cloak media

terrorism here to stay

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now that terrorism is coming home, first nairobi, then new york, then kabul, then baghdad, and now london it won’t be long until we are all dodging bullets and bombs. wait, i already live in los angeles, where little girls are being shot by SWAT snipers, and gang bangers are shooting senior citizens. i already live in a terrorist community where on a good year 2000 folks are murdered, but now the threat may come from across the seas or across national boarders.

we all need to learn what is means to become a true muslim (arabic for one who surrenders) to learn what makes most of the world tick (including me). no, don’t study in a religious school in jalalabad , but learn some of the jargon of the jihadist and of the faith walks of others. like women in islamic nations who wear headscarfs. these garments are called a:

hijab

now in the conquered nation of afghanistan, they wore a special headscarf called a:

burka

so now we’ve all learned something. the people of mid asia (india, pakistan, afganistan) wear burkas, and the egyptians, saudi arabians, and moors wear hijabs.

china on my mind

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i love china!

over the course of ten years, millions of north american jobs have migrated to china, along with employment opportunities in europe, western asia, and south america. trade sanctions dropped and now chinese imports are not at record levels, but unbelievable levels. with a state controlled currency, plentiful workforce, and a growing middle class, world capitalism at its best has made a communist country the vanguard to the world. the ports of long beach and los angeles teem with activity, as electronics, foodstuffs, furniture, and clothes flood in as rusted cars, cotton bails, and other raw resources return to the land where everything is made.

in a 2005 interview with bill gates, the question posed was if any company gave gates some trepidation and competition. his answer was microsoft feared no single company (not apple, IBM, HP, etc.) but he had much concern about the china inc. laboratory. we are getting killed by chinese innovation. unfortunately, we cannot turn back time, and this is the new world order. the 20th century may have been the american century, but the 21st centruy will become known as the chinese century.

a recent movie i saw, ying xiong (hero), directed by yimou zhang of shi mian mai fu (house of flying daggers), da hong deng long gao gao gua (raise the red lantern), and ju dou fame told the tale of the unification of china some 2000 years ago. it was a spiritual movie, with fantastic fight pieces and excellent story. china has always been the apex of society historically, and over the last half century, have been building and developing for this moment and this time. the beijing olympics in three years will only cement this relationship that china is the center of the world.

i hold out some hope that the USA will continue to supply the world with weapons of mass destruction (military industrial complex), lively motion pictures, and electronic entertainment, and maybe a print author or two, but it was nice while it lasted.

we’re all on the titanic, on this time racing towards the bottom. all must take advantage of our new partnership with china, but wisely. as real earnings plummet for the bulk of western civilization and unemployment will continue to rise, every penny must be well spent.

so in this new climate, that i am gearing up to enter for the next 30 years, the only thing i have to offer is my creativity, honesty, integrity, and God given abilities to absorb new information, teach, and share. this is the foundation to cloak media.

shopping for bargains

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when changing or starting a business, an inevitable expense is buying more stuff to make thinks work faster, do thinks better, or just learn new stuff. be it new software, new hardware, new clothes, or whatever, for the start-up it’s easy to go wild and buy with abondon. i did this when i started green building concepts, but i learned my lesson in 1997, and will never do that again. i only buy something that i need for the next 30 days, unless it a birthday or Christmas gift for somone else.

here is my strategy on gettng great deals: never buy at retail prices. now this does not mean i only buy from ebay or overstock, but i always wait until what i’m getting is on sale, on clearance, or just after some mail in rebate. it may seem stupid to wait for a rebate, but i consider it an investment in the future, that will pay with interest in abour 8 to 12 weeks. and i always get my rebate, because i follow the directions on the mail in form. if it says original receipt, that’s what i put. if it calls for red ink instead of black, that too. if it calls for two UPC’s i made a copy. whatever the form says, i follow to the letter.

the best trick i’ve found in processing rebates is always to use a #10 business envelope, computer addressed with a USPS bar code for easy computer delivery. also, if the UPC is small, i tape it to a strip of paper so i will not hide inside the envelope. for all i know these rebates are processed in india or canada, so you have to send them for the long haul.

my second tip for bargains, is using the web. i search the sites:

fat wallet
slick deals
tech bargains
deal news

before i buy anything. this is a result of an article i read in november 2004. one of the largest consumer electronic dealers in the USA, best buy, made some statements in the wall street journal that some of it’s customers only buy things when they are heavily discounted and the company is losing money. they called these special customers, some 20% of its base, “devils.” they warned about the above sites that share coupon codes and discount strategies. i am one of those customers who buys only when something is free or close to it. good luck to you getting back at the man.

end of HTML editors

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i read with a grin the release of adobe dreamweaver 8. i’ve already completely transitions to the new media publishing systems that both wordpress or mambo offer. these web applications, based on open standard mySQL and PHP, offer tremendous advantages to any adobe breeze application, or say even adobe golive application.

where HTML or XML editors are going is away from the world wide web, and to the handset, where i don’t know of any 3G or 4G backend applications. i’m sure at the upcoming CTIA wireless IT and entertainment 2005 conference at the end of september 2005, they’re be all kinds of new applications, but until then maybe that might be the singular use for golive or dreamweaver. now adobe flash will continue to reign as a front end to a database or image server, but what good is a non bookmarkable file format (.swf)? i cannot usually even read a flash based webpage, since the fonts are hard coded into the elements, and i run my display at something larger than the designed 1024 x 768 resolutions (i’m usually at 1600 x 1200).

sites have become to complex to administer or author using text based tools. the web is about information, and both mambo and wordress offer a idealized platform for collaboration and sharing, unfathomable a few years ago.

writing on creativecow.net

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part of my business plan is to get my name out as a pipeline/workflow architect. i also know quite a bit about storage area networks (SAN). to leverage my knowledge, i’ve joined an online community.

SANetworks forum

please visit regulary to see what type of discussions i get generate. i’ve been lurking at the creative cow community for several years checking out the HDV forum, panasonic P2 forum, and panasonic varicam.

i’ve actually been to both the creative cow conference and a few years back at DV expo los angeles, i won autodesk combustion along with many books about networked media. thank you creative cow. now i get to contribute to the blogosphere.

junk filtering

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for the last two months i’ve had spam filtering turned on, and the floodgates of junk mail have finally turned off. i used to receive over 10,000 e-mails a week, and took it upon myself to sort through them about every two weeks. it certainly felt like a needle in a haystack finding a e-mail that was not junk, and actually is a bit fun sorting the 50,000 e-mails into subject and sender, and when 10 to 30 e-mails came from the same location, it was easily deleted.

unfortunately, it also took a few hours to get through all the digital debris. so now with spamassisin on, i get 2,000 junk mails a month, and it’s a little harder to sort, since the subject lines seem legit. i think i might actually open 15 of the 2,000, and it takes 20 minutes, instead of 20 hours. i rely mostly on mac OS X mail.app fine junk mail filter to get through the chore of finding the new needles.

moving blog to westhost.com

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so i experimented with http://www.blojsom.com/ on mac OS X server tiger, and it’s completely trivial to set up. now after a day using it, i’ve installed worldpress onto cloakmedia. and it works! it’s such a pleasure to escape the monotony of HTML editors like golive or dreamweaver (both adobe companies) and go directly to the page information. that’s why we visit sites, not to awe over the tables or CSS tags, but to read and learn. i will include some pictures in a future blog post, but for now enjoy the day to day updates on cloak media weblog service. i think i’m going to dig up my older ical blog so it can be published to the world.

this is not my first blog. i tried ical, but it was too buggy and did not display properly. now three years later, i start up my second log using a mature web application.

looking through mac OS X server 10.4 tiger edition

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i started exploring the apache services available to mac OS X server, and what a beautiful experience. in the old jaguar server, you had to edit some hidden files to enable PHP and mySQL, now there is a web interface or small app that does it for you. i just learned that i have a built in search engine for my blog and other website i deploy on the server using this unque url:

www.mywebsite.com/.spotlight

so no more going to atomz.com for free search. mac OS X server tiger will do it for me.

cloak media birth

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if everything in life was this simple. install mac OS X server 10.4 tiger on a legacy powermac G4 cube. install any and all updates. load the default bonjour website. hit start weblog. begin typing. that’s all i had to do. i learned this web application in under 20 minutes!

today i finished off my resume and business cards for my siggraph 2005 launch. in around a week i will know if i’ve made some headway into the los angeles marketplace. my solutions are a quarter away, but i’ll have a few experiences to write about. pray for me.