Jean Gazis Copywriting & Content Strategy

As of now, there are 500 quotations in my "Quote of the Day" compilation. Woo-hoo! They are an assortment of wise and funny words related to writing, marketing, websites, and life in general. I hope you enjoy them.

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: abstemious and facetious.

Are there really only two? This feels like a challenge to think of another!

I've been enjoying the Sierra Club's Daily Ray of Hope email, which consists of a photo and quotation every weekday morning. (I actually found it when I wanted to unsub from another of their email broadcasts that was getting annoying.) You can submit photos via a Flickr group, so I put in a few. They used one of mine back in April, and another today. Very flattering!

Today's Photo:



Pumpkins in a doorway on Union Street near the community garden in Park Slope, October 2008.

I have fun with digital photography, mainly of my children, nature, and city scenes. Here are a few of my pictures. Enjoy!




Reeds in Promised Land State Park in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania. Used in the Sierra Club's Daily Ray of Hope email for April 28, 2008.









Pumpkins in a doorway in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Used in the Sierra Club's Daily Ray of Hope email for December 3, 2008.










Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.













Late summer rose, Hudson River Park.











Tourists looking at a big crocodile, Mara River, Kenya, August 2001.









Rainbow over Celebrate Brooklyn, Prospect Park, Summer 2009. Used in the Schmap! Guide to New York City.







See more of my photos on Flickr.

12/12/07 from PS261 home 1.78 miles, 239 calories

Here are links to some other blogs I like.

My Sister

Camping Paradise (my sporadic "camping with kids" blog)

Crooked Timber

My Public Google Reader Page

The Forever Fish

My Brother

You're Ulysses!

by James Joyce

This week I've been going to town on cool, new (to me, anyway), online services:

• "Jott" - a service that lets you call a toll-free number from your cell phone, dictate a message, and have it automatically transcribed and emailed to yourself or others. My other half signed up for this because he's trying to stop schlepping a laptop everywhere. It looks pretty cool. We'll see if I end up really using it - I'm not a big cell-phone user, and I've usually got pen and paper with me. I have to say, speech recognition software sure has come a looong way over the past ten years. They were already working on it when my Dad was at IBM Research in the '60s and '70s, but in the '90s it was still pretty rough except for specialized applications.
• GTD Inbox - a free task-manager application. I have a feeling I'll end up not doing much with it, because of the need to actually put all my tasks in there in the first place. It was easy to install in my Gmail, but their help site seems to be out of commission. (Update: their site is still down a couple of weeks later, so it looks like Tech Republic steered me wrong on this one. I've mostly deleted it.)
• Remember the Milk - a nice, simple, online task manager. The more I use it, the better I like it.
• del.icio.us - I finally checked out del.icio.us after seeing links to it all over the place, and I really like being able to tag bookmarks more than one way, although it took a bit of time to organize my 100+ imported links into a sensible array of tags and tag bundles. (My other half prefers the Google browser synchronization feature, but I don't think that lets you share links.)

I've been looking unsuccessfully for years for some kind of project manager that matches the way I work and the types of projects I manage. I usually end up working from a combination of wall calendar and spreadsheet. How low-tech!