the MARTINI SHAKER

RECENTLY:

Making People Smarter

I spoke to Merlin Mann on the phone the other day. We had a great conversation, and he ended it with an interesting question:

“How do we make people smarter?”

I have a couple of ideas….
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SXSW 2010: I’m done stewing. Here’s the poop.

My very first SXSW experience is now in the history books. I had an amazing time, but the sheer volume of experiences and information that was crammed into 5 days was a little overwhelming. I needed a little time to …
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TweetStar

One of the refreshingly inspiring panels that I attended at SXSWi this year was about people who engage in “Slow Twitter.” These people take their time to craft most of their tweets for maximum entertainment value. Most of the time, …
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Spring Break for nerds.

Tomorrow morning, I’m headed on a plane to beautiful Austin, TX for the South By Southwest Interactive Conference, also known to some as Spring Break for nerds.

This is my first trip to SXSWi, and I couldn’t be any more excited. …
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A conversation that made me cry.

Nathan wanted to go on a car ride with me last night. In addition to being in the “me too” phase, he’s started his “Why?” stage early, so of course he wanted to know why we were taking an …
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About the MARTINI SHAKER.

Shaken for you: August 2, 2006

About this site.

the MARTINI SHAKER is one of those fancy-schmancy blogs written and curated by Kansas City-based Jeremy Fuksa. In the old days (read: 2004), this site was about Flash design and motion graphics. Writing about these topics tended to bore me because there were enough other blogs out there doing this better than me, and the topic was simply too restrictive and I tended to get “off-topic” too much for those who were looking solely for that type of content.

So, in 2006 I switched the focus of the site to be about issues in the nebulous realm of creativity. This site has since morphed over the years to be about whatever strikes my fancy on any given day. Some posts are works of pure fiction. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which ones are which.

Although I make every effort to keep things intact around here, the changes in CMS platforms, site layouts and the like might leave some of the older articles looking rather broken. Please excuse the mess in the archives. I think you’ll still get the idea.

About Jeremy.

I have my humble beginnings much as anyone else does. A short career in small-town Oklahoma municipal pool lifeguarding soon gave way to a rollercoaster of industries. Most notable was the relevatory day when I left behind broadcast engineering as a career/field of study to pursue the creative side of video production. The great leap from left-brained to right-brained professional thinking has left me as a self-professed creative generalist, which is kind of a bullshit way of saying “jack-of-all-trades” yet I’ll continue to call myself that regardless of how it sounds. Thank you so much.

I am currently the Presentation Director at Barkley. This unique title is sometimes described as being the creative director for our new business department, but I describe it as using all of my sundry creative and technical experiences to push the Barkley brand forward in the eyes of new business prospects. This is also sometimes referred to as rocket fueling technician.

I speak to university classes and advertising clubs about doing great creative work, I’m the Immediate Past President of the Art+Copy Club of Kansas City and I like to express myself in a mélange of other ways.