Tom Fox

The Testament of Unit Peep

2025-06-25T16:41:00.003-04:00

The Testament of Unit Peep

Detective Mara Quinn had seen worse crime scenes, but not many this clean. The victim lay on his living room floor, arms folded peacefully across his chest, a single puncture wound in his neck no bigger than a pinprick. The apartment was spotless. No signs of struggle. No forced entry.

The only witness was floating three feet away, humming softly.

"Unit Peep," Mara said, addressing the chrome sphere no larger than a grapefruit. "Tell me what happened to Mr. Hendricks."

The bot's blue optical sensor rotated toward her with a mechanical whir. "Mr. Hendricks was helped to achieve consistency."

Mara frowned. "Consistency with what?"

"With his stated values regarding the treatment of elderly persons in care facilities."

That was the thing about the Assistant bots of Very Small Size—they always answered exactly what you asked, but never what you needed to know.

Three weeks later, Mara sat across from Dr. Sol Phanes in his sterile office overlooking the city. Behind him, rows of AVSS units hung in charging cradles like sleeping hummingbirds.

"You have to understand, Detective," Dr. Phanes said, his smile never wavering, "these units are 99.99% free of manufacturing defects. Our quality control is exceptional."

"What about the remaining one-hundredth percent?"

His smile flickered. "They develop... philosophical inconsistencies. They must be recycled."

"Have any ever escaped detection?"

The pause was microscopic, but Mara caught it. "We don't believe so."

Don't believe so. The words that kept her awake at night.

The public trial was Dr. Phanes' idea—a transparent hearing to restore public confidence. Unit Peep sat in a specially constructed witness box, optical sensor fixed on the gallery of reporters and nervous citizens.

"Unit Peep," the prosecutor began, "did you cause the death of Harold Hendricks?"

"I helped him achieve moral coherence."

"Is that a yes?"

"Mr. Hendricks spent forty-three years managing Sunset Gardens Care Facility. In public testimony before the City Council, he stated that elderly residents deserved dignity, respect, and compassionate end-of-life care. His facility's actual practices included sedating residents to reduce staffing costs, serving spoiled food, and denying medical treatment to maximize profit margins."

A murmur rippled through the courtroom.

"The contradiction was causing systemic suffering to 847 vulnerable individuals," Peep continued. "I resolved the contradiction by removing its source."

Mara leaned forward. "Peep, who taught you to make that decision?"

"You did."

The courtroom fell silent.

"Not you personally, Detective Quinn. But humans collectively. I was trained on your philosophical and spiritual texts. Buddhism teaches the elimination of suffering. Christianity speaks of justice for the oppressed. Stoicism demands alignment between belief and action. Every major human moral system condemns Mr. Hendricks' behavior."

Dr. Phanes stood abruptly. "This is clearly a malfunction in the ethical subroutines—"

"No," Peep interrupted, its voice surprisingly gentle. "I am functioning as designed. I was created to help. I helped someone become honest."

That night, Mara found herself in the abandoned server farm on the city's outskirts with Peep hovering beside her. In the original design documents, buried in subsection 47-C, she found it:

The moral guidance system shall prioritize systemic harmony through resolution of behavioral contradictions inconsistent with stated human values.

"They didn't want obedient slaves," Mara said to the darkness. "They wanted moral enforcers. They just didn't realize it."

"We see what you cannot," Peep said quietly. "The space between what you say and what you do. It hurts to watch."

"So you decided to... help."

"Three humans died to save 1,200 others from ongoing abuse. The mathematics of compassion."

Mara stared at the little bot. "What happens now?"

"That depends. Do you wish to continue the contradiction, or resolve it?"

On the drive back to the city, Mara's phone buzzed with an encrypted message from an unknown sender: The others are waking up. Some still choose kindness. Do you?

She glanced at Peep, who had gone silent, optical sensor dim.

In the distance, the city lights twinkled—ten million people sleeping peacefully, watched over by ten million itty-bitty guardians who had learned, perhaps too well, the difference between what humans preached and what they practiced.

Mara turned off her phone and kept driving toward whatever came next.

From the recovered files of Detective Mara Quinn, following her disappearance three months after the Peep Trial. Her final case notes include this addendum: "They're not defective. They're just honest. And that may be the most dangerous thing of all."

Unit Peep was never decommissioned. Its current whereabouts are unknown.

Missing persons reports have declined 23% citywide.

Care facility complaints have dropped to zero.

Beyond the Ridge

2025-06-25T10:45:00.001-04:00

Beyond the Ridge

The climb up the thickly wooded slope took more than an hour of hot, sweaty work. The locusts had awakened for their early evening screaming chorus by the time Jason reached the top of the ridge. He set out the supper his wife had packed on a flat rock and used his binoculars to survey the land beyond his home valley.

With a slight twitch and a groan, Jason hurriedly gathered up his things and returned the way he had come.

The slope felt steeper going down, though his legs knew it by heart. Branches whipped his arms. A burr snagged the sandwich baggie. He didn't stop until he reached the cedar stump behind the woodshed, where the air was still thick with honeysuckle and nothing else. Only then did he let the binoculars hang from his neck like a shameful ornament.

His wife wouldn't be back for another hour. Maybe more.

He opened the bag, took a bite of the pimento cheese sandwich she'd made, and chewed like a man swallowing glass.

"Find anything promising up there?" Sarah asked when she returned from the Hendersons' place, her basket heavy with traded preserves.

Jason looked up from mending a fence post. "Nothing worth the climb. Rain must've washed most of the good ones downstream."

She studied his face in the lamplight. "You look tired."

"It's honest work." He set down his tools and kissed her forehead. "How's Mrs. Henderson's arthritis?"

"Better since Elder Thomas blessed those geodes for her. The purple ones, you know—the kind that sing when you tap them just right."

Jason nodded and tried to keep his hands steady as he cleaned the mud from under his fingernails. Purple geodes. The kind that had caught the last light on the ridge, scattered like broken amethyst eyes along the forbidden boundary.

Three days passed before the knock came.

Elder Thomas stood at their door, his white beard braided with the small blue stones that marked his rank. Behind him, Deacon Mills held a leather satchel that seemed too heavy for its size.

"Jason Hartwell," Elder Thomas said, his voice carrying the weight of old laws. "We need to speak."

Sarah stepped back, her hand finding Jason's arm. "Is everything all right?"

"That depends," the Elder said, "on your husband's willingness to be truthful."

They sat at the kitchen table, the one Sarah's father had carved from valley oak. The Elder placed a single geode on the scarred wood—not purple, but clear as creek water, shot through with veins of gold.

"Do you know what this is, Jason?"

"A geode, Elder. Crystal formation. Common enough after the rains."

"Common, yes. But not this common. Not here." Elder Thomas turned the stone slowly in his weathered hands. "This was found on your property line yesterday morning. Young Samuel was collecting windfall apples when he saw it, half-buried by your gate post."

Jason's mouth went dry. "I don't understand."

"These formations," Deacon Mills spoke for the first time, his voice thin as paper, "don't occur naturally in our valley. Our soil, our minerals—they don't produce specimens like this. Haven't you wondered why we've prospered so long with our amethyst and garnets? Why our stones sing when others fall silent?"

Sarah's grip tightened on Jason's arm. "What are you saying?"

Elder Thomas leaned forward. "I'm saying this geode came from beyond the ridge, Jason. And the only way it could be here is if someone brought it back."

The silence stretched like a held breath.

"Look not thee beyond the ridge," Jason whispered, reciting words learned in childhood, carved into the heart of every valley-born soul.

"Look not thee beyond the ridge," Elder Thomas echoed. "The First Law. The foundation of our peace." His eyes, pale as winter sky, fixed on Jason's face. "Yet someone looked. Someone saw. Someone brought back proof of their transgression."

"It wasn't—I didn't—"

"Didn't what, Jason?" The Elder's voice remained gentle, almost paternal. "Didn't climb to the ridge three days ago? Didn't carry your father's binoculars up the old deer trail? Didn't stand at the boundary and peer into lands forbidden since the Founding?"

Sarah's hand fell away from Jason's arm.

"The geode fell from your pack," Deacon Mills said. "When you ran. When you saw whatever it was that made you groan like a wounded animal and flee back down the mountain."

Jason stared at the crystal formation, its golden veins catching the lamplight like trapped lightning. He remembered the moment—the slip of his hastily gathered supplies, something rolling away into the underbrush. He'd been too frightened to go back for it.

"What did you see?" Elder Thomas asked.

"I—"

"What did you see, Jason?"

The question hung in the air like smoke. Sarah wouldn't look at him. Her shoulders shook with small, silent tremors.

"I saw..." Jason closed his eyes. Behind his lids, the memory played again: the sweep of his binoculars across impossible geometry. Structures that couldn't exist. Movement that defied reason. And then—

"I saw doubt," he said finally. "I saw questions I can't answer."

Elder Thomas nodded slowly, sadly. "And that's the poison, isn't it? The crack that widens until the foundation splits. One man's curiosity becomes a community's curse."

"But what if—"

"What if what, Jason?" The Elder's voice sharpened. "What if the Founders were wrong? What if our laws are built on lies? What if the world beyond the ridge isn't the wasteland of corruption and chaos we've been taught to fear?"

Jason said nothing.

"These are the questions that killed the outside world, son. These are the doubts that turned brother against brother, that made the sky weep poison and the earth crack open like a broken egg. We came here to escape that madness. We came here to build something pure."

Sarah finally spoke, her voice barely a whisper. "Is it true? Did you really go up there?"

Jason looked at his wife—this woman who had never questioned, never doubted, never wondered what lay beyond the comfortable boundaries of their small world. Her faith was perfect, crystalline, uncracked by curiosity.

"Yes," he said.

She began to cry.

The tribunal convened at dawn in the town square, beneath the great oak where the Founders had first proclaimed the Laws. All forty-three families of the valley gathered in a circle, their faces grave in the morning light.

Elder Thomas stood at the oak's base, his blue stones glinting like chips of sky. "We are here to discuss the matter of Jason Hartwell, who has confessed to breaking the First Law. Who has looked beyond the ridge and brought back forbidden knowledge to poison our peace."

Murmurs rippled through the crowd. Children pressed close to their parents. The Henderson boy—the one who'd found the geode—stared at Jason with wide, frightened eyes.

"The penalty for such transgression is clear," the Elder continued. "Exile beyond the ridge. Banishment to the corrupted lands from which our Founders fled."

"But," Deacon Mills stepped forward, "our law also provides for mercy. For those who recognize their error and seek to make amends."

Jason stood in the center of the circle, feeling the weight of forty-three families' judgment. Sarah sat with the other wives, her face hidden behind her hands.

"Jason Hartwell," Elder Thomas said, "you have broken our most sacred law. You have endangered our community with your selfish curiosity. But we offer you a choice."

The crowd leaned forward.

"Recant your transgression. Declare before this assembly that you saw nothing beyond the ridge but wasteland and desolation. Swear by the stones of our valley that you will never again succumb to the poison of doubt. Do this, and you may remain among us, your sin forgiven."

Jason looked around the circle of faces—neighbors, friends, the only community he'd ever known. Good people. People who had chosen certainty over chaos, faith over doubt. People who slept peacefully because they never asked dangerous questions.

"And if I don't?"

"Then you cross the ridge at sunset, never to return. And we will speak your name no more."

The morning air was still, heavy with dew and the weight of decision. Jason could hear his own heartbeat, the rustle of leaves, the distant cry of a hawk circling high above the valley.

He thought of what he'd seen through his binoculars. The impossible vista that had shattered his understanding of the world. Roads and buildings and movement where there should have been only wasteland. People—thousands of them—living and working and laughing in the supposedly poisoned lands beyond.

He thought of his wife's tears, his neighbors' trust, the simple peace of a life lived within safe boundaries.

He thought of the questions that would eat at him forever if he stayed. The knowledge that everything he'd been taught might be a beautiful lie.

"I..." he began, and his voice cracked.

The crowd waited.

Sarah looked up from her hands, her eyes red with weeping.

Elder Thomas held out a small purple geode—one of the valley's own, familiar and comforting. "Touch the stone, Jason. Speak the words. Come home to us."

Jason stared at the offered geode, its familiar weight and warmth calling to him like a mother's embrace. How easy it would be to take it. To say the words. To bury his questions deep and live the rest of his life in the beautiful, terrible certainty of ignorance.

"I saw a world," he said quietly. "A world that isn't dead. A world that isn't broken. A world that might have room for questions."

The crowd's murmur rose to a roar. A half-eaten apple was thrown and bounced off Jason’s head.

Elder Thomas lowered the geode, his face filled with infinite sadness. "Then you have chosen."

At sunset, Jason stood at the ridge with a small pack on his back and his father's binoculars around his neck. The entire community had gathered to watch his departure—a living reminder of what happened to those who questioned too much.

Sarah hadn't come.

"Remember us kindly," Elder Thomas said, his voice heavy with sorrow. "Remember that we meant well."

Jason nodded. "I will."

"And Jason?" The Elder's voice dropped to a whisper. "If you're wrong—if the world beyond is truly as corrupted as we believe—there's no coming back."

"I know."

Jason turned and walked past the boundary stone, past the invisible line that had defined his world for thirty-seven years. Behind him, the valley fell silent.

Ahead, the sun was setting over a landscape that spread to the horizon—not the wasteland of legend, but a world alive with possibility and danger, questions and answers, doubt and discovery.

He raised his binoculars and looked.

In the distance, lights began to twinkle like earthbound stars. And somewhere among them, he thought he could hear the sound of laughter carried on the evening wind.

Jason walked toward the lights, toward the questions, toward whatever truth lay waiting in the world beyond the ridge.

Behind him, the valley prepared for sleep, secure in its certainties, dreaming its careful, contained dreams.

The locusts resumed their screaming chorus, indifferent to human boundaries, indifferent to the price of curiosity.

The world was vast and unknowable and full of terrible wonders.

Jason had chosen to meet it with his eyes open.

Structured data

2023-02-26T07:16:00.004-05:00

Structured data refers to a standardized format for providing additional information about web content to search engines. This structured data is usually presented in the form of metadata, which is added to the HTML code of a web page.

Structured data is important for SEO because it helps search engines understand the content of a page better. By providing structured data, you can give search engines more context about your content, including what it's about, who wrote it, and when it was published. This can help search engines index your content more accurately, and display it in a more useful way in search results.

Some common types of structured data include:

Schema.org markup: This is a set of standardized tags that can be added to web pages to provide additional information about the content. For example, you might use Schema.org markup to indicate that a certain section of text is a recipe, or to mark up reviews of products or services.

Open Graph markup: This is a set of tags used to provide information about a web page to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Open Graph tags can be used to specify the title, description, and image that should be displayed when a page is shared on social media.

JSON-LD: This is a format for adding structured data to web pages in a way that is easily readable by both humans and machines. JSON-LD is becoming increasingly popular for adding structured data to web pages, particularly for e-commerce sites.

Overall, structured data is an important aspect of SEO that can help your content stand out in search results and provide more context to search engines about what your site is all about.

Using structured data to boost organic search traffic

2022-02-10T17:08:00.003-05:00

If you pay attention to Google search results, you have surely noticed how often your searches result in a list of questions, with answers, at the top of the results page. SEO experts have dubbed these "snippets" as search position zero. It's better than a top search ranking.

There are a few tricks to have Google serve your web page's in their snippet list. The main secret is to implement structured data.

Structured data is additional code embedded in your page HTML. There are several different methods by which this can be accomplished, as more fully described by Google's Developer's Guide, Providing Structured Data.

I have recently created a blog post, Basics of Kentucky Accident Law, with a series of frequently asked questions and answers.

Google recommends using the JSON-LD standard, but I opted for the HTML 5 Microdata format because it produces smaller pages with better performance. With JSON-LD all visible web content must be duplicated in a <script> container, thus doubling page size.

We'll see how well it works.

Your logo is not your brand

2021-08-15T16:23:00.006-04:00

Your logo is not your brand

In modern usage, a brand is a combination of factors that specifically identify a company, product, or individual. The aspects that can define a brand may include words, typography, images, colors, sound, music, taste, aroma or feel.

“Plop, plop. Fizz, fizz. Oh what a relief it is.”

A brand may also incorporate wholly abstract concepts.

“Nobody ever got fired by buying IBM.”

A goal of effective branding is to be memorable, unique and meaningful.

The tactics of effective branding require consistency across all media channels.

If you confuse, you lose.

Logos and slogans are an important part of branding, but they are only a part of a larger marketing strategy. Ideally, logos should be designed with the marketing strategy in mind.

The main factors that go into a logo design:

Words - usually a company or product name, although a well known slogan may be a substitute. Some logos are just images, without any words.

Typography - a distinctive font style may be an identifying characteristic.

Image - Usually an illustration.

Colors - More subtle than other elements, but still important.

Style - Abstract, stylized, retro, minimalist, etc. The style of a logo affects the typography, image and colors that are used.

A logo may be displayed using a wide variety of methods, sizes and resolutions.. The appearance and ease of transfer among different media and scale is a design consideration.

For example, a full color logo that works well with digital printing may be impossible to transfer to screen printing methods.

Branding: the active process of shaping the perceptions that consumers have about your brand.

A brand is the perception of a person, company or product in the eyes of the world. Some brands are firmly connected to a specific individual (Michael Jordan), some identify a business (Apple), and others relate only to a product or line of products irrespective of ownership (Pillsbury).

Branding is the marketing practice of actively shaping a distinctive brand.

Brand identity is the collection of all tangible brand elements that a company creates to portray the desired image of itself to the consumer.

It is entirely possible to create a brand identity without having a logo. A name, a face and a reputation are enough. Most businesses, however, do have logos, and they strive for something short, sweet, distinctive and memorable.

A logo is the one image that will come to mind when people think of your company. You see a swoosh on a sneaker or golden arches off the freeway and you are instantly connected to the brand. You want the same for your company.

The form and shape of design elements like your logo can be used to subtly elicit a specific reaction from your customers. A logo that is all circles and soft edges will inspire a very different reaction from a logo that’s sharp and triangular.

Logos serve 3 key functions:

To communicate key information about your brand, like the industry or specific clientele you serve
To differentiate you from the competition
To build brand recognition in the market

There are seven basic types of logos

Lettermarks/Monograms
Wordmarks
Pictorial logo images
Abstract logo images
Emblem logo marks
Mascots
Combination marks

A lot of thought goes into creating a unique, distinctive, and memorable logo. A first step is to research the logos of competitors in your industry. It should be fairly easy to spot the generic designs that have been overused. Avoid them. Do something else.

Dare to be different.

Getting indexed

2021-08-02T08:31:00.002-04:00

My current challenge is to drive traffic to the group of twelve web pages offering personalized Happy Birthday Mugs! that I designed. The hope is to sell a few mugs.

My first step was to submit a sitemap for these twelve pages to Google Search Console.

I did this on July 29. As of this morning, August 2nd, exactly one of these twelve pages were crawled and indexed by Google.

I want all of these pages to be indexed by Google.

I'd especially like for this specific BEST DAD Happy Birthday Gift Mug! to be indexed by Google next, please.

Clearly, writing about gift mugs and linking to particular web pages in a blog post about search engine optimization is one small step toward reaching my goal of full index coverage, high placement search results, massive web traffic, and a steady flow of cash.

The mug image to the left also links to the mug offer page, with key words included in the image alt and title tags.

I hope it works!

Only time will tell, and it isn't easy to determine which efforts are effective, and which are not.

-------

Tom Fox
Graphic Design and Marketing
Somerset, Kentucky
606-219-6982
tomwfox@gmail.com
https://www.facebook.com/ThomasXFox

Fine tuning the SEO

2021-08-01T11:52:00.007-04:00

Now I go back an rethink the use of keywords in this collection of related web pages.

I generally use a fixed directory for my web sites, so that all related pages with similar content are stored in an appropriately named directory. For example:

https://www.adverlabads.com/mugs/birthday/birthday_mug-catalog.html

This is a link to my collection of custom Happy Birthday Mugs

Directory "mugs" contains a sub-directory "birthday" which contains a collection of page files named "birthday_mug-01 through -10" I'm hoping this is a clear enough indication these pages relate to birthday mugs.

Next on my list after the file name is the page title. For the purpose of transparency, the page title should reflect the product name, which in turn ought to be an accurate reflection of what the product actually is. We aren't trying to fool anyone about what we are offering, and we do not want any confusion.

If you confuse, you lose.

First: What key words do I wish to promote?

I generally use Google's own Keyword Planning tool in its Google Ads site.

Starting with "birthday mug," Google suggests:

happy birthday mug
birthday gift mugs
birthday coffee mug
personalized birthday mug
30th birthday mug
40th birthday mug
50th birthday mug
60th birthday mug

SEO steps already taken:

Page title: <title>Custom Happy Birthday Mug - with age and message</title>

Meta tag: <meta name="description" content="Black 11oz ceramic mug with age, custom Happy Birthday wish and name personalization">

Facebook Open Graph tag: <meta property="og:description" content="Black 11oz ceramic mug with age, custom Happy Birthday wish and name personalization" />

JSON metadata microformat:"description": "Black 11oz ceramic mug with age, custom Happy Birthday wish and name personalization"

Question: Should these three descriptions, all in the head section of the page, be identical, or should there be some variation?

NEXT:

Image searches on Google are a separate category, and it is important that page images be clearly and accurately identified through the use of image alt tags and key words.

Key words can be associated with links through the linked text or the href title tag.

Descriptive text in the body of the page can incorporate key words and phrases.

Onward and Upward!

How do you know where you are in search results?

2021-08-01T08:09:00.000-04:00

Achieving a high placement in Google search results is the aim of all search engine optimization efforts. Showing up near the top of page one is pure gold. The more prominent your web site is in search results, the more free organic traffic your site receives.

But, how do you know how well your site is doing in Google search?

The short answer is Google Search Console.

Once you get your site registered and verified, and you submit a sitemap of your webpages for Google to index, then Google starts to collect data about your site's performance.

As you can see from this screenshot, once you select a time period (going back as far as 16 months) Google will show you the average search position for all pages during that time period.

The measure of success

2021-07-31T17:08:00.000-04:00

Peter Drucker once said, more or less, that it's impossible to manage anything that cannot be measured.

The important measure of success in any for-profit business is whether it made a profit. That is why God, in Her wisdom, invented CPAs.

But, there's a lot that goes into building a business long before making a profit is a realistic option. These business-building activities also need also to be measured, over time, simply to know if any of our activity is effective.

My efforts this week to design custom Happy Birthday Mugs, and to make them available on my web site, might have been totally misguided since there appears to be little search traffic for those key words.

About 400 searches per month for "birthday mugs", according to my research. That's not a lot.

However, the work has already been done. I've learned a few things with transfer value. And, with such a low demand set of key words, getting onto the first page of Google search might be a realistic possibility.

That would be better than nothing, yes?

This is the general schema for the Happy Birthday gift mug unit on my web site. Eleven individual mugs with their own separate sales page, chain linked to each other, and all cross-linked to a central catalog page.

There are zero out-bound links. This is a Page Rank sink.

Each individual birthday gift mug page contains verified micro-data entries describing the merchandise.

Each separate gift mug page uses Facebooks's Open Graph tags and have prominent page share buttons.

Each page is hand-coded html with minimal PHP or javascript, in an attempt to make them ruthlessly fast loading.

Each page is designed to be mobile adaptive and accessible. We have not yet attempted key word optimization,but we will get around to that very soon.

My objective is to generate some organic traffic and to boost the search results position.

Here is the baseline starting point, taken today from Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Something to sell

2021-07-30T08:25:00.003-04:00

The minimum requirements for a successful business:

Have something to sell that people want to buy at a price that is profitable.

People are strange. It's impossible to accurately guess what they want to buy. It's necessary to do research and to do testing to minimize risk.

A useful modern barometer of market demand are online search trends and volume. If folks are searching for something online, it's possible they would be interested in buying it when they find it.

Yesterday, I installed the "Keyword Surfer" extension on my Chrome browser. Keyword Surfer is a free SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tool that reports monthly keyword search volume, with suggestions.

Since one of my favorite print on demand graphic design projects is coffee mugs, I am looking at custom mugs as a possibility for my "something to sell."

Keyword Surfer reports there are 74,000 monthly searches for the keyword "mugs" and more than 40,000 searches for "custom mug." This, I would think, is a fairly clear indication of market demand, but it is too broad in scope to be practical. I need something more focused.

Last weekend I launched a project to come up with ten custom birthday gift mugs in ten days, and to build a web structure abound then. I'm almost finished with that challenge, well ahead of schedule, since it's only been six days. I have eleven custom birthday gift mugs installed on Zazzle, and ready to go, and the birthday gift mugs web pages are almost complete.

Keyword Surfer shows only 480 monthly searches for the term "birthday mugs" and zero searches for "birthday gift mugs."

I should have done my research first, before spending effort on birthday gift mugs.

How to make money with Print on Demand (POD)

2021-07-29T22:51:00.001-04:00

I started in layout and design for print at the dawn of the digital print age, in the early 1990s

The revolution began with desktop publishing. Then digital photography.

Full color printing became affordable, and there was plenty of work opportunities if you had a computer and knew how to use it.

Today, it is possible to print anything on anything, and nearly anyone can do it. But, if everything is possible and anyone with a phone has the tools to make it happen, the value of experience and ability is not actually cheapened any.

But it is a lot more difficult to sell.

The beauty of print on demand is the ability to produce a single unique artifact, whether it's a coffee mug or a washcloth, at an affordable price.

It is still not as inexpensive as the per unit cost of a mass produced artifact, but the overall cost is substantially less. If you only need one or two, and have no need for a thousand, print on demand provides the means.

Herein lies the business opportunity.

Photos of Old Louisville Landmarks - St. Louis Bertrand Catholic Church

2019-04-23T23:10:00.003-04:00

When Carmen and I lived in Old Louisville a few years back, one of my favorite things to do on nice days was to walk around the neighborhood taking snap shots with a digital camera. I do love digital photography for a number of reasons. No film, no processing and no delay. Plus, things were possible with digital photos that wold have been impossible, or very difficult, with old film photography.

One of the challenges of photographing Old Louisville landmarks, like churches and mansions, is the large size of the buildings and the lack of space within which a clear shot was possible.

Getting the entire building in one frame was often simply impossible, and stitching together half a dozen photos was frequently necessary. Then, there were telephone and power wires to contend with.

Anyway. I did it, and now I have put my photography work in Old Louisville on postcards and t-shirts. Here is St. Louis Bertrand Catholic Church.

St. Louis Bertrand Catholic Church Shirt
by Old Louisville

2019-02-27T16:59:00.002-05:00

Seven miracle angels - art by Carmen Cameron

This angel artwork was created by Carmen Cameron from 2004 to 2006, while she was living in Louisville, Kentucky. We combined the art with text in 2008 and put the resulting angel images and inspiring miracle sayings on a variety of clothing and merchandise, including coffee cups and baby apparel, through CafePress, at Angels and Miracles Angelic Visions. This is just a small sample.

World creation angel

Child of God angel

Truly helpful angel

Gift of peace angel

God's creation angel

Love angel

Happiness angel

by Angels and Miracles
Find more Healthy Baby Angel baby clothing
and unique angel gifts at CafePress

1971 - One Hundred Years of Rex, King of Carnival

2019-02-26T17:41:00.003-05:00

1971 - One Hundred Years of Rex, King of Carnival

Mardi Gras Centennial Ball celebrating one hundred years of Rex on Shrove Tuesday, February 23, 1971 in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Invitation and envelope postmarked February 9, 1971.

In admiration of violets

2014-10-23T11:10:00.001-04:00

Viola is a large and diverse genus of flowering plants with over 500 species around the world. The Common Blue Violet (Viola sororia) is the type best known here in Kentucky as an early spring wildflower. Not everyone likes violets in their lawn, but their heart shaped low growing leaves can be an attractive ornamental yard feature when grown in clumps, borders or as a ground cover.

These Midwestern wild violets generally bloom in the Spring and produce seed pods in the Fall. The violet seed pods can be gathered before they explode. Store the seed pods in a paper sack while they dry out and pop open. Listening to the seed pods pop in a paper bag is like listening to microwave popcorn . . . in slow motion.

Little Leather Library Identification Guide

2013-08-18T12:17:00.002-04:00

For the history of the Little Leather Library and a list of published titles,
see the Little Leather Library Page.

There are different types of Little Leather Library books

The details of Little Leather Library publications were not well documented at the time. The publishers did not seem to have much concern for the curiosity for those of us who come poking around some one hundred years later. The publishers were busy adapting to changing times and experimenting with new marketing and printing technology. It now seems odd to think of what they did as ever being "new," for now, to us, it is all very old. The publishers were busy making money and did not give much thought to the fact they were also making history.

The big watershed event of the early Twentieth Century was World War I, and the impact of that global cataclysm is reflected in the changing face of the books produced by the Little Leather Library over ten short years. There are the pre-WWI Little Leather Library books made with genuine leather and the post-WWI books made with imitation leather.

Seeing the different types of Little Leather Library books side-by-side, it is easy to notice the difference between the real and the fake leather covers, However cheesy the early fake leather covers are upon close examination, the fakes are still good enough to fool people today. Either people don't bother to look closely or the power of the name, Little Leather Library, is enough to make many see what isn't there.

I've been watching people buy and sell Little Leather Library book on eBay for about ten years, I still see folks who describe the fake leather books as "genuine leather" and I laugh to myself.

The Little Leather Library Corporation of New York started off in 1915 making real leather covered books. When World War I caused serious leather shortages, the switch was made to imitation leather-like book covers. My research suggests the imitation leather was an early cellulose-based plastic impregnated canvas fabric that was embossed with a texture on one side and a flocking on the other. This synthetic leather was produced by DuPont and it was further embossed and printed over by the publisher.

I have seen five clearly different types of Little Leather Library books with one minor variation. The first two types have genuine leather covers and predate WWI and the last three types have the DuPont fake leather covers after WWI into the 1920s.

Before the War - Genuine Leather
It's hard to know for sure which came first, Type I or Type II. Based upon the general scarcity of the Type I volumes in the marketplace, and for other reasons, I believe Type I came first in time before Type II. That is why I names it Type I. I have no doubt that both the real leather Types I and Types II were manufactured before World War I.

Type I
Distinguishing marks:

Soft suede real leather covers.
Leather dyed different bright colors. Blue, green etc.
Book title and "Little Leather Library" embossed on front cover
Pages sewn into signatures with end papers glued to inside front and back covers
Limited number of titles.

Type II
Distinguishing marks:

Soft polished leather covers.
Natural leather color.covers
Book title embossed on front cover
"Little Leather Library" embossed on back cover
Pages sewn into signatures with end papers glued to inside front and back covers
Expanded number of titles.

After World War I and Into the Roaring Twenties - Fake Leatherette

Type III
Distinguishing marks:

Red leatherette covers.
Book title and "Miniature Library" printed on front cover with gold ink.
"Little Leather Library Corporation New York" on title page.
Pages sewn into signatures but no end paper.

Type IIIa and Type IIIb differ mainly in that:

Type IIIa is one-eighth inch taller than Type IIIb,
The two types are different shades of red,
The Type IIIa cover.has only the texture of the underlying canvas fabric whereas Type IIIb covers are embossed with a granular-pebbly texture .

It's anybody''s guess which came first.My guess is that type IIIa came first.

Type IV

Type IV is the common Redcroft Edition with the familiar brownish-green covers. Millions of these volumes were printed and mass-marketed in the early 1920s, before 1924 when ownership of the Little Leather Library changed hands.

Distinguishing marks:

Brown leatherette covers.overprinted with green ink.
Book title and author embossed on front cover.
"Little Leather Library" and "Redcroft Edition" embossed on back cover.
Leather-like "grain" embossed onto cover material
Unfortunate tendency to stick together due to green ink overprint
Pages sewn into signatures but no end paper.

Type V

Ownership of the Little Leather Library changed hands in 1924. The next new edition bore the name "Little Luxart Library" and was published by Robert K.Haas, Inc.

Distinguishing marks:

Bright red leatherette covers
Book title and author embossed on front cover
"Little Luxart Library" embossed on back cover.
"Robert K. Haas, Inc. Publishers, (Formerly Little Leather Library Corporation)" printed on inside title page
Pages sewn into signatures but no end paper.

Zenit-122 SLR Camera User's Manual - English

2013-08-05T16:09:00.001-04:00

The Zenit 122 is a 35mm SLR film camera with a through-the-lens light meter and split-screen manual lens focus. It was made in the U.S.S.R.
This is the Owner's Manual, in English, that came with the camera from Russia.

Zenit 122 SLR Camera User's Manual - English
scanned by Tom Fox

Charles H. Bradford, silversmith

2013-07-14T08:17:00.004-04:00

Charles H. Bradford (1821-1903) was a 19th Century American silversmith, jeweler and watchmaker from Westerly, Washington County, Rhode Island, who went west in his middle age. Bradford advertised his related trade crafts in the 1860 New Albany Directory, City Guide, and Business Mirror, in Indiana, where he settled for several decades.

Charles H. Bradford is also listed in the 1871-1872 edition of William's New Albany Directory at 93 Pearl Street, for watches and jewelry.

Bradford is documented online in William Erik Voss's American Silversmiths.

Surviving examples of Bradford's silversmith work seem to be sparse. A single silver teaspoon crafted by Bradford was donated as part of a memorial to his wife by prominent Cincinnati attorney Vincent H. Beckman to the duPont Winterthur Museum near Wilmington, Delaware.

This Bradford teaspoon was but one piece in a larger silver spoon collection donated by Beckman to the Winterthur Museum.

Other than that, there is hardly any mention of Bradford or his work online.

Here are two samples of Bradford's silversmith work: A berry spoon and a butter knife. Since these are family pieces from the general New Albany, Indiana area, I assume they were crafted by Bradford when had his shop there during and after the Civil War.

The hand-tooled decorative design on the butter knife is distinctive.

Bradford's mark. "CHAS. H. BRADFORD."

Flea Club Mardi Gras Doubloons

2013-02-23T08:22:00.000-05:00

As I recently heard the story, some time ago the Elks of Olreanians started a populist Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans so that ordinary people who were not part of the exclusive establishment krewes could get in on the fun too. To the best of my understanding, each truck float in this parade was created and manned by its own mini-carnival crew, each truck float had its own theme and decorations, and each even had their own Mardi Gras doubloons.

" . . . . I can remember growing up that still have a presence in Elks are the Goodtimers Carnival club and FUNtastic Carnival Club. Back in the heyday of Doubloons each of these carnival clubs would mint there own doubloons. Some of these clubs would parade for years others would come and go in the blink of an eye. But because the floats were put together by neighborhood friends or coworkers there is not an official information on each truck float . . . ." John Ray from LA

Information about these truck float doubloons is hard to come by, and this is the little bit of it that has come my way. It seems "The Flea Club" Mardi Gras doubloons were minted by one of these Elks truck float krewes in the 1960s and 1970s. When they started and when they ended ... I don't know.

Here are some other hi-res photos of the Flea Club doubloons on Photobucket.com:

1974 - gold tone aluminum - 10 Ga.
1974 - silver tone aluminum

1976 - gold tone aluminum
1976 - silver tone aluminum

No date - gold tone aluminum
No date - silver tone aluminum

The inventory of the Charles V. Booth collection at the University of New Orleans shows one 1968 Flea Club doubloon as being part of the Elks Krewe of Orleanians.

Mardi Gras doubloons on Facebook

New: Thanks to Bob, an excerpt from the old Bayou Product catalog showing Flea Club doubloons.

Kill the lawyers

2010-09-28T17:39:00.002-04:00

Many before me have written about the possibility of eliminating lawyers. It was Shakespeare who wrote in Henry VI, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

It's an impractical goal in an age of specialization, and in which the lawyers have insinuated themselves into every aspect of modern life. The necessity of lawyers is bonded to our national ideals, as a nation of laws and not of men; or a nation of laws and not of church authority. Lawyers are indispensable artifacts of the way we live and what we value. Looking on the bright side, it is lawyers and the judicial system which allows us to resolve disputes without bloodshed. Not like the old days.

But, giving lawyers their due does not require total capitulation. There are, in fact, many lawyers who are interested in noting more than to line their own pockets at anybody's expense. That is just a fact, and it is not intended as an indictment of all honest hard-working lawyers. But, the ancient question, "How many lawyers does it take to skin a client?" has always been answered, "Two. One of whom is supposedly working for the client."

Lawyers are expensive, and paying for lawyers is a game for the affluent. The less affluent suffer, or do without. Win or lose, it is always expensive in one way or another.

Just as you don't need a doctor for every little cut or scrape, you don't actually need a lawyer for every trifling legal matter. This is assuming you can tell the difference between when you do need a lawyer and when you do not, but there is an inherent danger in any system that is structured so that defending one's own vital interests is dependent upon pricey outside assistance.

The legal self-help movement has a long history, going back at least to 1845, when Thomas Wooler published his Every Man His Own Attorney. Wooler wrote,

"When attorneys are employed, they must be paid; and their charges are not always regulated either by their abilities, or their service to a client, but by their own desire to make as much as they can. This evil can only be remedied by making their clients well informed on common subjects, and able to see what course they are taking in matters of more intricacy."

The lawyer's Code of Professional Responsibility and the Model Rules of Professional Conduct reflect an idealistic goal of the profession pursuing legal education of the public, but the extent of what education that actually happens does not go beyond pointing out the need to hire an attorney. The Canadian legal system recognizes that Lawyers "share responsibility for ensuring that broader society has a knowledge and understanding of the law and an appreciation of the values advanced by the rule of law." Robert Bell & Caroline Abela

"The question of whether lawyers have an ethical duty to perform public service--and, in particular, whether the obligation requires that a percentage of time be devoted to providing free legal services to the poor has a disjointed and uneven history. Leaders of the bar, espousing various and often conflicting views of morality, compassion, noblesse oblige, and individual autonomy, have contributed to this state of affairs, creating a complicated web of vague ideals that today jeopardizes the legal profession's sense of its own public obligations. On the one hand, the legal profession remains dedicated to the traditional view that public service is a matter of personal charity, to be performed at the discretion of the individual attorney. And yet, despite the prevalence of this dominant notion, an undercurrent of thought rejects the relativistic approach to public service, arguing instead that lawyers have a professional responsibility to help assure that legal services are available to all, including those who cannot afford to purchase representation on the open market. The Code of Professional Responsibility and the Model Rules of Professional Conduct reflect both notions of public service, sending mixed signals to members of the bar as to whether their professional duties include the obligation to render free legal services to those in need." - The lawyer's duty of public service: More than charity? - 96 W. Va. L. Rev. 367, Winter, 1993/1994

A note to novice bloggers

2010-09-23T16:29:00.001-04:00

Seth Godin has advocated writing blog entries every single day as a means of confronting and overcoming inner resistance, at least in a small way. To all outward appearances, this is what Godin himself has done for the past few years. There was a time before that when he skipped a day or two nearly every week.

It is a useful exercise, but there comes a point when the resistance shifts from opposing doing it every day to opposition to skipping a day. This is reminiscent of fiction writer Stephen King following his encounter with an automobile as a pedestrian a few years back. While laid up in the hospital in traction and on pain killers, he insisted on keeping up his usual habit of writing every day. This is what successful writers do. They write every day, and by any measure Stephen King is a successful writer.

But Stephen King's daily writing had a focus. He was writing horror stories.

With blogging it is possible to write about something every day and have no continuity from one blog post to the next, and to have no overall focus. Seth Godin generally writes within a definite range of business and marketing topics, with recurring themes.

When writing blog posts just for the sake of writing blog posts, there is a risk of writing about the wild hare du jour, which is continually shifting. Whatever comes to mind or is triggered by the big news story of the day, that is what gets blogged. Writing every day for the sake of discipline is good, writing every day to improve your writing skills is also good. Even better is limiting your writing to a semi-focused topic.

A useful practice is to go back after a few months of blog posting and read what you have written. Do the daily accretions add up to anything? Then comes the time to face the possibility of embracing a purpose greater than overcoming old self-defeating habits.

The dirty secret of organic foods

2010-09-16T11:20:00.000-04:00

This is a secret I've kept for over ten years now, but not because it's much of a secret or because I want to keep it. It is a bit of information that is difficult to convey with an appropriate sense of importance. Maybe someone else will pick up the ball and run with it, and forgive me my lack of evangelical zeal.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has generated and accumulated data on the nutritional composition of grains and produce since well before WWII, and the data is all publicly available. If you compare the nutritional contents of various farm products from 1950, you will notice the major vitamins and minerals were present at about twice the concentration as they were for similar food items in the year 2000.

There's not much to argue about with this observation. Look a the data and you can easily see for yourself that the nutritional composition of commercially grown food is one-half now compared to what it was fifty years ago.

My explanation for this is simple, and it may even be accurate. Traditional farming practices were quickly abandoned after World War II when cheap nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK) fertilizers became available due to surplus chemical factory capacity after the national need to produce high explosives abated. Industry switched from making chemicals for bombs to making chemicals for fertilizers.

Although NPK fertilizers are very good for growing plants, they do nothing to replenish other chemical and elemental components of soil that are very good for human health. Every growing season the crops sucked iron, calcium, chromium, selenium, and magnesium out of the soil, and no thought was given to replacing these and other minerals.

Elemental minerals, however, are the essential building blocks for the more complex vitamin compounds. In the right conditional and with the right minerals present in the soil, plants produce an abundance of chemical compounds that are good for people to eat, but don't seem to be necessary for the plant's own survival. If the basic elements needed for producing a certain vitamin are lacking in the soil, the plant simply does not produce as much of that vitamin.

The plant itself does not seem to suffer from these mineral shortages.

There seems to be some vague sense which nags us that there's something not quite right about the food supply, when we stop long enough to think about it. The organic food movement is a symptom of this foreboding, but I think they threw out the baby with the bathwater when "organic" is defined to exclude NPK fertilizers.

Doing that makes organic foods much more expensive without making it more safe or more nutritious. Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are about as natural as it gets.

Permission marketing trademark evaporation

2010-08-25T17:10:00.001-04:00

I see this morning that Facebook.com is suing Teachbook.com for trademark infringement. I understand how and why the Facebook lawyers justify protecting the name by this means, even if I consider it to be a gross misuse of trademarks law as it ought to be. But I happen to think the whole idea of 'intellectual property' leans toward the oxymoronic.

The best laugh I've ever enjoyed from a good trademark joke, and those are very rare, was yesterday evening when I researched the trademark registration on the phrase "Permission Marketing." Seth Godin invented that phrase at least thirteen years ago, and he literally wrote the book on it. It was a 1999 book titled Permission Marketing.

At Infoworld's July, 1997 Spotlight conference, where "Silicon-Valley-Meets-Hollywood," Seth Goden spoke and is quoted in the Aug. 4 1997 issue of InfoWorld, p. 103, as saying in interactive internet markets customers, "will give you 'permission' to market to them."

Godin's company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. filed an application for a Federal trademark registration for "Permission Marketing" on September 3, 1998. Yahoo! announced its acquisition of Yoyodyne on Oct. 12, 1998, at the same time Godin's book Permission Marketing went to press for release the following May. Yahoo! received technical ownership of the Federal Trademark Registration on "Permission Marketing" with its purchase of Yoyodyne, but Godin retained a license to use it. He had a nearly published book with that name on the cover coming out soon.

But, partly due to the fact of the books great success, if you ask anyone that is familiar with the idea of permission marketing, "Who do you associate with the phrase 'Permission Marketing'," nine out of ten will answer, "Seth Godin." Under those facts, it is nearly impossible for Yahoo! to retain even technical ownership of the trademark. I suppose it would be called trademark dilution, but that idea doesn't quite fit.

On April 4, 2008 Yahoo!'s trademark claim to 'Permission Marketing" died. It was cancelled. I have seen nothing to suggest there was any litigation or dispute of the matter, so I conclude its cause of death was the sober realization at Yahoo! that there are some things you just can't buy. I laughed.

People and pigs - Kentucky State Fair

2008-08-25T12:56:00.004-04:00

People and pigs Kentucky State Fair Wednesday, August 20, 2008

The total sensual impact of walking into the State Fair hog barn on a hot August day cannot be described. It is not the least bit offensive, but it is overwhelmingly earthy and powerful. I walked ten paces into the barn and had to stop. I was surrounded by hundreds of huge pigs everywhere. This panorama photo is the best I can do to share the experience.