Pre-Ramble: If there are two things that deserve our attention as we head into 2010, it’s neuroscience and cake mix. I’m talking about recent scientific breakthroughs as they relate to middle-aged mind power and the astounding news that General Mills’ Betty Crocker has 50,000 fans on Facebook.

Brain science first — According to NY Times health editor Barbara Strauch, many long held views around the decline of the aging human brain have been reconsidered.  The propensity to forget names and be easily distracted from tasks has now been reframed to suggest that … (what was I talking about? … )

“… What is stuffed into your head may not have vanished, but has simply been squirreled away in the folds of your neurons.” 

I’ll own that I have gotten more squirrely with age, but I’m pretty sure my neurons are more rumpled than folded.  New research claims that brains, with just a little strategic maintenance, continue to develop through and well beyond middle age.  The trick is to “keep brain connections in good shape and to grow more of them.” Probably easier said than done. Apparently, every moment that passes unawares is an opportunity lost toward building and maintaining precious neural pathways. It’s a wonder more of us aren’t wandering the halls of the care center with drool on our cardigans.

It seems that, as adults, we have developed a series of well-worn pathways among the connectors/synapses in our brains. Dr. Kathleen Taylor, professor at St. Mary’s College of California suggests that these synapses should be “jiggled a bit” by confronting people, situations and ideas that are contrary to one’s usual fare.  We need to ”crack the cognitive egg and scramble it up” in order to create what Jack Mezirow, professor emeritus at Columbia Teachers College, calls a “disorienting dilemma” … a situation or phenomenon that causes one to “critically reflect on the assumptions they’ve acquired.” 

Snappy synapses – Well, if that’s the way this works, I must have the healthiest neural pathways in the Universe. Since the dawn of the digital age, I have been subjected to a daily assortment of “disorienting dilemmas” … word processing, email, instant messaging, texting, skyping, podcasts, paypal, google groups … and the barrage of confounding technological developments doesn’t show any signs of letting up. Social media of every ilk is clamoring for attention … Facebook, LinkedIn, … apps for this and apps for that … and the scariest thing with the cutest name – Twitter. Everybody is going on about how Twitter is revolutionizing the world, and if a guy wants to even try to keep up with society they should start sending uber-witty Tweets to a whole bunch of people ASAP. 

If she can do it …  Cut to Golden Valley, Minnesota where traditional marketing methods at the Betty Crocker test kitchens have given way to aggressive forays into the land of social media. Forget bake-offs and box tops … old-school Betty Crocker has a thriving Facebook page and an iPhone app that lets users check recipes and kibitz with top chef experts. 

… Betty Crocker!?!  No stagnant synapses there!  The perky gal in the apron has been operating on the cutting edge of technology since 1926 when her radio debut signaled the nation’s first cooking show. (The broadcast featured thirteen different actresses working from radio stations across the country and ran for twenty-four years.)

The Take-Away:  Heck! If she can do it, … I can do it!  Betty is keeping her synapses sharp by staying on top of new media trends. We can all take a page out of her book on that!

Post-Note:  Ok, so even though I am clinging to the outer edges of the technological footprint that God intended for me, maybe it wouldn’t kill me to tweak my tech-neurons a little bit more.  Setting up a Twitter account is probably pretty straightforward. I’m even thinking that crafting messages made up of no more than 140 characters could be considered fun …  … I guess the real dilemma is convincing myself that:

a) I have the time and inclination to stop what I’m doing several times a day to send out a pithy communique; and

b) I have the kind of noteworthy swagger that merits mass communication.  (Who besides Ashton Kutcher does really?) 

Am I ready to be tethered to a constant technology-based duty that is fraught with outside expectations?  (I will be the first to admit that I hid, sabotaged or otherwise destroyed my kids’ Tamagotchi nano-pets back in the mid-90’s.)  … Hmmmm …… maybe I’ll just have another piece of super-moist chocolate cake and ponder that.

Pre-Ramble:  I almost want to hide under my bed for a couple of days until this all blows over, or at least until a third event happens to take the curse off.  I’m talking about crashes. 

First there was the “give-us-a-reality-show-couple” who crashed the state dinner at the White House last Tuesday night.  And then there was the curious case of Tiger Woods crashing his SUV into a tree at 2:30 in the morning … (… and his wife Elin broke into the vehicle with a golf club? … Really??)

I know what you’re thinking here. If history serves, the third crash should be coming any minute now, and it’s more than likely to be my computer. As you may recall, I have had the unfortunate distinction of having my computer crash twice in a two year period. (Surely, you could hear the kvetching and screaming from there … )

First, it was a faulty “reader arm” (!) … The second time, … I forget what the reason was (more like, I am blocking the trauma from conscious memory) … But I clearly remember that it wasn’t pretty, and I still have the dead hard drive right here on my desk to remind me to count my blessings (and back up my data) every day. 

The Take-Away: Just a gentle holiday reminder to back up your data, … and while you’re at it, buckle up your seat belt, eat all your vegetables, and don’t forget to floss. 

Post-Note: I’m not really superstitious, but if you don’t hear from me for the next 6 months, you’ll know what happened.  … ( … You don’t suppose that keeping the fried hard drive court-side brings bad Karma to my chi, do you?)

Pre-Ramble:  The following post was recently written (by me, as a contributing editor) for the PUSH Institute.  Founded by visionary Cecily Sommers, PUSH is an organization that monitors under-the-radar technologies, markets, people, and ideas that are pushing the future in new directions, and divines their implications for business, government, and nonprofit sectors in the years ahead … all to foster and promote “strategic foresight.” (And who couldn’t use a little of that?)  Check out PUSH at the link above!

So, here is the post.  It’s about the role of typography in the modern marketplace … (this kind of thing is really fascinating to us “designer types” … )

________________________________________

I was blown away the first time my accountant used the “f” word.  Since when does a bean counter talk bold face and italics?

B.C. (before computers) the word “font” was exclusive to graphic design.  Basically, unless you were a card carrying “creative,” you never had meaningful access to the secret society of typography. (Afterall, there are rules about this stuff … when typography falls into the wrong hands, all kinds of illegible things can happen.)

Anyone who has practiced the fine art of graphic design prior to the main-stream presence of word processing knows what I’m talking about. If I start waxing on about “keylining” or the living hell of “type spec-ing” you have my permission to slap my wrists with your pica ruler (google it). Let’s just say that, like nearly every aspect of our modern way of life, the design field, and specifically the manipulation of typography, has been literally transformed by technology.

In his classic tome, Designing with Type (1971), James Craig reveals the back story on all things typography — symbolic pictographs, ideographs, and early alphabets like Phoenician, Greek and Roman. Craig discusses the anatomy of a letter and common font terminology like: uppercase, lowercase, x-height, ascender, descender, counter, serif, san serif, boldface, italic, condensed, extended, leading, point size, punctuation marks, and the beloved “ampersand” … &.

When it comes to specific fonts, Craig has his favorites and goes into great depth on five classics that he believes provide a “standard by which to judge/evaluate all typefaces” — Garamond, Baskerville, Bodoni, Century Expanded, and Helvetica. I’m guessing that he would look askance at some of the fonts I’ve uncovered in my research here.

I’d invite Prof. Craig to contrast the Bodoni cap “S,” for example, with a cap “S” configuration designed by Estonian font designers, Vladimir and Maksim Loginov, made out of biscuit dough (biscuit alphabet shown above right). The brothers Loginov specialize in developing “unique, untraditional fonts.”  From the myraid samples offered on their website, I’d say they have exceeded this expectation.

The Take-Away: If you’re still thinking that nothing could be more pedestrian than font design, fasten your seatbelts and take a look at the iQ Font project by Pierre Smeets and Damian Aresta. I’d bet large sums of money that the genesis of this idea occurred in a dorm room somewhere.

iQ font – When driving becomes writing / Full making of from wireless on Vimeo.

Pre-Ramble:  Look out! As of yesterday afternoon, I am the proud owner and captain of my very own iPhone 3GS.  That’s right, mild-mannered, tech-challenged me is packing “the fastest most powerful iPhone yet”…  … featuring up to 32 gigabytes of storage, voice control, video recording, cut and paste functions, and a bunch of other cool stuff that I don’t even understand. 

Apparently, I now carry the technological equivalent of NASA, a Swiss army knife, and a concierge right here in my purse.  This multi-functional object works as a cell phone, text-messaging center, email access, Internet hook-up, gaming arcade, jukebox, restaurant guide, movie camera (and editing table), calendar, to-do list, directional compass, GPS unit, and ”virtual” coin flipper… it even has a backyard bird guide!  How on earth did I get through a day without this thing?   

As is the case with most every product released by Apple, the iPhone 3GS is as close to design perfection as you can get. Its sleek, curved styling and clean simple functionality are a wonder to behold, and the crisp, brightly lit icon buttons communicate so well that even the most tech-unworthy among us can summon up the intuitive gumption to grasp their meaning. 

Apple has elevated the shopping experience around its products to an art form.  The classy glass entryway and underground orientation of its premiere NYC location (shown above) evoke I.M. Pei’s Louvre Museum in Paris. Even at our local mall here in Minnesota, the Apple store has a unique and exciting atmosphere. You walk into the stark, but bustling, white, bleached-wood gallery/playground environment and are immediately greeted by the first tier of the Apple staff hierarchy, a chipper team of ”associates” in orange t-shirts. Once the assessment has been made as to the objective of your visit, you are upgraded to an associate in a blue t-shirt. (Our’s was named Drew.)

The tech-wizard will see you now … The guys (and gals) in the blue shirts (the tech-hip equivalent of a starched white lab coat), are young, friendly, laid-back and highly knowledgeable around all things tech. Techiness reeks out of their  pores. They have official ID badges on lanyards; two-way transmission ear buds; and wifi, pocket-rocket cash registers strapped to their belts. These combination brand evangelist, nurse practitioner, tech-wizards, flawlessly walk you through the pertinent points of their presentation, citing competitive advantages and nifty features, and emitting invisible rays of wisdom so deep they must be all but able to divine your most hidden thoughts. The overarching vibe we got from Drew was, ”you’re safe, you’re in good hands, it’s cool, and it’s all good.”

So, you decide on the couple of options available on the unit — amount of memory (16 or 32 gigabytes … apparently both are beyond a TON of storage capacity … my sales associate confided that even he, in all his uber-techiness, had trouble filling up the 16GB unit) and color (black or white … black seemed the way to go), and then you head over to the accessories wall … some particulars:

• While the unit comes with a charging cable and headset, you need some way to recharge it on the road.  The Griffin “PowerJolt” seems to fit the bill (we’ll see … my newbie phone still has it’s original charge). 
• An anti-glare film protector is also a must, to ward off 99% of the scratches, dust, dirt, smudges and fingerprints that could mar your pristine and inherently fragile touch screen. Comes in a two-pack.
• You also definitely want a cover – something grippy and bouncy, so when you drop the thing, it has some kind of chance at survival. My daughters recommend the “incase” brand slider case … pliable enough to hug the phone, but firm enough to retain it’s shape (some of the cases made out of the more “rubbery” materials will actually stretch out over time, becoming baggy and flopping off the edge of the phone … not good — too easy to bobble the unit).

So, there you are. A few clicks on the remote cash register, the grand swipe of the credit card, and you’re good to go!  I hope this has been a useful and informative play-by-play on the iPhone 3GS purchase process. Stay tuned for future posts on user-interface pointers, foibles, etc. …

The Take-Away: By far, the best part about the whole iPhone 3GS scenario was the tech-envy incited by my new toy in my beloved teenage children. I swear, I was floating a few gigameters off the floor as we left the mall, while my daughter trudged along, shaking her head all, “Mom, you have no idea how much stuff that thing can do …” as though I were some 95-year-old granny crawling out of the parking lot in a spanking new Maserati Granturismo S.  

… SO, WE’RE EVEN — beauty is wasted on youth, and cutting-edge technology is wasted on us old farts!

Post-Note:  Thanks Drew — great job – I’m off to leap tall buildings! … And, as I mentioned on the sales floor, should I have any little questions or issues, I’ll be sure to text you.

Pre-Ramble: So, let’s see if that link-to-the-email relay mechanism really works … (and if you’re just joining us, I added a new feature to the site that can send a note to your email when I post a new blog. To sign up, just enter your email address into the field in the upper left-hand corner where it says “Enter your email address” … ). 

Theoretically, if you entered your email address into that little block area after my earlier test posting, a note that I just posted this blog entry should pop into your email. Or, if you entered you email address just now, a note will pop into your email the next time I post something.

Phew – this high-tech stuff is complicated! (My kids are currently rolling on the floor laughing at my attempt to describe something so simple that they can do it in their sleep.)

The Take-Away: Well, enough admin housekeeping — stay tuned for my next actual blog … something insightful, informative and/or entertaining … blah … blah.  In the meanwhile, it would really be helpful if you could send me a quick note through the “responses” function below to let me know whether the email feed worked for you or not.

Pre-Ramble:  Several of my semi-regular readers have asked if there was a way that I could let them know when I post a new blog, so they won’t miss it, or so they won’t spend valuable screen time checking in on my site every other minute to see if a new entry has been posted.

So, I asked my tech guy about it and he said, “Yep, there’s a way to do that.”

About three minutes later, he sent me an email that said, “Look in the upper left hand corner of your site and see if that is what you were thinking of.”

So, I looked at it, and sure ’nuff – that was it!

So, now … if you’d like a quick prompt to pop into your email to let you know when I’ve posted a new blog entry on the “K” site, just enter your email address into the handy space on the upper left side of the homepage screen that says, “Enter your email address” and then click on the “Subscribe” button below it.

Poof!  … News of a fresh “K” blog will enter your world whenever I post one on the site.

Hold your applause – I’d like to check and see whether this actually works and would very much appreciate it if a couple of you Beta Canaries-in-the-mineshaft could enter your email address as described above and let me know if the loop follows through. 

Please note: No one will ever see the email address that you enter (not even me – it’s just a relay mechanism); I will not sell any email address that is entered for this purpose on my site (can’t - I won’t know what they are); and entering your email address will not cause any form of additional spam to come into your inbox. You have my word on that.

The Take-Away:  So, now, due to modern technology, and my super techmeister, Clay – you will never miss a single “K” blog post.  All is right with the world!!

Pre-Ramble:  My kids are all over this Mother’s Day thing. They know just what I like – nothing too expensive or over the top, and preferably, something that they had a hand in making themselves.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I loved the rake I got last year, we needed one and it has come in really handy. I also love flowers, of course … Mother Nature’s perfect blend of beautiful colors, shapes and scents, gathered in a bundle to look at in the house. I love all of that.

But, try as they might to identify and present the perfect gift, children have no way of knowing that they are able to surpass the surface value of that effort by one-thousand-million times just by being. 

This year, knowing that I am constantly struggling to keep up with the times, particularly in light of my deficit in tech-skills, my girls presented me with a cardboard cut-out of an Apple iPhone and my very first iTunes gift card… !  They told me that I could practice buying songs from the iTunes store for my iPod (a hand-me-down from my husband that I use when I go running), and if I had mastered that by the time my birthday rolled around this summer, I could graduate to my very own iPhone… just in time for 3.0! (My girls each have an iPhone and I accost them regularly with requests to check the day’s weather forecast, find directions to somewhere, or check out some other neat new app.)

While their gift might seem self-serving (I don’t know how to use the iTunes store, or my iPod, for that matter), it is actually their way of sharing a piece of themselves and of their lives that I could never buy in any store.  In sharing their experience as a member of the generation into which they were born (thank you very much), they are in essence, nudging me out to the edge of the nest … welcoming me into a piece of their world, and teaching me the secret handshake.  They know that I want to know how all of this works, I just need a little help. (Ok, a lot of help.)

The Take-Away:  The greatest gift we can ever receive as parents is the knowledge that, while our children no longer necessarily need us to be a part of their lives, they want us there.  I am the luckiest mother in the world.

Post-Note: I forgot to mention that a CD of hand-picked songs to play in my car was also part of this year’s Mother’s Day package.  This is particularly significant and meaningful because, along with the CD, they were able to show me where the CD player was in my new car.  

Seriously — I have been driving that thing for several months now and, for the life of me, was not able to find the damn CD player.  (And it wasn’t just me — the boys down at the dealership couldn’t find it either. In their defense, it was a used car and maybe they just weren’t familiar with this make and model … )

My daughters ushered me into the garage to sit in the car, pushed some random button, and like a scene out of the Transformers, whole chunks of the dashboard morphed around to reveal the elusive slot.  I almost cried.

Pre-Ramble:  When I got out of bed this morning the sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and life was good. Little did I know that the power and reach of modern technology would be able to foul my day so swiftly and completely.

You’re probably thinking, “OH NO, Kath had another traumatic computer event … POOR THING, … third time in three years… she should just cash it in and take up knitting.”

Or maybe you’re thinking that another hideous photo of me has been tagged on Facebook. (This would be true, but isn’t the source of my woes this morning.)

Contrary to the massively unspectacular spread of  H1N1, you may be concerned that my system has contracted some sort of  debilitating virus … which, thankfully, is not the case.

No - it is far more insidious than any of those things …

… this morning I had an email message in my inbox from the Minnesota Golf Association (MGA) … giving me an update on MY CURRENT GOLF HANDICAP!

Thanks.  Thanks for that.  No amount of coffee can prepare a person for such a rude assault … and so early in the day.  This intrusion is clearly out of bounds.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the sport (and let me congratulate you on your ignorance), the golf handicap system was introduced by the USGA (United States Golf Association) in the early 20th Century.

With a handicapping system, a weaker player is given strokes on certain holes on a golf course. That is, on a particular hole, the weaker player may be allowed to “take a stroke,” i.e., deduct a stroke from his or her score for that hole.  At the end of the round, the two players of differing abilities can figure their “net score,” i.e., their gross minus the strokes they were allowed to take/deduct … A player’s official USGA Handicap Index is derived from a complicated formula that takes into account adjusted gross score, course rating and slope rating.

Simple.  And apparently, “once armed with a course handicap, a golfer is ready to play on an equal basis with any other golfer in the world.” (I’ll take that bet.)

The Take-Away: Look – I know that I am a bad golfer…  Anyone who has played with me knows that I am a bad golfer … Certainly, by the steady uptrend of the ridicules scores I have posted over the past couple of years, the folks at the MGA know that I am a bad golfer… So, do we really need to revisit that fact?  

I think what we have established here is that, not only is technology capable of pointing out (via some intra-meta-tech twist) that I am technologically challenged, but it also has the capacity to remind me, in an unnecessarily cruel random-hit form of technological water-boarding, that I am a severely challenged golfer as well. Perhaps, as with the technosphere, the Universe is suggesting that I should consider trading in the clubs for a set of knitting needles?

Post Note: I have news for both cyberspace and the MGA – I have already staked my claim in this realm, and have the hand-knit, two-inch wide scarf/jumprope to prove it.

Pre-Ramble: According to Wired Magazine’s Scott Brown, the dynamic of Internet communications is turning us into a virtual community of stand-up comedians. His premise is that when we communicate online, we’re all vying for the attention, approval and esteem of the vast “out-there,” and we use the elusive mechanism of humor to engage our audience. He describes the ”unleashed energies of millions of amateur comedians” in this way:

Thanks to the digital hive mind, comedy is colloquy, everything is material and life has become one big writer’s room … a massive clusterchuckle of witty oneupsmanship.

Beyond mere humor, Brown cites “insight” as the basic currency of the information economy. Here, unexpected and/or ironic combinations of current events, issues, ideas and images draw upon the elements of “memory, annotation, contrast and collage” to create a unique type of “resonant” communication. The goal is to wield a blend of one’s personal area(s) of expertise, creativity, and wordsmithing prowess to spark a new awareness, or even better, elicit a response from an audience.

You can’t execute a high-quality social media communication without being either outright funny, clever, snarky, cutesy, or over-the-top enthusiastic (extreme use of capital letters and exclamatory punctuation). Deep knowledge around a variety of obscure, random or very cool, people, events and factoids is imperative.

The new comedy-based standard also brings out our competitive edge. There is definitely a smack-down quality to the parry and thrust of internet banter … a combination wit-fest and blogslam. Listen for the virtual fist-pumps as millions of master-hipster-quippers hit the “send” button. 

Brown suggests that “funny” is becoming a language unto itself, the “lingua franca of the wired world.”  Huh?  See, right there, I just got nicked by an obscure, foreign-language-based quip — “lingua franca” sounds really cool, but I have no idea what means, so, I’ll have to take a quick click over to wikipedia to look the damn thing up… (Brown-1, Emmons-0)

The Take-Away: Wow, this is unfortunate — I have nothing clever, insightful or informative to offer here.

Post-Note:  In a nod to stupid pet tricks, a byproduct of the imperative to be entertaining is that stupidness has been elevated to an art form. Case in point, the Lolcat series. (”Lol” as in text-message speak for “laugh-out-loud,” and “cat” as in … well, cat …, the lethargic house-pet.) People upload pictures of cats doing things that cats do (like lying around, or walking on the backs of couches) accompanied with a headline or some kind of dialogue that enhances what the cat is doing or thinking. People take turns trying to come up with a clever headline or dialogue, and still others vote on which headline or dialogue is the best. While I have spent a good fifteen minutes on the site, as a devout cat-hater, I refuse to concede that this phenomenon is in any way funny.

If you want funny, go to YouTube and listen to the Dane Cook rif on Bees and Sharks:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AtP0ctTQY4… (Warning: look out for some foul language.)

Pre-Ramble: I’ve decided to start an occasional feature on my site called, “In their Own Words,” where I share some truism or particularly incredible turn of phrase.  Here is a notable observation by a guy named Chris Anderson on his website, The Long Tail, regarding emerging social networking forums:

… [while] Twitter and other microblogging [mechanisms can make] lifecasting and other status updating easier, for most people it still feels like another obligation, taking time to do well and causing guilt when neglected.

I could not agree more, but before I go into that, I need to mention here that I casually clicked the “about” button on Chris’ site to get a little background on who he is, what he does, etc.

Ok – Duh. Chris Anderson is the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. Wired Magazine! As in, the keys to the kingdom for tech-trend-savvy folks (or wannabes). Chris Anderson is the wizard of all things tech. To cite something that he has to say about the dynamics of social networking as meaningful, is like saying a ripped guy named Laird can surf. Cut to me showing up at Teahupo’o Reef in floaties and a nose plug. 

To his point: And, Chris is so right about the double bind of social networking. While it is amazing and empowering to be able to share random thoughts, photos and even video with potentially millions of people, attending to what is essentially a constant chorus of calls to come out and play can be a serious time-buster. Do I actually need to know that you just moved your dark load from the washer to the dryer? That you have a front-loader? That it was set on “fluff”? That a brown sock went missing?

Or worse – I’ve been “tagged,” obligating me to list the top 25 things that I would want to have with me on a desert island. Except, I can’t just rattle off any old response; the self-imposed standards of my inner perfectionist dictate that this list has to be not only carefully considered, it has to be witty, hip, entertaining and express my true inner self. Shit. That kind of deliberation can take the better part of an afternoon – if I’m lucky. So,… either I indulge the well-meaning friend who sent it… or, I blow it off and risk alienating my friend and coming across as a royal-stick-in-the-mud-buzz-kill in front of the whole Internet.

The Take-Away: Learning how to manage time and maximize effort in this new online world will take some doing. As with reality shows, shoe shopping, cocktails, and now Facebooking, Twittering and the like, we’ll need to master some degree of moderation. And, we’ll just have to face facts - when it comes time to head out to the desert island, some of us will be prepared, and some won’t.