Blog: Ramblings and Rants

On my mind for a while, I thought I would commit to blog how I’ve been feeling and what happened with my friend. We’ll call him M.S. for he was the classic metrosexual.

M.S. and I had become friends through work (Adobe). I trained him, as a matter of fact. He came over and had Thanksgiving with Strawberry Blonde and me. When snow hit the Portland area this past January, M.S. shared his first snow experience playing with us and our children.

When office waters grew politically treacherous for M.S., I helped steer him through the storm. He was there with valid (if bombastic) advice when I needed it (or when he thought I did). In inner city parlance, I had his back and he mine.

We hung out together often, though it would have been more frequent were I single like he. After he met Strawberry Blonde and found that they liked one another as well, M.S. came around more often. He considered me, he said on more than one occassion, his best friend.

Then M.S. met a boy. Classic story: Boy meets boy, falls in love, blows off friends and forgets there’s a world beyond the one relationship.

My old friend The probably believes that this is what happened when I first began dating Strawberry Blonde (except it was a boy meets girl thing), though I recall many opportunities for chess games and boys’ nights out that The shot down.

With M.S., however, he threw himself completely and wholly into the boyfriend’s life. I was not the only one of M.S.’s friends whose phone sat silent. The only relationship that existed for M.S. was the one with the boyfriend. M.S. spent time only with the boyfriend’s friends and not his own. Unless I called (and nagged) him first, I wouldn’t hear from M.S. From his other friends, I heard similar tales. This went on for several months.

At first, I thought perhaps M.S. simply didn’t want to share the boyfriend, that he wanted to keep the relationship unto themselves as long as possible. We all get that way in the beginning of new, exciting relationships, don’t we? There’s a period when we have something new and thrilling and just plain ours. And, for at least a little while, we want to keep it just ours.

When M.S. didn’t share, I wondered if he were afraid of being judged.

Color Scheme by Pixy

Cruising Toni Allen’s design post archives I found this post, Comprehensive Color Tool, which links to Color Scheme by Pixy. Color Scheme is a free, web-based color scheme tool with almost as much power as paid applications like Color Impact. What really sets Color Scheme by Pixy apart from any other color picker tool I’ve used is something very, very cool: it accounts for color blindness.

After choosing your colors, Color Scheme by Pixy let’s you preview the colors as if through the eyes of people with various types of color-blindness—protanopy (which affects 1% of men), deuteranopy (another 1% of men), deuteranomaly (which affects 5% of men and 0.4% of women), as well as five other types of color-blindness.

With “accessibility” on everyone’s tongues, right behind “standards,” a tool like Color Scheme by Pixy could prove amazingly useful.

[Also posted to the Design Weblog, the JavaScript Weblog, and the Nanopublishing Weblog]

Adobe’s Microsoft Strategy - The Design Weblog - design.weblogsinc.com

In case anyone forgot, Chizen runs down the the Adobe vs. Microsoft score card. At this point in the game the Redmond team is behind by 5.

A subtle driving home of the point that Adobe is cooler than Microsoft: “Meanwhile, we get to partner with all Microsoft’s enemies because we’re a great alternative and we don’t really compete head-on with any of its big competitors. Tha’s our strategy against Microsoft.”

Pariah Rolling On The Floor Laughing

The Blue Hammer

Customer: Can I get [simple request]?
Me: No.
Customer: But everyone else does that for me!
Me: Well, I’m not going to.

That kind of exchange would then lead to this kind of exchange:

Customer: (Handing me a single dollar) This is for you, but I want you to know that you were really bad.
Me: (Taking the dollar) Fuck you.
Customer: I know the owner. You’re in big trouble.
Me: Fuck you.

Excite Money & Investing

TORONTO (Reuters) - Nortel Networks Corp. (NT) (NT) fired its top three executives on Wednesday and said accounting problems already under investigation by regulators ran deeper than expected.
The surprise announcement from North America’s largest maker of telecommunications equipment sent its shares plunging as investors speculated that an accounting review begun last year was developing into a full-blown financial scandal.

Ugh. And I own a piece of this company.

Thursday, shortly after posting Ban Jamie Leigh From Blogs, I received a nasty e-mail from Miss Leigh. It was disjointed and disorganized, contained several junior high level attempts at personal attack, made little sense, and redressed a few things that I never said. I wondered if maybe it was based on a form letter she sent out to those who disagreed with her.

The letter was obviously written by someone quite upset, and, well, I’m a sucker for tears.

So, I sent the below e-mail as an offering of an olive branch. After two days, I’ve yet to receive a response.

I call upon the blogosphere to ban Jamie Leigh from blogs. Report her to MT-Blacklist so that her URL, jamieleigh.net, and her name are banned from commenting on MT blogs. Bloggers using other systems should do the same. I have already banned her permanently from the Saturday Slant and my site, but she continues to plague the rest of the blogosphere. It isn’t enough to simply add her to our local blacklists; she’ll find other blogs to exploit. Send Jamie Leigh a message that we aren’t beneath her, that she can’t simply use us to further her own dillusion of celebrity.

Jamie Leigh is an annoyance to, and blight upon the collective ass of, the blogosphere and the Internet itself. She crap posts/blog spams with incredibly long (usually more than 1,000 words) pre-written, non-sensical essay comments totally unrelated to the blog and post to which it is spammed. She does this to raise her ranking in Google. Do a Google search for “‘Jamie Leigh’ and blog” to see all the blogs she’s spammed in the last three years. If you get more than a couple of comments on your site, she’s probably already spammed you.

Here, the most recent example of her blog spamming efforts, a 1,300 word diatribe about wax museums crap posted to about a dozen blogs (that I’ve found with 5 minutes of research) on 30 March, 2004.

1,300 word crap post to various blogs on 30 March, 2004 including (but not limited to):
• Amptoons Blog
• Joho The Blog
• The Talking Dog blog
• Talk A Blue Streak blog
• Alas, A Blog

More crap posts/blog spam:
• Crap posting on The Blog Herald (12 April 2004)
• Crap posting her press releases and giant photos of herself to the Saturday Slant
• Locker Gnome
• Another crap posting on the Saturday Slant (that I had removed at the time).

More info on blog spammer Jamie Leigh:
• Celebrity Blogs’ story about Jamie Leigh’s attempts to convince them she’s famous. (22 Feb 2004)
• A dissection of Jamie Leigh by Cam-Mafia.com
• Her self-written bio on Eatonweb.
• Fighting Blog Spam (about halfway down the page)
• The Official Jamie Leigh Fanlisting
• And, she apparently has a very successful career as a porn actress. I found this via a Google search.

[1.1 mb] Jamie Leigh titled this animated GIF from her “Official Jamie Leigh Fanlisting” ego-site the “Silent Movie of our Generation”

I’ve been threatened by the reigning queen of arrogance, the blog spammer extraordinaire, Miss Jamie Leigh. Via instant messenger today I got a dreadfully frightening warning [snicker]. The chat went like this:

I’m quaking in my boots. Should I hire protection? Anyone know of a good bodyguard service?

Illustration from the DRC Easy Read Summary of the report. © Copyright DRC.

Silicon.com reports:

An investigation into the accessibility of the internet has slammed the majority of websites for being unusable for disabled would-be web surfers.

Deaf, blind and dyslexic users are all being let down badly by the majority of website designers and online publishers, who fail to take into account their special needs, according to the report.

The bitterest irony is that the disabled, along with the elderly, have the most to gain from the internet and its virtual ability to bring products and services into the home.

Speaking at the launch of the report, Bert Massie, the chairman of the Disability Rights Commission, said: Eight in 10 sites are next to impossible for some disabled people to use.”

It’s a shame disabled people can’t read the report.

Last night I screamed at a kid. I don’t scream, much less at kids. I got angrier with this child than I have ever with any child or most adults.

Then I kicked him out of my house.

Chris will recognize from the days of Scary Carrie that I am never unable to find alternative methods for interracting with somone or so frustrated that I absolutely must have him or her immediately leave my company. I’ve never ordered someone out of my house. If I never told Scary, the most annoying and frustrating woman I’ve ever met, to “get the fuck out of my house,” I’d never say that to anyone. Alas, I ordered an eleven year-old boy out the front door last night—I did not use profanity, though.

I’m not an angry or quick-tempered person. It takes a lot to get under my skin. This kid did it all.

We need an alternative to the SciFi Channel, another better, more content-rich network that airs science fiction television series and movies of more substance than the schlock chosen by the First Network For SciFi.

SciFi Channel has proven again and again that it still firmly believes that science fiction should be the domain of men, not women, and that only women are interested in character-driven series. Among the actions demonstrative of this belief are: the termination of “Babylon 5: Excalibur” after production of twelve episodes; the top dollar production of the pilot for “Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers,” which originally (and only) aired opposite a major sports playoff event, and was never followed through with the promised series; the cancellation of “Farscape” weeks after announcing a two-year production deal, and; the frantic concepting, production, and rapid marketing of action-driven, character-weak schlock-fi like “Tracker,” “Tremors: The Series,” “Stargate: SG1,” and “Scare Tactics.” Nothing of substance, with complex, evolving characters and drama as well as big-budget effects remains on the SciFi Channel today.

The Magazine Design Weblog

After weeks of planning, my new project, the Magazine Design Weblog, Weblogs, Inc.’s newest commercial blog, is live as of 9:00 PT this morning. I’m very excited about this new, first of its kind, weblog.

The Magazine Design Weblog focuses on news, information, and opinions specific to the unique magazine publishing world. More than simply a design forum, the Magazine Design Weblog seeks to explore all aspects of periodical publishing, from creative to sales, publisher to advertiser, in a one-stop portal.

I’m also a frequent contributor to the Unofficial Apple Weblog and the Unofficial Microsoft Weblog.

And look here in the coming weeks for news about even bigger projects currently in the works.

SecurityFocus: Chat, Copy, Paste, Prison

You are engaged in a chat session with some friends and colleagues, when one of them makes a witty remark or imparts a pithy bit of information. You hit CTRL-A and select the conversation, then copy it to a document that you save. Under a little-noticed decision in a New Hampshire Superior Court in late February, these actions may just land you in jail.

From the New York Times:

Altering of Worker Time Cards Spurs Growing Number of Suits

Experts on compensation say that the illegal doctoring of hourly employees’ time records is far more prevalent than most Americans believe. The practice, commonly called shaving time, is easily done and hard to detect—a simple matter of computer keystrokes—and has spurred a growing number of lawsuits and settlements against a wide range of businesses.

Workers have sued Family Dollar and Pep Boys, the auto parts and repair chain, accusing managers of deleting hours. A jury found that Taco Bell managers in Oregon had routinely erased workers’ time. More than a dozen former Wal-Mart employees said in interviews and depositions that managers had altered time records to shortchange employees. The Department of Labor recently reached two back-pay settlements with Kinko’s photocopy centers, totaling $56,600, after finding that managers in Ithaca, N.Y., and Hyannis, Mass., had erased time for 13 employees.

In a graphic design group I recently got into a discussion about application choice on the Macintosh. During this discussion, in response to the accusation that, without Apple and competition, we would “be stuck in a Windows world,’ I said the following:

Actually, Apple’s current direction is the biggest proponent for using Windows. Apple is doing its best to force everyone to Windows by strangling the market for third-party applications developers on the Mac.

Here, flame-worthy as it is, is what I meant by that comment: