After much employee persuasion we decided to have Bring Your Dog to Work Thursdays. All sorts of cool, Valley start ups have “perks” like this and while we’re neither cool nor in the Valley we figured we could improve employee satisfaction a bit by letting our people bring in their beloved pooches one day a week.

So now that’s been canceled. Here’s a diary of how Bring Your Dog to Work Day turned into Dog Day Afternoon:

8am The first few people arrive at the office with their dogs. Apart from a few back-and-forth snarls and a lot of butt sniffing (between the dogs), things are going well. The first few dogs seem to acclimate quickly to the office environment. Some go to sleep at their owners’ feet almost immediately.  We’re feeling good about things.

8:30am Lisa in accounting shows up with her very feisty German Shepherd puppy named Jake who gets the attention of several of the formerly sleeping dogs. A shiatsu puppy comes over to introduce himself and soon the office is filled with the sounds of dogs fighting. Not playful let’s-learn-how-to-be-big-dogs fighting, but real canine on canine action. Lisa and Jake eventually end up retreating to the lobby where she decides to simply take him back home. The shiatsu stays but continues barking at the office door, apparently expecting Jake to come back for more.

9:15am We have about eight dogs total in the office now. Some of them pace their owners cubes, nose through garbage cans, scratch and lick themselves, but otherwise remain peaceful. A few others bark randomly at other passing staff or wander around the office. A golden retriever finds her way into the break room and gets her head caught in the vending machine return chute.

11:00am A dog has relieved him/herself in the copier room. No one will accept responsibility.

11:45am The pizza delivery guy is attacked by two dogs in the waiting area and chased down the hall. To prevent being cornered in the elevator he throws the his pizza carrier into the lobby as the doors close behind him. Soon pizza is everywhere.

1:30pm Three more dogfights and two unsanitary incidents later we send everyone with a dog home. The office is a mess and little work has been done. We decide that this will be the one and only Bring Your Dog to Work Thursday.

By Mike R at Generatorland.com

This has just a little to do with Generator Land, but we want to put it out there. We are adding large thumbnails (if that’s not a paradox) to our generator description pages and our effort is being greatly helped by a Firefox extension developed by Evgeny Suslikov called “Fireshot” and the brilliant new online photo editor Picnik.

Fireshot lets you take a snapshot of whatever page you’re browsing, including areas that are “below the fold.” With a click the screenshot is transferred to a very capable image editing program where you can finesse it and annotate it then save it to your hard drive.

Picnik is a web-based photo editor that has a few killer features, not the least of which is the ability to right-click on any web image and whosh it off to Picnik for instant editing. It must be seen to be appreciated.

Thanks to all the geniuses behind these two top-notch web tools.

Results of our “What should our next Generator be?” Poll

Thanks to everyone who voted and now our legal team can get to work on figuring out if we can actually use the Ben and Jerry’s name in a generator. Good luck team!

By MikeR, Generatorland.com

Marketing departments get a lot of grief. Often among the first to be laid off, they are the least understood and least respected department in your company (behind HR). They’re typically at the mercy of sales and despite their best efforts have a difficult time getting credit for anything they do outside of someone saying “Hey, did you guys create that nifty logo? I like it. Except I don’t like green. Try purple instead.”

Why do marketing people get so little respect? Let’s explore.

1. They are exceedingly aggressive with other peoples’ time.
   If you’ve ever been asked to do something for a marketing person you’ve probably experienced the “Marketing Full Court Press.” Basically you’re asked to do something and then somehow coerced into an aggressive deadline. A few minutes later you get a call saying they actually needed it sooner because of some campaign that starts in an hour or so. A few minutes later, as you’re scrambling to pull everything together, they call and say never mind, they got someone else to do it “but thanks, you’re the best.”
2. They spend a lot of time proving how important they are to the company.
   I’m not saying marketing isn’t important to a company. It is. However, because no one outside of Marketing seems to know what Marketing is doing all day and what effect it’s having on the company, Marketing people feel like they need to let everyone know how busy they are and all the activities they’re involved in. You realize this about 37 slides into their company meeting presentation.
3. They have extreme ADD.
   Marketing people are about ideas. Often they develop numerous ideas just on their way back from the printer—where they probably picked up a print-out of their latest list of ideas. They are passionate about everyone of these ideas for about a week. During that week they will discuss the idea loudly and rally people behind it, declaring it “the idea that will change everything” and “the thing we must do as soon as we’re done hearing the idea Brad just had on his way back from Starbuck’s.”
4. They breathe buzz words.
   Marketing people who don’t pepper their speech with the latest buzz words don’t last in Marketing. Because most marketing people, especially in meetings, have a little machine in their head that ticks off the number of buzz words another marketing person uses and automatically assigns a marketing prowess rating based on the number of ticks. Some marketing people have even stopped using articles like “the” and “a” to ensure maximum buzzwords per sentence. Yesterday I heard a marketing person burp the phrase “lead-gen.”
5. They are overtly enthusiastic.
   It’s great to have a positive attitude at work. It’s something else altogether to force yourself to be so enthusiastic and positive that your attitude shrieks “Everyone! Look how incredibly enthusiastic I am!” Whether it’s the clam dip at the office party or latest quarterly sales numbers, “IT’S ALL FANTASTIC! MY GOD IS THERE ANYTHING BETTER?”

Generator Land’s development team is currently attending a conference in Amsterdam. However before they left on Monday, they failed to tell us the name of the conference and where they were staying. Also we noticed all the petty cash was missing.

If anyone is aware of a developers conference currently going on in Amsterdam, please contact us. Also, if you’re reading this from Amsterdam and you happen to bump into Kevin, Joe, Burhan, Alexei, Wayne, Doug, or Henri, please ask them to call the office.

Thanks!

By MikeR, Generatorland.com

It’s not all fun and drunken boasting here at Generator Land. We also have to work sometimes and like everyone else, we’re often flooded with email.

I’ve become an Inbox Zero Zealot and one of the things I’ve noticed about being in the Inbox Zero frame of mind is that you value email a lot less. Actually, I should say you value certain emails a lot less. When someone sends you a “Thank you” or an innocuous “FYI” you just can’t wait to digitally incinerate it.

I’ve gotten to the point that when Outlook flashes up its little email notification alert, I read the first line of the email and decide if it’s deletable and then take action right in the little alert window. Delete it, flag it, or open it are all available from a dropdown in the email alert preview window. Nice.

After deleting three new emails in the space of a minute yesterday I began to feel like I was using an instant messenger, not email. Messages sent via IM are impermanent and fleeting. Some people save IM conversations for later reference but I doubt it’s as common as people saving emails. Now I’m blowing through emails like instant messages. Nice.

Sure, there’s a risk I’ll delete something without realizing I should have saved it, but I think by now most of us have a pretty firm grasp on who sends us the useless and trivial emails and how they can be quickly identified. Those are the ones I target with extreme prejudice.

So the next time Agnes in HR sends you an email inviting everyone to the breakroom for birthday carrot cake, make sure her email spends less than two seconds in your Inbox. Then go get yourself some cake.

Nobody ever writes anything down around here, but it occurred to someone in Marketing that Generator Land has been around for a year this month.

That took many of us my surprise. Seems like only yesterday we began this fateful journey into the world of random generators and now, one year later, we stand atop the heap of random generator sites that are published within the generatorland.com domain. High-fives everyone. High (sniff) fives.

We also couldn’t help noticing that our birth conincides with American Craft Beer Week. We believe this was not as much a coincidence as it was an impetus.

So thanks to all of our loyal members, users, and passers-by. We’re the proudest and, likely, tallest one-year-olds on the planet.

When you create something you like on Generator Land and you want to save it you have two options.

1. Save it to your member page
2. Save it to the Hall of Fame

Historically, we’ve let anyone post their stuff to the Hall of Fame, which was really cool when we started out. We vividly recall the day the Willy Name Generator struck a chord with an Irish Rugby forum and we received 1,600 submissions within an hour or two. However, we’ve begun getting a lot of spam through the submission form lately and we’re not big fans of imposing captchas on our users every time they want to submit something.

So we’ve decided to make the Hall of Fame a “member’s only” feature in the near future. You’ll just have to take a moment to sign up the first time and then you’ll be free to create and submit to your heart’s content. Everyone will still be able to view the Hall of Fame, but only members will be able to add new stuff to it.

Since being a member is free and requires nothing more than a username and password, we don’t expect the number of submissions to drop much. We love those submissions and personally approve/disapprove each one. And if you know any spammers personally, tell them we hate them.

GL friend, Dan, had the great suggestion for a Nun Name Generator which is now in production. The idea immediately conjured images of “Sister Mary Elephant” of Cheech & Chong fame. We will draw on our vast experience in catholic grade schools to derive words that evoke the part-matriarchal/part-Godzilla nature of the parochial school nun.

We’re also planning to add a dessert item to the Froo Froo Menu Generator. Beef Gelato Puffs anyone? This was suggested by Kit a while back and we’re finally getting around to it. Sorry for the delay, Kit.

Finally, we’re thinking about a Drink Name Generator. A quick look at any bar tending site will reveal the random generator possibilities inherent. If you have ideas for any of these post a comment or go to submit an idea.

We’ve added screenshots of all the generators to their respective ratings/overview pages, something we’d been meaning to do for a while but seemed to keep forgetting. It’s nothing earth-shattering but it looks nice. Here’s an example:

http://www.generatorland.com/display.php?id=77

Also we wanted to call your attention to a fine post by 37Signals dude, Jason Fried, called “Urgency is Poisonous.” We couldn’t agree more.