We say Ook Ook when we do something impressive in our work. Most of the time it is something that we have been trying to figure out for days.

Here’s an example. I insisted on adding a segment to our url many years ago, and now we have discovered it is wrong for the website and has to be undone. FYI, if you are interested in the terminology:
• https:// is called the “protocol”
• whatever.com is called the “domain name”
• everything after the domain name slash is called the “path”

Easy Peasy…days later, we are down a rabbit hole and all of a sudden there are more things we are finding to fix. What?! We don’t have Yoast on some of the inner pages? Now Linda is checking broken links. I am searching online for articles on “installer-data.sql”, which means very little to me. Linda thinks she hand-coded it in the php (techie), and I think the problem is in WordPress setting (not techie).

Back to our goal: We find a promising article that calls the middle section of a url a “chonky thorax”. Really? The article says “the long tail has exploded”. Linda ominously warns, “We might break the site if we do this.” I ask clueless questions like, can’t you just undo? Linda asks me how far in years does Chrome history go back- maybe we can find the original article that got us into this mess? And then…. it’s fixed. I asked her how she did it, and she tries to explain, but I was already moving on, “Great work Linda! Ook Ook!”

Then, we laugh for five minutes and I write “chonky thorax” in our co-list that we are compiling of our silly tech history together.
(And, by the way, in the end, the answer was non-techie, found in the page settings of WordPress, and easily editable.

It’s called a Chonky thorax
Linda pretending she has a macro lens again
I am so freaked out and I want to kill Go Daddy
I schedule all my chron jobs at the same time
Psycho refresh
Nothing so satisfying as figuring out your password
You had me at Malware.
I am going to have to just go back and fix it pixel by pixel.
How can a dropdown menu be sexy? That is ridiculous.
I was going to do that but I got distracted by Russian Spam.
some days I miss that domain.
Your logo looks like spam
you are spiking my resources
I have GDPR
The first thing that I always install is my spam protector.
Oh. I have done this. The all in one integration plug-in. It’s a savior!
I am going to go into my c-panel and kill my php processes – it won’t hurt anything
Bots can’t activate parsers.
Oh no, oh dear. I shouldn’t have done that with the gutter.
Woo commerce Menu structure -I gotta get outta here
Mail Chimp Humor- How can I drop a large content block if I can’t even see it?
Put that in the Divi why is this messed up document
If we had a cool saying we could add a big drop shadow to it and put it up in the sky. But it would have to an awesome saying.
I just cleared out all the homeless articles from our site. They are transient.
Love when I find a tutorial that uses The Worm Tower (home composting system) to show me how to add an unlisted video to a youtube playlist!
Photoscape. That must be a fancy program.
I want to make a tutorial so badly for dynamic pages on Wix. But I hate Wix. (note: we now LOVE Wix- want to do WIX sites – For hire!) I am only doing it because I am forced to.
just say no to logos
General Data Protection Regulation, known as GDPR, has come into effect.
This setup’s designed to be used literally 12-16 hours a day; everything about it is rigged so that it’s all in arms reach and ultra-comfortable. I can (and have) slept in here before.
the day Linda changed my yahoo password
I have a super arousing content idea that will surely make a great addition to your site and provide a lot of value to your visitors. If you are interested, then please let me know your thought.

Nicole’s sister sent  an email with the subject interesting blog and book. It was a link to an author/blogger on parenting. Nicole  loves self help books, but is beginning to discover that one really needs to be in the mood for them.

She recalls one year many many years ago at Christmas being given a book called something like, How to Create a Life Worth Living. Ironically, today Nicole would so want to read a book like that, but at that time it felt like criticism. Last year, when she was reading a self-help book about relationship-first parenting, it made her husband feel that she thought something was wrong with their relationship.

Anyway, life quotes do inspire Nicole, and she is more open minded these days about recommended books. She will probably end up getting that book from the link her sister sent.

The quote written on the chalkboard above is from The One Minute Mother by Spencer Johnson, which Nicole devoured it in a minute. (ok three weeks) She still thinks back to that book and its advice. As much as she wanted what she had learned to effect her children, maybe they were not in the mood.

[addtoany]

We love Uptime Robot. It’s a great tool, letting us know when our sites go down for any reason, but we cringe every time we get an email.

Guest contributor Nicole Rhino spotted the words on a t-shirt, which led to capturing the image of an ice cream face, which resulted in our meme today, which led us down the well-traveled path of copyright questions. (sounds a little Dr. Seuss-y, doesn’t it?)

We are very careful about copyright. In our very early days as designers we used a photo from Google images. It was a simple image of fingers holding a pen, and we used it as a small thumbnail within a newsletter. We thought we were following the rules by changing the image substantially enough – reversing the image so that it would not look exactly the same and only using a tiny portion. We weren’t using it to sell anything. It wasn’t intended to ever be online, only to be printed and used within the office. However, many years later, when we were digitizing newsletters for downloading, the stock image crawlers found the .pdf download link and found the image. (Whoa, right?) It was a hard lesson learned, and we experienced the results of copyright infringement to the tune of $900.

Today’s user journey is another twist in the road – are short phrases copyrighted? Googling “Do yourself a flavor” turns up an interesting old 1961 7-Up magazine ad, on sale through Amazon, so the phrase is not new and original. If we posted the t-shirt from a small Midwest shop, would we get them in trouble too?

From the Stanford University Library:

In these sales-oriented cases, copyright is sometimes stretched to do the work of trademark law. In the world of trademarks, short phrases are protected if consumers associate them with particular goods or services.

More research turns up a couple of tools for checking U.S. patents and trademarks: Trademark Electronic Search System, and also the U.S. Copyright Office. It is tough to trace who currently owns this “phrase” because the search engines are very confusing. However, after cross-comparing some data between TESS and online trademark legal sites, we found this: https://trademarks.justia.com/765/83/do-yourself-a-flavor-76583022.html

It appears that that “Do Yourself A Flavor” is trademarked for retail store services in the field of frozen comestibles and coffee drinks, is owned by Mr. John S. Captain III, and was first used in 1982. (So what about the 7-Up ad?) Mr. Captain has also trademarked Whirla-whip, and Codeword. Following this trail leads us to Portland Tub and Tan, and he is listed through LinkedIn as the owner of this business.

Since we are not selling our meme, and this type of online humor often borrows common phrases and quotations, I think we’re ok with sharing it. As far as claiming it as our phrase? selling it on a product? Can’t do it. I scream, you scream, we all scream . . .