Annoyances

So, for some reason my blog has gotten targeted by comment spammers just recently. The comments on this blog are (were!) moderated so none of the lame attempts to spam my site were getting through. But I still had to deal with getting dozens of notifications a day. I received 48 new comments to moderate in just 12 hours. So I turned comments off. Who knows, I might turn them on again at a future date. But at this point, if anyone wants to chat about what I’m writing here, you’ll just have to do it via FB or some other location. Sorry for the inconvenience. And to all you spammers out there - F-OFF!

So, I’ve had an iPad since the first day the iPad 1 came out. And I’ve been reading books in the Kindle reader for iPad almost that long. I am a long-time book reader. In fact, when I got the iPad I didn’t think that ebooks would hold that much of a draw for me. After all, I love the feel of a good book in my hand, the smell of the glue holding the perfect binding of the paperbacks together, the crispness of the pages, yes, even the jolt awake when the hardback falls into my face while reading in bed. But in the two years since the iPad 1 has come out, I’ve changed. I like to think of it as growing. Now, I prefer to read books on my iPad, iPod, and in the cloud reader on my laptop. I love that when I get to page 110 on my iPad, I can open up my iPod and be right there on that page. This is better than when in Jr. High I learned how to almost subconsciously remember where I was in a book without bookmarks to combat the teasing people who would grab my books from me and move or remove the markers in an effort to thwart my knowing where I was. (I also learned the best hiding places for reading at my Jr. High—back in the library stacks on one of the lowest shelves where no books were stored was the best. No bullies ever venture into the library.) When Apple changed the rules and removed the bookstore links from the apps, I quickly bookmarked your site in my mobile Safari and made sure that that bookmark was synched to all my devices. And when you announced the Kindle Store, I saved the location as an app on my iPad so I could always get to it quickly.

So, this morning we got back from our shopping trip and walk and I brought in the grocery bag (in my reusable wolf bag) and the cat carrier we are using to transport our new puppy in. [caption id=“attachment_456” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Stormageddon the day after we got her”][/caption] I thought about being lazy and just put the kennel down and thought, “No, I’ll put it away right now, so it’s not cluttering up the kitchen.” I then walked to where McKinley’s leash and backpack go, put them away and then walked to the storage area and put away the carrier. Yay me! [caption id=“attachment_457” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“McKinley’s leash hung up by the door”][/caption] A few minutes later I realized that I hadn’t put away the groceries. So I went back to the kitchen where I’d left the bag to put them away. No bag. But Jaryth had moved the chair by the door so he could get a cup of water from the sink. So, I guess he moved the bag. Started searching the most likely areas a toddler would put a bag of groceries—in other words I looked around the kitchen floor. No bag. So I looked in the living room and dining room. No bag. “Jaryth, do you know what happened to the grocery bag? You know, the one with the wolf on it?” Blank stare, still no bag. Mark starts helping to look about then. He looks outside where Jaryth had been playing in the rocks, in the barn, in the shed, in the trash cans, in the car. No bag. I am starting to wonder if I imagined buying groceries. As the bag is no where! I give up looking, and decide to take Storm, who has woken up with all the commotion, outside to do her business. Mark comes out and says “I found it! Now you have to find it!” Of course, I’m thinking “I’ve been looking for it for the past 20 minutes, what makes you think I could find it now that you’ve found it?” He asks, “What else were you carrying when you brought in the bag?” For those of you playing along at home, go back and look at the second photo in this post. Note that BEHIND McKinley’s backpack is a bag with a wolf on it. [caption id=“attachment_458” align=“aligncenter” width=“199” caption=“what the leash rack should look like—sans bag”][/caption] Most of the time, I do the stupid things done in this household, much as I’d like to lay the blame on any toddlers or animals in the vicinity.

I know, I’ve ranted in here about email before, but seriously, the messages I receive sometimes send me around the bend. In the last week or so I’ve had the following (paraphrased) gems:

• One man asked me for some help in building a complex website. He sent his first message on day 1 and when I hadn’t had a chance to answer it, he sent it again on day 2. I finally responded to his question suggesting an answer and that if he had more specific questions, he should post them to my forum. Over the next 3-5 days he sent me numerous more questions, and if I didn’t respond within 24-hours, he would resend the message. Finally, after getting tired of answering his questions (he really needed to take a class on how to use a computer before he’d be able to build a basic website, let alone the complex one he wanted to build) I just stopped. After four days of no answers from me, he started over. Yes, he sent message 1 (which I’d already answered) to me again. Messages? Meet the spam filter…
• I got a long (LONG!) letter from a man who wanted to build a complicated photo-submission website. He seemed to have a good idea of what he wanted but no understanding of how to do it. I was getting ready to ignore his message when I saw that at the end he asked me if I knew anyone who could help him. Phew! I sent him my “hire someone” spiel talking about RFPs and Freelance Switch. He wrote back saying thanks. This one was unusual because of that thanks. Most people never respond at all.
• Then I got an email from someone asking a bunch of questions that indicated that he really had no clue how to use the interwebs or describe his problem. The questions were along the lines of “I tried for 2 hours!! to read your email, but I couldn’t open it. Um, buh? How the heck should I know what is preventing you from opening an email message? And telling me how long you flailed blindly at it doesn’t improve my chances of figuring it out, but it does improve my ability to ask the last question you asked—“Do you have to be a computer science major to understand this or am I an idiot?” Uh, I’ll take answer B!
• So, then Mr. Idiot answers my reply. His way of saying thank you “wow! I didn’t think I’d get an answer!” does not inspire me to great heights of desire to answer more stupid questions from him. Now he wants to know why my article doesn’t work on his web page. Of course, he doesn’t include a URL. Unfortunately my psychic powers are on the fritz, so I ignored that message.
• He emailed again today, this time with a URL, and to tell me that because of my site 2/3s of his entire site is gone. I think he also mentioned that he spent 16 hours working on it. Maybe I’ll answer this one, um let’s see… [DELETE].

Here are some tips if you want to get an answer from me by email:

It’s stupid how I fall for giveaways so often. When the reality is that they are done solely so that the blog or site owner can get more readers and more comments. They have no interest in you as a person, and are most likely going to give their products away to people they know (either IRL or because they’ve posted lots of times before). They may also give away to people who write the most “heartwarming” response. But of course, they say that they’re giving them away to a “random” person. The nice thing about Goodreads is that they don’t say it’s random. They even say that people who read and review books of a similar type are more likely to win. Unfortunately, giveaways end up making me feel bad. In one case, I commented for the first time on a post because I wanted to tell the author that I really liked her post. Then I realized it was a giveaway post as well (I hadn’t read that far) and wanted to remove my comment, as the fact that the post was a giveaway made it seem like I was posting some lame “I like your site” post just to get the crappy lavender chatchkies she was sending to “one lucky reader.” Whatever. In other cases, I think I have a good chance of winning something, either because there are very few posts, or there is a large number of prizes, and when I don’t win I’m disappointed. I’m reminded of the contests About would have where the person who wrote the most content in a month would win. The first one they did, I was on fire and submitted like 20-30 new pieces of content. This was easily 3-4 times as much as I normally did in a month. Of course the winner a) didn’t have another job and more importantly b) wrote about 20-30 glossary entries A DAY. In terms of word count or character count, I probably wrote just as much as s/he did. But because s/he spread it over 600+ one sentence pages means that s/he won. This was over 10 years ago, but it sticks in the head. Of course, staff saw this contest as a huge success and so held another a few months later. And no one in the computing channel competed. We all (or nearly all) had other jobs and couldn’t waste our time on contests we had no chance of even coming in third or fourth for. At least that was the reason I didn’t bother. Our editor was very disappointed. I’m sure that another giveaway will come along tomorrow or next week that I’ll really hope to win. And maybe I’ll have the strength to think “no, don’t bother” as I don’t need more stuff anyway… But I suspect that my willpower will be weak or the thing given away is sooooo cool that I can’t stop myself. All commenters to this post will receive a FREE copy of my eternal goodwill. :-) Of course, you’d get that if you comment on any of my posts.

I was reading an article yesterday about how facial recognition is getting so good that there are apps being built for cellphones that can identify random strangers from photos (taken as you walk along with your cell phone). The article was bemoaning the fact that this was a “further invasion of our privacy” and that pretty soon nothing we do would be private. I then moved on to another article that talked about how Google(?) was working on an algorithm that could evaluate the writing style of someone online and make a good correlation as to who actually wrote it. Even if the author had posted anonymously or with a pseudonym. The article was bemoaning the fact that this was a “further invasion of our privacy” and that pretty soon nothing that we do online would be private. But is this idea of “privacy” such a good thing? Ultimately, what it really is is the idea that we can go out in public or online and be anonymous. And some people see anonymity as the same as the freedom to do anything they want. And as we saw in London over the past few days, anything they want seems to cover a wide swath of things that most civilized societies consider wrong. Some examples of things anonymous people do:

I was hoping for a long morning alone with my writing. But instead I got to help clean up a flooded bathroom and attempt to fix the washing machine that hit it’s planned obsolescence date today. Mark thinks the pump cracked. We bought an expensive washer 3 years ago thinking naively that if we paid a lot for a good brand it would last longer than the cheaper model we’d bought 3 years before that. Nope. This time, if the repairs cost more than the cheapest model we can buy we are going out and buying the cheap, no frills model. At least that way in 2014 we will have paid less on our rental. In 2008, we did all this research, but the reality is that washing machine reviewers don’t have 3 years to evaluate a machine. So they really don’t know if they will last a reasonable amount of time. And no, I don’t think 3 years is reasonable. We had the same washing machine my entire childhood with a family of four. My three-year-old son has seen two machines die in this house! (Yes, the last one died about two weeks after he was born!)

Our current process with our son goes like this:

1. wake up between 7am and 8:30am
2. play hard all morning
3. lie down around noon for around 15 minutes, but don’t fall asleep
4. play hard all afternoon until about 4pm
5. fall asleep hard, and nap for an hour to two hours
6. play hard until mom is exhausted (any time after 10pm) and then lie in bed fighting with her because he’s not tired at all

8 hours of sleep is barely enough for me, and I’m not convinced it’s enough for him. We have determined that if we can get him to stay awake at 4pm he’ll go to bed and sleep around 7:30 or 8pm. But that period from around 4pm until 6pm is killer. We can’t seem to keep him awake. He has fallen asleep while eating, while playing, watching a movie, reading a book, and more. We then shake him (gently), talk to him, carry him around (hard when he weighs nearly 60 pounds), try to get him to play, and nothing wakes him. Yesterday he fell asleep on the couch, and when we told him we were going to feed the animals (a chore he loves to do) he woke up enough to say “I want feed animals” and then he was asleep again, and continuing threats did not wake him again. Any suggestions? How do you keep a toddler awake when he doesn’t want to be so that he will sleep when we want him to be asleep? I’m desperate (and tired).

The most common complaint I see about content farms is that they serve up lousy information written by under-paid (or non-paid) writers. I can join the ranks of people who will tell you of the lousy results they found on eHow (or insert your other favorite content farm to bash) here. Yes, I don’t like doing a search for “how to build a web page” and getting a result that says, essentially: step 1. build a web page, step 2. put it on the internet. step 3. there’s no step 3! But I am equally tired of the writers saying “I make a living writing and they are turning writing into a commodity!” And other such statements. Guess what, Virginia, writing has always been considered something anyone can do - and as such paid as little as possible for. Yes, every writer I know, including myself, recognizes that writing is hard. To get up in the morning, stumble to the computer and stare at that blank screen is a fate all writers share. To know that you may or may not get paid a living wage for whatever pearls make it to that screen puts even more pressure on. And to then go out and read about how some moron was paid 3 cents to write the above “article” on how to build a web page is both depressing and demeaning. Some days, I start thinking that I should just start writing tutorials that are that meaningless (and I’m sure some of my “fans” would argue that I already do…). After all, that “tutorial” took me longer to think up than it did to write. But ultimately I believe in market forces (says the woman who has been known to rant for hours, yes hours, on the evils of laissez faire capitalism). If the content that is created by these under- and non-paid writers is lousy people won’t read them. And if it gets too bad, people won’t visit the sites that generate them. Then the sites won’t make any money and they will either focus on getting more non-paid writers to flood the internet with crap or they will come around to the idea that paying good writers something slightly more than peanuts is a way to get better quality content. Personally, I am hesitant when a search result feeds up an eHow or wikipedia article. Not because the writers are underpaid but because I’ve found the content to be less than stellar. And the other thing to think about: how much are you paying for the content that you read? I have friends who are proud of the fact that they view all websites with ad blockers on. Others that refuse to pay any subscription fees for content. And others who think that buying a book that was “just their blog posts” is tantamount to complete idiocy. I had a discussion with my brother a while ago where he told me he didn’t want to work with a money manager because “they just want more money”. And I thought, “well, sure, who doesn’t?” I mean seriously, how can one complain that writers aren’t being paid enough when you aren’t willing to pay them yourself? I buy and read over 100 (probably closer to 200) books per year. I have donated to websites and blogs that I find valuable, and do so every year. In this case, I think paying it forward means literally paying. And I’m okay with that, because if I like a writer I want them to keep writing so I buy their books. And another thought: what makes Wikipedia so damn popular and “content farms” so not? I have found the content on Wikipedia to be just as questionable as eHow. And the writers there aren’t paid, in fact every year the Wikipedia founder asks them to pay him! But that’s a rant for another day.

I got an email yesterday from someone who wrote (paraphrased): “I read your top 10 list of best web editors, and it was interesting. I use ___ editor, and I was wondering if there was a better one than it available.” Really? The editor he mentioned was not on the list. I honestly don’t know what to tell him. I mean, seriously, if his editor was not on the list (and it does qualify to be on that list - it’s free and it’s for Windows), then chances are, I believe that all ten editors on that list are better than the one he named. The only thing I can think is that he doesn’t understand what a “Top 10” list is.