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Showing posts from April 10, 2005

Brain "warshing"

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I prefer to pronounce brainwashing with an Ohio or American Midland Dialect. "Warsh". Its a catchy pronounciation. Step one of any effective brainwashing is to eliminate any notion or self-evidence of brainwashing. "I am absolutely sure I am not brainwashed. I am an American. I believe in the individual. I believe that all of my ideas and thoughts are my own." Those thoughts are a good starting place. The fact is that you, as a human, are a herding animal. It is a lesson that I found in my time in Antarctica and watching my own herding animals. "No man is an island" --John Donne (1572–1631). Is also a good start. We are all affected by our instincts. Tribalism being one of them. Many of us have lost a lot of our instincts. When we loose enough we probably fall somewhere into the vast ontology and categories of mentally ill. So, You are what you eat, both informationally and physically. Think different. Use what you learned in school about empathy. Pr...
We received more facts about the Awards that Donna Cuyle, Dave Schriber, Susan Spear, Kim Bush and Joan Rifanburg won in the Society for Technical Communications Annual competition. In addition to the Award of Excellence we were honored to receive a Distinguished Award from the Rochester chapter at the 43rd annual conference. This is the first time we have been successful in obtaining that level of award. This is a difficult achievement to obtain and we have been working on this level of award by reviewing the comments (mostly from non-winning entrants) from judges over the past few years and identifying areas where we could be effective in making improvements. Much to our delight, when we went to accept the awards in Rochester we learned that not only did we win one of the five distinguished awards, we also won “Overall Best of Show,” out of 38 submitted publications. Our publication was judged higher than publications from Eastman Kodak, Xerox and other companies. If that was...
From Douglas: He drives a Honda Insight. The following vehicles must have fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. From least ugly to the ugliest, here they are: 10. Chevrolet Avalanche 9. Scion Xb 8. Chevrolet Aveo 7. Chrysler PTCruiser 6. Subaru Baja 5. Toyota Echo 4. Scion Xa 3. Honda Element 2. Honda Insight 1. Pontiac Aztek
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STC Awards Woo Hoo! The folks in my department won the top awards at the Regional STC conference Friday. You can't ask for better than that. The PDF link above shows some of the awards we won. We are still sorting out the significance of some of the awards, including overall best of show! I don't think I could be more proud. All sorts of folks were scrutinitizing the books and we let a Technical Communications professor from RIT borrow them for some work she is doing. Friday was a good day. Saturday, the weather was fantastic. I don't know how warm it got, but I was lying in the grass next to the llama pen for quite a while. I did some farm work and relaxed. Now I have to pay for it. I have a lot of home work (at least 10 hours) to get done on this great day (possibly even nicer than yesterday). It takes a lot of discipline to concentrate and work through homework on a weekend like this one. I will do it. If someone, someday, ever asks, "How did you manage to ...