KPAO by Dave Cortright

The Real American Hot Dog

I'm currently reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Saffran Foer. In it, he has a fantastic proposal for dealing with the pet overpopulation problem and the environmental problems of livestock: eat unwanted dogs. He points out that these unwanted dogs are local (so no transportation issues), don't require any additional feed or medicine to raise, and are  being wasted in the current system of euthanasia and disposal.

It turns out that 44 states do not prohibit eating dog meat (although I believe that California is one of the 6 that restricts it). Still, that's plenty to work with. My idea is to set up food stands at street fairs, art fairs, county fairs, and other typical summer weekend events. I'd name them The Real American Hot Dog. The prices would be really low: $1 for a hot dog or burger, $2 for a stew $3 for a kabob, $4 for a steak. Maybe we could even get the local animal shelter to bring some live specimens too, with a slogan "Adopt them today, or eat them tomorrow!"

I'll classify the whole thing as art and apply for an NEA grant.

Unfortunately, the only thing that will happen is those states will outlaw dog meat, just like the other 6. It won't get anyone thinking about why it's ok to eat a pig or a cow or a chicken but not a dog.

A charitable gift idea: subsidize important knowledge

On April 15, 2010, the White House blog published President Obama's and Vice President Biden's tax return. The Obama's earned $5,505,409 (mostly from book sales), while the Biden's earned $333,182. More interesting is that the Obama's donated $329,100 to charity, which works out to be about 6%. The Biden's donated $4,820, or about 1.5%. I've previously blogged that I shoot for a minimum of 3%, so I think Biden is a bit low. Obama is doing well.

But of course this begs the question of where to donate your money. Sure, you could give to the places most do: your alma mater, the arts, medical research organizations, or human welfare. But how about something a bit off the standard 501c3? Something were you don't have to worry about a significant portion of your donation getting eaten up by "fundraising and administrative costs"?

One idea I had is basically a twist on a previous marketing idea I had. If there is a particular book that has ideas that you want to get out there, why not subsidize the distribution? Christians do this for their bible in hotel rooms. Why not do the same with a secular book?

OK, so maybe that level of subsidy isn't possible, but with Amazon and eBay, it is possible to do smaller scale subsidies. Just acquire a bunch of copies of the book you want (maybe talk to a local bookstore about getting them at a discount. I imagine they'd be happy to help). Then price them at or below your cost and wait for the orders to flood in. You now can include your own printed material in the shipment that explains who you are and what you're trying to do. Tell them if they like the book, pass it onto a friend, or get involved in spreading the ideas.

It'd be very interesting if Amazon made things easier by simply taking your money as a subsidy and using it to knock the price of their product down. Of course you'd need a helluva lot of money as the volume they'd sell would be pretty high. There's also danger of people perceiving that the book isn't as good if it has a lower price. It's probably better to have the Amazon price there as an anchor so people know they are getting a deal.

I'd love to hear if anyone does this. Post a comment!

The music industry fails again with Glee

I watched Glee this week. And while their renditions of most songs are a bit too sugar-coated for my taste, I really liked their version of Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart. Since I've got some credit left on Lala.com expiring this month, I went there to buy it. It shows in the search results, but there's no way to buy the song, or even to preview it.

Fine, so I head over to Amazon to buy it there. Nope, not available there either. The Original List Date is May 4, 2010, but for reasons beyond me, the song won't be available for purchase until May 11, 2010. Oh, right, that's a Tuesday. i forgot that all new music has to be released on a Tuesday. But wait a minute—May 4 was a Tuesday. Ugh, my brain hurts.

Of course this song is available on various file sharing sites right now, so consumers like me who want to do the right thing and give the music industry money for a song that's actually worth paying for can't do so.

Music industry, the world has changed. You've had a lot of chances to catch up. But if this is how you want to do things, then you deserve what you get.

This is not Mohammed

OK, I'm a bit early. But for Everyone Draw Mohammed Day, I decided to go with a Magritte theme to explore the bounds of what is an image of Mohammed and what is not. It also uses the framing technique I blogged about earlier: asserting not(x) to focus attention on x.

Yes, it is art, but it also a statement. Freedom of speech is a right. Freedom from being offended is not.

So if this isn't Mohammed, then who is it? Click here to see who the web thinks this is.

Everybody draw Mohammed Day · May 20, 2010

Does Typinator suddenly stop working for you?

Okay this blog topic is as narrow as a razor blade, but I figure Google will usher visitors with this problem to this article.  The rest of you can ignore this message and safely carry on with your lovely spring day.

Do you use Typinator on the Mac?  And does it sometimes stop working inexplicably?

Frustrating isn't it?  I mean once you start using Typinator or TypeIt4Me or any text expander you know how your habit expands and how you can barely use your computer without it.

Anyway, if you have this problem

• Do you see two little dots on the Typinator menu icon?
• Are you using Firefox?
• Are you surfing a bank web site like, for example Chase?
• Is the Chase tab still open?

If so, here is your remedy:

• Close the Chase tab(s).

And here is how to avoid the issue in the future

• When you sign into the Chase website, don't leave the cursor in the password field.  Tab back to the userID before clicking the login button.

What is going on?  There is a bug whereby the password field is disabling external typing extensions (as a security thing), and it's forgetting to re-enable it again.  Tabbing out of the password field releases it, but clicking into your account does not and Typinator stays locked out until the tab is closed.

Incidentally, I highly recommend using a text expander like Typinator or its competitors.  And I highly recommend avoiding Chase for reasons beyond their password field bug.

- Philip

What I learned about web typography

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm a typography aficionado. When I was working with start-ups a few years back, I was heavily pushing SIFR, the Flash-based headline replacement tool. But boy was that a pain in the butt to get working right. Then there was FaceLift, which did text replacement via image files. And then Typeface.js and Cufon, both of which used vector tools to literally draw the custom text letter by letter. In summary, web typography was a mess.

And now? Well, it's still a mess, but not quite as bad as it used to be. The latest versions of all popular browsers now support the @font-face declaration. No more hacks for rendering text in arbitrary fonts. The text is selectable and searchable. There is little (if any) performance hit, and the download hit is only the size of the font.

The biggest problem is browsers all support different formats. IE only supports the obscure EOT format. But give Microsoft credit. This was created over a decade ago, and works in practically any version of IE. Chrome and Safari support TTF and OTF, and Firefox is putting their weight behind yet another standard called WOFF. And still others can only work with SVG files (e.g. Mobile Safari). This is where I draw the line, though; The big 4 browsers are sufficient for me.

Thankfully, a really smart web developer named Paul Irish worked through all of this cross-browser crap, and came up with the optimal way to make @font-face declarations. The downside is you need at least 3 different formats for each font. Thankfully, the fine folks over at FontSquirrel have created this @font-face web tool to generate the different formats for you.

The other thing I learned the hard way: Firefox does not support cross-site font referencing. This is apparently to prevent font piracy, but it's a PITA when you have multiple domains that want to share font resources, or when you're trying to spruce up another site via GreaseMonkey. A simple way to get around this is to embed the font binary into the CSS code:
@font-face {font-family:myCustomFont; src:url(data:font/ttf,base64,A6EA...);}

But even after all of that, I find that these fonts aren't rendered using proper anti-aliasing in all cases. It's very inconsistent, and makes using many fonts impossible. I'm hopeful these bugs will get fixed soon.

For more info, check out this slide deck.

pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs