Thinkcage

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My son, Brett, is six years old and in the first grade. He and his sister spend hours and hours every week coloring. Sometimes original works in crayon, but most often they are colored pages from the countless coloring books they have. The wall by my desk at work features several of these masterpieces and I even have an overflow folder in a drawer of dozens of pictures they had sent me to work with for which I have no more space to display. The last thing I want is to not be able to produce such-and-such picture when they come for a visit!

A couple of days ago Brett brought me a stack of pages torn from his coloring book. All were carefully colored with crayons. He said he had decided to put them online to sell so he could make money. I was pretty surprised by this. As parents, we have not done much with him to teach him the value of money. Sure he occasionally has some gift money to spend, but for the most part he has been unconcerned. I was even more surprised to learn that he had chosen a price for his works ($4 per piece) and had even considered what to do with the money: the was saving for college! I can only assume this was some seed planted at school as I cannot remember ever mentioning to him anything about college or its cost. I fully expected to be met with a list of toys or video games, but he blew me away with his thoughtful response.

So, last night we got out the camera and took photos of each drawing and put them up on ebay, sending a link to each of his grandparents. He is very proud of his new venture and eagerly anticipates the incoming bids. Scrapbook material that this is, Holly and I plan to keep a good record of this and any proceeds for when he actually does go to college. Should be a fun memory for him. Kids are pretty amazing.

Those who would like to bid on an original coloring by Brett can follow the links below:

• Police Car Coloring by Brett
• Police Car (cutout) Coloring by Brett
• Double-Decker Bus Coloring by Brett
• Military Helicopter Coloring by Brett
• Military Hummer Coloring by Brett
• Red Pickup Truck Coloring by Brett

I was fortunate to have saved some vacation time for the end of the year and that, coupled with some clever scheduling, allowed me to take a couple of weeks off of work to spend at home with my family. It was a great and much-needed break, though its a little bit difficult to get back into the swing of my normal schedule:

• 6:30 A.M. – get up drive to work by 7:30 – 7:45 A.M.
• Work all morning, after scanning the news and various blogs via RSS and NetNewswire.
• 12:00 P.M. – Lunchtime. I try to escape the office, weather permitting, with either my sketchbook, some reading material, my camera, or just a short walk in mind.
• 4:30 P.M. – Usually the end of the work day. Hometime.
• 5:30 – 8:30 P.M. – Family time. Dinner, movies, games—with the kids. And then snuggling them into bed.
• 8:30 – 12:00 P.M. or so. – Back on the computer for some freelance design time. To all of my clients, this is when your projects get done.

Its a long day, and quite a shock to my system after two weeks of staying up late, sleeping in, and generally lax days. But that said, I’m slowing getting back to work. 2004 looks to be a busy and exciting year for me and I hope to keep you up with my doings here. Stay tuned.

(Now I’m off to the watch Steve Job’s MacWorld keynote. Is this the year they finally break me and I buy an iPod?)

I recently finished up some work on the moblog section of the site. I had been using MMS Diary, a fine application by Hellkvist.org. MMS Diary works like a charm and was pretty easy to setup, only requiring some minor coding to make it XHTML compliant and setting up a custom MMS gateway on my phone. I had been using it for the past couple of months without a hitch but it had a few weaknesses that caused me to search for a better solution. For starters, MMS Diary does not have a very robust archiving system. It creates an incomprehensible series of folders and text files to store its data and would be very difficult to manage either manually or with a script. That ruled out the likelihood of me ever getting the data stored in a database. Likewise any ideas of RSS syndication were also thrashed. Furthermore, because MMS Diary used a custom MMS gateway, I essentially lost MMS functionality on my phone for anything save moblogging. Certainly a small concession, but not the tidiest of solutions.

So with a little help from my web host (updating a couple of PHP modules) I am now successfully running Marc Rohlfing’s simsi. Simsi has nearly everything I wanted: XML data storage, RSS feed, simple template system, local image storage, and it accepts posts via email and MMS without any special configuration on my phone or web server. The script is simple and self-contained in a single file. And since I first learned about simsi a few months back, I see that development continues at a brisk pace. The only feature I am really looking forward to is management tools that will allow me to edit/remove posts and maybe paginate or categorize them as my log grows.

The new system is up and running now, just click moblog in the navigation bar above to see it in action. More photos will be coming soon.

Update: I put up a fix for a little bit of weirdness that was happening with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows. Should be better now.

I want to start off by admitting I am a statistics freak. I religiously read sports stats and regularly check the website traffic statistics for my site (and all of the sites that I manage).

I especially enjoy referring links — seeing which sites are linking to yours. The nuts and bolts of the internet.

In the past week I’ve noticed several new links from weblogs, For example, www.mikesspot.com, www.jennifersblog.com/, www.a-b-l-o-g.com have all linked me.

At first glance these appear to be just another blog but closer inspection reveals a few interesting things. They are completely generic. There is no personally-identifiable information, no contact info, the posts lack any personality; they are just little news blurbs (no rants, no posts about ‒my cat”, etc.). The links to comments and trackbacks are are dummies. One has a link to a textamerica photo blog, but it appears to be positioned to push a clothing line.

These blogs are fakes.

But I can’t figure out why. A little digging reveals that all three domains (and perhaps there are more) are registered by the same company — a hosting company. My guess is that these are somehow used by this hosting company to funnel traffic, or perhaps to fool search engines. Clearly, they are trying to benefit from the traffic generated by the linked news stories. Maybe its a scheme to show high traffic to potential advertisers. I am not quite sure but I am curious.

The link to this site has appeared in the links column of each of the sites on several occasions, though the list seems to me to be dynamically generated and perhaps even harvested by robots.

Interesting if nothing else.

Update: As quickly as they came, all of those sites and the others that appeared to be similar are now down. Maybe nothing more than a failed experiment.

While the world continues to fight unsolicited email, I find myself just as inundated with junk mail of the paper variety. Each week, our family receives dozens of pieces of unsolicited mail from advertising circulars to special mortgage offers.

However the worst offender has to be credit card offers. I literally get 2-4 of these every day — often in duplicate as we will receive the offer twice, addressed to both my wife and I. The most frequent name I see is CapitalOne. Not a week goes by that I do not receive at least one offer for the coveted CapitalOne Visa.

I have never had a CapitalOne account, never responded to one of their offers and yet they continue to arrive with religious regularity.

I have not found a way to remove myself from their lists, but I have been able to exact a small amount of revenge: the business reply envelope. For those unaware, the business reply envelope is a pre-addressed postage-paid envelope that allows you to reply to their offer on their dime. Every credit card offer comes with an application and business reply envelope.

The cost of these credit card offers has to be fairly high to the soliciting company. CapitalOne, for instance, regularly ships glossy stickers and other such expensive printed materials; some even ship plastic dummy credit cards! So what I try to do is make sure that when they send one to me it costs even more. The business reply mail postage is not paid by the soliciting company until you use it so be sure that you do. That likely doubles their cost right off the bat, but I’m sure it is a small price to pay for them if it contains my credit application.

But it doesn’t. My envelope contains junk mail. See I keep all of the junk mail I get and all of the business reply envelopes and then I match them together; CapitalOne gets some American Express offers, Sears Siding gets a coupon book for Lil’ Caesar’s Pizza, etc. And I use every bit of it including weekly newspapers, magazines, and the Wednesday grocery store advertisements. I fold, cram and stuff as much as physically possible into each envelope adding many times the weight (and cost) to each envelope and then drop them in the mail. Most of them cost upwards of $2.00 each in postage. Subtract that from your marketing budget, CapitalOne!

I know this probably doesn’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things but it is extremely rewarding knowing that I could be a tiny thorn in the side of a large corporation filling my mailbox with crap. And if thousands or millions of people would take the time to do this, you might see a change. The cost of the original mailing, the excessive postage on return, and perhaps even the time spent by some poor worker opening my letters and searching through the mess for my application has to add up. Maybe we could force them to find another way. Even if nothing changes maybe someone will get fed up and at least remove me from a few mailing lists.

That would be satisfaction enough.