This morning on the way to school we sang the following song from one our favorite bands, Trout Fishing in America.

Sing along with us, won’t you?

Birthdays, when one has a Facebook account, are even more awesome.

Birthdays, when one has a Facebook account and your birthday is on a Monday, are even most awesome.

Birthdays, yada yada Facebook, Monday and your friends are so bored at work they look for anything to do but work, are THE BEST EVER.

If I had a dollar for every character typed on my Facebook Wall used in accordance with happy birthday wishes, well, I’d probably pay someone else to blog for me.  As you can see from my past posts, that duty comes pretty cheap. 

Fortunately I have great blog friends who pity me and give me content FOR FREE that I can use ROYALTY FREE and so I don’t have to pay because it’s FREE.

WHO ELSE AMONG YOU gets a one-of-a-kind Davetoon?

Oh wait.  I didn’t crop off the copyright all the way.  Well, I guess that makes it mostly royalty free.  I don’t even know any royalty, so I’m about as royalty free as you can get.  I mean, look at my whalltoon – I’m wearing a hawaiian shirt.  People who wear hawaiian shirts don’t get to meet royalty.

Thank you, Dave for the picture.

And Thank YOU to all the rest of you who reached out to wish me a Happy Birthday, or will at some point today.   The whole weekend was great and this week has started off in stellar fashion.

I have but one Birthday Wish if you feel like doing something good for your fellow band. 

No, not “fellow man.”  “Fellow band”.

You see, my wife and I are members of the Vandegrift Band Boosters.  Our daughter is a senior at Vandegrift High, and she’s an active member of the award-winning Viper Band.  One of the things us boosters have is a program called “Effortless Giving“.  This is a way for people to support the band without actually donating any of their own money.

Yeah, I thought I’d get your attention with that last part.

Some of our Effortless Giving sponsors are local to the High School area (Capital City Running, Take 5 Haircuts, Pizza Hut).  It might be hard for some of you in other states or countries to take advantage of these offers, so I thought I’d ask you to consider helping by using some of the “it doesn’t matter where you are” opportunities.

If you purchase anything from Amazon and you start your search from our webpage, the band gets a donation from Amazon on your behalf.  If you shop at Safeway or Randall’s, you can add us to your membership card and they’ll send us 1% of your purchases.  If there’s a Compass Bank near you, you can tie your account to us and we get a percentage of your debit card purchases.  And using Goodsearch or the Goodsearch toolbar is a great way to support us as well.

So take a look at some of these ways to support my daughter’s band, and whistle the rest of the year knowing you helped a great guy on his birthday support a great cause.  And best of all, you didn’t have to spend any money to do it.

Thank you.

Earlier today I tried several times to tweet my XMAS tree picture, but something was going on between Tweets for iPhone, the t.co shortener, twitpic or maybe it was something the dogs ate.  But no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get my XMAS tree picture posted online.  Good ‘ol Marty pointed this out to me and held on fast, and claimed he had the patience to sit it out.

If you ask me, it’s a Christmas Miracle.  Much like Tiny Tim getting the ability to eat and muster up the energy to bless our ears with “God Bless Us, Every One!” I am now filled with the ability to blog and can muster up the energy to bless your eyes with “Hall XMAS Tree, 2011“.  I’m sure you see the pertinent relevant characteristics.  Tim wouldn’t have felt the way he did without the infirmity of not being able to walk, and I wouldn’t have felt this need to blog without the calamity of twitpic problems.

Wait, what’s that?  What is that up on the tree?  Is it a TRAIN?

Why YES IT IS, it’s a train.  Up in the tree.

Choo-choo!

Well, I for one am exhausted, what with all this blogging and stuff.  Happy Thanksgiving!

Ok, so he has four (4) favoritest games, and they’re all Transformers.

• Transformers, the Game (from the 1st movie)
• Transformers Revenge of the Fallen (from the 2nd movie)
• Transformers War for Cybertron (no movie)
• Transformers Dark of the Moon (from the 3rd movie)

Coincidentally, shortly before he called I noticed a Facebook update from a friend complaining about the Playstation Network. 

For those who are unfamiliar with the Playstation Network (PSN), let me bring you up to speed.  The PSN can sometimes be a flaming pile of guano left baking in the Texas sun.  When it’s down (which seems often), most games don’t play at all.  It’s not just that you can’t play online with others, but for some games, you can’t even launch the game because the game developers and/or Sony decided that it’d be neat to require the online portion to be working.

Armed with the tip-off from Facebook, I could convey to my son that it probably wasn’t our Internet connection but most likely the Playstation Network that was down.  So I asked him if the other computers, laptops, gadgets were working.  He he asked me to hold on while he checked.

It took him a while.  I stayed on hold for a good 4-5 minutes, which actually is a long time knowing that there are plenty of Internet-enabled devices to check.  He eventually returned with confirmation that other devices in the house were indeed working fine.  I felt good in the knowledge that I was coaching him on the tenets of proper troubleshooting. 

We comiserated on his inability to play his game with his online friends, then I asked him about his day and how his Backyard Monsters were doing.  After our chat, we hung up, I went about my work out of town and returned that night.

Today I found this on my home office desk.

I rest easy knowing that in addition to solid Troubleshooting skills, I’ve also imparted two equally important abilities, and that is Documentation and Communication.  Now I know why it took so long for him to return to the phone.

That’s right, the Alamodome.

As many of you also know, Caitlin is currently a drum major in Vandegrift High School Marching Band.  This very young school music program, only in it’s 3rd year in existence, has recently advanced to the Texas UIL State finals for Class 4A Marching Band.  This means they are in the top 24 out of 250 bands in the State (after District and Area qualification rounds).

[insert fist pump here]

That’s a pretty big deal.  Texas is already blessed with a great reputation for music education.  On top of that, the Viper band is actually fairly small for a 4A band.  Due to the way the school was formed (first year was 9th and 10th graders only, then second year added 11th, then this year added 12th), the senior class is quite small.  There are only 17 seniors in the band.  That’s rather small for Class 4A (total school size between 990-2064). 

Why do I mention it?  Well, thanks to Yamaha and Mr Video Productions, you can WATCH TEXAS UIL STATE CONTEST ONLINE FOR FREE!

http://streaming.mrvideoonline.com/uil-state-2011

It’s actually going on right now — Monday the 7th and Tuesday the 8th.  There’s an entire schedule of events available at uiltexas.org.

Vandegrift plays at 1:15pm CENTRAL (2:15 eastern, 11:15am Pacific) on Tuesday 11/8/2011, so if you’d like to see my daughter and her band nice and clear on your PC, you can click the above link and watch.   I’ve watched a few bands and they have some neat close-ups and coverage of the event.

Hint: Caitlin is the Drum Major on the left, the flute soloist and the piccolo player in the center troupe.

Disclaimer: there may or may not be Tribbles at the State contest.

If you happen to miss that specific time or are not available, you can go online and watch archived performances at vhsband.com.

Congratulations to the Viper Band!

… when all around is dark.

    — Monty Python skit about Oscar Wilde.

One of our daughter’s friends snapped this picture of her during one of the band’s rehearsals and posted it to Facebook.

Mom and I are quite proud of our little Drum Major.  She volunteers, gets good grades, has fantastic friends and helps a ton of other students all the time.  We’re very lucky to have her. 

Thank you, Caitlin for making our lives better.

But there’s one birthday going on today that’s very local and very cool.

My little girl is 17 today!

She’s starting her senior year and it looks to be a great one.  She’s Drum Major of an award-winning band, she gets good grades in a course schedule that’s filled with all AP or pre-AP classes, and has surrounded herself with a cadre of stellar friends.  She’s responsible, generous with volunteering and brings her parents much pride as she navigates life and discovers what it has in store for her.  She herself has won several awards relating to music, including the John Phillip Sousa award, UIL Outstanding Performer, and Outstanding Musician just to name a few.

I really don’t know how I could be happier with what she brings to our lives.

Oh wait, I just thought of something.

She’s raising money for her band’s March-a-thon.  If she was one of the top fundraisers, THAT would make me more proud of a papa.

On Saturday, August 6th, the Vandegrift High School Marching Band will set out and march a local neighborhood for 4+ hours, braving the triple-digit heat and raising money to help the band.  This is their biggest fundraiser of the year, and as a student leader, Caitlin is expected to raise the bar.

The way I see it, you have two choices.

or…

Vote with your heart, people.  Your heart has NEVER steered you wrong.

PS: Happy Birthday, punkin’

Tigger takes his job very seriously.

He’s always there for the family, watching out for strangers, enemies, mailmen, evil insurgents that might break into the house at night and take the dog food and/or treats, and especially other animals such as rabbits.

You just can’t trust rabbits.

Who is your copilot?

– Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth, Futurama

If you’ve been following my most recent entries, you know that A) I begged the internet to help spread the word about my wife’s artwork entry in an online Duran Duran voting contest and B) I thanked everyone for their help, because it looked like she made 13th place out of > 300 in a contest that takes the Top 10, which in itself was an amazing feat.

Well, we found out over the weekend that after what we assume was a re-tallying of the eligible votes, her entry was officially named a member of the Top 10!

[cue the holla]

According to the official contest website, “Winners announced in 1 day”.  The details indicate that final judging ends tonight at 8:31pm EDT.

What does this mean?

Well, it means that for sure, the band viewed her artwork!

This was the huge thrill she was after — I mean, sure, it’d be incredible if they chose her artwork as the grand prize winner, but just having them look at her artwork is an amazing experience.

She’s so thankful to all of you who helped her get into the Top 10.

We’ll be paying close attention to see who wins the Grand Prize.  There are so many beautiful entries I’m sure it was difficult for them to choose.

And for those D2 fans out there, here’s a little sumthin’sumthin.  How many references can you spot?

To whom it may concern: Is there anyone out there tempted to add a little UMF to the Duran Duran Artwork contest? I tricked out my entry so you should click on it, zoom in, and give in to the reflex to vote for my success. Can you deal with it? I don’t need to be the last man standing, just one of the top 10. Sorry if it’s too much information, but I’m barely still breathing at the proposition that one of these days I might go from nice to notorius my own way. I’ve had a few friends of mine click faster than light and I’m about to come undone! It’s like being freed from chains on the perfect day in my finest hour. Fame is not a big thing to me, it’s just a matter of feeling what the first impression will be when the wild boys of Duran Duran take my artwork and look at it with their own eyes. It’s like my artwork is pleading “hold me” and that would make me smile.

Thank you, and we’ll see what happens tomorrow. I’m serious.

Well, the contest is over.  The gist is, we don’t think she made it, but we won’t know for sure for 9 days.

I’ve flirted with the limits usually ascribed to “friend” and “acquaintance” and “fellow blogger” by invading Twitter feeds, plastering onto Facebook walls, infecting email inboxes and exploding forth with word-of-mouth tenacity.  I’m sure some people are fed up to “here” with whall and his constant reminding to vote.

Then again, I’m sure some people… dare I say more people… are happy to have helped and are hopeful for her entry.  They’re truly excited to find out results and have wished her the best the whole time.  It’s these people who mean so much to me.  They know I don’t go on daily, weekly or even monthly “help me” online frenzies.  I think everyone’s entitled to a little wacky-involve-everyone-you-can-this-could-be-big excitement every once in a while and I’m glad for those of you who helped.

As far as status goes, the contest is currently in the Judging phase:

To be brutally honest, we’re not thinking she made it.  But there’s still a slight possibility she might make it, so we’ll stay tuned to see what happens.

There’s more detail in the extended entry.

Here’s what we know for sure:

Her entry was in and out of the Top 10 for the past few days

This shows how awesome my friends are.  There was a time in the beginning where she was #1.  She was all over the place, and it was great to see her way up there.  I’d see a marked improvement in her standings a few hours after I’d send out my blast, and I knew it was my friends’ assistance and willingness to spread the word that helped so much.

THANK YOU.

We are both happy with whatever happens

My wife won’t be devastated with the results of this contest, no matter her placement based on voting.

She gets that this is an online popularity contest, and we’re both humbled by the response from our friends, both in-real-life (IRL) and online.  There are people I haven’t even met who are responsible for dozens of votes based on their forwarding of my request alone.  She was excited to have entered, and happy for my online group of friends.

THANK YOU.

A few entries shot up from nowhere into the Top 10 recently

I suspect a few of the entries of benefiting from illicit voting.  I’m not saying conclusively that cheating occurred, but several entrants were scratching our heads when one of the entries, a pencil drawn image evidently different from all the other submissions shot way up in no time and with barely any comments.  Most of the other entries in the top 10-20 had dozens of comments, both from Facebook-authenticated users and otherwise, and this one only had 4 or 5 anonymous comments but clearly a massive number of votes relative to the rest of us.

There were also a small number of entries that shot up to the Top 10 in a matter of minutes, where I hadn’t recognized the entry in the first say 50 entries (I looked through a lot of them), and 5 days into it they shot from  > 50th place to 8th.  The entry I’m talking about ended the contest in 3rd place.  I grant that this could possibly happen legitimately… say, someone’s speaking at a conference and asks everyone to go vote for their entry.  Or they have a highly visited website, twitter feed or facebook wall and they posted it, and that’s when everyone voted.

For those of you who put up with my ranting and unique style of logic in this section, I

THANK YOU.

There’s a bit of drama in the comment section

This is to be expected, so no big deal, really.  There will always be haters, trolls, and immature people sharing their opinion or stoking the fires.  Some of it was a little funny, actually.  I think it could have been a little mitigated had the company running the contest allowed the “nickname” to be shown with the comments, and it probably would have been a little more fair if they required an email address and verification link be clicked in order to count the vote.

Some of the drama came from inconsistencies with the contest rules as written and the implementation of the contest rules in the voting app.  The contest rules specifically stated “Limit one vote per person per day” and for almost three weeks, all the entrants had to go on were the contest rules.  This is not my first rodeo – I’ve seen online voting contests before that allow one vote per day.  In order to win, you have to get as many people as you can to vote – ONCE PER DAY.  This is where I knew we had the upper hand over most of the other contest entries — I knew people who would actually be willing to click once per day. I had a twitter feed, and a facebook page, and a blog.  I’m not even a big deal on the internet, and I knew I could move the troops.

I even registered a domain name just to point people to the entry.  It was a vanity name, easy to remember, easy to type, and easy to tell people when you meet them.  With a domain name like voteformedaily.com – how could it not succeed?

Well, the contest started.   THE ONE FLAW IN MY OTHERWISE PERFECT PLAN.

Despite the contest rules stating people could vote once per day, the actual voting app stated people could vote once per entry for the entire contest.  So now people assumed that if you asked people to vote once per day, you must be cheating somehow.  My new domain name was not only useless, it was worse; it was a liability.

I changed the domain to point to my blog entry about the contest instead of the contest entry itself.  I made corrections about voting once per day and explained things a little better.  I did damage control.  I didn’t want to cheat and I didn’t want anyone thinking I was cheating.  I didn’t want to jeopardize my wife’s entry in any way.  I started getting emails, texts and DM’s from people on the second day of the contest saying “I tried to vote again, but it wouldn’t let me.”  I patiently explained the issue and then decided I needed to change tactics.  I needed more people to vote, not just more votes from the people already willing to vote.

That’s when the email and facebook message barrage started. Fortunately, everyone either voted or ignored the email; no hate mail arrived, and no people demanding to be left alone for the rest of their lives.  Some responded with best wishes, some responded with sharing on their wall, and some lamented not being able to vote twice.  Truly I have the best Internet friends humility can buy.

THANK YOU.

Christy was in 13th place right before voting ended

I checked the status of the contest every day, multiple times per day.  I had the web page saved as a favorite on my phone and my computer so I could quickly see if she’s disappeared from the first page, or doing comfortably well.  I toyed with the idea of writing a quick script to pull the first page of entries, sorted by votes, every 15 minutes, then alerting me if she got out of the top 10… but then decided that that itself might be seen as cheating or some sort of tampering from their weblogs.

For the last day of voting, her entry danced between 11th and 12th place consistently.  A couple of times, she was in 9th place.  Then 10th.   Then OMG 13th place!  RALLY THE TROOPS!!!!  I knew *all* the contest entries in the top 25 would likely be pushing everyone to do what they could to increase votes, so if I didn’t do the same, the entry would be yesterday’s toast.  So I did another tweet, another email, and it seemed to help because she held her place.

About 10 minutes before the contest ended, I checked again and she was 13th place.

Out of > 350 entries.

13th place.

THANK YOU.

There are 18 hours between voting and judging

I noticed the contest ended midnight on the 28th, but the judging period didn’t start until 8:31 PM the next day.  That’s 18 hours that I assume will be used to validate the voting.

Why validate the voting, you might ask?

Well, there are many ways to cheat in this contest.  I think Wildfire did a decent job of trying to mitigate fraud, although it’s always possible to do more.  I think they struck an acceptable balance between the effort required to have a 100% error-free voting system, the ease of voting, and avoiding most forms of fraud.  If you make it too hard to vote, people avoid the contest or complain. If you make it too easy to vote illegitimately, people avoid the contest or complain.

I expect them to categorize the massive number of votes a few ways:

Facebook votes

I would expect counting Facebook votes to be an easy process.  After all, a person’s vote is tied to their Facebook login, and they don’t need fancy computer terms like “cookies” or “forms-based captcha authentication” to verify a vote.  If you’re logged into Facebook and you cast a vote, that vote should be a 100% certain non-duplicate vote.  The only issues that might come are from Facebook accounts that are new (ie, say someone created a bunch of Facebook accounts just to vote with – those would be cheaters).

Non-Facebook votes

I found it extremely easy to vote without being logged into Facebook.  This is a good thing for those of us who don’t have Facebook accounts or who aren’t comfortable sharing their Facebook information with the company running the contest.  Privacy is a big deal to lots of people, after all.

However, the system needs a way to reduce duplicate or invalid votes.   You no longer have a one-to-one mapping of human being to their vote like you did with tying a vote to a Facebook account.

In order to do this, the voting app did two things — first, it popped up a window with CAPTCHA word authentication.  It presented two disfigured word-like forms and you had to decypher the letters and type them in.  This helps validate that the entity doing the browsing is not a computer, but rather a human.  Secondly, it stored a cookie on the person’s browser, which is like a little breadcrumb designed to help servers recognize you when you return later.

If a person re-visited the site again later to vote, the voting app would check for the presence of the cookie, and if it was there, it wouldn’t let you vote again — instead, it replaced the “Vote now” button with an “I voted!” button.

Now, the web-savvy people out there are already saying “well, what if you removed the cookie?”  Without the cookie there, the “Vote now” button would return, and you could vote again.  All browsers have a menu option to remove cookies.

I’m sure several people did this.  A few people even commented on the entries and said as much, instructing others how to clear their cookies so they could vote again.  Some used that to call foul, and things got a little more heated, because with a little knowledge and a lot of emotion comes drama.

More than CAPTCHA and Cookies

However, they probably weren’t aware of a third mechanism that I expect Wildfire to employ, and that’s of logging identifiable information with each vote.  When you visit a website, your IP Address is used on that website, and is almost always logged.  Every device on the Internet must have a unique IP Address in order to work, although in many cases, multiple devices share a single IP Address, such as in the case of multiple devices in a home, or multiple computers at a single company.

So, Wildfire needs to figure out a way to still count valid votes (ie, 15,000 Dell employees potentially sharing one IP Address) while weeding out the cookie-clearing-cheaters who just stayed at one computer, clearing their cache, and voting again over and over.

There is other information typically provided by your browser to the voting app as well, and that’s the version of browser you’re using.  For example, if you go to ipchicken.com, it will tell you the IP Address you look like on the Internet and the browser you look like (you will also get a chicken, but that’s beside the point).

In my case, it’s

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.204 Safari/534.16

Wildfire can use that information, along with timing of votes, to attempt to identify cheaters.

Now, the super-web-savvy people out there are already saying “well, what if I used a different browser?  and a different IP Address?”  Yes, yes, yes, there’s always another step you can take towards cheating and there’s always another step the contest has to take to prevent cheating.  The trick is — how much fraud prevention should they do?  What’s an acceptable amount of risk?

As I put in one of the entry comments, I fully expect Wildfire to do their due diligence with this contest. This is what they do for a living – online promotions, online contests, and voting.  They do this to promote an idea, a band, an album, or a brand.  They wouldn’t be in business if they didn’t at least have some basic protections against these types of fraud.

Therefore, I’m thinking that 18 hours between voting and judging is so Wildfire can toss out the obvious duplicate votes and provide Duran Duran with the real Top 10 winners.

And to Wildfire, I pre-emptively say

THANK YOU

Our hope at this point

As I said above, I don’t think she made it since she was in 13th place in the last remaining minutes before contest end.  But there’s a lingering chance that some of the 12 entries ahead of her had duplicate or otherwise fraudulent votes, and would then be thrown out.  Or, if not the entry itself thrown out, maybe the duplicate / fraudulent votes themselves are somehow removed, and a new ranking of eligible votes is used.

If that’s the case, and her entry had the Top 10 eligible votes, then it could be she goes on.

Also, as shown on the Judging tab on the website, it describes how the winners will be selected.  It says

“We’re looking for a fan artist who captures the feel of the All You Need Is Now album and does it with passion, creativity and beauty.“

We all know art is subjective, and several of the entries in the top 10 don’t look like it captures the feel of All You Need Is Now album at all – it just looks like fan art (not that fan art is bad… just that it’s not inspired by the latest album).

My wife’s entry was inspired by the latest album – the electricity, the colors, the chaos… even the letters themselves are from the font being used on the latest album.  So, it’s possible that the judges take that more into account than most people realize, and that would help her entry be counted in the Top 10.

Either way, we won’t know for 9 days.

At this time, Wildfire has closed down the listing of all entries by vote count.  They only show the top 5 on one page, and all entries on the other page.

In closing, it’s been a fun ride, and I’m thankful to Wildfire, Skin Divers, Facebook, and Duran Duran for hosting or helping with this contest.  Duran Duran fans truly are brilliant, creative and fun folks, and Duran Duran has known that for a looooong time.  I’m glad they saw fit to run a fan artwork contest — how cool was that for the 350+ fans making artwork for their favorite band?!?!?

But most of all,

THANK YOU