Good idea. If you carry a firearm, you should really look into that. There's a good review of the budget plans of Carry Guard, USCCA, Second Call, Self Defense Association and others over here, and a comparison of the top-end plans of NRA Carry Guard and the USCCA over here.

Labels: concealed carry insurance, self defense legal protection

At least not yet. My gun blog is at Misfires And Light Strikes.

Please adjust your reality accordingly.

I see this sort of thing EVERY TIME I've done a website redesign. An organization that is customer-focused and knows what it's about does quick redesigns that produce tremendous results. A business that's silo'd itself into fiefdoms produces something else, and it usually isn't good.

Bad publishers often get bad redesigns, agencies say. That’s because a publisher has to know what it’s about. When that vision is muddled, so to is the design. Want to know a publisher that’s driven by internal squabbling: look for the carousel, which is usually a sign of different departments fighting for scarce real estate.“The state of the organization generally reflects what that experience is like,” said Mike Treff, partner at design agency Code and Theory. “Dealing with forward-focused, modern, aligned-from-a-values-perspective organization, it’s easier than dealing with an organization that’s struggling and what their way forward is.” 

Yep.

There's food for thought in this article on Twitter and TV:

Being a San Franciscan, I definitely watched the Super Bowl last week. And, yes, I'm feeling better, but it will still take some time to get back to feeling really good again. At least we still have the World Series champions. But I also had my phone with me the whole time. In fact, I was upstairs, checking on dinner when the most spectacular moment of all occurred: the lights went out in the Superdome.
It was spectacular because I found out what was happening from Twitter. Actually, I thought "lights out" referred to the Niners' secondary. It wasn't long until I realized, like the rest of the country (this is still the biggest shared TV moment in the U.S.), to tune away from the TV and toward social media. 

I'm not as bullish on the future of TV and Twitter: I think Facebook and streaming will continue to prosper, but I think that broadcast/cable/dish and Twitter will continue to exist for the same reasons that movie theaters and live concerts will continue to exist: They are shared social experiences that streaming media can't replicate. We're starting to see media break out into two broad groups, the immediate and the thoughtful.

Immediate media is things like concerts and "event TV" shows like season premieres, the Super Bowl and Dick Clark New Year's Eve show and awards shows: They must be watched at that moment to be enjoyed in full, and are best when shared with others who have the same interests. I've chatted with the stars of TV shows while watching those shows, and it really added to the experience. That's the magic of a shared, immediate experience, and that won't go away.

But there's also magic in more restful, complex activities. Catching up with old friends or reading a newspaper (online or not) is a contemplative experience that isn't as time-sensitive or shared as a rock concert or the NBA Finals. I'm in charge of when I read e-mail, Facebook and my blogroll, and I decide what's on my reading list for the day.

Both immediate media and thoughtful media are useful and needed: When an earthquake struck Ensenada, Mexico in 2010, the chandeliers in our house rocked back and forth, and my first thought was that California had suffered "the big one". I didn't turn to Facebook or a newspaper to find out what's going on, I went to Twitter and TV. Afterwards, once I found out what was going on, I went to Facebook. It's not a question of either Twitter or Facebook, it's both.

Mashable lists the first ten, the other two are:

Classmates.com: Why should I pay to keep in touch with my school chums when I can do it for free?

Link Registries: Digg, Reddit, etc. I'm more interested in what my friends find interesting than somebody who I've never heard of.

A revealing yet damning journey into the mind of traditional media, and where it has gone so wrong.

"In particular, local journalism's occupational self-image, its vision of itself as an autonomous workforce conducting original reporting on behalf of a unitary public, blocked the kind of cross-institutional collaboration that might have helped journalism thrive in an era of fractured communication."

Le presse, c'est moi.

20 Spectacular Pinterest Fails.

Apple CEO Tim Cook:

"We changed the vast majority of our iPhone in a day. We didn’t kind of—you know, change a little bit here or there. IPad, we changed the entire lineup in a day. The most successful product in consumer electronics history, and we change it all in a day and go with an iPad mini and a fourth-generation iPad. Who else is doing this? Eighty percent of our revenues are from products that didn’t exist 60 days ago. Is there any other company that would do that?" (emphasis mine) 

That is how you stay on top for ten years. 

Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt on Monday once again warned that his company could drop weaker-performing cable networks as pay TV giants continue to pay more in channel carriage deals. 



Disney and NetFlix announce a blockbuster deal to stream Disney content on Netflix. 

Korean rapper PSY is a millionaire based on YouTube ad revenue alone, far more than he's made from digital subscriptions. 

... so Apple is bragging how Newstand allows people to read their magazines on the iPad instead of the print editions.

That's cool.

Only if you read magazines.

But if you've replaced dead-tree media with an RSS aggregator, why does that matter? Why should I wait a week for someone to serve up the internet to me once again so I can read what they think I should read? Instead of trying to re-create the technology of yesterday on the platform of today, why not create an Apple-branded news aggregator for iOS, because I've yet to find one that works to my satisfaction.

iPad + Web app + Stand = Kiosk.

There's a bunch of retail markets that could benefit from this neat little hack. And what if the kiosk had a "I need help" button that texted a store employee to your location?

All of a sudden what used to cost $100,000 becomes affordable for almost every small business owner.

From A Photo Editor:

"It’s helpful to think about social media as just another publishing platform and delivery tool. No different than creating a postcard and mailing it to someone except that when you put something online it can be shared over and over again with no additional cost to you. ...A blog is the perfect tool for tackling all of these at once. You can publish your marketing material on a blog and have it sent automatically to an email list and post on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter." 

Personally, I'm not a big fan of "Write once, post everywhere", as each medium has grammar and conventions all their own. Hashtags mean squat on Facebook, and writing a meaning message within the 140 characters allowed on Twitter can be a challenge.

But the idea that a blog is where it all starts is 100% correct. A blog is your voice. Where else you chose to speak (Tumblr, Facebook, etc) is up to you.