Friday was my 31st birthday and I am recovering from a long weekend of celebration. My friends at work took me out to lunch at my favorite barbecue restaurant Friday afternoon. That evening I had a quiet evening at home with Betsy and Rian. We ordered pizza and opened some gifts. Saturday was the “official” party and I had a bunch of people over for a ping pong tournament. Sunday we drove to Denver to celebrate an early Thanksgiving/birthday meal with extended family. It was great fun and I can’t help but feel blessed to have such loving family and friends.

Whenever you make a birthday post on your blog you feel like you have to say something profound about getting older. Since 31 is such an uneventful age, forgive me for not having the secret to life in this post. However, I am going to use my birthday as an excuse to do a little naval gazing. Apologies in advance.

If I had to comment on a characteristic of my personality that I have noticed lately it would be how competitive I am. I have always been competitive but lately it seems especially hard to not want to win at everything I do. It doesn’t matter if it is ping pong, chess, basketball, graphic design, or a weight loss competition. I will put everything I have into trying to beat you at it. I am even competitive when the only person to compete with is myself. For example, when I run I am disappointed if my time isn’t a personal best every time. I am so competitive, that I don’t want you to just think of me as being a competitive person, I want you to think I am the most competitive person you have ever met. And I am not sure why.

As I try to consider what makes me the way I am, I think it has something to do with how I handle failure. My mom tells stories about how stubborn I was as a child. Being strong willed is a trait that hasn’t left me over the years. I like to think of this as a positive attribute, and it has served me well. Perhaps a better word to describe me would be “determined,” When I don’t win I will try again, and again, until I achieve my goal.

If I have achieved any degree of skill, it has been earned from failure. I have always been a mediocre basketball player. Today I can hold my own because years of blocked shots and turnovers have taught me what not to do. I have lost more games of chess than I care to admit – probably in the thousands. Playing ping pong with me is like playing against a wall – because I have logged so many hours of racket sports.

Unfortunately, being extremely competitive often goes hand-in-hand with being a jerk. And that’s where things get tough. Allow me to end this post with an apology to anyone I have annoyed with my constant determination. As I said at the beginning of this post, I am blessed with family and friends. Thank you for putting up with me! Oh, and if you think it is annoying now, wait until I turn 40 and really have something to prove.

I used to be a habitual stat watcher, but over the last couple years I haven’t kept a close eye on where my traffic as closely. As a result it was a bit of a surprise to learn which of my posts get the most hits from search engines. Using Google’s Webmaster Tools, I was able to get a good overview of what search results are sending people to my site. I thought I would post the results here so that perhaps you can use this information to give you some ideas about what to write about on your blog. Here are the four main sources of traffic I have seen visiting adrian3.com…

1. Victims of Scams/Cautious Shoppers
Whenever I get ripped off, I usually use my blog as a place to vent. Several of these rants generate traffic for me because I am not the only victim in most of these cases. For example, the most popular search on my site is for “Privacy Matters Scam” which I posted over three years ago. Apparently, the fraud continues with that organization. It also looks like the Nebraska gas stations are still up to no good because people are searching for “Cost of Gas in Nebraska.”

Cautious shoppers are also finding my site as they do their homework on local companies like “Mac Shack Fort Collins.” It makes me feel good to know that my posts are more than just rants, and people are finding useful information to help them deal with bad situations.

2. Software Pirates
I was amazed by how much traffic I get from people searching for activation numbers for the Adobe Creative Suite. I wrote a post about my frustration with Adobe, but the traffic this post receives seems to be exclusively people looking for a “Photoshop CS3 Serial Number.”

3. Unique Longtail Content
Unlike the software pirates, it is reassuring that people are finding the unique content I create here on Adrian3. Searches for topics of my essays like, “What to do on your Last Day of Work,” or “How can I improve my dream memory?,” and “Where is Velveeta in the grocery store,” are evidence that their is an audience for my obscure ramblings.

If you have a blog, I would encourage you to write about your unusual, non-traditional ideas because people will find them. Common sense might tell you that a broad post that appeals to the masses would generate the most traffic, but actually the opposite is true. The reason for this is that the popular topics are also the subject of many more blogger’s posts. Competition is much higher for a post about Ashton Kutcher, than it is for a more obscure post about the Ashton Kutcher Camera.

Other longtail topics I have written about include:
iTunes Orphans (A post about how to remove orphaned iTunes Files)
Stop Motion Movie
Good mechanical pencils
MacBook Pro Crashed (I feel for these people!)

4. Original Creations
A good portion of my traffic also comes from people looking for things I have created. This is probably the most rewarding result of my traffic analysis because I really love it when my creations get seen and used. My most popular creations include:

iPhone Control Panel Plugin
Font Burner
Konami Easter Egg
Sofa Control scripts

I spent last night trying to figure out how my websites got hacked. Luckily no permanent damage was done, but it did take some time to figure out what was going on. I wanted to post my experience in case someone else comes across this same problem. Here is what happened…

By pure coincidence I happened to be looking at my robots.txt file last night. Actually, I didn’t even have a robots.txt file on my site. I was playing with Google’s Webmaster Tools and noticed that Google was giving errors when it read my robots.txt (which didn’t exist). I went to the address where there shouldn’t have been a file at all (http://fontburner.com/robots.txt) and saw a page of text filled with links to porn/spam sites. This sent me off on a wild goose chase to figure out how my site had been exploited.

The first place I looked was at my .htaccess file. My guess was that they were using the .htaccess file to redirect robots.txt to some other file. In my .htaccess file I noticed this code which I was pretty sure wan’t put there by me:


RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule .* http://allvideo.org.uk/in.cgi?4&parameter=sf [R,L]


The thing that threw me off was that this looks like legitimate code because the first line looks like it might be telling Google not to index the images of your site. Is this the work of a clever hacker adding decoy code before the really nasty stuff?

Deleting this code from my .htaccess file didn’t seem to affect my robots.txt file so I kept looking for a solution.

At this point I opened a ticket with MediaTemple, my web host to see if they had any advice. They responded quickly with a link to a knowledge base article called “Working with a php injected website.” This article confirmed my .htaccess suspicions and also pointed me to a line of code found in php files. Removing the .htaccess code was easy, but how do you find a line of code in the thousands of php files on a WordPress powered site?

MediaTemple also hinted at the possibility of needing to reinstall all WordPress files, something that I really didn’t want to do. I did some searching and came accross a good writeup of the situation on kyle-brady.com called “WordPress, MediaTemple, and an Injection Attack.” If you are a victim of this attack, I encourage you to read this post because it gives instructions about how to fix and identify the problem as well as many comments from other victims.

It turned out that in addition to removing the malicious code from the .htaccess file I also had to remove code from the index.php files in the root of my site. Once that was all cleared out, my robots.txt file issue was corrected. It looks like other people encountered deeper problems that affected the links in blog posts. Those people had to recreate their recent blog posts manually. Yuck.

This whole ordeal has left me feeling violated and unconfident about both WordPress and MediaTemple. If someone can add code to your .htaccess and your index.php files, that is a major hack. I feel lucky that they didn’t do more harm than they did because it seems like if you can hack those files you could easily take a site down or worse.

I am unsure who is actually to blame for this exploit, if anyone is. I heave read that MediaTemple blames WordPress and WordPress blames MediaTemple. There are reports that Drupal sites have also been exploited, so the problem isn’t limited to WordPress only. WordPress has released an update in the last week, but I don’t see any evidence that this issue was addressed in the latest security fix.

MediaTemple has told me that they changed all affected sites passwords for FTP. They also said that they scanned their servers and removed the malicious code. This is a confusing statement because neither of these things appears to have been done in my case. My FTP password still worked, and unless I removed the code before they did, they didn’t remove it from my site.

The good news is that the issue is (hopefully) behind me. If you are hosted on MediaTemple, I would advise you to take a look at your robots.txt (even if you don’t have one) because if I hadn’t noticed it I never would have known my site was infected. You may be a victim of the hack and not even know it.

For my money, there isn’t a better sound in the world than James Mercer and The Shins. Their music resonates with me unlike any other band and I am always on the lookout for bands that make music that will become a part of me the way The Shins have. Have you ever loaded your favorite band into a search engine hoping to find something comparable? If you have, you have probably been disappointed. Despite advances in recommendation engines like the ones used by Amazon and iTunes, it is still really hard to find great music.

The idea of recommendation engines is a wonderful concept. Netflix used to do a pretty descent job of recommending movies for me based on my rankings of past rentals. Unfortunately, after a couple years of Netflix it has gotten to the point where all the obvious recommendations have been exhausted. All that remains are the 3.5 star options. A recommendation of 3.5 stars is pretty much saying, “you might like this one, but don’t blame me if you give it 2 stars.” Thanks, for nothing Netflix. So I watch these 3.5 star movies hoping to find the gems and occasionally I find one.

A similar thing happens with music recommendation engines like Amazon and iTunes. Since I have a pretty large music library I am not interested in recommendations that are more mainstream, I am looking for the rare gems that I have never heard of before. If you tell Amazon that you like The Shins it will give you suggestions that point you in two dead end directions: either deeper into The Shins discography (which I already own), or toward more successful better selling musicians. Since I already own (or don’t care for) the albums they suggest, Amazon can’t make a single good recommendation for me. For example, Amazon will suggest Arcade Fire, The Postal Service, and maybe Death Cab for Cutie. Good bands to be sure, but you could get this same advice by consulting the top sellers at Target. Amazon’s goal is clear and the strategy is surely effective: the purpose of their recommendations is to sell as much as possible. They point consumers at the most popular options because they know they can sell more of those products more easily. This is bad news for a serious music treasure hunter.

So after you have exhausted the surface level recommendations of Netflix/iTunes/Amazon, how do you uncover great new music or movies? The only place to turn is to the people with similar tastes as you who also have a much deeper catalog of experience. If you are lucky enough to know someone like this, they might recommend lesser known artists like Great Lake Swimmers, Rogue Wave, or Nada Surf if you tell him/her that you love the Shins. And because this recommendation come from a trusted source you are more likely to take a risk on these “unknown” options because you respect this person’s opinion. Unfortunately, we don’t all have a friend like that.

The next best source is to go is online. There are so many music blogs out there that you should be able to find someone out there that shares your tastes. This person’s passionate praise and revelatory rants will be an amazingly more accurate recommendation engine than any automated system in existence. But how do you find the right music blog? That’s a tough question.

The best advice I can give you is to plug a band that you really like into Hype Machine. This will generate a list of music blogs that have posted music by this artist. Follow the links one at a time and spend some time surfing the various sites you land on. Chances are you will stumble upon some blogs with similar taste to you. Add these sites to your RSS reader and start following them. After you have followed the blogs for a while you can keep the good one’s and weed out the rest. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

With the end of the decade in sight I have enjoyed browsing the best-of-the-decade lists that are starting to circulate. I love discovering a new album that sends me down a new vein of musical exploration. Unfortunately, most of the lists contain largely the same albums, just with the rankings slightly jockeyed around. The exception came earlier this week when I stumbled upon a really great list from a music blog called RawkBlog. David Greenward ranks the top 100 albums of the 2000s and the list is amazing not because of the order, but because he has the guts to pick the albums that meant the most to him. There are so many albums on his list that I haven’t heard of that I feel like I have discovered a goldmine. Unlike Amazon where you get pushed to the bestsellers, a great music blog takes you deep down the rabbit hole.

I suppose the magic of RawkBlog’s list comes from the fact that he has similar taste as me. He describes his tastes like this: “I like acoustic guitars, scrawny dudes and odd voices; songs about girls; songs; girls; cymbal-heavy percussion; major 7th chords; harmonies; emotions; dynamic range; the production style of Jim O’Rourke; the early 1970s; the late 1990s.” I think I may have found my musical soul mate.

Perhaps someday the automated recommendation engines will improve to the point that they can make deep suggestions as well as the obvious, but for now, the blogs are the best place to discover new music. Even if the computers advance to that point, the blog will still win out because it is personal. And that’s really where the joy of music comes from – sharing the experience with people like us.

Cuba wasn’t always the place we imagine today. It may surprise you to learn that in the early 1900′s Havana was known as the “Paris of the Caribbean.” It was in 1910 in Havana that the world was introduced to one of greatest chess players who ever lived. His name was José Raúl Capablanca.

Capablanca learned the game of chess from watching his father play. He claims to have never read a book about chess. I don’t tend to believe in talent, but Capablanca seriously challenges that belief. His incredible mind seems to have been born with an amazing natural ability for chess. At age 12 he defeated the Cuban champion. Here is a video showing on of those incredible games:

When Capablanca became world champion in 1921, he was in the middle of a winning streak that lasted 8 years. Yes, you read that correctly. Capablanca, playing against the greatest players in the world, including Alexander Alekhine, Emanuel Lasker, and Akiba Rubinstein he never lost a single game.

To give you an idea of the amazing mind of Capablanca, consider this. He would give exhibitions where he played multiple games at the same time. At one point he played 102 games simultaneously. He didn’t lose a single game. His opponents marveled at his speed and praised his ability to instantly see deeply into the position of a game. Here is another game of Capablanca’s that has been described as one of the most instructive games of chess ever played:

A world champion of chess may seem like an unrewarding title, but don’t be fooled. When a world champion was defending his title in 1915 the stakes were about $700,000 in today’s terms. Don’t ask me where this money came from, but needless to say, world champion chess games are big money.

An interesting footnote to Capablanca’s amazing life is his invention of a variation of chess that added two new pieces to the game. The first new piece is called an archbichop which has the combined power of a bishop and a knight. The second piece is a chancellor which has the combined powers of the rook and a knight. The game is played on a 10×8 board and is referred to as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capablanca_chess. If you are interested in chess variations the wikipedia page about fairy pieces is fascinating.

My wife gave me a short list of groceries to pick up on my way home from work last week. One of the items that proved to be elusive was the Velveeta cheese. As I searched up and down the aisles at Safeway I started thinking about the implications involved with where a store stocker places this non-cheese. For some reason the experience has stuck with me through the week. I keep coming back to it because I think it illustrates the “gray area” that marketer’s often find themselves when the try to do “the right thing.” Let me explain…

The Velveeta Paradox
If you owned a grocery store, where would you stock the Velveeta cheese? This question seems simple enough, but let me walk you through the moral implications embedded in this seemingly simple question…

Answer 1: The Dairy Aisle
It seems logical to stock Velveeta with the other cheeses. This is the first place a customer will typically look when searching for Velveeta. In case you didn’t know, Velveeta isn’t truly a cheese and doesn’t need to be refrigerated. This raises some problems. First, since dairy products need to be refrigerated it costs more for you to keep the product here. How do you pay for this extra cost? Do you markup the product and charge the customer for the luxury of finding the product where they expect it? Is it deceptive to sell imitation cheese as if it were actually cheese?

Answer 2: Near the Dairy Aisle
If you choose a location close to the dairy aisle you face a different moral conundrum. The nature of the refrigerated section of the grocery store is that there rarely will be a good spot near the cheese. If there is a shelf in eye sight of the cheese, chances are the items found here will not be a context where you would look to find cheese. Stacking bricks of Velveeta between loaves of bread or between coffee grounds puts the macaroni lubricant severely out of context. If you truly value your customers you won’t want them to miss the location and walk aimlessly around the store for hours. Or perhaps you are the kind of person who would hide the cheese intentionally so that customers will load their cart up with other non-essentials as they search for the holy grail of cheese products.

Answer 3: The End Cap
To compensate for the lack of visibility caused by taking Velveeta out of the context of the cheese section you may decide that an end cap is the best place to stock your loafs of lard. End caps, however, are the prime real estate in the store. Can you afford to give up this space (and possible revenue) just to make the orange jelly easier to find?

Answer 4: The Chip Aisle
Since imitation cheese is a common ingredient in dips, it might make sense to stock it in the chip aisle with the junk food. You are now presented with a different type of question. Velveeta has very few redeeming health merits. If you are concerned about the health of your customers, should you really be promoting I-can’t-believe-its-not-cheese in the first place? How do you avoid feeling guilty about providing a substance that kills people?

Answer 5: The Cigarette Counter
If your conscience gets the best of you, guilt might cause you to pull the toxic cubes off the shelves all together. Perhaps the cigarette counter is a more appropriate spot. You can add warning labels, age restrictions, and generally make people feel guilty about buying the irresistible yellow sludge. This would of course have the negative side effect of offending the responsible Velveeta user who uses it in moderation in the privacy of their own home.

Answer 6: Anywhere Else
There aren’t any other places left in the store that make sense to put the artery arsenic. Again, if you value your customer’s time it has to be in a place where they know to look. Additionally, as a store owner you will lose sales on Velveeta if people can’t find it. Can you afford to put it somewhere where it won’t be found?

I hope you found this analogy entertaining. As funny as it sounds, these are the kind of moral decisions that we all have to make on a daily basis. Although advertisers are often lumped into the same category as politicians and lawyers when it comes to measuring the “most loathed human beings,” almost all the marketers I have ever known have been good honest people. For the most part, the average human has nothing but good intentions when it comes to their careers. We want to help people. We want to produce quality products that people will find useful. We want to invest our lives in things that we consider good. Inevitable this will eventually put you in a catch-22 situation. Sometimes there just isn’t a safe answer to questions like these. If you are sincerely trying to be a good person you will regularly be confronted with situations that compromise your integrity. What do you do when you are between a rock and a hard place?

By the way, I am giving out high-fives to anyone who leaves a comment with a good slang phrase for Velveeta. I think my favorite so far is “the holy grail of cheese products.”

Oh, and if you were wondering where Velveeta actually gets stocked, you will usually find it in the refrigerated dairy section next to the other cheeses. You can be sure that the store passes the unnecessary refrigeration cost on to you…

Up until that moment creating art was easy. Before this, all that was needed was patience and practice. You find something beautiful and draw it. Let your eyes absorb the beauty and then channel that vision onto paper. I was a junior in high school when my art teacher rocked my world.

The assignment was to make something that represented our families. Sounds simple right? The catch was that this wasn’t a drawing. It wasn’t a photo. As we tried to pin down Mr. Schatz about what exactly we were supposed to create, he was elusive. The more we pressed him the more confusing the assignment became.

We knew what a drawing was. We know what pottery was. We knew what photos were. We knew what songs were. We knew what a poem was. These things defined “art” as we knew it. But this assignment was something confusing, something foreign to us. Finally, Mr. Schatz gave us some vague direction. He said something like,

“Think about what your family means to you. You know these people better than anyone else in the world. You can’t sum up the most important people in your life with a drawing. You can’t represent your love for your mom with a poem. When you think about your brothers and sisters you feel something inside you. Focus on that – and then make something that feels the same way.”

Needless to say, we left class that day bewildered. We struggled with it. The word that comes to mind to describe what I felt was “terrified.” I was supposedly one of the talented artists in the class and I had no idea what to make.

As I struggled with the assignment, things gradually became clear. Creating something was secondary to the process. It didn’t matter so much what we made, what mattered was learning to think creatively, passionately, and personally. Shapes, color, paint, tools – all the familiar skills we were learning – were all finally given a purpose beyond “making pretty things.” For the first time in our lives, this thing called “art” was connected to something inside of us. It was terrifying, yes, but it was also empowering. It was a pivotal moment in my creative development.

This was in a public school in the midwest, Wentzville High to be exact, but I still wonder what impact traditional education has on creative development. So much of what we learn in school is how to memorize and recite answers. We learn what hoops to jump through and in what order. Do a, b, and c and you earn a diploma. Where does creativity come into play? Creativity isn’t something that you can create a formula for.

As a graphic designer I get paid to work for so-called “non-creatives.” It is a challenge that I gladly welcome, but I can’t help but wonder if these people are merely missing a creative component that should have been taught in school. These brilliant people are enormously intelligent with successful careers and more wealth than I will ever see. And yet when it comes to a visual vocabulary they are infants. When conversations stray beyond the physical/quantifiable/literal I see the same thing that I saw back in high school: terrified bewilderment. And just like in school some people embrace the new world, others run for cover and the comfort of more easily measured occupations.