Lessons from McDonald's Golden Arches I'm not a huge fan of the quality of McDonald's food. However, the golden arches have a tractor beam that pulls me in with a seemingly irresistible force. Part of why I still like McDonald's is the nostalgia. I now prefer burgers from Fudruckers or Five Guys, but I noticed my son Tyler started recognizing company brands wherever we went. I'm loyal to Safeway because I work for the company....
My all-time favorite band was one my parents forbade me from purchasing because of their controversial name. This was back in the cassette tape era, long before digital music formats like MP3s or streaming services existed. Since I couldn't buy their music directly, I found a workaround — I would visit my best friend Rob who lived across the street and listen to the band at his house instead. Looking back, I felt like such...
Today we went to the U.S. National Whitewater Center in Charlotte. From their website the Whitewater Center is "home to the world’s largest man-made recirculating river, the USNWC provides exciting rafting adventures on Class II, III, and IV whitewater rapids. All raft trips include a professional guide, a short trip talk on the fundamentals of rafting and essential safety information and all the technical equipment needed." OK so that all sounds fine and dandy. When...
From a Finnish student's hobby project to the backbone of the digital world—how Linux transformed computing and sparked a movement The Linux penguin mascot, Tux, has become an iconic symbol of the open source movement Twenty years ago, a Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds made a seemingly modest announcement on an internet newsgroup: he was working on a free operating system as a hobby project. Little did he know that his creation would...
Reconsidering an Old Adage Through Alice in Wonderland I'm a CMMA member and was recently asked to provide a written response to the question below. Because I share practically everything, below is my response. Hope you enjoy it. My Answer As long as I can remember I haven't liked playing by other people's rules, so if I may, I would answer this question by only choosing one which is doing communication projects well (good). I...
Humans as Routers The Future of Free Communication Two very important quotes in this article which may have forever changed the way I think about the Internet and communications. To give you context in case you don't know, routers control Internet traffic throughout the world (which is why Cisco became a dot com darling). Because we are still dependent on routers, dictators can kill communication in their country by telling ISPs to shut down. Give...