Ebay profits from the sale of Caylee Anthony doll–boycott Ebay.

Prostores.com, an Ebay company, is hosting the vile Showbiz Promotions’ “Caylee Anthony Sunshine Doll.” UPDATE ADDENDUM: Doll has been suspended. The response must have been overwhelming. The people have spoken.

I would say a lot more, but I don’t think words will suffice.

I am boycotting Ebay and urging my customers to pay us via credit card and not PayPal. If you would like to make your voice heard, please contact Ebay and/or Prostores (info below).

For those who are as outraged as I am,  here is the contact info for Prostores:

ProStores
2145 Hamilton Ave
San Jose, CA 95125

info@showbiz-promotions.com

Info@CayleeDoll.com

Call 1-866-747-3229
Mon – Fri, 10am-7pm ET

Destination London

New original art addition in my vintage pastiche series.

New original vintage pastiche art from moi, “Destination Paris.”

This is the start of a new vintage pastiche series I’ve been working on for a couple of months. It starts with Paris, but I have also been working on New York, Venice, and many more cities. I  hope you enjoy it

Nigerian Scammers: even savvy people can get fooled.

I pride myself on being internet savvy. I pride myself on being business savvy. I am hardly naïve, and my New York City background makes me naturally suspicious. My husband, too, is no fool when it comes to things that just don’t pass “the smell test”.  But if it wasn’t for a little voice in my head, instinct that kicked in at the very last second, we most definitely would have become two very chagrined–and perhaps, poorer— people in a long line of scam victims generated from Nigerian scammers on the internet. At the very least, our bank and identity details would have been compromised and probably used to set up bogus accounts for illegal merchandise delivery.

Since Nigerian scammers are usually known for talking people into sending advance sums of money in the hopes of a significantly larger gain, his desire to buy tile murals didn’t seem to be unsavory. At no time was any money requested. The whole thing, from start to finish, felt perfectly legitimate and the process was exactly like any other international buyer wanting to purchase a tile mural from us.

Last year, about eight months ago, I received an email from a very articulate man from Nigeria. Now, of course, his native country naturally set off alarm bells. I will always, however, read whatever is sent to me carefully from any prospective customer before reaching a definite conclusion as to their legitimacy. It costs nothing to read or communicate with someone, and that is what I did. This gentleman was very different than any scammer I had come across in the past, and for many reasons. Let me tell you what those reasons are—exactly what made him different and, therefore, way more capable of engendering trust– so you, too, can be made aware of just how sophisticated these scammers are becoming, and act accordingly. Forewarned is forearmed.

He wanted to buy four ceramic tile murals. Four very large murals. They were to be installed in an outdoor tunnel, and they were to depict four much-loved Nigerian leaders. He was, he said, a representative of the Nigerian government, and had authority to purchase on their behalf for this “tunnel beautification project.” After having contacted me in Spring 2008 initially, and getting some information from me as to if I had the capability of doing this, he said the approval process was long and drawn out, (bureaucratic delays from governments are pretty typical) and it would probably be some time before I heard from him again. This in itself was unusual for a scammer, because the contacts from scammers are usually quick and urgent, and these people usually don’t let months go by before they contact you a second time. These multiple contacts over a months-long lapse builds subsconscious trust. This time, it most certainly did. That long delay, and all the questions about our service capabilities, disarmed me.

Now, scammers are always vague about what they want to buy. For example, they will tell you they want to buy “six coffee tables” or other very large items, and they will not tell you the kind of artwork they want printed on the items. You’re buying custom art products and you don’t care about the artwork? Red flag. Scammers, too, will be happily willing to pay retail price, even though they are buying in bulk. Red flag. They (scammers) will not bitch about price, or get you to come down, or beg you to “do better.” Red flag.  They will rush the transaction, telling you how urgent a quick delivery is. Red flag. They will not be familiar with you, your company, your services or products. In fact, it will be clear they haven’t even read your website. Red flag. Your contact will offer quick, as opposed to long, drawn out discussions about the transaction. Red flag. None of these typical red flags appeared throughout our discussions.  This man is someone who has studied the American way of doing business, and he was quite good. Lethally so.

He knew exactly what he wanted, the size murals he wanted, the type of tile and size tile he wanted, and the subject matter he wanted on the murals. He sent me four small images of past (and I am assuming, much loved) Nigerian leaders for the murals. After telling him I couldn’t use such small images, that they were not high resolution enough for printing and not even good for enlarging, we both discussed options about what we could do to get high resolution photos or illustrations of these men. He asked me if I could reproduce from Nigerian currency, which he later sent small scans of via email. I said I probably could from the original currency. He expressed concern that the currency numbers on the bills would look bad, and could I retouch them out? Yes, I could, I told him. He also wanted custom text under each man’s name, such as their birth date and death date, and some other information.  Could I do that? Yes, I told him, of course I could. In other words, what he wanted was very specific and exacting. Just like anybody spending a goodly amount of money would be—and the desire to cover such specifics are very unlike most scammers operating online. In fact, he called me on the telephone a couple of times–something else these scammers *never* do. They have always limited their contact to email. This, too, was disarming.

He provided a full name, street address, company name and phone numbers and fax numbers in Lagos. In fact, his email address was generated from a corporation, not merely a web-based email addy. So far, all looked legitimate. In fact, he urged me to call *him* a few times, but I always opted for email.

After working up a bid for the four murals, and explaining the amount of work involved, he complained that our price was too high and asked if I could come down. He did not realize how expensive this would be. This also had the net effect of relaxing any suspicions I might have had, because this is a very typical way of conducting business—not only in the United States, but all over the world, people will always try to get the best price. In this case, the price came to $18,500.00 including shipping.  Now that we are on the subject of shipping, most Nigerian scammers will insist on some involved, twisty shipping process that includes their own”special courier” and what not. This man never insisted that the boxes be shipped a certain way, or by using *his* special courier. This, too, had the effect of relaxing any suspicions I might have had. So far, he was batting a thousand.

Yesterday, we reached the end of the week-long negotiating process, and had hammered out all the details. I had won the bid, he told me. I was getting the project because I could do what no other tile company was able to do as far as intensive retouching. (Here, too, he was correct. It is safe to say that no tile mural company has the customization capability that we have. He was not wrong.) He also expressed extreme admiration for our tile mural site, and this, too, was not unusual–we receive glowing compliments quite frequently about the quality of our work and presentation online. We realize that we are an anomaly as far as our capabilities, and we know that our competition cannot come close to doing what we can as far as from-scratch, intensely customized design. We *are* special, so we didn’t feel that he was “blowing smoke up our skirts” a little southern expression my Texan husband likes to use. We know that we are different, and we know that our capabilities are singular.

He was to send me the currency I was to use for reproduction, and he also wanted a sample tile. This, too, was very smart. Anybody sending eighteen thousand dollars would insist on seeing at least one sample tile, and the fact that he did, as well, continued to relax or erase any suspicions I might have had. He also wanted to know “what percentage” of the fee I wanted up front instead of blithely agreeing to send the whole thing. This too, was very smart, putting another roadblock up, and not an unreasonable one. I explained that for an order this size, and because he was a first-time buyer, we had to have the whole amount up front. He agreed to that, albeit grudgingly.

And then three things happened. First, I saw a North Carolina number on my caller ID when he phoned. I questioned him about it and he seemed honestly befuddled, wondering if it had anything to do with the fact that he was on a cell phone. It concerned me enough to mention it to my husband, and we both were ultimately too excited about the possibility of the huge order to give it much credence. Cell phones can show wonky numbers and be tied into any network, who knows why that happened? We blew it off. Kinda. It was a red flag, though, and I started to be on my guard. But at this point, we had every intention of going through with the transaction.

Then, in order to ease his mind about sending eighteen thousand big ones to a strange company in a strange country, I offered to contact the Nigerian Embassy in Washington, D.C. in order to proffer our business credentials and prove our legitimacy. When I mentioned this offer of good faith on the phone, he couldn’t change the subject more quickly. *That* was my second red flag.

The end game: I was just about to send him my bank routing and account numbers—a second away from clicking “send”—when I stopped. A little voice in my head said, “no. Is this safe? You better find out.” I removed my finger from the “send” button and instead Googled this phrase: “is it safe to send bank routing and account numbers?” and boy, did I get an eyeful. No, it wasn’t safe, and people on support groups and discussion boards enumerated all the reasons why it was not. Yes, they could remove money if they know how to work the system, but even more often, they use that information and identity to set up bogus accounts and get bogus credit so that they may ship/receive hot merchandise all over the world. Now, I have had people from other countries wire us payment before, with no problems whatsoever. I had assumed it was safe. I had no idea it was not.

Then, I phoned my bank. I told them my concerns and the manager was pretty adamant about *not* sending him that information but instead, demanding a bank check sent by mail. Yes, sending this information was dangerous, she said, and the bank could not guarantee protection. That’s all I had to hear. I wiped my forehead, relieved I followed my instincts. “I have to tip my hat to you, honey”, my husband said. “I thought being the recipient of a money wire was perfectly safe, too.”

I asked for a certified bank check and have not heard from him yet. Since I have heard from him every day for a week now, it’s pretty clear I won’t be hearing from him again. Nothing yet today, and he usually emails first thing in the morning. I think we dodged a bullet. And, after this post, I hope you have more ammo with which to protect yourself.

Addendum, April 2009: Well, it just goes to show you. Sometimes you can be surprised, pleasantly, by the world. You know what? Not all Nigerians are scammers. Call it a a miracle, call it a fairy tale, but a about a month ago, the deal was closed and they proved themselves to be perfectly and completely legitimate. To that end, we received a rather large cash payment drawn on an American bank for twelve, yes, twelve tile murals. The biggest order we’ve ever had in our six years in business. We are in production right now, and are thrilled to be working with some of the nicest and most professional people we’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. These murals are for a city beautification project in Lagos, Nigeria. They depict beloved (mostly, albeit assassinated) Nigerian leaders banked by a beautiful African pattern mural on each side of the main mural. I shudder when I think about how close we came to losing the project;  I made them jump through hoop after hoop to prove their legitimacy, all the while believing nothing they said. They took it with calm good humor, because, after all, they are used to it. “It’s a shame,” my client says, “that because of our country’s bad reputation and some bad apples that people like us have a hard time conducting international business.” Nigeria, here’s to you I am sorry I doubted you. -MS

Free software I can’t live without.

There are wonderful free software programs that are indispensable to any artist, or, for that matter, anyone who owns a computer. From font management to batch management to free plugins and anti-spyware programs, I’ve become a bit of a software phreak and have come to depend on a few in a big way.

Here are some of my all-time favorite freebies. I hope that they may be helpful to you in your art and design pursuits, as well as keeping your compy safe

THE FONT THING
This little freebie installs quickly and is not a bloated program. It helps you manage your fonts by installing, uninstalling and viewing them. Easy to understand interface.

PICASA
If you don’t have Picasa yet, you are missing out on one terrific piece of free software. Picasa will scan your whole system (external drives, too) and make it so you can manage, view, edit, find every single image file on your computer. You can even organize your images any way you like. But Picasa does much more than that. It’s an image editor, you can make screensaver slideshows and even mosaics from your images. I adore Picasa. I think you will, too.

VISUALIZER PHOTO RESIZE
Have to resize fifty images all at once? This little program is a keeper. Batch resize JPG images in a folder, and optional subfolders. It supports different aspect ratios, automatic color correction and grayscale conversion, as well as customizable image dimensions and JPG compression level. In addition, you can also embed a small text in the image, add a visible watermark to each, and optionally create a ZIP file containing the resized images.

PIXILLION
There are many times that I have a bunch of files which I want to convert to another format…for example, .jpg to .pdf…in one fell swoop. Pixillion supports .jpg, .bmp, .png. .gif, and .pdf. Nifty!!

KMP PLAYER
I was always having trouble with Windows Media Player and other media players playing every single file format without problems. I’d get “codec” errors (what the heck is a codec and why should I need twenty different ones?) or other kinds of errors and suffice to say, no one player plays every single audio or visual file format without problems. Except KMP. It’s free, has a slick interface and works with every single file format I can throw at it. And I throw a lot of stuff at it. A must have.

ADAWARE ANTI SPYWARE
If your computer is acting wonky—loading and booting slowly, lots of popup windows, unusual error messages, etc, you may have a worm or just some adware or spyware. Or worse, maybe you have a virus, rootkit or trojan. Anti virus software is not always enough to protect your computer from spyware, and spyware can be just as damaging as a virus. Malware Bytes is free, even though they have a professional version. The free version works just great. It will scan your drives and registry and clean up all the nasties, especially the ones every other program misses.

AVG ANTI VIRUS
Personally, I swear by Kaspersky. They are, hands down, the best anti-virus software on the market. However, they do not have a free version–only a trial. If you can’t afford to buy anti-virus software, AVG by Grisoft is the next best thing. They have both a paid version and a free version, and both work extremely well. PC World said AVG performed admirably well (top five) in the toughest virus tests they tossed at it, catching and cleaning even the newer viruses. Highly recommended.

IRFANVIEW
I cannot say enough about Irfanview. What is amazing about Irfanview is that it’s free, and it is far superior to many other paid image viewers, such as ACDSee. However, not too many people know about this wonderful little software, but more and more are hearing about it every day because it’s just the best at what it does. Yes, it is an image viewer. But it’s also an image editor, resizer, EXIF data manager, batch processor and more. I use it for many batch processing commands such as mass renaming or resizing or desaturating, and I even use it to process and download images from my digital camera.

FILEZILLA
I tend to use WS_ftp when I am in a hurry and Cute FTP when I am changing file and directory permissions (CHMODding), but Filezilla is no slouch no matter what your needs and preferences are in an FTP client. Free, intuitive, easy to install, if you want the best free FTP software around, it’s Filezilla.

CC CLEANER
Oh do I love CC Cleaner. Nothing is worse for your computer than a ton of uncleaned registry entries, cookies and temp files. This small, easy to install and run freeware program will clean it all out, and within minutes.

Glorious Alphonse Mucha.

You’ll probably see a ton of references to Mucha on Nostalgica; I am hopelessly addicted to art nouveau and his work encapsulates that stunningly beautiful era. Here are a few of my favorites, although I have many more. Mucha’s work is available in high resolution download here.

Freebies: do they work?

One of the ways many businesses create “buzz” and try to get new customers is by doing giveaways or “freebies.”

On the one hand, freebies can introduce your work through word of mouth buzz, thereby introducing it to many people who may never have heard of you before or seen your work. On the other hand, people tend to devalue what they can get for free, (it’s not just men who are guilty of that, it’s a human trait) and they may never have been your customer anyway. So is it in your best interest to give away freebies? You decide.

Let me tell you a story.

My web design site was a freebie site for years. Online since 1999, my website was a banquet for those seeking freebie graphics for their own websites or web projects. I gave away free desktop wallpaper, free web ornaments and jewels, free banners, free linkware web set templates, free BladePro presets. I had a few CDROM’s which I sold online, as well, like my screensavers and special high resolution graphics, better web templates and desktop wallpaper. Needless to say, after I had developed a following, my traffic went through the roof. My server used to crash every other day. I sold some screensavers, but not very many. I sold some high resolution art discs, but not very many. I was content that so many people loved my work that they were downloading in huge numbers, sucking up bandwidth like hungry vampires. The emails poured in like barrels of honey: thank you so much for this wonderful free art! My desktop is now beautiful! I love my new web set! I told all my friends about you! And so on.

Even though the terms were clearly stated—for personal, non-commercial use only, and I begged people not to hotlink–my requests were blatantly ignored, more often than not. I had to password the directories to stop the hotlinking, and chasing down the terms violators was a tiring, depressing business. Then there was theft, where my work was printed and sold…but that’s another post for another time.

Little by little, I started to become sought after for web design and commissioned art pieces. I developed a reputation, and a client base. I sold a couple of screensavers a month, and every once in a while, I was hired to do a website.

One day my husband sat down and said, “we need to have a little talk.” Money was very tight, and we needed to find more ways to bring in income. Our web bills were huge; the bandwidth kept going up and up. The sales weren’t really covering the costs, and the commissioned art pieces and web designs were too spotty to be depended upon. We decided to remove the freebies and let my work stand on its own merit.

I removed all the free wallpapers, ornaments, linkware, banners, etc. I made my art site a professional online portfolio to display my work. And something amazing happened. I started to get hired. A lot. Serious buyers began to write to me for quotes on their websites or to create commissioned art pieces. They started to buy prints. They started to pay for the screensavers. And the hatemail piled up in my Eudora mailbox like black poison. Some people cursed me to hell for removing the freebies. I was threatened. I was told I would never sell anything because they would no longer recommend me or promote my work. Some emails were more plaintive. They begged me to keep the freebies online, or pleaded to make it available just for them because they were such loyal “fans.” The emails continued for about two years, warning me I’d ruined my reputation and that nobody would know about me any more because their co-workers wouldn’t see my beautiful work as they passed by their desktops.

My husband encapsulated it very simply: “the complainers were *never* your customers, and were never going to be your customers.” He was right.

That’s the day I started to make a living from my work. And I still get an email once in a while from someone looking for free desktop wallpaper. Some of them are whiny, some of them are nasty. When I do decide to answer them, I blithely tell them that I love my cats, and that I’d rather feed them Fancy Feast than Nine Lives. Or I ask them what they do for a living. When they tell me what they do—”accountant”–I ask them if they give their accounting skills away for free. That usually ends the discussion.

There is a happy medium between offering freebies and paid work. A smart website owner artist will have a little taste of the former to support the latter. It can be argued that I wouldn’t have had the traffic and buzz if I hadn’t offered all that free stuff for so many years. Perhaps that is true, and the free stuff is behind my healthy, sizeable, repeat customer base.

Moral of the story? By all means offer freebies. But make it a little piece of chocolate, not the whole box. When you value your work, you value yourself. And people follow your lead.

Splash pages and Flash-lose ‘em.

I love designing beautiful splash pages. Splash pages are “entry” pages for websites. They are usually very graphic heavy, have no text, and you click a beautiful piece of art to enter the site. Yes, they are beautiful. But they are hell on your search engine rating aspirations. The reason for this is that there is no text on them, and remember, text is “food” for the search engines. With a splash page, you are giving the search engines nothing to spider when they land on your site. Therefore, as beautiful as they are, don’t have a splash page. The first page a search engine should “see” should be rich in meta tags and keywords….lots of information and text to spider.

People who have to wait for a Flash splash page to load, or even a splash navigation system, are hurting themselves in a few ways. First, surfers are impatient creatures and hate waiting unless they have chosen to click on something to view it. If they are forced to wait for a navigation bar to load, or a splash page to run, they will get annoyed and click off. Secondly, the search engines cannot spider Flash code. They can’t read it. They are working on the issue, but it’s not a priority since Flash has lost a goodly part of its appeal since it first appeared. Today, most web designers are staying away from it because it is becoming passe.

I am not against Flash altogether, it has its place if used sparingly and creatively. For example, Flash photo galleries and slideshows can be a beautiful and effective way to display your artwork. However, make sure you *also* have plain text on any page you have Flash for the search engines to read. And keep your Flash OFF your index page. It will hurt you.

SITEMAPS: YES.
A sitemap is a page that has a listing of links that comprise every page of your website. A sitemap is really not for your visitors; it’s mostly for the search engines and specifically Google. Sitemaps are extremely valuable in helping search engines index every page of your site effectively. There are even software programs that can make you a sitemap by clicking a few buttons, one of my favorites is by Coffee Cup Software, and it’s called Sitemapper. Not very expensive, and I highly recommend it. A text link to your sitemap should be on every page ideally, but most importantly on your index.html page.

Once you have your sitemap created, open an account with Google. The easiest way is to open an email account with Gmail, Google’s web-based email. Once you have a Google account, you will see a link for webmaster tools. In this section, you can submit your Google Sitemap so they will validate your site. You can also read tons of cool traffic statistics once Google validates your sitemap. For more information about Google sitemaps, take out a Google account and read up on it or feel free to ask me.

ROBOTS.TXT: YES.
A robots.txt file is a straight text file you upload to your root directory. This is an important file because a search engine will look for this file automatically as soon as they land on your domain. If they find it, the chances are they will spider your site regularly and effectively increases threefold. How do you get a robots.txt file made? Simple. Either Google “robots.txt generator” or you can get one here. Just do the wizard and download your text file, then upload it to your root directory.

Protecting your art online.

If you are posting images–even if they are not high resolution images—online, do you know that they can be easily reproduced and stolen? Did you know that even a 500 x 500 pixel, low resolution jpg (72 dpi) can be scanned, printed and sold?

They can. Very, very easily. It has happened to me. More than once.

Granted, the reproduction will not be as fine or high quality than if it was printed from the original, but a thief can get very usable print indeed. And then he/she can resell it–as posters, postcards, greeting cards, you name it.

Do I have your attention? Good.

When you post your work online, remember this: anybody can steal it. And most likely, someday, somebody will. You can put in a no-right click script, jumble your code, etc., but a simple little screenshot can grab it. It can end up as a greeting card or on millions of desktops as wallpaper or even as a poster print somewhere, and you will have not seen a dime from it.

The very worst thing you can do is to post high resolution artwork online. Even if you have it residing on your server, Google can find it if you don’t know how to configure your robots.txt file on your website. So…NEVER upload high resolution, printing-ready images unless they are in a locked directory and not displayed online.

So how do you protect yourself?

There is only one way: by watermarking. Digital watermarking, to be effective, needs to be visible. A watermark is your name, website url, copyright, etc, printed across the image in diminished opacity. Few thieves will want to bother with the extensive retouching required to remove it.

There are a few ways to watermark your images. There is watermarking software available (Google “watermarking software”) or do it yourself in Paintshop Pro, Photoshop, Photo Impact, Elements, etc. I believe even Picasa has a watermarking feature.

To do it yourself, open the image you want to watermark. Create a new type layer. Type your name, “sample”, or whatever you want on it. Make the text white if the image is dark, and black if the image is light. Diminish the layer’s opacity to about 20-30 percent, you decide which looks best.

For beveled watermarks that are transparent, make the type layer in “multiply” mode. Go to your layers palette with the layer selected, and click on “bevel emboss.”