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Wonderful and telling portrait sketched by my niece, Adah.

I haven’t posted in several weeks now. I’m back in Boston and swamped with work. There are number of great new things going on with RDVO, including the impending launch of our new sister company, Metaverb, which will focus on Dynamic Digital Marketing programs ranging from SEO to SEM to Social Media to advanced customer research.

More to come soon…

It’s surprising that the iPhone doesn’t have a native solution for MS Outlook task synchronization. Task management has become a core element of my work style and not having my task list (or the ability to create tasks) on the iPhone is an annoyance. Not even MobileMe has a task management feature.

I was able to find a nice workaround after some investigation. This approach is free and seems to work just fine.

You can create a free account at Toodledo.com and then use the free Toodledo synchronization tool to sync your data between Outlook and the Toodledo.com cloud. Once synchronized, Toodledo has a iPhone-optimized page for viewing, managing, and creating tasks.

Your task data is stored in the Cloud, and you can set the synchronization tool to auto-sync at a set time interval or you can sync manually. Total set up time was less than ten minutes.

Get a step-by-step set-up and install guide.

Chapura, the company that developed a number of Palm OS and Outlook sync tools, recently release KeyTasks. KeyTasks costs $9.99 at the app store doesn’t support categorization. KeyTasks also requires a yearly fee.

Visionary American artist Robert Rauschenberg died on Monday at the age of 82. He was a true innovator in the disciplines of graphic arts, poster art, and mixed media design. Rauschenberg’s ability to work across different types of artwork and practices defines him as one of the first true multi-media artists.

Some Rauschenberg resources online:

• NY Times Obituary
• Wikipedia Entry
• Rauschenberg @ Flickr.com
• Galleries Displaying Rauschenberg’s Works

Free ice cream at JP Licks. Red Sox opening day. Impromptu jazz ensemble in The Square… Springtime is finally here!

Talking about bringing you back! Muxtape.com is simple little web service that lets you create online “mix-tapes”. You can upload up to twelve MP3s, rearrange the order, and share and play them on any machine.

It definitely brought me back to the high school years!

Without further ado…my first Muxtape!

I’ve discovered that one of the best ways to generate a creative spark is to find a creative a cool environment to work.

I’ve been working intermittently out of the lobby of the W Hotel in San Francisco for the last couple of days. As fans of the W chain will know, they use interior design, materials, audio/visual (and even scent) to craft a provocative experience for their guests. The W known for being hip and attracting the same with their clientele (myself excluded!)

The lobby at the San Francisco W is a little loud and there is constant action and people milling about—basically there’s a lot of distractions. Nonetheless, I’ve been able to get a large amount of work done, both in quantity and quality. I’m finding that the environment is inspiring and clearly conducive to getting work done.

When you get busy and under pressure there’s a normal inclination to hole up in your office, seek quiet, and hole up with the familiar. The last couple of days have shown me that contrary just may be just as true. Working somewhere new and cool may be just what you need to get you out of your creative funk.

Unfortunately I’ll have to wait until August of 2009 for the W Hotel Boston to open…

I watched Once on a cross-country flight and was totally blow away. It’s a simple and unfettered love story set to music—an almost perfect Indie film.

This is a movie you need to see if you haven’t already. Granted, the acting is a bit wooden, and it’s shot in that grating docu-style that is so popular among independent movies. Nonetheless, the story is gorgeous, the music is memorable, and you will be thinking about the ending long after the closing the credits.

In what some are calling the best moment from the Oscars, here are the lead players from the movie (Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova) performing “Falling Slowly” that would eventually win “Best Song”.

The New York Times Online recently launched a neat online tool – The TimesMachine – that lets you browse their issue archive stretching back to the 1850s. You can see the newspaper layouts in their original format (something Google news doesn’t offer).

I did a look-up of October 25, 1872 – one hundred years before I was born. It doesn’t seem like too much was going on outside of the Horace Greeley campaign, although it’s hard to tell because there are no real headlines! I suppose the headline is an invention of the modern newspaper…

I was initially skeptical about The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. While a number of friends had recommended the book, I generally try to avoid preachy lifestyle books—especially the ones about food. I’m not interested in the politics of food and subscribe to the “if it tastes good, eat it” school of food theory. Then I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma…

The basic message of The Omnivore’s Dilemma is that we need to begin thinking more about the foods we eat—we have become far too removed from our meals as a society. Relatively new advances in technology have created a bounty of cheap and readily accessible food sources. The growth of food supply chains, agribusiness, and transportation has created this boon, but it has come at a huge cost to our natural resources and health. To demonstrate this, the author takes us through four meals – a fast food meal on side of the scale and a completed hunted and gathered meal on the other.

The most compelling (and disturbing) part of the book is the in-depth investigation of the industrial food chain. Pollan traces the creation of a McDonald’s dinner all the way back to the corn fields of Middle-America, where farmers grow massive crops of genetically-engineered corn, most of which is consumed by cattle or chickens inside industrial feed lots. In addition to corn, these animals are fed a number of antibiotics, hormones, and steroids that fatten them up faster and quicken their journey to the slaughterhouse. After being process and treated with more chemicals and preservatives, the meat is shipped across the country to fast food joints and readily consumed by millions of people every day.

Get the picture? By deconstructing the industrial food chain, Pollan gives us alarming insights into the true cost of our meals and the stress it puts on natural resources and the health or our nation.

Pollan also analyzes meals originating from “industrial organic” and sustainable farms. He also creates a meal that is made from food he hunted and gathered in his community.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is not a preachy or political book. The author is a true food lover and he takes care not to criticize the choices of others. The book informs and avoids sermonizing. Pollan’s simple process of meal deconstruction is incredibly compelling.

Related links:

• Michael Pollan’s website
• Omnivore’s Dilemma Wikipedia Entry