A Mad Vox

How do you feel about sharing your salary information with your friends?

Calling all open mic aficionados, musically inclined locals, and visitors!  It's A Grind Coffeehouse in Santa Monica is debuting their very own open mic night and you are invited to come participate!

If you plan to play get there by 7PM!  Our show will begin at 7PM and go 'til 9PM.

Where is It's A Grind?
It's A Grind Coffeehouse is located on the southeast corner of 6th and Santa Monica Blvd.
602 Santa Monica Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA
Make It's A Grind your myspace friend:
myspace.com/itsagrindsantamonica

How much does this cost?
It's free (along with free nearby street parking after 6pm). There will be plenty of light food and tasty beverages for purchase.

Never done this before?
Neither have we. It's our very first open mic night here too. Let's make history together!  Newbies are welcome here. This is a perfect venue to make your debut in a positive and supportive music community.   

Early weeknight bonus!
Advantage of a Monday open mic is that you've got plenty of nights left in the week to head to other music hot spots in LA, Santa Monica, Hollywood, or the valley.

Feel free to pass this message along to anyone you think may be interested.  See you Monday!

What's the best April Fools' Day prank you've ever had pulled on you?
Courtesy of Team Vox.

I am pretty sure that all this news of phasing out of the Vox QotD and the Vox Hunt is a top runner.  :D

I wish that Google would offer custom time stamp for emails. That would be so awesome because it would make procrastinators all around the world have to work to find new ways to procrastinate.  Custom time stamping would be like Tivo for real life! Or something.

Good ones, people. Keep it up.

I'm off to pick up some business cards in a few for a networking event tomorrow. I would have ordered moo mini-cards, but I didn't have the foresight to order them 2-3 weeks ago.

Saddest subject line ever, isn't it? It's still true two and a half hours after dinner.

The dinner I made went well!  I shared homemade cream of carrot soup with croutons and provided the fixings for make-your-own (up to six layer) turkey burritos. Hanging out with everyone present was really nice to boot. 

Tomorrow Ben and Jerry's "Fossil Fuel," you will be mine. Unless I crack open a box of Thin Mints or Tagalongs (girl scout cookies) first. On second thought, maybe I should save all those goodies for a later day. I may still be full from tonight's dinner.

Thanks to all those who made such delicious suggestions!

This week I'll be making a simple dinner for up to a dozen friends and I'm wracking my brain to come up with a suitable menu for possible vegetarians, definite carnivores, and all who are anticipating tasty treats from my kitchen. I happened upon this video via Viddler:

Good things to know. If you have any ideas of what to make for a main dish, I'd love to hear them. I'm looking forward to this. And don't worry, I'll leave out the beet puree in any dessert I end up making.

This is from one of my yahoo groups, graphic design. I thought it would be relevant to others who'd be interested in opting out of web snooping:

Yahoo is now using something called "Web Beacons" to track all your moves on the web, not just ones on their site. They see what you're doing and where you are going (similar to cookies.) Yahoo is recording every website and every group you visit.

Take a look at their updated privacy statement:
1.  http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/details.html
2. About half-way down the page, in the section on Cookies, you will see a link that says Web Beacons. Click on the phrase "Web Beacons".
3. That will bring you to a paragraph entitled "Outside the Yahoo Network". In this section you'll see a little "click here to opt out" link which will let you "opt-out" of their new method of snooping.
4. Once you have clicked that link, you are exempted. [Notice the "Success" message on the top of the next page.
Be careful because on that page there is also a "Cancel Opt-out" button which, if clicked, will *undo* the opt-out. It appears after you have hit the opt-out button so is very confusing. Feel free to forward this to others and groups.

I believe they should have made something like this an opt-IN situation but who in their right mind would volunteer to be spied on?

I also found (on my own no less) that when you have Microsoft Outlook and Firefox open at the same time on a PC, and you have a tendency to copy text and then realize you already had other text copied that you'd forgotten to paste earlier, your most recently copied text will simply be added to the clipboard instead of replacing the originally copied text! How fantastic is that?

Massive cuts have taken place at Y!. I could just blame Micro$oft, but it wouldn't make me feel any better (after an hour or two).  So I'm going to explain the situation as I understand it.

As you may know M$ aggressively offered to buy Y! in cash and stocks valued at about 50% more than the stock price was worth at that time (for $31). If this offer was accepted, essentially I would have become a redundant employee and lost my job when M$ eventually would have devoured the existing departments and outsourced my department (search marketing), probably to Google.

Turns out the M$ offer was declined. This was also bad for my department because now, legally owing shareholders some sort of a consolation for turning down all that free money, the CEO, Jerry Yang, was forced to do something to raise the share price immediately-- hence the layoffs. Almost 10% of the company had their last day at Y! today. I was one of them. There was nothing I could do to change this outcome and I'm confident the decision to let me go had nothing to do with me personally. It doesn't mean I'm not left feeling a little bit lost trying to process everything.  It was great working with my group each day, and all the people I got a chance to say goodbye to were saddened and shocked to see me go. I was pretty shocked myself. I was there only seven months, but I feel like I've learned so much during that time. I worked with extremely smart, very knowledgeable people and I was especially thrilled to be a part of that team. I'm going to go back for some placement help through my ex-employer starting tomorrow to make the transition to a new place and wrap up loose ends.

Fortunately I have some friends in my network who are also offering to get me web work, which is pretty comforting. Keep it coming! I may be more open to that than anything else. I also know I have a limited time to choose from all opportunities presented and so I must do so wisely.

So now what?
I get to actively move the 'what I want to do next' plot in my life along and I feel pretty honored to be in a position to choose. My passions for music, writing, social media, and the web remain strong as ever and I'm glad to remain on a path to doing some fantastic projects in the future.