Privacy: Scary and Weird Stuff

Database information collection behind the scenes is something most of us rarely think about, and when we do our reaction seems to be "what, me worry?". Well I got a promotion from Yahoo marketing yesterday that brought to the front how much is going on behind the scenes.

The card was addressed to my Post Office box. But it wasn't addressed to me. It was addressed to the General Manager of an employer of almost 10 years ago. They used his correct business title. They used MY business name, which is in no way related to my former employer's business.

While it has been nearly ten years I can't imagine why I would ever have received any mail for that organization at that Post Office box. And I can say with 99.9999% certainty that HIS name would not have been connected with it if I had. However, through my professional association I did order publications, which I might have had go through that PO, at the time I was employed there. But all such orders always came in my name. So clearly there has been collection and cross-referencing of records to come up with this rather bizarre hodge-podge of information.

Oh yeah, doesn't make me very confident in Yahoo! either. Sheesh.

I'm on a roll recently. The creative juices have been flowing, and along with them the energy to do something. So I've created a number of new designs recently. My personal favorite is See the Wag. It is the first time I can remember a design selling less than 24 hours after I created it. I've created another using the same wagging tail image. . Funny thing about blogging; I don't have time for it. Blogging is more like a newspaper - the subject should be topical. But most of the information I want to share is more static. It does better on a web page. Of course I DO have a webpage. OK, I don't have a web page - I've got a thousand or so web pages on a handful of web sites. I have DogPlay, DogPlay Shops, Dragonshire, and TutorTanith. I also maintain Friendship Foundation, SMART Dogs and Westside Agility. DogPlay (actually both DogPlay and Dog-Play) has hundreds of pages and is my oldest site. It turned 10 this year.

Today I started this blog because I was writing a piece for TutorTanith on creating affiliate links in a blog. But in addition to keeping those sites up to date I have my CafePress Shop and a couple other accounts here and there that need to be attended to. Then there are the herding and agility discussion groups. Of course I can't forget the most important thing, making time to play with my dogs. About the only time I'm home on a weekend is if it is raining. So even though I'd like to keep a blog up, this is likely to be my last one for a while.

People keep asking about creating affiliate links so I thought I'd show how it is done. I really do like Angi's stuff. So I think I'll start with her shop. I have this blog, and I'd like to make a commission for selling Angi's stuff. So first I go find a place in her shop to link to. I've copied the address of the section. Now I'm going to create a link to "Funny Things Dogs Do and Think."

Notice that the original URL or web address was http://www.cafepress.com/artbyangi/508083 but I added ?pid=1074121 to it. The ? tells the system to expect an instruction. The pid= tells the system that there is an affiliate id coming. And the number is my affiliate id. That is all there is to it. When someone clicks on the link they get a cookie with my pid. If they buy something from the shop the system knows that the original link came from me. So I get the credit.

How much credit do I get? 20% of the retail price - what the customer paid.

I can create a link to the affiliate program too.

Ok, I'm convinced, I'm a geek ... or something like that. I dunno. Life working for a software company is a life of change. Recently they took the team I'd been working with and split us up; 3 of us to one group; eight to another. My new manager was originally my manager's manager. You'd think going up a level would be a promotion, but no. At first I thought the plan was for me to work on the web user interface for a support tool, something that would be fine with me.

But it turned out that the manager thought that I could script. Um I can pretend to script but I'm not really a coder. I've taken a beginner's class in PERL and in javascript so I know things like "oops, that line is missing a semi colon" and "ah here is where they declare the variable" But I don't have the feel for it. Every script I have to tinker with is a struggle and there is much that is just beyond my knowledge level. But more to the point, while I enjoy problem solving, I don't enjoy scripting.

However, I can understand their confusion. I'ma very good problem solver. I'm good at seeing the whole picture, and picking out patterns. And I'm good at extrapolation. And I've really quick to learn new software.

So today I was talking to a co-worker from another group. They gave her a task, but didn't tell her how to accomplish it. "Have you ever used this program before?" she asked.

"Well, no," I said "I've dabbled a bit in a related type."

Her face fell in disappointment.

"So what's the problem?"

She explained that she was supposed to give commands from the command line, but didn't know how. And she had a nice little helper tool that COULD do the job - if only it didn't have an 80 character limit.

?80 character limit? That sounded strange to me.

I asked her to show me. She opened the helper tool, and showed me that she could paste in her commands but they truncated at 80 characters on the line.

Hmmm, I grabbed her mouse. Clicked tools - found something like a configure or preferences option. Found an entry that said 80 characters. Changed it to 200.

"Oh, but that didn't work, the margin rule is still there" Back into the menu, find another menu option, change THAT to 200 characters. Poof, problem solved. I do that kind of thing fairly frequently. I remember when I first started at this place within a week I was explaining the application we were using to people who had been there over a year. "I don't know why it does that" She'd say.

"Well, I do I'd respond. And then I'd explain the functionality of the application. I do that a lot too. I'm not good at taking "it can't do that" as an answer. Sometimes it really can't but a little out of the box thinking often reveals a way to accomplish the goal.

I think that is the key to my success. I focus more on the goal, than on the means.

One of the first challenges in creating designs for T-shirts is grokking the difference between the way stuff prints and the way it looks on screen. Monitors emit light, and things like t-shirts reflect light. Because of this difference the available colors are different. There is some over lap, but not even neon paint can quite "glow" the way something made of light can glow.

There are other two factors that make it harder for the designer to really "get" the difference. The first is the variability of the computer displays. Our brains are really good at adjusting to expected colors. We tend, for example, not to really notice the yellowish cast created by our incandescent light. I've had the opportunity to look at exactly the same image on multiple displays and can see that in one a color might be definetly blue, while in the other it might have an obvious violet hue.

It is very common for designers to complain that their colors weren't printed correctly. However unless they have actually calibrated their monitor for color there is a better than even chance that the designer wasn't seeing the color correctly on the display. So what got printed was actually the way it was designed, just not the way they were seeing it.

The second factor is the brain breaker if one thinks about it too much. You are looking at a light source to interpret a non-light source image. Generally this isn't a huge factor in the actual design process, it just makes it harder for people to grasp that color generated out of the display really is of a different quality than color appearing on a printed product. With all this in mind I created some color charts to help me keep an eye on my designing.



The coolest thing to arrive at CafePress is the much awaited BLACK T-shirt. Woo woo.So I ordered a couple and got a reminder of the difference light sources can make in the way things looked. In my dimly lit house I was a bit disappointed in one shirt. But when I took it outside to photograph it I discovered it was much better than I thought. Sure, I can, and I did, work on the color to improve the indoor appearance. But that misses the point which is that the light source can significantly influence the way light reflects and thus perceived color. And the new shirts introduced new design challenges. So back I went to my color charts. I wanted to create a test chart so that I could see the behavior of colors on the black t-shirts. But I didn't want to pay for a boring bunch of squares. So I created a more interesting test pattern. Now I can actually look forward to wearing my test subject. Fun and learning on the same slate - what a concept.

My Hebrew teacher used to say "Without the rain, you'd never appreciate the sun." Of course he meant it as a metaphore but there is some literal reality to that as well. Lately I've had a little too much appreciation for the sun.

The last time we got any good herding in was at the beginning of the year. I took the two dogs into the 60 mph winds and we drove out the the California coastline. We were attending a herding trial. I sent the entry in too late to get a place for Tsuki, but Freeway was entered in Junior Herding Dog. There were reports of flooding all over. Our drive was not too eventful, one road was flooding when I went in. We had to leave the back way to go around it at the end of the day. But Freeway did make two successful runs and so he starts his new year as Dogplay's Roadside Rescue, JHD.

After that, however, the arenas have been just too muddy for training. So I've been spening my time on my new Dog Play Mall. I'm really married to the concept. The idea is that there are a lot of people like me, sharing our lives with mixed breed dogs, but a huge percentage of dog related products assume your dog is some identifiable breed. It is really frustrating to have to dig through all those breeds in the hopes of finding something that is really friendly to MY dogs. And I really hate those "If it isn't a [breed name], it's just a dog" Ha ha ha I'm supposed to be laughing, I guess. But I'm no more in favor of breedism than I am in favor of racism. Of course some breeds are better at some things than other breeds. That is the point of breeds - to get specialized superior abilities for some specific purposes. But why does pride in one's breed require being snobby about other breeds. And this whole thing of people relating to dog by reference to what the breed is, stinks similarly. That is what sets people up to pay absurd amounts of money for a dog. They pay for the label, not the care in breeding.

What's that? You aren't understanding? What I'm saying is that the real value in breeds is careful selection according to identifiable characteristics. When this selection begins to have consistent reliable predictable results in reproducing those characteristics you have a breed. But some people are more interested in simply the closed gene pool than in concerning themselves about the selection process. So people pay large amounts of money for a dog that is geneticially full of problems. Arrrgh

Yes, it has been over a month since my last visit here. I've thought of a lot of stuff I wanted to share. However, I have been thoroughly schooled into being careful about what is written down, especially publicly. I thought a lot about following up on my first blog, then realized that I had put links to my blog on my web site. And I naturally point people to my website, including my employer. So, I thought, what if my employer reads it. What will they see in it?

So now I'm struggling with what to write.