WordPunk tag:wordpunk.com,2008-08-27://3 2009-06-26T13:11:30Z Words in the Wilds Movable Type Pro 4.261 Pet Airways Takes Flight tag:wordpunk.com,2009://3.3433 2009-06-26T13:09:17Z 2009-06-26T13:11:30Z David W. Boles http://bolesblogs.com We love animals but we have always been frustrated for an easy way to transport them long distances.  With Pet Airways taking flight in the marketplace, we finally have a safe and effective way to fly our pets from endpoint to endpoint.

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  1. Pets Fly in the main cabin Not in the cargo hold.
  2. A Trained Pet Attendant is always monitoring your pet.
  3. We make sure there is plenty of fresh, cool air at all times.
  4. Pets are never left unattended in a warehouse or on a ramp.
  5. No need to buy a pet carrier, we provide it FREE of charge.
  6. Peace of mind that your pet is in the hands of pet professionals.
  7. If you're delayed don't worry; your pet is in good hands.
  8. No hot or cold weather restrictions that prevent pets from flying.
We are thrilled and excited by Pet Airways and we can only hope they are able to quickly expand their flying circles to include every airport in every corner of the world.]]> What Good is Plagium? tag:wordpunk.com,2009://3.3421 2009-06-15T13:38:24Z 2009-06-15T13:39:25Z David W. Boles http://bolesblogs.com Plagium is a new web service that tracks "Plagiarisms" using the Yahoo! Search API.  I tried Plagium this morning and I was disappointed in its lack of helpful returns and I was disappointed because I always love catching content thieves.  

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Plagium immediately informed me that a search could not really be performed -- even though it appeared to try. 


I gave up waiting for the churned results after 10 minutes.

Next, I decided to be more proactively forceful and use a story I wrote that I know has been stolen, in full, many times over:  Jesus Found Dead in His Grave.  I have the proof of those thefts -- but does Plagium?

Let's use Plagium's "Search by URL" feature by cutting and pasting in the URL of my Jesus article:


Ooops!


Let me cut and paste a few sentences from the start of my Jesus article to see how Plagium does in finding content theft:


Parsing...


I gave up waiting for any result form Plagium after two hours of watching the circle churn.

In three attempts this morning, Plagium provided zero results even though I'm quite certain all my queries have been re-used, stolen, quoted, and scraped.

I'm not sure how you'd use Plagium, but I don't find it a useful tool for finding any of my stolen content online.
]]> Does Fair Mean Unhappy? tag:wordpunk.com,2009://3.3413 2009-06-04T13:38:47Z 2009-06-04T13:40:02Z Yesterday, during an intensive discussion of murdered doctor George Tiller, I made this comment concerning the Hegelian idea of tragedy:As my first attorney told me: "If no one on either side is happy after I write up a contract, then... David W. Boles http://bolesblogs.com murdered doctor George Tiller, I made this comment concerning the Hegelian idea of tragedy:

As my first attorney told me: "If no one on either side is happy after I write up a contract, then I know I've done my job."
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If two sides have irreconcilable differences, it seems natural that a negotiation ending up being "fair" must mean each side is wallowing in some sort of disappointment in the outcome.

Instead of saying we want a "fair" deal; perhaps we should start thinking in terms of getting an "unhappy" deal that will begin to set a new bar of human expectation.
]]> Catching the Google Wave Haiku tag:wordpunk.com,2009://3.3399 2009-05-29T12:14:26Z 2009-05-29T12:15:02Z David W. Boles http://bolesblogs.com Wave -- yesterday, a new online collaboration meme that blends email, maps, documents and social networking into one workspace.  Is Wave Google's Basecamp killer that will finally make Google Apps a complete and total winner?

]]> early Wave notification.


As part of the Google Culture of Fun and Belonging -- you can try to treat and amaze those at the Google Empire with your creative writing skilz -- and maybe, just mebbe, they'll let you into Wave just a little earlier than the more prosaic.


Here is the Google Wave Haiku entry I submitted:

Springtime awakens
Wave crashes in earthen core
Winter waives the ice
We're holding thumbs we still have the magic touch!]]> Scribd Encrypts Your eBook tag:wordpunk.com,2009://3.3387 2009-05-20T13:15:31Z 2009-05-20T13:13:54Z Scribd -- the most unpronounceable branding since gdgt.com -- wants to encrypt your eBook and sell it for you -- and for that favor they'll take a 20% consignment fee for their role in the life of your book.... David W. Boles http://bolesblogs.com Scribd -- the most unpronounceable branding since gdgt.com -- wants to encrypt your eBook and sell it for you -- and for that favor they'll take a 20% consignment fee for their role in the life of your book.

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We don't know if Scribd will be a marketplace magnet for authors seeking protected publication of their content, but competition for mindshare is always a good thing -- but with Scribd around, Amazon's eBook publishing mandate might be held at bay a bit -- and when you have more than one company wanting to sell your books, authors win big for the freedom of their readers.]]> Dawkins Reads Darwin tag:wordpunk.com,2009://3.3379 2009-05-14T13:16:42Z 2009-05-14T13:17:04Z The great, and memeingful, Richard Dawkins provides a six hour reading of Charles Darwin's seminal book -- "On the Origin of Species" -- and we are thrilling on the idea of two genius minds blending together across the arc... David W. Boles http://bolesblogs.com memeingful, Richard Dawkins provides a six hour reading of Charles Darwin's seminal book -- "On the Origin of Species" -- and we are thrilling on the idea of two genius minds blending together across the arc of 150 years of evolutionary thinking.

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Listen to "On The Origin of Species," and you immediately find yourself ushered into the presence of one of the finest minds ever to grace this planet. In this recording, which was a true labour of love, I made no attempt to act the part of Darwin, but instead worked hard, as a modern follower of Darwin, to convey the true meaning of every sentence. I even surprised myself: the exercise of reading Darwin's words aloud and identifying in every phrase the syllable that needed to be stressed, revealed to me subtleties and depths of meaning that I had missed when reading quietly to myself. I hope listeners will be enlightened in the same way.

Of Darwin's six editions I chose to abridge from the first. Surprisingly, and in many ways, it is the most modern. Moreover, it is of greatest historical interest, as being the one that actually hit the Victorian solar plexus and drove out the wind of centuries. In abridging the book, my priority was to cut those passages that are now known to be wrong, notably those concerned with genetics. I believe it is what Darwin himself would have wished. What takes my breath away as a modern biologist is how much Darwin got right. It has been well said that he worked a century and more ahead of his time. The year 2009 is both the bi-centenary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of "On The Origin of Species" and that statement is becoming harder to deny.
We can't wait to give our ear a listen into the mysterious mastery of two of the greatest minds in our human history.]]> Final Draft 8 Review tag:wordpunk.com,2009://3.3362 2009-05-06T16:18:04Z 2009-05-06T16:18:50Z David W. Boles http://bolesblogs.com Final Draft. 

]]> using Final Draft as my main software writing system for many years as writer and Script Professor and after using version 7 for the past few years, it is a great thrill and a delight to see Final Draft move up to version 8.

The look and feel of Final Draft 8 is refreshed and sleek.  On the Mac, Final Draft runs faster and better than the previous version.  Here's the lowdown on some of the new features:




If you are serious about writing, then you should not be without the industry standard for script creation. 

Final Draft is proven in the marketplace and it works every single day in New York and Hollywood and beyond. 

Final Draft takes the technicality out of writing a screenplay so you can just concentrate on the writing and the storytelling.  Final Draft is your first, and only, necessary writing partner -- and if you've been writing without it so far, you may have been surviving, but I guarantee you haven't been thriving.
]]> Faith in the Dying tag:wordpunk.com,2009://3.3348 2009-04-28T15:23:53Z 2009-04-28T15:23:45Z David W. Boles http://bolesblogs.com newspaper is dead.  It's only a matter of moments before we start wiping up the blood and burning the bits of leftover pulp to ash.  We have absolutely zero sympathy for a medium that denied their own end and propagated the memes of the demise of their profitability.

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His [Bronstein's] tour ended with cold comfort, as he observed that longer life expectancies may keep us on life support. "For people who still love print, who like to hold it, feel it, rustle it, tear stuff out, do their I. F. Stone thing, it's important to remember that people are living longer," he said. "That's the most hopeful thing you can say about print journalism, that old people are living longer."
The quicker the newspapers are put out of their misery, the faster the rest of us can get around to doing for free what used to be the business of their day.]]> The Tropicana Nipple tag:wordpunk.com,2009://3.3335 2009-04-21T14:32:03Z 2009-04-21T14:33:38Z David W. Boles http://bolesblogs.com Pepsi bottle to look like a wrinkled penis and now they have recalled the redesigned Tropicana orange juice carton because the cap -- in the shape of half an orange -- actually looks like a human nipple.

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It seems the Tropicana re-design was supposed to suggest not just an orange, but also the juice inside the orange, and so -- the experience of "squeezing" the screw cap was to imitate the squeezing of fresh orange juice. 

Or, perhaps, that squeezing also invoked a little naughty nipple play as well.


PepsiCo is quickly returning the original, beloved, Tropicana cartons to the shelves of your local grocer. 

Notice the humdrum orange screw cap is back, along with the semiotically delightful "straw in an orange" meme that so many of us grew up loving.


Not every logo needs to be redesigned.

Not every soda bottle needs to suggest male anatomy.

Not every screw cap needs to invoke the pulp of the human breast.

PepsiCo, please retire the Freudians from ruining the innocent goodness with the naughty bits that bring you an undeserved sexual embarrassment.]]> Doing the Hundreds tag:wordpunk.com,2009://3.3320 2009-04-13T20:31:48Z 2009-04-13T20:31:34Z David W. Boles http://bolesblogs.com semiotic image.  Sometimes it is simpler to grasp a complex idea with a simple vector graphic.  Here's the seminal work of the "World of 100" and as you can see in the image below, only one person in a village of 100 would have a college education.

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Here's the official blurp for the site:

This is a self-initiated project based on the scenario - If the world were a village of 100 people. There are a few different versions of this text in circulation about the world's statistics. I found the data very striking and neatly summarises the world that we live in. So I used information graphics to re-tell the story in another creative way. I designed a set of 20 posters, which contain most of the information. I used simple vector graphics that related to a statistic in order to present the information in the simplest and most accessible way.
We love the association of information and images and we encourage you to visit the World of 100 for more eye-pleasing data. ]]> Thought in Apology tag:wordpunk.com,2009://3.3304 2009-04-06T17:18:14Z 2009-04-06T17:20:00Z One of the most common things you will hear in a crowded city like New York is "Excuse me." Rather, you would hope that you would hear this, especially when people bump into you when you are getting off of... Gordon Davidescu http://bolesblogs.com
]]> crowd of people that was trying to get on at the same time. Towards the end there was a group of people that had a baby carriage with them.

No matter how hard they tried, they absolutely could not get the carriage to get on. When they finally got the carriage onboard, they realized that a few of the members of their group were not on the train and so they kept on keeping the doors from closing. There was no attempt by any member of the group to apologize to the rest of the train for the inconvenience that they were causing us.

On a contrasting note, I was just on the train last night when a couple of men got in and started lecturing a woman who had bumped into them about the necessity of saying "Excuse me" when bumping into people. They then turned this into a chorus of songs and telling us that they were not yet homeless but wanted some money, some "love" to help pay for their studio time.

I guess having people be polite to you costs money now.

So what doe it mean when somebody offers you an "Excuse me" - do we appreciate it at face value or do we really appreciate it as a waning thing to do in our sometimes cruel society?
]]> Giacomo Brunelli Eyes Animals tag:wordpunk.com,2009://3.3292 2009-03-30T13:45:21Z 2009-03-30T14:10:03Z Giacomo Brunelli is a great photographer and he set out to capture the spirit and essence of everyday animals in a new book.... David W. Boles http://bolesblogs.com Giacomo Brunelli is a great photographer and he set out to capture the spirit and essence of everyday animals in a new book.

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Giacomo Brunelli has been looking hard at animals. His focus is not on the framed and caged exotica of zoos but on the ordinary animals that remain with us to some extent: horses, dogs, cats, chickens, pigeons. He shows us a fox, looking sharply at the camera and poised to flee, and there are numerous birds, a snake and several toads, but this wildness is small and fragile, living in the familiar liminal space where manmade and natural meet and overlap. His animals inhabit farmyards, cobbled streets and the facades of stone buildings.

There are no tigers here.vBrunelli's animals are often composed only of suggestive fragments. His spare black and white images are attuned to the nuances of a moving mane, a silhouetted whisker, a highlighted, almost illuminated wing. He favours the profile and the counterintuitive angle, setting dark unobservable features against dark undiscernable backgrounds.

A dead mouse, on its back, paws in air beside an oversized flower against a stark and distant mountain is no more or less frozen in time than is the growling dog, eyes alight and teeth forever bared; both are icons of states we fear but cannot know. These pictures are timeless and uncanny, powerful in their ordinariness, and emotionally much bigger than their simple subjects.
If you visit Brunelli's website, you will be overwhelmed by the images:  They are haunting and real and sometimes a little cruel.  Just like life - and Brunelli challenges us to question if we are more animal than human.
]]> The Apple Keyboards Review tag:wordpunk.com,2009://3.3280 2009-03-17T14:54:23Z 2009-03-17T14:55:03Z David W. Boles http://bolesblogs.com Apple MacBook computers and a single Cinema Display; but one can never have too many keyboards.  As you can see below, I've gone wacky for the gorgeous, new, chicklet-style keyboards from Apple.  On the left is the wired "laptop" keyboard; next to it is the wired "full" keyboard with numeric keys; beneath that is the Bluetooth keyboard. All of these keyboards allow you to control the brightness of the screen and manage the starting and stopping of music or movies.

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Three AA batteries are stored in the round top of the device and they give the keyboard its balancing heft.


I also think Apple did a genius job in mirroring the size of the Bluetooth keyboard to match the keyboard size and style of the MacBook keyboard. 

That means there's no uncomfortable learning delay switching between your laptop keyboard and the standalone version.


The wired keyboard provides a high-speed USB ports on each side of the keyboard and the keys have a nice, natural, responsive feel.


As well, the wired keyboard below is quite fine.  The clanking space bar has a little stiffer feel than the Bluetooth version, but that's a small niggle.  


Finally, if you're a traditionalist -- and if you want the old boat of a keyboard that's too big and forces your mouse off the desk and into the frozen, Siberian, tundra -- then you'll love this massive monster, especially if your life is entering numbers.  You might also like having a dedicated Backspace key. 


I am smitten with the new Apple Bluetooth keyboard.  I like its style and inherent grace and it makes my life more portable and much more productive -- and it's hard to find any tool in the shed that can add both a wicked convenience and a great aesthetic in the same, tactile, intangible.
]]> Writer Groups Ruin Writers tag:wordpunk.com,2009://3.3263 2009-03-09T17:00:08Z 2009-03-09T17:00:26Z David W. Boles http://bolesblogs.com not mystical or special.  Writing is tough and thankless work and I don't know a working writer who has time to stop to attend a writer's group because the author is either in the middle of a deadline or is collapsing after just hitting a drop-dead date.

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Non-writing writers and writer wannabees.

Talking about writing only keeps you from writing.

For me to go to an in-person "Writer's" meeting will take up half a work day getting there, meeting, and getting back.

I don't know any working writer willing to give up half a day for the nonsense of chatting about writing in a group.

Sure, writers are lonely people, but that's part of the job description.

Even online writing workshops leave a lot of be desired because people love to talk about writing instead of just writing.

If you're young and interested in writing as a career -- don't go to Writer meetings!

Shun the Writers workshop!

Skip the therapy-group-as-artistic-outlet and devote 100% of your remaining free breaths to putting down words for association on paper because your Writers workshop is in the palm of your hands and erupting from your fingers. 

Honor that creative impulse.  Don't get caught up in the pretend world of talking about writing instead of just writing.]]> Stinking Like Diddy tag:wordpunk.com,2009://3.3245 2009-03-02T17:19:30Z 2009-03-02T17:31:09Z Sometimes you see something that makes you wonder if the people responsible for that thing have any connection to reality or if they are living in their own world where the skies are purple and roses bloom forth from open... Gordon Davidescu http://bolesblogs.com
]]> the cologne from Macy's or other fine stores.

Let me tell you about the commute to my job -- a job which does not involve me wearing a tuxedo or being surrounded by women who cannot seem to wear clothing that actually cover their bodies.

I live in New York City and in Manhattan, I walk to 96th street and Broadway, where I descend underground and get on either a 2 or 3 express subway train -- or a 1 train if I am not particularly in a rush to get there and am early enough. Many times, the train is so crowded that if I tried, I could not possibly fall over.

I get off the train at 34th street and walk two blocks and approximately three avenues to get to the office. On my way there, I see hundreds of people who are all in a rush to get to their own places of work. They, too, are not wearing tuxedos and are not flanked by scantily clad women.

It leaves me wondering this: What is the target audience for this cologne? It's certainly not me. I am not King. It's not the majority of people I pass on the street every day. Are they flying in helicopters and enjoying the company of nearly naked women? I do not see that being the case. So why put out an advertisement that can be constantly seen by the eyes of the proletariat if it is meant for 1% of the population? Is it meant to attract attention to the cologne or to Diddy?

Or is the idea that since our actual lives do not contain helicopters and white tuxedos (featured in another I AM KING advertisement) we should buy the cologne to signify that we aspire to fly around in helicopters? The advertisement certainly does not make me want to purchase even one drop of the stinky liquid.
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