Its part of Googles Chrome stories they started telling online a short while ago. If you haven’t checked out the rest of the Chrome videos I suggest you do, they are clever, fun and like “Dear Sophie” emotional.

I’m not one for being overly emotional, yet this video stung me in the right places, my love for my daughter Emily and technology. The understatement that this video was just another few minutes spent on You Tube would be just that, an understatement.

Upon completion as I attempted not to get all choked up at work. I fired up my .ca registrar and secured my kids personal .ca domain. This got me to thinking. As a parent I’m often thinking of ways to introduce technology into my kids life in a meaningful way. I’ve long been saying that Emily will learn to type not on a keyboard, but in fact; the visualization of what a keyboard is. Her concept of computer input isn’t necessarily a mouse, but the gestural nature of iPhones and iPads. But lets save that for another post. Back to grabbing digital usernames, emails and domains for kids who don’t really understand what they are.

The concepts of email addresses, .com’s and twitter handles escape kids. However, as a parent should you collect these things when they don’t matter to your kid so that when they do you can have them ready? For me I am going to say yes. Maybe for selfish reasons and obvious reasons but reasons none the less.

yourkidsname.domain
It’s true, Emily has no real daily use for having her own domain… or does she. Shortly after registering her.ca I found myself with options of what to do next. It’s true that in her future she might not have much use for her own personal domain. But what if she becomes famous? What if she becomes a photographer and wants to show off her work. In 10-15 years from now will she go to register a .ca and not be able to since somebody else did before her? I believe that the investment now can prevent what happened to me… I don’t own my own .com, I do own my own .ca (thankfully I’m Canadian) If I only had the foresight to grab the .com before somebody else. It’s a silly regret yes, but one that for 20$ a year I can nab up for Emily. Even if she never uses it, I know its there.

For now her domain will serve as a way to get in touch with her parents and subsequently her. Emily recently finished her first year of school, and while its nice to have phone numbers for parents I barely know, she connects mostly with her peers via paper notes. So why not make a little paper note with her email on it so parents can arrange playmates. You say an email for a kid? I digress, this first year of school was full of firsts and one thing that has changed from when I was a kid was the birthday invitation, now I’m RSVPing via email to kids parents and having lists of gift suggestions emailed to me, this is perfect and seemingly so perfect for parents of other kids. Why can this extend to emailing kids about playmates? It should.

Your kid on a social network.
For now, Emily is absent from any other network online save for twitter. My reason for this is that I want to use twitter as her way of learning to compose messages to a void, get her comfortable with posting short bursts of her personality. It might break some rules along the way but that doesn’t seem to have stopped even some of the twitter founders from getting their own kids on twitter. Plus it took close to 15 minutes to get a proper handle for Emily. Who surprisingly was quite picky as to what would pass and not pass when it came to deciding on a username.

What next?
For me the big crux for getting Emily online was having an email, sure I could have set up a gmail account for her (and I still might) but I like the personality that comes with having your own domain. Granted the nerd in me will eventually route her email through Google apps

I think for now she’s pretty set up and I’ll enjoy the years ahead when I know that I’ll be collecting usernames along the way, just in case. More importantly I’ll really enjoy the collection of memories she gets to create and that’s the magical part for me, most parents would agree.

along with red dead redemption skate 3 has consumed me in the same fashion previous installments have. Trying my best to keep it on hardcore mode to reap the satisfaction of landing even the simplest of lines, tho I throw it into normal every once in a while just to keep my sanity.

SO i’m going to get back into blogging. Mostly since I rarely remember what I’ve done from day to day. SO i figure if I get an offline blog editor then that might help me out. I’m lazy after all and if you know me at all I’m a sucker for new apps as much as I am for gadgets.

let the good times roll.

I’ve given some thought to focusing on one thing specifically, determining that one thing has its hardships since I love every aspect of what I do, and while most things are equal spending time with one more than the others makes me feel like I’ve stopped feeding one of my pet fish (i don’t have any pets) would that fish just die? That’s something I’m not prepared to accept. Then there is the part of me that wants to learn more, heaven forbid that I want even deeper pockets than I already have. The though of getting into new things is intriguing all the time, I know it spreads me thin but at what cost. When does the quality of what I produce lessen enough to make it not a good product due to having my hands in too many pots? What happens when I’m expected to do it all on the time line of 8 people doing it separately? And would staying with these pockets of mine satisfy me the way I need them too? Will these new found skills add to my love of what I do day in and day out, or will it just add to the burden of being a guy who can accomplish alot?

I’m open for suggestions, i’m debating with myself the merits of focus vs loving everything. I find both appealing just not sure I can handle both. Maybe I can… but who knows.

Kudos john you made me laugh.

p.s. read from bottom to top… I’ve numbered them for you.

A few short hours later my Facebook desktop notification bliped at me I went to my inbox to see that I had recieved a note from Maya Heart, her avatar as Joan from mad men caught me offguard, her note however took me even more by surprise. Below is our correspondence.

Wow! I was shocked, I had done something so little as like and comment on their video on Facebook. This was awesome I thought, and plus I love getting free stuff. So, I replied and then set out to Twitter to tell them how awesome this whole thing was.

No later than an hour later my iphone buzzed to let me know that I had a new follower from twitter. Lately I’ve been getting some strange followers, so I took it with a grain of salt when a fellow named tombed was following me.

A quick profile check showed me that Tom was infact the CEO of AKQA. Now this type of thing has happened to me before with the good folks at popeyes chicken. I dont expect that I’ll be interesting to Tom but the real deal with this is that they are looking out for people that talk about AKQA. They are in tune to whats out there and are monitoring and then taking some action in the social space, and I have to give them props for doing that. I even followed tom back just to see what kind of CEO he was in relation to other CEO’s I follow ( i do follow a couple)

Today I got a call from Emily while I was at work. A package had arrived. I honestly thought it was from somebody else, heck for a second I thought it might have been the books I ordered this morning. ( a dude can hope right?) But no Emily informed me it was from AKQA, in the best of her 3 year old ability and I mentioned it must be my shirt I got from liking their video, something I’m still a bit shocked by.

Below you’ll find a flickr set of my unboxing. A seemingly hand wrapped box from over the pond. Containing a fancy frosted plastic box containing one Nike sportswear t-shirt with embroidered chest logo. the 5 stars representing the 5 awards they won this year “Creative Review magazine: Advertising Agency of the Year, Campaign magazine: Digital Agency of the Year, Revolution magazine: Agency of the Year, British Interactive Multimedia Asc.: Agency of the Year, IAB: Creative Agency of the Year, Cannes Grand Prix” and a small screened AKQA logo on the lower right of the front of the shirt. Included with the shirt was a letter thanking me and letting me know that my shirt was # 20 of 250 total. That was something that was even more unexpected than getting a shirt in the firstplace.

So whats the big deal right? Wrong, to me this was simply put something that I’ll remember forever an experience that will make AKQA and their work, their smarts and their passion shine above the rest of the digital agencies out there. They not only took the time to do this but they did it with great style that makes me feel like they actually understand the interactions between the online social realm and the real world importance of bringing that experience to you life. Was it hard to do? No. But the fact that they thought enough to do this and it in turn made me blog about it and subsequently I’ll tweet about it, leaves such a great impact of how I view their agency that I’m sure to talk about this many times over.

It’s no doubt to me that the folks at AKQA have great passion for what they do, their execution has proven themselves in all the major awards shows. For me i’m not an awards kinda guy, but what I do love is when somebody in my industry gives me props for doing rad work, so to AKQA I say good on you. I look forward to more.

I’m struggling to find a way to keep myself and people I care for happy. It’s a tough road but I think from here on out, I need to help myself first, others second. There are plenty of things I wish I would have done by now. Some simple, others requiring my attention for a longer period of time.

What happens now? Whats the plan?

Plan is to take everything that is currently on my plate and get rid of it, finish it. Kill it and bill it so to speak. While this happens I’ll make structured plans to get my personal projects in order so I can accomplish them at a steady pace.

I’ve realized that I’ve done alot for others but not much for myself in the last few years. I need to be greedy and try and make myself happy by doing the things I spend time dreaming about. Making myself happier is the ultimate goal, that happiness fed by the accomplishments I feel I need to do.

Sorry to say that I can’t help you, I need to help me…