Creative Victuals

Ikea: Lessons Learned

Believe it or not, I’ve only been to Ikea twice before today (Ikea doesn’t have locations in Iowa OR Colorado).

Here are my take-aways from the experience:

1. Be there when they open at 10A.

2. Make a list on Ikea.com and bring it with to avoid being there for hours.

3. Do not let your partner/spouse/roomate get out of going with you, especially when buying furniture. That said, the $80 same-day delivery is kickass.

4. Everyone there is an annoying asshole. This includes you.

5. The web site will say they have something in stock at your location when they really don’t. Luckily, there are about seven other Plan Bs—choose one quickly, be happy and move on.

6. Pretty much all the staff had too much to drink the night before, which is why they’re apathetic about helping you out. (See #3.) Or maybe this is just specific to the College Park, MD store.

7. Bring bags. You look like a total lame-ass amateur Iowan rolling out a cart of unbagged goods.

Any other Ikea shopping tips I should know about for next time? Optimum entrance points? Anti-anxiety pill dispenser I missed? (Is that why everyone was eating Swedish fish?)

Resume / Infographics

Michael Anderson’s super cool visual resume. View in full size to experience the goodness in detail.

Tweet My Bumper

“Follow me in traffic. Follow me on Twitter.”

I would like this for commercial purposes. For individuals? Not so much.

Tweet My Bumper | @tweetmybumper

[via]

I want to tell you everything...

Maira Kalman talks about Thomas Jefferson, the man, husband, and [fore]father in “Time Wastes Too Fast,” in NYT.

Love the writing, photos and illustrations. Partly because D and I forced ourselves to go to Monticello last summer during our trip to Charlottesville and were pleasantly surprised by the experience—-and partly because Kalman tells such an interesting and fluid story.

Pringles Nails the Banner Ad

Admiring Cleveland Clinic

I fell in love with Cleveland Clinic today. In terms of their web site, I can’t find anything to complain about; everything is in its right place. Moreover, I love their illustrative ad campaign and their social media presence. And how about that relevant, informative content? Just great.

ClevelandClinic.org | ClevelandClinicFacts.org

Washington DC: Garden District

There are many things that excite me about moving in with my boyfriend of nearly three years (a move which will be officially underway in an hour), and one of them is the great neighborhood we’re moving into.

While we have a lot to deal with this weekend, I can’t wait to hit the Garden District tomorrow for some new greenery.

There may well be other nice garden centers in my area, but Garden District won me over with their fantastic homepage, fluid and consistent site architecture and helpful resources. Love.

What are you waiting for? Go grow and bloom at Garden District.

How many people does it take to break the intarwebs?

photo from CNN.com

CNN notes how Michael Jackons’s death brought the internet to its intangible knees:

“Between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson,” a Google spokesman told CNET, which also reported that Google News users complained that the service was inaccessible for a time. At its peak, Google Trends rated the Jackson story as “volcanic.”

As sites fell, users raced to other sites: TechCrunch reported that TMZ, which broke the story, had several outages; users then switched to Perez Hilton’s blog, which also struggled to deal with the requests it received.

CNN reported a fivefold rise in traffic and visitors in just over an hour, receiving 20 million page views in the hour the story broke.

Twitter crashed as users saw multiple “fail whales” — the illustrations the site uses as error messages — user FoieGrasie posting, “Irony: The protesters in Iran using twitter as com are unable to get online because of all the posts of ‘Michael Jackson RIP.’ Well done.” The site’s status blog said that Twitter had had to temporarily disable its search results, saved searches and trend topics.

Wikipedia saw a flurry of activity, with close to 500 edits made to Jackson’s entry in less than 24 hours. CNET reported that by 3:15pm PDT, Wikipedia seemed to be “temporarily overloaded.”

AOL, and the LA Times also suffered outages.

It was strange; I was at the gym trying to call up CNN and an error page for the first time in my mobile news history.