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June 23, 2005
Pining for Place
I'm off to the country to frolic in the woods, fight ticks and pee in the woods. It's the Swedish way. Then it's off to New York, then the Bay Area and back to home a month later. Now that I've moved, it's weird to go back. I pine for the place that I left but it doesn't exist anymore. Staying with friends is both trying and a treasure. A treasure because they are so warm and wondeful. Trying because I want to be able to say bye after dinner and go home, that place I used to live, in the drafty, falling down bungalow on a block between Happy Produce and the county library. But that's not home anymore.
Is that why some people travel so much? Looking for the home they've lost or misplaced? Maybe they can find it on the 7 River Art Road in Sweden. Click on no. 4 for a church-like artwork that anyone could worship.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:49 AM | Comments (1)
June 21, 2005
The Swedish National Day Is Not June 6th
On this day, the longest day of the year, the sun rose at 3:31 am. The sun will set at 10:09 pm. And if Swedes weren't as addicted to three-day holidays as Americans, we'd be picking wildflowers for our hair and eating herring and singing drinking songs today. Instead, we'll do it on Friday, the official Midsommar Afton. And on Saturday my small family of three will get on an airplane and arrive in the U.S. in plenty of time for the flag-waving parades of the fourth of July.
This year the Swedish government removed one holiday from the calendar (the day after Easter) and added a new holiday on June 6th. That's the day in 1523 that Gusav Vasa became king. In 1916 Swedes began celebrating it as national flag day but it wasn't a stores-closed, everybody-go-home kind of deal. But then in 2004 the Justice Department got the dumb idea to make it a red-letter day and the politicians went along with it and the general populace went, "what? Are you serious?" But by then it was too late.
As an immigrant rapper/poet on a TV program noted last night, Midsommar is the true national day of Sweden, when everybody thanks their good luck for being Swedish and when it rains, as it often does, nobody goes inside but stays outside to celebrate nature and their good fortune in being Swedish. Midsommar is *the* holiday in Sweden. Christmas is swell, easter is fine but Midsommar is what makes you Swedish. It's the most inclusive holiday imaginable.
Last year I watched, just before the rain started, a large group of people of all ages dance around a Midsommar pole at a big public celebration. Some folks were wearing folk costumes. Most had on jeans. There were a few youngish punks with outrageous hair and aggressive tatoos. And they were all happy (me too) and holding hands as one does to dance around the pole in time to the live music provided by a small but hardy group of players. Outside of the politicians who voted for a national day and the marginal group of Neo-nazis who assemble every year on June 6th to march for white rights, virtually nobody in this country gives a shit when Gustav Vasa became king. Because Sweden already has a national day, no matter what the politicians decreed, and I'll be celebrating it on Friday with a bunch of herring, a box of strawberries and a few schnaps. Just like everybody else.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:15 PM | Comments (0)
June 17, 2005
DesignTorget, Design Year and the $3.8 Million Table
"EVERYBODY expected it. A piece of 20th-century postwar furniture, a trestle table by Carlo Mollino designed in 1948, broke the million-dollar mark at auction at Christie's New York last Thursday, a first. But nobody expected it to keep going, sailing to a selling price of $3.824 million - nearly 20 times the high estimate - that left an audience of insiders smirking and shaking their heads." William L. Hamilton's New York Times piece about the superhot market for modernist furniture includes this great quote: " 'I've never before felt like losing was winning,' said Lee Mindel of Shelton, Mindel & Associates, a New York architecture firm, who was the underbidder."
I'm in a modern design frame of mind. This morning I spoke with Lasse Folt, the head of DesignTorget. This chain of seven boutiques specializes in Swedish design, which makes up some 90 percent of its wares. As a long-time fan, I understand that. But I hadn't known that DesignTorget has a weekly design jury that chooses products to sell through its commission program. DesignTorget began as an outlet for designers to sell their wares; now there's also a buyer who scouts for interesting products outside the country. Designers still submit items for consideration and every Tuesday morning the design jury meets to choose the most appealing products and give them a test run in one or more stores.
After lunch I went to the National Museum to see the exhibit on Swedish design (1900 to 2000 or some such) as part of my personal tribute to the Year of Design. The web site is annoying as hell (no English version that I can find and no easy navigation. I thought I should be able to find a page for what I saw today under exhibits but it was under collections) but the museum itself is swell. There were no signs prohibiting photos so I snapped away (sans flash of course) at beautiful modern furniture and other goodies until a guard noticed and asked me, in the nicest way imaginable, to stop.
On the way to the museum I saw a collection of professional darkroom equipment next to a dumpster. It's the digital age after all and time to toss out old print dryers and ancient blocky enlargers. My husband and I used to have a home darkroom and it made my heart flop a bit to see this stuff trashed. Silly, I know. An odd-looking Electrolux contraption was part of the design exhibit. The olive green monstrosity was the first microwave sold for home use in Sweden. Soon we'll see enlargers and photo equipment like the stuff that got tossed today in museum exhibits as well. But that's okay. Today's digital darkroom is much cleaner than its chemical-drenched ancestor. Not as romantic, maybe, but I can live with that.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:07 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 16, 2005
Creepy Osama bin Laden Souvenirs
New Zealand's Scoop is all over the creepy and cheesy 911 sourvenir story:
A Thai shop selling lava lamps, magic tricks, and embarrassing gifts to surprise recipients, also offers a small, inexpensive hand puppet of bin Laden wearing boxing gloves.Stick your fingers inside and wiggle them, and little Osama punches the air.
On Bangkok's popular Khao San Road, where thousands of international backpackers flock to cheap hotels, restaurants, discos and an avant garde street market, stalls sell Halloween masks of a droopy, rubbery bin Laden, alongside other scary faces.
The trickle of souvenirs appear to be made not by Osama's supporters, but by profit-seeking factories which have slapped bin Laden's visage, and symbols of his international Islamist war, onto existing generic toys and other items in a crass effort to reach a fresh demographic of buyers.
Which is not to suggest it's the only obscene act of commerce the planet has ever witnessed. Not by a long shot.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
What We Keep: Prison Edition
According to AP:
A state hearing officer has upheld the termination of a correctional officer at Ely State Prison who let officers keep tear gas grenades used in a training exercise. ...The hearing officer ruled the evidence showed Cunningham denied culpability, manipulated official records and created a story explaining away the missing gas grenades. He also tried unsuccessfully to get the other officers to go along with that concocted version of the story. ... Cunningham admitted he had been drinking at the time and wasn't completely sure how many grenades he had given out and to whom.
Jeez, I always have that problem, don't you?
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 14, 2005
Stockholm Style: Furniture, Food, Nightlife
Stockholm's new Street market includes art exhibits that even harried parents have time for (above).
Among the wares: the Swedish version of Handiwipes, flat square sponges with attitude (below).
My former neighbor David Sanger, a professional travel photographer and web geek, was in town recently and somewhat dumbfounded by the hordes of (often drunk) graduates packed into the back of enormous trucks with equally large sound systems. Each graduating class rents one or more trucks or buses. After the graduation ceremony they hop on a vehicle and cruise the city while drinking frightening amounts of alcohol (or pretending to) and blasting innocent bystanders with continuous, ear-splitting pop. "I thought Swedes were quiet," David said. Not during graduation week. Because the ceremonies are staggered, the revelry goes on for hours and hours over days and days.
Fortunately for David, there's plenty more for a travel pro to cover. From the famously glittery Berns to the attitudinal Nordic Light to the music-fixated nightclub/hotel Lydmar to Grill, the dining-on-furniture-you-can-buy collaboration between two veteran chefs and a furniture company. Saturday we hit Stockholm's new Street market together. I was intimidated by David's mass of steroidal camera equipment but I took a few hobbyist pics anyway. (It was a little like cooking dinner for a chef: possible but painful.) Södermalm used to be working class and still is in part. But it's also the youth-fueled art and design center of the city. The fledgling market, which perches on the very edge of the island, is an entertaining mix of trash and treasure, a perfect weekend outing for tourists and locals alike.
Speaking of locals, Petrus sends along this bit of self promotion: "FORM US WITH LOVE presents two brand new furniture products; the first one as flat as the second one is flexible." Don't know Petrus? Me neither but I'm a sucker for pitches from Swedish designers, even if their company has an impossibly hokey name. “Bendable Interior Objects (B.I.O) does not come in a flat package, it is the flat package. B.I.O is an unconventional interior concept in aluminium," Petrus writes. “Group of trees is a flexible and sound absorbing room divider for public rooms that brings the outdoors indoors."
Don't imagine birds would ever mistake them for the real thing. But I like 'em.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 10, 2005
America's Coolest Stuff
Apparently the Discovery Channel is doing battle against the forces of minimalism (or maybe simply against all those other TV shows) by producing a show explicitly celebrating stuff. The Long Beach Press Telegram is doing its part to help: "We have been taking core samples of the solid mass that is the contents of our garage in search of some righteously retro stuff to haul to the appraisers/storytellers of the Discovery Channel's traveling post-'60s artifacts show 'Pop Nation: America's Coolest Stuff,' when it stops at the Long Beach Convention Center for taping on July 2. There's a lot of junk in the garage, but we have stumbled upon some things that might make the cut. The leading item so far is a laminated 1982 US Festival pass to Apple founder/concert producer Steve Wozniak's leased house on a rise overlooking the concert grounds at Glen Helen Park in San Bernardino County."
Wonder if Steven Levy knows about this show. Or the macaroni-and-cheese guy. I just cooked up a generic box of mac-and-cheese for my daughter's lunch. She considers this stuff, now available on the American shelf of the local supermarket for a small fortune, some kind of delicacy. I don't know when packaged mac-and-cheese came into being but doesn't the neon orange of this appalling concoction simply scream 1960s?
If Pop Nation comes to town, what would your treasured post-60s item be? Imagine all the Silicon Valley pop treasures in storage, such as T-shirts from the original Macintosh development team. My husband kept our original Amiga for years. Then I put my foot through it while packing for the move to Sweden. Oops! What are you hanging on to that's really cool?
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 09, 2005
Genre Fiction: Assault on Civilization or Damn Fine Read?
(Note: I've turned Comments back on for the opinionated.) Melissa Banks's new novel got slammed as chick lit in a recent New York Times book review. A funny and seemingly plausible analysis of the review and what might have prompted it (found via M.L. Rose's blog on writing and publishing) reminded me of the compliment that Joyce Carol Oates gave author Peter Abrahams in a New Yorker review earlier this spring. "Peter Abrahams’s strongest novels seem to suggest, despite their allegiance to genre, a fascination with something beyond mere form."
Ouch. Outside of an unfortunate experiment in junior high, I've never written fiction so I don't have any writing skin in the game. But I've spent a good part of my childhood and significant chunk of adulthood in libraries. Maybe that's because my mother was a writer but I was thirteen before her first book was published and my library card had logged a lot miles by then. Mostly it's because my mother was a reader and I, in turn, became one. It one of the few still-welcoming environments for poor people and the only way I've found to travel while trapped at home. As an avid reader who likes literature but loves genre fiction, I have a proposal for all the players in book publishing, including reviewers: Can y'all just stop slinging the shit?
Human categorize. We like top ten lists. We like hierarchies. We trash the folks above and below us in hopes of clinging to our spot. And we try to move ahead, using luck or influence or talent or hard work or brown-nosing or money. Because book publishing supports the star system, like virtually every other media-related business these days, I understand why authors want to set themselves apart as better or different or more literary or more cultured or more popular. (Besides, some writers suck. Who wants to be compared to them?) More importantly, I understand why publishers encourage it. If more writers refused to squabble among themselves, were honest about their advances and royalties (like ballsy and brave Paperback Writer), perhaps banded together more and bitched about each other less, they might actually get a better deal.
But I'd be satisfied if writers just stopped sniping for awhile. The literature vs. genre fiction debate has been going on far longer than the bloggers vs. journalists mudfest but is just as stupid and pointless. There are genre authors who explore the deepest questions of existence and lightweight lit no more substantial than cotton candy. Literature comes in all guises. What's this obsession over form? Why is genre still a dirty word? As John Updike notes, "...it could be argued that all fiction is escapist: by its means we escape our own heads and lives and enter into other heads and lives. Whether the head belongs to a Hobbit in Tolkien or to one of Virginia Woolf’s sensitive, externally unadventurous women does not change the nature of the escape: what gives relief and pleasure in fiction is its otherness."
When I was clinically depressed and found no relief in drugs, I crawled out of my bed and plodded to the local library. I carried home two slim volumes : Lying Awake, by Mark Salzman, and The Nanny Diaries, by Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin. One is serious literature, the other brain candy. The first day I read Lying Awake. The second day I read The Nanny Diaries. The third day I got out of bed.
Think one book was superior to the other? Honey, think again. Lying Awake inspired fresh mental moxie. The Nanny Diaries made me laugh my ass off. Both books offered powerful medicine that brought me back to life. Both.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:32 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 07, 2005
Craig's List in Stockholm + Apple and Intel = What?
A while back I whined less than attractively to someone at Craig's List. I wanted a Stockholm branch and I wanted it now. Time passed (months? years?) and yesterday I noticed: oh my gawd, we've got it! Only it's sooo disappointing because nobody knows that Stockholm has Craig's List yet. There were all of 13 jobs listed yesterday and most of them aren't even related to Stockholm. But dude, if you are in Stockholm and you can, like, shoot a digital camera and, like, ask questions, you can get $150 and all the hearing damage you want by covering the Sweden Rock Festival this weekend for an LA-based "motorcycles and entertainment lifestyles magazine." Cool or what? If you can't make the festival, no worries: just spread the word about the Stockholm Craig's List, okay?
In other news, several friends had fun speculating on what the spawn of the Apple-Intel partnership should be dubbed. Suggestions include Mactel (Tim Holmes), Apptel or Inpple (Peter Linde), Mintel (Joseph Holmes' son Julian) and Intellimac (Ulf Molin). But no, Steve says it's going to be MacIntel.
Pete Gontier was paying attention as the rumors flew across the web before the partnership news was confirmed. He wrote, at the time, "There is sooooo much misinformation. And by this I don't mean I know what's going to be announced and the press doesn't. I mean the press doesn't even have remotely decent sources to interview." What, you need an example? "The hapless Peter Glaskowsky is my favorite. He works as an analyst for The Envisioneering Group, in Seaford, N.Y. 'It's a bunch of bull,' he's quoted as saying in eWeek, then goes on to detail how uninformed he is before dropping this stinker: '...IBM has no other customers willing to buy large quantities [of the G5].' Yeah, as if Apple is subsidizing IBM! This guy must be somebody's nephew. Within a few hours, the president of Glaskowsky's firm, Richard Doherty, had silenced Glaskowsky and gotten the NYT to quote Doherty about a 'seismic shift' which is 'bound to rock the industry.' Thanks for the specifics, fearless leader!"
Pete's not the only one to blow the whistle on Glaskowsky. As Web Pro News put it: "A decision that was eleven years in the making became official during the opening of the Apple WorldWide Developers Conference. Paul Thurrott and the Wall Street Journal had it right. Peter Glaskowsky and Leander Kahney were dead wrong."
I suspect I have more sympathy for both analysts and journalists than Pete does. And since I know John Markoff I have a hard time believing that Doherty forced a quote into the story. Remember, newspapers run on deadlines and it's often hard to find truly knowledgeable sources on short notice. Still I understand that it's painful to read quotes from people who don't know what they're talking about. Luckily, this doesn't seem to be a problem for Stuffola's hardy audience of 84 readers. For that I'm grateful.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 03, 2005
A New Take on the Bible + Standing Tall to Pee
According to a release on PR Newswire: "A new edition of the Gospels of the Bible for the first time shows Christ as a woman, named Judith Christ of Nazareth, and God as female. In all other respects, the classic texts of the Gospels remain unchanged." I doubt this development would have been welcomed by my late uncle, a Southern Baptist minister and a truly wonderful, caring man. He supported women in many ways but this would not have been one of them. As a militant agnostic, Judith Christ doesn't exactly rock my boat either. And yet...
I'll never forget a particular afternoon in the late 70s when, as a college student, I was at home in a decrepit apartment carved out of an old Victorian and listening to All Things Considered while I puttered around. Suddenly something sounded weird to me, kind of off. I remember actually looking at the radio while I tried to figure out what was wrong. Then it hit me. Two women had spoken in a row. Can't remember if it was two female hosts, only that it was unexpected and new to hear one woman follow another on the program. After college I moved to San Francisco and practically burst into tears of pride and gratitude when I saw a female firefighter on the street for the first (and last) time.
The phrase "our mother, who art in heaven" hits a different chord for me than "our father, who art in heaven." Is this kind of gender switching just plan silly? Maybe. I'm not an intellectual; I don't do theory. But I am the mother of a ten-year-old daughter who, despite my best efforts, still wants to emulate Brittany Spears (and the enormous H&M billboards that show models in skimpy outfits) and wear too-sexy outfits at a too-young age.
Like a black child clutching a white doll, little girls of all colors grow up in this God-the-father-fearing society understanding that they don't really measure up. They're good for some things, like sex and shopping, but not so good for other things, like becoming Pope or running government. This new Bible won't change much but maybe it will give some young woman an unexpected but welcome feeling of recognition and acceptance. Maybe.
In other feminist news, turns out that the guys-stand-gals-sit model of urination is fairly new, according to an article by Kim Bannerman Pigott (available via an EBSCO Masterfile Elite database) in the Winter 2005 issue of Herizons. "From the earliest days of childhood, we're separated into two camps: those who sit and those who stand. Yet as recently as 150 years ago, women stood as often as men to relieve themselves and in many countries--India and the Philippines, for example--it is still a widespread and acceptable practice. In The Histories Herodotus wrote, 'Women [in Egypt] urinate standing up, men sitting down,' a revelation that shocked his Greek sensibilities. Among the matrilineal Tualag people of the Sahara, this method of division has continued into the present day."
Then there's my hillbilly mom, who reported that her aunts, back in the Arkansas hills of the 1940s, used to pee like the guys while they were working out in the fields. The Herizons piece offers helpful tips for newbies: "You may want to start practicing in the shower." Or, failing that, consider the P-Mate.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 02, 2005
Happy Birthday Alertbox; Farewell Free Agent Nation
My stroll down memory lane continues today thanks to a couple of items in my inbox that highlight the dot-com era. The first is an Alertbox mailing from Jakob Nielsen announcing the site's tenth birthday. Congrats, Jakob. Influential people tend to attract both fans and critics and Jakob (who spoke at one of my conferences and is a swell guy) is no exception. His work on web useability guidelines inspired lots of things, including a a brief, sarcastic "what would Jakob do?" movement. You don't have to agree with his specific recommendations to agree that the web was a design mess in the beginning. Jakob has done a kick-ass job of encouraging appropriate, user-friendly design. (It's not Jakob's fault when companies ignore his research--such as how to make their sites useful for PR.) May Alertbox live long and prosper.
The second is news that the Free Agent Nation enewsletter is no more. Remember the galvanizing December 1997 cover story ("The Brand Called You") in Fast Company? "There's a new movement in the land. From coast to coast, in communities large and small, citizens are declaring their independence and drafting a new bill of rights. Meet some of the 25 million residents of Free Agent, USA." The stirring call to arms was written by Daniel Pink and dazzled many of the free agents and wannabe free agents of my acquaintence, including a Swedish friend. As the article explained, "Free agents gladly swap the false promise of security for the personal pledge of authenticity. 'In free agency,' says Burish, who now designs training programs, 'people assume their own shape rather than fit the shape of some corporate box.' "
The idea of working on your own terms, work that is "personal, authentic, fun, and rewarding," is a compelling concept and led to Pink's Free Agent Nation book ("The Future of Working for Yourself"), which came out in 2001. Pink's manifesto offered a kind of liberation theology for the cubicle set. It was also representative of a type of utopian thinking common then and common now. According to "The Hidden Work In Virtual Work," a paper prepared in 1999 for the International Conference on Critical Management Studies, Pink's article was just one example "of visions of a world of more flexible, mobile, temporary and technologically mediated work. There are many more: as marketing imagery, as journalistic reports from the world of work, as presumably well-researched case studies and theoretical analyses in journal articles, as popular culture thinking, as lunch talk in business circles, as themes of conference and magazine launches, as explicit goals for organizational restructuring policies and implicit bases of technology designs."
As the paper goes on to explain, these cheery reports share an unwillingness to acknowledge that most of the costs of shifting to a supposedly swell, flexible, impowering, Free Agent Nation are borne by individuals; indeed these bright, shiny articulated visions of a techno-powered future usually are unwilling to acknowledge any real costs at all. (In a similar vein, I remember contributing to a Newsweek piece, around the same time, about the seller's market in tech labor by interviewing a programmer who could insist on twice-a-week tee time as a condition of employment. As he explained, he expected to be at the office practically 24/7 and needed some daylight time for golf. Not exactly my ideal term-setting situation.) For most individuals, there are always real costs: for self-employment (see the paper for pre-bust examples); for full-time gigs; and for unemployment. That how life is--nothing comes free. And during the tech slump, which created massive unemployment, many talented individuals had tons of skills but discovered that setting their own terms of employment was no longer one of them. (I'm sure there are truckloads of thriving, accomplished free agents, like Dan Pink, out there somewhere. I'm just more of a disgruntled rogue.)
Pink is now concentrating on a new book, A Whole New Mind. "The era of 'left brain' dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which 'right brain' qualities-inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate. That's the argument at the center of this provocative and original book, which uses the two sides of our brains as a metaphor for understanding the contours of our times." Given the continued success of bastard bosses, I find the premise a bit rosy but that won't stop me from reading this new book from a terrific writer.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 01, 2005
Dotcom Wayback Machine
Just found out about the database of failed dotcoms thanks to Katherine S. Mangan. "When future historians look back on the dot-com era, they may be surprised to come across records of companies like Tagarama.com, which was dreamed up as a way for passing motorists to connect with one another later by plugging license-plate numbers into a matchmaking Web site. The company, dreamed up by an entrepreneur in Grass Valley, Calif., has disappeared from the Internet, but an assistant professor of management at the University of Maryland at College Park is making sure that it -- and thousands of other little-known dot-com ventures -- are not forgotten.
"David A. Kirsch, an assistant professor who teaches management and organization at Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, has created an online archive that chronicles the rise and fall of Internet-related start-ups in the heady and tumultuous years from 1996 to 2002. ...'I view myself as a biodiversity specialist going into the Amazon,' says Mr. Kirsch, when asked how he decides which dot-coms to list. 'If you see the Amazon is filled with piranhas, you don't need to collect piranhas. But if there are only three of a rare species of bird, I try to save one of those. It's not that I'm not interested in the thriving species, but it's the at-risk species we need to collect now or lose forever.' "
News of the archive, which requires free registration to access (and none of those temp disposable e-mail addresses thank you very much) triggered my nostalgia reflex. So I had to pull out my copy of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter's June 1999 Internet Company Handbook, which covered the top 90 Internet companies of the time, many of which survive to this day (RIP eToys, insert your own joke here). I've also been leafing through my copy of Principles of Internet Marketing from 2000. And right there at the end of chapter 9 (Traffic and Brand Building) I find my friend Laurie Flynn, savvy and lovely contributor to the New York Times, cited in Endnote number one ("Alexa Internet: The Search as a Communal Effort.") I don't miss the attitude of the era but I do miss that sense of possibility.
Luckily, blogging and podcasting and videocasting have made tech exciting again and for normal people, not stock speculators or executive-suite swine. (That comes later.) Right here is where I planned to add a snarky comment about how preserving the business plans of loser companies isn't exactly comparable to rescuing endangered flora and fauna. It's not. But the database *is* oddly compelling and now that I've poked around a bit I have a better understanding of why it might be catnip to academics.
The database contains, for example, a PDF of a single page from a PowerPoint presentation by the once-thriving (1800 employees) Scient consultancy. The image shows a close up of an emergency vehicle and emergency tape is stretched across the front of the image. The description explains, "This is a page from a Scient consulting pitch in 2000. The original powerpoint slide has sound effects to increase the visual impact. In the one known instance in which this slide was used, the client hired the Scient team." Doesn't that make you desperate to see the entire thing?
Other juicy bits include video clips (including "La Vida Loca," a Quicktime clip "from what appears to be a Scient karaoke night"), more than 6MB of files on the company culture, and news that PhD student Andrew Russell is working on an open-source history of Scient for those who'd care to collaborate. But there are no files, at least not yet, on Scient failures. Which is exactly how I'd like to be remembered after I'm gone. Professor Kirsch, I salute your smarts. By promising informants confidentiality if they want it and by restricting some documents to bonafide researchers (unlike daytrippers like me), you've created an amazing wayback machine that should only grow in depth and complexity over time. Very cool.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 06:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack