, were included in the auction that featured the bulk of our possessions.

People tend to fall into a cycle of buying stuff to make themselves happy. Go to an estate auction the next chance you get and see what a lifetime accumulation of stuff looks like. Don’t bring any money or plastic. Just look around and see if you can spot all the happy.

Kiva is a website that provides very low interest loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries. We have been supporting this model since late last year. Our experience from the lender side is exactly what is portrayed in this very well produced video.

I highly recommend participating in Kiva . The website is featuring another great video in which a NYT journalist visits his own loan recipient at a bakery in Kabul. Here is a PDF of his article.