Honestly, I think I’m more surprised he didn’t suggest giving away Alaska instead.

• I admit, customized laptop bags are pretty sweet. But several people commented that they get free laptop bags at every conference they attend. Suggestion: Customized reusable grocery bags. You’ll be promoting environmentalism while also giving attendees something they’ll feel good about using again!
• On the subject of customizable materials, sure, it’s pretty sweet to have the conference and year on, say, laptop bags, lanyards, or pens. But that limits their lifespan to that particular event. If it’s a recurring event, the best thing to do would be to just use the name of the conference. Otherwise, use the logo of the originating group (in this case, Michigan State University).
• By the end of the conference, we had pillaged at least two dozen laptop bags for the program inside. People lose them, or just want the program, etc. Make sure you have a few dozen spare programs on hand.
• VIP presenters were supposed to get a laser pointer. Unfortunately, the only indicator was a tiny “vip” on their nametag. It made it incredibly hard to remember to hand the laser pointers out. All graphic indicators should be blatantly obvious.
• If you know you’re going to offer t-shirts, why not ask for sizes on the registration form? The default conference size mode is to order lots of large and X-large shirts and fewer small, medium, and XX-large. This alienates men on the fringe of sizes (S, M, and XXL) and pretty much every woman conference attender. HINT: a woman who normally wears WOMEN’s S shirts who is left with the choice between a MEN’s L or XL shirt will not actually WEAR your shirt. Ever. For real. Thus, you’ve just wasted a shirt! This is especially true for your conference volunteers–you should have a relatively easy time tracking them down and making sure they get their correct shirt size.

These, again, are just some preliminary ideas. So–what am I forgetting?

My goodness, people. This is why writing centers and editors exist. Let me give anyone who wants to use a site like that a hint: academic writing is about clarity and organization. If you can explain your research to these people, you can save yourself $20/page and write minimally your own first draft. I won’t deny the need for corporate professional writers… but it strikes me as unethical to pay someone for a paper that you’ll then get graded on. It’s called “credit where credit is due.” Seriously. Learn it before you enter the corporate world.

What gets me isn’t that there was yet another murder in Lansing, though of course that’s horrible, or even that, as always, the victim was “such a nice boy.” (This is a commentary for another day, but dead people are always portrayed as saints. I’m sure this guy was nice, but c’mon, are drug dealers never killed like this? “Man, it sucks that Bob got shot, but I’m so not surprised. Dude was always totally wasted and picking fights.” Makes me wish we were operating under the Speaker for the Dead model.)

No–the thing that got me was this quote:

“These kids,” she added, with sadness coming into her voice, “they can’t just settle things with their fists. When you shoot somebody, they don’t come back. It affects the family. It affects the neighborhood.”

What about settling things with words? If you’ve got violent tendencies, take them out on video games or at the gym, people. I like to chop veggies when I’m angry or stressed–it turns the energy into something productive (and tasty). Fistfights are still acts of violence, and even if there’s a legitimate reason for the violence, there are better ways to pursue justice.

I’m having fun with Photoshop, though. Too bad I probably won’t have energy to mess with it now that classes have started again.

All four of these were made for a course assignment. The shield was made using these instructions. I heart PSDTuts.

]]> http://wasabijane.com/2008/image-dump-1/feed/ http://wasabijane.com/2008/the-outward-appearance/ http://wasabijane.com/2008/the-outward-appearance/#comments Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:25:21 +0000 Lisa http://wasabijane.com/2008/the-outward-appearance/ In high school, I had an obese teacher who claimed to have once been the cheerleading coach for Madonna, who had graduated from my high school some 20 years previously. For years I wrote her off as a compulsive liar–it wasn’t the only hardly-believable claim she made. In retrospect, it would have been very easy to either verify or repudiate  her claim, as the school no doubt would have had records, but at the time it never crossed my mind to do so, and now it would require more effort than I really feel like putting into it (that is to say, it requires any effort at all, which is by default too much).

I bring this up because Yi noted that  Michael Phelps consumes between 10,000-12,000 calories each day, but burns so many off that he has trouble gaining weight. Like Yi, my first reaction was that it would be nice to have that problem. I definitely eat more than I burn each day. But it got me thinking: Phelps’ stomach is undoubtedly enlarged. When one day he stops working out nearly as much, will he also think to stop eating so much? Will he be able to retrain his body to desire less food? Or will he one day become one of the millions of Americans who suffers from weight issues because he failed to adapt? I’d love to see a study of former athletes to know if there’s some sort of major weight gain trend among them.

It also makes me wonder about my old teacher. If athletes require that many calories a day, it’s entirely possible that she legitimately was a cheerleading coach once, but didn’t decrease her caloric intake as she stopped exercising heavily. If that was the case–what a horrible fate! It’s bad enough being overweight in a Photoshop world. It would be even worse for one who used to be thin–who had a legitimate claim to fame–but gets discredited just for being the product of a consumer environment.

It’s fun! It’s free! And it’s available on the internets… until Sunday.

I think that’s my one lament about it, actually. It’s only up for a week. The last episode will only be up for 48 hours. Which may be brilliant on Joss Whedon’s part–the lack of availability may very well encourage people to buy it. But I would have liked to see that fact advertised more heavily, and I would have liked to have seen the entire thing up for one more week.

Granted, that may very well have to do with the fact that I’m tearing my computer apart on Friday night to move to an apartment that won’t have internet until Monday. No, wait, scratch that, I’m tearing my computer apart Saturday morning. Right after I watch the Dr. Horrible denouement.

It’s called Cats in Space, and I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.  It even beats out SparkleWorld. Seriously. I hope it’s real.

Actually, one of the even better things about CiS is its parent site. This high-quality publication is hosted by the similarly high-quality awesomecats.com. Content-wise, awesomecats performs its function of being a site about, well, cats. If cats are your thing, it has a decent collection of resources–if you can get past the horrible page design, at least. And the sad thing is, people have obviously very specifically spent a fair bit of time on the design of the site. The header, for instance, is beyond my Flash capabilities. Not that I’m some flash guru by any means, but somebody had some good quality bonding moments with Flash over that header. And they obviously try to offer a reasonable range of services. Why, I could register wasabijane@awesomecats.com if I so chose, or even have an awesomecats.com website of my very own!

Actually, this is what I find the most telling. Look at their site features: 5K free web space is but one example. For you non-techy people, this randomly selected image is 4K. A single-spaced, one-page Word doc is likely to be at least 25K. This blog post is probably more than awesomecats can handle. And, even more telling, the first line of their site features reads as such: “No knowledge of web design or HTML is required to create websites.” No kidding. But then, I think the only ones who would take them up on such an offer are people like the creators of Cats in Space.

…and anyway, I was always more of a dog person.