Found the above pic in Maurice Sendak’s strange count­ing book One Was Johnny.

What’s weird is that he looks an awful lot like Freddie (at right), the mas­cot for MailChimp.

This incar­na­tion of Freddie has been around since 2008, but it seems he was born August 17, 2001. So the mon­key in Sendak’s book has got to be a dif­fer­ent mail-deliv­er­ing pri­mate. In case you’re unfa­mil­iar, MailChimp does awe­some email mar­ket­ing (and email newslet­ters, and that kind of thing). It’s one of my favorite soft­ware-as-a-ser­vice com­pa­nies. If you’re using ConstantContact, there are about a gazil­lion rea­sons to switch. (If that sounds scary, I can help.)

Anyway, I’ve decided that Sendak’s mail mon­key must be Freddie’s dad, since it would make sense that he’d go into the fam­ily business.

Look at those two. They just gotta be related.

On some days I feel like I’m in awash in awe­some online tools… I’ll dis­cover one, and then it’ll lead me to another, and then another. Before I know it, I’ve signed up for twelve cool ser­vices that promise to make me more pro­duc­tive, cre­ative, orga­nized, inspired. ((To clar­ify, by “awe­some,” I mean: clever, time-sav­ing, fun-to-use, use­ful, innovative.))

I finally signed up for a kippt account today. Good timing.

The Next Chapter:

This marks the end of the jour­ney for us at Kippt. Although our ser­vice has been loved by many, we never achieved the growth and the scale that would allow a sus­tain­able future for Kippt. Building per­sonal knowl­edge online con­tin­ues to be a unsolved prob­lem. While we are switch­ing direc­tions, we hope that Kippt and Inc have con­tributed to the future of online col­lab­o­ra­tion and knowl­edge sharing.

Read the rest

Smarter Stand is my friend Dotan’s project on Kickstarter. Simple, bril­liant, insanely useful.

Check it out.

Today, a new orga­ni­za­tion called B’nai Mitzvah Revolution announced itself to the world.

I’ve been priv­i­leged to serve as the web­mas­ter/tech-guru on the project. Working with the team behind BMR — notably the co-direc­tors and their col­leagues at HUC-JIR/RHSOE/ECE and the URJ — has been an amaz­ingly ful­fill­ing and insight­ful expe­ri­ence. I’m thank­ful to Isa for giv­ing me the opportunity.

Check the site out. I’m incred­i­bly proud of it (though, truth be told, a lot of the con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion and tweak­ing came from the entire team).

Viva la revolution!

For par­tic­i­pants in the iCenter pre­sen­ta­tion how-to that I taught today, I’ve uploaded two files:

• Extensive notes, as promised.
Presentation Primer — Notes & Sources.pdf

• My slides. (They’ll only make sense if you were there, naturally.)
Presentation Primer — Slides.pdf

A designer knows he has achieved per­fec­tion not when there is noth­ing more to add, but when there is noth­ing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, on his 111th birthday
(orig­i­nally via Carmine Gallo)