Monthly Archives: March 2011

Best Buy Profit Down 16%; My Theory on Why

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The Wall Street Journal reported today that Best Buy‘s net dropped 16% based on sales. I’d link to the story, but if you know anything about the Wall Street Journal, they let you read the first few lines and then want you to sign onto their site. So we’ll just take their word for it and go on from there.

The theory that people are throwing around is that Best Buy is losing market share to Wal Mart and online markets, which everyone knows really means Amazon for the most part. But I have another theory, based on my many years of actually shopping at Best Buy. Before I give my theory, I would like to just say that I have been a loyal shopper at Best Buy for about as many years as Best Buy has been around. I used to practically buy everything from that place. My reason was that it was always a good deal, and it was always good equipment and stuff. Well, something changed over the years. I still shop there, but just not as much, even though I’m a silver member of their rewards program because of the amount of money I spend there on a usual basis. However, while I still shop there, I rarely go there because it’s the best price. Nor do I go there because it has the best stuff. Generally, I go there because it’s the only kid on the block that actually has stuff I can go and put my fingers on before I buy it. That’s still kind of important to me.

What I did want to say is what’s wrong with Best Buy. First off, their prices are no longer the lowest you can find. Online is the best price you can get for most stuff. Wal Mart is not the answer, as it’s like going to Tijuana for Mexican food. Yeah, they have Mexican food there, but honestly, who wants to go to Tijuana when you don’t have to?

The prices at Best Buy have been creeping up a lot over the last few years. And don’t get me started on peripherals. If you need a USB cord, you are probably better off buying one directly from NASA as peripherals at Best Buy are ridiculously priced to compete with property prices  in Dubai. I often dread going to Best Buy to have to buy a component for a larger item, only because I know how expensive it is going to end up being. When the clerk asks me pleasantly, “did you find everything you were looking for?” when you’re paying $70 for a cord that should have cost about $12, you have to suppress an urge to throw the person through a wall. After all, it’s not their fault. They just work for the company that charged you an outrageous amount of money for something you should never have had to pay that much for. Hence, sometimes I get help from https://exprealty.com/us/va/augusta-county/houses/ and listen to what they have to say before buying a property.

The second reason is that the stuff you get is no longer the best stuff for the best price. Yeah, it can sometimes be cheaper than other places, but at some point Best Buy stopped being all about great prices and then became a good price PLUS an extended warranty for even more money. It used to be that when you bought something in the ole’ good ole’ US of A, you were guaranteed a product that lasted forever. Now, it’s guaranteed for a year, somewhat, and then you have to pay if you want it to last longer. The prices aren’t that much better since those days, and with inflation it’s even more expensive. But now you know that whatever you buy is guaranteed to fall apart, so the only thing you can do is expect to buy a replacement soon or to pay extra to have it “guaranteed”. No, the US is not the country of quality it used to be.

So, when we’re trying to figure out why profit is down 16%, perhaps the reason has more to do with the fact that you can get what you want online cheaper, and that what used to be the best buy isn’t really the better buy any longer.

I’m just saying….

Explaining the Libyan Conflict to College Students Who Don’t Care

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I’m a college professor who teaches political science to students who generally aren’t interested in the information. It’s a required course, which means you end up with a lot of students who are in the class mainly to fulfill a requirement and then get out. The information is irrelevant to them. It’s not important. It’s information best left to people who deal with that sort of information. Which kind of brings me to an aside. Years ago, I was a counterintelligence agent working in a foreign nation. I was working with some very dedicated people. I had an assistant who was sponging off me, trying to learn everything he could so that one day he could be an agent himself. I remember him asking me one day when we were involved in something that would take a novel to explain (and could have very well qualified for science fiction status) when my assistant turned to me and said: “Aren’t there people in our government who handle these sorts of things?” And my response was, which I’ve never forgotten: “We are those people.” His response was classic: “You really should be getting paid a lot more than you are.”

Which brings me back to teaching college. I was discussing current events of the day, and a student mentioned that we were now attacking Libya and then asked: “I don’t understand why we’re doing it? Why are we attacking?”

This was one of those questions that most people don’t have to deal with because either they’re hip on what’s going on in the world and are more a part of the argument than the reasoning, or they’re part of that group of people who are oblivious to what’s going on in the nation and the world around them, kind of like most college students tend to be. We like to think that college students are the smarter of the young people out there, but quite often they’re clueless, mainly because their interests are still high school interests that have yet to evolve into something more worldly.

So I stood in front of class and tried to bring it back home. We had been talking about the War Powers Act of 1973, that details when a president can and cannot commit troops to war, and as much as I tried to explain it, the questions kept coming up with how a war can actually take place when the resolution basically says that it really shouldn’t. I tried to explain that the War Powers Act was a response to the Vietnam War, where Congress no longer wanted a president to be able to commit the country to war without a resolution of war first, but then also explained that real events in real time were always a test of boundaries, and right now we were going through yet another test of the boundaries set forth by the Act itself. I went through and explained the ramifications of Bush II’s escalation of war from an angered country after 911, and how it had everything to do with the state of the Act today. Little by little, I was able to explain what was going on, but each time I peeled another layer of the political onion, I found yet another raw debate waiting to emerge.

In the end, I was left explaining that events are happening right now in which the future has everything to do with how things play out on a day to day basis, that quite often you couldn’t rely on a textbook or legal definition to reveal what was right and what was wrong. Often, more than sometimes, the events of tomorrow have no predictability because people today are rarely rational, even though political scientists tend to veer towards the rational actor theory (people do what is most natural and, for lack of better word, rational).

It was one student, sitting in the back of the room, texting her friends during the lecture, who offered probably the most poignant question of all. “What will this mean for us in the future?”

And she meant for young people like her, those going through college and trying to create a life for themselves. Realizing the nation was already at war in two other places, the revelation that we might be at war in a third caused a texting student to stop texting long enough to ask what this might mean for her future.

And I had to tell her that I didn’t know. Politics is all about how rational actors respond irrationally to events that often make little sense in a solitary context. It’s why political scientists should never predict, even though they keep trying to do so. All I could respond with was confusion and knowledge of the past, because I realize that nothing in our future is truly new, as we often fulfill the axiom of history repeating itself. What that axiom never points out is that most people don’t have a solid foundation of history to recognize it when it does. You see, most people are like my students in that class, oblivious to the world around them, and equally clueless to the past because they didn’t think it was important enough to study at the time.

Twitter: The Technology Everyone Uses Yet So Many People Hate

Business, Social Networking, Television, Writing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Recently, I’ve gotten into the whole Twitter thing. Before that, I was strictly a blog guy who swore he would never really get into Twitter. But a few years back, I opened up a Twitter account because I’ve always been one of those “well, everyone else is doing it, so I should, too” kind of guys. Like most people who join Twitter, I followed a few people, waited for the throngs to follow me, realized no one was going to follow me and then just stopped using it. I figured, like so many other people do, that it obviously doesn’t work because it wasn’t working for me.

Yet, since then, a few nations, including Egypt, collapsed because of the use of Twitter. No matter how I tried to ignore the story, it was HUGE, and the fact that this strange technology was used to bring down a powerful dictator really was hard to pretend it wasn’t this massively large elephant in the corner, practically taking up the whole room. So, recently, I decided I would go back into the technology to see if maybe I might have been missing something.

What I have discovered is that there’s a lot of very interesting information that gets shared on Twitter, but you have to be patient to realize it. If you go into the game with the thought that you’re going to get instant satisfaction or quick results, you don’t understand Twitter. And I didn’t understand it. Now that I’ve started to follow a bunch of people, I’m starting to realize that it’s a pretty interesting way to view the world. Therefore, I’ve decided to give some advice to those of you who may be thinking about getting into it yourself.

1. Follow people you are really interested in knowing more about. This is really important because one of the mistakes I was making was trying to “sell” me and then getting people to start following me. It rarely happens. It actually looks desperate, and who wants to follow someone who is the equivalent of the loser in a bar trying to pick up on anything that walks in? No one does. However, what I did start to discover is that because I’m a writer, and I’m interested in all things writing, I’m going to find a lot of interesting people to follow who actually might have useful information. You also quickly discover who is just there to use it as a marketing tool and who is there to use it as a communication vehicle. Some writing Twitterers I followed, like Publisher’s Weekly, have interesting information they share with their followers. Others, which I won’t name cause this isn’t really a “diss” kind of article, weren’t all that helpful and turned out to be really annoying more than anything else. The hardest thing I found myself having to do was unfollow someone, but sometimes, you need to just because the amount of spam that someone clutters up your channel with can be overwhelming, especially when it’s not helpful.

2. Some people are on Twitter because their egos need to be checked. A lot of celebrity Twitterers are like that, and it’s unfortunate. But it also tells you a little more about them and lets you realize that you’re probably better off avoiding them. One person I started following in the beginning was Felicia Day, who is the creator of the series The Guild. She doesn’t Twit that often, but when she does, it’s usually interesting and worth following. About half of what she has to say is interesting. Mindy Kaling, however, who is the girl who plays the Indian girl on The Office, I thought would be interesting and funny to follow. Personally, she’s not. I found her attempts at humor to be really attempts to try too hard to be cool, and pretty soon I’m probably going to unfollow her. An interesting celebrity I’ve been following has been Wil Wheaton, who is the man who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I haven’t come to a decision on him so far, as I’m suspecting he’s still looking for validation, as I noticed when some of the senior members of the Star Trek franchise were twittering and left him out, and he actually made a bit of an appeal last night, practically begging for attention. He’s an interesting case because he tends to float between a Felicia Day (interesting to follow) and Mindy Kaling (not worth the time). So the jury’s still out on him. However, it should be pointed out that if you’re hoping to be followed by a celebrity, or even have one actually pay attention to anything you write in response, it rarely happens. I used some of my best funny material in responses to Felicia Day, and I was pretty much ignored, which is probably no different than it would have been had I met her in public. Unfortunately, the lowly among us remain lowly.

3. If your goal is lots of marketing potential, then yes Twitter is a great tool to use, but you’re going to have to put in a lot of work and a lot of time before it ever pays off. If you spam your messages into the channel, people will dump you in a heartbeat, which means you have to use the technology to actually communicate. And like most avenues of communication, if you’re only projecting and not listening, people stop listening to you. Granted, the celebrities still get attention because they’re celebrities, but the average person, like me, is only really going to get attention as long as he has something interesting to say. So if you’re just there to build followers, you’re going to have a hard time unless you can provide something interesting to say. I started off with very few followers, and slowly, I’m building a bit of a following, but I’m not fooling myself into believing I’ve somehow tapped into the Duane-amaniacs. Therefore, I have to make sure that what I have to say is as interesting to me as it is to them, kind of like regular writing is. People avoid spam and really want something interesting to read. Otherwise, why follow you?

4. The social implications of Twitter are huge and have already proven themselves to be excellent. Like Egypt discovered, Twitter gives the average person a voice he or she might never have had before. When people were looking for information about Egypt and the revolution, well, that was an audience just waiting to hear what had to be said. Twitter was perfect for that. What happens to that Twitter audience now is probably even more interesting, but I doubt too many people will study that as researchers always look for that pivotal event, not the continued ramifications of a pivotal event that has run through its play in the media.

5. The complainers and the critics. There was an interesting article today on CNN’s site about the 5 ways Twitter changed how we communicate. What was even more interesting were the comments from the readers. Most of them were from what I like to call the old grandfather who lives in the house that no kid likes to go near, constantly yelling, “damn kids, get off my lawn!” Rather than read the article and be interested in the new technology, the haters showed up and posted responses like Shawn777: “Twitter? I don’t even use that crap” and Guest119 ‘s “200 years from now, provided humanity doesn’t blow itself up with nukes, Twitter will not even be a footnote in tech history.” My personal spin on this is that the majority of the complainers are people who tried it out on a weekend, didn’t get a million followers and then figured it was a dead technology.

6. What is the future of Twitter? Who knows? Certainly not me. I’m pretty late getting on the bandwagon as it is anyway. I do know that somewhere down the line another technology will replace it and be the next “in” thing. I’ll probably be late for that one, too. But right now, Twitter is serving as an interesting way to communicate, and as a writer and a communications professor, it’s hard for me to continue to ignore it.

For the record, if interested, follow me on twitter at DuaneGundrum.

My One Day as the Kingmaker of San Francisco

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Me on my usual throne before becoming a kingmaker

Some years ago, I had a pretty unimportant job as an investigator for a major hotel chain. I happened to be in San Francisco, working for one of the properties of that chain, when there was a major political event taking place in the city. The election for mayor was taking place, and this was the evening of the results. The man who was going to be the future Mayor of San Francisco was holding his election rally in the hotel where I was at, so the big convention was taking place in the Grand Ballroom of this hotel.

This meant that everyone that was involved in security needed to be part of the crowd control. As a security investigator, I sort of fell under that umbrella, and while I could have opted out, I figured I’d help out and stood at the top of the escalators where the mayor was holding the big get-together. Well, like most bad television sit-coms, this is where everything sort of fell into place.

It turned out that one of the main advisors to the future mayor was someone I knew. He and I had met at the college where I had gone back to school after getting out of the military. He just so happened to be my physics instructor at the time, and we had gotten along greatly, although that had been a few years ago. Well, he was walking up the escalator with the future mayor, saw me, and immediately steered that future mayor over to me and said: “I wanted you to meet one of the men instrumental in helping you get elected.” And I was then introduced to the future Mayor of San Francisco.

You see, this professor of mine mistook his recognizing of me as a recognition of someone who was actually involved in the campaign. He saw my recognition of him, and his eyes lit up, and he sort of filled in all sorts of false past events because he probably couldn’t remember why he recognized me. I was fine with it, and personally I thought it was kind of funny.

Things sort of escalated from there. The number one man in this mayor’s campaign heard the exchange and immediately looked at this guy in a suit and figured he was important enough to continue a conversation. He pulled me aside and asked me to walk with him into the ballroom, because he wanted to hear my ideas for when the mayor took over the city.

So, not believing this was really happening, I went with him and spent the next half hour outlining what I would do if I was to take over as mayor. The man hung on every singlel word I said.

Then he introduced me to the future mayor to have a small conversation with while we waited for the returns to come in. So I stood there, in front of a lot of very important people, and I outlined what I thought this mayor should do if he became the leader of the city. He listened to every word, asked me a bunch of poignant questions, and then listened to my responses to every one of these questions. I must have spent an hour talking to him before the returns came in, and this man was announced as the next Mayor of San Francisco.

He then turned to me, handed me his business card with his private phone number on it, and then told me to keep in touch, because he valued his friends well.

So, I shook his hand, took a business card from his campaign manager, and then went back to work, helping the security staff take their lunch breaks by filling in for them.

But for that one moment, I was listened to by some of the more important people in the city. They’d never listen to me again, but for a few hours, I was one of them and the one to whom they listened to every word spoken.

I can only hope that I made a difference to the city that one day.

(this is a reprint of one my old articles from last year)

Is Innovation Dead?

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In case no one’s noticed recently, we seem to have a real innovation problem in the world today. I say this only because we live in an age where people think that innovations are happening all around us non-stop, yet no one really seems to recognize that we’re actually stagnating, doing nothing new and pretty much living in the successes of the past.

What am I talking about? Think about it. When was the last time something truly innovative appeared that has enriched humanity? I mean REALLY think about it.

What are the great innovations of today? The computer? The Internet? The microwave oven? The cell phone? Self-cleaning ovens? Google? Viagra? Honestly, I can’t think of an actual innovation that doesn’t have me thinking, um, that’s just an improvement on a previous innovation. The computer is probably one of the few that might be arguable as an innovation, although I would argue it’s really not that much more innovative than a calculator. It’s a machine that reads numbers in binary and then translates them into an operating system language that then gets used to produce computer programs. Nothing it does is really truly innovative. It’s not even all that useful if you think about it because the old arguments that the computer would make our lives easier were incorrect; the computer has arguably made our lives more difficult and as a result has increased the amount of paperwork we use, although it was supposed to cut down on it at some point.

The Internet is an improvement on the computer and email. The microwave oven is an improvement on the oven, and some people even argue that it’s made us a lot less healthy as a consequence of the types of food that can be produced from it. The cell phone is an improvement on the actual telephone, and I’d argue that it doesn’t make our lives any better as it now forces us to be “on” all of the time rather than letting an answering machine take a message for us so we can get back to people later.

Which brings me to the realization that there’s really nothing new that’s defining our current age when it comes to innovation. To make it even worse, people are no longer innovators either. Fewer people invent things, and fewer people are actually involved in the process of producing things. The rich people of our time don’t actually do anything other than move money around, or even worse, speculate about money. The people who do the most work get paid the least while the hardest workers are controlled by the people who haven’t made anything with their bare hands during most of their lives. Patent lawyers make far more money than the people who make the products that are patented and arguably wouldn’t be able to make the items they’re arguing about even if they tried.

The days of a lone scientist sitting in his laboratory trying to solve the mysteries of the universe are over. Instead, we have academics who sit in university libraries and then write papers that they discuss with other scholars who argue the merits of theories with people who generally don’t make anything themselves. Most current day scientists go into the science without producing new science but begin to theorize upon a foundation of theories that someone discovered centuries ago, and quite possibly that new scientist would never have been able to figure out the logic behind that theory himself/herself if presented with a blank state today. The line is “built upon the shoulders of giants” but we have so few people who are capable of creating the shoulders these days. Everyone stands on shoulders, profiting off the marvels of those who came before us.

Part of this problem may stem from the very nature of specialization, which makes the general theoretical scientist almost obsolete. But without those philosopher-scientists leading us forward, what exactly do we have to say for ourselves when we start to run out of new ideas? Conceptual innovation doesn’t really give us anything new but lets us figure out new ways of using what we already know. Which is why I argue that while Google is interesting and fascinating, it is by no stretch of the imagination an actual stretch of the imagination.

So, no one should be really surprised when we start looking for enlightenment from our world leaders and we keep coming up with the same, bad responses and answers. Instead of some great 21st century logic of how to move the world forward in areas of peace and understanding, we are still sending soldiers into hell holes to kill people who seem to be living in the ways of the 12th century. You see, as much as we like to think that we’ve emerged far better than we once were, we’re still the same barbarians we once were. We just have better toys than we used to have. So instead of pointing a spear at some Visigoth, we point cruise missiles at Libyan SAM missile sites. But in reality, it’s all the same thing. We never grew up; just our weapons did.

In the end, I hope we one day realize that we’ve stagnated in our technological growth because what that means is that our cultural growth is equally stunted. And until we start to realize that, we’re never going to move to the next stage of an evolution we keep thinking we’ve already achieved.

Cell Phone Companies in the US Really Suck

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Just yesterday, AT&T attempted to (and may have succeeded in) buying T Mobile. Now, personally, this really doesn’t affect me as I don’t have a T-Mobile account. I do have an AT&T account, but as AT&T is doing the buying, and not being bought, it’s not that big a deal to me. However, an inner sense in me tells me that I should be concerned because yet another cell phone provider is gone, taken over by one of the big ones that means less competition and fewer choices for us in the long run.

Some years ago, I was in South Korea, and I had a pretty good cell phone (even though it was pretty hard to understand half of the texts that would come through on it, so I never knew if it was someone from work or someone trying to sell me sex over the phone). The amount I paid per month was minimal, and the coverage was excellent. Sadly enough, I can’t say the same about the amount I pay here, nor can I say very good things about the coverage. Let me explain.

I have been with AT&T since they first got hold of the iPhone. When I first started with them, the coverage was atrociously awful. My phone dropped calls nonstop, and for someone who doesn’t get very many phone calls as it is, that’s extremely problematic. But eventually, it got better, but the pricing never did. It’s like they’re offering a luxury service at luxury prices when in reality they’re offering me something that’s essentially nothing more than a phone. Yes, a phone. Not a teleportation device. Not a phaser or a device that provides me with access to continous sex (or religion for those of you who don’t like the idea of instant access to sex). This is not a luxury item. Yet our cell phone companies act like they’re offering the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: Sliced bread was pretty damn great, and nothing’s really come along since that’s better. The pricing for cell phones is horrible, and that’s something that never seems to get better.

In other countries, they get decent cell phone packages at really good prices. The phone networks are also a lot more stable. And to top it off, they’re built on really powerful cell phone networks that don’t feel like they’ve been established with duct tape and string. The whole 4G thing is probably the straw that should have destroyed many backs of camels a long time ago. Instead of just telling us that they haven’t really produced anything all that great, cell phone companies tell us that they have “4G” coverage, when in reality it’s 3G coverage but designed so that it doesn’t fail as much. Sprint is the one provider that actually has a real 4G network, and I’ll let you in on a little secret I’ve discovered recently. They can’t seem to handle their 3G service in some areas, like where I live in Grand Rapids. Every time I have gone in to complain about lousy cell phone service, a clerk tells me something along the lines of “Yeah, we know about it, but I’ve been told they’re working on it.” Kind of like the government is working on the War on Poverty, right? Working on something, and FIXING something are two different things. Unfortunately, no one seems to get that.

What we really need is a brand new communicator technology that does away with cell phones completely and ends the monopolies that these companies have over our communication network infrastructure. It would be so much nicer if a brand new company came along and offered us something of serious value and put these cell phone companies completely out of business. Of course, I can imagine that these parasites will jump in before that ever happens and claim some weird patent was already filed that reads something like: “Patent covering any technology that actually communicates better than cell phones” and causes our legislators to side against us like they usually do whenever it comes to an argument of big business versus real people.

That’s really all I have to say on the subject. I need to take my medication now. [ /end ridiculous rant]

We Seem to be Running Out of Good Television Shows

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Recently, I was looking for a good television show to watch on dvd. That’s kind of how I roll these days, watching dvd television series rather than original programming when it actually airs. What I’ve discovered is that everytime I watch a series that’s currently on, they cancel it. It doesn’t matter what it is, or how good it is, it happens to me all of the time. I mean, everyone has their complaint about the demise of Firefly, which was a great show for its time, but every other show under the sun as well gets canceled by today’s television networks. I started watching Star Trek Enterprise. Canceled. Watched The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Canceled. Jericho. Gone. Jeremiah. Gone before I even knew it. It seems no matter what I watch, it gets canceled.

I guess I could watch stupid shows like Two and a Half Men, but as much as I enjoy poking out my eyes with a spork, I just can’t watch that kind of garbage. An example is the sister show of that garbage one I just mentioned, Big Bang Theory. I bought the first three seasons of it for a pretty good deal at Best Buy, mainly because colleagues at work kept telling how funny it was. I think I chuckled every four episodes, and I finished watching the third season last night. Was not very impressed. It was like someone heard that geeks were funny, didn’t know anything about geeks and then wrote an entire series around what he “thought” geeks might be like if they were actually funny. Throw in a bunch of comic book references and various Star Wars/Star Trek-isms, and that’s pretty much the show. Oh, of course, you have to throw in a few hot females to exacerbate the whole idea that “geeks can’t get hot women” and then we’ve pretty much finished the triad of doom. Like I said, it had its moments of interesting jokes, but overall I keep wondering what happened to that last few weeks of my life. If I went with the premise of the show, it wouldn’t make a difference because geeks don’t have any worthwhile lives anyway, but let’s just say I’m not buyiing their nulled hypothesis.

Which leaves me searching through the Netflix queue hoping to find something, ANYTHING, to watch. I was in Best Buy the other day (when I bought the dvds for Big Bang Theory), and I noticed that Felicia Day‘s 4th Season of The Guild was out on dvd. I kind of wish I would have bought it then, but it was only 82 minutes, and I had been planning to spend a lot more time with a show. Should have bought it then. In case you’re not aware, Day’s series is a brilliant commentary of how actually to do geek humor, as it really gets it right and tells it from the perspective of people who ARE the geeks, in this case a guild of online gamers who have no other lives but the game. It’s completely believable and funny. An interesting ironic point is that one of the recurring characters (who showed up in the third season) is Wil Wheaton, the man who played Wesley Crusher when he was growing into adulthood. What makes it ironic is that he’s also a recurring character in Big Bang Theory, and I’ll go out on a limb and say that the few times he was in the show (as Sheldon’s arch enemy because he once showed up the main star of the series for a comic book convention signing) were the few times where I actually found myself enjoyiing the show. In those occurrences, Wheaton played essentially himself as a crass asshole of a person who may or may not actually be a lot like the actor himself, which surprisingly is not offputting, even though you would think it would be.

Unfortunately, I find myself unable to really find any great shows on television anymore. I sat down and watched on Netflix streaming the three seasons of Kyle XY, which was so much like so many other shows it was attempting to steal ideas from, like Roswell, the X-Files and even Buffy. So, until I find something decent, I’m kind of stuck waiting for Smallville to run out its final season before I’m left with nothing but these four empty walls of nothiness where my stuffed animals and I will finally realize we have very little to say to each other and lots of times to say it.

Stop me before I buy more books! And other complaints when it comes to running a blog.

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For some reason, I’m a glutton for books. I buy them even when I don’t need them. Case in point: Today. I was at Barnes & Noble just wandering around, minding my own business, when out of the blue BAM! Another book came at me from behind and forced me to buy it. I didn’t even get to the cash register before another book, hiding behind the greeting cards and magazines jumped out WHOOSH! and there I was at the counter with two books I didn’t need. But no matter how hard I tried to get them out of my hands, they wouldn’t leave, and I ended up having to shell out another forty some bucks to the evil cash register lady for the purchase of said books.

I had actually gone into B&N looking for a specific book on Twitter information. I recently realized I had this Twitter account that I never really did anything with, so I decided I would see about optimizing Twitter to see if it might actually benefit my blog. My blog has been one of those underperforming vehicles that has been driving me nuts for some time. I write posts constantly, and I seem to have a massive amount of phantom traffic, but I’ve never really been able to do anything with my blog to make it worthwhile to me. I’m not talking about making money, like others try to do with their blogs. I’m more interested in just getting people to read my stuff, and I’m constantly struggling to do so.

Some months back, I joined Open Salon and started blogging there, and what I discovered was that if I didn’t spam the crap out of people, I really didn’t get any real traffic to my blog. And that bothered me. I decided to stop emailing people every time I wrote a post because I started to feel that it was bothering people rather than letting them know that I had more posts for them to read. I know that I have started to get annoyed at the amount of emails I get from people who post every day (and then email me every day), so I decided I didn’t want to be one of those kinds of bloggers. Unfortunately, the alternative is even worse. My blog is practically invisible as a result.

It’s partly frustrating because it kind of falls into the same paradigm problem I have with my writing career. I know I’m good at writing, but I can’t get a career jumpstarted no matter what I do. So I end up writing for myself or for the wind (or whatever other dorky metaphor fits the situation). My main blog site has been active for years, and it’s almost like I started it yesterday, judging from the amount of communication that comes across it. It’s a lot like my life these days. I get the idea no one even knows I’m alive, even though I’m still kicking and screaming. Just screaming in silence with the volume turned way down so as not to wake up the neighbors.

What a No-Fly Zone Really Means

Politics, , , , , , , ,

I really shouldn’t have to write this post, but it bothers me that so many people don’t understand what it really means when they advocated for a no-fly zone over Libya. It’s like we’re playing some kind of video game where America (or the west) is so powerful that we have all of the cheat codes enacted, and there’s no way anything bad can happen. Well, we just declared war without actually declaring war again, so in case anyone thinks this is something less than that, you’re wrong. We’re now at war with Libya for as long as it takes to scare a dictator into surrendering, backing down or something equally improbable. In reality, we’re demanding he step down, which then means he either escape to another country that might take him, hope his own people won’t kill him or put him on trial, or that some other equally undesirable event doesn’t befall him. In other words, we’re asking someone to take a path of worse consequences than the one he’s actually in right now. We did the same thing to Saddam Hussein, who held out until we had to put troops on the ground, decimate his country, kill LOTS of his own people, and then finally capture him hiding out in a cellar somewhere, hoping he might not be caught.

Right now, the French have attacked with aircraft. It’s possible one plane has already been shot down. Details are hard to come by this early in the war. But they have engaged the Libyans on the ground.

Which means people are already starting to die. So, no amount of posturing, pretending or ignorance gets us away from the fact that our entrance into this war means people will now die. Yes, people were dying before, but we’re going to be killing people ourselves now. We don’t get to paint over that with new paint and then put up a new car fragrance ornament to hide the smell. We’re killing people now. And we may lose some of our own. This is war.

I’m not against a war. I just want people to know and understand that they’re in one now. Sure, we’ll all go back to the mall on the weekend and buy videogames, dresses and other crap, but it doesn’t disguise the fact that we have aircraft in the air right now bombing people we don’t know anything about, and probably never will, especially since they will be dead soon. Hopefully, it won’t be as bad as some previous wars, and hopefully the survivors won’t grow up to hate anyone from the west, planning our deaths decades from now while we’re celebrating  a holiday or just going about our usual business.

This is war. It sucks. Don’t let anyone try to pretend it’s anything more pleasant.

But they will. Because that’s what spin doctors do with these sorts of subjects. Just hope that we don’t end up having to send soldiers over there to “finish what we started”  because someone in power who will never see combat can’t see any other way around the “dilemma”. War sucks, and it rarely turns out the way you plan, intended, or desired.

Now, back to American Idol and whatever we were doing before I so rudely interrupted with reality.