Blog: Ramblings and Rants

From Designorati.com:

Starbucks today announced that it will be closing more than 600 stores in the United States during the remainder of fiscal 2008 and the first half of fiscal 2009.

Pariah S. Burke (yours truly) is an avid coffee drinker residing in Hillsboro, Oregon, a suburb of Portland. Mr. Burke reportedly drinks upwards of six cups of coffee per day while working as a freelance software industry consultant, writer, and publisher; he drinks even more, he says, on his annual day off. According to the Starbucks.com’s store locator, there are no fewer than 10 separate, company operated Starbucks stores within a 1 minute drive of Mr. Burke’s home.

When asked to comment on the announcement of the planned closure of more than 600 Starbucks stores nationwide, Mr. Burke is quoted as saying: “Yahoo and hallelujah, brother, pass the sugar! The infestation of Starschmucks on every corner—and across the street for people on the other sidewalk—is finally nearing its end! Other, better coffee shops will hopefully be able to compete again.

“To paraphrase Dennis Leary, maybe now we can order some freaking coffee flavored coffee again. And we’ll again be able to use English words like ’small,’ ‘medium,’ and ‘large’ to communicate how much coffee we want.

“Let the empire of tart coffee served by pompous teenagers crumble!”

Read the press release.

This, I would think, would work just as well for co-workers prone to peering over the cubicle wall or checking out one’s computer over one’s shoulder.

Have you ever sat on a plane, next to an irritating traveler who keeps talking to you, snooping at everything you read,etc.? Next time, follow these instructions:

1. Quietly and calmly open up your laptop case.
2. Remove your laptop, and open it.
3. Start up.
4. Make sure the guy annoying you can see the screen.
5. Close your eyes and tilt your head up to the sky. Take a very deep
breath…
6. Then hit this link

After every flight, pilots fill out a form called a gripe sheet, which conveys to the mechanics problems encountered with the aircraft during the flight that need repair or correction. The mechanics read and correct the problem, and then respond in writing on the lower half of the form what remedial action was taken, and the pilot reviews the gripe sheets before the next flight. Never let it be said that ground crews and engineers lack a sense of humor. Here are some actual logged maintenance complaints and problems as submitted by Qantas pilots and the solution recorded by maintenance engineers. By the way, Qantas is the only major airline that has never had an accident.

(P = The problem logged by the pilot.)
(S = The solution and action taken by the mechanics.)

P: Left inside main tire almost needs replacement.
S: Almost replaced left inside main tire.

P: Test flight OK, except auto-land very rough.
S: Auto-land not installed on this aircraft.

I began this blog to share my thoughts and feelings; it’s a place for me to vent. That was years ago, before the “blog-olution” and the idea that a blog is a mandatory component of every good marketing campaign. This site was never part of marketing Brand Me. This is my personal blog, but for someone in my industry no part of the Internet is personal.

It’s a fact: if you do business with someone like me, you Google the person’s name before—and sometimes during—the professional relationship. Wherever a name like mine appears, in whatever context, clients, prospective clients, collaborators, and colleagues consider the source part of my resume and references.

As my name was Googled with ever increasing frequency, as more and more business associates commented on the content of IamPariah.com, I wrote less in this blog about the real me, my real thoughts and feelings.

Screw that.

If you want to hire me, work for me, partner with me, interview me, or whatever, don’t bother reading this blog. It’s not indicative of my business acumen or professional skills. If you want to know about the professional Pariah S. Burke, Google me, but ignore links that lead to IamPariah.com. Google will turn up pages and pages of other links where my name appears in a professional capacity; pages from Amazon.com, QuarkVSInDesign.com, Designorati.com, WorkflowCreative.com, REVDrink.com, IndesignSecrets.com, Creativepro.com, InDesignMag.com, and a few dozen other places. There are things I’ve written and things written about me. It’s all more than enough to get a clear picture of the professional me.

This is my personal blog; it’s not a professional reference. Here, I swear and express opinion on politics, religion, sociology, psychology, and morons from all walks of life. I don’t do any of that in my books, proposals, training classes, or pitch meetings. Nothing here has any bearing on how well I write books and articles, consult, train, design magazines or Websites, or work with you or your company.

However, if you’re here solely as a human being looking for a glimpse into the mind of another human being, read on. That’s what this blog is about, not selling Brand Me.

The GetHuman Project is a volunteer Website devoted to improving the quality and speed of telephone support and service systems in the US. The Website offers general tips and advice for speeding through and getting the most out of dealing with any company over the phone. For instance, did you know that most companies’ Spanish support queue is often a potentially much shorter wait than the English queue, and that most operators on the Spanish queue are bilingual, offering support in English as well? Chose uno and maybe you’ll be helped and off the phone faster than you would if pressing two.

The most useful advice provided by GetHuman is the GetHuman 500 Database, an invaluable resource listing specific methods to cut through phone system menus and voice prompts to—you guessed it—get a human on the line. America On-Line, for example, who no longer even lists a customer service phone number on their Website, has a primarily voice-only telephone system. If you can’t enunciate to the system’s satisfaction your problem, secret question answer, desired department, probable problem area, and favorite Spice Girl, then you’re out of luck. The system doesn’t even offer the ability to press buttons for most of its prompts. Fortunately, the GetHuman 500 Database has the secret finishing move code—up, up, left, down, right, right, down… Whoops! I mean: 0 (zero), repeatedly while staying silent during all requests for vocal interaction.

Even with the secret codes, there’s no guarantee of reaching a competent human, just that you will reach a human.

Next time you have to call your ISP, cable company, credit card issuer, airline, or just about anywhere else, check the GetHuman 500 Database for the fastest way through to getting to a human.

This past Friday, Strawberry Blonde and I surprised Mojo by checking her out of school to go see Ghost Rider on opening day. Mojo, whose grades had been suffering the first part of the year, worked hard and brought D’s and F’s up to A’s and B’s in the last grading period, and seeing the movie was her reward.

While I’m at it, here’s a quickie review of the film:

Ghost Rider was a fun ride, but jarring leaps in scenes, character development, and logic were disorienting. Willing suspension of disbelief couldn’t be maintained because every few minutes I found myself asking: “Wait! Did I miss something? I don’t recall stepping out of the theatre…”

Lead by Nicholas Cage, who, as lead Johnny Blaze, wore an obvious digital facelift, the acting was excellent, hitting all the nuanced highs and lows expected during the story. Unfortunately, the jerky editing made it impossible to become emotionally involved with the characters. Whereas other superhero films of recent years—most notably Spider-Man—gripped the viewer’s heart and, in many, even elicited tears, Ghost Rider carried the same deep character development and universally heart-gripping themes, but too much of it wound up on the cutting room floor. All the poignant moments remain, but the connecting scenes, the subtle moments that make the poignant believeable and engaging were omitted.

Although an extremely fun ride for all audiences—not just comic book fans—Ghost Rider was a two and one half to three hour movie chopped to run in 1:50, which is more than apparent in the stuttering theatrical release. I’m looking forward to the restoration of numerous scenes in the director’s cut DVD and the opportunity to care about the characters.

MSNBC’s Keith Olberman speaks directly to Mr. Bush about the BBC news report stating that Bush will announce the commitment of 20,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq.

It’s a powerful, empassioned response that sums up the frustrations many of us feel.

Watch Here.

Today, while searching for a different WordPress plugin, I ran across this troubling post from John TP from last week:

My blog posts have been reblogged a few times in Splogs in the past and that too directly from my feeds. After switching to partial feeds, I never faced this problem until recently a few splogs like http://weblog-pla.net have started it again. This raised my curosity as to how they do this and that too automated…I found two WordPress Plugins that these spammers use- Autoblog and FeedWordPress….I highly recommend that you do not use these WordPress Plugins. Earning money through these methods is not safe and can get you banned by the Adsense team.

John’s discussion of these plugins is ambiguous at best. In fact, given the space he devotes to their features and functions, one might even think his goal is to encourage their use without being overtly encouraging. If John really didn’t want to encourage their use, he should be stronger in his condemnation of them.

In addition to “I highly recommend that you do not use these WordPress Plugins. Earning money through these methods is not safe and can get you banned by the Adsense team” John should note that losing out on Google Adsense advertising revenue the least potential consequence.

RSS feeds are published for individual, private consumption; they are not a blanket license to, or waiver of, reprint rights. Taking and republshing content—no matter how much or how little—without the original author’s permission is a violation of U.S. and international Copyright laws. There are exceptions, of course, detailed in the Fair Use doctrine, but such exceptions are very specific and do not apply to the vast majority of sites using FeedWordPress, Autoblog, and the like. In fact, Charles Johnson, the creator of FeedWordPress is in constant and frequent violation of copyright law because the apparent majority of his blog’s content is stolen without the original authors’ permission.

This entry, for example, does meet Fair Use criteria because I have quoted John TP’s content as part of a critical discussion in which I respond to John’s work instead of republishing it as if it were a native part of my blog. In over-simplified terms for those newbie bloggers:
blockquote = has a chance of being okay
adding complete RSS/Atom feed items to your blog without permission = definitely not okay.

Calling a site “an aggregator” does not exempt it from the laws or prosecution to enforce the laws protecting other content creators and owners.

Anyone contemplating “splogging” or even just pulling others’ related content into their blogs should know that, for each and every post or excerpt incorporated without the original author’s permission, U.S. federal law allows for a fine of up to US$50,000 plus potential damages to be awarded to the victim of the theft. In addition to the monetary cost, each post stolen could earn the thief a year in a federal penitary—and that’s if he can pay; if he can’t, the amount of potential prison time increases.

Contrary to popular Internet misinformation, copyright infringement is prosecutable regardless of any or all of: one’s ignorance of the laws, one’s intents, or whether one actually makes money from the theft. Stealing a blog post and reprinting it on a site without ads can net you a $50,000 fine and a year as Bubba’s wife as easily as reprinting onto a site with ads.

Losing Adsense eligibility will seem like a very insignificant consequence while defending against a $5 million lawsuit in a far away state.

How likely is it that someone will actually sue if his article winds up reprinted on you blog? Well, it depends on whose work you steal. A professional content site like the ones I publish will sue to protect its intellectual property—in fact, I have sued for that very reason and prevailed. Under the law, content creators/owners are obligated to aggressively protect their intellectual property, up to, and including, prosecution.

While the average content thief (a classification that includes “splogs” but also any blog or Website using content not of its own creation without permission) may steal from hundreds of other content creators and see no suit or other consequences, the difference is not the thief—it’s the content creator. Every victim of content theft has the right and obligation to go after the thief. More and more creators are learning this, which means the odds of content thieves being sued—even by the average Joe blogger—are increasing. One may steal one hundred RSS feeds with no reaction, but that one-hundred-and-first could put the thief into an orange jumpsuit and with a lein against his wages for the next fifty years.

If you use FeedWordPress, Autoblog, or any other automatic content republisher, employ it only with the permission of those who own the content you want to use. It’s a simple process: Go to the blog you like, find a contact e-mail address or form, and ask: “I have a blog at http://yoursite.com, which covers this, this, and this. I’ve been really impressed with your content and know my readers would like it, too. Could I get your permission to reprint your RSS feed content within my blog as individual posts—with links back to your blog, of course?”

As always, I am not a bar-certified lawyer, nor was I educated as an attorney. Do not believe me. Do not believe any claims about copyright or other intellectual property law you find on the Internet—from anyone. Do your own research into the subject. Google is not a research tool on copyright law and do’s and dont’s; there is so much confusion, misinformation, and, occassionally, disinformation that the truth is buried too far down in Google’s results. Go to the source for copyright law information, the United States Copyright Office. It’s free to get the information you need to protect yourself and remain legal.

If you have more specific questions about copyright, buy an hour of a intellectual property lawyer’s time; you’ll find them listed in your local Yellow Pages under the heading of “Patent & Trademark Attorneys” (copyright, trademark, and patents are all intellectual property law served by the same attorneys).

If you plan to attend the InDesign Conference or Creative Suite Conference next week, or will just be in the Chicago area, stop by and say hello to me.

Meet Pariah S. Burke

I will be teaching two sessions of the InDesign Conference on Tuesday, appearing on panels throughout the week, and working the Q&A Table with Anne-Marie Concepcion Friday afternoon.

Stop by and ask me your InDesign, QuarkXPress, InCopy, Illustrator, Acrobat, or Photoshop questions, or tell me about your wackiest design experiences or if your cat farts, too.

Bring your copy of my book, Adobe Illustrator CS2 @WORK, for a signature.

Location and scheduling for the InDesign (May 15-18) and Creative Suite (May 18-20) Conferences may be found here.

I’m not one for bathroom humor, but this is extra special, and simply must be shared.

This afternoon I was holding and petting my cat, Chloe. As is often the way, I held her like a baby—on her back, cradled in my arms. While my left arm supported her weight, my right upper arm acted as foot rest for her hind paws. Suddenly she gently pushed my arm away a bit, spread her hind legs slightly, let her tail droop away, and… farted. Pvrhhtt.

It was hysterical!

I have never before heard (or smelled) Chloe flatulate, yet she did it today—in my arms, no less!

I have to say, I really like Texas. Though I’ve never lived there, and my opinion might be different if I had, I’ve visited Texas more than a handful of times now. Each time has been a wonderful experience, whether it was a fly-in/fly-out one-day consultation in Dallas, two weeks on-site in Fort Worth, or a spontaneous roadtrip from Florida to El Paso. The big-smile-hospitality and come-on-in attitude of Texas has never disappointed me.

Down there, they even know how to drive well—trust me on this, I’ve driven in 42 of the United States, several Canadian provinces, parts of Mexico, and through most major North American cities. Texans in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area in particular drive well.

They speed—as a rule, not as an exception—and those who don’t speed (tourists) are quickly ostracized to the outside lane. Texans, though, know how to speed; they don’t rush and stop, rush and stop. Rather, everyone speeds uniformly within his lane. There’s a speed limit+10 lane, a speed limit+20 lane, and the holy-crap-I’m-late-for-work lane.

Cars sold in Texas don’t come equipped with turn signals, but Texas drivers are redeemed by their other qualities. They know, for example, the ancient Aztec secret of Highway Merging, and they practice it religiously. In Philadelphia, cars often sit stopped at onramps for several minutes before they find the space to muscle into the flow of traffic. When one is trying to turn left across a highway, Texans will stop and wave one through—in Boston, such heresy would be met with the cacophany of angry horns and shouted obscenities. In New Jersey, you’d be killed for it and your car stripped while you lay dying in it.

In Texas, one won’t be shot for anything less than stealing a man’s horse, dog, boat, or wife (in that order of importance). Avoid those activities, and Texans will treat a guest with absolutely hospitality.

This latest trip to Texas—to Fort Worth, specifically—is a return trip to teach the wonderful (and talented) design staff of Lockheed-Martin. Which means I also get the opportunity to be (happliy) buzzed by low-flying F-16s punching their afterburners 75 feet above the ground to set off a parking lot full of car alarms. Hopefully, I will also have the chance to tour the F-16 production plant again—a mile long stretch of factory that starts one end with giant blocks of raw steel and aluminum and ends with painted, ready-to-fly airplanes.

I’m also looking forward to some good barbeque. And, of course, being able to feel relatively safe on I-30 at 85 MPH.

After a week of preparation, iamPariah.com and several of my other domain properties moved to my very own server this past weekend. No more virtual servers or worrying about whether some other guy’s Website is going to take down mine. Nope. Now I get all the CPU time, all the RAM, as much harddrive space as I need, and my own DNS servers. With that, I also get the slightly frightening power and responsibility to be my own sys admin; it’s up to me to monitor the health of the server, manage backups (I’m a fanatical backer-upper), and restart the machine and its laundry list of services and processes.

I have used and managed my own virtual servers continuously since late-1994 when I launched my first Website. I understand FTP and all that entails; I can configure cron jobs; I can setup my mailboxes, autoresponders, stats reporting, and write my own .htaccess rules. All the typical tasks involved with managing Websites in a virtual or shared hosting environment, I can do with ease. But now… Now I’m still configuring and managing all those options and services, but I’m also managing the server—the entire machine—on which my domains live. There are tenfold the number of things I must now understand, setup, monitor, and modify.

For several years I owned a mid-sized Web hosting company. One would think this makes me an expert sys admin. Nope. I was the CEO and had the systems operational knowledge of, at best, a level 3 tech support agent. The company had sys admins that did the server work. I just made sure they had machines on which to do that work and customers for whom to do it.

This is uncharted territory for me—and I’m excited to be learning.

I’m not running the server at my offices, of course; it’s sitting in a server farm at a hosting provider, enjoying triple-redundancy power backup systems and a very large pipe that sits only about a mile from a major backbone hub. I manage it remotely, through HTTP, FTP, and SSH (which I don’t yet fully understand).

Following advice I received long ago, I have created another user account to make modifications to the system. This makes the Root user account a backdoor of sorts, enabling me a way to correct errors I may make in the other account.

What else should I be wary of? Any sagacious tips or advice you experienced sys admins would like to share with this humble neophyte sys admin?

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.

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.

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.

Although Designorati officially launched to quite a bit of fanfare and a little help from our friends, I have to wonder if we could benefit from a little bumvertising.

Indeed, between the proliferation of sign-weilding homeless at highway off-ramps and the abundance of .Coms in major American cities, thousands of eyes could fall upon an advertising slogan—even if the signs were changed every hour to rotate advertisers. At only US$1-5 a day, the smallest website or blog could easily afford incredible exposure, and those holding the signs could clean up—figuratively and literally.

The Register reports:

A US net entrepreneur has solved his lack of advertising budget problem by paying beggars to stand motionless beside Seattle Highway exit ramps with ads proclaiming his wares, the Seattle Post Intelligencer reports.

Ben Rogovy, 22, wanted to promote his website for poker fans, but was a bit short in the wonga department. Inspiration struck, however, when he was looking at a cardboard sign commonly held by bums hoping for a hand-out beside the city’s freeway exits.

Rogovy explained: “So much traffic goes by these sign holders, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if they could advertise themselves and me at the same time?’ ”

Rogovy now has around 12 vagrants “Bumvertising” his site. He pays them “a bit of food and water, plus $1 to $5, according to each beggar’s relative value, based largely on traffic patterns”.

Rogovy admitted: “I am fascinated by these people, out there from dawn to dusk. Some of them were working longer days than I was.”

Here in Portland, Oregon (Seattle’s groovier neighbor just to the south), every highway off-ramp sports homeless—some legitimately down on ther luck, some wearing $150 sneakers and watches better than mine—standing in shifts (you can see them change shifts, passing the signs between early-shift-bum and afternoon-shift-bum at 14:30 Pacific Time). They hold up cardboard signs with tons of wasted space. In the hands of a professional designer, those signs could be made to include any advertising slogan.

It could be the best advertising system since Google AdSense!

Hmm…

(I’m kidding, of course. Although the Register story is legit.)

This week I finally broke down and bought my first iPod. I was giddy with the heady combination of both music and gadget geekery as I rushed it home Thursday evening. Sunday I leave for a week in Chicago, and the thought of listening to the Chemical Method, Peter Gabriel, and Blue Murder during the flights to and fro was euphoric. No more airplane tunes! All my favorites would be but a thumb’s swipe away.

At home I unpacked it, flipped briefly through the manual, and plugged in its power supply.

Fluidly—like chocolate gushing down Wonka’s waterfall—my fingers moved across the keyboard, answering e-mail, taking care of the business before I could play. In scant moments I was about to connect the USB cable that will funnel forty gigabytes of music from my external harddrive to my new pocket jukebox.

Fzzzt!

Let me explain.

I laughed hard at this Gizmodo story:

Frugal people (like myself) would say that counterfeit products is probably the best gift giving idea ever, especially if the person receiving the fake has no clue whether it is real or not. Well, now my Christmas worries are over. Some Korean MP3 player manufacturers are complaining about the Chinese companies who are making knockoffs of their products…. Looks like my family are all getting brand new Prodo bags and Sumsang MP3 players this year!

This can’t be right. It’s consistent—everytime I run this speed test from CNet (and comparable tests) I get similar results. It’s consistent, but it can’t be right… Can it? Is my cable modem connection faster than not only a full T1 but a base T3 as well?

Comcast Cable, faster than DSL, faster than a T1, faster than T3…?

I don’t have a vast knowledge of networking. Would someone mind taking a moment to explain to me how I could be getting a speed test reading five times the top cable/DSL, and how Comcast could be giving me speeds faster than a T3? I’m really quite curious.