Tag Archives: Adam Cohen

7 Things You Might Wish You Didn’t Know About Me

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Okay so Mike Langford (aka @MikeLangford) hates me as and selected me as a Twitter friend to take part in this 7 things list with his post. This little ditty has been going around though as Lyell Petersen (aka @93Octane) sent it to him and you can follow the train back from there…

If I deemed you worthy enough to pass this glorious honor on to you, and put its continued existence in your very hands (you! have! the! power!), please follow these care and feeding guidelines:

  • Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
  • Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
  • Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  • Let them know they’ve been tagged

All right here we go…

  1. I split my head open jumping over hurdles – but not the way you may think. We had to do plyometric bounding drills over hurdles set closely together my freshman year of college (few people even know that I ran track in college). Well I clipped my heel on a hurdle and fell. So the first thing you do when you fall is jump back up and hope nobody saw you, right? Well what I didn’t realize is that when I fell on the hurdle it had sprung up and was spinning in the air…and I stoop up into it leaving a gash over my left eye near my temple. It took 7 internal stiches and 9 external stiches to close it up. Now I just have a barely noticeable scar line over my eyebrow.
  2. I was a history minor in college – when I started college I didn’t have a firm knowledge of what I wanted to do, but who really does? That’s the type A number crunching part of my personality. So I took a bunch of history classes as well as my art & design classes. Come senior year I learned I only needed to take a history survey class so I figured why not?
  3. I don’t like football – I know sacrilege to some. I actually played football in high school for a couple of years…just didn’t have the passion for it. I can sit & watch parts of a game, just not in a group with a bunch of people yelling at the TV. Also after watching Tim Krumrie’s leg get sickeningly crumpled over and over again during the Super Bowl XXIII in slow motion I stopped watching. The only sports I follow religiously now are baseball & cycling.
  4. eric_guerinI once had a giant dyed blond Mohawk haircut – That’s right. I also had my head shaved and my hair long & dyed black as well. What can I tell you…I was in art school! While no photos exist of the Mohawk here’s a funny one of me with my head shaved.
  5. Once I was stalked by a Nile Crocodile – I was doing a graphics installation at the New England Aquarium after they were closed on an African lake exhibit. While installing some information card turrets in front of the Nile Crocodile exhibit I noticed that the 16′ Nile Crocodile slipped into the water in his tank and was gliding toward me. When I turned to look at the crocodile…it stopped completely still. So then I turned back to my work and noticed out of the corner of my eye that the crocodile was gliding towards me again! Not trusting the 3″ thick Lexan to keep the crocodile away from me I sped through the rest of my installations and got the heck out of there.
  6. I developed photos for Ben Affleck before he was BEN AFFLECK – well he was still Ben Affleck and had been in a couple decent movies already but it was before Good Will Hunting was released. He used to go into a little boutique photo store I used to work at on Newbury Street and get his film developed. I also helped him find where to buy a Hasselblad Medium Format Camera and he invited us all to go to the Boston Premiere of Good Will Hunting which I unfortunately turned down.
  7. This is the first time I have ever returned a chain mail of any form – I normally get a bunch of these emails and prior to email actual snail mail letters which promise good luck or a horrible curse and they usually all get deleted. I thought this one sounded fun and Mike is a good egg so I decided to do this one for fun.

I hope you enjoyed this little bit of useless knowledge about me & my life and now the poor souls I am passing the baton to with their Twitter handles:

Nick Inglis (@nickinglis)
Ken George (@KenGeorge)
Josh Garner (@SEOFactor)
Adam Cohen (@adamcohen)
Tom Gastall (@tomgastall)
Danny Brown (@PressReleasePR)
Wahyd Vannoni (@manifest_mag)

Leave a comment below with the link to your 7 things post once you’ve written one.

 

 

How Twitter Can Save The World

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Or how the power of conversation can help you out in a bind

Okay so Twitter probably can’t save the world, but on one occasion I was involved with it saved one person’s afternoon. I often hear that “Twitter seems like a huge waste of time” from people who don’t get it or aren’t trying to get it. Here’s my argument why that is completely not the case.

Twitter can be as simple as following an interesting conversation between a few people, providing a link to a great article or video or maybe just some witty banter between friends. A great example of an engaging conversation on Twitter is posted by Adam Cohen (or @adamcohen on Twitter) on his blog called Twitter: The Value of Good Conversation where he takes a snapshot of a conversation between Scott Monty (@ScottMonty) and Christopher Penn (@cspenn) of a look at a big corporation’s struggles in the current economy. I didn’t see the original conversation between Scott and Christopher (although I do follow both of them) – but I found the link to the blog post by Adam on Twitter and really wanted to include it in this blog post as a great example of the quality dialogue on Twitter. I’ll admit reading this post made me want to finish my own blog post I’ve been talking about writing since it happened back in August.

The flip side to an interesting dialogue on Twitter is occasionally just getting stuck in a situation and throwing a question out to the world in the hopes that one of your followers in the Twitter stream might have an answer. So I was inspired to pull a thread of conversation out of Twitter I had with Alex Howard (@digiphile) to illustrate this point:

@digiphile: Where’s a good bikeshop near Boylston Street in Back Bay? Blew a tube hopping over a cobblestone curb. No spare. Whoops
August 28th 5:35PM

@eric_guerin: @digiphile I think the closest bike shop to where you are at is Back Bay Bicycles on Comm Ave http://backbaybicycles.com/
August 28th 5:38PM

@digiphile: @eric_guerin & @skalik Thanks! That might still leave time to get a tube, switch it & return to Cambridge & shower. Twitterific replies.
August 28th 5:40 PM

@eric_guerin: @digiphile Been there…almost the same spot too! Good luck & safe ride home!
August 28th 5:43 PM

@digiphile: FTW: http://backbaybicycles.com/ | These guys were awesome. Highly recommended. Self-service tube change, 10min. Loaned me a tool, too. A+
August 28th 6:51 PM

So within the span of 10 minutes Alex was able to find a bike shop less than a block away and get his bike back up and running. All because he asked his followers on Twitter. I used to work less than a block away on the Newbury Street side and frequently used to stop in to Back Bay Bicycles so I was very familiar with the bike shop and their great service. I’ve also been in Alex’ situation with a flat tire and had a LONG walk because I had no way of asking for help on a network like Twitter. By the way Sandy Kalik (@skalik), another of Alex’s followers also answered within those first 10 minutes to help him out.

This is my own experience of how I actually helped someone out of a bind by listening to the ongoing conversation on Twitter. On an everyday basis I get help and ideas from my Twitter followers for simpler things like figuring out a WordPress Plugin. I also give assistance, opinions and ideas where I think I can help people when they ask but this was an example of a time-sensitive situation I was able to help someone else out with.

How about your own experiences? Please consider sharing them either below, on Adam’s post or pingback with a post on your own blog.