Blog: Ramblings and Rants

Apparently, Jamie Leigh has discovered that ego-surfing for her name returns this website among the top search engine results—and she has taken issue with it. She has asked me to delete a post from this blog so she may ask Google to remove that link from its directory.

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

Indeed, a quick Google search for the name of this self-styled “Madonna of the Internet” lists that post in the top ten results along with her own website and press releases about her, as well as matches for porn videos featuring an actress by the same name (I have no idea if both Jamie Leighs are the same or different women). Specifically, it returns my 22 April 2004 “Ban Jamie Leigh From Blogs” post decrying her then contemporary practice of spamming or “crap posting” pages of nonsensical diatribes within the comments of blogs with high search engine rankings.

This week (25-31 December 2005), Creativepro.com is handing out five signed copies of my acclaimed project-based book Adobe Illustrator CS2 @work in their weekly giveaway.

Unlike any software book you’ve ever read, Adobe Illustrator CS2 @Work by Pariah S. Burke teaches how and why to use the world’s greatest drawing program through real world projects completed everyday, on the job, by working graphic designers and illustrators. Practical advice on planning and budgeting, overcoming your fear of Illustrator, knowing your rights, and negotiating with clients take this entertaining and confidence-building book even farther beyond the realm of just another software book.

Using the author’s project files or your own, let Adobe Illustrator CS2 @Work take you from blank page to polished deliverable with confidence. Projects include:

After a couple of weeks as lead feature stories, my two-part “Add Reader-Friendly Finishing Touches to Your PDFs” have been used as the foundation for PDFZone.com’s “Making the Perfect PDF” special report. My aforementioned articles are the two leads, and my “Using PDF Layers,” a tutorial about proofing design clients with layered PDFs, is also in the report. I’ve written three of the top four articles in the report.

Yeah, I know: I publish an average of a dozen articles per month online and in print. But I’ve got three front page feature bylines on PDFZone.com, a Ziff-Davis media. That’s cool (in a graphics geek kind of way).

I ran across this while watching “Mind of Mencia.” ‘Nuff said.

You Passed 8th Grade Science

Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct!

Five minutes ago I got the ninth “this is my last day with” message since Thanksgiving.

I recognize the fiscal concerns that justify to companies year-end RIFs (Reduction In Force—layoffs or terminations). But, Christ! Have fucking heart! Nine people at different companies with whom I do or have done business have sent out e-mails announcing their last days, saying good-bye, and passing me (and their entire list of contacts) off to someone else at the company.

Some of these people I’ve gotten pretty friendly with, others I didn’t even know whether they had kids. But how well I knew them is not the point. It’s the Holidays. Winter Solstice, Christmas, Channukah, Kwaanza—it doesn’t matter what your faith or if you even have a faith, this time of year is a societal institution about being kind to your fellow man. That would include your employees.

Spammers are employing a new tactic to attack blogs, and it’s a tactic that could bring down anti-spam measures protecting not only the Blogosphere, but e-mail too.

Blog spammers are attacking blogs with their typical messages, but they have a new, ingenious, and potentially catastrophic trick. They’re incorporating links to legitimate, respectable domains into those attacks. The net result is that automated spam filters, even so-called “smart filters” like Dr. Dave’s Spam Karma plug-in system for WordPress-based blogs, are Blacklisting domains like CNN.com, IMDB.com, MacCentral.com, and dozens of others.

The anti-spam logic engine on one of my high search engine ranking sites, for example, Blacklists 15-25 respectable domains daily. Should I actually get a comment from someone at MacCentral.com, for example, the anti-spam system will kill the comment before I see it. In the past that site has received comments from people working for, and e-mailing from, MacCentral.com.

Although someone might have already coined a different term, I call this type of spamming Whitelist Attacks.

This is only the beginning of the Whitelist Attacks. Beginning with one or two per week 90 days ago, Whitelist Attacks are now up to an average of two dozen per day on each of my Web sites and those of several other professional bloggers. Whitelist Attacks are effective, and their scope and frequency is increasing.

Whitelist Attacks are designed to accomplish two goals:

Oh…god… This is so true.

25 Signs You Have Grown Up

3. You keep more food than beer in the fridge.

4. 6:00 AM is when you get up, not when you go to bed.

5. You hear your favorite song in an elevator.

6. You watch the Weather Channel.

7. Your friends marry and divorce instead of “hook up” and “break up.”

8. You go from 130 days of vacation time to 14.

9. Jeans and a sweater no longer qualify as “dressed up.”

10. You’re the one calling the police because those %&@# kids next door won’t turn down the stereo.

I laughed so hard, I need a nap.

A few hours ago I got home (Portland, Oregon) from Baton Rouge. After spending a few days on the campus of Lousiana State University (I was teaching a course on Illustrator CS2), I feel old.

Granted, LSU has plenty of graduate students and older people going back to school, but the majority of people I encountered were 19-22. I suppose I looked like I belonged—ponytail, dressed in fashionably relaxed clothes, iPod on my hip, cell phone attached to my ear, PowerBook under an arm—but, boy, did I feel old.

Thursday I ate lunch with my students in the cafeteria. I got some looks from co-eds, but I think it was less “oh, he’s cute” and much more “he’s cute for an older guy.” I’m not that aged, mind you. However I am old enough to recall a time when MTV actually played music.

The class was fun and exciting, of course, but being on the LSU campus, being around the young, hopeful students, was at once invigorating and aging. When I lived in Daytona Beach I loved Spring Break. No matter how hectic or harried my day—and I as the principal of a busy Dot-Com Bubble design and advertising agency at the time, so everyday was hectic—the Spring Breakers would re-energize me. I’d drop the top on the convertible, take a drive down A1A (Atlantic Ave), and open myself to the feelings of the Breakers. They were always excited, zealously pursuing fun; their cheer and energy would wash over me, reviving me after—or during—a long day of soothing designers’ egos, negotiating with vendors, and coddling clients who didn’t know what the Web was other than they had to be on it.

LSU was like that. In particular, the design students gave me a shot of design passion—not that I needed it, but I liked it nonetheless.

I’m rambling. Time to get some sleep.

…And boy are my arms tired.

I just got back from a rapidly setup 1-day consultation in Dallas, Texas. It was the workflow observation and understanding phase, where I go in, learn how a creative workflow runs currently and the agency’s goals moving forward in that workflow.

Now that I’m home (an hour now), I go through my compiled data, samples of the client’s deliverables, and my notes (10 pages of notes today). I’ll use all that to flesh out the workflow optimization strategy I had already started building in my head on-site, then produce a detailed report of my recommendations and an action plan. That’s when the real fun begins—executing the workflow optimization.

Though only a 1 day trip, it was remarkably productive. Both the client’s team and my team left this afternoon excitedly optimistic and with a solid foundation for the actions to come.

What else have I been doing? Or, as Chris may ask: What else has been keeping me from mailing him his copy of Illustrator CS2 @Work? Quite a lot.

• I wrote the current feature story on PDFZone.com, “Using PDF Layers,” which explains how—and more importantly why—proofing clients with layered PDFs can save time and hassle.
• I’m working on my portions of what will undoubtedly be a very cool feature article in the next issue of InDesign Magazine. (I’m not going to spill the beans—you’ll have to check it out for yourself.)
• I wrote “XPress to InDesign: Overcoming the Top Three Pain Points” for Publish.com.
• I’m hard at work writing the last two articles in the Quark VS InDesign.com feature series “InCopy CS2: In Production.”
• I’ve been managing and building Designorati.
• Applications from talented writers and editors interested in joining Designorati have been pouring in, and the audition committee and I have been pouring over them. We’ll be announcing new team members next week.
• Speaking of next week… I’ll be Baton Rouge, LA (can you believe I managed to find the one hotel room available?) doing what promises to be a very exciting workflow migration consultation: Freehand to Illustrator CS2. I help transition creative and advertising workflows from PageMaker or QuarkXPress to InDesign and Word to InCopy frequently, but Freehand to Illustrator is not as common a need. It’s a real treat for me.
• I exposed the public leak of highly confidential Adobe and Quark information in LEAKED! Creative Suite 3, InDesign CS3, QuarkXPress 7 Features
• I have some other articles in the works for Publish.com and InDesign Magazine.
• I’ve been expanding and updating REVdrink.com, a site listing my various creative how-to writings (books, magazine articles, websites, and so on) as well as providing original content resources.
• Of course, I’ve been out promoting my book, Adobe Illustrator CS2 @Work (exclusive excerpt) as well as Cate Indiano’s InDesign book in the same series, Adobe InDesign CS2 @Work (exclusive excerpt).
• I’ve been deploying significant new content delivery and other systems technologies across all my websites.
• A redesign of Quark VS InDesign.com and a design realignment of Designorati are in the works.
• I’m getting ready for some very exciting upcoming lectures and workshops (more on that later).
• And… I took out the trash without being asked.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to the last few weeks. Granted, it isn’t very much, but it’s kept me entertained. I’ve also been working on a couple of projects not listed above (everything in its own time) and have several interesting opportunities on the horizon.

Chris, I will get the book mailed before Baton Rouge!