Thinkcage

I found these great vintage Christmas cards in some things my dad sent me when he moved out of his house in Wisconsin.

They are in a neat decorative box, complete with envelopes. The set features a few different designs of wintry scenes in a watercolor style complete with a shiny gold stripe at the bottom. The message inside wishes the recipient an “old fashioned Merry Christmas…”. I think it’s cool that these were meant to look old fashioned years ago when they were made.

I’m going to try to convince Holly to let us sent some of these out next Christmas — I think they’re wonderful.

Oklahoma City is a buzz this morning with the news that we’ve finally landed our own NBA franchise. Within hours of the announcement this leaked image showing the new team name and mascot was discovered:

That’s right the new team will be called the “Oklahoma City I Love this Basketball Team!”s. In a snippet from the press release leaked with the image, I Love this Basketball Team owner, Clay Bennett commented on the selection of Oklahoma celebrity Toby Keith as the team’s mascot:

“Toby is a local legend. With his love of chest hair and barbeque, Toby represents the hopes and dreams of Oklahomans and, indeed all Americans. I can’t think of a more meaty face to represent what is sure to be America’s team.”Clay Bennett, owner, Oklahoma City I Love this Basketball Team!

I’ve been a Blockbuster Online subscriber since the early days of the service. It hasn’t been perfect but does offer a good value and decent selection. The recently added in-store exchange was a nice touch, adding a lot of new value without raising prices. That’s almost unheard of these days.

For those of you unaware, Blockbuster has a variety of plans that offer x number of movies out at a time for one monthly fee. Much like Netflix, you choose movies using web app, creating a queue of movies you’d like to see. They ship you 2 or 3, you watch them and mail them back and they ship you more. About a year ago they added the ability to return the movies in one of their retail store AND take an equal number of movies home with you right then. Not only did this save time in mailing the movies back, but it also did not count against your online plan so you still got your 3 movies in the mail a couple of days later. Free movie rentals. Awesome!

A few days ago as I browsed my queue, a lightbox-style modal dialog popped up in my browser. It seems the online system was now more tightly integrated with the retail stores which noticed that I had already rented a movie that was in my queue and offered to automatically remove it. Nice touch. It’s nice to see a web app with such a helpful feature.

Those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed (both of you) are about to notice a change. A few weeks ago I stopped splicing in my del.icio.us links and Flickr photo feeds so all you’ve been seeing is the woefully inactive blog feed. The reason? Jaiku. Jaiku is the best solution I’ve found to address my long-standing desire to offer a really comprehensive JasonFeedâ„¢.

At it’s core, Jaiku is a twitter-like app that allows for short IM-like blog posts. But the real beauty is it’s capability to read and splice most any RSS feed into your personal stream. And I might add, it does a marvelous job of auto-discovering these feeds. All you have to do is point Jaiku to a URL and it will find any associated feeds. Very slick. So the end result is a combined feed showing a large portion of my online activity. If you want to know what Jason is doing online (not sure why you would) you can see it all on Jaiku. The feed combines my Jaikus, tweets, blog posts, Last.fm tracks, mog tracks, upcoming events, Flickr photos, and my links from del.icio.us and digg. Its everything!

So tonight, I replaced my blog feed with the combined feed. This should show a lot more activity and really better represent me. If it gets to be too much, though you can still get the classic blog-only feed here.

I’ve got a pretty Utopian view when it comes to the workplace so I’m always interested in what companies are doing to make the office environment more productive, conducive to creativity, more fun, and overall help preserve the separation between what we do to make a living and what we do with our families.

Netflix, the online DVD rental service has a policy of allowing employees to take as much vacation as they’d like. I’m fascinated by the idea that the conventions of the modern workplace need to be rethought and in fact, represent an antiquated system that makes workers less productive. Netflix seems to agree:

“The worst thing is for a manager to come in and tell me: `Let’s give Susie a huge raise because she’s always in the office.’ What do I care? I want managers to come to me and say: `Let’s give a really big raise to Sally because she’s getting a lot done’ - not because she’s chained to her desk.”

I could not agree more.

I am bit late to this party, but I wanted to climb on board anyway because I feel very strongly about this.

[Note: this is part of a webwide series of blog posts about compact fluorescent lightbulbs. January is the darkest month of the year in the Northern Hemisphere (December might be a bit darker, but with all the candles, trees and dropping balls, we work hard to light it up). To fight off the darkness, bloggers everywhere are invited to create a post with their own riff on why CF bulbs are cheaper, better politically, harder to market or just plain cute. Your choice. If you trackback here, I'll post your link in a future post and/or you can add your link to this lens, which donates all royalties to Ecotrust].

From Seth Godin’s Blog

This is something I’ve felt pretty strongly about for some time now. I’ve always been a turn the lights off when you leave a room kind of guy so naturally any energy savings is appealing to me. Why? Is it to save on my utility bills? Sure - who wouldn’t want that? But I really think it is more than that. Every bit of energy you conserve cascades, it adds to the big picture. Sure your bills might be a little less. But on a grander scale every little bit of energy that you save is less energy that has to be produced be it via a coal plant or oil refinery. That helps the environment. So when people are still buying large SUV’s because they can “afford” the price of gas, they’re missing the point. There is more to conservation than just your bottom line.

But the thing is, switching away from incandescent lighting may make a bigger impact than you might expect. How big? Well, according to Energystar.gov:

“If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR [compact fluorescent bulb], we would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gasses equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.”

Frankly, that’s a pretty modest goal. Australia has plans to completely ban incandescent bulbs altogether by 2009. How about that for government really acting on something?

So please comment here. Send your trackbacks. Sign the lens linked above. But most of all, replace those outdated bulbs with newer, more energy-efficient compact fluorescent models.