FEMA and Media Relations PR Nightmare

In the day and age when the Public Relations industry should be focusing more on interactions with the public and less on media relations, someone decides the best solution is to FAKE media relations. Brilliant.

From Bulldog Reporter:

FEMA employees last Tuesday posed as reporters at a news conference in
Washington about the Southern California wildfires. The briefing was
called on short notice and no journalists were on hand when it started.
Instead, FEMA deputy director Harvey Johnson stood
before a FEMA camera feeding live images to television networks and
took questions from agency employees posing as reporters.

Refresh Bryan College Station Profitable Business Slides

Per the request of a few attendees, here are my slides from the Bryan / College Station Refresh presentation "Starting and Profitably Growing a Technology Business".

I’ll try to get links to the books that were mentioned up in a bit along with updates to CyberChuck’s notes from the presentation.

Thanks again for the hospitality y’all!

World Creole Music Festival starts today

Yea! World Creole
Music Festival starts today if you are in Dominica! This of course, is
the celebration leading up to National Day on November 3^rd when they
became Independent from the United Kingdom.

So what is
with you people not dressing in traditional Carib attire today?

And on that note, my Mom OWES me one for making me promise to wear traditional garb. Note I am in Houston. Best comments so far today at work are below. They typically start with "you look like…"

1. Santa Claus’ bullet proof vest
2. You look like my Scotch tape cover
3. You’re awful tall for an elf
4. Are you looking for a Christmas tree to sleep under?

Yes these are the types of people I work with….

How to Wipe a Blackberry Clean

I had trouble figuring this out, so here goes. To completely wipe your blackberry clean varies by device. But it can be done. I had a 7100 series and the steps are:

1. Settings (looks like a folder with gears on the top right)
2. Options (just has two gears)
3. Security Options – select this from the visible menu by scrolling down
4. General Settings – select this from the visible menu by scrolling down
5. << Press Scroll Wheel in >> – this shows a scroll wheel menu
6. On the resulting scroll wheel menu there is an option to "wipe handheld" – That is what you want.

I mention this because several places on the interwebs told me to go to options and select "wipe handheld" but of course this ONLY shows up for this particular device in a scroll wheel menu.

Other sources (clear blackberry) and (blackberry faq)

Brian Connolly, Strumpette Finally Out of the Closet

Still crazy after all these years. Just a lot less cleavage. Brian Connolly has come out of the closet and relaunched strumpette with the less-cleavage brand name of "futhermore". So if we weren’t sure, yes, we now know he definitely wants the last, the further-mostest-wordest. Thanks for coming out of the closet Mr. Connoly.

Update: Had a somewhat funny conversation with Brian about this earlier this week. Very insightful actually and hopefully I’ll get my thoughts organized on a future blog post about PR in general.

A few things to be clear about.

1. Yes I realize Amanda Chapel is a character that that there were numerous writers and not just Brian. I had a mental list to do a linguistics analysis of different posts just to prove this point, but never got around to it. Which leads to my second "update" point.
2. As snarky and sometimes mean as Strumpette was, I am disappointed that the experiment is now completely off line. Yes reinvent, start anew, experiment. But to remove the old site leaves the world without an anti-brand for PR. The void will be filled of course, we know from Primal Branding that you must have your "non believers". And Strumpette filled that void. It would be a shame if it remains off line. It means the spinsters beat strumpette in the end. That bums me out.

Update 2 – checking my links for this post – it seems Amanda’s back (NSF link as usual). This is a good thing. I think. As long as the talons are pointed at me. But then again I would never bait someone like Amanda, now would I?