Blog: Ramblings and Rants

Just a passing argument against advertising spin.

Have you seen the Cingular wireless commercial featuring two guys in the stands at sports event (presumably baseball)? One, while brandishing his cellular phone, turns to the other and brags about his undisclosed number of free minutes. His buddy, a cooler head, balks at the first’s claims, saying he has more free minutes. When challenged by the braggart, the friend reveals a little haughtily that he can speak to 50 million people free.

To this I haughtily say big deal.

Someone’s computer is working very, very hard to try to spam my sites. The reason the Saturday Slant (below) was late today is because an hourly average of 2,600 comment spams downloading into my inbox completely maxed out the computer CPU.

After more than three hours of Outlook grinding away, the spam that had accumulated to that point finished downloading. I have my anti-comment spam system set to send me notifications so I can police for false positives.

Fortunately not a single one of those made it to public view on my blogs—they’ve hit both iamPariah.com and QuarkvsInDesign.com—but waiting while Outlook received and automatically sent them to the Deleted Items folder was annoying—offset by the gratification that the anti-comment spam system is doing its job.

Now I have to go turn off the notification option so the 2,600 hourly spam comments some Chinese Republic server is broadcasting at me simply disappears as if it had never been.

It’s my birthday, and its also the birthday of another nice blogger.

So stop by Neurotic Fishbowl and wish Kymberlie a happy 30th birthday!

(Say happy birthday to me, too, since you’re already here.)

It’s time for a change.

A couple of days ago I received a laughable reminder from BlogRolling.com to renew my subscription to service outages:

Hello from Blogrolling HQ,

We hope you are enjoying your Blogrolling.com subscription. Your current service is due for renewal on April 6, 2005. In order to continue using your Blogrolling.com’s services, you will need to renew your subscription by that date.

[snipped]

Thank you for your subscribing to Blogrolling.com. We look forward to serving you for many more years to come.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at support@blogrolling.com.

Sincerely,

Ross Rader,
on behalf of Tucows and Blogrolling.com

So Ross actually thinks I’ll pay US$19.95 to renew a service that is down nearly as often as it is up? For a service that was actually useful and well-maintained until Tucows bought it up and forgot about it?

Tucows is the trailer trash Microsoft, buying up whatever potentially profitable technology it can, then parking it on a shelf to gather dust. True to form, innovation—indeed, even routine maintenance!—shuts down the moment the acquisition contract is signed, and nothing happens until it’s time for Tucows to stick out its hand.

After teaching InDesign and Illustrator Advanced classes this week (with the expectation of flying home Saturday), I’ve been asked to hang here in Hotlanta and teach a Photoshop class early next week. So I’ll be here for another few days.

It would be great if I weren’t sick with a cold. Blah!

If anyone reading this is in or near Atlanta, drop me an e-mail via the Contact page. Maybe we can have a drink this weekend.

As reported below (Tattoo Artist Claims Copyright Infringement Over Nike Ad), Portland, Ore. tattoo artist Matthew Reed is sueing Nike, another Oregon native, over the use of Detroit Pistons’ (and former Portland Trail Blazer) Rasheed Wallace’s tattoo, which has been prominently featured in Nike advertisements starring the basketball player. Reed wants the advertisements pulled, and wants damages for the unlicensed use of his artwork. The tattoo can be seen here in this photograph from the Detroit News.

Copyrights for Tattoos?

Respondant, Uncle Bill, writes in the comments to the iamPariah.com post:

After 32 years in the TATTOO business,I have never met a more talented, honest artist than Matt Reed and his crew. For [too] long the magazine world and other media have made money off of the sweat and talent of tattoo artists around the world. The media [has] burned with lust as they line their pockets with MONEY from off color stories and pictures feeding on a world that is so far above anything that they are able to understand. It is about time we stand up to the money powerful! Matt has the guts we wished we had. WAY TO GO!!!

Way to go, indeed. Reed’s demand to share in the proceeds Wallace has earned from any exposure in which in his tattoo is visible is an amazingly greedy and foolish move that will ultimately damage the tattoo industry as a whole, not to mention end Reed’s career in it.

Google keeps throwing GMail invitations at me. I had 25 left, so I gave them away here, but every time I dip below 50 invitations, Google tops me off again.

So, I’m giving ‘em away here too. I know you can get GMail invitations from various places, but if you haven’t already, and you’d like to have the free, 1GB web-based e-mail, leave me a comment (on this post only, please).

After reading a rather babbling mind-flush I had vented into a friendly design-related forum I contribute to, someone asked me how to get started writing articles.

To be honest, I don’t know.

I realize that may sound incredible considering the fact that I write four regular online columns and I’m writing a book. The truth is, I’m still trying to find the time (and a knowledgable resource who has the time to answer a few questions) to learn about how to begin getting articles published in newspapers and magazines.

I’ve done things kind of backward with regard to writing, which is typical of my entire career in and around the design field.