Hello, World. Meet my littlest monster. It’s called Retrievem and it’s rather crude. I spent way more than nine months developing this baby. I think things would have been better had I been forced to deliver after 40 weeks of gestation. What would the world be like if mommies everywhere constantly shouted, “Not yet! The ears are too big! Let me just get those toes pointing in the right direction. Oh my god, is that a hairy mole?”

I finally told myself that enough is enough. 80% of what this software does will never even be seen by most users. The ears are unsightly but, you know what? It’s time for the little monster to come out of its shell. I can train it along the way. I will benefit from user feedback, too. After all, it takes a village to raise a monster.

I’ll do up all the proper what-the-heck-is-this pages, starting with What is Retrievem? Really briefly, I can tell you that it is a time-saving beast. It can do things like extract all the email addresses from almost any text file on your hard drive. I’m training it to do other tricks, too. When it learns something new, I’ll write about it here.

Twitter followers will get the scoop on these new articles, even before my email subscribers. (Talk about flipping the script on conventional wisdom!) Keep in touch, and you will see what all the fuss is about.

By the way, if you want to help the other villagers deal with this monster, please bring torches and pitchforks to the general store.

© Mitchell Allen for Morpho Designs, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Retrievem

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Photo by Trondheim Byarkiv

Your spiritual samovar may be ornate or utilitarian, but the fuel you choose to burn determines whether your temporal teapot will pump a steady stream of strong, dark zavarka, or merely pass the bitterest green bile of jealousy through its mindless vein.

With what will you fill your pipe? Crumble a chunk of confidence and serve with a twist of irony? Shred the leaves of regret and season with remorse? Or will you opt for the coals of courage to heat the blend of passion and potential brewing within?

Only you can truly master the nuances of self-actualization, change its taste and obey your inner barista.

Copyright © 2012 by Mitchell Allen

This was inpsired by CreativeCopyChallenge.com #232, a writing prompts site.

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Mitch Smith of pxls2prnt happened to catch my rambling tweet about finding balance on the web. We chatted for a couple of beats and something must have reminded me of the conversation because, while I was doing my 750 words, I started writing about doing away with email subscriptions, RSS feeds and unused social networks.

Suppose we actually had to pay for distractions? I mean, we already do, but we’ve gotten so good at deluding ourselves with rationalizations that, barring total meltdown, we’re not going to change our behavior. So, let’s pretend that the good people from SOPA decided to vent their frustrations by charging us for the use of the Internet.

You have an allowance of 100 Attention Credits, which are redeemable at the SOPA Exchange Counting House. Social Media Networks are the most expensive, at 20 credits per network. RSS feeds are 12 credits per business-related subscription (SOPA doesn’t care about poetry or your daily inspiration fix.) Email subscriptions are 7 credits per subscription. Surfing is free, for now. But, don’t be surprised if SOPA targets Instapaper.

Well, it’s plain to see that if you have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and one more network, you will be maxed out. No feeds for you! No email subscriptions, either, which might actually work, especially if you hate spam. Just make sure you turn off all email notifications. You wouldn’t want to run afoul of some arbitrary decision regarding metered email subscriptions funneled through regulated Social Media Networks.

If you like getting your information from news readers, you’re going to have to get rid of one or more of those networks. Mitch Mitchell can help you decide whether LinkedIn is for you. Check out his post, Marketing – LinkedIn. Before you trash your Twitter account, watch this video from Lisa Irby:

If you can’t see the video here, you can watch it on YouTube: Twitter – A Waste of Time?

I’m sure you get the point, so for the sake of your Attention Credits, let’s say you decide to keep three Social Media Networks. You can use the remaining 40 credits for up to three RSS feeds. Only three? Am I crazy? Well, no, SOPA is. They’re the ones who set the exchange rates. Personally, I think this an accurate valuation. Precious attention can be spent reading dozens of feeds. The links are easy to acquire and they tend to accumulate like iron filings on a magnet.

Well, this brings us to email subscriptions. There just aren’t enough Attention Credits to spread around! Even if you deleted all of your networks, you could have no more than 14 email subscriptions at one time. But, maybe the real question is, why do you need so many people to tell you what to do? Keep in mind, SOPA only charges for actionable subscriptions. My dad’s Movie Trivia Game is exempt. If you find one person to teach you everything, great! That person will probably recommend a couple of social networks, anyway, so there you go.

In summary, our fictitious SOPA would not have a problem with your spending the Attention Credits on two networks, four feeds and one email subscription. If SOPA implements the planned Internet Footprint Certificates, you can donate the unused five credits toward your Investment in Internet Marketing Education.

© Mitchell Allen for Morpho Designs, 2012. | Permalink | 13 comments |
Post tags: education, email, Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS, spam, twitter

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Fester Codswollop had to choose between being the funny dad or the creative dad. However, when Fester stepped into the plasma, he tripped over a rollerskate. The result was a mad scientist who cackled a lot. He wasn’t cackling today, however, because his good friend, Fester Festerloop had given him a task that should have been as simple as chewing the fat of the lamb. But it wasn’t. It was more like lying in the arms of sheep.

Photo by JoeInQueens

“Fester,” began Fester. “I would like you to time the squares in Times Square.”

“But, Fester,” spluttered Fester. “What ever do you mean? Am I to measure or multiply? Am I to regard cement blocks or block heads?”

Fester Festerloop laughed loudly. “Neither, my friend, I would like you to time the squares in Times Square.”

Fester Codswollop, obviously, was not going to get a clue from his good friend, Fester Festerloop. So, meekly, he informed his friend that he would do his best. As he hung up the phone, it occurred to Fester that he may have misunderstood his good friend, Fester Festerloop. He whipped out his portable Lexibus. This handy device served triple duty as a dictionary, thesaurus and puzzle solver. He set the mode to puzzle solver and typed in the cryptic clue: TIME THE SQUARES IN TIMES SQUARE? After a very long time, the screen glowed with the answer.

“Of course,” bleated Fester. He picked up the phone.

“Hallo?” Fester Festerloop fancied himself a Brit.

“42, you sly dolphin.”

© Mitchell Allen for Morpho Designs, 2012. | Permalink | 26 comments |
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Brian Thomas is possibly world’s greatest spammer. I sincerely mean that as a compliment. I’m not trying to be snide, like calling him “The Gentleman Bandit.” No, you have to see his comment to understand what I mean.

Here’s why I think he is awesome. First, he is unapologetic. He truly feels that the only way to get his message out is to spam. Second, he gives praise – yes, I like that that when it is reasonably warranted. Finally, he actually has an interesting product. I checked him out, Googled him and found him on EzineArticles as well.

Reading this, I wonder how many people will scoff. That’s okay. This is an open forum where all ideas are considered. Notice, I wrote that all ideas are considered. I won’t publish mean-spirited attacks, so save your fingers. Instead, reserve that ire to give us a good explanation for why you scoff at this. On the surface, I can tick off a few items:

• Spam is NOT the only way to get noticed
• It’s still spam. Brian refers to “comment further down” which is BS
• EzineArticles is probably not anyone’s idea of social proof, post-Panda

Yet, in spite of these personal feelings, I still applaud Brian for his stand. The part that makes me wonder if spam might be combated by assimilation. Hell, even the less gifted spammers are trying to blend in. That’s why they invest so much in tools designed to fool moderators.

Brian fooled me. That’s sad, huh? This post is the equivalent of the vanquished warrior giving his adversary props, just before said adversary hacks off vanquished warrior’s head.

© Mitchell Allen for Morpho Designs, 2012. | Permalink | 28 comments |
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Yes, it is a disgusting headline but, now that you’re here, let’s see why it’s not just eyeball-grabbing retina-searing gibberish.

Inevitably, I couldn’t think of anything to put down. This is supposed to be a brain dump and, to be frank, I was mentally constipated. Musical prompts managed to come, unbidden, to the fore. I listen to my tunes whenever I’m on the computer. One of my favorites was playing. From here on out, what you’ll be reading is the unedited second half of my daily journal:

Crap. I am completely out of it this morning. Let’s do a prompt. Dexter Wansel’s “Sweetest Pain”:

The French bakery was named Sweetest Pain. Located in downtown Philadelphia, it was the dream of a Scrabble Champion and his beautiful wife, Claire. Claire was a professional pastry chef – she had trained in Paris. The two of them decided that the world kneaded more good food. She made French Bread with cinnamon and raisins.

It was an instant hit with the obese crowd.

Okay, here is the idea: Write as long as the song is playing. When a new song comes on, do a prompt for that!

Howard Hewitt “Stay”:

“Stupid dog. Why must you take me so literally?” Howard looked at the dead mutt in the middle of his kitchen floor. He had no idea that Hewitt, the golden retriever, had simply expired from a heart attack. All he knew was that, if Katie came downstairs, she would be upset.

Cal Tjader “Davito”

My favorite actor is Danny Devito. He is just so funny. The movie in which he played Arnold Schwarzenegger’s twin brother was the source of one of my favorite movie quotes of all time, “I’m genetic garbage!” Yes, I’m talking about Twins. That was one silly movie. I can’t seem to recall much about the one where Danny was a slumlord.

Could we look it up?

Kenny G “Save the Best for Last”:

Gerrie was excited. Today was the day that she and Fred went on their cruise. They had booked it two years ago, when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. They sold all their possessions, kissed the grandkids goodbye and boarded the plane that would fly them to Miami. Gerrie was so happy that she would get to spend this time with her best friend since forever ago. Fred had always been by her side, from the time he had stomped on that bully, Roger, who had been pestering Gerrie for a kiss.

They were all ten years old.

Now, 45 years later, Gerrie and Fred had lived full lives…

This is fun! Okay, the next one is “This Time Around” by Michael Jackson:

He spotted her in the scope. Drat! Some punk’s head was in the way. She drifted out of view. He took a deep breath and relaxed his finger. Counting to twenty-seven, he closed his eyes and waited. At twenty-two, he opened his eyes and focused.

He spotted her in the scope. Perfect! He squeezed the trigger just as she sneezed. Her head exploded forward. The punk handed her a tissue.

This was getting ridiculous. Nobody seemed to notice the puff of plaster that screamed out from the center of the Merry-go-round. He counted to twenty-seven.

“Jungle Book” by Weather Report:

“Look, fool. You can’t go traipsing off into the canopy without a map! You’ll never make back to camp!” Jackson rolled his eyes.

Burt simply smiled. “Who said I wanted to come back?”

© Mitchell Allen for Morpho Designs, 2012. | Permalink | 47 comments |
Post tags: 750words.com, habits, journal, prompts

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In this Scrabble Sunday series finale, let’s explore the end game. You’ve battled your opponent down to the wire, matching bingo for bingo, your QI for 30+ to counter her triple-threat JO. Everything comes down to the last few tiles in your rack. If you are playing online, you probably won’t have any idea how many tiles your opponent has left, so you have to play as if the next word will be your last. The board is your real enemy, anyway. Just about every big word you can form has no place to be played. The difference between glorious victory and agonizing defeat often depends on your arcane vocabulary.

Photo by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

OSPD

There’s no getting around it, the remaining topics in this post are all just subsets of your biggest weapon – the OSPD: the Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary. Casually browsing or seriously studying the OSPD will improve your end game.

Money

If I had a DIME for every monetary unit I’ve ever played, we could split a cuppa joe. Besides being a handy way to play tough consonants, these tiny words can squeeze into corners and other tight spaces on the board. Here’s a brief list:

• AVO: a monetary unit of Macao
• DINAR: a monetary unit of Tunisia
• EURO: a large kangaroo (in case the money system fails!)
• HWAN: a monetary unit of South Korea (next time, don’t hold that W so long!)
• KYAT: a monetary unit of Myanmar (Burma)
• LAARI: a monetary unit of the Maldives
• LEV: a monetary unit of Bulgaria
• LEU: a monetary unit of Romania

*

• OBOL: a coin of ancient Greece
• PISO: the Philippine peso
• RIEL: a monetary unit of Cambodia
• SEN: a monetary unit of Japan
• YEN: another monetary unit of Japan

Wikipedia has an interesting list of currencies – but you should verify unfamiliar words with your OSPD before committing them to memory.

*In the comments, Audrey shared this word, along with OKA, which is a Turkish unit of weight.

Energy

OIL and GAS are obvious energy plays; however, you can really power up your end game with all kinds of weird units of measure, including these energy-related terms. Buckle Up!

• AMP
• ERG
• FARAD
• JOULE
• KELVIN
• LUMEN
• MHO
• MOL
• OHM
• TESLA
• VOLT
• WEBER

Get charged up by reviewing the NIST list of units! Sadly, katal, a measure of catalytic (activity) concentration, is not in OSPD.

Greek mythology

If you have lots of vowels and a more open board, consider these:

• BOREAS: Greek god of the north wind
• CHAOS: the void between heaven and earth
• DRYAD: a tree nymph
• EROS: the Greek god of love (anagram of SORE, LOL!)
• KORE: Greek goddess Persephone
• NESTOR: a wise old man (cf. STONER)
• NAIAD: a water nymph
• NEREID: a sea nymph
• NYMPH: one of a numerous class of lesser deities
• OREAD: a mountain nymph
• TITAN: any of the sons of Uranus and Gaea
• TRITON: a son of Poseidon and Amphitrite
• ZEPHYR: The Greek god of the west wind

Well, any culture’s mythology can be mined for Scrabble words. There’s just something cool about all the Greek words available for the end game.

Alphabets

AYE, BEE, CEE, …, EX, WYE, ZEE. AITCH is playable, dubya is not.

See answerbag.com for silly answers

In addition to knowing how to spell out our English alphabet, you should try to memorize the Hebrew alphabet, including the variant spellings. There’s nothing like getting rid of a pesky V by playing VAV or TAV.

Finally, I’m forever grateful to my fraternity brothers of PHI BETA SIGMA (Temple University, EPSILON Chapter) for forcing me to learn the Greek alphabet.

© Mitchell Allen for Morpho Designs, 2012. | Permalink | 43 comments |
Post tags: anagrams, OSPD

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If you read my blog regularly, you’ll know my friend, Mitch Mitchell of ImJustSharing.com. If you don’t know Mitch, he has over 1,200 invitations for you! Those monuments to prolific writing are towers of interesting content.

Whether Mitch is writing about Affiliate Marketing or WordPress Updates, he informs, entertains and engages. Mitch doesn’t shy away from saying the things that need to be said and, when he writes, people respond.

from Dictionary.com

Engagement is a bit of a beat-down phrase, having been tossed around the blogosphere like a hot potato. Yet, no word better describes ImJustSharing.com. The community is thriving! Someone is always leaving a comment over there. I know this because I remain subscribed to several threads longer than I usually do. I have to, or I may miss a follow-up reply from Mitch. He takes the time to write meaningful replies to most of the comments and that keeps us coming back. Heck, I’m starting to recognize the regulars!

I want to help Mitch get more recognition for his efforts. So, I’m asking each of my readers to do two things:

• Check out his blog. This Milestone 1,200^th Post is a good place to start. Mitch links to many of his interesting posts.
• Nominate him for a Shorty Award.
• Spread the word

Thanks!

© Mitchell Allen for Morpho Designs, 2012. | Permalink | 34 comments |
Post tags: ImJustSharing.com, Mitch Mitchell, Shorty Award

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With spammers outnumbering regular readers 30 to 1, I’m about to change tactics. Which tactic would bother you the least?

• Private Blog – Members-only
• Public Blog – All comments disabled for posts older than one week
• Public Blog – Registration required to comment

CommentLuv Premium restrictions would be removed. Turns out human spammers don’t mind pumping out 24 words of garbage…so, why should you have to fight to leave a pithy reply?

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The premise of games like Scrabble and Words With Friends is mastering anagrams. The ultimate anagram, of course, is the Bingo, using all of your tiles in one turn. In most games, that means using seven tiles to create words of seven or more letters. Before rushing off to play your next Bingo, here are a few points to consider. Ha-ha, I said “points”. I’ll probably do that at least once more – it’s in my blood.

Opening up Pandora’s Box

The allure of playing all seven tiles must be tempered by the understanding of the consequences. Your score is pointless if you provide your opponent with the keys to the board! Be wary of placing high-value tiles in the path of a triple-word square. Your vocabulary just might get a rude shock when that safe-looking Q, J or V gets connected with a word bomb. Heh, you’ll probably utter your own F-bomb, if that happens!

Bonus

In Scrabble, the bonus is 70 points added to your score. In Words With Friends, it’s only 35. In my opinion, it’s generally not worth playing a Bingo in Words With Friends just for the points. Always add up your potential score, and then look for better plays! The time you spend trying to place a lousy Bingo like RESTART might be better spent shoe-horning some tiles into a more lucrative crossword formation.

Naturally, this is less of an issue early in the game. In fact, it appears that Words With Friends challenges you to find seven-letter words from your very first rack! If you can get started with three or four Bingos early on, you’ll build up a formidable lead that’s tough for your opponent to overcome.

Strength of Opponent

If you like a challenge, you should play opponents who are really good. They will help you become a better player, strategically. If you have a habit of “setting up” your opponents, by ignoring the advice about Pandora’s Box, for example, they will literally beat it out of you – unless you are a glutton for punishment.

On the other hand, if you are the stronger player, don’t hesitate to deliver that same punishment to your opponents. They might be F-bombing you as you Bingo them into oblivion but, eventually, they should improve. Or they’ll abandon the game. Either way, the survivors will be stronger. This is how super bacteria do their work, you know…

Sneaky Setups

This is not something to do with stronger players. A sneaky setup is a play that allows for a monster play on your next turn, assuming your opponent doesn’t mess it up. First of all, you almost always need a little help from the “bag” of tiles. If you don’t get the right tile or tiles, the setup won’t work. Here is an example:

Suppose I wanted to set up that juicy triple-word square on the right edge. I could use IT to play FIT and hope for any of the following:

• draw AR and play GAROTTED
• draw EH and play DOGTEETH
• draw a high-value tile that goes on the triple letter square below FIT

First of all, Sharon is not likely to leave that option open for my next turn – she started the game with PULLETS! Look at her last play, too. She is a strong player with the lead and I know better than to open Pandora’s Box against her. I opted for a less tantalizing play:

As it turns out, Sharon had a monster Bingo, waiting in the wings:

Ouch.

This lesson was brought to you by the letter M. See you next week for a less painful episode of Scrabble Sunday!

This final screenshot summarizes why I play Words With Friends.

© Mitchell Allen for Morpho Designs, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: anagrams, Words With Friends

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