Archive for March, 2008

As you may recall, earlier this month, I discovered that scrabble players at Bloc 11 Cafe were not playing with a full deck, and resolved to do something about it.  My ebay purchase arrived earlier this week, and today I went back to Bloc 11 and audited their scrabble set.

Oddly, I found the set contained 96 tiles, not the 94 I counted last time.  Perhaps there are other scrabble robin hoods at work.  In any case, I quickly replaced the missing blank, P, E and A, finished my espresso and put the set away.

I hope that alert limeduckers will let me know if this or any other public scrabble set in the area is in need of repair. The price of cafe scrabble is eternal vigilance.

It recently came to my attention that I have become a spokesperson for Lake Champlain Chocolates. Specifically, they have taken a liberal quote from this very blog and featured it on their chocolaty web site. [Looks like Lake C have updated their site with a different quote. For the moment, you can see the cached version of my semi-quote here, further proof that nothing is ever truly erased on the internet.] Read the original post here.  I suppose I should be flattered, but instead I’m annoyed. Why?

1. They didn’t ask, or even tell. How hard would it be to send an email,”Hey, we love what you wrote, can we use it on our site?” or even an after the fact notification that they had done so. This stuff is copyrighted, you know.

2. They didn’t link. Seems to me that internetwise, the proper form of attribution is a live link, so readers can click through and view the full context of the quote. On the plus side, they did attribute the quote to “David K., Limeduck.com”

3. They edited the quote. This is the worst sin in my opinion. They clipped out a few words without using ellipsis. The changes didn’t alter things in any substantial way, (we all know my writing could use a nip and tuck now and again) but it’s still lousy journalism.

I don’t run the sort of blog where I talk up products and expect glory, samples or schwag for my efforts, but a quick note from a vendor, or even an appearance in the comments section, would go a long way toward my continued goodwill, and probably that of both of my regular readers.

So, my cocoa-dusted friends from Vermont, if you’re still scraping the interwebs for juicy words of praise for your products, I call foul on your policy of not so fair use and urge you to mend your ways. It’s not so hard. You can do it. And when you’re done, get back to the chocolate mines!

They say that the only thing worse than finding a worm in an apple is finding half a worm. I had such a moment at work last week. We had sent a list of target companies to a data mining firm in India with instructions to find the web and email addresses and contact names of people at these companies. A fairly standard practice these days. Data miners charge as little as a few cents per record for this kind of work.

I received a batch of such data and was giving it a once-over before having it imported into our database. You can’t really quality check thousands of names and addresses in any meaningful way, so you just leaf through and look for anything really odd. And completely by random, I found something really odd.

Company: Hebrew Academy of [redacted]
Contact: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President

It was truly a half a worm moment. We had already marketed to tens of thousands of records mined by this company. I checked the Hebrew Academy web site, and there was no evidence that Mr. “wipe Israel off the map” was in charge of a mid-western yeshiva. I checked all the other Jewish orgainizations in the list a a bunch of others for good measure but found nothing else odd. Several troubling thoughts came to mind:

• Since there’s no way this was a random error, somebody over there is making stuff up, and probably thinks this is funny.
• Imagine how awful it would have been if we had sent a letter addressed to Mr. Ahmadinejad at the Hebrew Academy.
• I happened to catch this one. How many others are lurking in the data?

As a marketer, I figured that there are lots of other data mining fish in the sea, and the cost of redoing all this work was still small compared to the potential cost of not just erroneous but offensive material lurking in there. Trying not to be too political about the specifics of the problem, I sent a note to the vendor simply saying that we could no longer trust the quality of the data for marketing purposes, and would have to cancel the project.

There was some back and forth, and then I found the other half of the worm. My data miner sent me a link to a press release posted on the Hebrew Academy’s site titled, “Israeli leader calls for tougher sanctions against Iran,” and including the line, “In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pledged to push ahead with his country’s nuclear program and said his people would not bow to Western intimidation.” The miners had searched the site for the word “president” and grabbed the name next to it without paying much attention. Had they searched for “prime minister” they would have put Ehud Olmert in charge.

Sure, this suggested less than stellar QA practice, appalling lack of awareness of current events, and maybe even laziness, but at least it didn’t mean that there was a bigot on the loose out to embarrass us. Much more in line with my expectations of cents-per-record data mining.

So what makes this a Purim story? Not much other than coincidence. Tonight is Purim, a holiday that marks the escape of the Jewish people from genocide at the hands of the Persians. Weird how these things sometimes fold back on themselves.

Enjoy the holiday and don’t forget to double check your mailing lists.

Settling in after a week off, I found that the yoga ball had been relegated to a conference room and a new employee had appropriated my door.  Good thing I had brought in my favorite office chair, the Levenger Sprezzatura, and was able to scavenge a nearby IKEA Galant.  Interesting that when viewed in actual natural light, the chair is in fact red, not as many would suppose, orange.

I fell in love with the simplicity and small footprint of the Sprezzatura chair at the Levenger store a couple of years ago.  Lots of people look at it and ask how I can sit in a chair without arms all day, but I’ve never missed them in an office or work chair.  I now have two, a black one at home and a red one at work.  When I went back to research the chair for this post, I found that they seem to have been discontinued.  Or at least replaced with the very similar but not quite as interesting Morgan Desk Chair.  I can’t help but feel that the seam is in exactly the wrong place.

Sprezzatura, by the way, is an excellent Italian word that’s fun to say.  It means – according to the dictionary applet on my Mac – “studied carelessness, esp. as a characteristic quality or style of art or literature.”  A more detailed and art-historical elucidation of the term is over at the wikipedia, but I use a definition more along the lines of “making hard stuff look not just easy, but also stylish.”

Other citations for this wonderful chair come from the also wonderful Book of Joe, which notes that the Sprezzatura is “intended for small home offices where space is really tight.”  That’s part of the appeal, definitely.  Apartment Therapy posed the question, what’s a good compact desk chair that doesn’t look officey, and at least one of their alert readers nominated the Sprezz, although several others mentioned are now on my list to check out.