I'm Not Anthony

Recent Media Diet — October 2024

Last month, I posted about things I've read, watched or listened to recently, so I thought I'd come back for another round. Maybe we'll get to three months in November, and then it's a pattern! Read The King Street Affair, by Jon

Black and white photo of a white Chevrolet truck with many stickers, including the Sex Pistols and the England flag.

Recent Media Diet – September 2024

I don't publish here regularly, so I thought I'd try something out and see if it sticks at all. Here's a sampling of things I've read, watched or listened to recently: Read The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson This is book

Let's Help Cure Childhood Cancer Together

For the fifth year, Relay FM podcasting network and the community of listeners, friends, podcasters and friends of listeners are raising money to support St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. As part of the campaign, anyone can create their own fundraiser to support it, and this year I'

I Got to Live in the Future for 12 Days

It feels like I'm the last person in the U.S. to drive an EV for the first time, but my recent need for bodywork on my main car (a Honda hybrid) presented me with the opportunity to try out living with a fully electric vehicle for a

Here's what I've been up to lately, and what I'm doing in 2023

Tooting My Own Horn At the end of 2021, I left my full-time job and launched a consulting company called Fanfare Studio. My goal with Fanfare is to help organzations of all sizes get the right messages in front of the right audiences, whether that's through communications strategy,

public relations Featured

Advice and Resources for Musicians who Want Better Media Coverage

My education was in music, but my career has primarily been in advertising and public relations, even though I also still play and teach. In my experience, musicians have all the skills necessary to be effective at PR and marketing but often have to learn the hard way how to

Pokemon Go

Sorry, you already missed the "Pokemon Go" train

It's the new sensation that's sweeping the nation, and you, intrepid marketer, are sitting there wondering (perhaps even aloud) "how can I use this to my advantage?" Well, I'm sorry to tell you, it's too late. Sure, if you own

performance

The Trough of Awkwardness and the Fallacy of Over-Rehearsing

How often have you heard someone, when preparing for a speech or presentation—or working towards some other form of public performance—state that he or she is worried about over-preparing? Most often, I hear this these days in the context of presenting a powerpoint. I've heard it

Big-Boned Guy's Guide to the Apple Watch

As Casey Liss pointed out [http://www.caseyliss.com/2015/4/12/random-apple-watch-thoughts], it seems like all the comments I've read about how the Apple Watch fits have included some kind of qualifying statement about having small wrists for a man. Well, I do not have small wrists.

No-Knead Bread Step-by-Step

I got a Le Creuset dutch oven over the holidays and since then I've used it five times; twice for no-knead bread [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html?_r=3&]. It's dead simple and delicious. Despite it's simplicity, there

Never, Always and the Oxford Comma

Of the many discussions that crop up over and over again across the internet, the topic of the serial comma is perhaps my favorite.1 I place it just above the recurring discussion of how to pronounce GIF on my all-time list. Recently it’s cropped up again in my

Watching the watches in Wired

The October issue of Wired just landed on my desk (their third annual "design issue"), and as I started flipping through it, I noticed a couple full-page watch ads.1 In all, I counted seven watch ads, mostly in prime positions, including the two-page spread inside the cover

#RVASW: We messed around and made a startup

This weekend I participated in the local edition of Startup Weekend [http://www.up.co/communities/usa/rva/startup-weekend/3409], a 54-hour-long competition where a group of mostly strangers comes together into teams to put together a product, service or business over the course of a weekend. I wasn'

Link: Apple Pay Tries to Solve a Problem That Really Isn’t a Problem

That's the headline from a post on The Upshot today [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/upshot/apple-pay-tries-to-solve-a-problem-that-really-isnt-a-problem.html?smid=tw-nytimesbits&_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1] by Neil Irwin (@Neil_Irwin [http://twitter.com/Neil_Irwin]). The post starts with a humorous argumentum

apple

I'm a gadget fan, but you think I'm an Apple fanboy

As far as I can recall, I've always loved gadgets. It's a passion I learned (inherited?) from my Dad, who maintained a house full of various interesting electronic devices. Like the sound-activated light switch, which, as he tells the story, lived in the hall bath until

Please don't audition for American Idol

I just read that an American Idol audition bus is making a stop in town next week [http://www.timesdispatch.com/entertainment-life/music-movies-tv/music/american-idol-audition-bus-in-richmond-on-tuesday/article_d9bb0036-06f2-11e4-80b6-001a4bcf6878.html] . As someone who came up rather short in his quest for a music career (more on that below), I thought I could

Anyone can play guitar, but can a video game teach you?

I recently picked up a copy of Rocksmith 2014 [http://rocksmith.ubi.com/] for Xbox 360, a video game which purports to teach you guitar (in as little as 60 days [http://rocksmith.ubi.com/rocksmith/en-us/60-day-challenge/] at that). Unlike Guitar Hero and the like, you use an actual

PJ Vogt's Twitter grammar question: it's "an" except when it isn't

Today on On The Media's TL;DR blog, PJ Vogt asked an important question for our time: when using an indefinite article before a Twitter username, do you say "a" or "an"? [http://www.onthemedia.org/story/twitter-grammar-question-no-true-answer/] When I saw the link on

Some additional interesting articles

Each week for work, I write a roundup of five interesting articles [http://hodgespart.com/gong/archives/innovators-dilemma-hodgepodge-for-apr.-18/] . Some weeks it's all I can do to come up with five articles, but this week I had a few extra I thought I'd share here. Horace

My top 5 bad excuses for not running

The other day I ran a 10k (with about 26,000 other people) [http://www.sportsbackers.org/events/monument-avenue-10k]. I realize for some, that's not much of an accomplishment, but I hadn't really run at all since my last high school gym class in the mid

Let me upgrade you

> Thats a good look Better yet a hood look Ladies that's a good look —Beyonce Let’s say you’re someone with an AT&T iPhone 5 with a contract that means you can’t upgrade for any reason for another 16 or so months, but

My coworkers think I hate BuzzFeed

I can see why they might think that, since I tend to grumble when presented with a link titled "23 ways you know you're a child of the 90's" (or some other such nonsense). But it's not true that I hate BuzzFeed.

17 Ways to Use Your Time Now that Your Favorite Football Team Has Been Truly, Utterly and Completely Eliminated from Contention.

In defense of ideas

> This was done between June and November. So shut up and get back to work. pic.twitter.com/XpqeMh4RZt [https://t.co/XpqeMh4RZt] — Mike Monteiro (@Mike_FTW) October 21, 2013 [https://twitter.com/Mike_FTW/statuses/392109728693628928] A little while ago, some friends of mine organized the third installment

Why I quit WordPress and Google Analytics

I started this blog as a place where I could just write for the sake of writing, so I wanted to simplify everything I could. I picked a brand new, minimal blogging platform [http://ghost.org] built around Markdown formatting. The design of the site is simpler as well, both