I can't get rid of my Kerry cookie

On a day of almost uniform good news: Democrats taking control of the House, and possibly Senate. Rumsfeld resigning. The end of the Romney error. On a great day for a liberal-leaning news junkie, my web browser, and MSNBC is playing dirty dricks on me. Every time I go there I am greated with the above banner from two weeks ago. The day when our dufus Senator stuck his foot in his mouth and gave rise to the insecurity and fear of every Democrat that, just like the Red Sox, they were going to find a way to blow it in the bottom of the 9th. If I refresh, I get the current good news, but every time I go back to get any updates, I'm greeted by Senetor Dufus again, and for an instant think yesterday was only a dream.

It just keeps getting better

New Foley Instant Messages; Had Internet Sex While Awaiting House Vote

Let's see, yesterday the excuse was that he was an alcoholic & headed to rehab (just like Patches Kennedy and Mel Gibson). Today it's because he was molested a a child. Tomorrow he'll have been framed by Mark Fuhrman. All I can say is, thank God he's not a Democrat.

The biggest bummer of the whole day for me is that Keith Olbermann was off (taping the Letterman show) on perhaps the best day of the decade to be a Republican-hater. Keith, how could you desert us at a time like this.

Maybe taking the country to war under false pretences and a pack of lies, trashing the Constitution, and just general incompetence isn't quite enough for the Republicans to lose power, but a good sex scandal (or as Tony Show calls it simply naughty emails) might just do the trick.

And here's some more art on the subject.

Dennis Hastert & Bernard Law: Separated at Birth

Stop coloring your email

I hate colored email. I'm not talking about HTML email from businesses (that is covered under spam). I'm talking about the kind from your Aunt Betty, who knows nothing about computers, and certainly nothing about graphic design, but still can figure out how to change the text of an email to green, and the background to some awful flower image. She can also choose the tackiest true type font (say Mistral) and put the whole letter in that for good measure.

Just stop it.

Emails should just be typed in one basic font. No crazy colors or fonts, or fucking italics. I know of no graphic designers who design the type in their emails. Get yourself a blog for your cat, and then you can use all the tacky fonts, ugly clip art, and silly background images you want and the other cat lovers will think they are great.

OK, now I've offended all cat people.

Age of Misinformation

I have fits every time I try to research anything online. Do enough research and you'll find 10 different answers to whatever the question you have is. You'll end up more confused than when you started. We've been doing a lot of renovation work on our house recently. Nothing is more maddening. You can't get a definitive answer on anything. Who are all these bogus "experts" anyways.

Here are two simple remodeling questions I'm trying to get a definitive answer to online:

Can I use a solid stain over paint?

Answer 1a: Cabot tech support says I can use a solid stain over paint with no problem (no need to strip first) and they say the stain should last longer than the paint.

Answer 1b: If you cannot get all the paint off, sand off as much as practical and then apply two thin coats of A SOLID color latex stain. it can peel, but will resist pealing more than paint will.

Answer 2a: You can always stain or paint over a stain, but you can never stain over paint.

Answer 2b: You cannot stain over paint.

If we want to reside our house with cedar shingles, is it better to use red cedar or white cedar?

Answer 1: Red cedar is a much better product because it contains all vertical grains. The Easter white cedar has mixed grains and is more prone to cupping.

Answer 2: White Cedar is the best material to make shingles.

I really shouldn't pick on the internet, because the same thing can be said of live contractors. I've probably talked with at least ten different contractors, and I don't think I've gotten the same answer out of any of them. Someday I'll do a whole post on remodeling and contractors. Heck, with what we've been through the past two years, I could do a whole blog on contractors sucking. I just can't get started on it, because it makes me very ill.

Packaging Madness

I just ordered a new camera. Through the miracle of the internet/delivery-industry complex, it arrived barely 24 hours after I ordered it via Amazon. Camera arrived in a reasonable sized box, and cost something like $13 for delivery. Small price to pay since the camera cost me $40 less than anywhere else I saw it.

But I also ordered a memory card from a separate vendor. Again, I shopped around and got a super good deal, so I didn't grumble that much about paying $6 for delivery of a $9 item. It's all relative.

But check this picture out. See the little blue spec at the bottom of the box. That is the memory card (1" x 1.25" x 1/32") resting against the box it came in. (12" x 9" x 8")

That's just packaging craziness.

At least it wasn't filled with styrofoam peanuts. That really would have pissed me off.

This could turn into a really long post on this subject, but I just don't have the time right now. My son's birthday isn't too far away, and that might be a better time to get into the whole broader issue of packaging madness. Nothing is nuttier than the way kids toys are packaged.

Blogs that look like mine

So I think it's about time I learned how to design an original blog template. Anybody who looks at many blogs has probably seen at least a few dozen that look like mine (minus the thumb, which I managed to modify).

This is especially true since my blog was featured a couple weeks ago on Designers Who Blog, and I still have many visitors who come from there. I probably don't have too much credibility with the design community when my blog design is just a stock Blogger template— albeit a pretty well designed one.

It's very much like stock photography. I try to discourage my own print design clients from using royalty-free stock art for just this reason. The image that they cheap out on to represent their happy and satisfied customers, could easily end up in a competitor's ad to represent their happy and satisfied customers. Or worse yet, end up in a porn site or some other embarrassing place.

On that note, as I was searching for an entertaining example to use as the image for this post, it suddenly became much funnier. My first random hit on a site in Blogger that looked like mine was the above hard-core gay porn blog.

My only excuse, fellow designers, is that as a print designer, my web design skills are limited. I know it's probably not rocket science, but I just don't technically know where to begin to design my own template yet. I'll figure it out someday, but blogging alone is very much distracting me from my paying work, so you'll just have to bear with this cheap stock template for a while longer.

Buying Red Sox Tickets

I just spent two and a half hours staring at my computer screen, watching it refresh every 30 seconds waiting to buy Sox tickets. This was after I supposedly won the opportunity to buy green monster seats.

Red Sox Ticket Purchase Opportunity - Congratulations

Dear Cranky,

Great news! You've been selected for the opportunity to
purchase Green Monster tickets for a Red Sox home game in
our second chance drawing.

It's more like "you may already be a winner" in Publishers Clearing House. Even if you happen to win the opportunity to buy tickets, its still a long shot and a pretty frustrating process.

The first hour, I was in the Virtual Waiting Room, waiting to be randomly selected. After about an hour, I was selected, and got to pick a game. Here it gets even more annoying. Of course the Yankee games are all gone. I try to select other hot games: Like any September game against a division rival. Sometimes it looks like I have a shot. The game is available. I select two seats (that's the limit here-2 seats for 1 game at $110 each). I even get past the enter secret word screen. I think I've made it. Then I get the dreaded error page.



What do you do here? Keep hitting continue like it says, or does it really mean the game is sold out? I don't know. So I try selecting other games. Maybe earlier in the season games. Maybe midweek games would be easier. Maybe games against crappy teams. Maybe interleague (yuk) games. Maybe midweek, interleague games against crappy teams. Nothing works. Always sold out, or the error page, which really means sold out.

Finally after 2 hours I started going for standing room tickets. Even most of those were sold out. But finally I "lucked out." (if you call paying $64 for two standing room only tickets "lucky") But it's a Sunday afternoon game in May against the Orioles, and I'm a Sox fan, so I'll take it. It's a good deal. I've never been in the Monster seats before.

Even after you hit, you are still worried, though. You have 60 seconds to put in all your info. That's really tough. Especially when you get to country, and have to use a pull down menu to scroll through every country in the fucking world until you get to the U's. That killed at least 10 seconds.

Really, I'm lucky because my wife has connections to get good seats to a couple games a year, and I have a client who usually gets me tickets to at least one game. So this won't be my only opportunity. Really the only way people really get Sox tickets these days is to have some kind of connection, or to pay scalper or ticket agency (legal scalpers) rates. There really is no easy, legitimate way to buy tickets any more. I'm sure this sounds nuts if you are just about anywhere else in the country where your team plays to half empty stadiums, but this is what it's like to be a Red Sox fan.

Come work for us (for nothing!)

As a freelance graphic designer with a pretty steady client base, I fortunately don't have to rely on the help wanted ads on Craigslist, Guru, and other job posting sites. Thank god!! I well remember the days of being a starving artist.

My first real job was is the art department of a certain alternative weekly newspaper. Well, actually my first real job was making signs for a department store, but I don't like to talk about that one. I'm sure one of my regular readers will fill you in on the clown mask I used to put on when I got home from that job it made me so crazy. SickOE, please keep in mind this is a public forum.

But anyway I digress. The newspaper gig was a great job and a great relief from making signs for toaster-ovens, especially for the partying and perks that went along with it. But I made shit. I think I made $12,000 a year full time when I started. The basic philosophy of the place was "this is such a cool job, that they should be paying us to let them work here." And it certainly worked for them.

That attitude is alive and well on the job posting boards today. Why pay for a professional to design your logo, when you can find somebody to do it for $250 bucks. It's really a depressing commentary on what the perceived worth of graphic design (and other creative work) is, if the rates offered for our services on the boards are any indication. Here is a sampling of what people think creative work is worth in Boston today.

• Magazine Seeking Artists and Writers Compensation: Selected articles will receive $20 for every submission.


• Need Outdoor Location Photos: There is no $ budget at all for this job. What we can offer is visibility and credit/advertising on the well trafficked site


• $100 to anyone who can paint/draw/photograph something cool.


• Corporate Logo Needed: Compensation: Less than $250 (This appears to be the going rate for a corporate logo on Guru.com)


• Drawings of famous philosophers needed (Nietzsche, Freud, etc.): Compensation: $30 per picture


• I need a student or someone willing to work for free/trade to design a rock star flash site for my business: Compensation: Not sure yet, maybe some food? coffee? small stipend? a hug?


• Seeking a design for our corporate logo, Timeline is one to two weeks, more if needed. We have already selected the colors, images and art for the logo (gee leaving a lot of creative to the "designer") Compensation: start at $160
  

Blogger can't spell blog

Judging from what I read around the blogosphere, there isn't a lot of spell checking going on. But has anybody who ever used Blogger's spell check, realized how crappy it is? It's really rather comical. Among the words that it doesn't know are Blog, - duh!, and Google (or google), which I believe is now a recognized verb. Even more ironic, Blogger is owned by Google.



Even when it does pick up a word that really is wrong, it almost never has any idea what to suggest. Check out the example below. It's smart enough to know that anydody is wrong, but the best it can come up with for a suggestion is anted. What the fuck is anted?



While on the subject of what sucks about Blogger. Why not the ability to do categories? As you can see, my posts are all over the place subject-wise. Really would like to be able to sort them by category, like all the good blogs do. Doesn't seem like rocket science. I know there are supposed to be workarounds, but none seen too easy to figure out unless you are a programmer.

There are no original ideas left

I've been somewhat obsessively blogging since I started this last week. A couple nights ago, as I was blogging on my laptop, while my wife watched TV, I said something about her being a Blog Widow. Was just something that popped into my head. I thought I was pretty clever. I said, "that's pretty funny, huh. I wonder if anybody has ever used that term". So I do a Google search on Blog Widow. 13,000 fucking hits! So much for being clever.

No Thank You, my Penis is Fine

What's up with all the penis spam. Every day, I get dozens of spam emails to enlarge my penis, buy cheap Viagra, "improve my results in bed" , buy a vibrator. You name it. If I wanted any of this, I certainly wouldn't buy it from an email. Do people really respond to this stuff. It's just nuts. Biggest annoyance is the legitimate emails that get sucked out by my spam filter, while all this stuff still gets by.