I've made a few tweaks over at birdahonk.com. First of all, the URL has changed slightly. You can now find the site at thoughts.birdahonk.com (birdahonk.com will automatically refresh to the new site). You'll also notice that I've got a new design as well. Finally, it seems that you may need to update your RSS feed. The RSS link (http://feeds.feedburner.com/birdahonk) is still the same, but because I changed the original source, the old feed doesn't seem to be getting the new content. So, you'll probably have to delete the old one and then add it again.
See you on the other side.
So Pete tagged me with the "8 random things" meme. So many things about me are random it's hard to choose where to start. But here it goes:
1. One of my first words as a baby was "birdahonk" -- hence the name of by site. My family teased me about it for years. On my 15th birthday, my entire family played a recording of me saying it and they were all dying to know what it meant. Like I remembered. They're all crazy. But they kept teasing me so I decide to shut them all down by buying the domain name and making it my cyber-identity. The rest is history. (For what it's worth, we think its a reference to the days my dad used to hold me as a baby and I'd look out the window and see the geese flying over head, honking -- bird-a-honk!)
2. I'm told, although I cannot verify this, that my half sister's grandfather (on the side of the family I'm not related) invented the paper toilet seat cover. So the next time you're having a sanitary public restroom moment, you can think of me and my brush with fortune.
3. My dad, 50 years old when I was born, was a bombardier in WWII. Hey flew in the B-24 Liberator.
4. Every Saturday morning as a child, my little sister and I were interrupted at 9am so my mom could record Star Trek (the original series in syndication). What a drag on your Saturday cartoon watching.
5. I played the viola from the 5th to 9th grade (with a brief attempt at resurrection in college that didn't stick). I wasn't very good. However, I was a fairly decent tuba player in high school and college. I even majored in instrumental performance in college for about a year. Then I realized there was no money in that and I just focused on business (not sure there's much money in that either after my last raise). As part of my performance art-type experience, I was a member of the Santa Clara Vanguard Drum & Bugle Corps in 1992 and 1994. I played the contrabass bugle and the euphonium, respectively.
6. After the dotcom bust (c. 2001), I took a year off and spend an amazing time in Alaska (I camped out in a sleeping bag on the top deck of the ferry for the 3.5 day ride from Bellingham, WA to Juneau). Then I crashed with a buddy in San Diego and basically hiked every day and hung out at the beach. I also manage to get accepted to grad school during that time (go Tartans!).
7. I recently learned that I have a long lost brother.
8. While at college as an undergrad I was the editor of an underground newspaper that really rubbed the administration the wrong way.
I'll pass this along to some old buddies:
- Kenneth Berger
- Chad Thornton
Well, a lot has changed since my last post. I spent a little over a year at Catapult Thinking. I learned a ton as a Senior Design Researcher/Strategist. I left Catapult back in September 2005 for an opportunity I couldn't pass up. I'm now a Senior Media Analyst at Forrester Research (joining my better half, but she's on a different team). My primary coverage is the Internet's impact on the media business which includes business models for online content, Internet video, consumer search, social computing, and consumer created content. I've got a handful of reports under my belt so far, and there are plenty more to come.
It may seem like a departure from design, but one of the reasons I'm at Forrester is that I get to bring my design thinking to a business consulting organization. I'm also excited to round out my business experience and merge those skills with my design thinking. I also get to cover cool new emerging technologies and write about them. My coverage areas are also indirectly related to my thesis essay, which I also intend on covering more agressively, but more on that later.
More to come soon...