What a week. I'm still not caught up. My new favorite band, Falling Anvils, is in the list this week. Check them out here: http://www.myspace.com/fallinganvils.

Oh yeah, it's Friday again. Today I just randomly scrolled through MediaMonkey and picked what I felt like.

Wife Beater Brand Woman's Shirt

I'll be the first to admit I find sick things funny. I listen to metal music, which is wrapped with sick imagery, usually for the sake of shock value. I get it.

However, Wife Beater brand clothes cross my own arbitrary line of what I can take. Maybe because I'm a victim of childhood abuse myself. But take a look at the picture of the women's shirt to the right. There is something deeply unsettling about women wearing a bloody hand symbol, representing domestic violence. To me that's like Jews wearing swastikas or blacks wearing the KKK symbol. There are some things I can't even laugh at.

Read more from: Geek Meets Girl.

H/T: @chris_oh

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Palm/HP is giving away $1 million in goodies for developers to port their apps over to webOS. I'm not going to pretend I'm not biased. I have a Palm Pre and I love my phone nearly as much as my own children.

Head over to Palm's development site for details.

My hopes for HP's involvement with webOS development are high. My wife has an Android phone and it's not bad but it certainly doesn't have the usability of my Pre. However, since I've had it, a few things are lacking:

• No voice dial. By this point, it's silly it hasn't been implemented yet. So many pedestrians are needlessly exposed to me finding numbers by hand. Just saying.
• No support for appointments received in email via POP or IMAP. Only Exchange appointments actually work. Appointments received in other mail services result in an error message. Come on dudes!
• No basic photo editing. Before I upload any photo to any online service, I should be able to perform basic cropping and resizing.
• Basic file management. I want to be able to rename files and organize them without connecting to a PC.
• Audible still hasn't created a client for the Pre. I've been an Audible customer for years and I'm about to give up on them altogether.
• 4G. Duh.

With layoffs pending at Palm and HP admitting phones are their highest priority for webOS, I probably won't get my wishes. I will also probably end up on an HTC EVO, which  is a great phone, but it's still Andriod-based and so many things about webOS have spoiled me.

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This week is about getting my evil on so I can get work done. I'm in a dark brooding mood. Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's the fact I'm really behind on everything.

Full disclosure: I don't own an e-book reader. Maybe that's why I'm not too hip on e-books as described in this Huffington Post article by Paul Levine.

Funny, I don't recall anyone blissfully sniffing their books until the threat from e-publishing appeared. Now, readers can't resist comparing their moldy old tomes to the finest Bordeaux.

I'm not an e-book contrarian. In some ways I think e-books are cool. I work in technology. I love technology. If it was legal, I'd marry technology. As a tech writer, I've been making online documentation since before Project Gutenberg when AS/400s were the means to get electronic documentation. I may not have said "RTFM" first, but I was an early adopter. It's just that my online documentation isn't around anymore except on my hard drive. I have kept nearly every project I've written since my early days of CP/M and Wordstar. Here's the rub: when I try to open one of these old documents, here's what I get:

My high school paper on Jon Donne was written in Wordstar for CP/M and looks like crap now

Why is that? Wordstar isn't around. Oh and check out this error:

Word doesn't like older Word docs.

That is Microsoft Word protecting me from my own early Word documents. Sure there's a work around but now we get into security and old files. Those who have not adventured to DIY PC maintenance may be at a loss as to how to recover that letter they wrote Aunt Marge telling her to stick it.

Do you know what this is?

Old documents and software I have to keep for some reason

This is a necessity for previous client work. Somewhere in this stack is Corel Ventura so I can open a bunch of documents I did for somebody many years ago. I don't know what the retention should be on holding that kind of work. I'm no longer independent, but if they want the source files, I have them. There are no rules for this other than everything changes.

How about PDF? It's an open standard right? The only wide and open standard is PDF/A is plain text and doesn't prevent anybody from copying and forwarding out the books. So we go back to digital rights management (DRM). I hate DRM. Why is it that I don't have the Beastie Boys' To the 5 Boroughs anymore? It's because I bought that album from MusicMatch in 2004 and Yahoo took MusicMatch and flushed it down the DRM hole. However, I still have all of the MP3s I purchased from Lala.com as real downloads and I'm glad I did since Apple seems to be treating Lala.com like MusicMatch's ugly step-sister's dog. I predict long-term e-book DRM will be full of headaches, lost purchases, and overcomplicated restriction. It's the nature of the business.

Also from that article is this:

The shelf life of dead-tree books roughly approximates that of a pint of yogurt, but out-of-print books get eternal life on the Internet.

Levine goes on to explain how one of his books is out of print but alive and well as an e-book. That's great for authors. But I point you to the photo above of my stack of CDs. In that stack are CDs of electronically published books I never reference. I forget about them. I forget who wrote them. I forget what they are about. The very fact I have terabytes of documents and a growing deficit of time to organize means more things are lost in the shuffle. I don't see much cover art and authors' names when I look in a directory.

Your book may live on forever on the Internet, but what is "eternal life"? Authors don't want to be pirated, but Levine discusses free classics and their abundance online. The classics are abundant because they are freely distributed. I can get Sherlock Holmes books from any number of sites in just about every format imaginable. But my favorite edition is this printed edition I had recovered after my dog chewed the spine.

It's not anything but a personal preference. When I buy a real book, it's tangible. While I don't normally smell my books, I will admit loving the bookstore smell. I also don't collect books in the first-edition-or-die sense. But here are my shelves:

Technical, business, and design books:

Technical, business, and design books.

Living room fiction:

Living Room Fiction

Bedroom fiction:

Bedroom Reading Queue

Eldest child fiction:

Eldest Child Fiction

While my collection won't live forever, I've yet to have a shelf not allow me to read a book or give me something incompatible with my reading environment. I'm open to e-books, but not that open.

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Over the years, I've heard of people having issues with Paypal randomly freezing funds, mostly related to eBay. I never paid that much attention because I never knew anyone personally that happened to. Well, it's different now. Some good people trying to do a good thing are feeling the random Paypal wrath:

Over the past several weeks we’ve had 3-4 random calls from various people at PayPal, all of whom only identify themselves by their first name, none of whom have direct phone numbers or email addresses, and all of whom are asking the exact same questions over and over…

• What is this OpenCamp thing?
• How many people will be coming?
• Why are you doing this?

Every time I go through the same speech with them. They are aware that we held WordCamp the past two years and have verified the previous registrations those years. They are aware that I personally have had a PayPal account for many years with them, and that I even have the Woopra account through them with far more volume than OpenCamp will ever have.

But despite the long term and multi-account relationship we enjoy, they’ve gone so far as to force me to send them copies of my drivers license and social security card to some strange physical address, and even run a personal credit check to allow us to keep accepting payments for OpenCamp.

OpenCamp is running all registrations through EventBrite and then into Paypal. It's an easy way to put on a conference, right? As a Big Design organizer my hackles are up. After reading this, I was on the phone immediately to co-organizer Brian Sullivan and he is with other organizers at lunch. We can take our Big Design business elsewhere. In the meantime, I encourage you to complain to Paypal if you registered for OpenCamp.

The irony of all of this is that OpenCamp needs access to the money to have a successful conference. By freezing their account, Paypal is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Paypal has successfully put the conference at more risk. Go read the whole article and pay attention to the information they are asking from OpenCamp. This moronic behavior cannot be justified.

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At first, I tried to find patriotic metal for the July 4 weekend. After realizing that was stupid, I picked some works I haven't heard in a while instead plus the new Yakuza, which is highly recommended. Also, I'm writing a review on As My World Burns. The jury is deliberating. Heavily.

I know this making the rounds, but still, it is the best press release ever. Ever. Ever.

Random searching somehow lead me to Youku.com and some guy doing a great job playing a Jay Chou song. Since I can't read Chinese, all I say "is good job random search result guy" and then share it with everyone else. BTW, Jay Chou will play Kato in the upcoming Green Hornet movie along side Seth Rogen.

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Yeah, #metalfriday. This day is devoted to me getting enough work done to actually enjoy a beer tonight without thinking about all I didn't get done. May the gods of metal have mercy upon my soul.

While having lunch with some Sabre folks today, a group of firefighters sat at a table next to us. As soon as they ordered, their radios went off and they all rushed out. On my way home, I saw them again working this scene.

That's Not Going to Buff Out

On the upside, I had spinach lasagna with a caesar salad.

This is brilliant. That is all.

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Nevermore - Obsidian Conspiracy

Once upon an MP3-eary, while I worked, weak and weary,
Over many a deprecated code and compiled kernel’s core
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly double bass came a tapping,
As if rapid machine gun rapping, rapping at my eardrum’s door.
“Tis ass kickery,” I muttered, “slapping at my eardrum’s door --
Only this and so much more.”

Ah, distinctly I remember it was the music beginning to dismember,
Obsidian Conspiracy’s embers wrought a ghost crafted by Nevermore.
I listened til the morrow – vainly I had no time to borrow,
Work forgotten without sorrow—no sorrow because of Nevermore
For it was the talented quartet who named themselves Nevermore
Who fled from grunge for evermore.

“The Termination Proclamation” bore Warrel Dane’s vocal modulation,
Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors rarely felt before.
So that following with the beating of “Your Poison Throne” I stood repeating,
“Rise! Rise! Rise! Tis much more than a standard reaping of my eardrum’s door—
Tis no ordinary album this Obsidian Conspiracy thrashing me to the core;
It’s progressive, tech, thrash, and so much more.”

Jeff Loomis’ beguiling riffs, with mastery of the circle of fifths,
“Emptiness Unobstructed” lifts above erstwhile dark narrative lore,
An earworm eating, “Without Morals” beating and beating,
Repetitive treating without fleeting the constant beating of my eardrum’s door.
This is the essence of Nevermore.

Deep into the darkness peering, their lyrics weave a tale of fearing
The human psyche, eerily leering dreams of mortals dark to the core.
Each song tells a tale of sadness, beckoning me to the edge of madness,
But Obsidian Conspiracy contrary to any concept album of yore—
This was something new and so much more.

Twisting sound into new contortions, but keeping echoes of past distortions,
Nevermore’s growth epic in proportions, will rap, tap, tap on your eardrum door
Masters of their craft steadfast, consistent but building on albums past
Never falling for trends amassed, of faddish incongruity like metalcore
Obsidian Conspiracy is wonderfully dark, beautiful, and hard to the core
Quoth the reviewer, “I give it a four.”

Author’s Note: If none of the above made any sense to you, drink your milk and stay in school. Also I highly recommend you buy this album, as it’s Nevermore’s best work to date.

Bill Swallow (a.k.a. @techcommdood ), the renaissance man of technical communication, has posted some tips on going from Framemaker to Robohelp. Working still on the Framemaker side of a similar project, I am singing on a hill that is alive with the sound of music. Go forth and read: Using Conditional Text in Adobe Technical Communication Suite 2 and then thank Bill for the fine writeup.

Also note one of the linked articles below. Dear Adobe, if you have to put the word "demystifying" in any headline related to your own product on your own blog, it's time for you to bring in the UX guns. Seriously. You can demystify stuff on the back end and save us all the trouble of hating on you later.

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As I stood on stage at the Big Design Conference, I had no idea the trouble brewing on the back row. Sitting back there was Giovanni Gallucci, the social media expert. He came in at some point after I started. He knows Dave Curlee and Dave said to him, "Oh man, Keith called you out."

I didn't mean to call Giovanni out specifically. I knew he was slated to speak in a couple of hours already and I was about to make a point that social media doesn't have to be all about making money. This was not planned but "Giovanni will not like this point" or something like that slipped out. I went on about the assumptions that social media is all about money, marketing, etc. is wrong.  Then I went on to define "Douchebaggery". Apparently this word resonated with Giovanni. He spent the next hour changing his entire presentation from "Extreme Social Marketing with Youtube" to "Extreme Douchebaggery with Youtube".

Yes, he did.

And this was his opening slide:

I'm Not Ignorant.

I have never been called out like this before and it was hilarious. Now if you were there and missed the Mad*Pow after party, you missed Giovanni and I having dinner. We did not duke it out. Giovanni definitely has a stage persona. Real Giovanni is a really cool guy. He's very smart, smarter than I am, but he is more like a whore to my slut. I guess I give it away too much but loathe myself in the morning. He feeds his children using his knowledge and is proud of it. I respect that.

I also appreciate his good humor and the fact he made his presentation all about me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. It was like an early birthday gift of self-absorption.

Anyway, thanks to Giovanni for his presentation and his ability to do some serious riffing. It was the best time at the conference for me. I think I want to do a panel with him sometime, but who would clean up the mess?

Thursday

Brian's sister's SUV full so full

While the conference doesn't start until Friday, Thursday, Thursday is the day to be there. The loading and unloading of so-called "swag" and the French mimes with their constant voices telling me to put the books for the bookstore into Ballroom West. So I moved the boxes. All of them. Volunteers telling me something I can't hear like death of a microphone.

Vendors with their giant signage building around me. Handshakes all around. Why do they know my name? There's something about "exhibit coordinator" exhaled lifelessly from the vendor with the nice hair. Alfonzo. Userzoom. The company with nice hair. I wish I had nice hair.

More trips to and from cars with signs, boxes, and other awkwardness. Brian Sullivan's borrowed Hummer is at capacity and so is Brian. I'm bleeding inside from the death grip of hunger. Eating my soul and my Twitter stream.

Thursday night mixer with speakers. Oh there goes Jared Spool walking by. I'm taller than him but his passing crushes my spirit and I collapse into another room only to find Russ Unger staring away from me. Maybe I'm invisible or just really fat.

There is beer in this place. It is the beer of acceptance, the beer of peer pressure. The beer of unobtainable intellect swirling and fizzing. Thoughts abound. Phillip Hunter finds me and I hide inside.

Chris Hester is about, easily talking about design with the micro-celebrities of this plane. There is laughter. Cackling laughter. Adobe people are there. They laugh too. So much laughing.

Friday

I'm late. I'm early. But late.

More vendors. So. Many. Vendors. We've turned SMU into a trade show and no one seems to care. Not one bird falls from the sky. Dead.

Susan Weinschenk speaks and people gather and listen. Heads nod. Tweets tweet. Future books sell. Big Design becomes a blur of activity. Donuts with orange icing mock other donuts with their Aquent sponsored superiority and their heavy-handed yumminess. And Aquent collects people, like a harvester robot. I don't know how many but so many were collected. So many.

They Stare Back At Me

It's a day of meet and greet. Some speakers don't show. But fortunately a sub-woofer steps up.

At 1:00 pm, I find myself on a stage. They stare at me. People staring. I talk about ideas I have and it makes attendees argue with each other and I feel bad. But really I don't. Only later do I realize Giovanni Gallucci will mock me, openly and without mercy. Curse him and his western capitalist jackhole persona. I'm only a hippie and am afraid to rush the stage.

B.J. Allen is rushing around getting stuff done. I decide I don't like marathon men both real and in my head.

Mad*Pow after party lets me down because I was hoping to see infected cattle. I think my hearing needs to be checked. But I stay anyway.

Later, Giovanni and I eat dinner together and his monster is turned off. I no longer fear him, but I'm still fat. Ben Smithee watches us both with superior thinness.

Later that night I meet Darren Hall who wears his life on his arms. He connects with me and steals my mojo. I want to curl up into an alien baby fetus. Then I meet Brad Venable. He does voices. Voices. Lots of them. More than the ones in my head.

Saturday

Chris Bernard speaks about John Hughes. Why is everyone so focused on death? Chris finds the Christ figure in all of John Hughes' movies. I am moved. A little. I'm still not sure Maizy is Uncle Buck's Judas.

Can't attend sessions as work needs to be done. I'm jealous of the attendees drinking from the knowledge pouring from the heads of intellects who share at goats. Joshua Bright runs around me making stuff happen. How I loathe his energy and I try to trip him. It doesn't work. Damn.

Like surreal melting clocks, I get pats on the back from people I don't know. But I remain fat.

Lara Becker plans to put a body in the ice chest. She's always thinking behind those glasses. Thinking thoughts.

Jared Spool closes and brings the house down. Literally. Somewhere someone is homeless and wailing about their house.

After party: Jared wears a toga. I become infatuated with Jeremy Johnson's hair. I think he hides things in it like Sweet Lou from the Super Globtrotters. One minute he has all of this camera gear and the next it's gone. I will call him Gizmo from now on.

Beer is poured. Nathan Shedroff is too nice. Something must be wrong with him like he was hatched from a pod. He must be stopped.

Some whacked-out beer commercial is played followed by awkward silence.

Sunday

Nothing.

This is why I'm on Twitter. I wasn't aware of RSA until a few minutes ago and now I am planning a white board for every wall in my house. Who needs dry wall? The only bad thing I can say is both the medium and the message are duking it out for my attention.

Hat tips to @valeskaUX, @willsansbury, & @jasonrobb

Over at Snipe.net, Alison Gianotto (a.k.a. @snipeyhead ) thinks she's all that and a bag of chips on the shoulder. She went a long rant about bloggers giving advice about blogging. Clearly Alison has some kind of bone to pick with douchebaggers everywhere. She might as well have dropped an anvil on my head personally. Now I realize her article is a few weeks old, but she apparently is asking to be taken to blogging school.

I will not enjoy this, but somebody has to manage the woodshed.

Metameta

First and foremost, blogging is all about the meta. Bloggers must talk about blogging. How else would anybody else know how to blog? Let's say, for example, James Joyce didn't deliver the goods in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man? Would anyone know the depths of self loathing and misery novelists must endure before crapping out their own works of metafiction? I think not.

Metablogging is where the real modern writers are. They are the success stories. Like Tony Robbins is to real world business,  the metabloggers of our time are here to inspire wannabes everywhere to write about writing. If you cannot blog about blogging then you can't report about reporting or sing about singing. It's all the same really. Writers who don't blog about blogging are lost and don't deserve the revered title of "blogger". There are only a few blogs out there and they must count for something.

Marketing Is the Cornerstone of Civilization

The next thing Alison rants about in her "article" is some nonsense about marketing people needing to get a clue. In today's society, marketing is what holds us all together. Obviously she doesn't appreciate the way commercialism and marketing have rooted themselves into our culture to such a point people wear tattoos of logos of their favorite companies. She must have something against scripted phone calls during dinner time. What kind of communist would post such drivel? The next thing you know, she'll want the Pentagon to hand Wall Street's keys over to the Kaiser. Makes me want to puke.

Blogging Is the New Blogging

Finally, I say all bloggers out there must blog about blogging. Nobody cares about your cats or your kids or your stupid charities. Book reviews? What a joke. Nobody reads anymore; ask Steve Jobs. No one asked for regular people to become journalists and write stories that lazy, stupid reporters can't copy and paste from press releases. Bloggers who blog about blogging write those damn press releases for a reason. It's just the way things are. We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning.

I hope this clears things up. Coming soon, my listicle on blogging about bloggers who blog from a blogging conference. I'm thinking a good 75 tips should do it.

Alison's Real Spelling

Update: Apologies (in all seriousness) to Alison for originally misspelling her name. I went with the spelling in this graphic from her website and without my glasses, the letters blurred together. Where oh where did my 20/20 go? Pretty soon I'll be one of those people who use their 24" monitors to display 640 x 480 and view it through a magnifying glass.

And no, the irony is not lost on me.

As @brianksullivan and I where coming back from SMU today, we passed by this.

Fire! Fire! Fire!

What can I say, Ronnie James Dio inspired me as a vocalist and made his mark in the rock and metal worlds in such a way nothing will be the same. I dedicate this playlist to his memory. Cheers, dude. I hope Rock 'N' Roll heaven is full of rainbows, packs of dogs, and a lack of fools who should have sailed away before you got there. You will be missed.

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Today is going to be an excellent Metal Friday. All the music below is new to me.

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