The Delicate Sound

For the past 15 odd years, my wife and I have diligently designed, created and posted holiday cards to our family and friends. It started the year we got married and has snowballed a bit since we had kids. Every year around September we started having conversations like this: Me: "Do you think we should start our card for this year?" She: "I told you that last week - you were going to start it..." Me: "Right. Do you have any idea what you want to do?" She: "YOU are the creative one - you had all these great ideas last week when we were out drinking..." You get the picture. I say holiday because we have a number of Jewish friends and a number that don't acknowledge religion or holidays. Making a non-denominational card was the thing to do. The first few years they were made by hand and posted by hand. That led to store-bought cards, followed by spreadsheets with Avery labels and ultimately to electronic cards designed online and the iTunes sto...

I created a box set of 1980s songs for my brother for Christmas a few years ago. It was broken up into themes: Cool Kids, American Rock, Soundtracks, Anthems, Synth Pop, Hair Bands etc. I had a lot of fun making it and even more enjoyment listening to it with him. The 1980s, for all it is maligned as a musical era, gave birth to a lot of things: the CD, the cassette single, the music video (this is debatable) as a commodity and visual marketing as a whole. Prior to 1979 (the year I consider the beginning of the 1980s musically), marketing and production were formulaic: go into the studio, make a record, release the record and tour in support of the record. If it failed, you went back in and made another - this time with a big name producer and spending months at a time. In the 1980s, musical technology came of age too: MIDI was formalized as a technology and it allowed for all sorts of amazing musical advances: songs could be sequenced, tempos could be set - for an entire song!?! Th...

In an effort to be fully compliant, I admitted several years ago that I was not an iPod owner and then when I got one, I gave full disclosure. Same goes for Facebook. I was not using it, resisting using, very happy with LinkedIn etc. Then I started working on Facebook applications and suddenly I needed to be on Facebook. For the articles - as it were. Long story short, I have been using it for a few months now and I am hooked. I have communicated with friends I haven't spoken to since high school and college. I went from a few friends to a lot of friends - and I mean friends. These are people I genuinely am friendly with. I have a distaste for people on LinkedIn (and probably Facebook too) that have hundreds and thousands of connections. Honestly - what do you do with all those people? I have almost 400 connections on LinkedIn and I think that is too many. How someone can have 4,000 is beyond me. The tools to find and contact people on LinkedIn just aren't there yet. maybe I ne...