It’s high time I became an adult

08Sep09

It’s official: we’re moved in.  I’m employed with a house to live in, a dog and roommates to love on, and a big screen TV that our landlord left in the basement.

What’s that you ask.  Why no: I don’t think it could get any better.  But I’m always open to suggestion.

The house!

The living room.

The bathroom.

The backyard.

Riley! Our 10-year-old border collie mix.

So…when are you coming to visit?

Filed under: Updates, Work + Life = Balanced?   |  4 Comments
Tags: new house, north portland

My unlikely online persona

19Aug09

Courtesy of personas.com, which peruses the interwebs to find how your presence measure up in different categories.

Anyone who know me notice anything (or…multiple things) strange about this assessment?  The question now is of course two fold: why is the internet wrong and how can I fix it.

Filed under: Because you wanted to know, Other web plugs   |  1 Comment
Tags: personality, wrong

Learning from Lynda

12Aug09

So I have a new job. I’ve been working for nearly a month now and have yet to brag on my firm, so it’s just about that time, don’t you think? I’m officially an Account Manager at a technical firm called 500lb Marketing Solutions. We’re a firm of contractors, offering a range of techie stuff from website redesign, all kinds of coding, and email marketing.

We going to pump...your website up.

The virtue of being at a smallish firm is such that I have a lot of freedom to learn.  I’ve done everything from designing a logo for a kids soccer team to coding HTML to making sales calls and finding new business.

Translation: a lot of self-teaching and observation.

I spend the time not spent writing proposals brushing up on my skills (and creating new ones out of thin air).   Enter Lynda.com, a way cool resource for plopping in front of the computer and cramming knowledge into one’s screen-wearied brain.  Lately, an ecclectic guy named Deek has been teaching me the eccentricities of Photoshop, a tool I’ve always known about but never really gotten to know.  Photoshop to me is like that barista you order coffee from every morning and are always friendly to, but all of a sudden the zombpocalypse occurs right in the middle of your caramel macchiato and you find yourselves side-by-side barricading the front doors and sawing off steamer wands to slow down the onslaught of the undead.

I digress.

My point is, even at $25/month, Lynda is a really great resource, especially for an entry level aspiring technical marketer like myself.

Filed under: Shameless promotion, Work + Life = Balanced?   |  1 Comment
Tags: 500lb marketing, lynda.com, new job, photoshop

Counting down the days: paper chain edition

10Aug09

It’s now 18 days until KS and I move into our new house (along with our 3 roommates and new doggie) and we’re about fed up.  Not necessarily with each other, but certainly with having a kitchen the size of a shower and a shower the size of a sink.  The Portland State dorms have treated us well for a temporary living situation (see: Chipotle in the basement) but we’re ready to move on with our lives.

We’ve been dreaming of full-sized refrigerators, comfy couches in our very own finished basement, tending watermelons* in our garden, and hearing the click-clack of Riley’s toenails on the hardwood floor.  Especially now that we’ve overcome the hurdles of employment and transportation, housing is beckoning like a siren song of chili dogs over a cold, rainy carnival parking lot.

*Not kidding.  WATERMELONS.

So I give you…the paper chain:

Hung in between the closet and the microwave.

We made the chain for our own sanity.  Every day, we can get out of bed and remove one link, knowing this simple action brings us one day closer to the NoPo hearth and home we’ve been dreaming of.

Filed under: Updates   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: new house, paper chain

Why I love the city of Portland

27Jul09

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  2 Comments
Tags: Brewfest, debauchery, Portland

My theory on work

21Jul09

Today marked my first full week of being employed.  First of all, I feel exceedingly lucky to be getting paid to a) do something within spitting distance of the field I want to be in and 2) not cut up animals with a chainsaw.

I had dinner tonight with three friends from my honors business class, two of whom are in temporarily bunking in the PSU dorms like me and the other of whom is temporarily bunking in Vancouver, WA (which apparently has an adult version of Chuck E. Cheese and also lower property taxes).

We count among us…

The marketer turned nerd: Working 30-40 hours at a technical marketing firm with a PR/media relations gig with a food cart (go KOi Fusion PDX) on the side.

The accountant: Doing the same internship I had last year (with a different firm) and we all know how well THAT went for everyone.  Granted he’s approximately 10x smarter and 3x more devoted to accounting than I, so I have vast amounts of hope for this as a viable career path.  He spends 2 hours wrestling with printers and mailing labels and goes on jaunts at Lloyd Center around 3:00 PM when the team runs out of work since apparently even accountants don’t want to account when it’s 90 degrees and the Nord’s half yearly sale is on.

The downfall of number crunchers everywhere

The aspiring accountant: Working at a health insurance company for the second summer in a row, this time in internal audit.  She’s headed back to UO for a Masters of Accounting in the fall, but for now she passes the days hunting down supervisors to edit work papers that are #104 on the top 50 ToDo’s of any boss she set her sights on.

...I need real work.

The “corporate” retail goddess: She interned at a large retail chain last summer and was hired on to work at corporate.  Unfortunately, no one at the company bears resemblance to the two friends profiled above and had trouble with the basic math of open positions (0) + jobs offered (15) = salaried college graduate “supervising” management in store locations.  She passes the time asking 10-year retail veterans about the basics of inventory tracking that she’ll never use in a true calling position.

Maybe she’ll have a chance in the virtual corporate word.

So here’s the basic lesson: we’re all working jobs that aren’t great, living day to day in temporary situations that may or may not involved game tokens and frequent karoke nights at bar named for gleeful reptiles.  But we’re happy as clams and thrilled to pieces to have any kind of income at all and be in a city as awesome as Portland.  Even if we have to fight the meanest of photocopiers to stay here.

ALSO…I got a bike and I think I’m in love.

Yep, love affair.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  1 Comment

To crowdsource or not to crowdsource

07Jul09

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about value.  And not just getting more bang for your food buck at happy hour.

Everything in advertising and marketing needs a purpose.  In an ideal world, every dollar spent of client money would translate into more than a dollar in return.  Call it ROI or just good business, but agencies won’t last long without making a return for clients.  The good agencies find the ways to infuse creativity into every step of the process, despite the fact that thinking strategically can often constipate any semblance of creative flow during your average brainstorming meeting.

Mantras and buzzwords are flying through my brain: no idea is a bad idea in brainstorming…strategic brand alignment…landing above the fold…it’s enough to make an intern throw up her hands, right?

However, crowd sourcing is still one of my favorite topics.  Tasks that used to cost tens of thousands of dollars, such as approving a promotional video, can now be handed off to the discerning filters of the internet for a fraction of the cost.  The value of popular opinion as a tool is so up for debate, it’s practically impossible to pin it down.  Sites like the Eternal Moonwalk have made crowd sourcing into a novelty, and engines like the one at Threadless have turned popular opinion into profit.

Crowdsourcing can also mean finding commonalities in the disjointed, such as this YouTube case study:

So in the spirit of crowd sourcing, have you stumbled upon any innovative and (nay I say it) profitable uses of public sentiment lately?

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

When you give a new grad a new city

03Jul09

She’s bound to ask for more.

After two days of bed ridden sickness, I was ready to get back to work and back to the romp and fantasm of Portland. I traisped into work 20 minutes late (thanks a lot, Streetcar, for not running late when I’M running late) to find both my supervisors on early vacay/working from home.  After a quick permission email to leave early for the day, I promptly made like an obidient intern and GTFO’d.

I had my interview with the awesome folks at KOi Fusion, the awesome Korean taco stand I hope to be marketing/PRing for very soon.  I’ve also got another interview tomorrow morning with a marketing agency called 500 lb Marketing Solutions.  Multiple experience points, FTW!

After the interview, the beau met me (serendipitously) at the food carts on 9th and Alder.  There we discovered Spella Caffe, which Yelp was just loving ALL over.  The espresso truly was heaven, and the blended drink we went back for in the afternoon was heaven redux.

It spells delicious.

Next we headed to ye olde city of books (Powell’s) for an afternoon of time warp.  I managed to make it out with only one cycling book (I AM in Portland now) and a new sketchbook.  We headed over to Powell’s technical to help me bone up on my HTML skills, but I think we all know who had more fun perusing the tech-savvy shelves.

He's a voracious little reader.

Heading back to the streetcar, we (okay, I) was drawn to a little knitting shop I’ve had my eye on for a while.  The ambiance was perfect but the prices were…a bit pricey.  At least for this station in life.

Yes. Please.

Finally, we spent some quality time at First Thursday in the Pearl drinking some free wine and looking at modern art that, in the words of someone famous (and Max), “You could have done, but you didn’t.” (pictures to come on Facebook)

So that’s the story of a day in Portland.  Everyone reading this has either done everything I did today or should try everything I did today.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

Down with the sickness

02Jul09

So I have been a bit under the weather the past two days.  By under the weather, I mean at home, in bed, chugging OJ and swabbing my nose with zinc-covered Q-tips in the futile hope that I’ll be well enough to go back to work tomorrow.

In my sickly internet wanderings, I happened upon HealthyFellow.com, a natural medicine blog that has – among other natural intelligence for your health – a few posts on the prevention and treatment of colds.  One article promotes the use of ginseng to prevent and treat cold symptoms.  The author conducted a study that concluded ginseng users had a lower incidence of colds AND their colds lasted fewer days than the placebo users.

Note to sick self #1: Buy some ginseng.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

If you wanted to know what Kristin’s up to…

30Jun09

A bit of shameless self promotion of things I’ve been up to lately.

1. Applying for this a PR/Executive Assistant position with an awesome PDX food cart called KOi Fusion (that’s Korean Oregon infusion).

2. Attending the Online Marketing Summit stop in PDX.  Enjoyed the speakers, the free lunch, and learned more about search engine optimization than my poor little intern brain could handle.  Thanks to eROI for the hookup.

3. Starring in moderate drinking videos as a puppet (I start at 3:45 – not my voice, BTW):

4. Generally loving being in Portland and rooming with the beau.  City livin’ all the way.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  2 Comments
Tags: eROI, koi fusion, online marketing summit, PDX