Month: February 2006

Temporary theme issues

God I wish I had time to learn CSS. Where’s Bill Hall and Todd Borglund when I need them?

dc

My Past as a Forger

Put a couple beers in me and one of the stories I’ll always retell is the onea about how I forged a check and achieved instant fame and temporary fortune with a slip of the pen … err desktop publishing system.
This dip into the past — late 80s in fact — was brought to you by an email — one of a type I receive every so often, asking me: “How do you forge a check?”
I am not a pen-and-ink man, no master at clever forgery like the expert in The Great Escape who equips all the Allied prisoners with work permits and travel documents to help them through the Nazi system. No, I was just a fortunate criminal-manque who happened upon a good story.
It started after the 1988 SIGGRAPH (a convention of graphics geeks) at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Sam Whitmore, then the editor-in-chief of PC Week, came upstairs to the newsrooms from seeing a demonstration of the very first color photocopier, a Canon, and told the funny story of how the sales engineer asked the audience in the Canon booth if they had anything wanted to copy, thinking, perhaps, that someone would dredge a picture of the wife and kids out of the billfold. Sam produced a twenty dollar bill, which attracted some giggles. The demonstrator said, “We’re not supposed to do that, but what the heck.” and proceeded to run off a copy of the greenback in all its glory on the sucky waxy paper those first copiers used.
Skip forward a year to me as a green reporter at Forbes, where success and job security meant delivering a cover story every year. The editors were merciless. Every story idea pitched had to aspire to be a cover and I was running short on ideas. One day, short on ideas save for the usual one-page company profiles of mundane Route 128 mainframe software vendors, I was pushed to the edge by my editor, Bill Baldwin (now the EIC of Forbes) to come up with something big, something huge, something about technology that could carry a cover.
Desktop forgery, I said, Shamelessly ripping of Sam’s insight that color copiers were a counterfeiter’s best friend.
That got Baldwin’s attention. We talked over the idea, and it turned into a challenge, a double-dare, a “I-bet-you-can’t-forge-your-paycheck” kind of bet. I went for it, and for the next two months, my life was all about deceit.
First I had to do some reporting. Could I find a case that forgers were using desktop publishing systems (which were pretty crude by today’s standards) to forge checks and other documents? The Secret Service was no help whatsoever. In fact, one could say they were … secretive. FBI, same stonewall. No one was talking. So I sicced the Forbes research department onto the court dockets, looking for cases where someone was bagged using a PC to alter a document.
No luck. It was apparent there was no story, and where there is no story, a good reporter invents a story.
I decided to forge my paycheck.
This was before direct deposit, so every two weeks I got a check for about $2,000 which I detacked from the stub, walked to an ATM, and deposited. I decided to turn that check into a $20,000 check. I told Baldwin the plan, and he said, “If it clears, then you have a story.”
Okay, I was working on a lame Epson Equity II 8086 machine with a 286 accelerator card and a LIM Spec memory card that brought the RAM up to a whopping 4 megs. There was no way I was going to attach a scanner and laser printer to that rowboat anchor, so I had to seek out the weapon of choice for real graphics work. That meant ….
A Mac.
Having no Mac, and being allergic to them after four years working for the “News weekly of IBM Standard Computing” I went to Harvard Square, found a place that rented time on a Mac in a room full of Macs and started running my paycheck through a flat bed scanner. There being no privacy in the computer store, anybody sitting near me could see I was messing around with a financial instrument and attempting to change the numbers. Eventually, inevitably, the clerk came over.
“Hey man. You’ve got to leave. You can’t be doing that here.”
I went into my journalistic integrity speech, trying hard not to give away my story idea in the process. None of it worked, I was bounced, and back on the Red Line to Boston with a low res printout and a serious feeling of defeat.

there are days when I miss the W.E.L.L.

The WELL Photo Gallery

Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link. Where it all began for me online in 88 as dbuck. Home of the Savage User Interface — character based community run in some weird thing called PicoSpan. Deadheads dominated. Some serious characters: Tom Mandel, Howard Rheingold, Hinging, David Gans. The media salon before Salon bought the place.

The Web killed it, but what I learned about community, I learned at the WELL. Best thing ever to come through a PC into my face. The ultimate proto-Blog.

The Art of Creating a Community

Let the Good Times Roll–by Guy Kawasaki: The Art of Creating a Community

Some good insights from the master evangelist. I’ll follow with my insights on community management and getting the inmates to run the asylum.

Guy is doing great work with his blog. His post following this one is about how he blogs. Sounds a lot like the way I work — after 10 pm, TV on mute.

Blog Ad insertion engine

Experimenting with Qumana and playing with the ad insertion engine — very cool system. I write a post in Qumana’s offline editor — a good thing in and of itself — and when I finish, I tag the post with Technorati tags, or I click the advertising button and get asked what the keywords are. Qumana searches its inventory, finds a match, inserts, and ta-da. Money for nothing, the clicks aren’t free.

Qumana Test

I’ve been looking for an off-line blogging tool, primarily because my Lenovo X41 has two browser keys which, if hit accidently, will shoot me off of the WordPress compose screen to the previous page, sometimes undoing an hour’s worth of blogging and sparing my dear readers from a 500 word ode to my favorite ball point pen or whatever drivel I feel like spewing onto glass.
This is a test post. More on Qumana after I decide whether I like it or not.Technorati Tags : ,
Powered By Qumana

On roadside memorials …

I’m waiting for some feckless shutterbug to publish a coffee table book of roadside shrines — those crosses that pop up alongside the interstate to mark the spot where some loved one breathed their last — and expect to immediately find it on the bargain table for $2.99. Heck, I’d write it myself except for the act of hauling over into the breakdown lane, popping on the emergency flashers, and risking my own life as the 18-wheelers whizz past just to take a picture of two pieces of wood, a garland of plastic flowers …

I first saw roadside shrines in Puerto Rico — apparently its part of the Hispanic culture to mark the tarmac where the bus plunged or the publico had its last chance power drive. Busy intersections and treacherous curves are veritable Arlington cemetaries, forests of white perpindicular planks that are more effective than Slippery When Wet signs for warning of dangers ahead.

About a decade ago they began to pop up around southeastern Massachusetts, primarily around New Bedford, a big Portugese-American enclave. Some local attorney had been taken away for offing some junkie hookers and dumping their bodies in the ditch (New Bedford is also the home of the infamous Big Dan’s Tavern, home of the pool table where the poor woman played by Jodie Foster in The Accused was raped) and I always wondered if some of the crosses were meant to memorialize his victims. Gruesome thought, but now that bucolic stretch from Wareham to Fall River is still creepy as can be thanks to the crosses.

It is strange to read a newspaper account of a particularly tragic car accident and then see, for years afterwards, the trio of little crosses that mark the spot where as wrong-way drunk wiped out a young family. And that’s the point. My father died in a head on crash on Route 130 in Mashpee just past the spot where the highway crosses under the approach path for the runway at Otis Airforce Base. I didn’t erect a cross. But I did seek the spot out the day after the accident, finding it by discovering the detritus and trash the EMTs had left behind by the roadside.

Roadside memorials went official after a state trooper was gunned down by a desperado on Route 3 in Kingston, right by where the old Howard Johnson’s stands by the muddy banks of the Jones River. It’s a big honking pink granite monument in memory of Trooper Mark Charbonnier. Apparently roadside memorials are illegal in many states, but the road crews always seem to mow carefully around them out of respect.

There are many resources about roadside memorials online. The most irreverent is PorkJerky.com — and therefore the funniest, or as the author says, “Funnier than a Retard on Fire.”

It contributes this image to the forthcoming coffee table book project:

There is a book on Amazon, Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture which will not be getting the One-Click treatment from me this evening.

As for my decision not to get out of my car to take pictures of memories, Mr. PorkJerky tells this cautionary tale:

“Here’s the gist: Jeff Frolio, a cameraman for the ABC affiliate in Omaha (KETV 9) was getting some stock footage of dangerous intersections in the Omaha area. Can you see where this is heading? Well, it happened. As Jeff was walking back to the news van he gets plowed. And where did it occur? That’s right, at a dangerous intersection in the Omaha area. Specifically, 220th and West Center, exactly in front of the Wilkins and Alfrey memorial which moments early he was shooting. That intersection is so dangerous in fact, the driver who hit Frolio wasn’t charged with a thing.”

I should get onto more important things. Like using Mr. Jerky’s interactive build-your own memorial tool.

Foldera Completes Oversubscribed $8.5 Million Series B Offering, Following $2.0 Million Series A Offering Completed in August 2005

Foldera Completes Oversubscribed $8.5 Million Series B Offering, Following $2.0 Million Series A Offering Completed in August 2005

I advised these guys when they were Taskport back in the winter of 2004 out in Newport Beach. Very interesting approach to web services in the group collaboration space — using a “smart” folder approach to sort communications and activity automatically. The appeal is to the SMB market that can’t afford an internal Exchange or Notes implementation but which needs some group collab apps such as shared skeds, document sharing, IM, etc.. SMB is the bullseye right now in all IT services, and a custom fit for a web services play like Foldera.
The cost? Free. Total viral play. You sign up for an account and then invite colleagues, customers, friends to join in.

Upselling opportunities if the user needs more disk space, premium support, etc.. Today the company merged into EXSM, and is officially in the market. CEO Richard Lusk is a fireball, entrepreneur (OANDA.com and others). Beta accounts now being offered.

Full disclosure: I was compensated with shares in the company, now holding 45,000 shares, and sit on their advisory board. I made some introductions, helped with the business and marketing plans, and still do some spare-time communications work for them.

Out the door to Raleigh

All good snow days must come to an end, and so I unplug for the balance of the afternoon to make my snowy way to the Triangle of Research.

Things are heating up at work in a big way. So much for vaunted First Ninety Days. More like the first 90 minutes. Warp speed Mr. Sulu.

I dropped the Status gizmo in the right column when I upgraded to WP 2.0. Not that anybody cares.