Yesterday I told my friends they should ditch GoDaddy. This isn’t the first time I’ve joined in on a protest against GoDaddy, but this time because of SOPA, it apparently had some traction. Enough to get GoDaddy to back out on their support. So I tweeted something like this. GoDaddy no longer supports SOPA, but they worked for months to make it what it is? So all of a sudden they’ve had a change of heart? We have to remember here that the heart of any corporation is its profits. Of course they’d back out if their SOPA support began to hurt them where it matters most. But I wouldn’t be surprised if profit isn’t also at the heart of the reason GoDaddy was supporting, and indeed helping to craft SOPA, in the first place.

So when one of my friends posted that Nintendo had also backed SOPA, and asked whether we would boycott them, too, this was my reply:

I can see why Nintendo would support the idea of an anti-piracy act. There is a big difference between a non-US video game manufacturer supporting this and someone like GoDaddy working to tweak this bill to their liking:

- As an ISP, GoDaddy should understand that simply playing around with DNS isn’t going to stop the problem, and could lead to a lot more screwups

- As an ISP, GoDaddy (unlike Nintendo) isn’t having their stuff ripped off. At worst, some of their ads might be spread around the net as some kind of soft porn. Do you think they mind? I realize that very good people don’t have to be personally affected to fight for the right thing, but…

- As a huge ISP, GoDaddy could greatly benefit from shutting down smaller ISPs. I worked at a startup ISP years ago. I know how quickly we had to act to keep our services from getting shut down (by our datacenters, etc) in light of a DMCA violation. There are already laws and rules and standards of conduct in place here for US companies that go far to help this problem. The main “benefit” here would be that it could slightly trip up foreign companies who shouldn’t be affected by those same rules, but at what cost? Do we really want the government (or corporations they appoint) to be in charge of what we can and can’t see on the net? That doesn’t affect Nintendo in Japan. It WOULD affect us. GoDaddy knows this, but like any normal corporation, only “cares” how it affects their bottom line.

By the way, from my perspective, here’s how the DMCA violations typically went: We would get an email reporting a violation on one of our customer’s sites. This could be a video, a picture, a book, or whatever. We’d have only so many hours to fix the problem before they’d go over our heads to our datacenter to have our service shut down, so we would immediately contact the customer AND suspend their site. Of course we’d hear back from them right away, and they’d have X hours from us to remove the infringing material.

If they had a problem with repeat infringements, we’d notice and give them the boot.

How would that process work with SOPA, and how would it be more effective than what we already have?

(quoth the girl in the Mario shirt. So take it with a grain of salt if you’d like. I will hold off on buying Zelda Skyward Sword until this mess is clarified — but that has more to do with my personal finances this Christmas ;-p)

A photobooth shot I happened to take two nights ago... in my mario shirt :-p

Jesse’s argument, by the way, was that we should fight the elected leaders who are pushing this through, particularly Orrin Hatch. I couldn’t agree more that this particular senator’s ride should have been over years ago.

I think, in this case, the grunge look communicates well.  I also designed the T that way on purpose, and yeah, the swirls I left from the font (Bleeding Cowboys) are meant to subtly suggest horns.  Kind of a suggestion of the whole heaven and hell thing that many of us associate with death.  I also cleaned up a few of the splatters and what not because frankly, they were just too much.  I think it works, and that it sufficiently demonstrates that yes, I can do grunge.

But just because I can doesn’t mean I should.

Design is an art form, yes, and I do enjoy the artistic aspects of it.  But it’s all about communication.  I don’t talk to my 2-year-old nephew the same way I’d talk to my dad.  I don’t talk to my bishop the same way I’d talk to a love interest. And, depending on who my potential customers are, I might not want to talk to them the same way I might talk to my friends.

Sure, grunge is hip. Again. Frankly it’s terrifying that I’ve already lived through the real 80′s style and its rebirth as well as the comeback of 90′s style grunge, but I digress.  If you’re trying to sell your product or service to, say, businessmen twice your age, you might not want to talk to them like they’re the guy next to you at a concert.

Then again, perhaps you might. In my case, I choose to communicate here as I do with my friends, because it helps me find the kind of work I like to do.  But the point is that in any form of communication, be it visual or verbal, you must consider how your audience(s) will interpret the message, and make your decisions accordingly.

I can do well on about half the salary I’d earn working full-time, so you would think part-time work would make sense. The problem? Part time jobs typically pay less than half hour-for-hour what their full-time counterparts would pay, under the assumption that anyone working part-time doesn’t need to make a living. So instead of earning half of a full-time salary for half of a full-time schedule, it’s more like earning a quarter of a full-time salary for half-time hours.

In my case, that is not a livable wage, so I would be forced to work full-time or take multiple jobs to earn enough to live. Wouldn’t it make more sense to take the higher full-time salary in the first place? It would if I didn’t feel so strongly about being home with my kids when they are home. That’s a strange sentiment these days, I know, but one I’d hope some people out there can understand.

So there lies my dilemma; all my cards are on the table. This is what I want, and I’m fully aware that business simply can’t operate on the demands of its potential employees. But could there be some real benefits for employers to work with part-time professionals? Here are a few I could think of:

- If you’re a smaller company that might not need a full-time employee, you can get full-quality at half-price.
- You could also pay half (or even less) what you normally would for medical benefits and other full-time perks.
- Because part-time professional positions are rare and valuable, and because they allow the worker such flexibility, you’re less likely to have problems with turnover.
- How productive is an eight-hour work day anyway? A shorter shift increases productivity, and you get more for your money.

I’ll see if I can find some scholarly articles and research to help back this up, particularly the bit on higher productivity in shorter shifts, but I think anyone who has worked 8 hours per day and observed their coworkers doing the same knows that much time is spent gabbing, goofing off, and otherwise not really being productive — the idea being that so long as an employee is in the building for at least 8 hours per day, a company will get their money’s worth.

In the meantime, if anyone’s aware of a company that could use a part-time designer/marketer/geek, let me know. I am looking.

Today I caught myself… er… critically reviewing the ads in a local coupon mailer. I’ll add a few others that caught my eye, too.

I am excluding the many, many ads that successfully peddle their wares via misogyny — like the one I saw of a man in a suit and a woman in lingerie saying “Strengthen your marriage!” Because the strongest marriages are made up of white-collar wage-earners and women who run around in their undies all day? Or is that the OTHER woman you’re supposed to compete with by buying more lingerie? Maybe I’ll post those sorts of ads another day, since they bother me immensely but do, in the end, convince men and women that they or the women around them just aren’t hot enough without their products. Again, that’s a topic for another day.

But just on the basis of poor communication or bizarre  aesthetics, you tell me, am I too judgmental? Also, I realize the photos taken with my droid aren’t very good, and yes, I criticize that as well.  But my DSLR just doesn’t fit in my purse.

Off with her head!

The Problem: Either really unfortunate photography, or (more likely) hasty photoshopping.
The Solution: If you can’t just use one good photo of your model, splice, don’t slice. Pay attention to shadows and natural placement. Ask yourself, “Do humans look like this?” and if the answer is no, go back to your originals.
Other annoyances: Seemingly random margins on the coupon, and truly ridiculously tiny social media icons that stand just a few millimeters tall.

What does this MEAN?

Problem: Cognitive overload!  Are those chicken nuggets?  Why are the girly nuggets naked — as evidenced by their high shoulders and super-saggy cleavage — and lazy-eyed to boot?  What happened to the middle nugget girl?  What is that guy looking at?  Are they on the pizza? What is going on here? OH! I see the 2nd from the left coupon says “our famous Mojo Potatoes” — which must mean these are potatoes. Whew. But what have they to do with this pizza?  I don’t see any potatoes on it.  The coupon says “Pizza & Mojos” but the top says “The Mojo Supreme Pizza” — I don’t get it!  I need a nap.

Possible explanation: Maybe these … weird looking thingies — are featured on a TV commercial or some other marketing channel.  I still don’t know what they’re trying to say, though. I would recommend sitting down and deciding all of the ways you could communicate what you’re trying to say, and then eliminate all but the most vital.  Then, make sure that message is conveyed in each channel so that it can have stand-alone meaning.

Does your wittle huter-wunter want his minky winky?

Problem: Well, I had this typed up but lost it. and I’m tired. I’ll revisit in the morning. Unfortunately it already published since I posted this via phone, so, bear with me.

Gingerbread Jones and the temple of doom

No wonder he was able to run away from the little old woman and the little grey man!  He had no heart – at least not after brutally ripping it out.  Here he is offering it up, though, and winking at us in the creepiest of ways, “Heh heh — well, wont’ be needing this, want it?”

The solution: Just don’t pose the heart in his hand next to the hole in his chest. That’s what made him creepy.

RE-EXCAVATE!

I’ll call this part of my design portfolio since I need to update it with some more diverse projects.

- You probably need to enable Paypal’s IPN for this to work. From the merchant account in Paypal, click the profile tab, then click the payments option, and choose IPN settings. Enable IPN and set the listener URL to the URL of your WordPress installation.

- In my case, we then had to deal with Internal Server Errors on the listener. I still don’t know why that was, but the site worked fine on other servers. I had the host move from FreeBSD to a linux server, and it worked well after that.

- Disable the built-in CSS so you can make the buttons as you’d like them, then go back and add in your own CSS plus whatever you deem necessary from their CSS to make the site look fine.

- Form Fields won’t line up in IE:
The form page was showing up in quirks mode; if I used the Developer Tools to display in strict mode, it worked fine. As it turns out, there were some hidden input fields above the DTD. IE didn’t know how to deal with this, so into quirks mode it went. I talked to my super wordpress guru friend, Tyrel, and he pointed out that wpnonce was echoing rather than returning. So I had to change wpgft_processOrder.php like so, from:

if( function_exists(‘wp_nonce_field’) ) $post_content .= wp_nonce_field($nonceID);

to

if( function_exists(‘wp_nonce_field’) ) $post_content .= wp_nonce_field($nonceID,’_wpnonce’,true,false);

Currently, I’m trying to see whether I can find a way to display gift certificate information such as the name of the gift, rather than its purchase cost, on the printable emailed certificate. I’ll share details there once I have them.

As much as all we geeks were somewhat sick of the ambiguous buzzword of the year, none of us can deny that “The Cloud” is a fairly important topic right now. Plus, since it’s such a popular term with business executives, we thought that talking about Open Source technology and the cloud might be a great way to help draw in that audience.

The trick was coming up with a fun way to phrase the theme, and one of the phrases I blurted out was, “The Silver Lining.” Alas; everyone latched onto it. I actually liked “Demystifying the Cloud” a bit better — but we all thought that might be a bit too puntastic, but The Silver Lining just sounded weak. “It’s okay,” Mindjuju reasoned, “The designer will come up with some way to communicate the idea without it looking too cheesy.” The designer == me. And thus I was sent home with the impossible task of coming up with a cool logo using that tagline. And I thought about it a lot, but couldn’t love any of the ideas, and thus kept putting the project off til I was faced with a deadline.

I explained my plight to a friend, and he suggested I might try a big thundercloud instead of a care-bear-ish sort of cloud. I thought that might work, but the tagline still sounded off to me. Walking to my car and staring at the thunderclouds forming above me, I started to brainstorm what I could do. I liked the word storm, not just the image. Storm cloud. Almost, right? So I came up with this, and after talking to Mindjuju and Herlo and their consulting with others, the phrase stuck.

What do you think of it? And what does the phrase Storming the Cloud mean to you?

The fix was pretty easy, though. I just used Replace. Do a datadump of your wp_posts table beforehand, just in case, and then:

update `wp_posts` set post_content = replace(post_content,’-400×266.jpg’,’.jpg’);

I had a few other variants like 400×300.jpg or 400×400.jpg depending on the aspect ratio — obviously you’ll want to use sizes that are in use at your own site — but but for the most part this went smashingly. Hoping that helps someone.

Technically, I’ve got quite a bit of cleanup to do both here and there, as well as a number of hairy redirects (or perhaps I’ll only redirect popular articles and clean up my internal links) but I figure I’ll let cowpaths be cowpaths and let each blog take whatever direction it will before I polish either one.

For those of you who didn’t know, I’ve started a brand new blog: blog.SingleMormonMommy.com, wherein I’ll unabashedly cover subjects from Mormonism to Maryisms without worry that such postings will inadvertently turn up at Utah Open Source Planet or as fodder for highly awkward job interviews. Likewise, I’ll be able to post geeky stuff here without coming across as a mumbler to my non-geeky mom friends.

Anyhow, so whether you fit best here, or there, or still prefer to read both, know that I do hope this will work out well for you as my reader, too. On to geekier matters…

Stuck in an elevator with somebody who talks a lot?(A)
OR
Stuck in an elevator with nobody at all?(B)

If you said (A) then you are probably extroverted like a dog.
If you said (B) then you are probably introverted like a cat.

Dogs usually like being with other people.
Cats usually like being alone.

My mom was scratching my head this morning and said, “Ethan, you are just like a puppy.” But I sort of think I am more like a cat.