Bee’s Musings

Fun new website, lauched by Seth Godin, creater of Squidoo:

HeyMonkeyBrain!

I haven’t played around with it much, but its a quick and easy way to argue a point in a pseduo-blogosphere.

Holy crap…. this is seriously the coolest thing ever! If you’re on AIM, add the user name “SmarterChild” then say hello. SmarterChild an AIM bot that can do all sorts of interesting command line-y things, like look up the weather, store notes, trigger timed IM reminders, calculate and convert, and generally answer any kind of question.

Here’s just part of our conversation today.. its even got little pick-me-up’s if you’re feeling down.

Brandi: what is the weather like in loveland, colorado
SmarterChild: Current weather conditions for Loveland, CO:

Currently: 28 F
Condition: Overcast
Wind Chill: 20 F
Dewpoint: 27
Humidity: 91 %
Visibility: 2 mi
Wind: N/8 mph

Next time, just type weather loveland, co.

>>> I have a thesaurus. Type thesaurus (any word) and I’ll give you synonyms.
Brandi: i love you smarterchild
SmarterChild: OK, I love you too!

Since I’m a registered iPod owner, I get the fun, promotional emails from Apple. Despite the fact that they break every best practice that I’ve learned for designing promotional emails, (They’re all images - very attractive on the surface but impossible to read without an HTML-enabled email program… but more about that will appear on eMedia Daily) I enjoy looking at their campaigns.

The campaign for their new iMac left me wondering about the consiousness of Apple, however.

The primary tagline? “You can’t be too powerful or too thin.”

Granted, we’ve all heard that before. You can’t be too rich or too thin. You can’t be too anything or too thin. But the fact is, in our society that is driven by how thin you can be, there is such a thing as too thin. Take, for example, Nicole Ritchie, Mary-Kate Olsen, and Kate Bosworth… all good examples of how we are obsessed with weight. It goes beyond the celebrities as well. At my office we have a “biggest loser” competition, which is often populated by the people who need to lose weight the least. I’m not sure if its supposed to be motivational for someone with 25 pounds to lose to be egged on by someone who wants to lose 5.

Either way, you can be too thin. You can be so thin that your body shuts down. And while I accept that this is just a marketing ploy from Apple to promote the thinness of their recent iMac release, it pays to be socially conscious.

In case you’re interested - I set up a photo page. Lots of fun.

I’ve been noticing lately that I have entirely too many sites for which I am registered and newsletters to which I subscribe. I easily wake up to 5-7 new messages in one account, 3 in another… and two accounts which I’ve completely given up on because there’s just too much.
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