DM CONFIDENTIAL — Nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news. Shocking news, yes, but bad news no. While it might be true, bad news causes anyone to come away feeling hopeless. They feel lost in a system and problem greater than themselves in which they have no ability to impact. It’s why...

Lots of talk about Bishop Allen, Cursive, The Number Twelve Looks Like You and the new Punk Goes Pop collection. Hate to say it, but I’m not really looking forward to any of them much. A few that might get overlooked: Mirah’s new release is awesome. Portland’s repping pretty strong...

As I wrote quite a while ago, I set up a RAID5 with three IDE disks at home, which I'm using as backup (yes, I know that RAID != backup) and storage space. A few days ago, the RAID was put to a real-life test for the first time, as one of the disks died. Here's what that looks like in dmesg: raid5: ...

What if your carefully-prepared presentation contains bad information?  Answer: give your presentation with humility and curiosity.  And don't put unverifiable hard data on your slides. A reader writes: So what do you do when you collect critical information from a non-decision maker and the infor...

No surprise that it’s another small release week. Mostly unknown or undesirable releases, with a few gems, namely the stateside release of the Justice DVD that I want, a Thrice live DVD and a Cat Power EP. There’s also a debut from a new Asthmatic Kitty band called The Welcome Wagon that...

OK, over on Twitter they have this feature. It’s called “Direct Messages.” It means you can send me a Tweet that no one else can see. A LOT of people try to use this feature with me and I really, really, hate it. How many people? I have 4,388 direct messages. Twitter isn’t th...

photo credit: ©aius One of the hardest jobs I have as a direct marketing copywriter/consultant is to get my clients to test variables in their promotions. Test headlines, offers, lists, color, etc. With smaller clients I urge them to test single variables where the difference to their response/bott...

She’s back, pimpin’ out notable new releases to place on your radar! DEVIL MAY CARE by Sebastian Faulks — The execution of an Algerian drug runner in Paris leads to the return of Agent 007 to the world of intrigue and danger where he is most at home. The head of MI6, M, assigns him to ...

I am not a fan of 50connect, but since meeting the guy from the company who did the Web site re-design I have been taking a bit more interest in the company. This morning I received an e-mail from the company. My quick scan transformed into a detailed read. You cannot ask any more than that from an ...

I've bought a new hard drive for my laptop recently, because I finally got fed up with my constantly-full disk. Having to browse around in $HOME looking for stuff which can be safely deleted just because I want to run fetchmail (and that would fill up my disk) just sucks. So, after getting a cheapo ...