Miscellaneous

/ Don

You Work For Her

A dozen years ago, I was sitting in the senior design lab at Ferris State University with the soon-to-be graduating class. Looking around the room, it was hard not to notice that I was only one of three guys in the room. My freshman year, close to fifty students had gathered in the survey courses. Whittled down to a dozen through the pressures of the program and a rigorous portfolio review, I found myself within the gender minority. In fact, all the professors of my core classes were also women.

Last fall, partially due to an increasing percentage of my studio‘s clientele being female, we rebranded the company to better appeal to women. This Spring, looking up from a dozen concurrent projects, I realized that, other than a few long-term clients from the previous decade, 100% of the projects I was working on were for women. Even those accounts built on the life and work of men were being driven and managed by female liaisons. And the digital peripherals of the design world also have afforded me the privilege of working with a rising number of women stars—notably Krystyn Heide (@SquareGirl) of SquareSpace and Caroline Schnapp (@CarolineSchnapp) of Shopify.

It makes perfect sense, when you think about it. Read more

/ Don

Verizon’s $30 “Upgrade” Fee

The following is a post from a friend that I thought was interesting enough to add to the blog. As I don’t have a category for bad business practices (despite such posts as:  Don’t Upgrade Quickbooks, Overdue Casualties of the Recession, Free, Online, Too,  Free, Online, Adventures in Small Business Banking, A Representative will be with You Shortly, Network Solutions is Utter Garbage, Guaranteed Value vs. Value Assessments (or MyPanera vs. My Starbucks Rewards), Sears v. NJCEP v. PSE&G v. Sears (again), Goodbye Windows Mobile, etc.), I’ll settle will categorizing this post under Rants. However, consider Verizon added to my Bad Businesses List.

Hello,

I just wanted to share my recent discussion with a Verizon representative over the chat feature. I felt like I was in the land of Orwell’s double speak. My mother-in-law’s phone isn’t working and I needed to replace it. Our free phone every two years option was not used since we don’t use all of the bells and whistles and we like saving the new phone for when we actually needed a phone. So I went to check out my “free” phone and saw an “upgrade fee” of $30 dollars.

Confused with the charge on my free phone I opened a chat window and chatted with the nice Verizon representative. Here is a copy and paste of the conversation:

Read more

/ Don

Did Tom Waits Inspire Heath Ledger’s Joker?

Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker in The Dark Knight is legendary. So is Tom Waits.

If these thoughts seem disconnected, you clearly need to watch this video.

The 1979 Australian TV interview with then 29-year-old Waits has been making the viral rounds on the Internet this weekend, and for good reason — Waits’ voice is virtually indistinguishable from Ledger’s memorably creepy Joker. The only difference? Waits is speaking this way in real life.

Also worth noting is interviewer Don Lane’s impressive — and presumably unintentional — rendition of Phil Hartman’s Frank Sinatra impression.

The two share a genuinely awkward (read: hilarious) conversation — witness Waits struggling to sit up and Lane attempting to avoid second-hand smoke to no avail.

Ledger’s extreme commitment to his role as The Joker has been a topic of interest for years, particularly after the actor’s untimely death.

But it seems that a little credit may be due to Waits’s unique voice — and perhaps even his casually bizarre demeanor.

Found on Mashable