TFRL HighEdWeb T-Shirts!

Continuing last year's tradition of bringing TFRL T-Shirts to HighEdWeb, I will once again be... uh bringing, uh, TFRL T-Shirts to HighEdWeb.

These are custom shirts, designed specifically for the conference and available only at the conference. If you want one, the only way to get one is to get it at HighEdWeb.

Sadily, the rising cost of CafePress has forced me to charge $25 per T-shirt... and trust me, I'm not making any money on the deal. I wish I could give them away, but that's just not realistic is these times of budget cuts and furloughs.

There are two designs:

And:

To this point, I've ordered 2 medium, 4 large, and 4 extra large of each T-shirt. If you want one, let me know ASAP. Tweet me, email me, leave a comment. If I have to order more, I need to know soon.

You can have a shirt for the price of a lunch or dinner at the conference (at the restaurant of my choice), but one dinner is already taken.

The Zombie Home Page Chronicles - Part 2: Attack of the Zombie Home Page

Nobody likes to be told "I told you so!"

And if you don't understand the cricket bats, I suggest that you go forth immediately and rent Shaun of the Dead. 

The Zombie Home Page Chronicles - Part 1: Rise of the Zombie Home Page

 

This all started when I read this post (or more precisely, listened to the presentation). According to Paul Boag's presentation (which, BTW, you really should listen to), the number one harshest truth about higher education Web sites is "Politics are killing your site". I commented to Prophead that in our case, you can't kill something that's already dead. We both laughed at the idea of an unkillable zombie home page.

We're not laughing now.

P.S. Apologies to Brown University. I had to steal some university's design for this cartoon, and 4 out of 5 discerning design thieves prefer the Brown University design over other university designs. Who am I to argue?

Are Viruses Trying to Tell Me Something?

As with everything else in TFRL that never happened, this actually happened. And how embarrassing - I got a virus while doing a Google image search for my presentation for HighEdWeb that totally infected my computer with spyware crap and made it crash every time I tried to do anything. And no, I wasn't searching for or looking at porn (I'm smart enough to do that at home), but some site I went to infected my computer. Great job preventing that McAfee!

So now my computer - and my presentation - are in the loving, caring, healing hands of our User Services department, who sadly already have many reasons to hate me.

So, if I'm using an overhead projector and a grease pencil (Google it if you don't know what those are) next month, you'll know why.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

So, I'm starting to work on my presentation for HighEdWeb in October. My topic is the lessons we've learned in our redesign process. I'd like the presentation to be humorous but of real value. What keeps coming to me is that there has been a lot of good things, some bad things, and some really ugly things (can you say 'furloughs'?) throughout our process.

Last year, I brought the LOLs at HighEdWeb when I brought the LOLcats in my presentation. And of course, I want to continue the tradition, but maybe add to it. I started off with the idea of making demotivational type posters for my slides.

But I kept coming back to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (which by the way if you didn't know is the best movie ever made in any genre of all time with the possible exception of Terminator 2 which if I used that for my presentation would probably get me terminated. Just sayin'.).

Anyway... so I started thinking about maybe doing LOLcats and demotivational posters based on the movie. Sounds weird, right? I mean really weird.

So, I'm asking for your input here. I'm going to toss out a few examples that I threw together and I want you to let me know if it works or not. I also need to know if you'd get sick of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly LOLcats and posters after 45 minutes.

Here they are. Be honest! Funny? Not funny? Too wierd?

Leave comments on your opinion!

A Minion's Vacation

I can't say that none of this happened, because most of it did. I perhaps over-dramatized the things that my minion didn't do before he left. Perhaps.

However, if anything I under-dramatized what we did to his desk while he was gone. Seriously. Check it out:

Check out all the photos here.

Eight rolls of aluminum foil. Eight. Thank God it's cheap! We even foiled the inside of the drawers. I sure hope that I don't get in trouble for this. We'll recycle the aluminum, we promise!!

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