Dear Ignorant Ass,

So last night you scaled a six foot fence and broke into my car.  I suppose I could congratulate you on the extent of the bounty resulting from your daring raid, but the problem is… you probably don’t know how to use half the stuff you carted off.

I’m not really sure how you decided that there was a car worth breaking into on the other side of my fence; we all get lucky.  But let me see if I have this right:  You…

1. Roamed the city, in the rain, looking for loot to plunder;
2. Climbed a six foot fence between an old woman’s house and my building;
3. Landed in a muddy patch behind a rolling dumpster;
4. Ran, (perhaps, skulked?) across my lit parking lot;
5. Inserted a screwdriver into the channel of my window;
6. Lifted forcibly, thus shattering it into a jillion pieces without setting off the alarm;
7. Traipsed mud across my seat as you clambered in;
8. Began to toss my belongings around like tissue paper.

In all, you stole:

• Two leather jackets
• $30 cash (my emergency gas money)
• 24 port Ethernet switch
• Charging cables for my phone (which wasn’t there)
• Bluetooth speaker phone
• A Cerner-specific device (which I really needed you not to steal)

Forgive my foolishness; I thought my car would be safe from people like you behind a fence.  I know better now.  But, I must ask: do you have any idea how to use even half of the items you stole?  The Cerner device is locked, the Bluetooth speakerphone has a pairing code, the charging cables are worthless without the devices, and… do you even know what a 24 port Ethernet switch DOES?!?

You ignorant waste of my time and space.  Next time, knock on my door… I’ll give you the $200 it costs me to replace my window.

I was driving to work Friday morning, when I stopped to take a left turn at Gillham and Rockhill. A black puppy was romping around a the top of the hill near the park, and as I came to stop, she ran up to, and then beneath, my car.

To make sure I didn’t run her over as I pulled away, I opened my car door to look underneath…

… and she jumped in.

She was very dirty, smelled terrible and was shaking from head to toe. So there I was: driving a manual car with a confused, scared puppy, trying to determine what to do. I couldn’t just toss her out of my car; it was freezing out. At the same time, I couldn’t just take her home… she was a stray. So, I did what first occurred to me:

I called 411 for the nearest vet’s office.

Turned out she had been out for a couple of days, by the vet’s estimation. They gave her a bath, trimmed her nails and wormed her. She’s delightful, and takes well to discipline.  The name that has stuck is “Shandy,” one of my favorite Guinness drinks.

This is where I found her, and here are some fun pictures:

Shandy

Yet, no matter how adorable she is, and how much I may want to keep her, I’m posting flyers later today around the area… if she does have a home that misses her, I’m going to be returning a happy, healthy puppy to them.

I was directed to a CSSZenGarden design created by Outline2Design that is rather beautiful… I was really impressed, so I looked at their homepage.

Their designs are extremely artistic, and valid XHTML, so I was even more impressed; I wanted to know more about their work and where they manage an office, (mostly to determine if they were a small shop, a front for a larger shop or just “a person.”)  I noticed a copyright link to Zertle, LLC.  Clicking that, I saw that Zertle owns two shop fronts, Outline2Design and PSD2HTML.

That’s when I was absolutely disgusted by the pricing strategy at PSD2HTML.

Deciding How to Charge is Hard

I realize it’s difficult to decide how to price web work; I’ve had that problem before. You kind of have to divide the effort into the creative and the technical - creating HTML, (at least, in my opinion) is the easiest of the two. Creating a brand identity and graphical assets are far more subjective tasks, therefore requiring much more work.

Converting a design to HTML, however, is much easier. You can almost feel how the document flows. Sure, there are elegant and thought-provoking approaches to noodle through, and reusability and accessibility concerns… but the process goes very quickly. Oftentimes, you use tools from your toolbox, like Microformats or common libraries.

At Cerner, when I’m handed a design, it takes me roughly two hours per layout to complete, less if the following location follows a cohesive style, (and they do). So this company promises an 8 hour turnaround time, which I think is respectful, if not aggressive if they have a large workload.

What I find appalling is their package rates and “options.”

You Want to Charge Me For WHAT?!?

Here are a few examples, and an explanation as to why they are shady… I mean, “Used-car Salesman” shady. Throughout the following examples, I’m going to draw an analogy to someone coming to paint your house: you know what color you want, and how you want textures to look, but you don’t really have the time, nor the expertise, to paint it yourself.

How Good a Job are You Willing to Pay For?

Ok, we’re all set to start. Pick a package and price range for them to convert your image into a web page.

Screenshot from PSD2HTML.com

Figure 1 - So… do you want your page done professionally or not?

Asking someone to quantify exactly how professional they want their page is like asking if they’re willing to pay more to get things that a professional should already do. You’re telling me you won’t “pay special attention to Load Speed” if I don’t shell out the extra hundred?

The trouble is, someone who doesn’t really understand the web may not understand what they’re paying for… besides, the developer should do this anyway.

The painters show up with the crew, the paint and the brushes. They’re ready to paint your house, but before they start, they ask:

“Do you want us to tape off non-painted surfaces?  Then you’ll want our Professional Painter’s Package. Do you want us to avoid getting paint splatters on your concrete and bushes?  In that case, you’ll need to upgrade to our Hi-End Painter’s Package. You see, it’s all about what you’re willing to spend.”

These aren’t options: they’re the mark of a professional job.  Cross-browser compatibility, Search Engine Optimization, semantic code, prez-layer separation… these are professional, industry standards. You could get away with asking for more time, but more money?!? C’mon…

Flex Your CSS Muscles

This one, I kind of understand.

Screenshot from PSD2HTML.com

Figure 2 - To Flex… or not to Flex.  Well, that’s gonna cost ya.

Flexible, or “fluid” layouts can be difficult, depending on the style.  You have to decide the widths of each column, how text wraps, and even when items start to drop.  Again, asking for more time is one thing, almost expected… charging more, I could almost condone.

But isn’t this on a case-by-case basis?  Don’t you have to ask some directed, consultative questions about intent and purpose?  And how did you arrive at $29?  It just seems nonsensical to me.

After shelling out more cash, your painting crew has another question:

“Would you like us to hand-paint your house, or can we go ahead and use our sprayers for the larger walls?  You see, when we got your address, we weren’t sure about the texture or composition of your walls, so we can’t tell you right now without looking which would be better, per-se… but we’ll knock $20 off if you let us spray.”

Maybe they’re encouraging a fixed width by offering a $29 discount?  At any rate, it’s a client call, and I just don’t think it can be programmatically determined.

Moving on… because the next one is my favorite.

Nickels and Dimes Add Up to Big Bucks

I’m curious about Advanced Markup Options.

Screenshot from PSD2HTML.com

Figure 3 - Opera and Safari qualify as “advanced markup?”

“This option gives you the guarantee…”  Are you kidding me?

You know, in my office, hack-less cross-browser compatibility is a point of pride.  Sometimes, when we do a demo, we like to give the people in the room the choice of which browser we use to demo… no-holds-barred.  We also give the option of a JavaScript-disabled or CSS-disabled configuration.  It’s cool to be challenged, to be able to show our stakeholders that no mainstream browser was ignored, no detail was overlooked.

“I’m sorry, but which side of your house faces the most people?  I mean, people who live next door to the east can’t really see the house wall… their window on that side is pretty tiny.  And most people don’t drive east on the street, so most wouldn’t see the east side.”

“Oh… and should we avoid painting the exterior window fixtures?”

To ask a client to pay more for cross-browser compatibility, or to offer a discount to let it slide, encourages the very attitudes web professionals hate: that only the majority matters… that it’s too hard to code (and test) for 99.9%.  That attitude is what allows Microsoft to continue including proprietary features, (and oftentimes, tolerating omissions): they’re the majority, make your site work in their browser.  It’s unacceptable for a professional web shop to not work in these browsers out-of-the-box.

And, I’m sorry… but $4 for rollovers?!?  Are CSS hover implementations been deemed hard enough that the code to create them is worth $4?  Are you telling me I have to pay you the equivalent of your morning Starbucks Latte for the effort?

The following, though… is unacceptable.  That’s all I’ll say:

Screenshot from PSD2HTML.com

Figure 4 - Unacceptable

What else can I say?

Damn, I’m Sorry, but…

I don’t mean to pick on these guys; I don’t know them from Adam.  They’ve obviously put some thought into how they’re to be paid for their work.  But the strategy is flawed: what they’re charging more for should just be included.  They should just state the job will cost between $150 and $300, depending.  As I’ve pointed out, they have more questions to ask once they get the design anyway.

Will they change their pricing “menu” because of this post: probably of course not. But then again, I don’t know how much of a market there is here.  Most web professionals like to be in control of the design.

For someone like me, I’d love it if the client provided me the visual they want; I suck at drawing.  But even if they did, I would still consult with them and provide them with a quality product that another web professional would be able to edit…

… but more importantly, respect.

As I was driving home around 12:30 AM, I passed our one Apple store to see who was waiting for “the big day.” When I saw the security guard protecting the precious stock from a videographer, a mother and half a dozen dedicated Mac geeks, I just *had* to stop and take a few shots. At least they let the poor guy listen to an iPod…

read more | digg story

After 18 holes of golf on Saturday morning, I attended the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s An Asymmetrical Evening, which celebrated the opening of the new Bloch Building.  It was an evening I won’t forget anytime soon.

The new building certainly leaves an impression… I’ve had a stronger appreciation for it since I’d heard it described as “a feather beside a stone” several months ago.  The interior is impressive and complementary, and I would urge anyone who wasn’t there this past weekend to attend this coming weekend’s celebration!

The next morning (after I returned my tux), inspiration struck and I set out to do some photography… check out the results if you’d like!

Outside the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art	Liberty Memorial

If you are interested in visiting the new Bloch Building, here are a few events to keep your eye on… see you there!

• June 8
  • 10AM-5PM: Member Preview Day
  • 6-8PM: Panel Discussion
  • 8-12AM: Friends of Art Opening Party
• June 9
  • Bloch Building Opening Weekend
  • 2-3PM: Architect Lecture
  • 6-7PM: Architect Lecture

Here are my attempts using this technique:

Here are the before and afters, raw image to edited:

Just for giggles, I also attempted the the “300 effect,” proposed within the comments of the Digg post:

Then, the damn thing shut down.

I was really confused.  I messed around with it for a few minutes, then I jumped into a chat session with a Sony representative.  After suggesting the DVD was scratched or the wrong region, (uh huh, sure), he THEN recommended I reset the whole player.

Now, the thing is, this player requires you to manually type in the names of DVDs where it can’t read the standard demographic information.  I’ve got 300 discs in that player, I’d rather not lose that information.  So then he gave me a phone number to tech support and wished me luck.

But you’d better believe I started searching the Internet for any other reports of this nonsense.  It didn’t take long before I found this Amazon discussion and a blog post on erkkila.org.  A number of DVD players, a number of new DVDs… sounds fishy.

Here are the numbers I have so far:

Sony Pictures: (800) 860-2878
DVP-CX995V Support: (800) 222-7669

This does not bode well for Sony.  Is there some kind of write protection on these DVDs?

Unfortunately, as in all rules assumed in parsing, mistakes can be made:

My guess is that it was looking at “7.50 ea” and translated that into 7:50 Eastern, but I can’t be sure.  All I know is that it interpreted three items a friend of mine ordered into appointments.  No big deal, but it just reminded me that, even when some parsing rules seem simple and straightforward, someone is going to have a use case that breaks them.

Yet for me, being a MySpace-r myself, there is an even larger issue: their insistence on perpetuating ignorance to avoid addressing not only the formerly mentioned issues, but also their own laziness and incompetence.  I’ve had it.  This blog is going out to all those people who have, at one point or another, had “weird things” happen on their account… let’s see if this will help.

The Shepherd Warns the Sheep…

Occasionally I’ll sign into MySpace and see some message from “Tom Anderson,” the “face of MySpace,” on my homepage.  For example, this past week MySpace has been pitching a “download this Quicktime patch, quick” message… so there Tom is, asking me to take 30 seconds to install it.

I politely ignore him.  I’ve heard about this patch, and I’ll wait for Apple to update me, not MySpace.  Besides, I don’t surf aimlessly on the ’space.  I only visit my friends… I’m one of those guys who actually knows most people on his profile.   But I digress…

On occasion, Tom has insisted the following, (which I now paraphrase):

“Hey everybody… If you see or hear people tell you that you’ve been posting weird bulletins that you obviously didn’t post, it’s because someone has gotten ahold of your password and hacked into your account to send SPAM!  Change your password often and this should stop happening.”

Now, I realize that there is some truth to this… someone could indeed have brute-forced your password, or even phished it off a clone site.  I acknowledge it’s possible… it’s just not likely.

… but the Shepherd is Really the Wolf.

First, it’s important for you to know that MySpace was allegedly founded by professional Internet spammers as a network by which to attract, maintain and eventually advertise to users across the US.  Tom became the face of MySpace because he was the one employee, (then a copyeditor) who attracted the most people in the beginning.  Read about it here and here. 

MySpace was not designed for it’s eventual overwhelming popularity, and it’s frequent crashes are a clear indicator of this.  It’s also clear from both the incredibly annoying ads, their lack of common security features and their ridiculous lies about how the Internet works that they really don’t care that much if your account is a haphazard source of spam.

Tom’s answer is not the real reason unauthorized bulletins are being sent from the profile; it’s because:

1. The majority of it’s users don’t understand safe surfing techniques,
2. MySpace lacks any form of (reliable) security, and
3. Spammers are persistent creatures.

Let’s take each of these in turn, shall we?  There’s something here for everyone.

Dear MySpace: You Know You Can Do Better Than This

I’m going to make this short and sweet, because everything else has already been said.  Your lack of stability, your poor design, the code bloat, the haphazard patching… look, I can sympathize.  Your popularity exploded, you had trouble keeping up with demand, your system load challenged even Microsoft’s software.  The trouble is, by now, you should have overhauled the site three times over.

Dear Myspace: You know you can do better than this.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it’s free, but according to the CEO of News Corp, you guys are making a pretty penny of your users, too, so can it.  Here’s a quick list of (rather obvious) steps you could take to make things more secure.

• Captcha on signups, bulletins and messages.  I’m tired of the robots.
• Sitekeys on login pages.  Bank of America did it, so can you.  I know, I know, not foolproof, but it’s SOMETHING.
• Put the “Delete a Bulletin You’ve Posted” somewhere more conspicuous, for crying out loud.  It seems like no one knows they can just delete the damn thing!  It’s almost like you don’t want them deleting the spam… hey, wait a second…
• A redesign of your markup.  I realize you’ll alienate all of those wonderfully designed MySpace customization sites, but honestly, they’re contributing to your problem.  Phase this crappy design and code bloat out.  You’ve gotta be dumping millions on the load you’re pushing down the pipe.
• Download the spam software, analyze it and defeat it!  Are you telling me your staff, now bolstered by News Corp, is incapable of getting your hands on the robot software and stopping it?!?

Honestly, I can’t decide if you guys are inept or devious, ignorant or in collusion.  Which is it?  I’d love to know.

Dear MySpace Users: They Don’t Make a Condom for Your Keyboard

It’s not necessarily the users’ fault, I suppose.  No one really talks about safe ways to surf… they’d rather sell a firewall, install a popup blocker or an anti-phishing filter and lull you into a sense of security.  You’ll keep the tech support guy employed and the economy of the consumer IT world will keep on spinning. Yet a firewall won’t prevent you from typing your password into a field on “myyspace.com,” or perhaps into some DIV floating over a profile tricked out to look like a “log in to continue” page.

You liken email to postal mail, yet you don’t seem to grasp that, not unlike the postal mail, Bill Gates doesn’t know who forwards his email message on to their friends and certainly has no intention of paying you to do so.  Similarly, Tom doesn’t need you to repost that bulletin; have you not seen his global messages when something breaks?

You have no interest in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, yet you copy someone else’s code to your profile without thinking twice.  Afterward, you’ll wonder where those overlapping logos in the upper left came from.

You have no idea how documents and pictures are hosted and served on the web, but you’ll blindly implement a profile style that uses someone else’s image.  Later, you’ll think your profile was “hacked” when that image changes to some other colorful representation of the image owner’s disdain for you when they notice the bandwidth drain.  You might, in the depths of your ignorance, even send a panicked email to the owner to let them know their site was “hacked.”

You don’t think before you click, you’ll blindly install that plugin to get Nelly Furtado’s latest single “for free,” you don’t inspect the authenticity of the page you’re on, you don’t right click and view source… you don’t want to get it.

And you’re driving those of us who do get it crazy.

So. Dear MySpace Users…  there is an old saying that mirrors well in disciplines such as software engineering: Invent something idiot-proof and the world will invent a better idiot.  Instead of focusing on delivering feature functionality, we’re having to spend time and money grappling with the endless struggle between the user and what they use.  We can’t give you what you want if you don’t help us out.

Why not save that money and aggravation? You call the Geek Squad whenever your browser slows down from all the crap you’ve installed?  You realize these guys are laughing at you as they count the cash back at the office… let them help people with hardware failures, like when your 4 year old dumps his orange juice in the exhaust vent.

Why not protect yourself?  Hackers need your machine to attack popular websites.  Even worse, they need your hard drive to store materials that would earn years in prison if merely discovered on their own, such as child pornography.

It’s easy to do: LEARN about the tools you use.  Here, I’ll get you started:

Wikipedia: The World Wide Web

Don’t be scared… this page has terms like “Hypertext Transfer Protocol” and “Uniform Resource Identifier.” Guess what? You use these terms everyday without knowing it, (aren’t acronyms grand?) Take a second to read about what the hell you’re talking about.

Wikipedia: HTML

Little known fact: the Internet doesn’t function on CODE, but rather MARKUP. It’s a subtle difference that allows non-technical people to actually understand what they’re seeing, (or even writing). Your web browser can read it, so can you.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group

Committed to wiping out Internet scams and frauds.

US-CERT for Non-technical Users

Established in 2003 to protect the nation’s Internet infrastructure, US-CERT coordinates defense against and responses to cyber attacks across the nation.

TRUSTe for Consumers

TRUSTe® is an independent, nonprofit enabling trust based on privacy for personal information on the internet.

Dear Spammers: Get a Life and Get Out of Mine

Like it or not, spam is a business.  I understand the math of it all.  They send out a billion emails or MySpace messages… cost: $0, one person in 100,000 clicks: $$$$$$$$.  I get it.  Nigerian princes would be without their inheritances and Viagra would stay on pharmacists’ shelves if it didn’t work.

Dear Spammers: Honestly, I detest you.  I think most people do.  To quote the vernacular, die in a fire.

You insult my intelligence everytime some “innocent girl” who is just “looking for a nice guy” joins MySpace and asks me to “check out her webcam” on “this really cool site for FREE!”  Even better are the bulletins about free gift cards or ringtones, comments on ghost sites about cheap Cialis, or messages about from someone who “really liked what I said on my profile” and yet they seem to know nothing about me.

To quote Saul Bloom in Ocean’s 11, “I saw you [coming]… I saw you before you even got up this morning.”

I know nothing will prevent this stuff from going on; it’s impossible to police or enforce.  So, I’ll just repeat my internet curse under my breath (DIAF) on the occasions you pop in, mark your profile as spam and move on.