Almostgotit.com

I like good quotes as much as the next person. Really.

So when my sister sent around this “great quotes from great leaders” video from Simpletruths.com, I watched it happily enough. It’s only three minutes long, and it does have some really good quotes. It also has some really sweet piano music.

All that’s missing are the smiling receptionists, the strong scent of chemicals, and the dentist drills whining in the background.

“The Beautiful Gift Book” from SimpleTruths.com, which contains all these quotes and many MORE, costs $19.95. Plus you get a free DVD.

Motivational quotes and sayings — particularly the ones made into the glossy, black-framed motivational posters that line the walls of our schools and work places, are a multi-million dollar industry. Or so I’m told by Despair, Inc., whose mission is to Fight Back.

Deeply concerned that “while promising to stimulate “Hope”, “Success” and “Teamwork”, instead these tools of coercion and intimidation have inspired only grief, anger and nausea,” Despair, Inc. seeks to redress these irrationally exuberant products with some profiteering, er, amelioration of their own.

At Despair.com, one can purchase high-quality DEmotivational posters, despairwear, pessimist mugs, and other thoughtful corporate gifts. Featured prominently is bestselling book,The Art of Demotivation, praised by Financial Times Management Columnist Lucy Kellaway as “the most daring, funny and subversive management book ever written”. There are also several downloadable management training podcasts on the site too which shouldn’t be missed.

Hint: if you like/understand “The Office,” either in its American or British versions, you will like these, too.

In fact, the webmaster recommends that if your life is desperately without purpose or hope, you ought to make Despair.com into your homepage.

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Attainable Affirmations for the almost-employed
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Don’t bail. The best of the gold’s at the bottom of barrels of crap. - Randy Pausch 

Randy Pausch is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.  Last September, he was invited to take part in a CMU lecture series called “The Last Lecture,” in which top academics are asked to give a lecture as if it were hypothetically their last chance ever to share their best wisdom with the world.

For the amazing 47-yr old Dr. Pausch, who has terminal cancer, it wasn’t hypothetical.  

At left: Randy Pausch and family

• 10-minute video: reprise (on Oprah)
•  Video of original lecture (75  min) and more about Randy

Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.
- Faith Whittlesey

Many thanks to WorkingGirl for the heads up after my previous post; I found the NPR link in which Robert Olen Butler talks about his now-infamous e-mail. Wow.

Butler insists that his initial email about the break-up, as well as all of his subsequent public blather, is meant to prevent people from saying terrible things about his wife — things which he details, of course. Butler also claims to be deeply grieved that Dewberry, “like many women,” (all we inept little wives, in other words) “had trouble living in the shadow of a stronger man.”

What a liar. The truth is that he’s mad as hell at her. He’s also overwhelmed with embarrassment. Ego-man Butler publically lost his trophy wife to a much-more-famous man. Moreover, she was a wife who had been a trial and a challenge to him since day #1, not because of her inadequacies but because of her irrepressible accomplishments: her very competency. By getting away from him in the end, she finally proved to be a challenge he could neither master nor meet. Pathetically, he is now trying to snatch the attention and victory back for himself by attempting to make Elizabeth Dewberry look like a freak; alas, he only succeeds in making himself look like one.

It’s so new it’s not even in Wikipedia, and baby that’s SAYIN’ something!

Invented (according to Web Worker Daily) by software developer Brad Neuberg, Coworking is “a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents.”  Mostly young, mostly hip independent workers are trading their pj’s and isolation for shared work space where they can network, meet clients, and enjoy some of the time- and space-structuring benefits of “going to an office.”

Click here to watch Brad and some of his colleagues in a “learn more about it” video.

While it’s not an entirely new concept, the current “coworker movement” among the growing number of (mostly web) workers is clearly taking advantage of the social connectivity provided by the internet to collaborate in forming a number of “coworking” spaces  already available (or currently being formed) throughout the US. 

It’s a really neat idea.  What I want to know is whether they accept anyone older than 25, and if you can still get a mocha?

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Related posts:
We are ALWAYS networking
Trying it on for size: permanent 9-5 expat?

I’ve long since learned that when my stomach hurts a certain way, I need to pay attention.  This was especially useful when it came to evaluating boyfriends in the old days (my wise old Yoda stomach always knew when it was time to dump them!)  

And now my stomach has hurt a couple of times in relation to this blog. 

Of greatest concern to my stomach have been a few things like intellectual property, copyright, fair use, and the intersection of these things and blogging.  I think most of us know that quotes should be properly attributed whenever possible.  And the documentation for Wordpress (my blogging host) basically okays the resyndication-by-linkage of YouTube videos (as Wordpress basically handles it by linking to the YouTube videos without actually hosting them)  In other words, if YouTube pulls them (as YouTube will, if complaint is lodged) the video will cease to function in a Wordpress blog, as well. 

There are also many things on the ‘net for which authorship can no longer be determined.  The resume bloopers I posted, for instance, were collected from a number of sites, all without attribution and all appearing on more than one site, as well, thus making it impossible even to identify the original online source.   

Jokes are even older than the internet, of course, and even harder to give sources for:  really, there are only three basic jokes in the world, I think, and all the rest are derived from these three!  (I must confess with some pride, however, that the Marilee Jones joke was almost entirely my own creation…)

Probably the real sticky problem is images, or pictures.  Photographers and artists own their intellectual and creative  property, and may even depend upon their work to make a living,  just as much as writers do.  Of course.  But many (most?) bloggers post other people’s photos and artwork, while very few (if any) of us are paying for them.

I think there are several ways to look at this problem.  “Fair Use” can be a tricky concept, but a great deal depends on whether one is financially profiting from someone else’s work, or using it for educational/instructive purposes, instead.   Blogging is commonly viewed as a kind of news reporting or commentary, and therefore would often seem to pass the 4-factor test for legal fair use

However.  While using properly-attributed images might seem analogous to including properly-attributed quotations, one rarely uses only part of an image.  Therefore, using someone else’s picture is probably more akin to using someone else’s entire poem.  And when is (or isn’t) this an okay thing to do? 

Another way of using images, which I’ve applied to some (non-profit) websites I’ve managed, is to make them into links to (and therefore, promotions of) the source site.  Is that legitimate?   (Then, of course, stealing bandwidth is  yet another issue, and few perps even know they’re doing it.  This is when you link directly to an image online, rather than downloading it first and then loading it to your own host.)

Because of the need to balance the surge of interest in the “open source” democratization of the internet with the need to protect the livelihoods and right of individual artists and authors, an increasing number of images are now made available through creative commons licensing, an alternative to full copyright protection with the goal of encouraging users to “Share, reuse, and remix — legally.”  

Anyhoo, for the sake of my stomach, I am going to go back through my posts and clean up a little. 

But I would also very much welcome further feedback and suggestions from my readers.   How does plagarism and copyright protection REALLY work in the blogosphere, and is it enough?  Is attribution enough?  Is it best to leave other’s work, especially images, out entirely?  (one can always LINK to them instead)

Please weigh in!  My stomach thanks you in advance.

Sometimes when you ask for poetry, you get poetry.   But a lot of people are very bad at following directions.  I find this a great relief, actually:  It’s good to know I’m not alone!

From Gina (before getting to know this woman, one ought to invest in a super-sized package of Depends..) (& that’s probably a joke that only a mother would understand…)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhcA4Ry65FU]

From my dearest Susie:

If you’ve read the Give a Mouse a Cookie series, you will think  this is familiar…

IF YOU GIVE A MOM A MUFFIN
If you give a Mom a muffin,
She’ll want a strong cup of coffee to go with it.
She’ll make herself some.
Her three year old will spill the coffee.
She’ll wipe it up.
Wiping the floor, she’ll find dirty socks.
She’ll remember she has to do laundry.
When she puts the laundry in the washer, she’ll trip
over boots and
bump
into the box of Goodwill items.
Bumping into the Goodwill items will remind her she
has to get these
boxes
in the car and out of her basement.
When she puts the boxes in the car, she’ll find a bag
of groceries and
this
will remind her she has to cook dinner.
She will get out the chicken defrosting in the fridge.
She’ll look for her cookbook (101 Things To Do With
Chicken).
The cookbook will be sitting under a pile of mail.
She will see the Netflix movie she’s meant to mail and
the preschool
bill,
which is due tomorrow.
She will look for her checkbook.
The checkbook will be in her purse that is being
dumped out by her one
year
old.
She’ll smell something funny.
She’ll change the baby’s diaper.

As she finishes up, she’ll realize she brought the
hand sanitizer down
to
the kitchen.
While she is throwing away the diaper and searching
for the hand
sanitizer,
the phone will ring.
Her three year old will answer and hang up.
She’ll remember she wants to phone a friend not for
coffee but a very
strong drink.
Thinking of drinking will remind her that she was
going to have a
cup of coffee in order to stay awake for the rest of
the day.
And chances are…

If she finds her cup of coffee (which she has to
reheat by now),

Her kids will have eaten the muffin that went with it.

From Mindy, a woman always full of surprises:

So, we had this great 10 year old cat named Jack who just recently died.  Jack was a great cat and the kids would carry him around and sit on him and nothing ever bothered him.  He used to hang out and nap all day long on this mat in our bathroom.

Well, we have 3 kids and at the time of this story they were 4 years old, 3 years old and 1 year old.  The middle one is Eli.  Eli really loves chapstick.  LOVES IT.  He kept asking to use my chapstick and then losing it.  So finally one day I showed him where in the bathroom I keep my chapstick and how he could use it whenever he wanted to but he needed to put it right back in the drawer when he was done.

Last year on Mother’s Day, we were having the typical rush around and try to get ready for Church with everyone crying and carrying on.  My two boys are fighting over the toy in the cereal box.  I am trying to nurse my little one at the same time I am putting on my make-up.  Everything is a mess and everyone has long forgotten that this is a wonderful day to honor me and the amazing job that is motherhood.

We finally have the older one and the baby loaded in the car and I am looking for Eli.  I have searched everywhere and I finally round the corner to go into the bathroom.  And there was Eli.  He was applying my chapstick very carefully to Jack’s . . . rear end.  Eli looked right into my eyes and said “chapped.”  Now if you have a cat, you know that he is right–their little butts do look pretty chapped.

And, frankly, Jack didn’t seem to mind.

And the only question to really ask at that point was whether  it was  the FIRST time Eli had done that to the cat’s behind or the hundredth.

And THAT is my favorite Mother’s Day moment ever because it reminds us that no matter how hard we try to civilize these glorious little creatures, there will always be that day when you realize they’ve been using your chapstick on the cat’s butt.