Megabytes

You are surfing the web one evening, catching up on your blog reading perhaps, when you come across a beautiful image. And you think to yourself, “This image would be perfect to demonstrate my new marketing plan on my company website.” Then you do a simple control-click on the image to save it to your hard drive. So far, no harm done.
But once you take that image and insert it onto a page of your company’s website; if you haven’t gotten permission from the creator of the image; you have broken the law.

This happens more than you may realize, primarily because it is so easy to do. Technology allows us to “grab” imagery and other content from web pages. There is no harm in taking an image from someone’s web page and playing with it in a program like Photoshop – on your own computer.

Copyright protects creative work such as writing, music, photographs, and paintings. If you want to use that beautiful image to visually denote your new marketing plan, obtain permission from the image creator. Even if you attribute the image to its creator, if you publish work on your site without the creator’s permission, you may be held liable for copyright infringement.

Using an email program, technology also allows us to communicate easily and quickly with another person, whether they live on the next street over, or the next continent over. So, protect yourself and ask permission.

Colorzilla is a great little add-on to Firefox that provides color information for the web page you are viewing. It includes an eyedropper and color picker, and now with version 2, the Webpage DOM Color Analyzer and Online Palette Viewer.
Both of these are useful additions to an already handy web developer tool. Quickly find out the hex color code for a particular item on a page. With the Color Analyzer you can find out what CSS rules specify a given color. The Online Palette Viewer allows you to create a color palette based on the colors of the web page.
Here you see the Color Analysis for my blog, Megabytes. When you hover over any color square in the palette at the bottom of the screen, the tool tip provides both RBG and HEX color info. Further, the item(s) on the page which use this color, are highlighted. Click on a color square to see the CSS rules that specify that color.

I recommend installing Alex Sirota’s Colorzilla into Firefox. Oh, and using Firefox - well, that’s a given!

Tonight, Wynton Marsalis and his pals from Lincoln Center played Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Two sets and one encore.
Appointment in Ghana by Jackie McLean: solos on trumpet, piano, and tenor sax.
Movement #11: in 3. sounds of Spain. Melody passed from baritone to alto to soprano in the sax section. a beautiful piece.
Down By The Riverside, Oliver Nelson arrangement: The rhythm section shines and keeps time going in this piece with its funked-up melody. The first of many solos that can only be described as way out - Elliot Mason on trombone, followed by Ryan Kisor and Marcus Printup trading phrases on trumpet.
House of Jade by Wayne Shorter: beautiful melody, quite peaceful after the Nelson arrangement.
Portraits in Seven Shades, Dali by Ted Nash: written for a combined event with J@LC and MOMA. Marsalis explained that this piece “is in 13/8 or something like that… it’s impossible to count; you just have to feel it.” Anita declared, “It feels like a birth!” Came time for the drum solo, all the horn players clapped hands and stomped their feet in a complex rhythmic pattern, enabling Ali Jackson, drummer, to stretch and shrink the time.

~ intermission ~
The Holy Ghost from a Mass written for Abyssinian Church’s 250th celebration: Ted Nash on alto and Marcus Printup on trumpet shared an improvised solo where one was mimicking the other. It was done so successfully, I couldn’t really tell who was leading!
Continuous by Wynton Marsalis: “The melody doesn’t really end… why it’s called Continuous…” A bossa nova 5 minutes and 37 seconds in length. Marsalis dryly reports that it is best use a prime number like 37 when, for example, saying how late you will be. Not 20 minutes, but 17. He continued in this vein for a bit, prompting a few of the band members to say that his speaking was continuous. Moments like this, you can see how much affection members have for one another and how much fun they are having.
Braggin’ in Brass by Duke Ellington: recorded in 1939 by Ellington’s band and never played again. Never can tell when Marsalis is joshing you. Nonetheless, all this to say the trombone part is quite difficult. A repetitive sixteenth note melodic line that is passed between the three trombonists, each having about 2 sixteenths at a time. They executed it flawlessly! very impressive. iTunes Music Store has this song and I just bought my copy!Hymn of the Orient: 32-bar song form? not sure. the solos all started slowly, peaceful, building gradually into a frenzy. Solos by Victor Goines, tenor, and Sean Jones, trumpet.
Single Petal of the Rose by Duke Ellington: bass clarinet and piano duet. Bass clarinetist, Joe Temperley, is a former member of the Ellington band and most senior member of the J@LC Orchestra. A gentleman hired these two players to come and play this one song at his wedding in Paris. Lovely, warm clarinet tone with a healthy vibrato. Anita described it as “hopeful, tender, and realistic. perfect for a wedding.”
C Jam Blues with guest musicians: three locals, two trumpetists and one trombonist. Carlos Henriquez on bass had a swinging solo.
Encore: Cape Verdean Blues by Horace Silver: with a light drum intro, this latin blues piece began. The 2 alto players picked up piccolos for this song and began trading 4s and then 2s in a multi-chorused solo. Also solos from Vincent Gardner on trombone, one of the turmpetists, and Dan Nimmer on piano. Dan’s fingers were moving so fast, they were blurry from my 10th-row seat.

Wow! I am inspired by the virtuoso musicianship, the tight sections, the sexy drive of the solos, the choice of material, the depth of talent in the orchestra. Thanks, Wynton and friends, for a memorable evening.

Styling and building layout for HTML email is a challenge mostly due to the multitude of email clients and their varying support for standardized practices. While some webmail clients like Yahoo and AOL display HTML email well; others like Gmail do not. Gmail removes anything before the <body> tag and strips out inline CSS styles.

Desktop email clients like Outlook, Mail.app, Entourage, and Eudora display HTML email with widely differing results from app to app. Outlook 2003 actually has more CSS support than Outlook 2007!

How to Code HTML Newsletters by Tim Slavin is a helpful 3-page article chock full of suggestions on proper coding. Leave behind notions of layout using DIVs. HTML email is a table-based world.

New or improved ideas I found in the article:

• Tim outlines a detailed testing method; first testing the content as it displays in the various webmail clients and desktop clients. Then perform a checklist of such things as the subject line, how the From address displays, and others.
• Use SpamCheck to check the spaminess of your content. This is a free service that you can use to check your HTML Email, to ensure that it makes it into your subscriber’s INBOX.
• “If you need a light-colored link against a dark background color, put the font definition in the td cell (so it applies to p and a tags equally) then add a color: style to the a tag.”
• Links to: templates from MailChimp and Campaign Monitor; Plain Text email formatting tips; Email Standards Project; and a lot more.

HTML email can be beautiful to behold, but remember that good old plain text email can still get the point across without breaking down in Gmail or Lotus Notes.

In addition to the Pride Celebrations going on at Waterfront Park yesterday, many of the local gay bars held block parties. One such event on SW Stark St was sponsored by Scandals with the $3 entry fee going to a local queer organization. Rose City Swing put together a jazz sextet for Scandal’s stage. It was hot. So were we!