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Bitly Shoots Itself in the Foot and Eats its Own Toes

Bitly — formerly one of my favorite link shortening services — shot itself in the foot this week and ate its own toes in releasing an incredibly confounding and confused “update” to what was once a perennially pristine service that was dead nut simple to use.

Now, when you login to Bitly, you are presented with this horrible screen that talks about “Bitmarks” and other junk that makes no sense.  Where is my update box for Twitter and Facebook? All I want to is shorten my links with the Boles.co domain and have the update sent to Twitter and Facebook!  I can’t find a simple way to make those menial tasks happen any longer.

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Invoking the Cross and the Gun

We rely on stereotypes a bit too much in the theatre to provide a crafted, but logistical, shorthand for wringing out the emotion from our audiences.  How easy is it to invoke the Angel and the Badge to provoke push-button reactions?  We must always be wary before invoking the Cross and the Gun.

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How to Evaluate Effectiveness

Few of us are taught how to provide effective feedback when we’re dealing with an artistic creation.  In my classes, I do not allow the use of “good” or “bad” in a critique because nobody has any real, shared, sense of what those value judgments mean in the scheme of the overall community.

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One Bad Apple: Going App-less on the iPhone 3G

Apple has set forth upon us a bad iPhone 3G — and if you dare to complain about it — or find ways to hope to deal with the matter on the official Apple forums… you will be silenced with the deletion of your discussion thread.

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Usain Bolt Loses While Winning Gold

Saturday night — 6-foot-5-inch Usain Bolt of Jamaica — won the 100-meter race at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and, in grabbing the gold, he lost so much more.

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Why Christie Brinkley is a Bad Mother

We were disgusted by the circus that was Christie Brinkley’s divorce.  She set that brutality in the center of the public square for our stoning and scrutiny.  We believe Ms. Brinkley is a bad mother because no good mother would ever purposefully exploit the welfare of her children by mocking and embarrassing their father on television and in reams of newsprint.

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Good News Bad News

Do you see a Good News/Bad News story in the image below? If so, tell us what you see.

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Bad Baby Signs

After the wild success of our book, Hand Jive: American Sign Language for Real Life, for Barnes and Noble Publishing, Janna and I have been searching for just the right project to continue our perpetuation of, and love for, ASL. We are still building our Online ASL Classroom and we thought about doing a traditional Baby Signs book, but we felt the market was saturated and the money and contracts we were offered were never quite right with any mainstream publisher. We love the idea of going against the mainstream meme and providing an antidote — an antithesis, if you will — to the Baby Signs Movement by creating Bad Baby Signs: Words No Infant Should Know!

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Die Sopranos Die!

I have never been a big Sopranos fan. The acting on the show has been generally pretty good, but I never drank from the Sopranos well of dedicated fanaticism and I missed the first few years of the show when they originally aired.
I am now caught up on all the episodes and — after watching last night’s dreadful “Final Episode” — I am left, once again, wondering what all the fuss was about over a mediocre show.

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Bury Bad News on Friday: Saturday is Dead

We all know if you want to release bad national news you do it on the weekend when no one is reading blogs or newspapers or watching: Bad News Runs into Weekends!

Run It On Friday!

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