Today, I went looking for lychee fruit. It’s the season: they’re best in June in the Northern hemisphere. (They’re also available in December if you fly them in.) I finally found them at the Koreatown Galleria market.
Seems like I might be in trouble, Google-wise. After a run up the Google charts that has brought me all the way to #2 for “Travis Smith,” there’s a new T.S. in town.
Today: worth remembering, for no reason other than that it was pleasant and, while typical, isn’t something I do often enough. Hope this will remind me to do it more often.
Two months ago, I wrote definitively that Disney came up with the phrase “TTFN,” meaning, “Ta Ta For Now.” But, as sometimes happens when I’m trying to be authoritative, I was 95% wrong. The phrase is currently heard mostly from Tigger. But it appeared in the media much earlier than that, in a WWII BBC radio show called “It’s That Man Again”, otherwise known as ITMA, that ran ten years from 1939 to 1949, starring Tommy Handley.
So I just added Google’s ads to my Web column today. It’s a little odd, like having a sponsor for your journal. “Dear Diary, today I asked Becky to the dance. She’s so pretty. I was so nervous I had to drink an entire DELICIOUS ORANGE FANTA™ to get up the courage.”
“I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so. ... She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain—it’s that the pain is actually a gift. What’s the option? God doesn’t really give you another choice.”
After over a decade of user testing, it is clear that the way we search the web is similar to the way we would search our home for valuables as it was burning to the ground. Frantically.
“We must shift the focus of companies back to the customer and away from shareholder value ... The shift necessitates a fundamental change in our prevailing theory of the firm… The current theory holds that the singular goal of the corporation should be shareholder value maximization. Instead, companies should place customers at the center of the firm and focus on delighting them, while earning an acceptable return for shareholders.”
You can scroll right easily by holding down the SHIFT key and using your scroll wheel. (Firefox users trying this will end up jumping to old Web pages until a) Firefox releases a fix, b) they change their settings like so.)