Explicitly and without apology a marketing vehicle MaryMaryQuiteContrary

So as I may have mentioned before, the love-of-my-life and I are parents to three spectacular young children who are our life and our joy and our reason for living.

They're also my reason for tearing out my hair sometimes. The way they throw around their toys and leave them everywhere just drives me bananas.

So I woke up early, early this morning... couldn't get back to sleep... so instead of tossing around, I decided to go downstairs and pick up their toys and put them away.

Look at what I found:



Plastic toy coins.

You can't really tell from the picture, but they're really light-weight and cheap. There's absolutely no way that you could ever mistake these for real money.

But the manufacturer of the coins put the word "COPY" on them.

And it got me thinking... what kind of employee would make the decision to put the word "COPY" on these cheap plastic multi-colored coins?

I mean, the target demographic for this product can't even read that word.

What kind of management culture do you operate in that you feel like you have to put the word "COPY" -- in raised plastic -- onto these coins.

There's something completely messed up about that.

And it got me thinking... you know those closet MaryMaryQuiteContrary readers who are high-and-mighty executives?

(A girl's got to dream. :-)

I've got a personal communication to you guys:  if you see plastic coins with the word "COPY" on them someplace in your organization, you've got a big problem.

Just a little free advice from the rank and file down here.

:-)

mary

Blogging the Hand That Feeds You

submitted by tmolini 14 minutes ago (via http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09…)

Today, business blogs are becoming as common as iPods, and by some estimates are growing at a steady rate. Rather than fight this trend and quietly hope that employees don ’t reveal trade secrets, many companies are welcoming business blogs. ....One of the first businesses to welcome blogging was Sun Microsystems, the software giant based in ....

 

digg it?

Hal Stern[Read More]

Digg it?

Dalai Lama and heavy-hitting line-up of speakers webcast - CA Women's Conf

submitted by marymary 9 seconds ago (via http://www.sun.com/2006-0925/f…)

The 2006 California Governor and First Lady's Conference on Women is sold out, but you can still sit in on the three general sessions. Beginning at 8:30 a.m. Pacific time on September 26, the all-day event will be webcast live. Featured speakers include the Dalai Lama, California First Lady Maria Shriver, Martha Stewart and many others.

mary

In a Q&A with C/Net, Sun Co-Founder Vinod Khosla talks about the growing trend of clean technology.

When asked if the clean tech market will have a similar technology explosion as the computer industry, he notes, “Absolutely.  I was at the Clinton Global Initiative … and (Virgin Group Chairman) Richard Branson announced that 100 percent of all the profits from all their airlines and all their train operations over the next 10 years, which is expected to be about $3 billion, will go into clean tech.  That's an amazing, amazing story.  Is there interest?  Yes.  Are these economically viable?  Yes.  Will people lose money?  Absolutely.  It happens in Silicon Valley every day.  I do believe the profile will look as good as or better than the traditional Silicon Valley semiconductor or Internet start-up.  If you do a sector-by-sector analysis, I'm saying this sector should stack up on rates of return … It's just starting.  The typical maturation of a Silicon Valley start-up is four or five years, so we'll know by 2010 (how the sector is stacking up).”

Really good read. Check it out.

mary

p.s. if you just can't wait until 2010, we've got something for you today. :-)

 

First person to guess the identity of this hot-shot techno celeb (who happens to be a close personal friend and who gave me a private tour of his office which has the making of volumes of blog material but I've been so busy that there's just no time)...



The first person to guess the identity of this hot-shot techno celeb gets



A really neat pen shipped to them FOC.

Play (along) by posting a comment to this blog entry.

:-)

mary

Dan Briody met with Dave Douglas, the vice president of Eco-responsibility at Sun Microsystems
and wrote an interesting piece as a result. Briody said he left the meeting coveting Douglas' job.

(I know what you mean, Briody. That's of how I felt when I met Sun Chief Gaming Officer...



Chris Melissinos. Truth be told though, though the (acting) job I've got is a pretty hot one, so I'm not complaining.)

Check out the Briody piece. Good read.

mary

p.s. Dave Douglas is on my list of new best friends I haven't met yet. Give me just two more works and watch me work that one. :-)

Here's a little something that I found interesting.

Get ready. I'm about to engage in my most-favorite marketing tecnique (which has taken years to hone) -- copy; paste.


:-)

Check out the whole story.

And find out what propelled ...



... Tom Yager into my RSS feed.

Happy Monday!

mary

p.s. Had the mother of all techno celeb sightings on Friday. Details coming soon.

Q: What's missing?



Reliable sources have communicated to me that Brendan Gregg is now a Sun employee spending time in the Bay area.

He's going to be in Australia next week for



.... and a wedding -- his own!

So I wanted to extend my very best wishes to my very best friend that I haven't met yet -- Brendan Gregg!

And I want to thank Alan for giving me the skinny.

Congratulations, Brendan! To new beginnings!

mary

I'm a big believer in that.

Every good thing I've ever done has come back to me.

And every bad thing I've ever done has come back to me. Two fold, actually. But that's another story.

Today I'm here to tell you about a good thing.

And it's gone around.

And it came back to an OpenSolaris developer named Bill Rushmore.



Two fold.



That's right. Through a big-time MaryMaryQuiteContrary hook-up, Bill Rushmore got free, SIGNED copies of

Solaris Internals, Second Edition: Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Kernel Architecture

By Richard McDougall and Jim Mauro
Second edition, 1072 pages
ISBN 0131482092


and

Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris

By Richard McDougall, Jim Mauro and Brendan Gregg
First edition, 496 pages
ISBN 0131568191



All because I happen to be close personal friends with the authors, hot-shot techno celebs Richard McDougall and Jim Mauro.

(not to brag.)

And because I love and adore OpenSolaris developers. Bill Rushmore happened to be at the right place at the right time when I decided to get effusive. To the tune of $129.97, I'll have you know.

(Free stuff is the brand promise of MaryMaryQuiteContrary.)

So how's that for a bright little pick-me-up on a rainy Thursday afternoon?

:-)

mary

p.s. I fully recognize how hard it is to believe that your run of the mill marketing girl can be close personal friends with hot shot techno celebs like Richard McDougall and Jim Mauro. I know. Sometimes I feel like I'm living a dream. But it's all true. It's honest-to-goodness true. I have engaged in 1:1 dialogue. I've got the email trial to prove it. :-)

p.p.s. If you think that's hard to believe, have I got a story for you... I'm Acting.(!) I still can't say it out loud without smiling and it's been nearly three weeks.

Don't miss it.

mary

Breaking news from...



Sun’s DTrace software is named the Gold winner in The Wall Street Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation Awards.  According to the piece, “Bryan Cantrill and a team of engineers at Sun have devised a way to diagnose misbehaving software quickly and while it's still doing its work.  While traditional trouble-shooting programs can take several days of testing to locate a problem, the new technology, called DTrace, is able to track down problems quickly and relatively easily, even if the cause is buried deep in a complex computer system … Mr. Cantrill came up with the general idea for DTrace in 1996, while he was a computer-science student at Brown University, but didn't get to start work on it until late 2001.  It took nearly three years for him and his team -- Michael Shapiro, a Sun distinguished engineer, and Adam Leventhal, a staff engineer -- to make it work; a final version shipped early last year as part of Sun's Solaris 10 OS.”

Digg it?

Would you even believe me if I told you that I count these hot-shot techno celebs among my close personal friends?

:-)

mary

p.s. this is certainly cause for a most exhuberant swivel-swivel-double-snap. feel free to join me.

Thrilled to introduce you to JP, my new best friend I haven't met yet.

JP knows what the MaryMaryQuiteContrary brand promise is.

Because it's riding his bike.




JP was one of the 17 people who got packages of free stuff out to them this weekend.

Lots of those 17 people send me thank-you emails. JP's the first one in a long time to send me a picture and I'm totally loving it.

Along with the captions.

Which made me smile.

:-)

mary

p.s. as soon as I get caught up with things in my new (acting) job, I'll hit up Jamie and see if I can get the Free Stuff Fairy to come through with the goods.

The latest addition to the list of prohibited items when it comes to commercial air travel...

You guys, I've got so much going on, both at work and at home, that sometimes I feel like... well ...  sometimes I just wish I had a minute to tuck in my shoes and tie my shirt. I mean tuck in my shirt and tie my shoes.

So after a pretty crazy busy day, I find myself in my kitchen all alone with the kids asleep upstairs. I look around and realize that we have no sandwich meat, no bread, no veggies or fruit. In a nutshell, I am completely ill prepared to pack lunches for my brood the next morning.

So at 8 p.m. I head off to my neighborhood wholesale warehouse. It's really hard to explain if you've never been to one. And it's kind of embarrassing if you're not American.

(The love-of-my-life was -- obviously -- staying home with the kids.)

Anyway... I'm at Costco... and what do I see there... Christmas decorations.

I am completely serious.



It is September 5. Summer officially has nearly three full weeks left.

I could not even believe it.

Anyway... I load up my shopping cart and $300+ later I'm out the door with enough supplies to feed an army. It takes me an hour to put it all away once I get home. By this time I'm completely beat. I need a little something to unwind. And I had completely forgotten to charge the gameboy.

So I go to Java.com -- my #1 all time favorite place for finding hot games and cool apps.

And I find -- a typing test!

TypingMaster Online Test

Free typing skills test




I hadn't taken one of those since high school. It reminded me of early career advice I got: "Never admit you know how to type. If they find out you can type, that's all you'll ever do."

I guess that gives you a sense for how long I've been slugging it out in this rough-and-tumble-world we call the workforce.

Anyway...

I took the typing test on java.com.

The results:

TYPING TEST RESULTS

Here are your full test results:

- Test Name:   Strategic Alliances with Competitors
- Date:        2006-09-05 22:48
- Test Time:   01:00
- Gross Speed: 100 WPM
- Errors:      4 
- Accuracy:    96%

- NET SPEED:   96 WPM

Pretty good, eh? I was kind of pleased with myself on that one.

Betcha can't beat it.

:-)

mary

p.s. They're espadrills. The shoes. With the ribbon ties. I've got them in white, pink and blue. :-)