Some People Have Too Much Time On Their Hands

I just got told by our service manager that someone had connected this blog with some software I wrote for my company. They told him I did not represent my company well on this blog and I had an awfully high opinion of myself. Maybe there is a reason for not representing my company well ... hmmmm. Oh yeah, this is not my company's blog. It is my personal blog. I have removed references to the software I created for my company. Hopefully, that will prevent this from happening in the future.

Senator Christopher Dodd's Housing Bill And You

Well, the federal government is at it again. Slipped into a new housing bill is a data collection policy requiring payment systems to track and report information on nearly every electronic transaction to the government. Yes, this is the same government that managed to lose 800,000 social security numbers by leaving a backup tape in an employees car. It's the same government that lost millions of veteran's social security numbers when a Veteran Affairs employee took the data home without authorization. Do we really trust them with our credit card and payment information? Why is this slipped innocuously into a Housing Bill? Are they ashamed to foist this turd in its own bill?

Where's My Fiber?

In a time when our Internet Service Providers are planning on foisting "pay as you go" plans upon the American consumer, it might be useful to look back 12 years to 1996. In 1996, America's Congress was ready to pass the Telecommunications Reform Act. The telephone companies "promised" to run fiber to 86 million American homes by 2008. They also promised that this fiber would enable us to cruise the Internet at 45 Mbps. In exchange for this promised, the telcos received $200 billion in tax breaks and beneficial legislation. That is about $2000 per American home in benefits we never received.
If you or I had scammed every household in the United States to the tune of $2000 we would be sitting in prison. Of course, you and I don't have millions of dollars to pay the American government hush money.
Telcos ... I'm still waiting for my fiber. Next week would be fine with me.

Chosing Between Crap And Poo

Ahhhh, politics is in the air again campers. Aren't we all just so excited? I don't know about you but I am sick of all the political parties and candidates. It just seems like every elections we get the choice between crap and poo. They both stink and taste bad going down. Just once, I would love to have a candidate that was not:

1. In bed with special interests
2. Lying to me
3. Pre-compromised
4. Looking for as much power as they can grab

Oh well, I guess I won't hold my breath. I don't want to turn blue and pass out.

RIAA Bullies At It Again

Just read about the RIAA doubling settling costs for people that try to quash their automated "piracy" pre-litigation letters. You know, the ones that try to link IP addresses to people (sometimes with horrifyingly unreliable results).
In other news, school yard bullies are doubling the amount of lunch money they take from their victims if they try to fight back.

Bruce Lee's Top 7 Fundamentals For Getting Your Life In Shape

Just read some crap at a site called the positivity blog. It is the authors re-interpretation of 7 rules Bruce Lee had to make his life better. They are:

1. What are you really thinking about today?
2. Simplify.
3. Learn about yourself in interactions.
4. Do not divide.
5. Avoid a dependency on validation from others.
6. Be proactive.
7. Be you.

Not bad rules necessarily (if a little general). The only problem is that you have to wade through so many pages of flipping Google ads to get to the rules. I did not even realize the site had completely loaded because no content besides ads was coming up. My only other gripe is that the author forgot to include Bruce Lee's 8th rule:

Don't do too much cocaine. It's a real killer.

I know. I'm utterly tasteless.

Twitter Is Like A Big Whale ... Suspended By Birds

This just seems Sooooooo appropriate. Look everyone. It is the Twitter Whale suspended in the air by some really small birds. Maybe that's why Twitter is so unreliable?

A Little Something New

Just a little something I've been working on. This is a larger version (than the preview) of a t-shirt I created for threadless.com. I hope you enjoy.

I Have Problems. I Can't Tell You The Details But Could You Fix Them?

We have a sales director where I work that insists on sending an email to the company president about how much GroupWise (an email system) sucks. He usually waits until something goes wrong (yesterday I didn't get 20 messages), polls his people for their problems (without any detail) and then sends our president an email. He makes no effort to tell the IT department any details about the problems. His emails contain such helpful statements as (not exact quotes ... just examples):

"This thing simply isn't working."
"GroupWise sucks."
"Why can't you get this thing working."
"I didn't get 20 messages that I was supposed to get yesterday."
"If we were running Microsoft Exchange Server it would work."
"It's working great now but yesterday it wasn't working right."

An average user might find the above statements helpful. Let me tell you why they aren't:

1. There are no details. If you can take the time to copy the company president you think you could say what messages you didn't get giving details such as email address, time it should have been received.
2. Saying something sucks is not constructive. There is usually a reason why a business has chosen a particular product to use (cost, ease of use, fit with business objectives). Until you know the reason why a product has been chosen just saying it sucks is not what I would call "constructive criticism".
3. The comments lack evidence. Simply saying that another product would work better without evidence is like saying a certain make of car is better without looking at crash, safety and maintenance statistics.
4. You went above my head without giving me a chance to fix your problem. This sets the tone of the conversation. I'm already on the defensive and I probably am not feeling like having a constructive dialog with you.
5. Saying things like, "Why can't you get something working?" immediately puts someone on the defensive. They are no longer in the mood to talk with you ... much less solve your problems.
6. If you tell me that it's working great today but you didn't contact me when there were problems will NOT help me solve your problems. When you have issues ... COMMUNICATE. I probably could help you at that point. Now it is too late.

The upshot of this is there are two types of conversations we can have ... constructive and nonconstructive. By communicating with your IT professional in the manner you are setting yourself up to not be helped. There are limits to what someone will do for an individual that treats them in this manner. It may not be right but let's face it, you will go the extra mile for a person that treats you with respect and professional courtesy. For everyone else ... you're just going to do the bare minimum required to keep your job. Having any other kind of expectation is as silly as expecting someone to solve your problems without any supportive details.

Every Dog Gets It's Day

Another new shirt design. This one has a happy ending ... for everyone but the dog.

A Little Lighter

People at Threadless say that my t-shirt might be a little too dark. I have created a lighter version just for them. I hope they like it.

Smart People Don't Follow Advice

I was talking to my president today and something unremarkable happened. He once again did not follow my advice.

Just to preface, my president is an incredibly smart and accomplished man. I have nothing but respect for him and like him in general. He does however get trapped by the Labrea Tar Pit I see smart people fall into all the time. He doesn't follow advice by a topical expert and yet still expects good results to follow.

Every 3 months he comes to me and asks why his mail is running so slow. I go up to his desk and run his email. I see anywhere between 6000 - 10000 messages in his inbox. I always tell him that he needs to move all but 500 - 1000 of these messages into folders. I further tell him that having that vast quantity of messages is slowing down everything he is trying to do with email. His mail client takes forever to come up. Why? The thousands of messages in his inbox.

His reply is always the same, "It didn't used to do that." He doesn't bother trying to take my advice. He just falls back upon his intelligence which tells him that computers are automata and should always work the same way. Never mind that he's installed 10 programs this month and that we've upgraded his computer 5 times since the moment when, "It didn't used to do that."

Personally, if I hired someone for their expertise I would hope that I would at least try to follow their advice. I hope I would but I probably wouldn't.

New Threadless TShirt

Well, I'm at it again. I'm trying to get a design accepted for Threadless T-Shirts. I hope that the design is original enough to get passed through. I guess time will tell.

A Little Something I've Been Working On

Well, I've been at it again and I think I might be getting a bit better. Hopefully, I can turn this hobby into some real money at istockphoto. If not, there is always the enjoyment of creation.

Net Neutrality

Imagine this...
You are driving down the road and come to a toll plaza. It's the only way to get to your destination so you pay the $1.50 and move down the road. Then you get to the end of the toll road and pay another $1.50. Leaving the toll road you reach your destination, a grocery store, you proceed to buy food. You get up to the cash register and pay your bill. When you get your receipt you see a extra charge for $1.50 on it. You go to the service desk and ask why the extra charge was tacked onto your bill and they say it is to pay for you coming to their store on the toll road. They nicely explain that they are just passing on to you the charge the toll company passes on to them. You exclaim that you already paid those tolls and they say that's just the way it is.
That in a nutshell is what giving up net neutrality is going to do to this country. By enabling the toll road companies (i.e. Verizon, AT&T, etc.) the ability to charge companies for their traffic across their small section of the Internet you are going to hobble everyone. The U.S. (you know, the inventor of the Internet) is not the number one country when it comes to average connection speeds and is the most expensive one in which to have a high speed Internet connection. Do we really want to hobble this countries Internet connectivity anymore by giving in to these highway robbers? I think not.

The Garden

Just a little Inkscape vector drawing I worked on this weekend. After I get better, I plan on perhaps submitting some of these to istockphoto. We'll see.

Butterflies And Apple Pie

And now for something completely different....

I've been looking at starting to sell my stuff to istockphoto and saw that their vector illustrations were very beautiful and daunting. The first problem is that I don't have Adobe Illustrator. I have Inkscape and the Gimp however. I thought I would tackle creating an image like the ones I saw being downloaded (some over 2000+ times on istockphoto). This is the result of that work. It is completely different from what I usually do (A heck of a lot more cheerful).

I first got a Gimp script from Gimp-Talk.com called Brush-Batch and a program called ABRViewer. Brush Batch takes any image and converts it into a Gimp Brush. Then I got some paint splatter brushes (Photoshop brushes converted by ABRViewer) and went crazy to get the background patterns for the butterfly and actual backgrounds. I got a vase off the internet and digitized it and colored it. Then I converted some bubbles from particleillusion and created some brushes from it, imported them into Gimp brushes, created some images that I then digitized and brought into Inkscape for matting. Then I used a program called PlantStudio2 (now free) to create the stems.

If only I had Illustrator (way too expensive) I would try to get this kind of work submitted to istockphoto. I'm just way to cheap ;-)

Music Is My Weapon

Way back in the day I remember a time when I used to use my choices in music as a way to shield myself from the world. That is no longer the case ... but it was the inspiration for this new work I did.
I was able to take a bunch of images from Poser and else where, vectorize them in Inkscape and then import them into Blender 3D for positioning. It's an interesting technique that seems to hold promise.

Well Deserved Rest

Ever stop at the end of a day's hard endeavours and say, "Wow. I should have had a V8" ;-). I got Bryce 6.1 today (they were having a special where you could get it for $19.99). I had to play around with it and see what I could do. 10 hours and an optikVerve Labs filter in the Gimp later and this is the result.

For Dad

My Dad and I were talking this weekend about how we felt like people treated us like village idiots sometimes. I thought it was funny and made a T-Shirt design using that as a theme. An outward visualization of inner feelings if you will ;-)