Category Archives: Uncategorized

Gridlock

When I wasn’t TikTok tracking tonight, I was trying to figure out how to deal with Instagram’s grid dimension change from square to 4×5.

I guess this change was announced long ago, but I didn’t get (or ignored) the memo.

I’m not going to worry about my grid, except for my first three pinned images. And Elle (Instagram/Threads inkwell.elle) has a fix for that:

“Click on the post, 3 dots, adjust preview and fit… it’s the best workaround for the new layout but you have to do it on each post individually 😅”

https://www.threads.net/@inkwell.elle/post/DE81LidINVm?xmt=AQGzw75jD9q_OLaeYqgNVEg930qDDQlWvfgeWKyDBX8Zog

When I edited my three pinned images, I also changed the background from white to black.

Bredemarket’s Instagram grid at 9:30 pm PST.

Then I experimented with Canva (my primary image and video tool these days) and created an Instagram image that was 4×5 rather than square.

Nice neat grids are overrated anyway; I like mine messy. But I also like it readable.

TikTok Watch, Friday 7pm

Even though it appears that the U.S. government will not shut TikTok down in my country on Sunday, I wondered if TikTok would shut itself down, just to grab attention or make a point.

According to the BBC, TikTok is threatening to do just that.

“(TikTok) said ‘both the Biden White House and the Department of Justice have failed to provide the necessary clarity and assurance to the service providers that are integral to maintaining TikTok’s availability’.

“It said unless the government immediately stepped in to assure the video app it would not be punished for violating the looming ban, it would be ‘forced to go dark on January 19’.”

But if President Biden (who remains President until Monday) provided such an explicit assurance, he may be in violation of both the bipartisan Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act and the Supreme Court ruling (PDF).

To be continued.

Introduction Goes Here

(Imagen 3)

Proposal professionals are familiar with this question: do you write the executive summary first, or last?

I recently struggled with this, but in a non-proposal project—specifically, for an online article I was writing for a Bredemarket client. I had already asked my seven questions, so I had a high-level idea of the points I wanted to make. But I intentionally started writing the rest of the online article, and put some filler text at the beginning:

“*** Introduction Goes Here”

Those who have worked with me on content, proposal, and analysis projects know how much I love my three asterisks, and other things to flag incomplete text.

But why did I delay writing the introduction to the end? Because of one important difference between proposals and online articles.

  • When an entity receives a proposal, the content is analyzed internally by few who HAVE to read it. The humans and non-person entities (proposal evaluation software) are required to analyze sections of the proposal, or perhaps even the whole thing.
  • When an entity receives an online article, the content is analyzed externally by many who DON’T have to read it. The humans and non-person entities (Google, Bing, etc.) may start reading at the beginning, and if they don’t like the article, they quit reading right there. (Proposal evaluators don’t have that luxury.)

Because of this, the opening words of an  article can be very important. And the right words need to be there.

So I saved that writing exercise for later.

Process

Luna Marketing Services asked us on Instagram when we last went over our current processes.

My answer: January 18, 2024.

The illustration shows just one part of one of my processes. I don’t share the rest of this particular process, but it governs creation of most of my “CPA” materials.

In fact, I am about to start a short writing project for one of my clients, and I will start by asking these seven questions.

But not in Word. In the client’s Jira.

Don’t forget that processes require flexibility. Don’t complete processes for the sake of completing processes.

Meta Tok

In any large organization, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

On the morning of January 17—which mathematically inclined individuals know is 2 days before January 19, the potential de-Tik Tok day—a message on my personal Facebook feed encouraged me to feature my TikTok presence on my Bredemarket Facebook page.

Perhaps this is just a cruel joke. What if I were to do this and the link broke? “Shoulda stayed on Facebook, not that wimpy service.”

But it’s still mystifying that some Meta employee thought it was a good idea to risk diverting traffic to a non-Meta property.

Maybe a Meta AI bot created the image.

Yes, I Would Like a Two Billion Dollar Annual Salary

I tried to enter a salary range in an online job application and got this error message:

“What is your target overall salary/annual compensation rate?: Please enter a number using only the digits 0 to 9 with a value between 10000 and 2147483647. Do not include any commas, decimals, or letters.”

I was tempted to enter the maximum value, but I wanted the job. 

But I knew the number 2,147,483,647 had to have some significance.

And it does. 

  • It’s a double Mersenne prime. 
  • It’s 2 to the 31st power minus 1.
  • It’s hexadecimal 7FFFFFFF.

But for Applicant Tracking System (ATS) purposes, it’s “the maximum value for variables declared as integers.”

Don’t tell anyone, but I’d gladly settle for an annual salary of only $2,147,483,646.

If Only It Had Been Lower Key

Several days ago, I scheduled the low-key release of a 10 second short for today at 9:00 am PST.

Specifically, I scheduled 2 uploads (which went to 3 platforms).

After I confirmed this morning that the uploads were successful, I performed a 3rd upload.

Only after that third upload did I realize that the video prominently highlighted Bredemarket’s ability to create proposal “temolates.”

Oops.

So I hurriedly deleted the old video (I hope) and released the “OP” version.