Archives for category: communication

We Regret the Error

January 5, 2009 //

The end of a year/start of a new year lends itself to reflection and soul-searching, often leading us to review the past year in order to attempt to change in the new year.

Before you end up being too hard on yourself for mistakes you made during 2008, take heart — at least you didn’t end up misspelling your own name. In this particular case, Regret the Error reports of a New Hampshire/Vermont newspaper that spelled its own name as “Valley Newss” on the front masthead of its July 21, 2008 edition.

Read the NPR interview for more egregious examples of errors from this past year, including Epic Organizational Failures.

Though this isn’t a typo, it certainly is a fail:

Categories communication, just grinning

Happiness is Contagious

December 26, 2008 //

While the idea of Becoming a Contagious Christian has always kind of offended my OCD-ish sensibilities, I was extremely interested to learn that, according to recent research, happiness really is catching.

According to researchers from Harvard and UC San Diego:

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories asian american, communication, community, faith, family, just grinning, Uncategorized

I Do Love Lists…

December 21, 2008 //

… but this is getting out of hand.

Check out this enormous, year-end meta-/mega-list from Time magazine, aptly titled Top 10 Everything of 2008. In case you were wondering, Time says there’s a difference between the Top 10 Quotes and Top 10 T-shirt Worthy Slogans.

If you have some time to meander through this list, you might find gems like this one: Aerial Duo Parachute Into Wrong Stadium or the oddly compelling video, Western Spaghetti. You can also learn a thing or two about nuking the fridge (hint: it’s not good).

I might just write in this video as my Top Ten of awesomeness for the year. Seriously, I dare you to watch it and not be totally psyched for working your lats:

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories communication, just grinning, video

Finally. Found. Out.

December 9, 2008 //

Lately, I’ve been noticing this bit of grammatical trickery floating around the internets, often in the following form:

Best. Day. Ever.

I often see it associated with gaming/comic/nerd culture. For example, a recent episode of Heroes used this particular phrase during a subtitled portion of Hiro’s dialogue, which was spoken in Japanese. In the same scene, Seth Green’s character utters the phrase out loud, with dramatic pauses in between each word (as the periods after each word would seem to dictate).

A couple of weeks ago I set out to figure out the origins of this particular phrasing. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories communication, hooray!, just grinning, postmodern

Let’s Go Idea Camping!

December 1, 2008 //

I’m so stoked for The Idea Camp, which will be from February 27-28, 2009 in Irvine, California! Charles Lee has been a catalyst for bringing together this unconference. From their site:

The Idea Camp is a FREE, open source hybrid conference designed to help people move from the realm of ideas to implementation.

We are gathering some of the most innovative and creative leaders from around the country (this means YOU!) to share ideas, intentionally network, and move collaboratively into idea-making. Whether your passion is church leadership, non-profit work, social entrepreneurialism, technology, media, creativity, culture making, church planting, spiritual formation, compassionate justice, etc., this is the conference for YOU.

The focus of this conference will be on the participants (yes, You!) and not on keynote speakers. We function under the belief that the crowd is always smarter and wiser than any one speaker. In fact, you are invited to create and refine some of the major components of the conference prior to the gathering itself via our web interface. You are welcome to suggest specific topics for our workshops (called Idea Sessions), leave comments, ask questions, share case scenarios for discussion, and even volunteer yourself to facilitate one of our Idea Sessions.

We desire the Idea Camp to be a conference for friends by friends.

In keeping with the trend of confessions around here, I didn’t really know what an unconference was until reading DJ Chuang’s helpful notes explaining the unconference concept (thanks, DJ!).

In related news, support Charles’ idea for how the Obama administration should change America at change.org! Charles has put forth the idea of a national campaign to build more shelters for the victims of human trafficking:

In light of the recent growth of awareness and practice of reporting human trafficking suspicion around the country (which has resulted in more rescues and arrests), I would like to see our government help fund a national media campaign to build more trafficking shelters around the United States. In addition, our government could also award some of our private, recognized service providers with funding for building and operating shelters for trafficking victims.

Categories church, communication, community, freebies, ministry