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Funny text messages

Posted on by Brian Lee

Besides phone calls and email, there are a few clients with whom I text message. I try not to make the texts too sloppy, as I have to still be professional despite the medium.

One thing I do is double-check all texts before I send them. Here are some funny examples of the autocorrect feature messing up some text messages (warning, NSFW). I would probably die of embarrassment if these happened to me, especially during a communication with a client!

http://damnyouautocorrect.com/10484/the-top-15-most-popular-dyac-texts-of-all-time/

Who cares about Asian carp?

Posted on by Brian Lee

I’m really sick of the recurring stories about Asian carp. Reporters and editors preach so much about publishing stories that matter to/affect their readers, but the Asian carp is not one of them. If it did, reporters would explain why higher in the story.

Take this story from The Capital Times, titled “Fears become reality as invasive Asian carp detected in two Wisconsin Rivers.” Who is fearing the Asian carp? Not the vast majority of readers, I suspect.

In fact, it isn’t until the seventh paragraph that the writer says “… carp destroy and disturb the natural habitat of waterways because of their ability to eat a significant amount of plankton daily.”

At this point, the writer fails to explain how destroyed waterways directly impact the reader. As it stands, the article just sounds like another whiny environmental piece, and most people nowadays are immune to those types of stories, it seems.

Note: I don’t mean to single-out The Capital Times. Other newspapers, such as the Wisconsin State Journal and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, are guilty as well.

Grocery shopping with QR codes

Posted on by Brian Lee

QR codes (the square, barcode-like picture that you scan with your smartphone to access a website) still haven’t taken off in the United States. For one, they were never really introduced to the public; rather, they just started appearing. Second, not everyone has a smartphone, and even the people who do know that QR code readers aren’t a standard app.

On top of that, I have read many case studies on QR code usage and have been completely underwhelmed (oh boy, a chance to sign up for your company’s crappy newsletter), until now: A Korean grocery store called Tesco put up displays of their foods in subways so people could shop while waiting. Watch this video:

Instead of creating some useless website as the destination of the QR codes, like most companies to date have done, Tesco actually filled a need (grocery shopping). Pure genius.