Click below to view my literary or below: to view my graphics resume or below: to contact me or below: to enjoy my
by e-mail
e-zine ned
Herewith, several samples of my writing for various high-tech clients. First, a direct mail piece for New Horizons’ new Major Accounts Division program.
At New Horizons,
we don't get even. We get MAD.
What a whopping lot of fun our bigger customers must have had dealing with us up 'til now. We said sarcastically.
Great Big Imaginary Company, with headquarters in let's say Oakland, California, but with branch offices in Two Dot, Montana, Buttocks, Texas, and Outskirt, Maine, among other places, would contact our franchisee in San Francisco about having its employees instructed in the strange and wondrous ways of let's say PowerPoint. “Can do!” our franchisee in San Francisco would exult. Whereupon he'd get on the horn to our franchisees in Two Dot, Buttocks, and Outskirt to arrange for GBI employees in those necks of the woods to receive their instruction locally.
So far, so good.
But the devil, as usual, was in the details. And what a whopping lot of details there tended to be, what with our franchisee in Two Dot being let's say a lifelong Net 30 guy, while Buttocks was perfectly OK with Net 60 and Outskirt wanted cash on the barrelhead. Having to dot i's and cross t's on separate contracts with every other dot in the picture proved so onerous that both Two Dot and Buttocks rued having become involved in the first place — while Outskirt suspected Great Big Imaginary of playing the various dots off against one another. Which isn't to suggest that GBI was having any fun either. Indeed, as its paperwork piled ever higher, and it became less and less sure of exactly whom it was supposed to call if a problem arose, it was sorely tempted to hire one of our dastardly competitors.
Enter, just in the nick of time, our new Major Accounts Division, which, in streamlining the whole process, will make both franchisee and client a great deal happier.
With the Dogs (as we affectionately call the brave men and women of MAD with no reflection on their physical attractiveness) sweating out the details, closing the deals, and, perhaps most important, making clear to the various far-flung franchisee exactly what Great Big Imaginary expects, everybody comes out ahead.
What with the Dogs having taken compulsory vows of poverty, our franchisee in San Francisco who started the ball rolling is able to rake in a generous 12 percent, while his counterparts in Two Dot, Buttocks, and Outskirt, respectively, share the remaining 85. And, seeing that it will need to cut but one deal, and will know exactly whom to call in time of crisis, Great Big Imaginary is only too pleased to do business with us.
And everyone gets rich.
A direct mail piece for O’Reilly & Associates’ Security Bookshelf.
Worms.
What next, for crying out loud — locusts
Flooding
Spoofing.
Sniffer programs.
Nothing's perfect. You can't have a picnic without ants (or even yellowjackets), or an episode of Seinfeld without a lot of commercials for automobiles behind whose wheels you'd never consider being glimpsed.
Nor, clearly, can you have the Internet without a certain number of lowlifes trying to wreak havoc.
How much havoc are we talking about? A slew, a plethora, a surfeit.
Before the Internet Worm evicted everyone from the fool's paradise we used to call home, it was almost comically easy for miscreants to guess passwords. Most systems have since tightened up their password controls, but password dictionary and cracking programs can still divine one of every ten. Which sounds to us like pretty rotten odds.
Sniffer programs exploit the fact that, on an Ethernet based system, every machine on the network can monitor the traffic on every other machine — and capture the first 128 bytes of every unencrypted FTP or Telnet session. More than 100,000 systems were victimized by packet sniffers in 1994.
Information thieves delight in inducing NFS and other 'Net services that use easily spoofed host authentication to cough up extra data — usually to unauthorized recipients. Such fiends think nothing of exploiting services that, because they were designed for use on local area networks, just haven't the ability to guarantee safe use across the 'Net.
Denial of Service attacks preclude people using their computers — almost invariably, of course, when they need them most. In such an attack, one intent on doing you dirt might flood your system with messages, processes, or network requests, or send an ICMP message telling the host or router to stop dispatching packets. Either way, you're likely by day's end to have aged a few months.
Some so-called IP attacks involve the forging of packet source addresses. In the dastardly man-in-the-middle variety, your tormentor both sends you packets and intercepts those with which you attempt to reply. Or he may even choose to exploit the IP header's source routing option. In any event, this isn't what your physician had in mind when she advised you to avoid stress.
In the face of this surfeit of evil, you might imagine that the most appropriate response might be to cower piteously. But such is by no means the case, since in the authoritative texts that make up the mighty O'Reilly Internet Security Bookshelf, the good guys now have a slew of their own.
Order any two and get 10 percent off. Order three and get 15 percent off. Order four and get 20% off. Order five and get a whopping 25 percent off. Order any one and sleep more soundly tonight.
O’Reilly & Associates’ computer books traditionally feature black and white line art of exotic animals on their covers. Essential System Administration features an armadillo.
Arm yourself with the armadillo and snicker in crises' faces. Whether you're soothing frustrated old users or adding new ones, convincing clueless managers that you need new hardware, or rebuilding the kernel, you'll find yourself reaching again and again for Essential System Administration, the text without which grizzled fulltime sysads and smooth-cheeked Linux users alike feel…well, like eunuchs.
Self-promotional piece for Bravo Marketing.
“But my account executive swore he asked the creative director to tell the copy writer to remind the traffic manager to tell the art director how much I liked the media buyer's idea of a horse.” It really helps, in dealing with a lot of advertising agencies, to be a realŠpeople person. You wind up dealing with such an awful lot of them, every last one with the ability (if not, as it sometimes seems, duty) to screw things up.
That sort of thing doesn't go on here at Bravo, the world's smallest high tech agency. Here you put your feet up and review your advertising or public relations needs with one of our two — count 'em! — personable principals, both of whose expertise ranges from hardware and software design through retail and distribution to electronic publishing and the Internet. Then either Rick or AJ personally oversees your campaign from first step to last, cutting out both all the usual middlemen and all the attendant chances for disaster.
And the horse winds up looking not like some mutant camel, but like a horse.
Self-promotional piece for Bravo Marketing.
Unless you're a rhino yourself,
you don't really know horny.
And by the same token, you can't sell high tech unless you understand high tech.
Imagine the advertising agencies vying for your custom as a continuum. Way over on one end, you've got those whose account executives wear the right loafers, but who, if you get a couple of vodka gimlets into 'em, will reveal themselves hardly to know a megabyte from Meg Ryan.
On the other end, you've got us. We've been high tech literate just about since the term became popular, having, for instance, helped design the first floppy disk drive.
Since then, we've become expert in retail, distribution, and franchising, electronic publishing and public relations, software design, both strategic and business planning, and, most recently, in the Internet and online services.
Us, with our vast range and depth of expertise. Or them, with their shiny Italian shoes. Brutal choice, huh?
