Jeff Gamet’s jeff-o-rama

I’ve been mulling over this whole controversy over the Target ad showing a girl on a bullseye for several weeks, and I’m just not seeing the sexual exploitation thing other people are picking up on. Maybe she’s making a snow angel, like many people have suggested, or maybe she’s jumping in the air. But assuming the position for a big old sexing up? I’m just not seeing it.

I totally get and appreciate the importance of protecting people — and not just women or girls — from exploitation. No one deserves to be taken advantage of, and it’s up to all of us to protect those that can’t protect themselves. That’s all just part of being a community.

Image courtesy of Bennett 4 Senate

For everyone that is in the dark about the Target ad controversy, here’s the deal: Target ran a series of print and billboard ads as part of its winter campaign that depict people performing outdoor wintery acts on the company’s logo (a target) instead of in the snow. Those acts included things like skating, hanging wreaths, and making snow angels.

The problem with the snow angel ad, according to watchdog blogs like AdRants and Shaping Youth, stems from the snow angel girl’s position on the target. Her hips, thighs, and crotch are clearly centered in the target’s bullseye. People that are offended by the image are crying foul because they see the girl’s placement as an intentional sexual reference, as something that denigrates women, and as a message that women are sex objects.

I have to disagree with the watchdoggers on this one. I see a young woman making a snow angel, and I think her positioning on the target was most likely chosen to balance the overall image. That’s it.

I remember my junior high and high school days when certain activist-ish groups wanted to tell me what I could and couldn’t read. They insisted that the Tarzan series shouldn’t be read or even available in libraries. Why? Because Tarzan and Jane were living in the same tree house and they weren’t married.

That’s a connection I wouldn’t have ever made, and it really bothered me when younger kids had that confused look because they didn’t get what the grown ups were all upset about. In the end, they were being exposed to concepts like premarital sex — and sex in general — years before they needed to be thinking beyond the adventures of Tarzan the Ape Man.

The other thing that bothered me was that these groups were looking for sexual references everywhere and in everything. You know, if you go looking for something hard enough and you really want to see it, you probably will… even if it’s not really there.

When Quark announced its Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution this week, the big news was that the company is moving deeper into the enterprise market, right? Wrong. Quark has been on this path for some time, and the whole Quark DPS thing is just another logical extension of that business plan. The real news for me was several paragraphs deep in Quark’s press release where they make a very clear statement about the future of QuarkXPress, the company’s flagship desktop publishing application.

Here’s what Quark CEO Ray Schiavone had to say:

“QuarkXPress is a valuable and widely-used graphic design and page layout tool in its own right, and will play an integral role in Quark DPS. QuarkXPress is and always will be the foundation of our product portfolio and we will continue to invest in it to meet the needs of individual designers and large organizations alike.”

Take a close look at that second sentence, because it’s more important than everything else in the press release. It’s the part where Quark says it isn’t dumping QuarkXPress to focus only on the potentially lucrative enterprise market. It’s the part where Ray makes a public promise to continue developing and supporting QuarkXPress, and that’s a good thing.

Sure, Quark is the company designers love to hate, but that doesn’t change the fact that we need Quark and QuarkXPress to keep Adobe on its toes. As long as we have good competition between QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign, everyone in the design and publishing community wins. It was Quark’s complacency after stomping PageMaker into the ground that created the “everybody hates Quark but loves XPress” mentality because we didn’t have competition or choices.

OK, to be fair Quark’s former boss Fred Ibrahimi’s total disconnect with customers and general jerk-head attitude drove users away in droves. He did more on his own to drive customers to InDesign than Adobe could have managed with its bottomless pit of resources. Adobe should send Fred a fruit basket to say thanks.

Despite the “screw you, Quark” attitude many designers have today, the truth is that we all need QuarkXPress even if we use InDesign instead. The two applications bring a balance to the universe and give us as consumers choice. The idea of being limited to a single professional page layout application really creeps me out, and I’m glad we have options along with healthy competition.

The truth is that sometimes QuarkXPress is the right tool for the job, and other times it’s Adobe InDesign. You get to decide which you prefer — as it should be.

Rumors that QuarkXPress was going to be phased out have been around for a while now, so it’s good that Quark is finally addressing them.

Just one question for Ray: Why did you wait so long to make a statement? Christ, man, don’t leaving us hanging like that.

I spent all of last week in Miami Beach at the MOGO media InDesign and Vector conference. It was great, or course, and it marked my first trip ever to Florida. Really. Had I not been such a mellon head on the flight down, I would have snagged some more pictures. You would be amazed at how well the iPhone camera does at 38,000 feet.

I talked about the whole on-the-way-to-Miami experience on my Jeff talks@TMO blog over at The Mac Observer, so I won’t go all re-run mode here. OK, maybe just a little.

One of the things that I absolutely love about flying is seeing places that I may very well have been and experienced, but from in the air instead of on the ground. The from-above perspective helps me stitch together in my head where things are in relation to each other in a better way than most maps because the view out of a plane window is always accurate, but maps are error prone. It’s also great for helping me work on my world domination strategy.

On this flight I saw several fires along what I’m sure was the Alabama and Florida coast lines. Most people on the plane never noticed them. Thanks to my trusty iPhone, however, I snapped a couple of shots.

If you didn’t catch where the fires are in this picture, try the one with the nice red circle.

First, I’m really happy with how well my iPhone picture through the crappy American Airline plane windows turned out. Second, I’m totally surprised that multiple fires big enough to be seen easily at 38,000 feet weren’t on the news.

I suppose I should have a point… OK, here’s one: Look out airplane windows. You never know what might be on fire down below you.

And another point: Keep your iPhone handy so you don’t forget to take pictures of the Mississippi river as you fly over it. Yeah, I know. Live and learn.

Well, there you have it: Toshiba finally rolled over and showed its belly to Sony. Blu-ray is now officially the high definition successor format to DVD.

OK, I’m sorry. That roll-over-showing-the-belly analogy was kind of creepy. How about “give up the ghost,” or “took its ball and went home,” or maybe “threw in the towel” — which is what I settled on for my article at iPodObserver.com.

This whole Blu-ray versus HD DVD battle has been going on far too long, and I’m really glad it’s over. Now we can finally get down to business, buy a player, and start watching super-high resolution movies on our nifty HDTVs. Imagine: Images so crisp and clear that you can see individual hairs on someone’s head. Simply amazing.

Here’s the irony for me: I really don’t like how movies look in HD — at least the ones I’ve seen so far. They certainly are clear and show tons of detail, but the problem for me is that they look like video tape and not film. I like the richness you see in film even though I know that comes with an overall loss of image quality and detail. And since I just can’t be consistent, I prefer digital photos to film because they tend to be clearer and show more detail. I also like that you don’t see any “grain” in the images like you do with traditional film-based pictures.

HD movies also have a kind of flat look to me, like the depth is gone in the shots. That said, watching individual water drops fly as the Flying Dutchman surfaces in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is stunningly cool.

I know… I’m just going to have to adjust to the new look, and I bet that over time film makers will find ways to make HD really work for them in a way that turns movies into something more than we have today. Yes, I will eventually buy a Blu-ray player, and it will make a great upscaling player for my current DVD collection, too.

That can’t be bad, right?

Not everyone can brag that there is a paper cut out doll version of themselves, and technically there isn’t one of me. But there really kind of is. Through some weird twist in the parallel universe cross-over nexus point thingy, Geek Culture’s Nitrozac created a paper doll me. OK, it’s actually one of the After Y2K characters, but it sure looks like me.

There are a couple different versions of this little digital wonder: A Shockwave-based version and an HTML version suitable for for printing, cutting out, and dressing up on your desk. The printable version had the unexpected side effect of making my nieces think it is totally normal for paper doll versions of their uncle to exist.

The end result, dear reader, is that you can have a little piece of me with you any time you like, all thanks to the deliciously talented Nitrozac.

Dress me up, or make me run around your office in my underpants. Bend me to your will. I am your plaything.