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Haunted Heathman

The former ‘Friends’ actress, who is starring alongside Woody Harrelson and Steve Zahn in romantic comedy Management, has reportedly been left terrified by supernatural goings on at Portland’s exclusive The Heathman Hotel.

A source said: “The Heathman Hotel is prone to eerie goings on, including broken glass, moving furniture, ghostly apparitions and loud screams. One guest who left his room clean returned to find towels and glasses had been used and moved.

“According to local legend, room 703 is haunted by the restless spirit of a former guest who reputedly fell to his death from this room. Jennifer has been given a $1,200 a night suite two floors above the haunted room. Guests staying in rooms 803 and 1003 have also reported mysterious phenomena.

The Heathman Hotel’s general manager Chris Erickson doesn’t deny it is haunted, but insists the hotel’s ghosts are friendly to guests. Erickson told America’s OK! magazine: “We don’t charge extra for ghost rooms. But we like to think of our spirits as a little bit friendlier and maybe just a little mischievous.”

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The beauty of genius

Okay, give her a simple question: Did South Africa score a goal after extra time? Yes/No or give me a bizarre answer for 2 extra points. Poor girl — that’s a very public humdinger. Let’s be honest, we’ve all lost our train of thought at one time or another. Miss South Carolina admitted her “momentarily lapse of reason” the next day on breakfast television. She even laughed about it– and all of us can laugh too. But don’t forget the lesson: simple answers, always. Original story read on The Times.

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The best seat in the house

Walking a mile in another person’s shoes may be the best way to understand the emotions, perceptions, and motivations of an individual; however, in a recent study appearing in the December 2006 issue of Psychological Science, it is reported that those in power are often unable to take such a journey.

Galinsky and colleagues also found that power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, thus leaving them unable to adjust to another person’s perspective and decreases one’s ability to correctly interpret emotion.

Galinsky says that this research has “wide-ranging implications, from business to politics.”

For example, “Presidents who preside over a divided government (and thus have reduced power) might be psychologically predisposed to consider alternative viewpoints more readily than those that preside over unified governments.”

Galinsky also adds that a key is to somehow make perspective-taking part and parcel of power, “The springboard of power combined with perspective-taking may be a particularly constructive force.” Science Daily article

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Valuation = P x S x E

Where Valuation = Problem x Solution x Experience

New York Times quote “V stands for valuation, or the worth of the start-up. P is the problem the business is trying to solve. S stands for the “elegance of the solution” and E the experience of the management team. The maximum value for any of the three is three — meaning the maximum a start-up can be “worth” is 27. The higher the score the better. If “V” is zero, or a small number, presumably the business is doomed.”

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Rock solid determination

jump

From Paul Zollo’s book Hollywood Remembered, an oral history of the movie industry: A 2001 interview with A. C. Lyles, a producer at Paramount who was born in 1918 in Jacksonville, Florida and worked at Paramount for over 60 years.

When I was 10 [in 1928] I wanted to make movies…

I had seen a picture called Wings — the first and only silent picture to win the Academy Award — with Clara Bow… and a new fella named Gary Cooper [who subsequently became a huge star]. I went and just fell in love with that picture. It was a Paramount picture playing at the Paramount Theater [at the time, the studios owned the theaters] in Jacksonville. I had seen that it said Adolph Zukor Presents, so I was in awe of Adolph Zukor [the founder and CEO of Paramount]. I spoke to the manager of the theater that day [to see] if he would give me a job. And he gave me a job handing out leaflets…

After four years in the job [he was then 14] I eventually met Adolph Zukor… when he came to Jacksonville. I asked him to let me come to Hollywood to work for him. He said, “Well, you’re just a kid, but you’ve been working for Paramount now for four years at the theater. So you finish high school, keep in touch, and I’ll hire you when you get out of high school.”

Now that was extremely kind of him… when he said to keep in touch and finish high school, my main objective then was to finish high school. But the most important thing was writing him a letter every Sunday. He didn’t tell me to write him every Sunday, he just told me to keep in touch. So I wrote him every Sunday for four years.

He didn’t write back — I didn’t hear from him but it didn’t matter. I never lost confidence or lost courage. I just knew he was looking forward to my letter each week as much as I was looking forward to writing him.

One day Gary Cooper came to my hometown. I was writing movie news for the hometown paper. I saw Mr. Cooper and I told him I would be out here in Hollywood to work at Paramount as soon as I got out of high school. And there again, for some reason, he took a quick liking to me. I told him about my letters to Zukor every Sunday and he asked me what I would be writing about this week, and I said, “Oh, about meeting you, Mr. Cooper.”

So he said, “Give me a piece of paper.” So he… wrote a note to Adolph Zukor saying, “I’m looking forward to seeing this kid on the lot.” So I wrote to Mr. Zukor telling him I had met Gary Cooper and enclosed the note to him.

Then I heard from Mr. Zukor indirectly. A woman named Sidney Brecker, who was his secretary, wrote to me and said, “Mr. Zukor has been receiving your letters. But he feels that you don’t have to write every week. If you wrote once every three or four or five months, that would be enough.”

Well, that didn’t discourage me at all. I continued to write to Mr. Zukor every Sunday. But I also had a new pigeon, Sidney Brecker, his secretary. So I wrote her every Sunday too. My whole main objective all week was what I was going to write to Mr. Zukor. Then I had to write another original letter to Sidney Brecker…

I wrote [Zukor] a letter every Sunday for four years, keeping in touch. The day I got out of high school [in 1936, in the heart of the Great Depression], I was in a day coach headed for Hollywood, where you sit up — probably four days and four nights. I had $48 in cash that I had saved up, and two loaves of bread, and two jars of peanut butter and a sack of apples, and I headed for Hollywood. Got off the train downtown, took the streetcar straight to Paramount, and told them at the gate to tell Mr. Zukor I was here.

    And I’ve been here ever since.

Producer, A. C. Lyles

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Tea and Sympathy

Drinking Tea

It was once said that nothing can’t be solved by a cup of afternoon tea

The best way to show your gratitude is with a tea cup, a saucer and some fine tasting tea and cakes. Afternoon tea honors those with delectable taste for the finer things in life. Notably bringing calm to a world that needs more peace.

Remembering a time when tea competed with playing football. Now tea competes with coffee and the occasional run around Prospect Park.

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Start always at the beginning.

As daft as that might sound, it’s rare for many projects to start at the proper beginning. When somebody says “cart before the horse” usually the original premise or context has jumped out of the stables. Now can we ask to retrace those original first ideas/thoughts?

Hmm

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Translucent Walls

The company’s new IllumaWALL melds the benefits of daylighting panels with the completely unnecessary, but entirely sensational night-brightening action of LEDs, as the polycarbonate structures feature built-in, fully programmable lights that can output a steady ambient glow or put on “a light show of pulsating colors” if you’re throwing a party at your pad. Inhabitat.

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2006 Winner, Ted Stevens

“Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. […] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. ” Senior U.S. Senator, Ted Stevens, Alaska.

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Between push and pull

Over the past century, institutions have been perfecting highly efficient approaches to mobilizing resources.

These approaches may vary in their details, but they share a common foundation. They are all designed to “push” resources in advance to areas of highest anticipated need. In the past decade, we have seen early signs of a new model for mobilizing resources. Rather than “push”, this new approach focuses on “pull” – creating platforms that help people to reach out, find and access appropriate resources when the need arises. John Hagel blog

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Be provocative

“The secret is to be more provocative and interesting than anything else in their environment.”

* Be Visual
* Be Different–Break Patterns and Expectations
* Be Daring
* Change Things Regularly
* Inspire Curiosity
* Pose a Challenge
* Be Fun
* Be Controversial and Committed
* Be Stimulating. Be Exciting. Be Seductive

HT @Kathy Sierra for the inspiration from her blog posting, “Creating Passionate Users”

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British Bulldog Brand

Take a cue from Winston Churchill,

“The further backward you can look, the further forward you can see.”

Understanding how competing brands position themselves allows us to learn from their mistakes and successes. When I think about brands I’m looking to lead my clients into making design decisions that allow a them to redefine the conversation within an industry. Build a niche for yourself, be unique.

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Influence with a whisper.

I think the way to influence is to whisper. Today I forget how powerful a tool it is in diplomacy and influencing change. Where as a shout causes people to get on the defensive, I see that whispering allows decision makers to absorb critical feedback in a non-threatening manner. When you whisper, people are forced to pay attention, to lean forward, to become engaged. To whisper is to exchange valuable, privileged information, to be pulled inside, to communicate emotionally and strategically, and to make yourself heard without beating your chest and yelling yourself hoarse.

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The first IM scandal.

“We knew it was coming, all this personal information zinging back and forth across cyberspace at the speed of write, all this constantly streaming technology being inexorably adapted to the needs of desire. IM-ing is like whispering, perfect for furtive, racy exchanges — or slimy, perverted ones. It’s as if your id had a typewriter. In a world where everything is instant, the delaying and censoring mechanisms that contributed to a civilized life are gone. Blog link, originally from NYTimes Select (Death by Instant Message By MAUREEN DOWD Published: October 7, 2006)

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Yahoo goes punk

The company also has its own Web 2.0 guru whose mission is to hack Yahoo “for its own good.” Bradley Horowitz, vice president of Yahoo’s product strategy group, told CNET News.com. Well, I run a group here called “Hack Yahoo”–and by Hack Yahoo, I don’t necessarily mean “hack it down at the root with an axe.” I basically mean help Yahoo break its own rules for its own good…uniting these like-minded people around the spirit of change and this start-up culture. What’s interesting: When I came to Yahoo, I didn’t find an innovation deficit. It’s not as if this company had grown complacent or sleepy or anything like that. But I think it was undercelebrated, both outside the company and inside the company. CNET article

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iPod flashmobbers dance

iPod flashmobbers in London

Hundreds of people descended on Liverpool Street station for the biggest ever turnout for the latest internet craze – mobile clubbing. Armed with MP3 players loaded with favourite tracks the “clubbers” arrived on the concourse just after 7pm last night. Students, business people and office workers danced in silence as they listened to their iPods among commuters listening to announcements about late trains.

One commuter said:

“It was entertaining if strange to see all these people gyrating to their own beat. It was the Soul Train arriving at platform one.”

Daily Mail source of original article.

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New York Times critic, Herbert Muschamp.

New York Times architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp rhapsodizes about Seattle’s new Central Library calling it, “The Library That Puts on Fishnets and Hits the Disco”. Seattle is a town with a big case of boosterism. Towns with this affliction usually have an inferiority complex derives from their envy of big cities like New York, Los Angeles and even San Francisco. This is precisely the case here. So when a big, bold, beautiful new edifice goes up, the local papers pull out all the stops. And they won’t disappoint with their coverage of Koolhaas’ Central Library. NY Times article