bentangle

Just to be clear, I don’t intend to do daily updates of my vacation events – that would be semi-contrary to enjoying my vacation. Yesterday was an eventful day in leisure. We started by heading to a local swimming hole (a lake nearby that had several swimming beaches) where we enjoyed several hours of swimming, playing in the sand, and picnicking. Then we attempted to go hiking, but due to heat and navigation issues, we gave up after about ten minutes and headed to the mall to watch Toy Story 3 in 3-D. Finally we stopped by Barnes & Noble for an early birthday present – a Nook.

The swimming was fun and went as would have been expected. Cricket spent as long as possible in the water. Grasshopper spent as little time as possible in the water. Gumba (their grandfather) spent the majority of the swimming time fabricating various tall tales for my daughter to consider. Grammy spent little time in the water and mostly sat either in the shade or on the beach playing with my son. The water was as warm as bath water which made the hardest part of the day getting out of the water – despite the air temperature being in the mid-80′s, leaving the water was a chilling affair. Then we enjoyed some sandwiches and chips while we dried off before changing and heading out to eventually arrive at the movies.

Toy Story 3 was much better than I had anticipated. As usual, it tackled the same types of issues typically addressed in this series – themes of loyalty, pride, betrayal, love, and friendship in the face of adversity all masked behind the role of a toy and its relationship to its owner. In this film the struggle came in the form of Andy growing up and going to college, both he and his toys coming to grips with change and learning when to hold onto the past and when to let go of it. I don’t typically find myself emotionally moved by movies (well, except in the forms of excitement or frustration), but this movie moved me to such levels of empathetic joy that I almost started to feel choked up (almost). Of course constantly keeping my son from swinging from the seat or running down the aisle helped keep me grounded.

So finally, the Nook. As is probably obvious by how many books I’ve been reviewing here (and there are several that I read and opted not to review), I’ve been reading a lot of books lately. So I’d been considering going digital with my hobby for a while now. And to my fortune, my parents had also observed my reading affinity and opted to help me achieve my digital goal. Yesterday they sprung for my Nook as well as a nice travel case for it. By the end of the day I’d already setup my account, bought my first ebook, and went to bed having gotten to chapter 7. Now the only outstanding issue is figuring out what other books to download.

There were other events that occurred after the Nook purchase, but they generally blurred together as I was somewhat distracted. Though among those events was my children camping out in Grammy and Gumba’s yard for the night (my wife volunteered to spend the night with them). It seemed to go well – no middle of the night fallout – but they did troop in early this morning at which point they became my problem so that my wife could get a couple hours of rest in a soft, dry bed. So I put on some cartoons, grabbed my Nook, and settled on the couch for a low-key morning (or at least as low-key a morning as is possible with a 3 and 6 year-old).

I want to apologize to the small band of followers that I have about making posting and signing up for my blog a tad more complex.  I’ve added a plugin for a captcha box.  While this adds a level of inconvenience to these processes, I hope it is a small and acceptable one.  I’ve added it to mitigate the flood of spam comments and user registrations that I seem to get on a daily basis.  We shall see how effective it is in deterring such things.  As it stood, I was receiving dozens of spam comments as well as dozens of fake site registrations daily.  And it is fully possible that I’ve accidentally deleted valid comments that were marked as spam by just hitting the Empty Spam button (I try to scan through them first).  So I’m sorry for the inconvenience … though only a little bit.

It seems that I can’t escape them.  I’ve been through my honeymoon phase with Facebook so I’m past the crest of full immersion and on to the phase where I’ve blocked most of the game and app requests so that my news stream looks less like some sort of ticker feed from a bizarre slot machine and more like a list of random status updates and photo posts (which I’ve gotten somewhat out of the habit of reading often anyway).  And yet this morning I found that some have taken to the closed door / open window philosophy to an odd new level.

I was on my way to work, had refueled my wheels and decided that I needed some fuel myself.  So I pulled into 7-Eleven to pick up some form of caffeine-based liquid enrichment.  As I do, in the same spot they normally place their product-promoted Slurpee poster of the moment, I saw something surprising.  It seems that the current promotional cup series for this product features various Facebook games – specifically depicted were Farmville, Yo-ville, and Mafia Wars.

As an aware consumer and one who works and has worked in various levels of marketing-adjacent industries, I like to think that I get on a core level how product placement advertising works and how important demographic targeting can be to marketing success.  It would not have occurred to me to align the users of such niche games as these in an application of fairly broad but still limited reach to the consumers of such products (though in thinking more about it, perhaps it does make a sort of sense).  But typically such cross-product promotion is intended to (a) drive the consumer to buy the immediate product (e.g., get a Slurpee because it has a cool cup) and also (b) drive the consumer to buy into the brand featured (e.g., if they were Iron Man cups, go out and see Iron Man and/or buy other Iron Man merchandise).  In this case, the featured brand is a series of free games that themselves are advertiser-subsidized.  I guess driving customers to consume such products still results in increased revenue for the producer (after all, Google fits a similar paradigm and they advertise), but it seems like a step in a new and unusual direction.

I’m curious where this will proceed.  Should I expect to next see a set of iPhone app-themed coffee mugs (could you imagine the potential of an iFart travel mug)?  Perhaps this is the dawn of a new era of marketing.  Who knows.  The only thing I can know for sure is that even with the best of efforts, Farmville is inescapable.

11 cents.  That’s how much cash was left in my pocket after two weeks on the road.  I honestly only used cash for minimal incidental expenses that required it (e.g., train & bus fares, items from convenience stores and news stands) and I only started with a little over $100.  I just find it funny how closely my funds matched my needs.

Anyway, I’m glad to be gradually returning to normalcy.  Though while Saturday with the family went smoothly, Sunday my children did their best to remind me of what I didn’t miss while I was gone.  Grasshopper seems to be going through that phase in life where he is realizing that he is not in charge and is fighting that reality tooth and nail.  And Cricket seems to be giving us a preview of her teenage drama queen years to come.  All upon the backdrop of dinner with the in-laws – their older cousin got fed up with the behavior and I’m sure the parents of their younger cousin were not thrilled with the image of their possible future.  It seems my wife and I have some work to do with them.

On a good note, there were some positive aspects of Father’s Day this year.  My family made me French toast in bed, got me a nice geeky card, and got me Super Mario Galaxy 2 (which the kids proceeded to watch me play for hours).  The game is a good continuation of the series in that it keeps some continuity with the previous installment.  But it is also an improvement – the level layout is much more sensible and enjoyable.  In the first you had this huge “ship” with various rooms to navigate to find the levels of play.  In the new version you steer the ship (which is smaller and simpler) to the various worlds which are all laid out on an easy to navigate map (more similar to games like Super Mario World or Super Mario Bros. 3).  And they brought back Yoshi which adds a fun new variation on the game play (plus the kids love to watch me make him eat things).

Anyway, now that my travels are done, I must return to reality and be a productive member of society.  I look forward to getting back into more interactive tasks than just sitting still and listening all day.  I look forward to getting to go home every day and enjoying some time with my family (maybe a bit less of it like this weekend panned out).  And I look forward to getting refunded all of my travel expenses so that I have more than a dime and a penny to line my pockets.

As exciting as I’m sure my daily chronicles of travel have been, I’m going to take a day off from it to write about something else.  This concept was something I discussed with a colleague last week at the conference in San Francisco and got to talking about again with another colleague this week in NYC.  After chatting about it, we dug up this link and made some popcorn.  The below video is a condensed version of a longer talk – the longer talk is good to, but doesn’t include the awesome whiteboard work demonstrated in the video below.

In watching this, as baffled as the results seem to be to a number of experts apparently, to me this seems akin to common sense.  While money can be a decent incentive, it is not the great incentivizer.  If it was, then rich executives would be the hardest working people in the world (while a handful of them might argue that they are, most of them are far from it).  The interesting coincidence of this topic is that in the discussion, the company that is used as an example of a different way of thinking about incentivization is the very one that sponsored the conference I attended last week.

I am very tempted to send this video to the top executive team at my company and see how willing they may be to adopt some of the habits of it.  I’m sure they will really love the full-length version as it seems to suggest that the sales commission model may be flawed as well (well the CEO and COO would like it, sales maybe less so).  What is important to glean from this, though, isn’t that monetary incentives like bonuses don’t work (though apparently they don’t), but that what does work is to pay people what they need and deserve (so that money is not an issue) and motivate people through personal challenge and growth, a level of autonomy, and a sense of purpose.

I am also motivated to consider the lessons of this set of studies in the context of parenting.  Obviously children aren’t motivated by money (at least not most kids) and material rewards and punishments have limited results. But perhaps more intrinsically valued rewards may be more motivating.  If I have any luck with it, I’ll post an update on the matter.