Sunday, November 19, 2006

late afternoon

National Blog Commenting Month?

C’mon, someone needs to start it.  We could use a month where each day participants comment on a blog where they’ve never commented before.  It’ll be cheery.  Here, here’s a logo.  (thanks to Leigh-Ann for fixing it for me)

The above was not approved by Perry Como.  I’ll bet that if Perry Como was still alive, he’d be honored to have December be NaBlaCoMo.  Seriously.  What better way to honor a guy who was associated with Christmas albums?  Also, I feel badly for leaving non-Americans out of the title, but just think of “National” as your nation, whichever nation is yours.  Or, it could be changed to InBloCoMo, although that looks vaguely dirty.

Look, it even makes for a lovely thumbnail. Here are a variety of sizes of logos for your viewing pleasure - http://www.theblogpound.com/nablocomo/

the wee hours

Maple Leafs & Dodgers Video Walls

It’s creeping me out that John Bolton keeps showing up in the one of the boxes.  It’s not fair, I chose the Dodgers, not incompetent & mean jerks who represent us at the UN.  Anyway, try it yourself at http://www.blinkx.tv/home

Saturday, November 18, 2006

evening

Interesting Marketing Blog

I was roaming around the web, working, wandering, waiting for Leigh-Ann to be ready to go downstairs to make some blueberry tea when I ran across the Church of the Customer blog.  It brought back fond memories of dealing with companies who wouldn’t answer our emails or deal with us in a fair manner.  Our first “sucks” website was TrocomaniaSucks.com - Trocomania was one of those surf and earn rewards websites that were so popular 6-7 years ago, before most of them went broke after many of us figured out ways of working their program hard, and getting lots of gift certificates and freebies from them.  Trocomania had terrible customer service and tried to cheat us out of our fairly earned rewards.  So, we started TrocomaniaSucks.com.  It very very quickly got their attention, and in exchange for giving us what we’d earned, we let them have the domain.  We had the same situation with a local microscope company, who accused of us trying to cheat them, when in fact, we’d never even opened up the box of the microscope.  Long story, but this was more recently and we were better than they were at search engine optimization (we gave our site immediate backlinks from PR6 sites), so we were ranking above the company for their product.  And geepers, after that “sucks” website, they also decided to deal with us in a fair manner.  It’s always worth the price of a domain name to get your bad customer service story out there in circulation.  You have to tell your story honestly and can’t be trying to hurt the company’s reputation for no reason, but there’s no law saying that you can’t tell your story.  We did.  We got a refund and a gift certificate - we donated the gift certificate to Bat World, so they could buy the binoculars that they needed.  Everyone ended up happy (okay, everyone, in this case, means us and Bat World) and hopefully this unnamed telescope/microscope company learned to abide by their little motto of “Our Customers Come First.” I sincerely doubt it though.

Friday, November 17, 2006

evening

Idiots of the Day - Inhofe, Cafferty, and Simpson

First, James Inhofe (R-OK) In an interview with Fox and Friends this morning, outgoing Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works James Inhofe (R-OK) argued that the current wave of unprecedented warming is due to “natural changes.” “God’s still up there,” Inhofe said, and to the extent there is warming going on, it is “due to the sun.”
So, uh, if God’s up there, why did he allow global warming to even start?  Huh?  Huh?  Answer me that, Mr. Smartie Religious Nut.

Jack Cafferty of CNN on the (mostly recently) kidnapped soldiers in Iraq:  Well on the point that Michael Ware was making. That the people who are fomenting this kind of activity over there aren’t stupid. They understand with the results of the U.S. midterm elections that there are a lot of unanswered questions in this country about what happens next. And they are going to use that opportunity to make hay while the sun shines if you pardon a kind of poor play on words. But our uncertainty and lack of direction at this moment simply creates another opportunity for the bad guys and they are taking full advantage of it.
Yeah, because before the elections, everything was going swimmingly over there.  No one was ever kidnapped/killed before November 7th, right?  Where should we start?  A list of journalists?  Iraqi academics?  British soldiers?  Random foreigners?  How about American troops?  Yup, Jack, no killin’ & kidnappin’ going on before the Democrats were elected.  Nope, just peace, love, and puppies.

O.J. Simpson - really, is there anything more to say than, “This man is a murdering pig”?  Naw, I didn’t think so. 

Thursday, November 16, 2006

late at night

Tips for Teens - The Kind You Don’t Find In Magazines

I was driving home today, after running some tedious errands.  Yes, it’s practical to make people drive across town to their doctor’s office in order to pick up a prescription because that piece of paper assures the pharmacy of not getting any forgeries.  You know what, the doctor’s office could also call or fax the pharmacy the same prescription...and then, to be super duper safe, the pharmacy could call the doctor’s office phone number to verify said prescription.  I know it seems like a wacky far-out idea, but it could just work.  Another pharmacy fun thing - I had to sign for Claritin-D, because it has Sudafed in it.  Yup, meth addicts are going to buy pills that are $1 each, and THEN try to extract some pseudoephedrine out of them.  They’re just that tricky.

Heh, a funny thing happened while I was standing in line at the pharmacy.  I heard the Dreidel Song while I was standing in line.  I thought it was the woman behind me, although to be stereotypical, I thought it was a tad odd because she was black.  Then, after I handed over my super dangerous prescription, I sat down in the waiting area and took my cell phone out of my backpack to call Leigh-Ann.  I was going to call and see if she wanted anything at the grocery store because I had fifteen minutes to kill.  When I pulled my phone out, I realized that because it said that I had one message waiting, the Dreidel Song that was playing was my ringtone.  I didn’t realize it because, for one, I never have the phone on, and we never give the number out, so we never have anyone calling us.  But, I’d turned the phone on when I was at Whole Foods (buying Diestel turkeys, the best tasting turkey ever) to call Leigh-Ann and ask her a couple of questions.  Anyway, I called her again and asked her if our ringtone was the Dreidel Song - she said yes, then asked if I remembered that she’d changed it when we spent hours at the DMV last year registering the car.  Nope, I sure didn’t, until she reminded me.

Ah, the blog title.  On the way home, I was listening to Fred on XM and they played Tips for Teens by Sparks, which I haven’t heard in maybe twenty years.  I used to love Sparks and their wacky lyrics.  They were the opening act for the very first concert I ever went to when I was a kid - Rick Springfield.  I think my mom had to bribe my brother to take me.  It was a great concert though.  Anyway, Tips for Teens...an entertaining song.