It’s not easy becoming a Part Time Vegetarian…but it’s a heck of a lot easier than becoming a Full Time Vegetarian.

The concept came to me in a dream. I imagined I was an FTV (Full Time Vegetarian) and I was in Kansas City. Some friends suggested we go get a Z Man from Oklahoma Joe’s. For those who have never been fortunate enough to go to OKJ’s, it’s a brisket sandwich with an onion ring and provolone cheese melted on top. I have mine on Texas Toast, thus making it what I call the R Man.

So in my dream, as an FTV, I had to ask my friends “Does OKJ’s have any vegetarian dishes?” At which point they beat me to death with golf clubs.

I awoke in a sweat, screaming and covering my head.

Then it hit me! “What if I was just a Part Time Vegetarian (PTV)? What if I ate vegetarian dishes for those meals that I don’t really care about, like drive-thru burgers from chain restaurants, etc. and saved my carnivorous desires for more select moments?”

Brilliant!!

So I started slowly. I ordered my Burrito Bowl from Chipotle sans carcass. Delish. I ordered a salad one day, sans mammals. It was fine. I ordered Chinese without either canine or feline. I didn’t miss it.

So now I’m a Full Time PTV.

For example, on Sunday the fam wanted to enjoy Stroud’s for lunch. I had the Chicken Fried Steak, Mashed Potatoes & two litres of Gravy over all of it…guilt free. Every meal since has been vegetarian. If I get a hankering for dead animal carcass, I get it, unless I have these desires for every meal.

What’s the benefit so far? None. Haven’t felt a thing. Haven’t lost a pound or added a glow to my skin. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

If there is one benefit it would be that I have broken a habit. I don’t eat meat “just because” any more. I eat it when I want it.

Time will tell. I’ve been a PTV for a few weeks now and I do see changes in my behavior. I shop differently and I seek restaurants where they have PTV options on the menu. Make a point of asking for the PTV menu when you dine, except at Truck Stops.

Give it a shot and report back to the group.

I have started a Facebook Group as a sort of online support center for those wanting to begin the journey towards Full Time PTVism. Check it out at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=114370262417

Keep us posted on your successes and failures so we can all grow together.

As a rule, I like Christmas music.

I think it recycles itself well, coming around once a year, like an old friend dropping by to visit for awhile. Often, when hearing a certain tune, I’ll flashback to great Christmas memories with family or friends.

Some songs, however, are more like that annoying uncle who you wish would forget where you live. Twelve Days of Christmas, for example, is just 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall for Christmas, as far as I’m concerned. Other songs are so over played, that I’ll skip them this year, if I can.

Here is my short list of what’s been playing on my iPod this Christmas:

Jingle All The Way by the Crash Test Dummies is a nice retreat from the typical seasonal music. Their version of Jingle Bells makes the record, as it’s done in a dark, Russian music style with lead singer Brad Roberts going deeper than usual. My younger boys said it sounds like he’s “farting” the vocals. On a second listen, I almost have to agree…but it’s a great tune, flatulence or not. Their version of The Little Drummer Boy is a treat, as well.

For the Space Age Pop lovers in the room, you can’t go wrong with Esquivel’s Merry X-Mas from the Space Age Bachelor Pad. The opening number, Jingle Bells, with his welcome is great and the CD is fun. If there is a negative, it’s that he didn’t go crazy enough. I like his style and I like it especially when he pushes the envelope a little, like you hear on his other albums. A little vanilla at times, but it’s still a lot of fun.

The prize for best version of The Little Drummer Boy goes, of course, to Ringo. How cool is it that a real drummer sings The Little Drummer Boy…and really drums along…and I mean REALLY drums along. This isn’t just perump-a-pum-pum. Ringo goes crazy on the skins and makes this one of the top songs I’ve listened to this year. And it’s Ringo. I grabbed this CD off iTunes.

If you are a Warren Zevon fan, and were sad at his passing, try to get hold of his covers of Ave Maria and The Christmas Song. I grabbed them off eMusic from an album named Christmas Moods by Michael Wolff. You’ll see the title of the song, then feat. Warren Zevon in parenthesis. Great find.

I’ve been giving the Jethro Tull Christmas Album a lot of action, too. I just love it. Listening to Ian Anderson tear up the flute on God Rest Ye Merry Gentemen and others…great stuff.

One CD that has stayed fresh with me for many years is Bruce Cockburn’s Christmas. A nice mix of standards and original material, I’ve played this every year for, oh I don’t know, maybe 15 plus years…and I still rank it high among my favorites.

Another hard find that I enjoy every year, but it drives my family crazy, is Tom Waits’ cover of Silent Night. Very dark, but very Tom. I’m a big Tom Waits fan, so maybe I’m not objective on this one. I’ve got all of his CDs, seen all of his movies, have a large collection of covers of his music…so I’ll give you this as a warning. You may just hate it…but I love it every year.

Other oft-spun CDs this year include Leon Redbone’s Christmas Island, with a great cover of Frosty the Snow Man with Leon and Dr. John, Barenaked Ladies’ Barenaked for the Holidays and Shirim’s Klezmer Nutcracker.

Notable singles include Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews’ version of Baby It’s Cold Outside, Gesu Bamino by Joan Osborne and Luciano Pavarotti and Steve Earl’s Nothing But a Child with Emmylou Harris (who, by the way, has a very good Christmas Album of her own titled Light of the Stable).

So what are the most listened to song on my iPod this season? I Believe in Father Christmas, by Greg Lake from his Live album, Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy by David Bowie and Bing Crosby and, the most listened to…El Niño, by Willie Nelson from his Christmas With Willie Nelson CD (and his sister backing him up on piano).

After Christmas, I religiously pack away the holiday tunes until the next year…I don’t want them to wear on my like old friends who come to visit and stay on too long.

Last night in Moscow I on my way to a customer visit with large Russian daily newspaper with my Adobe friend Roman Menyakin…and we were hungry.
Because of traffic, we wanted to get to the customer’s office so we knew we could make it on time.
We arrived an hour early, enough time to grab something at the only restaurant around, Jack Rabbit Slim’s.
Decent place…Elvis playing in the background. They made us check our coats at the door as it’s a rule: “No Overcoats Allowed.” I don’t profess to understand the reason a person wouldn’t be allowed to take their coat in, it certainly wasn’t because it would cheapen the atmosphere here at Slim’s.
So we check our coats and grab a table upstairs.
I could have ordered Mexican food, but I’ve always had a little unwritten rule in my life not to eat Mexican food prepared by Russians. There’s no logic to this and it’s certainly nothing against Russians, or their ability to make enchiladas…it’s just a little rule I have followed and it hasn’t failed me, yet.
I’m not a big steak guy, but we ordered steaks. I told Roman I would like mine medium-rare. So he starts to explain this to the waitress.
They don’t have that, he tells me. They only have three levels: rare, medium, well-done. Roman tries to explain, and even demonstrate, that we would like our steaks between medium and well-done.
Nope. Can’t do that. Pick one of the three.
“Whatever,” I said.
We had also ordered a nice cream of mushroom soup. When it arrived, we were each given a small bowl with a few croutons in it. Roman wanted more and asked about it.
“No,” she said. “I can’t give you more.” (all in Russian, of course)
“I will pay for them,” Roman told her.
“I would not know how to do that for you…you can’t have any more,” she replied.
So I threw my croutons in his bowl and I used the bread on the table, instead.
I certainly don’t want to get into a pissing match with a Russian waitress at Jack Rabbit Slim’s in Moscow…another little unwritten rule I live by…and it’s served me well so far.

About a month ago my good buddy Brent Niemuth visited me in Bregenz, Austria with a big box of Hot Tamales. Good stuff.
So I took them with me on our Beatles tour trip to Liverpool and London. They also joined me on trips to Warsaw, Istanbul, Winchester, Brussels, Zurich and Amsterdam.
As my wife was packing for my trip to Prague, she asked me if my Hot Tamales needed to join me on this trip, too.
“Of course,” I answered.
So now I’m packing my things getting ready to leave Moscow and I notice I still have a few left over. I guess they get to join me in Kiev and St. Petersburg next week.
If I’m careful, I can even have them join me in Nice, France and then Warsaw again the following week.

Yesterday I was doing an InDesign demonstration for some newspapers and magazines in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. A block away from the hotel I was speaking at is an old Kremlin, with its huge walls surrounding the government offices, churches and commons areas.

As I was going along, a woman in the audience asked if it was possible to have InDesign highlight any words that were spelled incorrectly.

“Of course,” I told her, and proceeded to demonstrate InDesign’s Dynamic Spelling. I showed her how to turn it on by choosing Edit> Spelling> Dynamic Spelling and how it underlines in red any misspelled words.

I also showed how if you see a misspelled word underlined, you can right click, or ctrl + click (Mac) on the word and it will pop up a list of alternate spellings or you can add it to your dictionary and it won’t be a typo anymore.

I was demonstrating on a document I have used for years that highlights the words RGB, CMYK and two words without a space. So I proceeded to right click on one of the words to show the list of possibilities InDesign offers.

Well as I right clicked on RGB, up popped a nice long list of choices and right there, between rub and rib was the KGB.

I was in London with my good buddy Brent ending out a two-day Beatles tour when we stopped for dinner at some British Pub that serves food.

We were hoping to grab a quick bite before seeing Wicked at the theatre across the street.

So the waitress talks us into some chicken pot pie type of traditional dish with mashed potatoes and peas on the side…and a Coke.

We were starving, as I think we had walked 237 miles that day seeing all the stuff American tourists are required, by law, to see.

So my food comes and I dive into the peas. I can’t tell you why I started with the peas, I just did. And they were cold. Not just “sitting around the kitchen too long on the plate” cold, but “just pulled out of the fridge and thrown on the plate” cold.

Our nice British waitress comes to our table and asks “Is everything okay?”

“Well,” I answer, needing to find out if the peas are supposed to be cold, “I have a question for you. Is it customary in London to serve the peas cold?”

She answered “I have no idea.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was thinking “Hmmm…you’re British…you grew up here and probably have eaten a bushel of peas in your life…you work in a restaurant that serves peas with every meal…who would be a better authority in this restaurant than you to inform me of the customary preparation of peas for a meal?”

And then she asks me “Is everything alright, then?”

“It’s great,” both Brent and I answered…then we ate our cold peas and saw Wicked.

I was walking into a public restroom somewhere, maybe one of those mega department stores, I don’t remember. Anyway, as I turned the corner to enter, I saw a large industrial roll of toilet paper drop from behind the stall and begin rolling across the floor toward me, leaving a trail of paper along the way.
Maybe I was in a restaurant…
After rolling about five meters and stopping on my shoe, I heard the voice of a young boy behind the stall say “Oooooh…that’s not good.”
I rolled the paper back under the stall to him, thus saving his life.
He thanked me through the wall.

The other day, here in my little town in Austria, we went to see Grease, Der Musical. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I assumed the show would be in German. Since I don’t speak German I don’t know how to say greased lightning or you’re the one that I want, but I was pretty sure I could recognize the tunes.
So we went.
Much to my surprise, the opening number was a language I recognized…English. Wow, I thought, this will be the first show I’ve ever seen over here where I would know what was going on. So far I’ve seen AIDA and Der Troubadour in German and I’m still not totally clear on those plots. I’ve seen some movies, too, and I think I need to see them again in English to really understand them.
So I’m tapping my foot along with Doo-wop-a-doo when, all of a sudden, out of the blue, there was a language switch and I was lost again. That’s right, they sang the songs in English and spoke the lines in German. What a mess for a unilingual, like myself.
At intermission my son asked me if I thought they were from England or the United States. I told him I didn’t have a clue but it sounded like they were from Germany to me.
“Nope,” he informed me, “they speak it with a heavy accent.”
“You don’t have a heavy accent?” I asked my very American little boy.
“Nope,” he informed me with great confidence.
So we headed out to the lobby and some of the actors were selling programs. We approached them and asked if they were English or American.
It seems strange that with all the English speaking countries in the world we only offer two choices. Then, when a third is offered by the questionee you feel stupid for not thinking of the other options.
“Well, actually,” he informed us, “we’re Canadian.” Why didn’t we think of that?
“Sorry,” we offered with embarrassment, but I don’t think it mattered. Luckily Canadians are a nice lot and I don’t think it ruined his day.
So during the second half my mind wandered away from the show, which is easy to do when you don’t understand the language that is spoken. Oh, I know the general plot since I’ve seen the movie, but it still gives a person lots of time between songs for the mind to drift away to thoughts in a more understandable language.
My thoughts ended up landing on this: “if they can be Canadian, speak perfect English, dance like Broadway stars, sing in perfect English, look cool and speak what I thought was perfect German, I can certainly learn how to master electronic media.
Yea…that’s what I was thinking about while Rizzo was thinking she might be pregnant.
I was thinking about how many of us who are so comfortable with print production are afraid, not interested or too busy to make the leap over to the growing world of electronic media…websites, video, multi-media presentations or even ads for cell phones.
I’m concerned that many print production geniuses will eventually lose business to less print savvy freelancers who are adept at creating work that is truly crossmedia.
I believe the day is here, or very close, where the customers are going to want one source for everything, instead of working with two or three different agencies to meet the needs of both electronic and print media.
And if that’s the trend for the hired guns, it won’t be long before employers demand more from the workforce. Just as years ago you didn’t have to know layout to write, photo manipulation to layout or page layout if you were a photographer, but now you do. It won’t be long before employers expect a print-minded graphic artist to also build the website. Some are already feeling this.
Now is as good of a time as any to get started.
As I look at what Adobe’s doing with CS3, it seems they are really trying to help us with the transition. They have done a good job of integrating the different worlds together, so as we veer into uncharted territory, there is some familiar ground on which to walk.
A good example of this is Bridge. If you’ve never used Bridge, I suggest you start. It is shared by so many of the applications that it can almost be your home base. And even if you don’t know all the programs in the new Adobe world that well, if you poke around a little you might find what you’re looking for in the Bridge.
For example, I got an email awhile back from someone who wanted to use Illustrator’s Live Trace function on a bunch of progressive video frames to created a hand-drawn video cartoon affect. They didn’t know Illustrator and didn’t want to spend the time opening all those video files one-by-one and doing the trace. The question really was “Does Illustrator have Actions like Photoshop so I can do this faster?”Bridge. Save the video frames you want, select them in Bridge and go to Tools> Illustrator> Live Trace.”
I’m not saying Bridge is THE tool. I’m only saying it’s a great place to start finding common ground among the various apps. From there you can start learning how the tools you already know can be used for web and video creation.
It’s also worth noting what apps are shipping in the Creative Suite 3 Design Premium…pretty much everything you need to start a print/web cross media business. InDesign for print, Dreamweaver for web, Flash for…uh…Flash (web, multimedia…) and the programs shared by both worlds including Photoshop, Illustrator and Bridge.
Oh, by the way, I just found out Rizzo isn’t pregnant, after all…I think that’s what’s happening up there on stage.
You don’t have to go it alone (I’m not talking about Rizzo, anymore). In the near future we will be doing training videos on taking your print expertise and familiarity with the Design Tools over to the other side…some would say the dark side.
We’ll focus on how Photoshop and Illustrator can be used to help you create electronic media easier than you may have thought. We’ll talk about how InDesign fits in to this scheme, too. And, of course, more about Bridge.
And the good news is, I’m convinced, that learning electronic media creation is a heap of a lot easier than learning to speak in German, sing in English and dance bilingually…with grease in your hair.

I was walking through the Dallas airport yesterday and noticed a vending machine for iPods and accessories. I walked over and checked it out. It had all the goodies: video iPods, Shuffles, Nanos and various cases, cords, etc.
My first thought was that I don’t have enough quarters for the 80 gig video version, and even if I did, would I have enough time to drop all 1,396 of them into the slot. That’s when I noticed that Apple had the foresight to put a credit card reader in the machine.
My second thought was of the bag of M&Ms I didn’t get the day before from one of these darn machines.
I can just picture myself shaking it, screaming at it to “give me my iPod…give it to me now!!!” …repeatedly pushing the Coin Return button…sticking my finger in the hole over and over just to see. Shaking it and yelling at it some more “You piece of crap vending machine from hell…give me my $349 iPod.”
Wouldn’t be funny if the iPod was $349 but they added $9.95 for shipping and handling…that’s an expensive drop.
They’ll vend anything, these days. I’ve seen Ice cream, phone cards, personal hygiene products, baseball cards, candy, drinks and Motorola phones.
I think they should have a machine to vend small domestic animals…Vend-A-Pet. Of course the fish would have to be on the bottom row, so the tanks don’t break when they drop out of the little spiral holder thing. It would also make sense to put the cats on top, as it is well documented that cats have an incredible ability to land safely from very high altitudes. Also in there would be puppies, turtles, snakes and ferrets all looking cute behind the glass, begging for freedom.
I do believe that the behavior of a vending machine is directly driven by your Karma. Good karma = treat, bad karma = tough titty, no M&Ms for you, pal. If I ever get ripped off by a machine, the first thing I do is look internally. I go inside myself and examine my behavior over the past 24 hours and I reflect on the cars I cut off trying to exit the freeway, elderly people I didn’t help across the street or not feeling sorry for Anna Nichol Smith and her mess of a life the world seems so interested in. I don’t feel sorry for Phil Spectre, either.
So, before I ever approach an iPod vend-o-matic and pump in 350 smackers, I better have behaved like a cub scout the week before.

Adobe blew it.
They made the big announcement about the announcement March 27th about the release of Creative Suite 3 this Spring…I’m sure you’ve all read or heard about it.
If not, check it out: Adobe Creative Suite 3 To Be Announced March 27th
I think they should have milked it a bit more…created even more buzz.
They should have come out on March 5, when they posted this to the their blog, and said “We will have a major announcement next Thursday.
Buzz, buzz, buzz…
On Thursday, make an announcement like “Thank you for coming, we would like to announce that after much discussion, Adobe will not be including a new version of PageMaker in the next generation Creative Suite, whenever it may or may not be released…good day.”
Buzz, buzz, buzz…
Then announce another major announcement for the following Tuesday.
When Tuesday rolls around: “Adobe has the luxury of choosing between three fine web page creation applications to be bundled with Creative Suite 3 …Dreamweaver, GoLive or a newly reworked PageMill. We are not at liberty to release our decision at this time, nor are we confirming or denying that there will, in fact, be a Creative Suite 3 in the near future, or that it will, in fact, be named Creative Suite 3. Thank you for coming.”
Keep this going for a few good weeks, announcing possible intentions of Adobe Streamline X for OSX, a rebirth of Dimensions Elements and LiveMotion Pro or possibly TypeTwister for Flash. The list could go on and on to include ImageStyler 3D and ATM Super Deluxe, which is both a font manager and a cash machine.
Then, just when the entire design world is going insane with discussion, announce Creative Suite 3 which will run on Windows Vista, Mac Intels and Commodore 64s.
Announce a Spring delivery…but don’t promise which year.