Reboot
It’s been a while since last I updated the old blog. Suffice it to say I’ve been keeping busy.
In the six months since last I posted to this site, I have been working my first New York City job, signed my first New York City apartment lease and have done my best to acclimate to a different climate (i.e. there is no such thing as humidity in Denver, where I grew up, a fact that was not lost on me the first time the temperature in NYC rose above 89).
Beyond that, life is good.
My goal now is to reboot matthewgunn.com and come up with new content that’s worth posting on a slightly-higher-than-biannual basis.
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Tags: blog, denver, humidity, moving, new york, work, writing
My name is Matt, and I am a social media addict.
It’s a difficult thing to admit.
The above video from the Social Media Addicts Association is a fun parody of what a social media support group might look like. While I can’t claim to know anything more about the site, the group or its origins, they do have a useful mantra:
Log out, shut down, go out.
It’s worth remembering on those days where it feels like Twitter and Facebook are real life.
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Tags: comedy, parody, social media, support group, video
Who uses NYC taxis anyway?
The walk from West 19th Street in the Flatiron District to East 91st Street in Yorkville isn’t so bad on a 61-degree March afternoon in New York.
In fact, it took about the same amount of time to cover that distance by foot as it did to go the opposite direction in a taxi earlier in the afternoon. I learned the hard way.
I often hear people say real New Yorkers don’t take taxis. I can see why. But today I panicked. Leaving the house about an hour before a job interview I decided to treat myself to a car ride, a rare occasion for me since moving to the city. Twenty minutes and 10 blocks later I started to panic.
On a good day in New York the lunchtime rush hour is brutal. Complicate that with a drive down Fifth Avenue amid preparations for the St. Patrick’s Day parade and you have what I can only describe as a nightmare. It’s safe to say I’ll never take a taxi downtown during parade preparations on a day where it’s important I arrive somewhere on time ever again.
Deep breath. Hyperbole aside, it’s probably a good idea to plan around major events in New York City and give myself extra time in advance.
My interview started about five minutes behind schedule. I called the office ahead of time to leave a voicemail about my misfortune just as traffic started to dissipate below 42nd Street. Being one who learns best through experience, it’s only fitting that I wouldn’t account for traffic when the number of cars on the road rarely affects how I get from one place to the next. Otherwise I feel everything went well, despite a touch of embarrassment throwing me off guard at the start of this afternoon’s meeting. By the time I started my journey back up town I didn’t feel so bad. Once I got home, “The Taxi Debacle of March 2010″ was a distant, yet painful memory. I hope to soon find out how the business end of my afternoon went.
It was a beautiful afternoon in New York.
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Tags: cab, career, downtown, fifth ave, flatiron, interview, job, new york, nyc, parade, st. patrick's day, taxi, walking, weather, yorkville
Recycled media
At a certain point, everything old is new again.
Take flannel for instance. There are days it feels like the 90s never went away, but rather hibernated for a decade so as to avoid Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and the overall pop uprising against the grunge movement.
It happens everywhere (Avatar didn’t win the Best Picture Oscar this year as a result of Avatar winning Best Picture in 1991 when it wasn’t in 3-D and they called it Dances With Wolves).
But rather than bore you with detailed analysis of our need to recycle themes and ideas in media, I’ll leave you with a song.
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Tags: avatar, britney spears, comparison, dances with wolves, dr. who, everything old is new, grunge, muse, music video, pop, reuse, the resistance, uprising
Though it only launched to the public several days ago, Flavors.me has already won my loyalty.
What is Flavors.me? It’s quite possibly the simplest means to pull the feeds of any combination of 14 social networks and RSS into one elegant personal spash page. For me that means collecting info from two blogs and eight social profiles ranging from the likes of Twitter and LinkedIn to Flickr and YouTube in one location, where it can then serve as an easy-to-use directory of my activity and the places I can be found. Unlike services like Friendfeed or Google Buzz, where the platform aggregates online social activity, Flavors.me neither adds the weight of one more site I have to monitor or network I have to participate in nor does it send my activity willy-nilly to sites like Facebook where the content becomes either out of context or too noisy for the uninitiated.
Flavors.me is clean, simple and either points people in the right direction or lets them quickly digest the info I readily share among online networks.
It’s a welcome solution.
Continue reading ‘Flavors.me: The new social aggregator with a pleasant aftertaste’
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Tags: blog, buzz, communications, facebook, flavors.me, friendfeed, interactive, Internet, online, personal brand, social media, social networks, twitter, youtube
Nobody’s perfect.
But within one’s resume, perfection is expected.
And then some.
To my chagrin, the act of pasting my resume into a Craigslist ad uncovered a severe contradiction in my attempts to portray myself as a competent writer and editor. Yes. The dreaded typo.
Perhaps the best part was the fact I misspelled the word, ‘competent.’
An errant ‘s’ found its way into the word. I’ll never know the damage it caused, suffice it to say the misspelled word found its way into the latest version of my resume, the one I’ve been intensely sending across the New York Tri-State area in a reinvigorated “Look mom, I really am serious about making it in New York and not just taking some sort of two-month vacation before moving into your basement” kind of way.
No less than six potential employers received that resume. Today, at least. More than a dozen received that version last week. And to say the least, I felt as though I was qualified for each and every one of the positions I applied for. But those employers were looking for editors, writers and marketing communications professionals.
Making a typo out of the word ‘competent’ (even if it was in the final three lines of the resume itself) likely says a lot about competency to a hiring manager or HR pro scanning dozens of resumes from qualified applicants each day. That is, if my cover letter was deemed good enough for follow-through to the resume itself.
I take it as a lesson learned, and one I’ve been told since high school to avoid. In my enthusiasm to perfect the design and content of the resume itself, and then turn that effort into a job interview, I forgot the first basic rule of professional communications: Always use spell check.
It’s nothing to dwell over. But a mistake I won’t soon repeat.
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Tags: communications, editing, job, new york, proessional, resume, work, writing
Happy (Lunar) New Year
Growing up in Denver I never understood the fuss over the Chinese – or lunar – New Year. In the middle of the country, where many residents of Asian and Pacific Island descent are several generations assimilated into American culture (myself included), there simply isn’t a strong cultural center. Denver’s Chinatown – or Hop Town, as it was called – was razed in 1940 and replaced by what’s now known as Lower Downtown and the Ballpark District.
It’s different in New York, where the largest Chinatown in the United States is alive and well.
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Tags: camcorder, chinatown, chinese new year, dragon, lunar new year, new york city, nyc, sanyo, tiger, unboxing, valentine's day, video, xacti
Good to know it
In my ongoing pursuit of building and playing around with sites on the Web, I’ve gone ahead and secured a new domain name. Soon joining the myriad of personal blogs under the Matt Gunn umbrella is http://goodtoknow.it.
The idea came from a Twitpic titled, “Good to know.” A friend on Twitter said it would be a good idea for a blog. Hours later I had a new URL ready to be populated.
I have a feeling this is how 80 percent of the greatest (strangest?) blogs get started.
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Tags: blog, casciato, domain, good to know, good to know it, Internet, japan, mattgunn, photo, twitpic, uniqlo
My favorite writing technology
It’s hard to beat pen (or pencil) and paper when it comes to recording quick thoughts and ideas. They require no electricity, no Internet connection and are ready to go at the flick of a wrist. Literally.
I’ve gained new appreciation for this since moving to New York; as with my early reporting career, I’m often mobile, and require the most basic tools to record information. Physically writing something down has several distinct advantages over typing into a smart phone or laptop.
(Disclaimer: This blog post was made possible by my HTC Hero phone and the wpToGo Android app)
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Tags: technology, writing
Recent Entries
- Reboot
- Social Media Addicts Association Meeting
- Who uses NYC taxis anyway?
- Recycled media
- Flavors.me: The new social aggregator with a pleasant aftertaste
- Learning from mistakes, or, typos happen
- The rise of the virtual backlot
- Happy (Lunar) New Year
- Good to know it
- My favorite writing technology
- Patrick Stewart on electronic communication
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- technology (4)
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