I’ve been a fan of the SitePoint(r) online resource company for about a decade, having first stumbled across its predecessor, webmaster-resources.com, and then following the company’s launch of sitepoint.com in 1999. I’m not a professional website developer, but as I’ve experimented with website design and content, I’ve benefited from SitePoint’s free and for-purchase resources.

If you haven’t visited sitepoint.com before, here are links to two recent columns that show the site’s benefits to non-web developers.

The first is an under-the-hood look at Twitter, and what may be causing the service outages that are frustrating Twitter users. I haven’t read this anywhere else. (I don’t subscribe to many other geek-oriented sites, so I might have missed some. A quick Technorati search didn’t come up with anything better than this article.)

The second article was a rant about the CAPTCHA utility that many website use to keep automated robots from accessing sites. But the CAPTCHA utility can be a pain for legitimate site vistors–especially when it insults those visitors.

Read Reddit’s Flawed CAPTCHA: Adding Insult To Injury for more information. I liked one commentor’s point that insults shouldn’t be part of the messaging in utilities meant to block automated robots. The robots won’t read or comprehend the insults. Only humans, most of whom are potential customers, would understand the insults–and they are not the ones who should be insulted.

Maybe SitePoint will become a new (to you) source for web-oriented information.

I’ve been taking photographs since I received my first camera at age 9 or 10. During a college course on photojournalism, I learned about exposures, ASA film “speed,” lighting, photo composition and how to develop and print black-and-white film.

Today I use an inexpensive Kodak digital camera that I won at a company charity golf outing. One beautiful advantage to digital photography is that I can quickly and easily delete any photographs that I don’t want to keep. On the downside, I struggle with proper lighting, because I rely on the small (and often insufficient) flash that is built into the camera.

But above-average subjects can trump average photographers, as these photos show. All were taken by me with the Kodak, during a recent family vacation to Maui, Hawaii.

I had lunch today with some people, one of whom told us about his history of heart problems. Bill has endured two major heart surgeries and can’t work because of the damage to his heart muscle. He told us that at one point during his most recent heart attack, while he was being pumped with nitroglycerin and morphine in an attempt to reduce his pain and keep him alive, the doctor told him:

“According to all of my training, and what I know, and what I’m seeing, you have about five minutes to live. If you feel inclined to make peace with your God, I’d suggest that you do it right now.” Bill decided that it would be a good idea to follow his doctor’s advice right then, and thought,
“God, thank you for the life you’ve given me. If this is my time to go, I’m ready.”

As soon as he had finished that “prayer,” the pain from the heart attack ended. “Doc, the pain is gone,” Bill exclaimed. “Are you B…s..ing me?” the doctor replied. Bill wasn’t kidding, and in the decade since that near-death experience in 1998, he has continued to live his life as though God has him here for a purpose.

If you were told that you only had five minutes left to live, would you be at peace? If you then learned that the Grim Reaper wasn’t making a house call that day after all, how would you want to spend the minutes, hours, days, weeks and months that could follow?

All of our days are numbered; let’s make them count.

I don’t know whether Miley Cyrus (Hannah Montana), Tom Cruise or the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. are familiar with any 12-Step Program, but they could benefit from some helpful guidance offered by those programs.

Most of the well-known 12-Step Programs (e.g., Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous) operate under a set of principles known as the Twelve Traditions. Number 11 states, “Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.” Number 12 states, “Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.”

My friends who taught me about 12-Step Programs said Traditions 11 and 12 protect both the individual and the 12-Step Program as a whole. They protect the individual because they discourage a member of the program from being “put on a pedestal” and becoming known as an “expert” on addictions or compulsive behavior in the media. That media spotlight could bring pressure that might, in combination with a failure to “work the program,” prove detrimental to the member. The traditions protect the 12-Step Program because it won’t be linked in the public’s mind with the failure of any individual member.

Take an example of a celebrity who goes on a media tour, stating that he or she is an alcoholic, but has stopped drinking thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous. If that celebrity later drinks, and that is reported in the media, some other active alcoholic might say, “I guess that A.A. Program doesn’t work.” Regardless of the fact that millions of people have successfully found and maintained sobriety through the A.A. Program, this person sees the failure of one famous person as representing the effectiveness of an entire program.

When 15-year-old Miley professes her Christianity–then agrees to be photographed in a sexually-tinged pose, she falls off the pedestal. When Rev. Wright engages in a clash of religion, politics and race, he stumbles from his soap box. When Tom Cruise appears irrational, then attacks someone for trying to retain rationality, he slides off of the pedestal and upsets the soap box.

No one is perfect, of course. None of us on a bad day would want to be held up to the media spotlight. When circumstances or good fortune, or old-fashioned hard work culminate in media attention, those 12-Step Traditions can be helpful in maintaining our perspective, and the reputation of the organizations or movements we hold dear.

Just read on Yahoo! that bloggers are in a group of “10 Great Careers You’ve Probably Never Heard of.”

According to the article,

Top bloggers can make six figures, and a handful are said to make millions.

Darn it! Now that everyone knows about the millions we’re making on this, the field is going to get even more crowded.

Time to find the “next big thing.”

I read (and write) warnings about the need to protect future job prospects and professional relationships by being careful about what we write in blogs. Someone interested in hiring me someday will learn a lot about me from the many posts I’ve written over the years.

But today I got a wonderful reminder about another side of blogging. It helps reconnect people separated by time and distance.

I received an email at work that contained the following exchanges:

Former college friend:

janey lou passed this along… keefe has a blog! and gray hair! and he’s suddenly morphed from a hip college dude into a suburban dad interested in family fun and spirituality. who knew?

Former college Journalism advisor:

YIKES!! Live in the present? And here I thought Keefe lived in the FAR OUT!

My reply to both:

Okay, the gray hair is true (better than NO hair), but the “suburban dad interested in family fun and spirituality” is only part of the puzzle. I still keep an eye on the dark side! [I threw in a link to the Big Dominatrix post from yesterday, just to show them how edgy I am these days.] I am thrilled to hear from you both! Please write back or call my cell so that we can catch up. I’m starting to crank up my podcasting as well as blogging, and maybe we can think of something to record together.

I would really enjoy reconnecting with the many great people I met at Eastern Illinois University, especially the daily student newspaper where we learned a lot about communications and life—both good and bad. Thanks to my blog, it looks like that will happen very easily!

eiu journalism blog

I sometimes feel like I’m beating my head against the wall whenever I try to teach my kids lessons on Internet safety and privacy. They’re relatively young (Kevin is 14 and Caitlyn is 12), and they haven’t seen or heard much of the sordid side of online communications.

Another case study recently whipped across my desk—but I don’t think I can share it with my kids yet. Maybe in a few years. Here’s the background. Tell me what you think.

I was reading an issue of Automotive News, a trade magazine geared toward the automotive industry. I was beginning to get a little punch-drunk from the usual collection of bland articles, when an article on page 46 hit me right between the eyes.

“Racy scandal for race exec” was the headline on an article that reported that Max Mosley, president of Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, the sanctioning body for Formula One and other international racing circuits, was caught on video recently with his pants down. Actually, with his pants, and every other stitch of clothing, removed from his 67-year-old body.

The video, which was posted on the British News of the World website, started a sort of media flogging of Mosley. According to the Automotive News story, in the video, the naked Mosley administered lashes to one of five prostitutes, counting the strokes in “vigorous German” and adding, in German-accented English, “She needs more of ze punishment!” Later, he gets punished by a dominatrix for being a bad boy.

Mosley is fighting off calls that he resign, lashing out at his critics, saying that the video was of a private matter that was “harmless and completely legal.” (I checked…prostitution among consenting adults is legal in London, where the video was made. Side-note: prostitution is not legal in Monaco, where Mosley lives with his wife.)

You may be thinking at this point, “So what is the lesson that you want to share with your kids, Tom? Tell us before we have to pull it out of you!”

In what, to Max Mosley, must have been a painfully twisted idea, the S&M sex video was filmed with a camera hidden in the brassiere of one of the participants (not Max, I’m assuming). That’s it; that’s the point that I want my kids to understand.

The world in which we live is closer than anyone would have thought to the “Big Brother” world written about by George Orwell. Only it is even more insidious than Orwell imagined, because rather than an evil government conspiring to remove our privacy, we are doing it to ourselves. Through our brassieres, through our camera phones, through our lack of respect for privacy.

My kids need to know this, before they start adding videos of their own (hopefully much more family-friendly than Max’s) to their MySpace, or Facebook, or whatever place they will consider to be “private,” “safe” and “boss” in the future. Because it isn’t only Big Brother we need to fear today; it’s Big Dominatrix with the Little Video Camera…or our best friend who doesn’t have the sense to yell “Cut.”
“max+mosley” prostitution video privacy commakazispeek

If you’re a student, or have ever been one, I strongly encourage you to watch the recently released documentary, “Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed.” It can help renew the healthy skepticism and willingness to explore new ideas that can promote discernment, greater learning and increased tolerance–skills and attitudes that many schools purport to foster, while stifling in reality.

At least discernment, learning and tolerance when it relates to the validity and scope of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and a second theory, Intelligent Design.

As stated in a press kit on the website for the movie, “In a controversial new satirical documentary, author, former presidential speechwriter, economist, lawyer and actor Ben Stein travels the world, looking to some of the best scientific minds of our generation for the answer to the biggest question facing all Americans today: Are we still free to disagree about the meaning of life? Or has the whole issue already been decided…while most of us weren’t looking?”

What do you think, readers? As a writer with journalism training and experience, I would be hard-pressed to think of something that bothers me more professionally AND personally than a person or institution (educational, governmental, religious or other) that actively and purposefully works to stifle freedoms—with freedom of speech and thought being near the top of the list.

Man’s inhumanity to man so often is played out by a degradation of rights and privileges, as dissent is cowered, obedience is demanded and resistance is punished. Don’t get me wrong—the scientists and learned people who are shown in “Expelled” have not suffered anything like people in devastated regions like Darfur, areas of China, South and Central America, or past generations who died in concentration camps, killing fields and the Roman Coliseum.

Ben Stein however, has purposely connected his documentary, both visually and factually, with major historical events that divided nations and resulted in the suffering and deaths of millions: Nazi Germany’s desire to rid humanity of genetically “inferior” people and the Berlin Wall that kept freedom and dissent out of a major portion of Eastern Europe after World War II.

Okay, you may think that it is over the top to discuss Adolf Hitler’s massacre of millions of Jews, Christians, Gypsies and others in the same breath as the fate of a teacher in Seattle, WA (USA) who doesn’t make tenure because of a paper that dares to consider the possibility of intelligent design. Take that skepticism, or disbelief, or whatever you call it with you to the next screening of “Expelled.” Then remember that Hitler didn’t set up the crematoriums on the first night that he took power in the 1930s. No, first he and his henchmen worked methodically to stifle the right to speak or think in opposition to the ruling authority. Today, the ruling authority in terms of science doesn’t want to engage in the discussion regarding intelligent design.

If you see the movie and then comment here along the lines of, “Nice try, but here’s why I don’t think that Ben Stein is right,” we can have a good discussion. Just don’t comment cavalierly that you don’t need to consider the question because “intelligent design is for religious morons and can’t hold a candle to evolution.”

Because then I might be closer to the truth by saying that rather than keeping an open mind, your head was squeezed shut so tightly that your brains fell out.

I decided tonight to upgrade to the latest stable release of the WordPress blogging software, version 2.5, and completed the upgrade easily and relatively quickly. You probably don’t notice anything different yet, because I had a clean site with few plugins and no widgets.

That may change when I get a chance to sort through some of the newer offerings from WordPress developers.

On my drive to work earlier this week, I heard the familiar voice of a writer colleague on the radio. I soon became uncomfortable listening to my colleague, for reasons that I’ll share shortly. The experience reminded me about the absolutely different skills required of a speaker and a writer.

I’m not going to name the writer because my post isn’t an attack on him; it’s an appeal to every person who may be interviewed or stand before an audience at a conference or other speaking engagement. Practice speaking, and consider getting training and experience in public speaking through associations or organizations such as Toastmasters, International.

A few months ago, after seeing some weaknesses in my speaking style, I joined a Toastmasters club that had just formed at work. Although I’ve only completed a few talks, I already see and hear the improvement in my structured and off-the-cuff talks. Club members actually gloat now when they catch me saying “um” or “err.” It doesn’t happen often!

My work within the Toastmasters program is what made me more aware of the conversation that my colleague had earlier this week with the host of a major Chicago-based radio station. The colleague was being interviewed regarding an article he had written that appears in the most recent issue of a consumer magazine.

As the colleague answered question after question from the radio host, my emotions changed from excitement, to bemusement, to unbelief, and finally to sadness. This colleague is a solid communicator—of the written word. He has strong journalistic senses and churns out a massive amount of well-written online and print articles and opinion pieces.

But he seemed ill-prepared and very unsure of himself during the radio interview. He stumbled over himself and strung out disjointed answers to the host’s relatively straightforward questions about the background for the article and some general questions about the people who are featured prominently in the article.

It sounded like the radio host had awakened my colleague from a deep sleep in the middle of night. But the reality must have been that the interview was prearranged, giving my colleague time to prepare.

I’m more convinced than ever of the very different skills involved in writing and speaking. Of course, both require organization and an understanding of how to communicate with an audience. But a writer cannot just “wing it” in front of an audience (or a radio host) without a different kind of preparation. When he tries, the lack of preparation comes through loudly and clearly.