So I used to be a painter. If you're a painter you have painter friends. One of my painter friends is Edgar Jerins.

This is a drawing that Edger did of our buddy Steve and his girlfriend. (Steve's an artist too.)

As an artist you often hear this: "I don't know art but I know what I like."

That's bullshit actually. If you knew about art, the art you like would drastically change. Saying that you don't know art but you know what you like is a complete manifestation and admittance that wallowing in ignorance is preferable to interest and knowledge. Here's what a critic said of Edgars work.

A recent show at the Tatistscheff Gallery in New York City (May 13–June 26) showed six works by Edgar Jerins that stretched the definition of drawing. There was nothing offhand or intimate about these huge charcoals on sheets of paper often measuring five-by-eight feet. The Nebraska-born artist describes these unsettling interior genre scenes as narrative portraits. The figures—friends and relatives, worked up from hundreds of photographs—are depicted in emotionally fraught domestic situations. Jerins admits to a special interest in the discontents of the middle-aged American male, as one title, The Artist’s Family, “We have to Move” (2004), suggests. Alienation is a venerable American theme, most notably embodied by Edward Hopper, but Jerins’s pictures are far more

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This is just one of my blogs. I have others.

 
One of them is Medical Spa MD, a blog for physicians in medspas and cosmetic medicine where there's a pretty active community. Medspa MD has around 50,000 unique visitors a month, mostly doctors, who are interested in both the business and treatment aspects of cosmetic medicine.

Medspa MD's become the defacto leader for docs in that field and as such it's become both an aggregator and a target. Loved by it's members and hated by those who have a less than pristine reputation. This has led to the following confrontation.

Dermacare and it's CEO Carl Mudd want to sue eveyone on Medical Spa MD.

 
A few of the posts on Medspa MD is a bout a medspa franchise called Dermacare and it's CEO, Carl Mudd. 

• Dermacare, Sona, American Laser Clinics & the rest.
  
• Dermacare Laser & Skin Care Clinics
  
• Dermacare Medical Spa Franchises Unite?

Together, these three posts have mucho comments. The middle one is gong to break 700 shortly.

Evidently, Dermacare and it's CEO Carl Mudd are not pleased since they sent me this email and letter threatening me with some sort of action if I didn't hand over all of the IP addresses of everyone who's commented.

This sort of action is both extremely cynical and growing in popularity. It's called a CyberSLAPP Suit and it works like this: If you don't like what someone is saying about you on the web you file a suit. This allows you to issue subpoenas to whoever you like. So now you can find out who these individuals are and threaten to haul them into court. It uses a lawful procedure to effectively intimidate dissent and free speach, both of which are protected after all.

If you've never run into this, count yourself lucky, but don't think it couldn't happen to you. It's a dragnet. 

Here are some links about these kinds of CyberSlapp suits and where the law comes down on free speech and other issues around this:

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse: A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics.

You've got to be kidding.

"...sources saying Hilton was refusing to eat much of the jail food served her. Whitmore said that after "extensive consultation with medical personnel" it was decided to offer Hilton "reassignment" to home confinement, which she and her lawyers accepted."

Is there anyone who's not pissed off by this?

Evidently she cried in prison, couldn't sleep, and refused to eat most of the food. That just sounds like a good jail to me. I'd write more but the tears are starting and the keyboard's getting blurry.

And then there's this:

Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in.

Superior Court Judge Michael T. Sauer issued his order after the city attorney filed a petition late Thursday afternoon questioning whether Sheriff Lee Baca should be held in contempt of court for releasing Hilton on Thursday morning.

"What transpired here is outrageous," county Supervisor Don Knabe told The Associated Press, adding that he received more than 400 angry e-mails and hundreds more phone calls from around the country.

Sauer himself had expressed his unhappiness with Hilton's release before Delgadillo asked him to return her to court. When he sentenced Hilton to jail last month, he ruled specifically that she could not serve her sentence at home under electronic monitoring.

From the NY Times: Attack of the Zombie Computers is growing threat.

80% of all spam now originates from botnets

I posted previously about Internet Evil: Bot Masters.

There may be real trouble for the net here. It will probably take a high profile attack and some real economic damage to bring out a solution. Nothing motivates like real pain. 

I hear a lot about encourageing risk taking and the benefits entrepreneurs provide to an economy. I'm still waiting for all this good will to funnel down to the level I'm at. It's kind of like that saying about Trickle Down Economics: 'The middle class didn't get trickled down... they got trickled on.'

Should We Worry about the Rising Inequality in Income and Wealth?, Judge Richard Posner considers how a high marginal taxes effects entrepreneurs and risk takers:

high marginal tax rates discourage risk-taking. Consider two individuals: one is a salaried worker with an annual income of $100,000 and good job security, and the other is an entrepreneur with a 10 percent chance of earning $1 million in a given year and a 90 percent chance of earning nothing that year. Their average annual incomes are the same, but a highly progressive tax will make the entrepreneur's expected after-tax income much lower than the salaried worker's. Many of the people at the top of the income distribution are risk takers who turned out to be lucky; the unlucky risk takers fell into a lower part of the distribution. It is rich people as a class who are growing relatively richer, not necessarily individual rich persons.

via Venture Voice 

I think that most businesses should be running their own blog. Most businesses don't.

The most common excuses I hear are no time and no knowledge. 

For the first time today on any of my blogs I deleted a comment. Damn. Simply a knee jerk reaction and something I regret. Adam, owner of My Secret Chef in Bountiful, flamed me for my post about customer service. I didn't even get the whole thing read and deleted it.

But there is something to be learned and it's something I've tried to teach to my daughter. "Never bait anyone who owns the mic". You're stuck in a no win situation. This blog gets a few thousand unique viewers each month from inside Utah. It's not the place to pick a fight since you don't control the mic.

I actually like Adam quite well. He's trying to run a difficult business from what I saw. I'm sure that he was angered when he came across a post that used him as an example of  what I saw as a poor choice. Guess he got a little miffed and decided to use my own blog to flame me. It's not the first time someone's taken exception to my opinion. These things can get a little out of hand and are generally not worth the effort and conflict.

So he flamed me and I deleted his comment. My bad and I'm sorry for it.

So, if you're around Bountiful, My Secret Chef is a great place to pick up dinner on your way home from work.

This video site really pissed me of with their hidden click fraud. They purposely hide ppc links that look as though  they're navigation for videos.  I only realized what happened after clicking a link that threw me off the site. Think the advertisers don't mind?

From the Healthcare Advocate Blog: Here's what he found when posing as an uninsured patient requesting an elective CT scan:

• The list price varies by 75% ($1,013 to $3,970).
• The best uninsured price varies by 92% ($204 to $2,600).
• List price discounts range from 0% to 86%.
• To get many of the discounts hospitals offer the balance needs to be paid in full at the time of service or a large down payment made, to receive it.
• Some hospitals are unwilling to divulge the price over the phone and others will not call back.

From Wired: Attack of the Bots

Bot Masters are starting to throw their weight around. And they're winning. Wired has a horrific story of one company being targeted as a personal vendetta, and being put out of business.

SIX APART HAD FALLEN PREY to a botnet – a network made up of independent programs, or bots, acting in concert. Over the years, corporate IT managers have learned to firewall their networks to block unauthorized intrusion and patch their system software to keep out viruses, worms, and Trojan horses. Likewise, PC owners have installed tens of millions of personal firewalls and antivirus programs. But bots are infiltrating even protected computers, and they have quickly become a bigger threat than virulent malware like the famously destructive Melissa, I Love You, and Slammer.

"After learning about bots, you might think, 'I feel hopelessly outgunned and outmatched,'" says Peter Tippett, CTO of security consultancy Cybertrust. "You are."

Via Wired: See Also

• Can Techie Oust Orrin Hatch?
• Orrin Hatch, Software Pirate?
• Hatch Wants to Fry Traders' PCs

Orrin Hatch, the entertainment industry-affiliated Republican who made it a federal crime to play a DVD on a Linux computer and tried to enable copyright holders to destroy the computers of suspected copyright infringers, is accustomed to representing Utah in the United States Senate.

After voters head to the polls on Nov. 7, he will most likely continue to do. But it won't be because there was no young, straight-shooting, idealistic, tech-savvy candidate there to oppose him.

His name is Pete Ashdown, and if anyone can clue Congress in to technology before it legislates the internet into a bunch of pneumatic tubes, it's Ashdown, who breathes bytes and exhales bits. He founded XMission (the first and largest ISP in Utah), deejayed raves and posted a Wiki version of his campaign platform for anyone to edit. One contribution to that Wiki formed a cornerstone of his platform: that the Iraqi people should vote through a referendum on whether U.S. troops should stay in their country.

In an age where energy magnates meet behind closed doors with elected officials to determine policy, Ashdown posts a calendar showing every meeting he takes in a day, and thinks other politicians should do the same.

This political transparency comes as a breath of fresh air to Ashdown's supporters, many of whom reside outside the state of Utah. The New York Times pegged Hatch as the "overwhelming favorite" there, but that hasn't stopped Ashdown from fighting for every last vote in a state he considers to be full of Democrats who just don't know that they're Democrats.