Monthly Archives: May 2023

Inside Voice, Stories, Vancouvering

Proverbs from Ramada Inn

One thing I sometimes do is just hit random play on my whole music collection. Almost every time I get reintroduced to a gem.

Today I got reintroduced to the audio file embedded above.

It’s an idea from 2008 for a radio advertisement for a hotel chain. We chose Ramada Inn but it could as well have been Holiday Inn or Marriott.

We’ve taken a simple fact of budget or midmarket hotel rooms – that each room comes equipped with a bible in the bedside drawer – and created a hopefully surprising story from it. And I think it holds up pretty well.

Full credit to Monica Hamburg for the main voice acting and to Joe Solomon for the collaboration.

And, if you are wondering about the passage, it’s source is Proverbs, Chapter 7, Verses 15-20, with some updated language. (In the read I made the mistake of saying Chapter 17.)

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Findings, Nerdery, Slack

More Brain, the tantalizing promise that persists

I was recently looking for a better writing tool and came across Obsidian, a “powerful and extensible knowledge base that works on top of your local folder of plain text files.”

I saw this on their homepage.

And thought to myself, that seems familiar. So I went searching through some archives and found –

That second screenshot is from August, 2013 when I was working with the team at Slack and we were figuring out our positioning prior to launching.

Now, I don’t mean this post to say that Obsidian are ripping off a Slack that never existed because they’re not. Slack launched with a different homepage and positioning, and the chance that anyone saw that Slack copy above is pretty near nil.

What I do mean to point out here though is that the promise of a “second brain” or a “scalable, infinite brain” is a tantalizing thought that persists still today, pretty much unsolved.

And will we ever solve it? Maybe?

And if we did ever solve it, my sense is that it would change what it means to be human.

There is a reason the zombies seek and eat “Braaaaains!”

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