Exciting news is on the way - soon - about the relaunch of Pistachio Consulting Inc. and www.PistachioConsulting.com. I’ve gotten to travel a whole lot this summer to meet with and talk to some incredibly smart and interesting people all over the place. I can’t wait to tell all of you what we’ve got under development, but here’s a partial “sneak-preview.”

These are the slides from my keynote talk at the Jive Software Enterprise User Interface/User Experience conference in Aspen last week. In a week there are already almost 1,000 views and 18 comments on www.SlideShare.net about these. What do you think?

UPDATE: Memo to my presentations-consultant self. Pay closer attention to Slideshare when uploading slide decks. Your slide notes now appear (YAY!!!) in the notes and comments section. Those “18 comments” you were surprised about? Your own darned notes. Ha!

Excited to be heading out to the Bay Area tomorrow for BlogHer, to meet some really amazing people around the area and to reconnect with friends. I’d really love the chance to meet you while I’m there. Here are some of the fun things going on. I hope you’ll consider saying hi.

(”Tweet-up” just means we’ll use Twitter to coordinate getting together for fun and networking. These are public events and all are welcome. RSVP at the links provided, or for HMB Ritz, just show up. Thanks!)

Friday & Saturday, July 18-19
San Francisco: BlogHer08 at the Westin St. Francis hotel. Very happy to meet this strong community of women bloggers to listen and learn.

Sunday, July 20
StartupDrinks SF 2-4 PM at the Medjool rooftop deck. Come support startup culture through this really fun decentralized networking phenom started by my buddy Andrew Hyde. RSVP and more information here.

Monday, July 21
Palo Alto Tweet-up: Breakfast in Palo Alto Joanie’s Cafe, 8 am. Yeah, it’s early but that will only make it more intimate. Please come wish Erica Douglass a HAPPY birthday. RSVP here
San Mateo Tweet-up: After Work Drinks at BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse. 5:30-7:30 pm. Sponsored in part by www.Qik.com (THANKS Bhaskar!) RSVP here

Tuesday, July 22
Half Moon Bay Tweet-up: Cocktails with Kathy Sierra, Robert Scoble, Francine Hardaway, JJ Toothman and YOU at the Half Moon Bay Ritz fire-ring by the ocean, 5:45 pm. (no RSVP link yet, just show up.)

Thursday, July 24
San Francisco Tweet-up: Coffee at Citizen Space, 9-11 am. I can’t wait to see Citizen Space, which is SF’s own entrant into the co-working revolution. Huge thanks to my friend and hero Tara Hunt for letting us all use the venue to meet and greet. RSVP here

There’s a WHOLE lot going on behind this here green curtain, and multiple announcements on the way in the next few weeks and months.

Sorry I’m not being very transparent about it at the moment. I promise all will be revealed, including this here blog in a whole new form that lets you choose whether you want to follow along on presentations stuff or on social media stuff as my work continues to shift going forward.

In the meanwhile, lavish thanks for your continued interest, and a promise to get back to more, and more consistent, content output in the near future…

Much love,
Pistachio

Current and upcoming subcontracting opportunities/requests for proposal:

Virtual Assistant
Wordpress Blog Maintenance
Graphic Designer

Description: Virtual Assistant

• extremely well organized
• good attention to detail
• prompt and accountable on managing their own projects and reporting back when complete or when something comes up
• extremely experienced and comfortable handling social networking sites, managing my accounts and logins, doing light blog maintenance on Wordpress (I will have someone else run the site, but VA will at times pitch in)
• good at managing upwards (i can be highly disorganized, so i can’t invest a lot of time in organizing the admin projects)

Responsibilities

• travel planning
• manage calendar (gcal)
• maintain & update contacts database (plaxo & others)
• help track/record expenses
• complete administrative tasks and projects
• assist with marketing tasks (opportunity to earn frequent large bonuses by securing paid speaking gigs)
• assist with maintaining social media presence (researching, organizing, streamlining and suggesting features to use on various sites and content streams)
• revamp and maintain filing system (help with move from paper to electronic)
• bookkeeping

Software: MUST have experience with

• some kind of financial reporting/tracking software
• google suite: gmail, gtalk, gcal, greader, etc.
• office apps: excel, word and powerpoint
• using an RSS reader & keeping up with blogs
• productivity/time management/product management software
• fluent in web search
• social networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, others

Should be willing to learn:

• Twitter
• specific finance apps like Mint, geezeo, freshbooks, xpensr, others
• WordPress blogging software
• specific project management software like Basecamp or other

If you have a recommendation or are interested, please contact Maria Thurrell via her site or via @mathurrell on Twitter.

View from the conference venue
in Ouchy: Image via WikipediaI gave a talk this morning in Lausanne at Stephanie Booth’s Going Solo conference for freelancers.

Stowe Boyd live-twittered the talk. Suw Charman-Anderson blogged amazingly complete notes, and Urs Gattiker wrote this post about the principles covered. Jaap Stronks is liveblogging the entire day using CoverItLive.

The slide deck is below:

| View | Upload your own

Big thank you to Stephanie and all of the attendees. We had a really enjoyable discussion (see Suw’s post for detailed notes on the Q & A also.)

(If you would like to follow these folks on Twitter: Stephanie is @stephtara, Stowe is @stoweboyd, Suw is @suw, Urs is @commetrics, Jaap is @Jaapstronks.)

UPDATE: Video of the presentation itself is already live. Wow, conference video guy! Thanks.

I don’t usually play at meme tag games. In fact, this one took me months to comply to. In the meanwhile Jane Quigley also tagged me, so this is really overdue.

Because, and only because it was Maggie Fox what did it, and because she tagged me in Such. Good. Company. I’m making an exception this one time. So here’re some weird things about me that you might not know. Whether you actually care is a different story altogether, but it can’t hurt to have a little fun.

1. Favorite adventure: hitchhiking around Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland in the summer of 1995. No offense, England, but I was having too much fun in Ireland and skipped visiting you altogether.

2. Most flawed climate research: living (the wrong) 7 months of one year (Sept. 94 - March 95) in Moscow.

3. Weirdest honor: nominated for President of a Sinn Fein group in County Clare.

4. Dumbest move: sleeping one night on the streets of Paris. (tho not at LeWeb3 when I stayed at the lovely Hotel Du Cadran courtesy of www.hotelsaparis.com

5. Jack-of-these-trades: Jobs I’ve held for pay for at least one week: first-grade teacher, waitress, prep cook, chef, caterer, purchasing agent, project manager, PR wonk, marketing exec., interactive television strategist, developing show ideas for cable TV, freelance journalist, and in retail selling specialty foods, equestrian gear and plants.

6. Best use of a state park: living in Hueco Tanks State Park, Hueco Tanks, TX for 2 1/2 months in 1993 in order to rockclimb full time.

7. Strangest home: I’ve logged 12+ months of sea time living in teensy bunks aboard the SSVs Westward, Corwith Cramer, and Robert C. Seamans with the Sea Education Association. I’m madly in love with the islands of Bequia and Saba as a result.

8. What’s my major? I studied Environmental Science and Public Policy, wrote my undergrad thesis on Social Analysis of Soil Erosion and published on soil erosion (in Science) and environmental racism. So naturally, I’m now in communications.

In turn, I tag YOU. (Call it self-service meme tag. If you want to play along, play along and link back to it here.)

Regular readers of this blog may understand pretty well just what it is that I do, and how I can make them more effective and profitable by expressing their ideas and value offerings more clearly. I, however, do not always lay out my own value-added as clearly as I’d like. Oh, the irony. Cobbler’s children, and all that.

I help you achieve more when you present. I make presentations easier to prepare, less stressful to deliver and more closely tied to ROI for your business and career. I provide tools, ideas, consulting and support that lets you and your team convey ideas more effectively and memorably.

For some clients, this means training or coaching. I help re-write and re-script the messages themselves, and more specifically target them to the audience. We can work on things you would like to change or I can run diagnostics (I know. like you’re a car) on your existing presentations and suggest areas to strengthen.

But how do you know if this is for you? Try me. Contact me to discuss an introductory analysis of your situation, opportunities and strengths.

I’m excited to announce that NewsGator just signed on as my newest client last Friday. I’ve been a huge fan of Jeff Nolan’s Venture Chronicles since last spring, so I was kinda giddy when he contacted me about working together on NewsGator’s stories and messaging. My excitement is equally split between how smart these folks are and how cool the stuff they’re working on is. Even if they were not my client, I would (and will now that I’ve posted this) blog and tweet enthusiastically about what I’ve seen. So, look forward to that, but for the moment: welcome aboard!

Today is Go Red for Women Day. Share with a woman you love how she can protect against heart attack and stroke. Love your hearts, ladies. Learn the signs of heart attack and stroke, and react quickly if you ever observe them.

Women are notorious for not taking care of themselves first. Heart attack and stroke are dramatically under-diagnosed in women, so badly that survival rates for women are worse (I will find a stat later, but wanted to get this post up fast). UPDATE: Some links below.

• Spain, 1998, women 70% more likely to die of their first heart attack.
• heart disease is THE leading killer of women
• 65% of women who die of heart attack had NO prior symptoms

You are better off, every time, to seek medical attention and have it turn out nothing was wrong. Too many women ignore their symptoms and risk factors until it’s too late.

Know the risk factors, but don’t be lulled into a false sense of security. I had no risk factors or warning signs prior to my stroke, and I ignored the (fortunately subtle) symptoms for hours. I got very lucky.

Women, love your hearts. Please.

UPDATE: @heizusan in line with that you can point people to www.americanheart.org - it’s a good site about heart health & awareness.

I am very excited to have a number of meetings in NYC over the next two days. I’ll get to meet face to face for the first time with a number of really interesting people I’ve been privileged to connect with over the past 9 months. If that wasn’t enough, there are also excellent social media networking “events” in the hopper for both nights.

Tonight: Seesmic Meetup at the Half King, 7 pm. Tomorrow: Informal Tweet-up, venue & time TBD. If you’re around I would love to connect, and even more I would love to connect you with other awesome NYC-area folks I’m lucky to know. You can always find me on Twitter and through email: laura (at) this web domain address. I hope to see you soon!