Yes, those really are square watermelons. My wife sent this picture to me and I ended up printing it as a reminder to get creative when a tough problem emerges at work.

You’ve been there. You sit down, ready to write the next killer blog post, only to have your mind go totally blank. Then, your brain clutters up with fluffy thoughts of melted chocolate, lust-inducing iPhones, and unicorns. (Or is that just me?)

One of my readers pointed out that they really appreciated the definition of marketing that I use throughout Duct Tape Marketing. Marketing is getting someone who has a need to know, like and trust you.

If we want to be innovative and generate ideas that will benefit our lives we have to think. We need to brainstorm. And we need to relax so our minds can formulate.

We all want to control the barrage of emails hurling at us everyday, but often the task is just too daunting. Perhaps, you read Merlin Mann’s Inbox Makeover tutorial or Gina Trapani’s Trusted Trio system for managing email. You might have said, “Wow, this is great and makes a lot of sense. I’m gonna do it now!”

Jason Friend, a co-founder of the wildly successful software developer 37Signals stopped by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast recently to chat.37Signals makes a collection of killer online apps such as Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack and Campfire.

Daniel Jalkut has just released the final version of FlexTime, a fantastic little Mac timer deftly suited for the (10+2)*5 procrastination hack. It still has no out-of-the-box support for Growl’s nifty notification system. Luckily, FlexTime now has robust support for AppleScript, allowing a backdoor into the Growl system.

You know you need to get your story told in the media, but you can’t seem to get anyone interested. The problem is you need to look at journalists as a target market - you need to get them to know, like and trust you just like you would a customer.

At some point I mentioned to everyone that I am very introverted and used to have a huge fear of public speaking. This fear was not just a simple reluctance to speak in front of a group, I am talking about a fear that scrambled my mind and turned me into a babbling idiot.

Behance did a very unscientific study of how we use our own reference items. Over the past three years, we have accumulated 4 faux-leather-bound plastic sleeve books full of magazine cut-outs, printouts, and book excerpts on creative people. The first thing we found was dust.