After you’ve shaved and rinsed your razor, tap the razor head rapidly on the side of your sink or on the wall of your shower to remove the last remnants of cream, hairs, and especially water from between blades.

I’m getting twice the life out of my blades.

Tom Trush of Phoenix is a talented direct response writer with a distinct and matter-of-fact point of view. Check out his site at www.writewaysolutions.com.

He’s just published The “You” Effect and developed a marketing marathon to promote his book.

A good reason to get to know Tom is his relentless use of social media for client development. He is far more patient than I am.

In this interview we talk about creativity, designing, the importance of knowing your client’s objectives, keeping things simple, and trusting your copywriter and art director to make your marketing work.

It’s 40 minutes.

The “You” Effect can be ordered as an ebook or in-print at Amazon. Click here to order.

Here’s a brief article about how these tanks ended up in this field, as blogged Stephen C. Smith’s ‘Space KSC’ blog ‘Shuttle stacked‘.

I never spend much time contemplating where all this old space stuff goes, and it was a nice surprise to see these tanks up close. Years ago — when I first moved to the area — I had a client meeting with a fellow out at Port Canaveral who had purchased [very cheaply as I recall] a discarded satellite protective cone. These are the containers that the manufacturers use to gently ship finished satellites prior to launch. This thing was huge. Beautifully made of high quality finished steel and foam, he had cut it in half the long way and converted it into big garages for a couple of his trucks. A very creative down-to-earth use for something very cool.

At about the same time there was a scrap yard owned by Charlie Bell just south of the entrance to the Space Center on SR 3 that was home to radar domes, old NASA equipment, and even what appeared to be sections — including the nose  – of the original Boeing 2707-300 prototype. There were two reassembled Atlas rockets and engines as well as parts from the Saturn, Apollo and Mercury during NASA’s early days. All this gear was auctioned off after Charlie’s death in 2000.

It bothers me to see iconic things like Shuttle fuel tanks and SST prototypes sitting in empty fields. I suppose they should have a more elegant after life.

In Low-Speed Mode, the vehicle is upright, and moves around at ‘walking pace’ at similar eyesight height to pedestrians. In High-Speed Mode, the Toyota extends in length by leaning back and extending the single rear wheel to improve aerodynamics and stability, thus being able to achieve a speed of 18.6 mph, or 30 km/h. It leans into corners, like other tall, one-man vehicles such as the Segway, to prevent it from tipping over.

There are two joysticks, one for each hand. Either joystick controls the i-Real, so left- and right-handed people will be equally at home. You push the joystick forwards to go forwards, left to go left, right to go right and pull back to stop. Perimeter-monitoring sensors detect when a collision with a person or object is imminent and alerts the driver by emitting a noise and vibrating. At the same time, it alerts people around it of its movements through use of light and sound.

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Like most of us, I have a nice collection of friends that send me interesting emails. What started as sending off-color jokes a decade ago has morphed into sending really big video files. Now — just to set the record straight — I have no problem receiving interesting off-color videos. Many of them are entertaining.

What I’d like to suggest is that we all start sending links to files rather than the files themselves. I know I’m sounding cranky, but I come at this Internet thing as someone who thinks a 6 megabyte files is huge. My kids don’t think so of course, they think 5 or 6 megabytes is nothing. A few years ago my brother sent me a picture of his new house that was [in my mind anyway] a whopping 7 megabytes [easily reduced to 200 kb with a reduction of size -- and the house was just as beautiful].

I can still remember dial up modems, 9600 bit download speeds, and a $283 bill on month from CompuServe for what amounted to what we can do in a fraction of a second today.

Almost all the videos I get are available as links from YouTube. Do a search of the video name and you’ll generally find the source file. I also suspect that clicking a link allows the host to figure out that you’re on a desktop or a smart phone and automatically pick the best size for whatever you’re viewing the video on.

Since I’m in beef mode today, Acrobat and PowerPoint files are another irritant. Most of these come from businesses trying to sell me something or friends that have just returned from a trip and they want me to watch a presentation with music and animation. Once again, I’m appreciative of their efforts, but a 15 megabyte file is torture, and only serves to make me on guard for future files from said businesses and friends.

“Did you see the presentation about my <select topic>? Wasn’t it great. I just loved the <select noun>!”

My universal reply is, “Yes, it was great!”

“Didn’t you like the video of the <select topic>? I almost got knocked over by a <select noun> catching that with my <select device>!”

“You’re lucky you’re still alive! That must have been dangerous as <select purgatory location>.”

“And I did the entire presentation myself. <select software> is SO easy to use!”

“Makes you wonder how guys like me still make a living doesn’t it?”

“Sure does. My son <select proper male noun> did most of the work. Can you hire him for the summer?”

In all fairness, the world is passing me by on the file size thing. My neighbor and friend — an accomplished videographer and producer with crazy fast download speeds — thinks nothing of sending me a 250 megabyte file of something he thinks I need to see.

He says, “Steve, d’you look at that high def file I sent you?”

“No, <name redacted >, I’m still downloading it. Maybe tomorrow.”

“My download speed is lightening fast. You need to upgrade your service to <vendor name redacted>. Didn’t we talk about that? You’re embarrassing yourself.”

I joked, “Yes, last time you called, I sent my modem out of repair. It’s a little zippier now…14400 I think.”

“Man, you are hopeless. Can I send it to you some other way? You should see this video.”

“Put it on a Zip drive and drop it in the mail.”

“Zip drive? Steve, really? Nobody uses Zip drives anymore…and actually, nobody uses the mail anymore either.”

Then I think to myself, “Crap, I’m almost 60 and 72 is only a dozen years away.”

I saw a piece on the Drudge Report about an 83 year old woman who is apparently a supermodel. She looks 83. This isn’t a bad thing of course, but she’s 23 years older than I am. Here’s how my mind works: 23 years ago I was 37. She was 60. 60 seemed real old when I was 37. Now I have friends in their 80′s and they don’t seem all that old anymore. Men seem to age quite a bit in their 80′s — many pass away — and it doesn’t seem that far away in the future. The tricks your mind plays on you.

August 18th this year is my 60th birthday. I looked forward to my 30th, thought my 40th was ok, spent a year fretting about turning 50 and now am facing 60. I feel no older than I did when I was 35. My joints are fine. I’m a little slower with some things and often not as mentally quick, but in general feel fine. My creative work is better than it’s ever been.

So what’s the problem, you ask? The darn problem is that this is all happening so fast. And I know that 70 and 80 will be even faster.

‘Turning 60″ will be my ongoing conversation about turning 60. How is my head doing? What about my creative work? What about my physical state? Hopefully I can explore these in the coming months.

If you have ever played golf, or listened to someone who regales others with a recent game, you know that golf is an unpredictably maddening sport with moments of glory and many more moments of deep despair and disgust (I should add that I watch golf on TV and the big money pros will occasionally make the same mind numbing stupid shots that I make — they do it far less often of course).

My round of golf today [what 'round' has to do with anything in golf other than the ball and cup we aim at is beyond me] started badly: I started driving my ball to the left; losing balls and taking crazy penalties. On the second hole I drove my first ball deep into the brush, took the penalty, and proceeded to hit a second ball deeply in the brush again. I was taking my 5th shot by the time I was setting up for what should have been my second. I did this on three holes in a row, devastating our first 5 ‘skins’, leading us to be 5 points down after 5 holes.

Golf is a head game. To shake off a demon like repeatedly hitting balls in the brush takes some golfing experience and patience. The other players, even if they aren’t on your team [and are making a killing because of your errors], all feel your pain and offer encouragement. Your partner of course is wondering what the hell is going on with your game.

By the 6th hole I started reconnecting with the ball again. We lost the hole, but only by a stroke. We won the 7th, 8th and 9th, pulling within 2 points. We started the back nine [we play a total of 18 holes] with consecutive loses falling to -4, tied 12th, won the 13th [which, in skins, gave us a point for the hole just won and the hole we tied] and then finished the round +4, which means we won a bunch of holes in a blazing finish.

The reason life is long and golf is 18 holes is simply that in life and in golf we need time to work out the bugs, failings and glitches. We need time to make our mistakes, pick ourselves and dust ourselves off for the next day. If golf were 12 holes and life were 24 years we would barely scrape the surface of what it’s like to be human or play golf.

Sometimes life is so hard and a golf game is so horribly bad for the full 18 holes that we wonder if it’s worth coming back to take another swing at both. Golf, of course, is one of life’s sideshows and hardly an equal. You can leave golf for a few weeks but you can’t just leave life. Yet after a few weeks without golf you’ll inevitably get a call from a friend looking for a fresh round and you’ll agree to play again. You’ll stand up at the first tee with your driver, ball and tee and look out over the first hole with a hopeful feeling that today will be somehow different. Maybe you yank the first shot, but maybe you hit a decent 2nd shot and drop a nice putt. Each hole becomes a new start. Some holes are better than others and maybe you’ll get a grip on a small swing tweak that fixes your slice or hook. At the end of the round you’re talking about the next round. You are back in the game again. Maybe you won a few dollars.

You just can’t count yourself out.

For example, I don’t us the commode room for resting or napping. So ‘rest room’ doesn’t seem accurate. I do use this time for checking email or reading a quick magazine article, but I don’t think resting applies.

I also don’t use the commode room for bathing, especially when I’m in a public place. So ‘bathroom’ doesn’t seem to apply either.

Men’s room and women’s room — while accurate in the sense that they are rooms reserved by gender — don’t explain the fullness of use a commode room brings.

Although I’ve frequently used the word ‘commode’ here, I am not a big fan of this term of art either. The word commode comes from the French word for “convenient” or “suitable”, and has nothing to do with a toilet. The term “commode” is a rurally used 20th century synonym for a toilet in the States, and it isn’t used often nowadays.

My favorite is ‘toilet’.

It can be described accurately as a ‘Men’s toilet’ or a ‘Woman’s toilet’. You could broaden the use of the room by adding couches and then call the room a ‘Women’s toilet and rest room’. You could add a bathtub and call it a ‘Men’s toilet and bathing room’, which would be clearly understood — as an area with toilets and a place to take a relaxing bath. You could also go to lifestyle extreme and create a room that features toilets, couches and bathtubs; finding the need for a ‘Men’s toilet, rest area, and bathing room’. It sounds almost 1st century Roman. Sign makers would be fans of this, in addition to couch, tub and toilet makers.

My request is simply for you to join my band wagon and begin referring to places with toilets as what they really are: ‘Men’s Toilet’ and ‘Women’s Toilet’, freeing us from the tyranny of misunderstanding that arises from words that don’t truly describe what is really happening behind those hallowed doors.

• Mapping addresses on my phone
• Eyeing a home or business from different angles
• Following directions on my android phone
• Using a Garmin GPS unit on a recent trip from Central Florida to Cape Cod
• Google’s self-navigating cars

Grandparents do it. Kids do it. Families in the military do it. I do it with my assistant when she’s out of town. But why don’t business people do it?

It’s not even hard anymore. You click an icon, then click a name and it rings on the other end. Your picture comes up and a few seconds later their picture comes up. Bang! You’re up and running.

Granted, some meetings can get a little weird. The video is pixelated. Maybe the sound is a little choppy. But most problems come from poor lighting on the other end. There’s so little investment in technology besides a camera and free software that it’s hard to stay mad at a conference ending oddly.

I do business all over the eastern U.S. and rarely can I coerce a client into a video meeting. It’s not even a novelty anymore. Almost all machines come with a camera and the software — mostly Skype for me — takes a minute or two to download.

Why do I like video meetings? Because I can watch how body language works with the spoken word. I can see the client’s reaction to new creative. I can drill down on a problem with almost no distraction.

Try it again if you haven’t done it in a few years. Call me on Skype at efsmart-creative.

Within in 24 hours all the racks and store ID had been removed; the ceiling tiles stacked in piles; and counters were removed. Within 48 hours there was nothing left — not even a sign or door decal — to indicate that Toys R Us had occupied the space for 15 years.

I’m not sad about this (my 15 year old daughter was dismayed). But the sheer efficiency of the shut down was inspiring. There are so many things in this world that seem to take forever to get done. Yet, there are so many different levels of retail, outlets and markdown services in this country that almost nothing goes to waste for very long. The bones have been picked clean and the store is ready for its next tenant.

When my clients ask me to rescale their sites for use on a mobile phone, they generally are thinking iphones or larger Android screens.

What this means is that I’m living in a slightly delusional world; assuming that what the majority of smart phone owners have a big screen like mine. And while the obvious trend is to iphone-sized devices, there are a pile of existing phones that have much smaller screens.

• The iPhone is 320 pixels wide by 480 pixels high.
• Many Nokia N-Series devices are 240 pixels wide by 320 pixels high.
• Newer devices often support a landscape mode where the width and height are spontaneously reversed.
• Older (yet still popular) Nokia devices have displays ranging from 176 by 208 pixels up to 352 by 416 pixels.
• Blackberry screen resolutions range anywhere from 240 x 260 pixels all the way up to 360 x 480 pixels.

All of my law firm clients appreciate the value that creativity brings to their marketing, but when designing for their firms I keep in mind that they take their work and reputations very seriously.

So, when I was on the west coast of Florida on business last week I stumbled on this interestingly funny downtown lawyer’s store front marketing message:

The copy reads: PRACTICING LAW IN 4-D, and then in little type beneath: IT IS REAL LIFE

After a little investigation, the 4-D turns out to be DUI, DRUG DEFENSE, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, DIVORCE

Needless to say, I’m just trying to get my arms about 3D TV and movies. Practicing Law in 4-D takes me to a much higher plane of existence and thinking.

I’m thinking that if Scott adds DEATH PENALTY and DEBT RECOVERY to his list of practice areas he could be practicing in 6-D. I looked up six-dimensional Euclidean space, in which 6-polytopes and the 5-sphere are constructed, and came away thinking this might be the way for Scott to market his services. In particular, where screw theory angular and linear velocity are combined into one six-dimensional object, called a twist.

It’s the interesting twist in a tough legal case that TV lawyers seem to find — and all clients patiently wait for — so Scott may be on to something.

See the particulars here about the conference and my topic specifically.

What a card table office requires:

• Card table
• The Internet
• 15″ or 17″ Mac or PC notebook
• Inexpensive scanner [which I haven't used in a couple of months]
• Cheap color printer [which I also haven't used in a couple of months]
• Skype for voice and video calls
• DropBox for your current working files
• Google Docs for all your correspondence and agreements

Accessories include:

• Television

I wanted to reconnect with New England and the Cape as I approached 60, and it’s all working the way I thought it would. Highly recommended if there’s a place in your past you love, a place you left to pursue family and career.

First, check out this story at BusinessInsider.com. Then, if you have any Google account [gmail, igoogle, google+ accounts -- generally all with the same log-in] sign-in and then check out your own stats.

Google correctly figured out that I was a male, 55-64 [I'm smack in the middle]; that I like politics, computers, space + technology, and that I shop on-line for clothing [I wish, of course, that Google thought I was 10 years younger]

Thankfully I spend zero time searching for erotic material, YouTube videos about cats, and conspiracy theories about Google data accumulation.

If I take this as a harbinger of the extensive data that Google and others will accumulate about me in the future, my opinion would take a conspiratorial tone. But for now, the returned data is benign and very general. For Google and other to have sufficient data to sell + target advertising they need to know their users; after all this IS their business. Users will demand the right to opt out, edit, or remove data.

Hopefully this won’t require the government to get involved, and that the on-line citizenry can handle this on their own.

I work from my office in Melbourne FL, my home on Merritt Island FL, and a house in Eastham MA. My office administrator spends half her time in Fort Myers Beach FL and the other half in Melbourne. I’m a virtual kind of guy. My code guy lives in Cocoa Beach FL; writers live in Orlando and Arizona. Clients are up and down the east coast from New Hampshire to South Florida.

My administrator and I do a Skype video almost every day; and we often include my code guy or another sub in a meeting [I pay for the Skype group video thing]. I like the intimacy of video; the ability to see gestures and facial expressions. It’s like being in a person-to-person meeting except I’m wearing glasses that make the other people a little pixelated. The audio is generally fine.

A few years ago I was contracted to develop marketing and image materials for a national video conferencing company. Not being too aware of the video conferencing world — and not wanting to embarrass myself TOO badly — I did some research. The net conclusion I came to is that most business people think of video today the same way they thought of it 30 years ago: It’s complicated to set up, never behaves well when you’re in a meeting, and costs a load if you want the fancy cameras and a decent moving image. Almost all had a bad experience that soured them on trying it again.

It’s tough to get client’s on board with video meetings.  Most have cameras in their monitors, a microphone somewhere nearby, and plenty of network and computer horsepower to handle video. I believe you don’t need crystal clear video for a meeting; a decent moving image is fine and a little pixelation isn’t at all bad. I say take video for a spin again. Skype is fine. For Pete’s sake, grandparents do it all the time with their grandchildren. If it’s easy enough for them, we can do it too.

I did some digging into the model and discovered that this a trendsetting design. Learn more here.

“Using recipes from such websites as Epicurious, the researchers examined more than 50,000 recipes. They combined these recipe data with information about the chemical components in each of the ingredients, in order to create a network map of related ingredients. For example, shrimp and parmesan are connected in the network, because they contain the same flavor compounds, such as 1-penten-3-ol.”

To read their conclusion, click here

New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses.

“Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.”

Notre Dame News reports that the study was published recently in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. Radvansky’s subjects – all college students – performed memory tasks while crossing a room and while exiting a doorway.

Radvansky found that the subjects forgot more after walking through a doorway compared to moving the same distance across a room, suggesting that the doorway or “event boundary” impedes one’s ability to retrieve thoughts or decisions made in a different room. “Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains.

Here’s more. What I relief. Now WHAT was I looking for?