Map of the path not taken

I came of age before Gary Gygax's (PBUH) Dungeons & Dragons fell onto my radar. And I escaped the fad unscathed.

My first and only experience with D&D was in intelligence school (I needed remedial, you see) in the Navy, where the Dungeon Master and I rapidly came to collision ("Man, I don't need no 10-sided dice to decide if the fuckin' dwarf dies, just kill him"). I was soon booted from the Dungeon, but the DM was soon booted from the Navy on morals charges, so I call it even.

Since then, I have been utterly sure that I was never infected by the D&D virus. But I can see from the map below... and I have traveled a good bit of it... that I must be carrying antibodies.

Technorati : dungeons and dragons, geekdom, maps

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 10:39pm in Career management, Cartography, History, Humor | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

What women want

What do women want in the workplace?

This 1943 Guide to Hiring Women suggests 11 ways to get the most out of that girl at the office, including:

7. Whenever possible, let the inside employee change from one job to another at some time during the day. Women are inclined to be less nervous and happier with change.
11. Get enough size variety in operator's uniforms so that each girl can have a proper fit. This point can't be stressed too much in keeping women happy.

Technorati : 1943, hiring women, politically incorrect, what women want, women in the workplace

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:31pm in History, Humor | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

Visions and voices from the past: Paleo-future

Ever lose yourself in a 30-year old copy of Newsweek or Life -- in the issue where they tell (told) you what life would be like in 2007?

You can do that every day at the Paleo-Future Blog ("A look into the future that never was").

Here's one "house of the future" -- summer all year 'round, thanks to the wonders of electricity.

Via The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society.

    Technorati : athanasius kircher society, paleo-future

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 12:16am in Bizarre & Amusing, History | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0)

Robert French buffaloes Steve Rubel, who is really Kaiser Wilhelm II

I think, after watching too many late night Texas-hold 'em tournaments on cable (God knows I watch them, but since we ban Texas in our poker group, it's just entertainment), Robert French couldn't resist the gambling metaphor. He calls Steve Rubel's milquetoast column in AdAge a "buffalo bet."

I can get with that... I often find myself using metaphors from what I am reading or watching.

This week, I am reading Castles of Steel, Robert K. Massie's history of the war at sea during the Great War. My metaphor for Steve is Kaiser Wilhelm II. Wilhelm (Steve) built an extraordinary fleet (blog cred with other PR bloggers) before the war in 1914 (before 2005)... but when a pretty good British fleet arrived at his doorstep  (when lots of other credible PR bloggers arrived in force), Wilhelm locked his mighty fleet in harbor (Steve stopped posting anything remotely thoughtful, stopped commenting on his own blog or those of others, and largely retired to "oh, isn't this cool?" link lists) and refused to play.

The Kaiser's unwillingness to come out and play (send him the Cluetrain!) sent the First Lord of the British Admiralty Winston Churchill (Jeremy Pepper?) around the bend. The result... Churchill (Pepper) went to the trenches (Shandwick) while the Kaiser (Steve) went to the relatively anonymous comfort of exile (Edelman).

Technorati Tags: Buffalo Bet, Jeremy Pepper, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Robert French, Robert K. Massie, Steve Rubel, Tag 22

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 11:39pm in Communication, History | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (7)

Playfair to Powerpoint... doesn't look like progress

One of the seminars I hold for clients is entitled Make Data Come Alive. It's a afternoon's course in which participants learn the basics of turning reams of data into well-designed charts that instantly convey an unmistakable message.

For many of the participants, who are used to creating graphs by highlighting some spreadsheet numbers and pressing "make graph", it can be an eye-opener. A typical page of corporate accounting data can contain several thousand possible charts. So 99% of the job is identifying the critical data and identifying the underlying message.

It's never easy.

One of the first thinkers to make data come alive was William Playfair (1759-1823), the inventor of statistical graphs, who realized graphmaking was little more than cartography applied to numbers. This insight allowed him to invent the pie chart.

American Scientist brings us the welcome news that Playfair's two main works, The Commercial and Political Atlas and The Statistical Breviary have been republished in one volume for the heart-stoppingly low price of $39.99 ($32.31 from Amazon). Rosalind Reid reviews the reprint and Playfair's life in her book review at the American Scientist.

Here's an excerpt:

"Playfair's most intriguing arguments are those in which he  anticipates the  findings of experiments on cognition and perception  that were not carried out until two centuries later. Graphical  representation, he argues in the Breviary, can  "facilitate the attainment of information, and aid the memory in retaining it."

He had already proved the point in the 1786 edition of the Atlas, with the first published bar chart, which     illuminated Scotland's 1781 trade surplus with America and its     simultaneous trade deficit with Russia. It conveys its message to the eye in an instant. Like Playfair's other graphs, it has grid  lines, axis labels and hatching, designed with a thoughtfulness that makers of graphing software would do well to emulate."

Reid notes Playfair might have been more successful in getting his thinking to catch on had he not been so playful with other people's money. He died penniless in Covent Garden.

Technorati Tags: data, graphs, charts, William Playfair, cartography, communication through images, American Scientist

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 04:53pm in Cartography, Communication Skills, History | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0)

10 Internet years is 70 dog years, or something like that

I am cleaning up my office this month (and, before you open your mouth, just remember Ike didn't plan D-Day over lunch)  and just ran across some clippings from the spring of 1995.

One, titled "Jobs of the Future on the Internet", states:

"If you want to be sure of work in the information age, you should be a multimedia designer or an interactive advertising manager"

And it goes on to note another other hot job:

"The 'Internet surfer'... has the skill to navigate on the Internet, package information, and sell it to online subscribers...

The other clipping is an editorial by Carsten Graff, a local New Age management consultant. In a full-page rant called "What can Mrs. Hansen do with the Internet", Graff calls the Internet "the most overhyped technology to make its way into the information age":

"Journalists write often of Internet users 'surfing in cyberspace'. Which really means they are just writing documents to each other.  I have been a windsurfer for many years, and I don't like my sport compared with something a computer user can sit and do in front of a screen."

"... [Internet] is the most incomprehensible and time-demanding thing since the baby was discovered... Mrs. Hansen won't be a loser if she's not on the Internet. The only ones that lose if she doesn't go along are the phone companies."

Yowsa. Well, that was 70 dog years ago.

Sources: Berlingske Tidende, April 25, 1995, and Børsen, April 25, 1995.

Hat tip to Flemming Wisler, 10 years late.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 02:46pm in History | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (4)

Happy birthday to Desirable Roasted Coffee

Desirable Roasted Coffee is a year old! And I didn't even notice.

Some dates simply slip my mind. I can tell you the date I started my first company (September 17, 1990), but couldn't tell you on a bet my oldest friend's birthday (sometime in August).

So it doesn't surprise me that the first anniversary of Desirable Roasted Coffee's hard launch happened last month. Without me noticing.

The opening post (As good a reason as any), on October 7, 2004, was about a subject that is both old news and, tediously, still news.

Why is this not surprising? A 15-month study by the Bush Administration confirms what most people have come to expect, even while the top of the Administration tries to pretend otherwise: Iraq had no WMD.

The first communication post came five days later (Can Corporate Blogs be Conversations?), the complete text of which was:

Friend Shel Holtz looks at some basic philosophy underlying what I call "bandwagon blogging" -- that is, the rush by CEO's to have their very own blog.

That's probably the shortest Desirable Roasted Coffee post ever, and it's all been uphill or downhill since then, depending on your view.

Along the way, there have been a dozen or so posts I suspect I should have watered down. I can think of a dozen or so that I should have made, or should have fired up. But comments, which outnumber posts considerably, keep me pretty straight.

There's a bunch of people I wouldn't have "met" had I not started writing Desirable Roasted Coffee: Lee Hopkins, Jeremy Pepper, David Parmet, Josh Hallet, Trina-Maria Kristensen and Robert French come instantly to mind. And even though I have known Shel and Neville  and Gunnar, and Eric for years, I certainly "talk" with them more regularly because of the  blog. (At the very least, I can assure myself that, if I don't give my readers value directly, I give it to them by linking to some pretty ace communication thinkers).

So... that's it! No cake, ice cream, pappadams or champagne -- but you'll get over it. And now I'll dive into year 2.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 01:20pm in Bizarre & Unexpected, Desirable Roasted Coffee, History | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (7) | TrackBack (0)

Blogging Katrina

Most Southerners share an affinity for New Orleans: Depending on your point-of-view and your religious bent, she's either a deliciously wicked sister-in-law or the wicked aunt who should have been put in rehab ages ago.

So I watched CNN and the Beeb much of today, and kept checking in on the Times-Picayune website, esp their bunker blog. What I couldn't find were many on-the-spot bloggers (no surprise there; I sure has hell wouldn't have been blogging).

This site lists some who are.

Update: the Wikipedia article.

Update: A map

Update: A blog from the front lines.

Update: IABC's leadership gets out safely.

Update:  Tom Keefe reports communicator looking to go back in to help with crisis comms.

Update: a Slidell Blog.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:27pm in Blogging, Current Affairs, History, South | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2) | TrackBack (0)

Undaunted Courage: the Satellite View

One of the great histories of the past few years is Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage, the story of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. With great verve, yet attention to detail, Ambrose gives us a story that, every time I turned a page, made me ask, "WTF were they thinking? Not a chance in hell you'd have gotten me to go." But they went.

So imagine my delight when I discovered this gem of a map showing the Lewis & Clark route through satellite imagery.

Via The Map Room: Lewis and Clark: A Satellite View.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 03:00pm in Cartography, History | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

Mark Felt, American Hero

Deep Throat -- the critical source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they peered into the morass of Watergate in 1972-74 -- turns out to be Mark Felt, number 2 at the FBI during that time.

I'm glad it's him. I'm glad the second ranking cop in the country looked at reality, realized the justice system was not working -- not at all -- in Watergate, and went to the press.

Nixon-apologists and convicted felons Charles Colson, G. Gordon Liddy, and Jeb Stuart Magruder, all of whom went, deservedly, and not long enough for my money, to prison for Watergate, and Pat Buchanan, who escaped any blot on his record through divine intervention (how else to account for it?), all weigh in on the 91-year old Felt.

Shame.

I believe in the rule of law, and I trust the legal system most of the time. But a White House gone amok makes its own rules, believes itself above the law. Above opinion.

Sometimes it takes a whistleblower to take folks down a peg.

Mark Felt: American Hero

Update: I added Gordon Liddy, and a link to Media Matters.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 08:24pm in History, Law, Politics | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (4) | TrackBack (0)

B. L. Ochman's Parallel Universe: What to Make of It?

I don't have a clue what to make of whatsnextenmesh.com, but I sure like the idea. B. L. Ochman, who is generally ahead of many of us, rolls back her clock to blog from 1911 New York.

It's a promo for a new book about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 -- one of the worst sweatshop tragedies in US history.

B. L. says hers is part of an 11-blog group in the project... but I can't find out where the other 10 are...

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 08:11pm in Bloggers, History, Writing I Enjoy | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

What a Pity He Missed Blogging

I've said it elsewhere, but it's a crying shame that Samuel Pepys didn't live long enough to blog.

"Sunday 15 December 1661 (Lord’s day). To church in the morning... Sir W. Pen dined with me and we were merry. Again to church...

"I have been troubled this day about a difference between my wife and her maid Nell, who is a simple slut, and I am afeard we shall find her a cross-grained wench.

"I am now full of study about writing something about our making of strangers strike to us at sea; and so am altogether reading Selden and Grotius, and such other authors to that purpose."

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 01:42am in Bloggers, Citizen Journalism, History, Writing I Enjoy | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)