Animals in Movie Titles

On my way to the movies last week, I uttered to myself, "If I could sit through Wild Hogs, I can sit through Old Dogs." And that's the moment I made the connection between the titles. You can fairly ask why I would go to a movie if that were my sentiment. Well, I had read the abysmal reviews of Old Dogs but also the cast list. I really did want to see what script would put Ann-Margret, Justin Long, Bernie Mac, Matt Dillon, Rita Wilson, and Amy Sedaris together. (As it turned out, these actors appeared very briefly in scenes that were more skit than story).

That's my cinematic defense. There's also the matter of language: I don't relate to the words wild and hogs. But I'm pretty comfortable with old and dogs.

(Next movie? I'm determined to move to the fox.)

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

Personal Technology: Target Technology

Target gets the award for best web marketing this season. An email message linked me to the Target web site advertising Black Friday sales plus the sweepstakes entry. I bit.

I had to work a lot. The site advised me that I would need the printed target symbol from the newspaper ad—or I could print one out right there on the web. (That's what I did.)

I followed every instruction, even folding my print-out on the guide lines so that the image was on a smaller field. More crucial to the exercise was the instruction to "allow" the site to access by web cam. My check mark also represented permission for possible videotaping on their side.

Next instruction was to hold my print-out target 18" from the camera and tilt it. Oh, my. The spinning wheel of gifts on the screen started rotating. Next instruction: to select the gift I want, put it in the center spot and hold the paper target close to the camera. Oh, my, oh, my. I was told my gift would be unwrapped. And it was. That step took about 20 seconds. The result: a free soft drink at Target's in-store cafe on specific dates. (I won't make it to Target on those dates.)

So, all that explains how my image appeared on the Target web site (see screen capture above). At least, on my view of the Target web site. Target generated an amazing amount of interaction between me and the web site. I can hardly wait for Christmas.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

Mainly for Humans: Three Dog Bakery

Happily, Sherman was welcomed in this bakery. It's Three Dog Bakery. We visited the Indianapolis store in October. What's kept behind glass (bakery shelf style) are the delicacies. See below photo for Drooly Dream Bars. No chocolate, so sugar. Just carefully crafted dog food to sell to humans. Although, admittedly, some of the displays spoke to Sherman. Buckets and buckets of bagels make an impression.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

Birthday Cake but Mainly Post Offices

I went to a birthday lunch yesterday and had wonderful cake at the Cheesecake Factory. This one really did have cheesecake, plus red velvet cake, plus sour cream frosting, plus white chocolate shavings. We intended to photograph it at start but instead dove in. Above photo is saved only by the artistic shadow of the fork.

My companion nodded with recognition when I told her about my USPS visit just before lunch. It marked the first time a postal worker has pointed out to me the most expensive route to send a thick envelope instead of the least expensive. He started pitching the $15.44 express method, then the $4-something priority. I pointed out that my side of the monitor showed regular 1st class (at $1-something) as the same 2 business days delivery time as the priority price. He agreed that it did. And finally sold me that stamp.

My lunch companion said something similar happened to her the previous day at her Post Office. The worker asked her if she would like to rent a box. And that's the first time in her life that's been offered across a postal counter.

We wonder if everyone is raising money....

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

Personal Happiness: Got a Measure?

On a scale of 1 to 4.... or do you know the phrase, I love what I do and I do what I love? Because I am often the last o hear catchy phrases, it was new to me when I heard it in an auditorium in early 2009. At the start of a conference at Claremont Graduate University (the headliner was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), a sound technician tested the mikes with that I love phrase. And he sounded genuine. And I was especially impressed because it was before 8:00 in the morning.

Happiness gets a lot of attention in our culture. Some of that attention is on baby boomers, who are said to expect happiness. And because we all assume that the doing generating happiness must be in paid employment, we look to research into job satisfaction. I like this report from a U of Chicago researcher in 2007 on job and general happiness. If you want the fast version (lists), go straight to pages 6 and 7.

Looking at anything from 2007 means looking at stats collected before the Great Recession. So, the next good research will be on happiness in spite of un- and low-employment. And the question of how much happiness today's young adults expect in life and career and will be far more interesting that what boomers expect.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

Posted from 30,000 feet. Yep, WIFI on the plane. This bit of fancy cost $7.95.

Could not resist.

WYSIWYG not editable.

. Posting with HTML. Clunky. Slow. Still fun.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

Personal Technology: I'm Waving

Do you remember the anticipation of gmail? Waiting for an invitation? It took months for me. Once initiated to the email system, I have never gone back to Outlook. Well, except for when clients require it, which, as it happens, two do.

I admire universities that have settled on commercial vendors like Google and Yahoo for their email systems. And admire even more those universities that simply say, use any email system (and address) you care to. The key to such a liberal policy is to not try to administer any of it, of course.

Contrasting gmail to everything else, the obvious winner is gmail. Ah, until wave turned up. And it is turning up. I imagine we'll know in a few months whether it's the next obvious winner.

Wave is all about conversation and my early experimentation with it suggests that it's also about speed. Streamlined access to communicating means that email and IM merge (to a ping, even) and then extras are thrown in, too. Like Google Gears. I don't have that loaded yet. But I think it's the drag and drop functionality that just worked its way into gmail this year, too.

OK. So, back to anticipation. Wave is coming by invitation just as gmail did. Good reasons for that, likely. Good way to beta or preview while error reports can be tracked and responded to. Good way to take advantage of early adopters who will tend to do anything for novelty. Good way to market a new product. You know, maximizing that anticipation factor.

So, how did I get wave? Well, it wasn't Google deciding to include boomers although surely there are a few accidentally in the first wave of wave. More likely, the first wave is composed of people just as young as those showing up on my contact list. You see, when I log into wave, it produces a list of wave-enabled users who are also on my gmail list of 2,093 contacts. (Yes, that was a wake-up call.)

I was invited to wave by one of the 5 people that appear on my wave contact list. I'm pretty sure the oldest person there is about 30. No, maybe 35. But the other 4 are 30 or younger. One is a professional staffer at Sloan-C (consortium on distance learning). Two are PhD-holders who are technical managers at Texas universities. One is a PhD student at Stanford. And one is a PhD alum from Princeton who now works in a non-profit. (And I am merely the old person that one of them fondly thought to share a wave with.)

Here's how compelling a wave can be... my laptop is on its last leg, which is to say that Tom Bold inherits it very soon. So, I'm tending it cautiously to keep functioning while I wait for holiday sales. You know what that means: lots of back-ups and no new software. Until wave popped up it's advisory that I need a newer or different browser in order to use the conversation system. (See how I'm already learning the new lingo.) I did not hesitate. I downloaded chrome on the spot.

I hope you are similarly compelled to catch the next wave. I plan to invite all my friends. Of course, it will take a while to work through my gmail contact list....

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

Boomers Among the Health Insurance Statistics

As analysts predict the percentage of Americans who will access a public option for health insurance, I continue to wonder if the analysts know the baby boomer mindset about employment in the years approaching retirement. Most women my age (that I know) readily acknowledge that they are working only "for the bennies." If they were able to access health insurance independently (and affordably), they would walk off the job and look for contract work, instead. More of my colleagues than you might guess are in their employers' health plans because of their own pre-existing conditions or their spouses'. Thus, the threat of leaving employment has to do with both cost and acceptance of those pre-existing conditions. Add one more feature: a lot of us are female primary wage earners, our boomer husbands already having been laid off or "retired" early due to the economic downturn.

The economic downturn is a psychological factor, as well, and one could argue that boomers will cling to employment as long as possible. But even on that score, I question the conventional wisdom. The boomers I know say they will cheerfully work part-time or as self-employed independent contractors under this assumption: they are going to have to work forever, anyway, so they want to do it as flexibly as possible in the early years when they still feel like traveling.

These scenarios are not mentioned in the analyses of the health care legislation emerging from Congress. Indeed, there's no good statistical reason that my thinking about "everyone I know" should be reflected in the national dialogue. After all, we are years away from the real impact of whatever legislation is decided. Whatever public option emerges won't do it until 2013 or thereabouts. And so what's the immediate impact? A whole lot of boomers (like me) factoring in the number of years we need to pay for expensive coverage before we can benefit from a more affordable version. So, as house mortgages are paid off, the dollars will shift to health insurance premiums and the new owners of those premiums will...have to work forever, anyway.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

Personal Technology: Internet on the Road... and In Flight

With the help of an air card (AKA data card), I kept on computing last week while crossing the country on an Interstate highway. (I wasn't driving.) That is, I kept online, not just computing. Any place I could get cell phone service, I could get the Internet on my laptop because I had the air card in a USB slot. Think of it this way: the air card is my computer's cell phone for one function, to access the Internet.

Now, as nifty as I consider this capability, I have to admit there's something fancier: Internet in flight. A colleague emailed me as she crossed the country via plane. Her access cost $7. Necessary? Nope. Nifty? Absolutely.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

Toy Story 2 Quiz Easier Than the GRE

I spent more than a week waffling on committing nearly 3 hours to the Toy Story double feature. I'm not so much a fan of animation even though the 3D Up caught my fancy earlier this year and Wild Things captured my cinema dollars most recently. I also had no fond memories of the Toy Story movies. I didn't know why. I certainly knew of the films. Why wouldn't I have seen them in first release? Ah... look at the year: 1995. I was taking the GRE. So, I went to the local Harkins for the double feature. And found a test in 2009! The intermission tested our knowledge about the characters. When the quiz at the 3-minute mark asked, "What was the name of Jessie's previous owner?" I didn't have a clue. I didn't even know who Jessie was. Happily, the sequel started just 3 minutes later and I learned all about Jessie and Emily. And I delighted that my quiz this year was so much easier than the GRE.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.