Sometime last summer I received a solicitation from them. They said they need to raise something like $16 million because they purchase all the products they test on the open market and never take freebies from manufacturers. Fair enough, I thought, so I sent them some money. I think it was like $30 or so.

Biggest mistake ever.

In the 6 months since that donation, I’m convinced they’ve spent nearly the entire amount soliciting me for more money. I get snail mail from them at least once a week asking for more money, and email every couple days. It got so bad I sent them an email last month telling them they’re wasting their money and will never get another dime from me and to please stop sending me anything. They apologized and said they would.

They haven’t.

Sure, the mail has slowed down a bit, but I’m still getting it. Now it’s maybe every 10 days or so. The emails haven’t stopped either, even though I’ve gone through the email unsubscribe process several times. I’ve finally started marking it as spam in gmail.

I’m so disappointed in them. Actually, strike that. I’m angry. I’m angry they would solicit me for what looked like a good cause and then turn right around and spend all or most of it soliciting me for more.

Word to the wise: never donate to Consumer Reports. You’ll regret it.

Pecha Kucha is a pretty cool concept – you get 20 slides that auto advance every 20 seconds.  Markus had already submitted a deck for me, which meant that I needed to take his script and make it work for me at that pace.  Given that I only had a few hours to do that, I’d say it went pretty well.

About a month ago I submitted a paper to Sony Electronics’ annual Technical Symposium. Out of the 50 or so papers that were submitted mine was chosen as one of 5 finalists, so I got to go to San Diego to present it in front of about 250 engineers and managers. I did such a good job of presenting that the audience chose mine as the best paper!

Given that I did so well at the presentation, I really want to try Pecha Kucha or Ignite again sometime!

Edit: and by a day or two I mean like 6-12 months!

Edit 2: Or years.. ya know.