Since becoming the one armed bandit this morning, I'm not supposed to move around much today. Not moving, having a two inch wound in my shoulder, not being able to lift my left arm, and general annoyance with life in general all cause me to want comfort food.

And what's better than a chocolate shake for comfort food?

I debated where to go for a chocolate milk shake. The least expensive was, of course, to buy a pint of ice cream from the store and make my own. That would, unfortunately, also require being able to scoop said ice cream out of the container, which I'm not able to do at the moment. So, next option?

Cold Stone Cremery was, of course, an appealing option. Kris really likes Baskin Robbins, so I decided there was fine, and drove, one handed (no small feat with a manual transmission car), to the nearest Baskin Robbins.

While waiting for the woman behind the counter to serve the guy in front of me, I looked around, and noticed a Copyright sign on the wall.

It read:

NOTICE

It is a violation of Federal Copyright Law to copy, draw, outline or reproduce in any manner an identical reproduction or close likeness of any copyrighted material. This includes any trademarked, registered or copyrighted material in cartoons, magazines, television, movies, greeting cards an various other media.

Copyright infringement can incur severe penalties.

NOTICE

Interesting in what it says, because it's wrong. It's a bold faced lie. I most certainly may, without permission, copy a copyrighted piece if I am using it to teach. I can also render a likeness of copyrighted material in a satirical reflection of the material. Oh, and I can also use the copyrighted material to criticize it.

I have to admit at that moment, I was overcome with a very strong urge to take a photo of the 31 logo, JUST to copy it as my new company logo. Wouldn't that be fun?

Anyway, after stewing for a moment, the women behind the counter was able to help me. I ordered a chocolate milk shake, yes, with regular chocolate ice cream, no, not with the fancy chocolate ice creams with fudge or chips or caramel swirls, just chocolate ice cream, please.

I, of course, then made the mistake of looking down and, shock, seeing WORDS! Words, words, WORDS! That means, "READ ME!" in Kitt-speak. The first sentence of the ingredient posting had me laughing.

It read:

We have posted the top eight ingredients (if any) in the products which are mostly likely to cause an allergic reaction in certain people.

"We have posted the top eight ingredients (if any)," indeed! Hi, lady behind the counter, I'd like to change my order to use the chocolate ice cream that doesn't have any ingredients in it. I'm trying to watch my figure, don't you know.

Of course, Baskin Robbins didn't bother to post the ingredients for the products that AREN'T most likely to cause an allergic reation, according to the way the sentence is structured.

And, hey, Baskin Robbins doesn't REALLY care about you. It cares for only CERTAIN people.

Whoever wrote that first sentence would totally have failed my English grammar class (and yes, I used to grade other students' grammar papers when I was in high school - the teacher thought I was a too harsh grader).

Unfortunately, I spent too much time entertained by the sign to stop the, I was begining to realize, retarded woman behind the counter. She, for reasons incomprehensible to me, thought that "chocolate milk shake" meant "chocolate milk" and blended my shake into oblivion. I had to tell her to stop before she actually stopped the blender, and that only after I told her, "If I wanted a chocolate milk, I would have ordered a chocolate milk. I want texture in my milk shake." I didn't manage to stop her in time, and ended up with one of the seven worst chocolate milk shakes ever made.

Of course, discovering the Baskin Robbins plastic straws were sealed in EVEN MORE PLASTIC didn't help either.

Next time, I'm driving to Cold Stone, knife wound or not.

I'm a big fan of bad, late night television. This isn't to say I actually stay up late watching said bad television. On the contrary, I'll stay up late work, and happen to listen to bad television as I work. There's a certain level of "bad" that I enjoy, and enjoy very much. Below that level, however, I'm not interested and turn off the television, choosing silence over crap.

After running the gamut of recorded tivo shows and my Hulu queue, I started browsing the new shows to see what bad television I could find.

Hoo, boy, did I succeed. Battle of the Bods is the PERFECT bad television, reminiscent of Elimidate, which may just have been the pinnacle of awful late night television.

The question Battle of the Bods tries to answer is "Can five women self-rank themselves in the same order as three arbitrarily chosen, but similar in at least one way, men rank them?" by allowing five women to do just that. There are three rounds of ranking: the face, some attribute the women choose by majority, and the full package. Here's how you know the show is bad: of the three episodes I've watched, the chosen attributes of the second round have been: legs, breasts and breast bounce.

Yes, that's good bad television.

I enjoy this show because of the incredible arbitrariness of the ranking process. Here we have five women who are supposed to order themselves in how they believe the men-with-one-similar-attribute will rank them in terms of prettiness.

Supposed to.

What we have instead is five women's egos wrapped up in how pretty each of them believes SHE is, relative to the other women around her. Her belief is based on feedback from the community and culture and world she lives in. If your world, as defined as your perception of the feedback you receive from those and that around you, values Rubenesque models, and you're underweight, face it, you're ugly. If your world is made up of 6' tall black men with small Asian women fetishes, and you're a tall white woman, you're going to be ugly, even if you're Cindy Crawford.

The ranking is completely relative, with five women unable to detach their own egos from the event and realize that, hey, it doesn't matter.

In the initial episodes of the show, the women are catty, ego-centric and small-minded. One woman can't believe the three guys ranked her last, "behind those two ugly bitches, did you look at them?" Honestly, I would have ranked her low, too, but that was mostly on personality. This woman then goes on to say, "If anything, I hopes this shows people they should be nice to each other," just before she says, "look at the receding hairline on number three!"

Because a hairline is all that matters in a mate, she needs to criticize the guys who made her feel small. I suspect "hypocrite" is not in that woman's vocabulary.

Some later episodes are even more entertaining. In one episode, one woman INSISTED that she be placed in the 2nd spot, when the other four women were all in agreement she should be fifth. when the guys ranked the insister 5th, the other women vowed, "She won't lose us any more money!" and dumped her in the 5th spot for the remaining rounds.

Little catty bites are always entertaining, especially when taken in the perspective that THIS MOMENT DOESN'T MATTER. Who cares if some guy ranks me fifth of five women in terms of looks. Am I happy with my life? Yes. Am I able to achieve my dreams and goals if I work hard enough? Yes. Do I really care about those people? No. Neither should those women.

Not that it doesn't make great bad television.

I tell you, I have the bestest friends ever. I mean, how many three year olds will let me help them make chocolate souffles, then NOT EAT THEM, leaving all of the tasty tasty chocolate for me?

I know at least one. We'll have to wait to see if Meter grows up to be number two.

I went up to the Smith's house tonight to spend time with the family. I arrived late, so missed out on helping fix dinner. Best way to make up for it? Make chocolate souffles. Mirabelle helped out and was amazingly good for a three year old. She didn't like the mixer noises, but seemed to love sugaring the ramekins.

We used the easy chocolate recipe from the New York Times that Mom brought over when she was out. It uses eggs and sugar as the roux, which is weird, but effective. The eggs from Andy's chickens are AMAZING. Other than just the dark dark yolks, they also beat into stiff peaks really easily, and without cream of tartar.

Kris and his coworker Frank were talking a couple weeks ago about running. Frank commented that his best 400m time was 90 seconds. "Pshaw!!" Kris comments, "I can do that backwards!" They continued to joke around, and eventually ended up with the bet that Kris couldn't run the 400m in under three minutes.

Once I heard about the bet, I asked that they wait until I arrive, in order to see it in its full glory. They waited, but only just barely.

After Kris crushed the time (I really wish I had yelled "2:40!" instead of "1:40!" to see what he would have done), we all went out for fish and chips, and talked about the bet. There was a side bet between Frank and Joe that Kris would fall over backwards at some point on the run. Now, that's a safe bet if I were running, not so much with Kris. So, Joe, here, is the ultimate backwards bet loser.

One of them suggested building a site about all the bets they make in the office. Apparently, they can make a bet about ANYTHING, and pretty much do. The "double or nothing" bet is nearly as common. I suggested a twitter feed of their bets, for the entertainment of the world. They all agreed it was a great idea, then realized that none of them twitter.

Sigh.

Maybe I should have bet them they couldn't twitter all of their bets for a month. THAT one I'd win.

I spent most of today at Scott Berkun's O'Reilly workshop / talk / Master Class How to Lead Breakthrough Projects. I've been following his blog for a while now, happily reading various posts, articles and such, but had never heard him speak. Given the Carnegie Mellon connection, I was curious to hear him speak, and figured, eh, discount, semi-interesting topic, sure, let's go.

The workshop (gah! I have no idea what to call it since it wasn't exactly a class, and wasn't exactly a workshop, and certainly wasn't a talk-at-you talk, so let's just call it a workshop and be happy with it, eh?) started off with the 18 of us trying to define "innovation." After much hemming and hawing, Scott suggested we never use the word again. It's an overloaded, overused word that is so vague it's applicable anything new (because, giving the correct, relative perspective, ANYTHING is innovative).

I can handle that.

Throughout the class, Scott had us go through various exercises. In order to do this effectively, we were divided up into groups of four or five, which worked well because of the room layout and seating configuration. One team was Team Shazam. My team was Team Mischief, which freaked Scott out briefly as teams rarely name themselves (clearly I named our team).

The first exercise we did was to design a product using three words from a list of forty words we threw out. My first word was "frisbee," which I used as a defense when Scott called on me and asked me for an adjective.

You know that deer in the headlights look people get when they're put on the spot? Yeah, that's what I had. My only defense when he said, "Yes, I'm looking at you in the front row. An adjective please," was "But I gave you frisbee!"

So, Team Mischief came up with the Spin Master 3000, an exclusive micro chainsaw frisbee which trimmed hedges with a flick of the wrist. As my fellow teammates commented, "it's a good thing he didn't ask for realistic product pitches." I wanted to go with the slenderizing, musical underwear which sent out subsonic vibrations which made the wearer nauseous and therefore thinner by not interested in eating. The chainsaw won.

What amazed me in the group as we were both innovating our produce and developing our pitch, was just how easily pitch development was for the other people. I don't consider myself clueless in the area, but I did feel 12 years old when my suggestions were immediately discounted by a teammate who clearly had more training in the pitch development area.

Which sorta led to other suggestions by Scott, which included having an enviroment where people are comfortable to experiment, knowing they're protected in some way, with people willing to be laughed at, but continue on anyway.

Following rules from improv comedy also helps to spur innovation. Instead of shutting down an idea, the rules suggest finding a part that works and building upon it using the conjunction "Yes, and..." Don't use "no," or "yes, but..."

Apparently, in addition to a comfortable group, you also need well defined roles (or people will continue with power positioning) and a direction (so you're all going the same way). Recognizing fears, so that they can be addressed, and stopping idea killers, so that they don't stop the ideas, are also quite important in creating a breakthrough idea. Having a visible output is also important: handing ideas over a wall to die will stop suggestions and new ideas might quick.

Scott is writing a new book on public speaking and wanted some input on why people sit in the front row. Since I was sitting in the front row, he came up to talk to me during lunch. Why, oh, why did I sit in the front row? I had intended on sitting in the second row, but the first row was empty, so why not? I let Scott know I sat in the front row for several reasons:

I expected him to be an engaging speaker and wanted to be able to interact with him (my deer in the headlines reaction, not withstanding).

It's easier to go to the bathroom when you're in the front row, if the front row is close to the door.

The second reason led into a discussion about the easiest escape routes from a talk. He commented that the front row at many conferences is empty, to which I responded, sure, because the conference attendees don't KNOW that it's empty and that there are seats available. People often crowd by the door in the back and leave the front row open simply because they don't know about the seats.

The front row usually means being put on the spot (Deer. Headlights.), which many people dislike. I don't particularly like that everyone behind me can read my screen when I'm in the front row, though I usually keep my monitor dimmed enough that viewing is difficult. Then there's the whole embarrassment factor in a nutshell: having people stare at my near bald head for an entire presentation doesn't exactly fill me with longing.

Oh, what? My head isn't near bald anymore? Yay, double whorl!

As for the random thoughts during the class/workshop/presentation...

1. Scott Berkun's hands are big.

2. The guy behind me in class had not one, not two, not three but SIX moleskines with him. The first three he had out on the desk I asked about. One was a sketch book, one was an idea book and one was a scratch book. And I thought my two books and my index cards were overkill. I've been trying to reduce that load. Perhaps I should increase it.

3. Scott has been out of school long enough to be unable to draw an exponentially or even geometrically decaying graph. If you have 18 ideas before you start (read: the zeroth step), and 12 die at the first step, and 3 die at the fourth step, you won't have a linear -1 slope. I suspect I'm the only one who cared.

4. You know how you can be "in the moment" at a movie, how the story line and characters are engaging, the music subtle enough to be unnoticable and the actors are good enough that you forget they're actors. Then, at some point, something absurd happens and you're pulled out of the moment, and you're aware that you're sitting in a dark room with a bunch of other people, slackjawed staring at a big white screen that has pictures projected onto it at the rate of 24 frames a second (or 30 if you're watching television). For me, the call to "Intubate!" on every freaking medical show or movie is what does it for me. I cringe at the near 100% intubation rate, and often worry that I may be intubated for a migraine if I stumble into a hospital looking for a bathroom.

Scott is an engaging enough speaker that I frequently found myself lost in the moment of his presentaion, happily following everything he said, thinking, "Hey, yeah! That's right!" or "Yeah! Me, too!" Oddly enough, I found missing capitalization on some of his slides pulling me out of the moment and back into local awareness. Usually grammar mistakes or speaking mannerisms will pull me out ("Um" and "Uh" and loud smacking of lips will both drive me insane and ruin a presenation), but this is the first time incorrect capitalization has done it for me.
I find this very odd, as I enjoyed the whole workshop.

5. I am Scott Berkun's best friend.

Yeah, just google for "Scott Berkun's best friend" now and see whose name shows up. I even have documentation to prove it.

Of course, Scott's comment, "Hey, you paid for the book. I'll put whatever you want in it. People don't seem to believe me when I say that," might put a small damper on that statement, but let's go with it.