There was a good article in the July/August 2010 issue of Landslide which discusses protecting your brand from counterfeiters. The article, titled “Fighting Back: A 10-point Plan to Protect Your Brand from Counterfeiters,” outlines 10 points useful for those concerned with brand protection. In sum the 10 points are:

1. Register Your Trademarks
2. Record your registered trademarks with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection
3. Monitor and Investigate trademark offices, the marketplace, affiliates and supply chains, and domain names
4. Take legal action when counterfeiters are caught
5. Seek formal recognition as a well-known mark in the countries which allow obtaining such a status
6. Work with local authorities, such as in foreign territories
7. Utilize the press using press releases and notices
8. Make it difficult to copy your products and packaging
9. Keep written anti-counterfeiting policies and guidelines which are to be distributed to employees and affiliates
10. Be active by networking through global or national organizations

For anyone interested in this area, the article is a great read. A copy of it can be found here.

Check out this article about how bloggers and other online posters may be liable for the things they post “anonymously”

Blogger Beware: You Can Be Sued Over ‘Anonymous’ Posts – via ABAJournal

As much as I told myself growing up that I did not ever want a job that involved a lot of writing (part of the reason I became an engineer) pretty much all I do now is write. Every.single.day. Tons of writing. Part of this is always me copying parts of documents into a new document. For those of you who also find yourselves doing this (organizing my law school notes into outlines involved a lot of this) I’m sure you’ve recognized that the ctrl+c (copy) followed by ctrl+v (paste) over and over leaves you desiring more. “Wouldn’t it be easier if I just could copy everything I needed and paste it once?” Seriously, wouldn’t it?

You totally can. I feel a little lame for not looking into it earlier, but the feature is built into word. It is called copying to the “spike.” This is how it is done:

• Selecting some text
• Use Ctrl+F3 to copy/cut it to the “Spike”
• Repeat for the other text you want to copy/cut
• Paste the combined set of copied text with the Ctrl+Shift+F3 shortcut key combination (or type “spike” and press F3).

Here is some more info on the spike.

Saw the Expendables last night, not a terrific movie, but it was entertaining… lots of explosions and fake blood. Not bad if you’re looking for an action movie. B-

The city of Los Angeles, LA for short. I don’t know how the trend of calling LA “lala land” originated, but I hate it. This isn’t lala land, call it LA.

That is all.

Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I set up a lot of new PC’s and this is a site that helps speed up that process. Ninite has a large list of commonly used applications that you can select to all be installed at once. Saves you the time of going to each site for each application and downloading…

Check it out: Ninite

You should know:

“All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them”
-John Fowles

Took a night off tonight, just to veg out and sit around. I have to say, it was awesome.

It isn’t that I want to sit at home, alone, every night… I just want to do it on occasion. Have some time to myself. To sit and be.

I’m tired of being tired. I’m too tired to add to this… fill in the thoughts. Extra hours of the day wanted for sleeping. kthxbye