Desks and distractions

Our first real company purchase was a big. solid pair of desks. See, we owed a lot of money to the IRS, but if we bought some equipment we could decrease the amount we had to pay the IRS. So we invested in very nice, wooden desks that would hold heavy CRT monitors.
Things have changed over the years and we don’t have CRTs any more. And maybe it’s time to upgrade or replace our desks. We got my desk assembled this weekend and I have to say, I’m really pleased.

Steve wrote about our experiences Autonomous.ai‘s purchase process. I have to say I’m impressed with the build quality of the desks.
I’ll be happy when our office is rebuilt and everything is back in its place, but even now I’m enjoying working at my new desk.

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International Women's Day

Today is International Women’s Day. In recognition of this day, there has been a call for a general woman’s strike. I thought long and hard about how I would participate in this event. Even yesterday I had no clear view of whether or not I would be working today.
As a self-employed woman, me not working today only hurts me and my clients. There’s no one to leave work for, I either do it before or after. It’s got to get done and it’s my responsibility to do it. But at the same time, I recognize the unpaid and underpaid work most women do and fully support the strike.
After much thought, I decided that my contribution to the strike would be to do what I needed to do for work. But that I would remove myself from public conversations about email today. I spend quite a bit of my time doing unpaid work that supports the email industry: standards work, answering questions in various fora, supporting different initiatives, writing documents, blogging about industry events. I won’t be doing any of that work today.
Yes, there are questions I could answer, advice I could give, industry events that I have comments and insight on. But today, today I’m not going to do any of that.

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And… we're back from London

The Email Innovations Summit in London was a good conference. Much smaller than Vegas, but with a number of very interesting talks. I got to meet a number of folks I’ve only known online and we had some interesting conversations at the conference and at the pub-track in the evenings.
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I had so many grand plans for doing some work while in London. So many plans. And then I actually mostly disconnected and ignored anything I “should” be doing.  Instead, Steve and I did some touristing, some relaxing, some family time and some connecting with his college friends. We also (over)heard a lot of conversations about the US Election. One night at dinner every table around us was talking about our candidates and what they thought of them. It’s always interesting to hear what non-Americans think about our country.
In addition to missing two debates, it seems we missed some online news, too. I think the biggest thing was another large DDoS attack against that took out many major websites. I’m starting to see some comments that spam levels were down during the attack, too, but haven’t dug into that yet.
I did have an article published in the Only Influencers newsletter last week: Marketers Can’t Learn from Spam. All too often marketers think spammers are better at unboxing because they see spam in their inbox. But spammers are just more criminal and spend a lot of effort trying to bypass filters. These aren’t lessons marketers can learn from.
Unfortunately, due to our London trip, we are going to miss M3AAWG in Paris, which starts today. Two weeks between conferences was exactly the wrong time for going to both. Never fear, many folks will be tweeting what they can using #m3aawg38.
We’re both slowly getting back into the swing (and timezone!) of back to work. Blogging will pick up over the next few days. And I have new castle pictures to share.

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