Hi, I'm Åsk, I'm a geeky creative director. Here I share whatever is on my mind and the occasional script.
Fonts in use, a great inspiration website to just click around on, checking out how and where fonts have been used in the past, just took note of New Roman Times, which is used on the album cover by the same name. In the comments, Florian Hardwig notes that this tongue-in-cheek detail was carried on in the cover of the book based on the album. I made that cover, so I'm pretty chuffed at stumbling over my own work on this site.
But egads, how do you repair it when you can't start it??
First, find the dang mysql files. The data usuallly hides in /var/mysql - this is uncool because that'll eat up your root partition - try something like /opt/bitnami/mysql/ or somehwere.... /stack/mysql/data if you have it on another EDS
Then
myisamchk -fr *MYI
You'll probably run into this too:
MyISAM-table 'whatever.MYI' is not fixed because of errors
Try fixing it by using the --safe-recover (-o), the --force (-f) option or by not using the --quick (-q) flag
Oh, and when you DO get that database started again, do mysqlcheck -Arp
Enjoy!
Creative Interviews has interviews with current creatives in advertising, editorial and publishing. They interviewed me here . Here is an archive.
"You are the force behind Adland, one of the most influential advertising blogs in the world. Tell us how you came to set up your own website back in 1996.
Two cats were ad-related on the web back then, and you probably know them. Dave Dumanis wrote adlib every Friday, and Jeffrey Zeldman set up the ad graveyard and lots of fun projects. I thought, heck, I’ll join these guys and set up a Badland corner for twin ads & bad ads, and proto-blogged about advertising on static HTML pages. Nobody else had done the twin ads thing on a website then, so I figured I could start there. I wanted to discuss advertising, I was in usenet groups doing it, I created a mailinglist for this purpose, and I built a website where everyone could join in by commenting on it. This kind of place didn’t exist yet, so I made it. Zeldman was giving away free advice on how to make pretty websites and Lynda Weinman of Lynda.com was teaching everyone how to do it as well with her website on web design. I rolled up my sleeves and got to it, that’s all.
It changed as it got bigger, I had to do video, I had to learn how to run linux server clusters, how to build servers, php, mysql, how to handle super bowl traffic, all that jazz. My first server was on the backbone of the Dutch internet, and shared with a guy who ran pornsites, this was my baptism by fire on sudden traffic spikes....."
Ah, so I am now verified on Twitter. Noice.
Looks good. Now let's see how this affects reach, which is what I am interested in. Archive.
Current Maine Today here. Waybackmachine archived article here. Archive.is here.
Today marks my first international “Social Social” interview. I was very fortunate to have had the opportunity to talk with Åsk who is a very well known and respected figure in the advertising industry. All the way from Stockholm, I give you Åsk “Dabitch” Wäppling. Pay attention as she takes no prisoners.
Globetrotting viking currently busy bagging seven continents. Åsk stems from a long line of engineers, and is driven by the need to pick things apart to see how they work, and the want of making everything useful pretty too. Her first social media handle was the email d@bit.ch back in the 90s.
Adland is the worlds oldest ad blog the largest commercial archive in the world.
Insomnia, shallow thinking, and the smartphone as our witness
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What do you dislike about social media?
“I dislike the shallow thinking it leads to. There’s a tendency to share sarcastic quips, jokes and surface only. People will only read the headlines of an article, and be done with it.”
“People worry about narcissism, I worry about stalking. People pass on ‘missing children taken by their mother’ alerts on Facebook without thinking, and have revealed battered women’s hiding places. Screen dumps of embarrassing images from Snapchat follow teenagers around until they kill themselves. Every upload of every sunset and dinner and pretty bike at beach that you share from your personal life is becoming a bit of data that reveals your geographical location, preferences and income bracket to the lean mean digital marketing machine. Privacy is something that we will lose if we keep giving it away. I’m very good at dodging cameras at events. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult as now even the local coffee-shop has ten ‘iPhotographers’ being arty. I bet they tag faces in photos, too. Our children’s faces will be automatically tagged, as by that time the worldwide computers will already know them so well.”
What impact do you think social media has had on advertising?
“In a way, it’s leveled the playing field for small businesses and local shops more than the Web already has. People online are actively seeking out their interests, and geographical area on social media. The small Mom & Pop café in ‘LittleTown’ can establish their brand & personality with a few well chosen keystrokes, say by sharing the über-local news about found dogs, cars that left their lights on, and today we have Mom’s Apple Pie free with every lunch. Becoming useful, like Duracell and Budweiser did, to the local clients. Or with a niché business, such as special organically dyed knitting yarn, joining and engaging with all the knitters out there who are collecting into Pinterest groups with yarn inspiration and Web pages with tips. Your local diner used to only have that chalk-board outside, but these days you can reach people who might want to drive for half an hour to get that free pie – it’s given local and niché clients a much larger reach. It is allowing Mom & Pop to battle a little against the Starbucks next door, without having spent the same bucks.”
“There are two kinds of ‘local,’ the geographical and the niché. Both of these types of businesses should be online and in social media.”
“Not all of us will go viral, and most of us don’t need to. But a tip to that café is to write funny things on the chalkboard and hope a photo of that gets shared on Reddit. However, going viral is like fame. It doesn’t equal sales, just like fame doesn’t equal riches.”
Lets say you did something kinda not-so-smart and you rebooted your EBS (Elastic Block Store) instance, and for some reason it restarts, but won’t let you in via SSH, or worse… It simply will not restart. Ruh-roh!
Yeah, I’ve done that. More than once too. We are all idiots when we’re tired. There’s is nothing more dangerous than a tired sysadmin.
Don’t fret! Pop over to your amazon GUI thingiemahbob, and detach that EBS from your crashed (and stopped) instance. That would be listed under “volumes” in their lovely control panel page there.
Start some other temporary server, and attach this EBS to it. Oh, make sure it’s Ubuntu or some other yummy *nix flavour because I can’t help you in windows.
Once the other server is started and has the instance attached, mount it. You will probably have to find it first. Here’s your new best friend: blkid
/dev/sda1: LABEL="cloudimg-rootfs" UUID="44ca5ce8-7504-45ee-a634-be52fdceb901" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sdh: LABEL="uec-rootfs" UUID="f9fc3b3b-94aa-4a67-827c-c24941303aa8" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
Lookie ! Crashed instances EBS volume of the root partition is there, woop woop! Now mount that baby!
Make the directory first, else you’ll feel like a right fool later looking at “/vol does not exist”
sudo mkdir -m 000 /vol
Then add it to fstab & link the EBS to that new directory you made
echo "/dev/sdh /vol auto noatime 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
Then finally: mount /vol
Now you can dig around and find the files you need to fix in that broken root partition. Or just save what you need into a new server. Have fun.
Pretty funny report from Jim Edwards at Business Insider, apparently we casued "a huge outbreak of whining in Adland" , hahaha, (archive link)
The many tweets are still available on Twitter if you use the search here and the hastag is still going, albeit evolved. It even came full circle, as Jim points out!
Ad execs have a new way to complain about their jobs, and are taking full advantage: The hashtag #AgencyLife sprang up on Twitter last week, Ad Age notes, and execs began confessing their pet peeves about work in public.
Some more amusingly than others: The AdLand blog was retweeted more than 80 times when it said, "Client hates first round. Re-do with all their suggestions. Thrice. Client hates that. Show them first round again. Loves it. #agencylife."
#AgencyLife joins the Creative Confessional Tumblr, which we told you about in January. The Confessional allows execs to complain about their jobs anonymously, and readers can vote to "absolve" or "condemn" the writer.
And it's come full circle: People are even whining about #AgencyLife on Creative Confessional.
Rupal Parekh muses about the twitter hashtag shitstorm Adland caused, and wonders if it reveals more about the current industry morale than intended.
If you're an ad person, and you're on Twitter, you've probably caught at least a few #AgencyLife tweets in your stream.
The hashtag, which was fueled by the blog Adland, caught on like wildfire Thursday in the span of just a few hours, with hundreds of tweets by ad people eager to poke some fun at themselves and blow off some steam. Makes sense; ad folks usually tend to have a good sense of humor. But many people were expressing that the missives didn't feel like mere jokes and rang a bit too close to home.
Below is a selection of them. That last tweet has to make you wonder about the state of morale in the business today.
Management wants to "get with it" with the latest tech craze. Buys everyone flip video recorders and tells you to join Gowalla #agencylife
— adland ® (@adland) April 11, 2013
You tell a non-adlander you're a copywriter and they ask you about copyright law. #agencylife
— J O H N N Y (@copybeard) April 11, 2013
Oxymoron #agencylife
— Boot Studios (@BootStudios) April 11, 2013
One third of the deliveries for the creative department are drugs. Two thirds are pizza. #agencylife
— adland ® (@adland) April 11, 2013
You're trying to sell spaghetti-sauce with a hashtag on twitter. #agencylife
— adland ® (@adland) April 11, 2013
They finally send you to Cannes. You're stuck jetlagged in a hotel room working for 3 days straight. #agencylife
— adland ® (@adland) April 11, 2013
Whining. Lots of whining. A tremendous amount of whining. #agencylife
— Spradley (@sprads) April 11, 2013
Slightly worrying that none of the #agencylife tweets were positive.
— Samuel James O'Brien (@samobribri) April 11, 2013
