sprang out of bed head full of dread concerning the days chores. jittering around the house in an attempt to be on time without forgetting to bring the keys. it's the normal morning routine it seems. where did i put my basketball shorts for the bike ride into work? bathroom floor. hanging from the shower curtain. in the dryer. it rotates daily and without fuss. except from me. shoes, belt, keys, wallet, ipod. wallet and phone in the front compartment of the pocket, phone in the back pocket. this way, it keeps the keys from slicing and dicing the screen. they want you to believe that you constantly need to buy new stuff, but all you have to do is make sure to tend to it and it will last long. dont believe the marketing. it's all a lie. just like all of the bells and whistles that come with a car. if you're upgrading from a 13 year old car to one that is either 2 or 3 years old, it's going to be magnificent for a month or two before acquiring a few scratches from keys. just tend to it well and it will last long. we have an amazing ability to adapt to life.

Rice and beans and meat

we ate rice and beans and meat. cleaved like a beaver, but not quite as eager. edgar davids. and goliath. go go gadget goliath arms. a fine farewell, so long as the flowers flow freely and finely whisp against the tip of my ear. ergo. cogito eargo sum. that is the question pondered by a preponderous person of pusillanimous character. or 5 or 6 or 7 characters in search of an author and the knights of the round table. slouch up to the table and table your argument. we'll cut it into slices like a pizza. rolling the blade across the top of the surface like a wheel barrow. burrowing into the details, the twists of tongues, the teeth and the lips. flaming read hot lips. the lip of the round table castigated with cuts and stabs of irreverent speech. speech. speech. speech. speech. choo choo choo choo train. one that zig zags through your gourd and hoards all of your minds eyes attention span. from sea to shining sea. let it see, like the beatles sang their song of me.

airport bound

it's been awhile. i shouldnt have left you without a blogpost to step to. right? right. how many blog posts have you read that begin with something like this first sentence? "it's been blah blah long since i've updated this blog."

so it goes.

who doesn't feel bound when they're in an airport? it's an odd place. people talk in muffled voices. just above a library hush. no one makes quick movements. well that was an abrupt interruption. the southwest guy at the kiosk informed jody that she needed to board her flight like he was rod roddy. that was too loud. it's 8:26 am in the morning - please calm down the enthusiasm. morning people, blah.

so, no quick movements. no exuberant smiles and hugs if you run into someone you know. granted, there is always the exception, but it's not a widespread movement. there are those who have gidgets and gazmos. the ones buried in their computers or high fancy phones. i normally do not have my laptop open at the airport, but i might as well make the most of this schnazzie macbook pro. i've joined the gidgets and gazmos clan. there are the book readers. it seems this clan often consists of white women. usually older white women. older white women with curly hair. the kind of curly hair you have created and built at the salon.

and cut.

for now.

started an infinite jest

jokes, jokes and more jokes.

it's thick, a brick, so many pages it slops over your fingers and pulls you down. from what ive heard, it's important to provide a month or so of you life to reading this book attentively. so. i'm going to try. try or try not, either way you're doing something.

we moved into a new house recently and it's awesome. there is still too much stuff camping out at corners and along walls to entirely enjoy the place, but it starts tomorrow. finally entirely out of my place as of today and it was anti-climactic. any sort of sense of accomplishment drained away with the 63 pounds of water that poured forth from me - it was hot. and humid. and hard. hhhreally.

tomorrow we get to unpack, toss away, stow away in the detached garage, place, prod, tweak. we get to set the house. now that ill come with a huge sense of accomplishment.

the neighborhood is severely evergreen. trees drape over the sides of the road providing a nice sliver of shade from the sharp heat. it's one block...two blocks from one of the major bike arteries of austin, shoal creek, which means biking to and from work and on the weekends.

in the car

i wake up nearly two hours before i actually walk out the door and head to work. it takes that long to move this lumbering mass to go mode. walk into the crisply cold living room. the sliding glass window does little to keep the cold out. unplug the charger from the extension cord that runs along the back of my couch. back into the dark warmth of my room. the curtains from target soak up the cold. check email, read a blog, read the message boards. enjoy that last bit of silence; unless it's lawn maintenance day and the weed wacker whooshes from side to side and wakes me up entirely from the morning slog.

if breakfast breaks the fast, it's usually an apple or a banana or a swig of water or rice milk. i always keep my wallet, keys and cellphone in the same place. it's just the same place moves on a nightly basis: the counter top, the end table, the chest-of-drawers, the coffee table, the couch, on the ground.

the hallway area right outside my door is always empty. in a building that can house 9 tenants, i only ever see one other person. he has a chihuahua. it's not intimidating. neither is the dog. what?

head down the stairs. step in the rock bed with one foot while the other hits the pavement. the parking spot is small. i have to turn wide in order to get into my spot and that still usually means the door will hit the beam holding up the covered parking. click. the hatch unlocks. i pull up the window. the resistance reminds me of waving my arms back and forth while in a pool.

out comes the wallet, keys and cell phone. cant sit on the wallet. it'll through off my alignment. the car's alignment is already slightly off after the t-bone accident from a few years ago. dont need too much misalignment. slide into the drivers seat. wallet and phone lobbed into the passengers seat. radio or ipod? neither.

Mirrors Vol 1

How to Remove the Navigation Bar from Blogger Blogs

The top navigation bar on Blogger/Blogspot blogs is less than appealing to the eye and it can help users bounce away from your site quickly. Want to know how to remove the nav bar?

1. Login to Blogger/Blogspot
2. At the dashboard, select "Layout"
3. Select "Edit HTML"
4. You'll reach a screen with the template's CSS code
5. Press Ctrl + F to bring up your browsers Find function
6. Search for "#header-wrapper"
7. Just above this line of code, insert:

#navbar-iframe {
height: 0px;
visibility: hidden;
display: none;
}

8. Select "Save Template" and voila! Goodbye navigation bar

Uh What?

One of the dumbest things I've read in a long time:

Please note that I offer these opinions as generalizations but not as blanket statements.

XPLANE: A Website Gone Wrong

For a company that, "...collaborates with companies to create understanding," the XPLANE company website and blog are a mess to navigate. If you're going to proclaim you create understanding, having a website that left me confused and annoyed certainly would not lead me to believe the mission statement.

I came across their website via a video, a viral video, they put out called "Did you know." It examines the changing media landscape via numbers and a snappy visual presentaion - it can be found here. It's a consistently updated video; several times a year. It's up to version 4.0 now. In any case, I enjoyed the presentation. Good music, lively images, colors and well presented. They had me thinking their site would be a gem as well.

Screeeeeeeech. Not so much. Go there > http://www.xplane.com. It's bare. I do like the white space. I don't know if they did that on purpose. Probably doesn't even matter at this point. What else is wrong with the site?

• Looking for their blog? Good luck finding the link on their homepage. I just happened to sign up for their newsletter and a link to the blog is located on that page.
• Looking for a link to their Twitter account? Good luck.
• Check out the sitemap. It looks like there is a lot of structured information behind that atricious homepage. Why doesn't the homepage have a link to "Services"? What does "Work" mean? It's too vague and requires the user to take a guess as to whether or not they'll find information about XPLANE's work, the work they've done for clients...? Who knows.
• Speaking of "Work," I'm using Chrome to navigate the ole internets, so this might work in other browsers. Still, that shouldn't be for me to worry about as a user. Don't make me think. Mouse over the "Work" link on the homepage. Look in the bottom left corner of your browser. You should see the URL of the "Work" page, but it's nowhere to be found. I looked down there to help me a) figure out where I'd be going within the structure of the site and b) figure out what they mean by "Work". If you mouse over the "Projects" section, you will see the URL of this section of the site in the bottom left corner of your browser. Consistency, where is it?
• Click on "Work." Once you get there, notice the word "Work" is blue and it's a link. Notice the words "Approach", "Solutions", "Clients", and "Store" turn blue when you mouse over them and they too are links. Mouse over the "Enefgy case study" text. It turns blue and is a link. Mouse over "We design results through visual collaboration." It's blue. But is not a link. Consistency, where is it?
• With the blue consistency in mind, click on "Solutions." More blue text to the right - "We Create Understanding" and the text below, "Internal Change Communications" down to "Launch Programs." From my prior experience, I'd assume the blue text on the left is clickable, are links. I wouldn't assume the blue text in the body is clickable because of this prior experience as well. Too bad I'm wrong. Mouse over Internal Change Communications and the whole damn box turns blue, is clickable, is a link. Consistency, where is it? PS why is this information two levels removed from the homepage?
• Overall, a user is required to click too many times to get to information he or she needs. The site should be flatter.
• As for the blog, why the yellow highlight when you move over a link? A link that is merely bolded, black text - blue anyone? Why the link at the top of the post? Why the block of bolded black text at the bottom of each post? It gives me the same feeling I have when reading something in CAPS LOCK - IT'S OVERBEARING.

And that's just a cursory walk through the site. I'm sure they do amazing things - just check out that client list. However, if your website is the first interaction someone has with your site, and it's poorly designed - in terms of the information architecture alone - and confusing, then why would they want to work with you when you aim to create understanding?

6 Questions a Writer Should Ask Himself

According to George.

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
5. Could I put it more shortly?
6. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

Buffalo River National Park, Arkansas

Tuesday I'm heading home. I've yet to take a day off this year, which is really ridiculous now that I've thought about it, but this trip to Arkansas will be followed by a trip to New York City to see the other side of the family. I'm looking forward to seeing the family, floating and fishing the Buffalo River. It will be a bit eery, though, since the family cat Squeaky passed on Wednesday. He was around for 16 years - picked him out of a woodpile in Arkansas in '93/'94 and he traveled the West with us before returning to Arkansas. Alas, he had a great life.

More pictures from the Buffalo River:

We're all prostitutes

image by bayswater97

"Remember the joke about the man who asks a woman if she would have sex with him for a million dollars? She reflects for a few moments and then answers that she would. “So,” he says, “would you have sex with me for $50?” Indignantly, she exclaims, “What kind of a woman do you think I am?” He replies: “We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling about the price.”"

SEO 101: How to Pick a Professional Search Agency

image by fightingbears

there are two points of view in my industry. they're analagous to how search engines worked prior to google and post google. in the pre-google, paleolithic period search engines gave the answer of a 5 year old. they took your query, scanned the internet for pages that contained the query and returned results that were spammy and not exactly relevant to the user.

look at query. run around the internet looking for query on page. match on 1-to-1 basis. return junk. one-dimensional searching. square hole, circlular peg. keyword density. that's what some people will still ask. "how much do i need to increase the density of keyword a on my page?"

here's a stock answer:

• go to hoovers.com
• notice hoovers is in a highly competitve space - business leads, sales leads, company and executive information and profiles
• take one of the keywords they like to rank of the first page of google results for - company information
• while at hoovers.com, press ctrl+f and then type in company information
• how many times does that word appear on the page?
• 0, none, zero, zilch, never

how might hoovers ranks so well for a term for which the term does not appear on the homepage? it has to do with the google. the search engine that decided to take into account who linked to a website as a major signal in how important a page is to a particular term. if important people...err websites...what's the difference?...link to a particular, and the site does not have the keyword on the page very often, should that disqualify the page from ranking highly? i dont think so.

id rather trust the incoming links of authortitave sites rather than a lack of keyword density.

if the page or website likely solves the problem posed by the user with his or her search for "company profiles," but only contains the keyword...12 times...on 1,000 pages and is linked to from...the new york times, .edu domains, .org domains and other highly trafficed and authoritative sites, again, what's more trust worthy - keyword density or users linking to the site because the content contained on the site is that compelling?

that's when you look at that vertical and conclude it is highly competitive. that your content will need to be sharp, compelling and link worthy. this is where the line is drawn between a professional search marketer and one who still sees title, meta, header, alt tags and, most importantly, content as a neanderthal would. in terms of the number of times a keyword appears on page. in terms of a 1-to-1 match. in terms of the framework of the site alone. that's important. your site should get that aspect of seo correct. naming conventions should be logical. straightfoward. simple. but the site should also be viewed as existing within an ecosystem.

Empty Apartment

I'm in my new apartment. So new it's barely empty. Two bookshelves and a small entertainment cube are sitting in the living room with me. Three 56 pound boxes, filled with my books, are lying on the floor. The kitchen light and fan are the only things on. The refrigerator hums the song that doesn't end. My plaid shirt from the day slouches over the bar next to a loaf of bread. I'm lying on the floor, two pillows beneath my head, a framed engineers outline of the Brooklyn bridge leans against the wall - by my side. I've got shampoo, soap, a single bathroom rug that wraps its arms around the toilet. I've got toothpaste, a toothbrush, deodorant, clippers, a silky soft clothe to clean my glasses, fancy water from Wal-Mart I'm supposed to squirt onto my glasses so that I don't scratch them - it's used in tandem with the silky smooth clothe. Ritz, Gatorade, Nutella, Tuna (I might as well capitalize tuna even if it's not a brand...why isn't it?), chipotle Tobasco sauce, Peaches, Oatmeal, Powdered Green Tea, Powdered Vitamin C, Extra Non-Sexed Olive Oil, Balsamic Vinegar, Paper Plates, Plastic Forks, a Bag of Frozen Pasta, Chicken and Some Sort of Sauce and a toaster in the kitchen. A single chest 'o drawers and a laundry hamper currently reside in my room along with two rolling suitcases. It's quiet. My complex is quiet. It almost feels deserted. I read apartment vacancies are at an all-time high right now. Recession. People shacking up together. I got a deal. Covered parking spots are empty, but visitor parking - the uncovered kind - is extremely hard to come by. Full of visitors. Empty apartments.

Information Overload

When did it really hit me that I'm feeling the pressure of information overload? A few weeks into deciding to write a weekly blog post for work. It's pressure. There are so many industry blogs and articles out there. Where do you go after covering links from your favorite blogs? You can't just write about topics and provide links from the same 8 or so blogs. I'm starting to think I can and want to. I like simplicity. I like Occam. I like diversity, but when I can do it at my own pace. The weekly business. Sheesh. Too much information. I like to find 8 or so sources and stick with um. Stability, structure and repitition in order to eventually free up my mind to come up with my own thoughts. Chaos leaves me feeling ADHD or ADD or whatever in the hell it is every kid supposedly has these days. I need to go check my Google Reader; got a blog to write tomorrow.

Ignore Everybody - 39 Keys to Creativity

Today I swung through BookPeople on my way home from work. I came across a book called Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity while perusing gapingvoid.com. I'm a fan of this guy, Hugh MacLeod. He' funny. Witty and doesn't seem to give a flying you know what about what others think - that's always inspiring.

In the book, one of the keys is the idea that there isn't going to be a big bang moment where your idea hits it big, or where your life says, "Well, you're a real life adult. Here have some honest to God freedom." If you're waiting to be discovered, it'll likely be a long sad wait.

Growing up, I always thought that once I reached my mid-20s I'd have that ah-ha epiphany moment. It'd be like having an idea hit it big, having it go viral. It'd be the moment things click, fall into place; you're older, wiser, have it all together (especially in this head of ours), have freedom (more money), have...a bunch of shit basically. That's all it really is - shit. Stuff, plastic, cotton, wood, metal, more plastic and a lot of high fructose corn syrup. Branded. Labeled. Seduced. Bought. Utterly middle class.

But, it all just flows together.

A demarcation line does not exist in my mind where I can point to and say, "Ya see! Right here! It's when I had this epiphany I knew I'd have as a boy." Nope. Nada. It all flows together. No promises.

I'm Fat and Nobody Likes Me

HR Departments...

Or anyone in a department that has arbitrary control over some facet of a business...this quote...it's exactly how I feel about an HR department:

Question: Do you think there’s a position for CTOs (chief taste officers) in companies?

Answer: Probably, but then here’s the tricky part: who do you appoint to find and hire them? You have to understand elegance first to find it.

Philadelphia Union Logo FTW

(Image from ESPN.com, click for full story)

Thank god for the Philadelphia Union actually designing a logo based on some sort of historical precendence rather than caving to the big shoe companies.  Everything doesn't have to be commercially shallow, right?

Emptying Out My Head: X's and O's

I came across this link on Twitter: http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2009/05/06/school-of-art-and-design-creativity-test/.  Using X's or O's, draw as many things as you can using said "shapes."  It'd be cool if I could pull out an internet pen, start drawing on my screen, attach that image to this post and then boom, release it to the world.  Alas, I cannot.  So, the word association game.  Write a sentence.  Any sentence.  There are a lot more than 27^140 options.  Take the last word.  First thing that pops into your head, run with it.  Hand in hand.  Create the next sentence.  Ready? Go!

laying on the futon listening to a tribe called quest.  love of the roots crew.  not j.  that place is too expensive.  like fine wine.  flu.  the coop.  or the co-op.  robo-co-op.  perhaps a bit too shiny for a photo-op with that devastating silver suit.  like the surfer.  of webs and jungles.  he's king of the contrete jungles.  juggles 3 jobs, works 4 am to 5 pm dawn.  keeps his shoes as clean as a plate bathed in dawn.  juan de marco.  polo.  nearly as expensive as fine wine, j crew and banana republic.  strawberry nation-state.  your mind. your business.  yes, your mind is your business.  speak it and make it public enemy number one a la chuck d.  chuckin' uncomfortable lines that lasso your mind and gets you eye 2 eye.  doctor. j.  dilla.  pickle.  politics is about getting into pickles.  brining your business in others' minds eyes.  tossing back and forth ayes and nays.