Disqus - Latest Comments for captaindigital

Re: The King of Pop Dies.

atrumichaeljacksonfan — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:16:42 -0000

i didnt mean 2sound hard sure evry1 gots flaws but he was a seriousy gr8 man u were the 178th peson dat day woo sed something somehing pityful?

no he wasnt he was the gr8 man evr. if u cld understand then i'll have a conversation, until then my sypathies.

Re: The King of Pop Dies.

captaindigital — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:56:43 -0000

Wow. I mean...WOW. Did you even READ my post? Put the Kool-Aid down for a sec and go re-read it. I didn't condemn him. I acknowledged his talent. I also noted that he led a sad life. And died young, largely because he didn't have limits - on himself, or coming from those that were supposed to care from him. But whack-jobs like you bear some guilt, too. If you can't look at those you admire and see not just the good, but the flaws, then you've moved from admiration to a card-carrying member of a hero-worshiping cult.

Call me when the shuttle lands.

Re: About

captaindigital — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:49:00 -0000

Um...WHAT?! Who are you and why in the hell are you flaming me? I am NOT a spammer. I have had several of the sites I host hacked. But thanks so much for your language, as well as for hiding behind a profane alias and jumping to conclusions. What are you...thirteen?

Re: Michael Jackson and web traffic.

antoinetteK — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:48:39 -0000

Michael Jackson was not a paedophile and anyone who followed his case closely, fan or no fan, even the experts came to that conclusion. You may think his behaviour was bizaar or weird but that does not make him a child molestor. The first child refused to testify against Michael and didn't even make the claims himself at first it was his 'wannabe' producer father. If it was your son who was molested you would not accept any amount of money but would want the accuser to go to jail. There were many circumstances surrounding the decision to pay the money, Michael wanted to fight it but he was ill advised by his then wife, lawyers and insurance company. He learned that lesson and was not about to let that happen to him again the second time when he did decide to fight it in court. There was not one shred of evidence found by a very determined police prosecutor and had they found any evidence, they would not have required permission from anyone to charge Michael. That is an offence that would have to be punished regardless. So get your facts right before you pass judgement. This is exactly why Michael was pushed to the edge in the first place.

Re: Michael Jackson and web traffic.

captaindigital — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 20:40:02 -0000

Well put. At some point each of us must take responsibility for our actions and our lives. Think about the many talented people that self-destructed - Elvis, Belushi, Morrison, Joplin, Cobain, et all. I believe that most of them (if not all) never had anybody willing to tell them "No." Certainly Elvis surrounded himself with a bunch of people all too willing to let him get away with any behavior (including drug use) no matter how self-destructive. Yet, Elvis had nobody to blame but himself, in the end. My point is that everybody is a product of their upbringing - some are able to overcome childhood problems/abuse/neglect, others not so much.

Oh, and your point about love and parenting were right on target, as well. Thanks for your comments!

Re: Michael Jackson and web traffic.

captaindigital — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 08:55:51 -0000

Um...maybe...maybe not. Remember, at least one of those cases ended with Jackson paying off the parties that brought up the charges. If I was accused of something that serious, I don't think I'd EVER agree to a payoff. I'd fight the charges with every cent I had.

By Jackson's own admission, he thought it was "normal" and "okay" to sleep with young kids and teens in his bed. I think that's waaaaaaay over the line of common sense and moral behavior.

Just because one case gets thrown out of court or the charges dismissed does not mean you did nothing wrong. It simply means the court did not meet it's burden of proof. (That's why no defendant is ever found "innocent" - they can be found "not guilty" - a subtle legal point, but an important one, nonetheless.)

I don't know if if Jackson was simply an odd individual who was "persecuted" because of his wealth and fame, or if he was a pedophile. Frankly, I don't really care - as long as no kids are being hurt, it's now a moot point. And I think that any parent - ANY parent - that would entrust their kids to someone, no matter how rich or famous - for overnight stays - should be brought up on child endangerment charges themselves. That whole thing fails my "sniff test" and fails it big time.

To assume Jackson was an innocent man makes me think that his fans are allowing his fame and talent to color their judgement, cutting him slack that nobody else on the planet would get.

Re: A Call to Arms. And Legs.

captaindigital — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:22:37 -0000

Jimmymac: sorry to lose you as a reader. Your comments, though, do beg for a reply.

I attended the San Antonio Tea Party back on April 15th, and the one in Amarillo on July 4th. What I see at the Tea Parties are people from all over the political spectrum - people that are concerned about the direction of our country. Most of those attending are concerned about excessive government spending, the influence of the Federal Reserve, bailout bucks, a government takeover of health care, and a rapidly growing Federal government. These aren't the only issues that our country faces - but they are are the ones that will determine our future as a country. I can tell you for a fact that trying to get the attention of your Congressman or your Senators is a study in frustration. My U.S. Congressman received thousands of calls, asking him to vote against TARP. The first time, he voted against it, then changed his vote for round two. I'll be voting against him next time. If I'd been in the minority on this issue, I could argue that he was listening to the majority. But the majority was against TARP. You can argue that he was elected for his wisdom and experience. I would counter by saying that if he thinks ignoring his constituents is a good idea, he's been up there too long, and needs a forced retirement. THAT is what the Tea Parties are all about - citizens using peaceful assembly and protest to get the attention of an unresponsive government.

You assume that I was asleep at the switch in the decade prior to Obama's election, regarding an assault on our Constitution. Our Constitution has been under assault for far longer than the last decade. In fact, you'd have to go back to the 1920s to find a point in our history where the Constitution has NOT been under a concerted attack. For the record, while I supported the Bush administrations policies and efforts in the War on Terror, I did NOT agree with things like the Medicare Drug benefit and the complete lack of attention paid to border security. I was one of the voices loudly complaining that Bush was abandoning Conservative principles.

I started the Captain Digital blog because I wanted to share my thoughts on politics, pop culture, and a variety of other topics. You have every right to disagree with me, just as I have every right to speak my piece. Apparently, there are a fair number of people that enjoy reading what I write. Not sure if they agree with me, but my guess is that they are at the least, entertained by what I write, and find at least some of what I write to be insightful. I am constantly reading histories, political commentary, other blogs, and listening to people I think have a firm grasp on the issues, rather than simply spouting off. Aside from simply hurling insults, I'd be interested in hearing something a little more substantial from you, if you want to express your opinions in the future.

Oh, and regarding your comment about driving "cheap hits," you've again missed my point. As a commentary on pop culture, I wrote about both Jackson and Farrah Fawcett's deaths because they were celebrities. (Can't really say write about pop culture if you take a pass on some big celebrity deaths.) When I saw what kind of hits I was getting on my blog due to the Jackson post, I was surprised. Then I read that Google had presumed that the Jackson hits were at first a concentrated Denial of Service (DoS) attack on their servers. The phenomenon was worth (I thought) a comment, simply because my daily hit rate went up to over 10x what was normal. It's ironic that by commenting on the hits, I would skew the results even more. (Scientist call that the "Observer Affect" - you can't observe something without affecting the result.) Since my second post was a commentary on the effect on my blog stats, I make no apologies for it.

So I'll keep commenting on what I see as "state-run media" and an administration that seems Hell-bent on driving us into a Socialist or Fascist state. You're free to read what I have to say, or not. At least while we have some Constitutional freedoms left.

Re: Michael Jackson and web traffic.

captaindigital — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:43:42 -0000

Um...first of all, stop "yelling." Second, did you actually READ my blog post? I state - emphatically, I might add - that I believe that EVERYONE is ultimately responsible for their own actions. Unfortunately, when you have someone who is raised to need applause and attention, fame becomes a drug. Any entertainer can tell you that fame is addictive - and that the more you get, the harder it is to quit. The death of Jackson is not the public's fault, but they played a part. Had they ignored him, he might have had some semblance of a normal life.

Re: When Marketing Fails.

cowdog — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:16:06 -0000

Brad,
Please share it with anyone, I hope and pray the new church will be a good
fit for all, and you can help support each other in the faith.

Richard

My parish link: www.graceslipperyrock.com

Re: When Marketing Fails.

captaindigital — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:50:27 -0000

Wow. Thanks for your comments. Unfortunately, we held our last service on Trinity Sunday, then followed it up with a really wonderful luncheon/party/celebration at a local restaurant. The Vestry made a (painful) decision to shut down when we did, because if we'd kept going, we would have had to have renewed our lease on the Presbyterian church as well as risked not having enough money to pay our Vicar. The timing was also being driven by the fact that a seminary/church in Houston has an opening, and our Bishop recommended our Vicar for the position - we felt it would have been selfish to insist on continuing to the very end, when he has a shot at getting another position, and we knew we would soon run out of money.

The good news is that, even though Amarillo is pretty small, there is another Anglican church here - oddly enough, meeting in another Presbyterian church's chapel. They aren't REC (and the celebrate Holy Communion only one Sunday per month, unlike All Saints) but they do use the 28 BCP and are not a part of the TEC. I suspect that my family and many of the other All Saints parishioners will end up at this church. It won't be All Saints, but I hope we will find a home there.

Some of our members (actually two members of the Vestry) are relocating to another city (job relocation). With the current economy, that's probably not surprising. Most of the families will likely check out this new Anglican mission.

I'm really touched by your comments, and your willingness to help us. If you don't mind, I'd like to forward your comments on to our (now former) Vicar. I'm sure they will warm his heart as they have mine. I also appreciate the fact that you discovered our website. The site was my project (I'm a web designer/marketer/advertising guy, and I had hoped that a really nice website would help us attract members). Didn't quite work out the way I'd hoped, but perhaps another church will see the site and find some useful ideas on it for their own online presence.

Anyway, thanks for writing, and do keep our parish in your prayers.

Godspeed,

- Brad

Re: Green is the new Red.

littleriver — Mon, 18 May 2009 23:22:55 -0000

You right on with that observation captain.

Re: Green is the new Red.

captaindigital — Mon, 18 May 2009 23:14:24 -0000

Don't forget...he also invented the Internet. According to him. Someday, I hope that a "gore" will make it into the dictionary, defined as "wildly exaggerated statement without any basis in fact." Right next to a "biden" - a crazy uncle no one pays the least bit of attention to, and a "pelosi" which would mean "someone who can't tell the difference in a lie and the truth, especially when it comes from their own mouths."

Re: When Marketing Fails.

captaindigital — Mon, 18 May 2009 00:13:21 -0000

I hear what you're saying. But while I'm a little too close to the trees to be able to see the forest, I'm fairly certain that wasn't it. You see, years before we joined, a couple of parishioners sued for control of the church, against the majority of the congregation, the vestry, and the rector. The church won, but ended up having to sell their building in order to survive. They chose to rent space from another church in town, but in the process, lost their "presence" in the community. The REC is a small denomination - an offshoot of the "mainstream" Episcopal church. When we joined, membership was down to about 60 people total - not families - people. The church budget was in the red every month, and that was a year ago. We needed about 100 people in order to get in the black, and we just couldn't find them.

I'd thought that our conservative theology would be attractive to disaffected Roman Catholics and those from the "mainstream" Episcopal churches that couldn't condone some of the things going on in their denomination. Unfortunately, they stayed away in droves. Turns out there was another "startup" Anglican church, very similar in theology to my church. Amarillo couldn't support two such churches, apparently, so one had to go. Ours was the one.

We had a vestry that was tireless in it's commitment to making things work, and a church family that was willing to do whatever they could to help our church grow. Unfortunately, I think by the time we joined, it was already too late - things had reached critical mass (no pun intended).

We're going to check out this Anglican church next week, and I hope we find a home there. Sadly, no matter how good it is, it won't be the same as what we've had. I'll miss our Rector and his wife, and all the friends we've come to know as family at our church. And I'll always wonder if there was something else we could have done that would have made the difference.

Re: Swing Voter.

captaindigital — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:58:22 -0000

I prefer "Benedict Arlen Spectre...the Dark Lord of the Sith." Notice the family resemblance?

Re: 3G or not 3G…

captaindigital — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 22:06:15 -0000

Yep. I heard about that they'd gone live about two weeks ago. My Sprint contract is up on June 18th. On the 19th (God willing, and if Apple has released the new iPhone) I'll be switching to AT&T. Some poor telemarketer called me from Sprint last week, all but begging me to extend my sentence...uh contract - for another two years. I just laughed. Sprint is still 3G-free, even after AT&T raised the ante. Is it any wonder that they are losing customers faster than they are adding them?

Re: Dallas Guitar Show: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly.

captaindigital — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:09:50 -0000

Sorry if I wasn't clear...I had a booth (373) where my other company, GuitarFurniture, was selling high-end guitar stands. You can see the stands online at www.guitarfurniture.com.

Re: Glade/Dori Kelly Update.

captaindigital — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:47:01 -0000

And the mystery deepens. The odd part is that I called the Glade folks and asked for info on the actress - whoever she is. That was a couple of months ago. I'm still waiting for a callback.

You'd think that SOMEbody - the actress, her agent, the ad agency, or SC Johnson - would want to capitalize on the Internet buzz and work the PR angle. Again, I'm still waiting.

Re: Pitchman Deathmatch: Vince “ShamWow!” Offer vs. Billy Mays

captaindigital — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:03:51 -0000

UPDATE: Our boy Vince Offer (nee: Vincent Shlomi) has been charged with assault after a Miami, Florida arrest for an altercation with a prostitute.

Sham Wow! must be so proud.

See the story here: http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/03/28/20...

Re: Shaken. Not Stirred.

captaindigital — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 08:46:56 -0000

Yep. My dad used to tell me, no matter how noble the idea, it had to walk in on two clean feet. Geitner may be "the smartest kid in the room," (I have my doubts...BIG doubts), but he has zero credibility - not just because of his tax problems, but because he was the architect of TARP I - an unmitigated disaster.

The real problem here is when the government started gaming the system to achieve political goals (i.e.: get more people to buy houses...that they couldn't afford), eventually, the system breaks down. To see the guys that screwed it up (Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, TIm Geitner, etc.) all pointing the fingers elsewhere and claiming only THEY can fix the system, is reminiscent of O.J. hitting the golf links to find his wife's murderer.

Somebody buy these guys some mirrors (so they can see the source of the problem) - and maybe dose them with sodium pentathol before their next news conference.

Re: The Five Stages of Marketing

Neuron — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:42:40 -0000

I very much appreciate you sharing this inside information. Looking from the outside, it is hard to imagine how such a good product can fail. I am sad that this is the case. Like you, I dream of the day that the source code will be released. I am sure the open source people wil be willing to further develop it. Until then, good luck with all of your future endeavors.

Re: The Five Stages of Marketing

captaindigital — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:11:32 -0000

There's way more to this than you might realize. Designer 1.0 (and it's forerunner, In*A*Vision) were really nothing more than an app that surfaced the Windows Graphic Design Interface (GDI). Starting with Designer 3.0, the app became a much more robust design tool. I was at Micrografx from 87 through 92. I saw Designer go from a relatively crude tool to a then-state of the art design tool.

Internally, there were huge debates over the direction of the application. I ran Creative Services - the in-house ad agency for the company. As such, we were both employees and users. We would go to the developers and say "we want Designer to do ______" and they would usually tell us why we were crazy and why it was impossible to do what we wanted. When we complained that if you took a drawing and stretched and scaled it several times it would lose accuracy, the response was "well...don't do that." Frustrating. Eventually, Corel released their Corel DRAW! application, and it did all the things Designer didn't (that we'd requested). The response from the developers? They claimed that the Corel code was poorly written kludges - not worth of Micrografx.

The sad part was that Designer WAS a vastly superior tool, with better features (and better code), than Corel. The turning point was when the company pre-announced Designer 4.0 - and then slipped the delivery date. That torpedoed sales and triggered massive layoffs. After I left, the company lost more focus, getting into kids software (Crayola, Hallmark Card Studio, etc.) and eventually sold out to Corel. I'm not sure why Corel bought Micrografx. I expected them to either subsume Designer into Corel, or keep Designer for "technical drawing" and position Corel DRAW as more of a entry-level drawing tool. They did neither.

I've been through this orphaned tool problem twice now - first with Designer, and second with FreeHand. Both of them are superior to their direct competition (Corel and Illustrator, respectively), but both are evidently doomed to play "Betamax" to the competitors "VHS." Frankly, I wish that both Corel and Adobe would release the orphaned product's source code into the wild, maybe under the Creative Commons license, and see if the open source crowd would be interested in updating the apps. You're right...it will never happen - but a guy can dream...

Re: O.J. (Karmically speaking.)

captaindigital — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:32:21 -0000

UPDATE: Fox News is now reporting that O.J.'s minimum sentence will be NINE years, with a possibility he'll be in for as long as 33 years (which, as he's 61 years old, whatever time he spends behind bars is likely to be a life sentence).

Re: Unclear on the Concept.

captaindigital — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:45:23 -0000

UPDATE: Persistence pays off...an old friend of mine in the PR field was able to game the Fox News telephone system (from her car, no less) to get me the phone number for the Assignments Desk. From there it was just a single call transfer over to the booker.

It just goes to show that when you are persistent - and have friends you can call on when you're in a jam - that you can overcome just about anything.

Re: Fox News Prime Time AC (After Colmes) - mediabistro.com: TVNewser

captaindigital — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:34:59 -0000

Kirsten Powers - she's articulate, intelligent, has shown that she's unwilling to carry the water of the wingnut liberals (although she leans left, she's never walked in lock-step with the Dems), and she's not hard to look at. When she's subbed for Colmes, she's held her own. Give her a shot.

Re: Improved Spam Catcher

danielha — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:16:15 -0000

You can definitely enable Disqus on every post, including old ones.