If you’re curious to see what the new monster plane looks like, check out these pics on the National Geographic site. Pretty wild.

Another interesting link from Boing Boing, The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form–an attempt to create limericks for every word in English. They’re still working on the “a”s right now, so the conference/convention/meeting area isn’t begun yet, but here’s one for attrition:

When you’re fighting a war of attrition,
You must throw away all inhibition.
Then despite people’s cries,
You exhaust all supplies
Until nothing remains but submission.

Obviously, the author, Suzanne Kreul, can’t be a meeting planner or hotelier, though she writes a mean ditty! So all you limerick writers out there, sharpen your pencils! You can join the project here.

I just read on about Ian Urbina’s recent excellent story about coping with life’s annoyances that ran in the New York Times, and how he’s looking to collect a few more stories along those lines. OK planners, I just know you all have come up with some creative ways to deal with life’s little irritations–if you do, just e-mail Ian with your stories. A few ideas to get you going, from Boing Boing:

• Why must phone bills be so indecipherable - and ripe with mystery charges and obfuscating language. Since the letters they send are in gibberish, why not write them back in their native tongue? Anyone done this or something equally irrational but cathartic?
• Emails sent to the wrong person. It happens so easily and can be extremely embarrassing. Has anyone gone to extreme lengths to try to avoid the fallout after making this mistake? I’ve heard of a guy who mistakenly emailed out the payroll list to all the employees and when he realized his error, he pulled the building’s fire alarm to buy himself time to track down the tech guy who could reverse the email. Anyone done anything similar?

He says he’s collected enough anti-spam, anti-telemarketer or anti-junk mail tactics, but otherwise, it’s wide open.

I don’t know if I’m just tired, or if I’m suffering from happiness withdrawal, but I have that strung-out, party’s-over thing going on since I got back from Orlando an hour or so ago. Anyway, to round out my Disney postings, here’s a wrap of last night.

First we went to a reception at The Living Seas in Epcot, where I got to commune with the manatees, rays, and a disembodied head named Bob who was a crackup in a very strange way (the actor’s head was in a glass-encased globe sitting on top of a box filled with gadgets–I never could figure out how they did that!). Another highlight was Turtle Talk with Crush, where an animated sea turtle on a screen gave us a great "hey, dude" experience. It was another one of those, "how do they do that?" moments to see the animation pick out specific people in the crowd to interact with. He also had some fun with the meeting planner organizations represented and really tailored the show to us. Cracked me up completely with his So-Cal lingo. (I never saw Finding Nemo, which I gather the character of Crush comes from, but I think I’ll rent it just to see Crush again!)

Then we watched the dedication for Soarin’, the latest Disney World attraction. It was, I hate to say it, pretty magical to see the skydivers soar down in huge zig-zags, streaming different colors of smoke against the clouds just as the sunset began to stain the sky with colors of its own. (Note to Disney: just as you made your ponchos clear so people can find their family members when it rains, you might want to consider changing the color of the umbrellas you provide. When we all unfurled our umbrellas while waiting for the dedication, the sea of black, even enlivened with Mickey images, looked a little funereal to me.)

The ride itself is a blast–you really do feel like you’re flying over the various landscapes. And I don’t think I imagined the scent of orange in the air as we wafted over some orange groves. I loved the Test Track ride too, where you get to pretend you’re a crash test dummy–we did that one twice. Good speed and G-force at the end.

Anyway, the night ended with a rocking Barenaked Ladies concert–I couldn’t believe how many of their songs I knew–and some spectacular fireworks. I was so jazzed up it took me forever to fall asleep.

There were celebs all over the place, too.  Especially John Corbett, who played Carrie’s ex-flame Aidan on Sex and the City. I swear, I think the guy was following us–he was everywhere! I either must be getting old or I need to watch more TV, because I didn’t recognize most of the American Idols, pop stars, and other celebs people were spotting.

But the real stars, to me and my group of meetings magazine editors at least, were Disney marketing’s Terry Brinkoetter and Amie Gorrell, who went so far out of their way to take care of us that they must have gone to Pluto and back several times over the past two days–and I’m not talking about the cartoon dog, either.

They were so unfailingly hospitable and fun, and I hope the company realizes just what gems they have in these folks. There was much I loved about Disney World, and getting to hang with Terry, Amie, and an intern who also is conveniently named Amy (and whose last name is escaping my brain at the moment–sorry!) was among the highest of the highlights. My experience over the past two days showed me that the place really isn’t all about the rides and the spectacular shows and the cool meeting space and the gorgeous hotels, though it certainly has all that in spades. It’s Terry, and Amie, and Amy, and Dennis, and Laurie, and all the others who went way out of their way to make our time there, well, magical. I can only imagine what they could do for a meeting…

P.S. I forgot to mention that we got a sneak peek at the guest room update they’re starting at the Contemporary Resort. I’ve never seen the current rooms, but the model of the renovated rooms was all earth tones, warmth, casual yet elegant–I would love to have a room like that to retreat to after the day’s sessions were over. The sinks are also very cool, and if there’s a hidden Mickey in the room, we couldn’t find it!

I don’t know, but it sounds like the rumors are flying.

ConferZone has released a Web Conferencing 101 white paper. I just did a quick skim of it, but it looks like a pretty good primer on webinars and webcasting. If you have yet to dip a toe into these waters, it might be a good resource.

I stumbled onto Bullfighter–a neat little program you can run Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents through to make sure they’re not stuffed with meaningless corporate-speak–a while back, then lost it when it moved off its original site. I just found it again here. Bummer of bummers, it still doesn’t come in a Mac version, so I can’t run my articles through it. But I love the concept.

Anyway, they now have a blog, where I found this post: A quick snip:

In a project that sounds like something too absurd even for us, three
MIT graduate students submitted a computer-generated, nonsensical paper
full of bull-speak to a conference. Astonishingly, or maybe not, it was
accepted.

From the Boston Globe editorial:

Jeremy Stribling,
Max Krohn, and Dan Aguayo call their paper ”Rooter: A Methodology for
the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" — which might
have been seen as a tip-off that scientific beaks were being tweaked.
After all, why would anyone want to unify redundancy?

But
the four-page send-up, laced with confounding graphs, was accepted by
an international conference that itself sounds like a spoof: ”The
Ninth World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics."

If I were a conference organizer, I’d make it a requirement that all speakers had to run their notes and PowerPoint presentations through Bullfighter. Your attendees would thank you, take it from someone who not only has to sit through all that yadda-yadda, but  also take notes and try to  write articles about it later. In the meantime, I’m anxiously awaiting the Web version, which they say is coming "early in 2005."  Coming from these guys, I’m sure hope that’s not just bull.

Thanks to B or not 2B for reconnecting me to this fine service to humanity!

That’s a question explored in this Gallup article–it seems like a good one to read, now that MPI, PCMA, and ASAE are all working on their own versions of core competencies…

This is your brain. And, according to a study done by the Institute of Psychiatry on behalf of Hewlett-Packard, this is your brain on tech overload:

That’s right, our Blackberry addictions and compulsive e-mail checking is lowering our IQs. From the press release:

Far from making workers more productive, the findings of a new scientific experiment reveal that those who “over juggle” and who constantly disrupt meetings and important tasks to read and respond to messages, significantly reduce their IQ. In a series of tests carried out by Dr Glenn Wilson, Reader in Personality at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, an average worker’s functioning IQ falls ten points when distracted by ringing telephones and incoming emails. This drop in IQ is more than double the four point drop seen following studies on the impact of smoking marijuana. Similarly, research on sleep deprivation suggests that an IQ drop of ten points is equal to missing an entire night of sleep. This IQ drop was even more significant in men who took part in the tests.

And just earlier today, when someone asked me how I do all this blogging and my day job, I thought I was kidding when I said, “Might as well face it, I’m addicted to blog” (apologies to Robert Palmer).

I was just reading an interesting post over at the Fast Company blog that says, "as Mary Cantando, founder of Womenbusinessowner.com,
points out: you can learn as much from others’ experience in dealing
with failure as you can from life’s winners. What’s more, it’s often
more fun hearing that the people we admire were once as inept as the
rest of us, than hearing one more tale of superhuman derring-do."

BizBash has a bloopers page that highlights some meetings-related goofs (the most recent is a save-the-date brochure that doesn’t mention the actual dates), but I’d like to hear them from you. What bad experiences have you had that others could learn from? (You can post them anonymously in the comments area below by not filling your name, etc., or e-mail me at spelletier@charter.net.)

I’ll start: On a magazine I worked on long ago, we were just putting the finishing touches on the issue that was to go to the printer first thing in the morning. Then lightning struck the building, zapping every machine in the place and sending our weeks of labor into the ether. We spent the entire night recreating the magazine on the editor’s home computer–it wasn’t pretty. Lesson learned? Back up, back up, then back up again!

And here’s a doozy of a sales blooper from Dan Seidman, who collects these stories: "Guy compliments company President on his picture of President with arm
around football great John Madden. It’s not John Madden, it’s the guy’s
wife."

What have you learned from the school of hard knocks? Please share, so others don’t have to learn the hard way, too.

I was just reading an interesting post over at the Fast Company blog that says, "as Mary Cantando, founder of Womenbusinessowner.com,
points out: you can learn as much from others’ experience in dealing
with failure as you can from life’s winners. What’s more, it’s often
more fun hearing that the people we admire were once as inept as the
rest of us, than hearing one more tale of superhuman derring-do."

BizBash has a bloopers page that highlights some meetings-related goofs (the most recent is a save-the-date brochure that doesn’t mention the actual dates), but I’d like to hear them from you. What bad experiences have you had that others could learn from? (You can post them anonymously in the comments area below by not filling your name, etc., or e-mail me at spelletier@charter.net.)

I’ll start: On a magazine I worked on long ago, we were just putting the finishing touches on the issue that was to go to the printer first thing in the morning. Then lightning struck the building, zapping every machine in the place and sending our weeks of labor into the ether. We spent the entire night recreating the magazine on the editor’s home computer–it wasn’t pretty. Lesson learned? Back up, back up, then back up again!

And here’s a doozy of a sales blooper from Dan Seidman, who collects these stories: "Guy compliments company President on his picture of President with arm
around football great John Madden. It’s not John Madden, it’s the guy’s
wife."

What have you learned from the school of hard knocks? Please share, so others don’t have to learn the hard way, too.