amg's blog

Around these parts we love Halloween nearly as much as we love Flannel Fridays. So today lead copywriter Molly and graphic designer Roxanne dressed up as The Mikes (Creative Director Mike and Graphic Designer Mike).

Have you been outside lately? It’s hot. Too hot, dammit. We need an Ice Age, people! If you are deeply, utterly, completely consumed and concerned with the increasing temperatures that face the planet (i.e. us), than read on. In honor of Earth Day, we’ve compiled a list of the ever-evolving steps we have taken to save the human race (after all, we need the Earth around to keep those Doritos factories running). Educate yourself, and  win over your hipster friends by reading Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

1. Everyday, we write inspirational messages to the planet, and then bury them in our organic dandelion garden
2. To save electricity (and prepare our bodies for the coming desert storms), we’ve removed all air conditioning units from the building
3. The previous step has dramatically increased our sweat production, which we will use to help restore the drought-ridden riverbeds surrounding our office
4. To encourage Mother Nature to “just chill out”, we are installing a massive speaker system in our parking lot, which we’ll use to blast calming tunes from our resident funk-star Mike Tallman’s band, Euforquestra
5. In an effort to combat heat waves, we’re installing wind turbines in the field behind our office building. Then we’ll truck in a few hundred tons of ice cubes, and enjoy the cool breeze everyday (…that it’s windy).
6. Every pen in the office is now green. Literally, not in the “we source our pens from organic pen farms” kind of way. That’s expensive.
7. We eat out at fast food restaurants everyday and save (some) of the grease to put into the gas tanks of our cars. Who said alternative fuel couldn’t work?
8. We’re starting a new “organic marketing” trend: Our office has been relocated. We’re now 50 miles away from all golf courses, supermarkets, hospitals, grocery stores, and paved roads. Sure, we’ll have to purchase massive SUVs to traverse over the rough terrain on the way to work, but getting away from all this pollution will really help us work at our best.

Have any more idea for us? Write on our Facebook wall, or send us a tweet! Unless you don’t care about the planet or something.

Instead of the ridiculous (and frankly uninteresting) fads of planking and coning, we have started doing somethign much more entertaining: Freeze Frame.

The official office rules (as created by our soon to be famous copywriter, Molly) are as follows:

Anytime you catch a co-worker doing something odd or quirky or just downright goofy (see Molly), you can call Freeze Frame and snap a photo.

At the end of the week we will compile the pictures together and show the world.  Prepare for unimaginable levels of embarrassment. A sample from this week:

87 tools. Eighty-seven tools. Need we say more?

Buy it for us please?

Anyone want to get some of this stuff for us? It will help us be more productive!

Here’s a clever music video featuring QR Codes, which can actually be scanned and will direct the user to information about the artist and even enter them into contests.

We thought about making one of our own, but we couldn’t decide who would get to play lead cowbell.

Awesome Uhura

This mathematical constant’s dedicatory day may have passed by without any festivities for some, but we here at AMG have decided to embrace our brainiac selves. That’s right, fellow poindexters, time to get your geek on!

Wanna hear a bit of celebratory tunes in honor of this auspicious and irrational number?  Take a listen to Lars Erickson’s lyrical ode to Pi.

National Pi Day Song

Geek/Nerd trivia, quiz questions and fun-facts

1. For what does YKYBHTLW stand?
2. What’s war-driving?
3. What century did mathematicians first use plus and minus signs?
4. What high-level computer language was named after a French mathematician and philosopher?

The deepest hole ever drilled by man is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, in Russia . It is over 40,000 feet deep.

In Portugese, Geek translates to “pencil neck” or eccentric.

Think math is too hard?? Even a dog can do it. Check out Maggie the Counting Dog:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nntGSioZPl0&feature=related

We believe that the geeks who have come before us have graced us with the amazing technology to create our stunning design work and to them we offer thanks and action figures in tribute.

Our own staff is overflowing with nerd-dom, and while we may not transcend to the high levels of the Society of Creative Anacronism yet

SCA on Youtube

we are ever striding forward so that someday we, too, can win the Adams College Greek Games by selling more pies than the Alpha Betas and by performing an elaborate computer driven, techno-song for the talent show. Clap your hands everybody and everybody clap your hands!

AMG Nerd Stats

Our resident copywriter, Molly, is a member of the Firefly Fanclub, a Galaga master, owns every DVD of Buffy, Angel and Supernatural ever made, and is addicted to NTN trivia. Plus, she owns the above Uhura doll from Star Trek TOS and has the theme from Battlestar Galactica as her answering machine message.

The Mikes, our creative gurus, have amassed a good deal of geekiness in their time, as well.

Mike Lindau was a member of Odyssey of the Mind, the choir, band, and drama club concurrently and he once bedazzled his own shirt to try and be more “punk rock.”

We believe Mike Tallman might be stuck in the nerdy 90’s (this is evident in his clothing choices) since he spends the majority of his free time playing Nintendo 64 Goldeneye and Mario Kart.

Our Marketing Exec, Ben, likes to brag (and Tweet) about acquiring 3 stars and beating all levels on Angry Birds. ‘Nuff said.

So, we would like to know…What is your nerdiest pastime?

Comment here

or Facebook us AMG Facebook http://www.facebook.com/amgci?sk=info#!/amgci?sk=wall

or Tweet us AMG Twitter http://twitter.com/amgci

Answers to trivia:

1. You Know You’ve Been Hacking Too Long When
2. The act of searching for Wi-Fi wireless networks by a person in a moving vehicle, using a portable computer or PDA.
3. The sixteenth
4. PASCAL

AMG Creative craves excellence like Joan Rivers craves Botox. That’s why we never stop finding new, genuinely authentic “green” ways of conducting our creative services. For our first list of “green” initiatives, go here. To see what new innovations we’ve cooked up, read on. And as always, we welcome all of your outside-the-box planet-saving ideas. Visit www.facebook.com/amgci to post your own suggestions on how AMG Creative can save the world. Without further ado, our second attempt at being “Green”:   

1. To reduce our carbon footprint, we’re switching back to lead pencils.

2. We have replaced all light bulbs in the office with candles. This was in no way motivated by our recent, multi-million dollar investment in the wax industry.  

3. In days following a full moon, we wear green clothes. Like, green-colored clothes. I mean, they are literally green. Problem is, we’re still trying to convince our kids that Trevor is not, in fact, a leprechaun (despite his curiously similar resemblance to the University of Notre Dame’s wiry green mascot).

4. The outside of our building was equipped with air conditioning units in order to blast cold air into the atmosphere… Just another way AMG Creative is actively combating the stoppable(?) forces of global warming.

5. To garnish more natural heat during the winter, and reduce our natural gas consumption, we will conduct business from our roof top, which is 12 feet closer to the sun.

6. Every afternoon, we take a 15 minute break to hug trees around the office building. Some take it a step further and straight up cuddle.

7. Ben and Justin manage our organic hemp farm in the back corner of the parking lot. We are still unsure as to how this helps the environment, but at least we get some cool necklaces out of it.

8. Instead of Post-It-Notes, we Tweet. For the inside scoop, follow us at www.twitter.com/amgci (can you say “shameless plug”?)

9. If someone in the office isn’t on Twitter, we bug them with green-colored Post-It-Notes until they join.

10. To get pumped up before meetings, we listen to NPR, National Public Radio (and the news is next).  

11. Instead of using TP in the restrooms, we will take queue from our environmentally conscious Middle Eastern brethren and use water. Just remember, never shake our left hand… (too far? Sorry, never again.)

12. We applaud “Green Terry” and have reached out to his agent to sponsor his Global Green Tour.

I say, I say, this is gonna cause more confusion than a mouse in a burlesque show!

AMG Creative has gone green! Woot. Below is a staff-compiled arsenal of ways to combat those evil CO2 emissions that trees need to survive. This list is just a portion of the changes we’ve implemented at AMG Creative. Why? Because we didn’t want to be the last business on the planet to jump on the elitist/morally-superior bandwagon.

1.       Every five minutes we hold our breath for five seconds (we call it the “Five Every Five” plan)

2.       We have canceled our once-weekly, printer-paper bon fires (too expensive and the flames died out too quickly)

3.       Sometimes we turn off the lights when we go home

4.       We flush only once a day

5.       We trap our flatulence in plastic bags from Wal-Mart then put them in the recycle bin

6.       All of us carpool to and from work in a single Smart Car – which is why our hours of operation are 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.

7.        In order to save electricity and reduce our carbon footprint, we will institute “Polar Fridays” in the winter months and “Nude Tuesdays” in the summer time

8.       Our office drink is an unsweetened tea made from oak tree bark and grass shavings when the lawn guys come once a week

9.       We stopped burying our empty ink cartridges in the lawn outside the building

10.   To conserve water consumption during work hours, we’re only drinking beer

11.   And to offset the amounts of water used/CO2 emitted during the beer-making process, at all times during the day, one of our employees will be running on a treadmill to create alternative energy to power our computers

12.   And to offset the electricity used by the treadmill, we do communal laundry once a month in the Poudre River