Teaching the F.A.A. That Dogs Don’t Buckle Up [NYTimes.com] – This is (part of) what it takes to do great work: patience and persistence. As much as we slap our foreheads about the corporate cultures we interact with, clearly the regulatory cultures are likely to be even worse.

In one scene, about a minute into the video, a man is shown sitting next to a large bull as he fumbles with his seat belt. A voice-over says, “For the 0.0001 percent of you who have never operated a seat belt before, it works like this.” Few people know that the bull was originally a dog. But when the Federal Aviation Administration reviewed the video, one of the many concerns it had was that passengers would think dogs, which are sometimes on flights, had to wear seat belts – I’m not kidding here – so it made Virgin America change the dog to a bull, as bulls are, thankfully, not allowed on planes. According to people who were involved in the making of the video, there were six months of meetings with the F.A.A. and changes to the video before it was finally approved.

Orangutans get iPads at Toronto Zoo [CBC] -I’m struck by the limited amount of adaptation the device required, in contrast to classic example where Koko the talking gorilla used a customized Mac II.

The zoo is working with a program, dubbed “Apps for Apes,” which was started by the conservation group Orangutan Outreach. The goal of the program is to improve the quality of life of primates in zoos by providing them with additional mental stimulation in the form of Apple’s tablet. Apps for Apes collects donated iPads and then provides them to zoos with orangutans. The staff who work with the orangutans had to teach them to touch the screen with their fingers – they were initially using their nails to manipulate the screen, and the tablet does not recognize that. In April, orangutans Puppe and Budi used Skype to interact with Orangutan Outreach director Richard Zimmerman. The next month they used Skype to view other orangutans at the Milwaukee County Zoo, although the video was blurry as the primates moved so much.

If you’re sending someone a resume, make sure you turn off track changes in Word.

Seeing that Award winning right brained/left brained marketer was changed to Award winning right brained/left brained marketer and business developer is perhaps more information than this person wanted me to know. There’s all sorts of evil hidden goo left behind in Word documents; to be extra sure, MSFT offers a plugin that creates a clean copy, or just make a PDF. Maybe this person doesn’t even use track changes and didn’t see the same view of the doc that I do. Pretty horrifying for them, as well. Makes me wonder what I’ve done like this myself.

More trouble for the poor guy in his cover letter, that was pasted into email from a text editor where many of the characters didn’t come through correctly on my end.

I?¢‚Ǩ™m a global leader of strategy with strong expertise in how to
tackle new markets and clients. Some highlights included:
?Ǭ? Developed strategy, leadership, innovation for Fortune 500
companies that resulted adding hundreds of millions of dollars in new
sales revenue, plus decreased operational expenses by 27%.

A cautionary tale for all of us!