If there is one thing I love about RSS feeds is that they help you get a lot of ideas about stuff to think about, and by extenssion write about. I was readingLorrel On WordPress where she was highlighting a post on another blog called “So: Why Blog”. The post was by Dr. Johnson’s Cat and was a reflection on how his personal blog journey has kind of developed. The part that struck me was this statement Dr. Johnson’s Cat made:

People starting blogs only to abandon them within months, or even weeks, is such a commonplace that you’re surprised this hasn’t become a a ubiquitous trope on sitcoms. Where indeed are the reality shows where the participants, instead of holding out to the last “What have we learned?” episode, instead wander off seriatim, not so much called back to real life as completely unsprung by despair.

It got me to thinking about how I personally, a well as those of my marketing demographic, approach life in general. The blogsphere is perfect for me for because I can express my opinion at length about any topic I feel like ranting about. I can say things, criticize people, expound on the mistakes I think government officials make, and complain about how Big Oil has American under a gun, and no one can stop me. And when I’m done, I can go back to life without doing anything to change things, but I feel better for getting if off my chest. This is my generation.

We are the people who keep Starbucks in Business; not because of the quality of the coffee but because it facilitates our self indulging desire to gather and complain about how thing can be changed (All for only $2.10 for a Venit Black Iced Tea, with .50 cent refills). We are the children of the generation that reaped the benefits of the Reagan Years, and taught us that the American Dream is a material goal that you can reach if you work hard enough and are willing to make sacrifices to attain your desires. We are the generation that looks at the state of things around us and say “That’s wrong, someone should fix this,” because that is what we were taught to do. There are people who’s job it is to make things happen, and when it doesn’t happen it’s not our fault for telling them they were doing their job right, they should have know better.

OK, so there is a lot of angst there, I took a breath and I’m better now. The reality is that the world we live in has a lot of things that face each of us every day, and make life hard. We try to set goals, and life spits in our face and prevents us from going on. But we soon tire of fighting the good fight, we are tired of getting kicked while we are down, and we no longer feel any kind of absolution by playing the role of the silent martyr that carries on and perseveres. So where do you go when you want to vent, to the safest place you can go and not have to worry about people getting in your face for expressing your feelings. I’m no expert, but it makes sense that blogs have exploded in number over the last few years, because now it is so easy to create one. And in doing so you create the safe place, that retreate from the madness of the world, to finally say what you want.

This is nothing new. When social web sites first started taking form, and with the introduction of things like on line chat rooms, people realized how freeing it can be to have their identity hidden and express things would not otherwise. Blogs are similar to this in that you can choose to reveal as much or as little as you would like about who you really are, you can hide completely as a different persona or be a different version of yourself. And, unless you encourage them to, the people you know don’t have to know about any of it. Technology is a tool, and blogging is just another part of that tool set the internet offers to people in this day and age.

Give this tool a generation of people who have been told that the world is their oyster to have if they just reach out and take it. The children of the career women who did the impossible and raised a family and had a career at the same time, are now taking the stage and letting people people know that the world is not what they were taught. The people who were taught in High School that the US is the strongest nation in the world, and is a force of good in the Global Community, watch in horror as their friends were sent to fight a war that went from honorable to horrific in a matter of months. The sons and daughters of the Parents that dedicated their lives to a company only to be laid off a year or two before qualifying for retirement, are faced with the truth that dedicating your self to your company will not earn you any job security at all if you cost too much for your company to keep.

These are the people who make up those blogs that have a post here, a post there, and have large gaps in between. These are the people who go to work every day, face the fact that the nation (in spite of fact pointing to the contrary) feels like it is in a recession and they are struggling to survive. Paying the rent, paying the bills, taking care of themselves and their loved ones, coming to a point where the stress needs a release valve of some sort. Then they have a shine jewel placed in front of them that gives them that safe place. No wonder we only blog when nothing is going on, and wish we could blog when we are so busy we can’t see straight. We don’t need to blog when things are going easy.

Why do we blog? We blog because we need a place to vent what we can not say to those around us. We blog to feel like, for once, we have have a say in something and not have to worry about dealing with the consequences of facing that person the next day at work or waking up to them in the morning. We blog because we have nothing better to do a the time. We blog because we feel the need to have our opinion heard. We blog when we have time to express our feeling in this way, which is an interesting commentary on how busy we are if you think about it.

So what I’m really saying is, I blog because sometimes it’s easier to throw something out on the internet and vent my frustration in a safe way that (as much I am ashamed to admit it) doe not required action on my part in real life. So I can be as unbridled and as unrestrained as I and willing to let myself go. Then I go back to real life, having gotten my major issues aside, and function like a normal human being again just like the rest of us who struggle to get by in this really funky world that does not make sense a lot of the time.

Lorelle VanFossen is probably one of the most respected bloggers in the WordPress community. If you want to see an example of someone who knows how to take blogging seriously but still keep it fun and up beat, she’s an excellent person to watch in action. I’ve been reading her “Lorelle On WordPress” blog for about year now, it was one of the first RSS feeds I ever subscribed to.

I saw this post in my feed reader today that was titled “Want to Help Google Clean Up Splogs,” and was drawn into it right away. For those who don’t know what a “splog” is, it’s the blog equivalent of spam: when a post appears on your blog serving only to offer a link to another site or blog in attempts to bring in money to that blog (usually the ones I have to weed out are pornography related). So I found myself caught in a bit of a catch 22 on this one.

There are some people in the internet community who have put two and two together and come up with a really great solution. Splog = content that I don’t want on my blog website that is mass duplicated with same info designed to generate money. Google = one of the most powerful search engines in existence. Therefore they conclude that Google should offer some kind of way to filter out splog entries in blogs. However, in this case 2+2 does equal a good result. In fact it leads to something that has the potential of going to a very dark place.

The whole idea of blogging, at least in it’s current idiom, is that you throw an opinion out and let the world respond. Blogging is, by it’s very nature, an open forum. As an American, I take for granted every day the right that I have to express myself with out fear of retribution from my Government. I can post any anti-government sentiment I want on my blog and nothing can be done because I have the right to my opinion. If I choose to move to a remote cabin in Montana, call myself the “Ultimate Cheese Wheel Trinity” and start my religious group of dairy lovers, as long as we do not break any laws (such as stock piling fully automatic assault riffles, or dealing in drugs) we can proclaim our message of “cheezy goodness” (yes, I spelled it with ‘z’) via our blog and not have to worry about government intervention. But, what if someone finds that our message of “cheezy love” is too radical and dangerous in a day an age where lactose intolerant people have finally established a place of equal recognition and respect for the first time in centuries. They don’t want be subject to such a bizarre and blasphemous attraction to the gift of the “Sacred Cow”. What would the children think if they saw such a thing on U-Tube?!

OK, so I went over the top a bit there, but I think I got the point illustrated there. The real crux of the issue is that at heart of Content Filtering lies this really sticky debate about how to allow open communities to exist and at the same time impose some sort of way to protect that community. Once again we return to the basic conundrum of the American Way of life: Protecting my Freedoms may cost me some of my Freedoms, so where do I draw the line.

This is where I draw the line on this issue: If I want people to be able to post openly on my blog, I have to accept responsibility for the posted comments according to my personal convictions or moral standards. I should have the right to choose weather or not I want to give this responsibility over to a company like Google, but I do not agree with having to submit to an all powerful content filter in order to make other people’s blogs adhere to those other people’s set of standards. The same goes for spam and splogs, one of the largest money making industries in the Internet World. Yes, it’s vial and fowl in my opinion, but I have the power to eliminate this particular wrong doing from my blog is I wish. The last thing the internet needs is a content filter who’s control does not lay with the individual user.

***Updated latter that day****

So Lorelle very kindly pointed out that I did not have a clue I was talking about…..apparently splogs are Blogs that exist as a way of generating money. They are the same blog, with the same penny here penny there money earning set up, that propagates out into multiple instances to make it look like each is a different blog. So, in essence, it like a mass money making scam.

This is for those people who love Science Fiction. I’m not talking about people who are into niche SciFi like StarTrek, or StarWars, but people who love it all. If you enjoy SciFi as a genre, you have to visit File770.com

Mike Glyer has been writing about SciFi since I was…well I wasn’t even born yet. Back in a day, before the WebErnet brought us thing like blogs (and their predecessors: the webzine), people used to use this stuff called paper (you make it out trees) and distributed news letters and home produced magazines. Back in a day, Mike was a fan of all that is SciFi. He has chaired a few Conventions that have been hosted here in the LA area, and is well known in the Fan area as one of the people how know the history of the Genre very well.

If you know who Orson Scott Card is, or Philip K. Dick, or even if you don’t but know of projects that resulted from their work (movies like Minority Report, or books like Ender’s Game), then you will feel right at home at file 770.com.

So go there, and link to him like a good blogger.

So I had a lot of fun this last weekend. July 5th and 6th was the first ever Big Bear Valley Victorian Festival. And, like I spend most of my time these days, I was there with the Belles of Bedlam. It was the fairs first year so it was really small. But the nice thing about small fairs, as a performer, is that you get to know the other performers pretty well. So here is a pick that the photographer there at the fair took for us. I apologize for the fuzziness of the pic, but it gives you a good idea of what we wore for the fair. Or rather…what the Ladies did no ware.

Belles of Bedlam: Fawnskin Victorian Festival

It was all about the corset shows for this fair. Which the girls were very grateful for, seeing July 4th in Big Bear California, is not cool by any stretch of the imagination.

So what did I do for Father’s day? I went fishing with my Dad. Sounds a little “that’s already been done,” but it was a lot of fun.

When I was younger, I remember have a lot of fun adventures with my Dad and my Brother. I think back and I have a lot of really vivid memories, fragmented and not really cohesive, but vivid. I remember trips to places like Bishop, late night peer fishing, streams, lakes, ocean, a lot of different places. I don’t remember catching a lot of fish, except for the fluke trip where we caught so many we didn’t know what to do. But I remember sitting with Dad and listening to him tell stories about when he was kid, stuff going on at work, and random stuff that you never really seem to appreciate at the time but now that your older you really miss. So fishing was not something we were ever good at, but it was a lot of fun all the same.

That basically describes our Father’s Day last week end. We had fun, but didn’t catch a thing. We cooked dinner over a fire pit, drank some alcohol, got sun burned, got a bit smelly, but we sat on the side of the lake and did nothing; which was the point. I know that I had fun, I’m sure my Dad did too. So here is a pic of me at Hesparia Lake, catching nothing:

The same voice that brought you the great hit classic “Upgrading to version 9 from Version 8.x” now you can have even more of that great Tech Support love with a whole new collection of Tutorial Movies for the Laser App Enterprise program, brought to you by Laser App Software. Now you can learn how to do useful things like “How to Download and Install Forms”, “How to manually input your client contact data into the Laser App database”, or “How to import your client contact data from Excel or CSV File”.

Or if you are a power user, one of those people living on the cutting edge of technology who says, “Why should I learn a whole new program when my client data is already in one that works just fine for me,” fear not. Laser App works perfectly with many diffrent database programs. Take a look at the “Using Laser App with Red Tail” video to see just what me mean.
Stay tuned for new videos, coming soon to the Laser App Support page video’s page Great tools such as, “Using Laser App with SmartOffice”, “How to create form groups”, and “Saving forms in Laser App”. More to come, and all brought to you by ME! It’s what I do for a living!

My co-worker sent me a link to this news article, and it made me go Ewwwww!!!!!! So, of course, I had to share it with the world. The caption at the subject of the mail was simple, “Don’t Shake This Man’s Hand.”

The MSN news article headline says it all:

Japan: 780,000 porn site hits earn demotion

click here to read the full article.

I think the best part of it, is that the guy still owes the government for the time he spent looking at the sites, while on the job (he was a government employee) in addition to the fine he has to pay.

My co-worker forwarded this to me today. It’s a WordPress blog called “Vista Sucks“.

If you read this post about What Laptop Steve Ballmer used for one of his recent Microsoft presentations, you will see something very peculiar about the hardware he has at the podium.

The day has finally arrived. Microsoft is now use Apple products in order to show case how to do things on a PC. I bet Steve Jobs is sitting in his office right now, thinking something like “And they said it would never happen.”

I think safety is an important thing. I feel glad that I, as an American, have the right to travel to any state with out fear that the Federal Government can, Constitutionally, prevent me from going and coming as I please. I am a law abiding, tax paying, citizen, and therefore have no reason to fear interstate travel.

The morning of September 11, 2001, I went to work not knowing what had happened in New York. Being on the West Coast, and listening to a radio show that was know for it’s morning pranks on people, I did not even think twice about the news story that planes were being crashed into the Sears Towers. I was shocked, angry, and confused, like most of the people I knew and lived with. But this incident is more than five years behind us. It is time for the government to stop reacting to 911, and take a good long look at the effectiveness of the policies created in the wake of that tragic event.

I’m glad that Airports have had to step up secruity. It makes me safer as a traveler. Yesterday, due to a 911 secrutiy policy, I was denied access to the terminal to board my plane because the security check point was so backed up there was no way I could make my flight. OK, fine, I was running late and that is no one’s fault but the people who booked me longer that I was supposed to speak. So I was booked on the next aviable flight, spent the night in a hotel, and went back the next day.

The boarding pass I was given had a big “S” printed on it. My ticket agent said nothing about it, and I cleared the TSA check point with no mention what so ever of any issues. I went to my gate and checked in with the desk, something most people do not do but with the issues I’ve had with the trip I like to have a security blanket. I was informed that I had been flagged as a TSA security risk, and that I would not be allowed to board the plane until TSA stamped my boarding pass. So I had to walk all the way across the airport to the nearest TSA check point, and tell them about the issue. I was told to go back to my gate, and an agent would be there to take care of it.

The agent arrived as my flight was boarding, I had made it back to the check point with 20 min till they started boarding. He had to do the following before I was allowed to baord:

1. Hand check the laptop bag I carried that already had been x-rayed
2. Use a wand to check me for mettle, having already cleared the mettle detector
3. Physically pat me down for weapons

All of these procedures had already been done at the check point,but I had to do this again at my gate. When I asked why, it was because I had changed my flight. That is all.

Does anyone else thing this is just a stupid way of going about making thing more secure?

I like travel. I like going to new places, seeing new things, tasting new foods, talk to people with different accents, the whole experience of being in a place different from the one you live.

So I’m still in Indiana. I was supposed to leave the conference I was scheduled to speak at by 4:00pm today. But someone decided to use last year’s agenda with out looking a the changes, and promoted a huge big panel discussion with all the software vendors. My flight was scheduled to leave at 6:30pm, and the conference was a good 60 miles away from the airport.

Now, if you have read the previous post, you know my feeling on speed limits in states other than California. Well, the freeway system here is similar to a country mountain highway in California, only with about have the amount of traffic that fits on a LA freeway. Put it all together, and you get me showing up to the Continental Airline check in counter, at 6:15pm. Enter the modern age of technology and security paranoia that is our post 911 world in the USA.

Now I’m totally willing to admit that I’m spoiled as a Californian who lives in the LA area. There are no less than three major airports with in a hour and a half of my house. Ontario International, is a small airport compared to most, but it is fast. I’ve never taken more than 15 minuets for a security check, and there are only two outgoing terminals to choose from for domestic flights. Indianapolis is very different.

When I arrived at the airport at 6:00 I turned my rental car in and knew that I was strapped for time. I got in the shuttle to the terminal and ran to the check in desk. At 6:15 the very polite and nice woman with a thick British accent told me that she could not check me in. When I asked why, she said that the computers prohibit people from being checked in so close to the departure time. Apparently the standard time to get through security in Indianapolis is one hour on a good day. I requested that they put me on the next available flight to Ontario, and they said there were no more flights leaving today. When I asked for a flight in to Burbank, LAX, or San Bernardino, or any other of the many airports in So Cal, they said they would not be able do do so. Apparently all flights out of Indianapolis are booked. ALL FLIGHTS, not just to California. The next available flight they could put me on is for 6:15am tomorrow morning.

So I called my company, spoke to the guy who sent me here, and got a hotel room paid for by the company near the airport. I am stuck in Indiana

Plus side…there is a great pub across the street from my hotel. I had a this excellent chicken burger that made the day worth it, along with a Guinness. So, the day is not a total loss.

Time to go to sleep, I have to be up early tomorrow.