Ellie's Blog

"Complete" New Testament in the Form of a Teen Magazine (Video)

This post brings together two of my favorite things: comedy and religion. Oh, and a third I guess: my family. But maybe I shouldn't have given that away...

 

 

This is totally for real. I haven't seen the actual magazine, but I have seen a Christian Teen Bible, which is absolutely the same idea - the Christian Bible with some pretty amazing additions with really valuable lessons on topics such as money, relationships, and sex (sex is not a ham and cheese sandwich... or is it?)

 

Thanks, Dan, for passing this along to me.

Geekalicious Links

We are in the Age of the Geeks, where everything "geeky" or "dorky" is actually cool and awesome.  We are all embracing our inner geek.  And my inner geek just can't help but love these wonderful articles:

 

Internet Marketing Data Predicts the Patriots Win the Super Bowl

Mathematical Symbol "Pi" Announces its Bid for President, Promising "Endless Change"

Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?  Helping Your Child Understand the Stay-At-Home Server (the ultimate children's book)

Fun World of Marketing #3

Where Modesty Does Not Mean Frumpy!

 

Headcoverings by Devorah

 

 

Just the mannequins kind of freak me out.

Happiness at Work: Finding the Right Job For You

I've spoken about this numerous times before - happiness in your job is all about finding the right company for you. There's no one perfect job for everyone, it's all about finding the right fit between you and the company.

And now there's a site that helps you figure this out! On Jiibe, you answer a bunch of questions (the more you answer, the more accurate your results) about your current and ideal work environment. It then creates a "jiibe" and report based on your responses. Here's my jiibe:

 

Not only that, it offers up companies that match your jiibe (based on users' ratings for the companies for the same set of questions) and (smartest part of all) actually displays current openings posted at that company. Well, that's Jiibe's whole thing - their tagline is "The best way to find a great place to work is to ask a friend, but Jiibe takes it a step further by asking everyone".

It's very cool (though somewhat tedious to answer all the questions) and it's free (but be warned: you will need to register). I don't agree 100% with the report it spit out for me or my company, but there's definitely some valid stuff in there. And it's "colorful." For example, here's what it says about HubSpot: "If this company were a band it would be a punk group called Innovate or Die!" Right now their directory of companies is still pretty limited, but this could turn out to be a very popular, very cool job search tool. These days it's all about valuable, user-generated content and that's what Jiibe is all about.

Surviving the Blogosphere: Bullets, Bold, Links, and Pictures

Both what I have heard about writing blog articles that become popular and what I have experienced in terms of the blog articles that I actually read and enjoy involve four things that boil down to the same point: make it easy to scan your article and still get what it's saying. People who really follow blogs (even me, who only follows a couple dozen) have a ton of posts to read every day, and in reality, they're not going to sit down and read every single one in detail. Make it short, sweet, and easy to read, with these key points:

 

• Bullets - Bullets clearly delineate the key points of your article. They're easy to scan because they separate out your points with white space and people recognize the start, and hopefully most important part, of your statement.
• Bold - Bolding a few terms also helps. Even bolding phrases, because when people scan or skim your article, they'll pick up on these bolded sections.
• Links - Links, too, are good scannable material. They're separated out with their (often) blue text and underline, which makes them easy to pick out and direct your readers to more information. This is a good way, too, to keep your posts short, and be able to offer more information to your readers if they want it.
• Pictures - Who doesn't love pictures? They're fun to look at and they're easy to scan. A picture's worth a thousand words, right? So how about inserting a picture instead of a thousand words I don't want to read through anyway.

These are all ridiculously basic things but I thought I'd share, in part in an effort to share with those who don't know these things, as well, in part, as a request to bloggers out there to make it easier to follow their blogs. I know you've got good stuff to say, but I just don't have time to weed through all your content. Make it easy to cut across the fluff to the real content. That's what the Internet's all about. Consumer is in control, and just wants to get straight to the good stuff.

Why FunWall Sucks and is the Reason Facebook is Pulling the Reigns on Applications

1. When your friend creates a post on FunWall, your feed reads, "[Your friend] sent you message." Confusing! Not so much the "[Your friend] threw a snowball at you! Continue the snowball fight and throw one back!" typical application feed. Use of the term "message" is very misleading and confusing.

2. To install the app, you MUST invite friends. What? You can't skip this? That's idiotic. It's bad enough you conned me into installing your app, now you want me to spam my friends? F*** you!

3. FunWall sent posts to my friends without my knowledge. How did I realize this? I was looking at one of my friends' profiles and saw a crazy post from me! What? I didn't send that. Not only did it send this mysterious message, but it sent TWO. This must be very easy to do by mistake, because I myself received duplicate posts from friends.

4. Not only did FunWall send messages to my friends without my realizing, but now when I go to find out WHO it was sent to, I have no idea who the messages went to. I understand this wouldn't be a huge issue if I had specifically picked out some friends and intentionally sent them messages, but that didn't happen in this case. Now all I know is that this particular message went to two of my friends. I've already deleted a couple other messages I found by accident.

 

I am unable to click, as would be typical Facebook fashion, on "2 friends" to find out which 2 friends the message went to.

More hateful things about FunWall:

5. Default is to send a message to ALL friends. Seriously? Anyone who's been on Facebook for longer than a week knows that you're not actually close friends with all of your Facebook friends. So why would I want to message all of them?

6. Ads! Seriously? You're trying to make a little cash by showing me crappy Adsense ads while I'm on Facebook? Not only is this stupid (the click through rate is ridiculously low for ads on Facebook), but it's ugly and I hate it. On its own, this would be a minor complaint, but coupled with the rest of FunWall's idiocy, this just puts me over the edge.

Facebook's response:

- Facebook is changing its news feed ranking algorithm so that it limits the distribution of application news feed stories for friends who don't have that application installed

- Facebook is also prohibiting the use of the term "message" in news feed stories because it is misleading and confusing and basically cons people into installing an application

- Overall Facebook is cracking down on "deceptive" developers who do this kind of crap

Breadcrumbs on the Career Path

Today was a big day. Just the typical day of work: wake up, work at home in my pajamas for a couple hours, walk into work, grab coffee and handcuff myself to my desk to get some work done between the day's many meetings... But today was a big day. Really, a thought-provoking day.

Also, a mushy day. Let this act as your mushiness warning.

We had a company meeting today, which of course started with my sentimental look around the room at how the company has grown in my short few months there. Not only was it amazing to see how it had grown, but it was also nice to see us all there together, because that doesn't happen as frequently as it used to.

One of the things I love about my company is that everyone loves working there and I'm not the only mushy one. What's especially great is that this mushiness is accompanied by stark realism. It's not all bananas and dancing with toothbrushes, you might say. There's the good, the bad, and the ugly (alternate blog title right there), and we see all of it and address it head on. But it turns out, all in all, there's a lot of the good. We're lucky, we're happy, we appreciate it.

So, on to the thought-provoking part (not just the mushiness-provoking part). The topic of the day for me - coming out of that meeting and also out of some catching up on my unread blog posts - is what does it take to succeed in this fast-paced, exciting, love-to-be-working-here-but-I'm- sure-they'd-soon-enough-hire-someone-to-replace-me-if-I-don't-add- some-mojo-to-the-team place. And two things came out of that:

1. What am I bringing to the table? How can I bring more? How can I grow and succeed and be the overachiever I love to be?
2. A lightbulb! AKA Inspiration, the Aha! moment. I am really starting out on my career path now, I've got a lot ahead of me and I'm only just beginning. I plan on continuing to learn and grow and figure out all this career and post-grad life stuff out and I know I'm not the only one who's confused and excited about all this, so why not share my experience and any lessons I learn along the way?

And so my blog is born: Welcome to my "career path breadcrumbs" blog (um, name still to be refined...). The idea is that I'm just starting out on my career path, and figuring out my way, and as I figure things out I want to leave behind some kind of tips, signposts, breadcrumbs to help others on their paths as well. (New look and feel and branding for the blog to come soon... :))

So maybe, to get us started, I'll drop a few of the things I learned/realized today.

• A good company (like mine) is a meritocracy. Deal with it. I sometimes "remind" myself that I am really fresh out of college and maybe this means I can excuse some of my stupidity at work. This is dumb. I should neither use this as an excuse for poor work, nor should this be a factor in evaluating my contributions to the team. At a good company like mine, you are rewarded based on your merits, not your age, or position, or anything else, so work on bringing some real value to the table.
• Find the right job for you. This will make you happier and more productive at work. Cliche, yes. And I've said this many a time, but I believe it more and more each day. It's also important to note here that the "right job" is different for everyone. I sometimes think how amazing my job is, and then I try to imagine one of my friends in the same situation and realize that it's just not the right fit. It's all about finding the right fit between you and the company.
• Good people make all the difference. At least in my opinion and experience, the people you work with can have a bigger impact on your happiness at work than the actual job you do. I've had some crappy jobs in the past, but it wasn't a drag to go into work when I enjoyed the people I worked with. The toughest times were when I was alone at my job - either temping as a receptionist (what fun) or having an office job sitting in an empty office all day.
• Stay in a job only as long as you are learning and growing. Some of the best job advice I ever got, and got it more than once from different sources. With my personality, I don't think this will be an issue (I would get bored if I wasn't learning anything and would be itching to make some sort of change), but it's generally great words to go by if you want to keep progressing through your job and life. Of course, other priorities come up and sometimes you will choose to stick with a stable job you know really well, where you aren't growing as much, so that you can focus on another part of your life, say, family. Also, I'll throw in a bonus, related lesson: Surround yourself with the smartest people possible. Another great piece of advice if you want to keep growing in your job, or life in general. My aunt gave me that nugget, which she heard as a quote from successful entrepreneurs when interview about what made them successful.

So perhaps I will leave you here. I hope you have enjoyed this mushy, yet hopefully thought-provoking and useful, blog post. If there are any other new grads with thoughts about this, or maybe some more... seasoned readers with comments, feel free to leave a comment below.

Blogging for Personal Sanity - Not Anymore

I'm technically what you'd call a long-time blogger.  I can't quite remember when I started my first blog, but it was quite a while ago, maybe in high school (ok, so that's only like 8 years ago).  And this somewhat surprises/impresses people in the Internet marketing world where we talk about the wonders of blogging, particularly for businesses, quite a bit.

But my motivation to blog originally was not SEO, was not communicating with prospective customers, or anything like that.  It was for my own personal sanity.  Blog = Weblog = Online journal.  Hence the name "livejournal," where my first blog was hosted.  I could go on there and complain about my day or waste time if I was bored or procrastinating and so on.

So then, what happens now that I have a "real" blog, where I post "real" content, and a good chunk of my readers are people I work with?  Well then I can't write nonsense and I can't vent the way I used to on my old blog.  What now, I ask?  Give up personal sanity for respectable Internet presence?  That's the problem with the adult world: you have to be all respectable all the time.  Oh, the plight of a recent grad.

Memories of a Warm Vacation: Highlights from Israel

Hello my dear blog readers! I am finally back in this (not so) cold home of mine, complete with a nasty cold and ridiculous jetlag (it's not even 5 am as I write this). I thought now would be a perfect time to post a little report with a few highlights from my trip.

First off, amazing trip. How could it not be? This was my third trip to Israel and each has been wonderful in different ways. This one in particular was special because I traveled with 7 of my family members, which turned out to be incredibly fun. Also this was my first time traveling to Israel "as an adult" - the previous times I had been a child and then a teenager - which I think affects the experience of the country. Since most of us had been before, we made a special effort to do and see new things, although having not been there for so long and being with a new group of travel companions made it unique already. OK, now for some highlights (with pictures, of course, because we all love pictures).

Highlight 1: Nature, nature, and more nature!

I'm not a big nature person, or so I thought, until I returned to the Negev desert in the south of Israel and also the northern hills of the Galilee. I think over half of my pictures are from those parts of the trip.

View of the Ramon crater.  Credit: Ellie Mirman

In Machtesh Ramon. You can see me crouching to take a photo there to get a sense of scale. Credit: Dan Mirman

Gorgeous little waterfall in Ein Avdat. Credit: Ellie Mirman

Reflection of cliffs near the waterfall. Credit: Ellie Mirman

Highlight 2: History

Also, not a big thing for me usually. But we went to a bunch of archeological sites and they were all amazing.

Partial view of the Roman theater at Bet Shean. Credit: Michael Mirman

Me among the remains of the city (what a great sense of scale). Credit: Dan Mirman

Hightlight 3: Amazing hotels, amazing food

We stayed at incredible places, ate incredible food (way too much of it), and had an incredible time. Yes, incredible.

This is actually a photo from the place we stayed in the north. Incredible. Credit: Ellie Mirman

Highlight 4: Family + New experiences = Ridiculous fun

Really the best part of the trip was the people I traveled with and how much fun we had together.

One of our unique stops was at an army base, where we got to climb on tanks and even go inside. Here's me sitting on top. Credit: Ilya Mirman

Eugene riding a camel on the Mount of Olives - quite the adventure. Credit: Ilya Mirman

One of many cool photo opps. This was at the Supreme Court building - very cool place. Credit: Ellie Mirman

Yes. Credit: Dan Mirman

And I can't leave you without at least one classic (or at least my take on a classic) view:

View of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. Credit: Ellie Mirman