The Outdoor Glacial Climate Workplace

By Christopher Schmitt
Mendenhall Glacier

While on vacation last week I met a woman excited about her job.
Most of the week and only if the weather is right, she rides a helicopter to the top of Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska—sets things up for tourists with her team mates.

Then she helps give four tours for people coming from all over the world who are happy to be there, too.

I’m pretty sure has a brown bagged lunch, but I forgot to ask. There isn’t a vending machine in sight. Only thing to drink is melting glacier ice. I was told there are some protein bars stowed away in a cooler in the tent, but I never saw them.

Along with her team, she is surrounded by the blue ice, crisp air, natural water, with one hell of a view from 9 to 5.

When the work day is over, she gets the scenic commute back down to sea level.

I decide to change my desktop’s backdrop to that of photo of the glacier that a better photographer took and get back to coding.

Social Media Expert Trust Certification

By admin

Today, I’m happy to announce a project that has been in the works for the past year: Social Media Expert Trust Certification™. 

With a seemingly unending number of “social media expert” consultants out there, as a user experience designer I feel it’s our goal is to have certification process of the social media industry. With this certification, companies and organizations will know they are getting a solid expert in social media and not just some schmuck wanting to be their online friend.

In connection with representatives from Google, MySpace, TechCrunch and Digg forming as an advisorary board, my intention is to make the certification standard complete and open sourced around the same time as HTML5’s completion.

Why Do We Need This?

A lot of people out there claim to be social media experts, but how can you tell the person who sits at in his mother’s basement friending everything with a MySpace account to those that can actually go about monetizing the crowdsource space 2.0‑style?

You will with Social Media Expert Trust Certification™.

What Vectors Do We Certify? 

The Social Media Expert Trust Certification looks at five golden vectors for certification:

  1. Can they tell the difference between making a point that benefits others rather than just blabbering endlessly into their Web cam?
  2. Have they ever bought their Second Life avatar virtual clothes that are in season?
  3. Knowing full well that no one can click on them, does their Twitter background image still contain links to their other social media sites?
  4. Do they have an auto-follow mechanism in place on their Twitter account that contains links to other social media sites?
  5. Lastly, but not least: do they like Robert Scoble? No, really. Do they like Robert Scoble? Seriously?

Aren’t There Others That Do This?

In this day, people might ask whey do we need certification of media experts while there are schools like Birmingham City University offering a degree in Social Media.

But we know schools take 5 years to catch up with anything technology-driven. So, while you are getting certified in Friendster by an academic insitution, you can get on the cutting edge with courses like “Being Reborn on Facebook 2.0, the new Twitter.”

How Can I Join In?

Are you a company in need of certified social media expert? Or are you someone who has been thinking they are qualified social media expert, but would like the veil of ignorance to be lifted and know once and for all? 

Then leave a comment below and I will get back to you with details once they are finalized with my Nigerian counterpart on this most exciting chapter in the social media industry!

3 Photos of People in Bathtubs Filled with Food (and 2 of Them are Naked Women)

By admin

Nothing is as viral as photos of people in bathtubs filled with food. 

First, I believe there was a photo of a woman in a tub of cheese doodles in a bath tub, which I believe scorched the Internet in late 90s. 

Cheese Doodles

Then Whoopi worked with the rock star photographer Anne Leibowtiz to put her in a bathtub filled with milk.

Whoopi and in a Bathtub Filled with Milk

Not sure what the thinking was behind that, except perhaps the 1999 milk mustache campaign didn’t go far enough to express the comedian’s love of the drink.

And then there’s the next logical conclusion after a bathtub filled with milk: a bathtub filled with cereal as done by Ted Murphy. (Ted is promoting his blog by giving away a year’s worth of cereal.)

Ted in a Bathtub of Milk and Cereal

All in a all, I would say that the Internet, if nothing else, provides a speedy vehicle for pictures of food, bathtubs and the people that enjoy them.

UPDATE

Reader Bill Weye pointed out that Dita Von Teese was featured in a bathtub of candy for Chocolate Altoids. 

Dalai Lama and President Bush: The iPhone Wallpaper

By admin

This week President Bush became the first sitting U.S. President to appear publicly with the Dalai Lama (photo by Eric Draper). This moment in history reminded me of another historical moment: Nixon meeting Elvis (that photo by Ollie Atkins):

Nixon and Elvlis: The iPhone Wallpaper

So, to help capture this history, I made both events into iPhone wallpapers. Natch.

Know Your Adoption Rate

By admin

Know Your Adoption Rate
Originally uploaded by teleject.

This week Angelina Jolie adopted another child, Pax Thien Jolie. (This time the child came from Vietnam.)

While not tied directly to the Web design or development industry, I thought it would be a good idea (or laugh) to contrast Jolie’s adoption rate with that of Internet Explorer 6 for Windows.

Please note that I included Brad Pitt as one of Jolie’s adoptions for my data. 

Fart Bucks

By admin

People work to get paid. That’s pretty straightforward, right?

People talk about how much money they make in terms of time. It’s mostly in units of years and hours. For years, it’s something like 40k, 20k, 100k, etc. For hourly, there’s $10 an hour or $7.25 an hour.

So, one day I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to calculate people’s salaries based on seconds not years or hours. Just doing the same thing everyone does, but using a unit of time that people really don’t operate in for the most part. (Sure, you may say, “wait a second” but it’s really longer than a second.)

And that’s when I thought, if I’m stretching the concept of how much you make per a second, I would need some other symbol to help represent that unit of time. It would be okay to create a JavaScript-powered clock that would display how much a second of work time means to you, but who would seriously check that out? It’s a clock.

So, I needed to something that took place in a second of time, but was somewhat universal in nature. Something that everyone did or could easily understand… Bingo! 

That’s when I came across the idea of using farts.

Farts can last a second or even longer. In fact, I would say farting is a great social equalizer. Everyone does it. (Except you. I would never say or think you would ever fart.) 

But then I thought, hey, you know celebrities make an awful lot of money. And so do politicians. Why not showcase how much they make per second by way of fart noises? It would be such an absurd, almost surreal thing to see! 

I threw together some quick Photoshop mockups and tried to learn some Flash to pull it off. Thus Fart Bucks was born. 

screen capture of Fart Bucks

Some time ago I stopped working on Fart Bucks, but I always felt it could have been so much more than what it is. I even made a list.

The following is the list of items I felt could make the project better:

  • Musical score, especially during the introduction. Maybe the addition of some original, ambient-spacey music could be created with GarageBand. 
  • Incorporate non-celebrity people and their jobs. Comparing, say, a waitress’s salary with that of a Kobe Bryant might be an interesting contrast and might people some pause. Or maybe not. 
  • Place yourself or a friend within Fart Bucks. Files this under Web 2.0, but I always thought Fart Bucks would be closer to what I had envisioned if people could upload photos of themselves or friends, loved ones, victims. It would be an instant personal farting machine. Sure, it might be used by mostly by guys (teenage boys, college dudes and guys bored in cubicles), but I’m sure that’s a big demographic, right? I’m looking at you, Trey and Matt, to back me up. After you would load up an image of yourself or someone you would know, you would be able to get a link of the Fart Bucker™ to bookmark and/or email it.

If you feel like you want to add to Fart Bucks, please do. Feel free to download and modify. I’ve placed the contents of Fart Bucks I’ve made under a Creative Commons license.