We have a stock photo site that we use at work to get photos for our advertisements. We occasionally run into one that’s a little ridiculous for one reason or another. We’ve run into blonde Amazon women with spears while searching for African American females, and we’ve run into topless nuns while searching for religious photos. There are some photos that are weird because of their descriptions. This one takes the cake.

Our company just purchased a new site relating to massage therapy training and work. We’re redesigning, so we need a new logo. Here is my submission. The good news is, as we’re going to be Wii boxing to determine the winner, I stand a good chance of winning!

I recently received this e-mail at work, which was sent to the management team:

Hey guys,

I’m trying to get a feel for the structure of each team’s regular team meetings.

What do the meetings consist of?
Examples: continuing education for your team, cross training with another team, updates on client projects, etc.

If you could send me any feedback on the frequency and structure of these meetings so that I can get a gauge of this, that would be great.

Thanks,
Joe

Here is my reply:

Hey Joe –

Good questions. My team meetings are held on dates one less than multiples of three if said date is on a work day and not on a Friday. To formalize the tone of the meetings, all speech is in Latin, excepting readings from the ancient web design texts, which are in the original Greek. On odd-numbered dates, we discuss web design topics (we discuss front-end design on prime-numbered dates and development on all other dates), and on even-numbered dates, we talk about why we are here, with a focus on Existential freedom (mainly Sartre, but we delve into some Kierkegaard from time to time). All discussion of Hegel is disallowed, and discussion of any of the other Idealist philosophers is frowned upon.

We’ve also held special meetings lately to talk about the ontological impact of the Postmodern shift on the career college industry, with specific regards to Kierkegaard and gunsmithing. No official conclusions have been drawn, as we encourage each employee to exercise his or her individual freedom and choose an outcome for himself or herself.

I hope this helps.

- Brandon Gregory

This:

“The foundation [of the Lutheran church] is still that salivation comes only by grace alone, faith alone, and through Christ alone.”

I forgot to post about this. The project that has been consuming me at work for two months is finally done. It’s a site where you can search for Christian colleges. (We have a few other faiths up there, but it’s mostly various denominations of Christianity.) I didn’t design it, but I built the site and managed the content (and wrote some of it).

For those familiar with web development, this was my first foray into developing in an MVC framework (in this case, CodeIgniter). There was definitely a learning curve, but I have to say, I’m going to use that for every large site I build from here on out.

And if you’re wondering, we’re hoping to add a lot more clients to the site. Right now, the selection of schools you can actually request information from is pretty slim (although there’s at least a mention for every major faith-based higher learning institution in the country). We had to have a site before we could sell clients on it, though. So if you know of a faith-based school that should have a more prominent listing here, let me know and I’ll get it routed to the right place.

All we have of it is a cell phone shot, so it’s hard to make out. Here it is!

We had a food day at work today as a sending-off for our intern, Pam. In the tradition of ThisIsWhyYoureFat.com, we concocted the most horrible things and actually ate them. Here’s some of what we came up with:

• Cherry Popper: A cherry tomato sandwiched between a scoop chip filled with cheese dip and a scoop chip filled with jalapeño cream cheese dip.
• Cheese Squirt: A “burrito” which consisted of guacamole, cream cheese, cheese dip, and pizza rolls rolled up in slices of cheddar cheese.
• Southwest Tower of Power: A scoop chip filled with jalapeño cream cheese spread, cheese dip, and corn salsa, topped with a pizza roll and a Funyun.
• Seven-Layer Chip: Chip, cream cheese, chip, cheese dip, chip, guacamole, chip. Eaten in one bite.
• Swamp Thing: Guacamole-stuffed turkey ball and cheese dip in-between two scoop chips.

There was also a lot of talk about corndog batter, although we didn’t have any (this time).

So, if you don’t know, the advertising agency I work for works exclusively with colleges. Wednesday, we had some clients in the office from a group of Adventist colleges. As you can imagine, they’re deeply religious and very conservative as well. My co-worker, Sheri, had to give a presentation to a room full of these clients, so she did her best to look like them: she wore a conservative skirt and blouse, and actually removed all of her jewelry and left it at a friend’s desk. (Adventists apparently don’t wear jewelry.)

So she gave her presentation, and from what I hear, it actually went over quite well. They were very receptive to her ideas and seemed very eager to talk to her. All in all, a successful meeting.

After the meeting, she went back to retrieve her jewelry. When she got there, she said, “Oh yeah, I’m going back to being a bad girl now!”

Her friend laughed and said, “The dollar is a nice touch.”

“What?” Sheri said.

Sheri had visited the vending machine earlier, but decided not to get anything. Since she was wearing a conservative skirt, she didn’t have any pockets, so she stuck the dollar into her bra. She forgot about the dollar. So she gave her entire presentation to the Adventist enrollment association with a dollar bill sticking visibly out of her cleavage.

People are still coming up to her and asking her to make change for larger bills. It’s still funny, even after two days.

I debated not posting this, but it’s too funny to pass up.

I had a conversation with a few co-workers a while back about how to name some of our internal training classes. When it got to my class on personality types, this exchange happened:

person 1: How about, “How to work with your schizophrenic co-workers”?
person 2: Ooh! How about, “How to work with bipolar people”?

Seriously, what are the odds?

Just a disclaimer: I’m not really all that offended by this.

I haven’t been able to blog about this, since I have some co-workers that read my blog, but I got a promotion today that I’ve been working on for a while. I’m now manager of a group of web designers/developers. Right now, I have two people under me, but I will soon have three. I’m still maintaining a lot of my old responsibilities on my old team, but I’ll be training someone else to be able to cover them as well, so my team shouldn’t suffer much because of it.

I’ll start having meetings real soon here to figure out exactly what this is going to look like and what exactly my new job will entail. I may have some stories in the coming week or two about that.

In other news, our department presentation for the company meeting was turned into a Renaissance play involving a knight, a dragon, and some minstrels. I’m in charge of costumes. At this time, I’m not exactly sure how that happened.