A long day at work. Doing some coding right now...

Brad and Helena...you can't log back in to the admin side yet...still working out some bugs.

The new features should be cool, but it could take up to a week for me to get them working. Combined with the fact that my work (during the day) is super-busy...well, let's just say posting will be light this week.

Part 3 of the cult experience, as well as the regular weekend update, as well as the new coding, as well as everything else in my life, is on hold until I finish a big proposal for work. It's a big proposal.

So I arrive at this almost-deserted officepark with Jill a few minutes late, and notice everyone walking into the building wearing suits and nice dresses. I immediately give my best accusatory glance to Jill, who had informed me that going home and changing into shorts was fine. A few huffs later, we parked and walked towards the entrance.

A few nicely dressed greeters handed us promotion materials and promptly shooed us inside to a large room containing a couple hundred people and a large stage. On the stage were two Landmark hosts, with the audience composed mostly of guests, with a small number of people scattered throughout who had participated in the forum. We sat down near the very rear, being late, and listened as the two hosts began their spiel.

From the opening moment, it sounded like your standard self-help-motivational-speaking gig. The hosts were loud and used generalities. The materials we were handed described a typical Landmark forum weekend. No cultish stuff there. It seemed fairly standard. Later, participants got up to speak about their experience. All were enthusiastic about the process, but they didn't seem brainwashed, or really that polished. Most just droned on a bit and hemmed and hawed. The only halfway interesting comment came from one participant who said his "breakthrough" occurred when someone "had their shirt thrown away" during the process. Said person then hastily added, "I guess I shouldn't have mentioned that" and kept talking. Not much to go on.

Several boring minutes later, they asked everyone to talk to the person who had invited them. After a brief (two minutes) conversation, they then told everyone to sign up for the forum. Jill and I declined.

Must run to party now...will update in part 3 in a minute.

Okay, so Jill used to work at this place that was a little, um, crazy. It's a progressive political organization that has been around for several years, but was a little disorganized. The fuhrer of this org decided to whip things into shape by hiring a friend of hers whom she had met at a "seminar" some time earlier. Long story short: new second-in-command comes in, assumes the reins of power, goes ape and ends up firing the few people who refuse to resign after working for her for a couple weeks. We're not talking decimation. We're talking dimidiation.

Since I knew people (not just Jill) who worked there, I grew concerned that the Dick Cheney in question was dismantling the entire organization. And I wondered why the person would do so? Was there some master plan behind her brusque behavior?

Connecting the dots led to an odd conclusion: the "seminar" mentioned earlier. Having been hired by virtue of this event, it turns out the techniques used in said seminar are remarkably similar to the behavior exhibited at the progressive organization. This behavior, in addition to being unprofessional, was also extremely...ahem...intense, including yelling to anyone about everything. Actual screaming.

When a dinner plan fell apart with Jill, I got a first-hand look at the "seminar" in question, because one of my other friends at the organization was just finishing up his seminar. He had invited Jill to attend, and so there I was, driving down 95, towards an extremely bleak looking office park with an innocuous facade. Appearances can be deceiving, however, so I was on my guard.

Why, you might ask? Well, I had heard that the group in question was a little weird. A brief history is in order. In the 70's, a guy named Wener Erhard came up with a program called est which promised "transformations" for people. Kind of a self-help on steroids program, thousands of people paid money for the program, which also spawned many tales of abusive behavior (refusing to let people drink, visit the restroom, etc.) during the multi-day training seminars. A feud between Erhard and the Church of Scientology also fueled more rumors (Erhard had once been a Scientologist and critics claimed he had "stolen" several components of est from the church) leading to the eventual demise of est. Erhard's followers went on to found a new company called "The Forum" in 1985, after purchasing Erhard's "technology" from est. In the early 90's, the group became knows as "Landmark Education". This was the seminar I was going to be introduced to Tuesday evening...

Part two coming soon...

Well, Helena, the document in question was already in hard copy first...

Cult is in the next post.

To clarify my rant, I was just annoyed because I wasted over two hours this morning cleaning up a computer in my office. Why? Well, because the user of this particular computer has rights to install programs on her box. (Everyone else has the right to shut up...and that's about it. They can't even change their homepage! Hooray for fascist IT overlords!) So every two weeks, I have to go in and clean up her computer again, because it's filled with adware, spyware and trojans. Why does she have permission to install these things? Because her idiotic Quickbooks application refuses to run unless you give said users administrative rights. It has to write to the damn registry to run! So unless I make her an administrator on her box, she can't do her job.

No one else seems to notice that all the computers in the office work fine except for hers...of course, no one else is forced to blow an entire morning cleaning up the damage.

Okay, cult is coming! I missed the chance to have sushi for lunch today...because the place was too packed. Jealous of Helena...

So I'll go into my cult-ish experience the other night later. For now, as I digest some tasty chinese food, I'd like to focus on a random event happening this morning: namely, some scanning.

Boring, right?

Well, in and of itself, yes. A co-worker asked another co-worker of mine to scan a small invitation. She had some trouble doing so, and asked me to help. I did, but afterwards, the first co-worker said that she wanted the result "in a pdf file...not in word, so that she could e-mail it to people".

Okay, a reasonable request, and one somewhat easily fulfilled. However, examining the statement reveals some internet ideas that deserve greater attention. It's clear that Adobe has succeeded in their attempt to make a single document standard somewhat ubiqitous on the web. I would argue that this is not a good thing, despite the relative open-ness of the pdf standard. Why? Well, fist of all, pdf documents are only tied to Adobe. Although other programs can allow you to edit pdf documents, if Adobe wants to change the standard, only they can do so. Sort of a "my door is open until I close it" level of openness. Of course, given that Microsoft Word is equally proprietary, it's not a solution either.

So the item in question is scanned again, and in doing so, the co-worker asks me to help her with it. After examining it, I tell her that rather than scan it as text and images, she should just scan it as one large image. This, of course, defeats the entire purpose of pdf documents, but it is quicker and looks nice. The item is sent out then as a pdf...

So, instead of doing the correct method, we ended up sending an image, wrapped as a pdf, to several people. Compatible? Sure. But so would an e-mail with the image embedded in it...or a link to a website instead. Too often with web design and technology in general, users want a quick solution at the expense of long-term goals. The real problem is that a universal standard (like those endorsed by the w3c) isn't around for documents. And xhtml just hasn't reached the saturation point where most editing programs edit in xml instead of something that's less open. The solution, as I've discovered, is not to educate voters. It's to fight dirty, the microsoft way. What do I mean? Well, Adobe and Macromedia both have some of the highest download rates for their two browser plug-ins, namely Acrobat and Flash. Neither Acrobat or Flash has ever been integrated into the browser, leading both companies to continue to market products which let users author content in pdf and flash formats for loads of cash. Microsoft has implicitly helped both companies by allowing IE to easily upgrade to include the latest plug-ins, which in turn help IE gain more market share.

The solution, then, is to simply place content of a different nature on websites and demand users install plugins to support it. Rather than offer the tired "we can't expect users to install plugins to visit our page" web developer should help boost important technologies by including them in their sites and placing the blame squarely where it belongs: on the backs of browsr developers. If every site began to use the open-standard SVG format instead of Flash, Microsoft engineers might think about embedding svg support into IE. If every site began to use png files instead of gif files, IE might include proper png transparency options.

To that end, I've decided to stop coddling Internet Explorer users. I'll code the site for firefox. If the css/javascript doesn't work in IE, so be it. Developers need to take a stand, and now is the time.

Armstrong is about to win L'Alpe d'Huez, I've got tons of stories from last night, and more coding for the backend to attend to. Perhaps during lunch I can catch up...

Congratulations to Helena, who scored the sweetest gig ever!