Chapter 42

I’m back from my perfect wedding weekend; thanks to any and all of our clients who waited patiently with their questions and needs while the last week or two of my life got hectic with preparation.  (And thanks too to the rest of WW, who did a great job running things in my absence.)  Although it was hard to leave Oz Farm, the site of our wedding, it’s nice to be back on the job.

One sad note during the weekend was the passing of Paul Newman; he died on September 26th, the day before our ceremony.  Although Oz Farm is off the grid and there’s no cell phone reception, the news spread slowly across the farm on Saturday.

Paul Newman was a great, admirable man in all sorts of ways, from his commitment to social justice to his lifelong and devoted marriage.  But he’s on White Whale’s radar because he was an alumni, frequent donor, and great friend to Kenyon College, whose site we redesigned earlier this year.  I was fortunate enough to be asked to design a homepage graphic to serve as a tribute, and it’s now live on the Kenyon homepage, along with a moving tribute page and a photo-by-photo description of the homepage graphic.   To create it, I paged through countless photos, which really gave me a sense of how long and how deeply Paul Newman has been a part of the American consciousness.  (The folks at Kenyon did the important work of securing all photo permissions, which I know was no picnic, given that since Paul’s passing copyrighted images have spread across the web without proper attribution.)

Tags: design, kenyon college, paul newman

To briefly digress from higher ed web development:

I’m getting married in a week.  (Thanks, I’m excited too!)  We have to get wedding insurance— something I’d never heard of— for our weekend-long wedding in the wilds of northern California.

Here is the list of exclusions in our policy:

Exclusions: Claims by Athletic Participants, War, Terrorism, Expected or Intended Injury, Sexual Abuse/Molestation, Asbestos, Nuclear Energy, Total Pollution, Fungi or Bacteria, Aircraft or Watercraft, Pyrotechnics, Employment Related Practices, Communicable Disease (Hepatitis, TSE, HIV, HTLV, or AIDS) Collapse of Temporary Structure, Lead Liability, Professional Liability, Use of Trampolines, Cheerleading Pyramids, Sale/Manufacture/Distribution of Athletic Equipment, Use of Saunas or Tanning Devices, Polo, Skin & Scuba Diving, Squash, Downhill Snow Skiing, Water Skiing, Whitewater Rafting, Bungee Jumping, Mountain Climbing, Rock Climbing, Motorsports, Rodeo or any Equestrian Related Sports, Waterslides, Ballooning, Parachute Jumping, Luge, Tobogganing, Gymnastics, All Motor Sports, Violation of Telephone Consumer Protection Act or CAN-SPAM Act.

How can we be expected to have any fun at all if we can’t play squash or violate the CAN-SPAM act?

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Tags: asbestos, cheerleading pyramids, collapse of temporary structures, pyrotechnics, trampolines, waterslides

A post on the NY Times Bits blog points out that there are only so many social networking services any one person can keep up with on any given day.  I know this is certainly true in my case.  I’m always talking to clients about the relative importance of Web 2.0 and social networking tools to their higher-education concerns, but the fact is that I can barely keep our own blog updated, let alone check in on my Facebook page or remember to post chatty musings to Twitter.

Who are these people who maintain accounts with Tumblr, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn, Mixxd, and CrowdVine— what do they do all day?  How do they get any work done?  

(OK, I made up Mixxd. But I think the others are real.)

Update: Tony from CrowdVine comments that CV’s network is transient— used primarily during conferences for attendees to let each other know which sessions are “hot.”  That’s a good point— it’s easy to understand how transient, explicitly function-oriented tools can be useful, and if CrowdVine’s efforts really are directed at serving temporary social networks like conferences, I wish them well.  It’s a good idea.

Tags: social networking, tech overload, web 2.0

Because we’re building a CMS, I am on the mailing lists of several CMS service providers, and quite often receive email from these companies.  Usually the messages I get are pretty marketing-heavy, kind of spammy, easily ignored.  But I just got this from Hobson’s:

I have heard from several past clients that Hobson’s doesn’t offer much in the way of customer service—  they seem to be a company that earns its money by buying up any higher-ed-related tool with market share and repackaging it as part of a “platform.”  Judging from this email—which, as you can see, showed up in my inbox with no content whatsoever, and a reply-to link to the mysterious “myvippage.net”— they put about as much thought and work into email marketing as they do into innovation and technology.

Tags: email, marketing, the dark side of the force