erniesblog

Kid Art

Georgia's art.  Robot.  6.5 feet tall.  She had help cutting wood to her specs, hammering a couple of nails, and installing legs.  Two views.

Jackson's Art.  Spikey ball thing.  Temporary.  Already disassembled.  Three views.

The long pole

Never mind the long tail.  What's your long pole?

The dad of one of Jackson's fellow Cub Scouts recently emailed about his son's progress toward the Wolf badge, singling out the requirement to make a chart of household duties, and keep it regularly for at least a month, as the Long Pole in the Tent.  I immediately knew exactly what he was talking about, because Jackson, while screaming through the other requirements, has become stymied by this whole chart thing, or rather, by the need to actually keep up with the chart thing.  So the chart is Jackson's Long Pole, too -- it's holding everything up.

A useful expression, I think.  Here, William Safire discusses it at length in the NYT Magazine.  You might need a subscription -- I'm not sure.  Surprisingly to me, I have one -- so, if you need one, it must be free.

The Cub/dad email got me thinking about my own various Long Poles.

When it comes to client work, I find that the Long Pole tends to materialize somewhere in the neighborhood of "new things we're not quite sure about and might possibly be afraid of."  Though the web is tailor-made for experimentation, little else in advertising has been for the past fifty or so years -- so the fear of new things easily and regularly becomes a Long Pole.  Education can help this particular pole, most of the time.  This is one I don't take personally - it's just one I run into.  The personal one is next, and much harder to solve.  At least it is for me.

When it comes to creating things other than immediate work assignments; creating anything, sometimes including immediate work assignments; making moving images, which I get very few opportunities to do at work, but which I love to do, and can do, noting that it's how I made my living for 15 years -- my personal Long Pole is time.  Or, rather, the shortage of it.  There's simply not enough time to make stuff.  Or, at least, to make stuff right.  One of the downsides to an always -on society and industry is that if you're not always on, you'll soon be off. Which means your time is spoken for.  And if you want to use time to do anything other than what has spoken for it, finding time can become a Long Pole.  The economy has shifted a lot of advertiser activity to the digital space, which simply means there are now more things speaking for time that's already spoken for, and the Long Pole in my personal tent is getting much longer.  I'm not sure how to shorten it, but when I get time, I'll think about it.

So, what's your long pole?  Time? Money? Fear?  Could be anything, I suppose, including an aversion to keeping a chore chart for a month.  The point is, you can't do anything to change, eliminate, or finally raise the Long Pole in the Tent until you've identified it.

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Fun with animated stills

YouTube's compression sucks.  But this was fun.  A few bursts from a still camera, and a sequential file import.  A couple of filters, and a quick Garage Band track.  The real thing looks a lot better than the YouTube version -- I gotta start posting on Vimeo.

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Of Course, This Makes Sense

A colleague sent me this post,  saying, "Maybe they read your eBook." 
The stick was just entered into the toy hall of fame.
Which makes perfect sense. Maybe they did read the book.

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