This inaugural installment of “Atta-Thing!” celebrates the user experience of a coffee mug – in particular, my Life is good. coffee mug – because it reminds me that incorporating optimism into experiences I create for people can make them feel better about themselves and their lives.

Dear Life is good.,

On any given morning, I have fourteen coffee mugs from which to choose and I nearly always choose yours. The reason why is because your mug makes me feel active and optimistic and down-to-earth.  It reminds me to appreciate the morning, and my coffee, and my life.  And I often take an extra moment to do just that.

Last week, a friend told me about the Blue Ridge Run, a 200 mile relay race through the Blue Ridge Parkway. As he recounted the turn of events that landed him an open spot on a local team, he said that he’d spent an hour “playing around” on the website before deciding to sign up.

My ears perked as I imagined a) what the analytics might look like for a site that had enough content and interaction to spend upwards of an hour consuming; or more likely, b) what a webmaster might assume after seeing an out of range visit of 00:59:42 on a site that probably averaged visits of 00:01:37.

“What exactly did you do for an hour on this website, Don?”

As a homeowner in the midst of several home-improvement projects I’m THE CLIENT an awful lot lately.  Seeing how it feels to trust someone to do things I can’t (or don’t want to) do has been an enlightening experience – especially given that my role as a practitioner puts me in the position of selling and delivering on exactly that… for someone else.

“Well, it just so happens that I’d love to organize your 40,000 pages of content! Rock on!”

“How many gigs of log files do need parsed? Half a terabyte?  Perfect!”

To some, the problems I help solve are as overwhelming as building a new deck or laying a new garden path is for me.

I just updated my five year plan tonight, tracking changes so that I can see where I was coming from and when those directions changed.

Which is to say, my direction seems to be changing.  I’m gentle enough with myself to allow for some meandering, but the current is strong.  I rewrote the original sections which said “In 3 months…” and “In 6 to 12 months…” and so on, to “By March 24th, 2008…” and “By June 24th, 2008…” so that I can manage things in bite-sized chunks.

Key components to each time period passing:

Very nice, Garrett.

v1.garrettdimon.com

This is a good example of comedy as a reward.  The leading paragraph combined with the picture selection, even the size of the caption font… all work together to deliver the punch line.

5 Famous Inventors (Who Stole Their Big Idea) | Cracked.com