Monday, May 30, 2011

A short mock of my spam

Here is a pieceless piece of spam:

Hello
My name is Mis norna toure please i will like you get bark to me in My Email
Yours
Mis Norna

Sunday, May 22, 2011

All blog comments recovered

At this point in time, I have re-approved all the comments that were submitted during the time period that Blogger had to do the roll-back though. And that includes all my blogs. If your comments have not been approved, either I consider them spam (or Blogger does---I always forget to check the spam folder for comments) or they have been lost forever (and need to be resubmitted).

Friday, May 20, 2011

Will my audience be raptured

One of the current concerns of writers is whether we will still have an audience for our writing after 6 PM on Saturday.

What?! You haven't thought about it? What do you mean that I am the only one that thought about this?

Egads! I guess that I am the only weird person that is writing in the whole entire world.

Anyway, I was thinking about this yesterday. What if my readership is part of the crowd that is raptured tomorrow?

Then I realized that my chosen market are probably the last people who would qualify for the rapture.

I am not sure if this should make me sad or not. On one hand, it is nice to know that my audience will still be around. On the other hand, it makes it sound like I am writing to a bunch of sinners and black magicians.

Oh...wait...I am, ain't I?

But it says a lot about the writing life that one's first thought about the rapture is concern about how it is going to affect your numbers (readers, pageviews, subscribers, potential income, actual income). Or maybe it just says that I spent too much time managing a business before becoming a writer.

And now, I can go back to worrying about the up-coming zombie horde.

Friday, May 6, 2011

Hmm Is Blogger Reading List Acting Up

The last couple of days, Blogger Reading List has been saying that I am not currently following any blogs. Some of the blogs I follow show up in Google Reader, but not all of them.

Going over to The Real Blogger Status (not an official site of Blogger news), I have learned that this is not the first time that this type of problem has occurred.

So if you recently posted something and are surprised that I have not commented, odds are that I have not read it yet because of this particular bug.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Yep It is All My Fault

On Friday, I had one of those days. You know the type of day that makes you wonder why someone would ever chose writing as a profession.

It was an administrative problem. The type of problem that a freelancer looks at and wonders if the department on the other end is trying to save money by ensuring that no one ever is able to collect a payment from them.

Yes, I was dealing with a payroll (human resources) department---one that insists that they do not have current paperwork for me, therefore they do not have to pay me by their rules because I missed a deadline for filing the correct paperwork. And yes, this department is connected with the government.

For the record, the information they had last year, and the year before, is still the current information. I still live in Denver Colorado, in the same house, I am still technically single according to the IRS (it is a common law marriage with a mortage, but my wife will not consider it official until I finish college and take her to the altar), etc. If they kept paperwork from previous years, then they have my current information.

To make matters worse, I have been stuck in the infinite loop (where each person sends me to another, and none of them is responsible for fixing the problem). And there is a small email problem (for legal reasons, they are required to communicate with me though an account that they set up---an account that was deleted), they keep sending emails to a dead account, despite my requests to send it to my primary email address.

But none of this is their fault. All the blame lays on my doorstep. And I have to shut up and accept it if I ever want to sell them another word.

I almost quit writing on Friday because of this (but my wife would not let me). Exactly why I didn't will be the subject of a future blog. In the meantime, consider this---have you ever seen a terrorist that wasn't upset at a political entity? Yes, I believe that it is red tape, governments, and power hungry and money grubbing politicans that create terrorists.