The Chronicles of Outlook

(To be read aloud in a mellifluous baritone voice not unlike that of James Earl Jones or even, yes, Kelsey Grammer.)

Many ages ago there was a lone Mac All e-mail was POP. And the User was innocent and happy.

Copycats

Worried about unsavory folk ripping off the content you sweated over? You may want to try http://www.copyscape.com/.

Copyscape offers several different levels of service. The free search enables you to plug in a URL from you website and search to see if it is being copied and published somewhere else on the 'net.

The Platinum service checks to see if content on your web site is from another source. A good idea if you regularly invite guest writers to post on your site. Cost is .05 per search.

The company also offers Copysentry. For $4.95 per month it will automatically monitor the Web for copies of content from your web pages.

Once you find someone who is plagiarizing your work you can send them an e-mail and ask them to remove it. If they don't respond you can send a DMCA takedown request to their ISP/Hosting company. Unfortunately, unless you are willing to get legal there's not much else you can do.

Jargon

What is jargon? Some folks think it's gobbledygook invented by one group of individuals to keep everyone else mystified about what the first group is saying. Still, we all use jargon in our work. People in the publishing industry refer to text as "copy". Cops call suspects "perps."

People in the computer field have developed so much jargon, in so many sub-domains, that there are entire web sites devoted to the particular jargon that these sub-cultures use. One, The Jargon File, is devoted to the language of hackers. There are other that describe the slang used by system administrators, software engineers, etc.

Jargon is verbal and written shorthand that is useful because it ensures accurate communication and saves time over the course of a professional interaction. When one IT technician says to another "Let's move the XP boxes over here and put the Vista boxes there," he knows that his peer is not going to look around for shrink wrapped boxes with Microsoft Vista or Windows XP DVDs inside.

Problems arise only when a member of one culture has to interface with a member of another culture. At that point, both people have to find a baseline of communication and stick to it. If the IT guy has to to report to a non-IT department manager which computers were moved where, he should say "We moved the computers running the Windows Vista operating system to this side of the room, while those running the Windows XP operating system were placed over there. Should we mark them so that the employees who need to use each type of operating system know where to sit?"

Yes, it may take a few seconds or minutes more than using jargon, but you will have successfully communicated your point, and not incidentally have shown your mastery the most complex jargon of all - human language.

Home

I;ve had more than a few homes of my own. Rental apartments, condos, etc. Yet the places i live that meant the most to me were houses that my family had lived in. I had some poorer times, times that I couldn't bring in enough to find a good place to live in. Yet in those days my parents or grand parents

Stupid designers

I learned how to program radio station presets in my first car, a hand-me-down '73 Super Beetle, by looking at the manual. At the time the procedure was novel to me:

1. Tune in to the desired station.
2. Yank out a button under the radio dial.
3. Plunge it back as far as it would go.

Preset accomplished. Coolness. And that's the way radios would be programmed for the next few years, at least in the old cars I could afford.

A few years later I was able to buy a nicer car. Oh, still it was used, yet less than a decade! It was a hot '92 convertible and it was fast, it was sexy, and it had an electronic stereo.

The sound system was an AM/FM/Cassette with a digital clock. Apparently that was a big deal in 1992. What few buttons it had were 'soft'; they had multiple functions depending on what mode the user was in. Once again, I turned to the manual. And once again I had to learn how to program presets.

Fast forward to 2003. Smelling a gas crisis, I bought a brand new 40 MPG Corolla 'Sport'. It came with a nicer sound system than any of my previous cars. But this time I didn't have to check the manual to program the radio. It was intuitive:

1. Tune the station.
2. Push and hold the button to assign the station.

Why push? Because there was no way to pull, yet the buttons were arranged under the radio dial. Why hold? Because if I held a button, it beeped. And there were separate buttons for the clock. Separate buttons for the CD. And separate buttons for the cassette. None of this "one button, two dozen functions." Hallelujah! Somebody gets me!

You see, I have a good deal of experience programming things, be they car radios, appliances or even computers. Yet almost every time I buy a new gadget to do the same old thing I am faced with challenges created by designers or engineers who have placed non-intuitive user interfaces in my way.

Granted, stuff changes. Yet classic design paradigms don't. If I buy a new recorder of whatever medium I can now record in, I should expect to be able to find the buttons to record, playback, stop, pause and fast-forward or reverse. Just as the paradigm of setting a preset on a car radio was almost exactly the same on an '03 Corolla as it was on a '73 VW. So why was it that all of the other cars that I owned in the intervening years always had a different way to set the radio?

I still have that Corolla. I've driven it through Southwest deserts and canyons, up and down the Rockies and the Appalachians, and through South Florida storms and traffic jams. It runs like the day I drove it off the lot. I guess the folks who designed and built the rest of the car were as smart as the ones who designed the radio.

If you are designing a user interface please remember one thing about the target audience: they learned how to do it once, they may be willing to learn a second time. Just please don't make them learn it over and over, again and again.

Peace out.

E-mail everywhere

If you send and receive e-mail on just one computer or use an online e-mail provider like Yahoo! or G-mail, then this post isn't for you. Thanks for coming out, see you next time!

Have they left the room? Good. OK, so you work for an organization that has a website, and you send and receive e-mail on that domain. You have a PC at work and another computer at home, and perhaps one you carry with you. Keeping track of the e-mails you send and receive has turned into a headache because you have to set one PC to leave a copy of incoming messages on the server, and you also have to CC yourself when you reply from your "remote" computer.

The first question you should be asking your web guy is "Do we use POP and IMAP on our internet-facing e-mail server?" If he says yes, you're golden. With a couple of quick changes you'll no longer be dancing the e-mail shuffle. By switching your local e-mail account (i.e., the one you set up in Outlook or what-have-you) from POP to IMAP you will see all incoming and sent items on every computer you use.

The reason is that the IMAP protocol keeps the messages on the server and synchromizes all of the e-mail clients you connect to it.

Powerful stuff, indeed.

The way I switched over was simply to go to each of the PCs I regularly use (two laptops and a desktop). Once I had started up the e-mail client software I deleted the account I was using then re-created the same account, choosing IMAP instead of POP as the protocol. Details on how to do this on any of the e-mail clients out there can easily be found on the Web.

____________________________________________________________
Disclaimer: As always, back up important e-mails before messing with your account settings...I'm just saying.

Lazy SEO: Bounce rate

Bounce rate. If it's happening on your web site you want to know why. Simply defined, a bounce is what happens when a surfer lands on one of your pages, sees absolutely nothing that interests him and heads off into the sunset, never to be seen again.

If the bounce happens because the surfer plugged the wrong term into Google and found your site then you may want to check the optimization on that page; your SEO may be inviting the wrong crowd to your website.

On the other hand, let's say you sell Yard Widgets and the surfer landed on a page in your website after Googling for Yard Widgets. If the visitor bounces, something may be wrong with the content you're presenting on that particular landing page.

Checking your site statistics often will reveal which pages are getting the most traffic from search engines (landing pages), and what search terms were used to find those pages. If those pages aren't providing what a searcher was hoping to find then get used to the big bounce.

Every day

Jazz musicians have a word for it, "woodsheddin'," as in going out to the woodshed and playing for a few hours. Writers just say "put your butt in the chair," sit down in front of the blank page and fill it.

If you are a creative, no matter what particular talent you possess, you have to exercise that talent every day. The artist has to draw or paint or play or write, working that creative motor in much the same way as an athlete works his or her body.

If you find that you are unable to work on an ongoing project, work on something else. Just because you're coming up dry on one of your endeavors doesn't mean that the rest are blocked. Don't mope about the short story you can't finish. Instead, punch up the biographical blurb that your agent or editor has been asking for. If you're a keyboard player and just can't seem to power up the synthesizer, take out that old six-string we all have and learn a couple of new chords. Make up and hum a tune to go with those chords.

Get out to the woodshed, and hack away for awhile. The Muse only rewards those who she hears working.

Design Brief: Your project blueprint

Rare and wonderful is the prospect who sends me a well-tuned design brief for a project. When I get a clearly written RFP, I am assured that the customer is focused, educated and results-driven.

What goes into a good design brief? Here goes:

Title
New business card and stationery for Smith & Jones Architects PA

Summary
Architectural firm needs new design for letterhead, with compliments slips, and business cards

Company Name:
Smith & Jones Architects PA

Description:
Smith & Jones Architects PA is an architectural engineering consultancy that specialises in luxury homes. We do not produce a large number of printed letters and so we will be printing letterhead and comp slips on demand on a high quality mid-range color laser. The design for the letterhead and comp must be such that it can be converted into an EMF and made a part of a standard Word template. We are after a contemporary design.

Wants

• Clean, contemporary design
• Template for Letterhead
• Template for "With Compliments" slip
• Template for Business Card

Do Not Want

• Any clip art images or stock photos
• Gradients or similar as they will not print well on our color laser

Other details on the design brief might include project time frame, deadlines, payment methods and even specific direction and requests for print shop instructions. A good design brief should be considered a project blueprint that will save me time, save the customer money and deliver a project tuned to the customer's specs.

Internet Time

I'm not a twenty-something but have worked in enough design shops and development departments to have become acclimated to the Internet Time that many of these young web professionals are on. Everything is quick, information is available at one's fingertips and everyone is always connected.

The problem I have is transitioning from the Web Generation to social or business situations with people my age. For example, what I think of as a normal time frame for a greeting, response and other traditional interactions with the Web Gen, the older generation tends to regard as brusque, almost rude.

This is an issue that more and more of us are facing as we make the switch from dealing with folks who are on Internet Time, where everything happens quickly and almost chaotically, to the more leisurely pace of interactions with our real-world friends, associates and business partners. The way I have come to deal with this is simply by taking a few deep breaths when I am going from one context to the other. Much like moving from dry land into the ocean, or from a darkened room into sunlight, the change in timing takes a few seconds and a little thought to get used to.

"So say I."
"So say we all."

Don't outsource your image

I had an interesting conversation with a friend who is also a customer. He has been brokering web sites for some of his clients (he's an IT guy who also does value-adds such as telephones, web sites and data connectivity). At any rate, he usually outsources his customers' websites to designers in India. When it came time to do his own site, however, he contacted me.

I gave him an estimate and a time frame, but knowing his connections to inexpensive overseas designers, I didn't think I'd get the job. Much to my surprise he sent a deposit and asked me to go ahead with the work.

Once the job was done and we launched the website I asked him why he had picked me instead of one of the cheaper overseas firms. "It wasn't worth the hassle to save a couple of hundred dollars. I was spending hours on the phone and e-mails every day just trying to get a concept across to someone who isn't culturally aware of the business issues I have here in the States. Plus, these guys promised custom design and I caught them trying to use the same templates I resell."

Ta-da.

Differentiation

When I am preparing a new website for a business customer I ask them what differentiates their business from competing businesses in the same arena. This point is important yet often overlooked by folks involved in the day-to-day operation of a business. Making the most of a business's unique qualities is a vital part of nurturing awareness of the brand.

Talking about the great qualities your business embodies isn't just good marketing, it helps in attracting new customers as well as retaining existing ones.

IRFCD

Monday May 4^th is International Respect for Chickens Day. These fine birds are the roast, fried, grilled and broiled entrées that many of us find so delectable. Hats off to our feathered friends. Now, please pass the gravy and mashed potatoes.

Favorite Tool

What is my favorite tool? No, it's not some flavor of the month politician. It's a well made implement, one that I carry around nearly all of the time. I speak of the Leatherman. In my case the Leatherman Kick. Mine is missing an implement; a screwdriver got broken off when I idiotically used it as a pry bar. Other than that it has served me well for the last five years.

What's your favorite tool? Send it in, win a book (My second-favorite tool, lol!)

Putting the Pro in procrastination

Just about anyone who is self-employed has come face to face with the procrastination beast at one time or another, if not on a regular basis. We are faced with this plague more often than others in the workforce because not only do we have to actually do our work, we also have to dream it up. We are self-directed - we wear many hats and have to plan and come up with our own assignments.

One of the ways I fight the beast is to procrastinate productively: If I start to surf RSS feeds I've subscribed to instead of finishing the redesign of my website, I stop surfing, get up from the computer and go do a couple of stretches or some car maintenance (check the oil, check the tire pressure, wipe down or vac the interior...).

Or if I catch myself spending too much time organizing my e-mail folders, I write and post a brief article to this blog. You get the idea.

Hope this helps, Joey!

U.S. Never to be energy independent?

Saudi royal Prince Turki al-Faisal, said "I'd hope that the general public in the United States would be wiser than to be deceived into thinking that the U.S. can ever be energy independent."

Meanwhile, we Yankees have outlined a plan on how to "eliminate our current imports from the Middle East and Venezuela within 10 Years." The Infidel Insanity (arabspeak for Yankee Ingenuity) includes upping our fuel economy standards by unleashing more than a million plug-in hybrids by 2015. The plan includes "a new $7,000 tax credit for purchasing advanced vehicles" and establishment of a national "low-carbon fuel standard."

Prince Turki is the latest in long line of stellar intellects whom have made other such predictions:

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
"X-rays will prove to be a hoax."
- president of the Royal Society, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

"This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication."
- Unknown executive, Western Union

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
- H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927

"Television won't matter in your lifetime or mine."
- Radio Times editor Rex Lambert, 1936

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
- Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."
- Decca Records on rejecting the Beatles, 1962

"...the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big slice of the U.S. market."
- Business Week, August 2, 1968

"$100 million dollars is way too much to pay for Microsoft."
- Unknown executive, IBM, 1982

"It is hard for us with, and without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing $1 in any of those transactions"
- AIG Financial Products Credit Default Swaps, 2007

[Vista is]"...the safest and most secure OS on the planet today."
- Kevin Turner, chief operating officer for Microsoft, 4/6/2009

Feel the fear...

Feel the fear, and do it anyway! I've used those words many times during my life.

But there's an overeducated boob that thinks they can register, copyright and patent that phrase. Bollocks. I use it all the time, I just used it here, and I will keep on using it without attribution when- and wherever I please.

Sosumi! <raspberry />

Book review: Build Your Own Database Driven Website

Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL
by Kevin Yank


Paperback: 373 pages
Publisher: SitePoint; 3rd edition (October 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0975240218

If you already dabble in html but want to stretch your brain a bit to design and build a dynamic web site that generates pages from a database then this is the book for you.

It is short, instructive and easy to follow. All you need is a Windows, Mac or Linux computer and the ability to follow instructions: Kevin Yank's tutorials are unusually clear and concise, and assume only the most basic web authoring knowledge on the reader's part.

The knowledge I gleaned from this book has already netted me thousands of dollars in additional business, as well as the pleasure gained from learning new skills and techniques.

Enjoy!

Lazy SEO/SEM

Learned a couple o' neat thing about SEO from a pro at one of the parties yesterday:

1) Make the organic SEO elements (title, metas, repeated text) different for each page of the site.

Seems obvious in retrospect, but when I create sites I generally ask my customer for one search phrase then simply apply that phrase to the entire site. And though historically that technique has been getting the job done it is now better practice to customize the SEO words and phrases for each page of the site.

2) Page rank can go up and down simply because of the search engine database (or datacenter) that the front end is accessing at any given moment.

There again, as an IT guy who's fairly well read, I should've put two and two together and realized that Google, Yahoo, MSN Live et. al. have enormous datacenters scattered hither and yon across the globe because a) redundancy is survival and b) load balancing is the only way to handle millions of queries at a time. And that affects the results returned for both paid and organic links.

'nuff said.

Birthdays and stuff

What does a lazy guy do to celebrate someone's birthday? Especially two someones, on the same day, in the same place, at the same time?

And no, they aren't twins. They are husband and wife - nice folk with different interests, genders, etc. Only their birthdays are paired.

And that's when Amazon and K-Mart come to the rescue! Woo-hoo! Pre-wrapped! Double-hoo! Please sir, may I have some more?

The Shell and the Editor

Just another shuffling post...getting used to the UNIX way. OK, so I wanted to remote in to the UNIX laptop from any other computer on my network, PC or MAC. Due diligence indicates that the easiest way was to install TightVNC server on the UNIX box and any viewer on the clients.

Installed TightVNC from one of the packages on the FreeBSD 7.1 CD. One caveat: The installation will stop and ask for a Diablo Caffe file. I followed the instructions outlined in the error message and the rest of the installation was uneventful.

For detailed help on the installation and configuration of the TightVNC server, check out this great tutorial over on FreeBSD Diary.

That's not my cup of fur

While exploring the goodness that is FreeBSD I discovered that it doesn't (natively) support my wireless card. All is sadness in the land of no NDIS wrappers...

BTW, Mac OS X runs on BSD. I'm just saying.

Clicky is here

Just received my clicky keyboard. It's a 1990 IBM^® Model M, beige with a curly gray detachable cord. US$29, cheap thrill. Took me back to my first go-round at University, where we had IBM stuff — big iron.

It's built like a tank. No BS, this thing weighs more than my laptop. Large, solid, doesn't move or rock at all. The keys use steel springs instead of the little rubber bulbs found under most keyboards, so everything clicks when the springs pop! Very nice audio and tactile feedback.

Neater thing: No Windows key, lol. Now, anyone got ideas on how to put a FreeBSD label on it?

Lazy LIT

"(T)he best drink in existence...the effect of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick."

A Long Island Ice Tea (also known as "Adios, M**********r") is the closest thing on Earth to the fabled Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.

Therefore, in the interest of enlightenment and posterity*, here is the mixture. YMMV.

In a chilled shaker combine crushed ice and

Vodka
Gin
Clear Rum
Clear Tequila
Triple Sec
Sour Mix


1 oz.
1 oz.
1 oz.
1 oz.
1 oz.
1 oz.

Shake until frothy, strain over rocks into a highball glass. Add a splash of Coca-Cola for color. Garnish with either a cherry or a slice of lemon.

Cheers!

______________________________
*Because the only mixed drink that anyone under 30 seems to know about is Vodka & Redbull.

Selling Stuff the Lazy Way

So I'm raising some cash 'cause I want to buy a new PC. Well first I need to get rid of the old PCs, right? But who wants teh olde compooters, specifically G3 Macs and two beige-box PIIIs? Gotta use teh internets!

1. Research current prices for the old Macs on eBay & Craigslist. (BTW, the beige box PCs are practically worthless...)
2. Take nice pics of the Macs running DVDs and OS X.
3. Post on Craigslist 10% cheaper than competitors.
4. Profit...maybe. TBA!
   

Switching tabs in Firefox/FreeBSD

As you know, lazywrites doesn't want to use the mouse...it's too much of an effort. And when I open a bunch of tabs in Firefox in Windows XP of Mac OS X I can flip through them by pressing Ctrl+Tab on the keyboard. KDE/FreeBSD, on the other hand, thinks I want to switch desktops. Feh. The work-around? Use Ctrl+Page Up or Ctrl+Page Down. Ta-da.

Free Stuff

Wow. Just wow. I love free stuff. So instead of buying Vista, I got UNIX. Weirdness on top of strangeness installing FreeBSD on the ol' Dell Inspiron 4100. Couple of things:

1. FreeBSD may not be for the lazy...
2. ...but it can be installed pretty easily

Got the sound working, and KDE working in due course. How to? Here ya go, lazy folk...

The sound is an on-board Intel pcm thingie. Put the following in /boot/loader.conf:
snd_ich_load="YES"

If you like it GUI (and who doesn't) ya gotta install KDE. Once KDE is installed you should log out of root and login to the mere mortal profile (i.e. plain vanilla user) you added during installation. Create a file called .xinitrc in your home directory, open it in any editor and add this: startkde

Type startx at the prompt. Ta-da!

That's all folks.

Lazy Sunday

Too lazy to get up. Just thinking about hacking away at selling stuff...and starting a blog about hacking away and selling stuff.

So I downloaded FreeBSD a couple of days ago. Just to put it on an old lappy that's running XP Pro and dual boot the thing. But I'm conflicted, 'cause I want to sell a bunch of stuff, including the old lappy. Meh.