NaBloPoMo

I’ve been watching a lot of TV lately. OK, not a lot of TV for the average American: According to a 2003 Census bureau survey the average American watch 145 hours of TV per month. That’s 4.8 hours per day. Stats from the AC Nielsen company say that the number of hours per day that TV is on in an average U.S. home is 6 hours, 47 minutes. But a lot for me which is about 5 hours a week.

Because I’ve been watching more TV I’ve been seeing more commercials and some of the things I’ve been seeing perplex me. One of them is the new campaign for the Toyota Highlander.

One of the commercials in this campaign a blond 10 year-old boy talks directly to the camera about how kids don’t want to be seen in “dorky” cars but sometimes parents just don’t know better. It’s not a bad approach. Most middle-aged parents, whether they acknowledge it or not, don’t like the idea of being…well…middle-aged parents. How else can you explain the existence of the “sport cross,” a class of American car that proports to meld the sports car and a small SVU to create a vehicle that is both stylish and suitable for hauling kids around?

But what’s scary about this approach is that it makes it acceptable for kids to be brand conscious at an age young enough to seem unreasonable to me. That may be because I don’t know a lot about how important that stuff is to kids these days and I can only make judgements based on how much I cared about brands and fitting in when I was a younger kid.

The other one that perplexes me lately is a commercial I’ve been trying to figure out most of the summer. The Schick Hydro includes some sort of lubricating gel right in the razor head. Never having shaved my face, I can only guess at the value of this from a practical perspective. What puzzles me, though, is the association of violent sports – a boxer being hit in the face, a soccer player heading the ball down the field – with shaving. What perplexes me even more is the scene in this commercial that apparently equates foreplay with a female sex partner with that same sporting violence.

Maybe it’s just that I’ve got a high degree of media literacy. Perhaps it’s that I’ve got high sales resistence; the harder you try to sell me generally the less I want to buy. Or maybe it’s just that I’m watching too damn much TV these days.

There is a part of me that hates programmers. It’s the same part of me that hates engineers, and it hates them for the same reason: they don’t think about the things they build.

Borders as a brick and mortar store is slightly more expensive than Barnes and Noble but in my circles of travel is infinitely more accessible. Borders.com, on the other hand, is way more expensive than Amazon.com and, in fact, you could say that Amazon.com is doing to other online book sellers what Barnes and Noble brick and mortar stores did to other meat world independent bookstores. But the frequent buyer program at Borders is free and the frequency with which they send me coupons gives me a chance to indulge myself in even the chain standardized, marketing research inflected version of the sublime pleasure that is poking around in a bookstore.

But life is busy and I’m only downtown two days a week through the middle of March, so online ordering is a better option for the things I know I need to buy and a 30% off coupon with free shipping made Borders.com a good deal until I realized their site was built by programmers who don’t think.

See, error messages are where most programmers fall down. Frequently, the error messages are accurate but opaque: they make sense from a programming perspective but have no inherent meaning for the user reading them. And even if the error messages make sense, most programmers fail the second test for any login usability: they don’t provide alternate look-up.

I haven’t carried my Borders Rewards card in my wallet for years because I know I can walk into any store and give them my phone number which the clerk can use to find my account and let me use the coupon I brought with me or apply any other discounts that I might be eligible for. So if I can do that in the physical store, why can’t I do that in Borders’ online store when the site fails to find an account with my e-mail address associated with it? Why is it that my only choice is to retrieve my forgotten username by e-mail address?

Why is it, then, when your site tells me that my e-mail address doesn’t exist, I create a new account, and I then try to register my frequent buyer card with that new account you tell me I can’t because it doesn’t match the account on file?

[insert banging head on desk and really aggravating phone call to closed customer support line here]

Yes, I realize this is a first world problem, and that none of it really matters in the grand scheme of things, but, again, I’m lucky enough to have the luxury of getting worked up by things like bad usability and incorrect grammar.

I’m also unlikely to do any shopping at Borders.com this holiday season. I know Amazon.com is the Buns and Noodle of online retailers. But I also know that when I show up at their virtual store they don’t lock the doors in my face.

I am lucky enough to have the resources to have two computers. One is the fabulous desktop/mini-tower machine I customized back when my old computer was just dying. It’s part of Gateway’s FX line of gaming computers which I chose not because I do a lot of computer gaming but because at the time I was looking to update my web skills and learn Flash which can require a lot of video processing power. This machine still runs on Windows XP Professional.

My other computer is a laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad T-500 which replaced an even older laptop. I bought it because I had some strange idea that I was going to try to write more and that getting out of the house to do that might be a good idea. Plus, since all I really need to do my job, what with Skype for voice calls, is an Internet connection, this machine also allows me to make my job portable which enabled me to spend Christmas week visiting family last year without having to either take leave without pay or burn all of my vacation. This machine runs on Windows 7.

Because the version of Norton Internet Security I had for my desktop machine was older and not compatible with this new version of Windows, I had to buy another version to run on this machine. [Read more…] about No, I don’t want the “protection plan.”

A couple of months ago I decided I’d take a stab at this freelance consulting thing all my techie and communications friends have been raving about for the past decade. The conditions were right – my full-time employment seems to be falling apart, I’d just won a major award from SoftwareVendor who provides services to a huge slice of the progressive non-profit community, and the idea of flexibility seemed attractive enough to offset the uncertainty of the income stream.

So with some help from the folks at the vendor’s shop, I started circulating my name as an “outside partner” and I redid my professional web site to better showcase my achievements and make me seem, well, sane and hirable. And I started thinking about rates.

Given that I have more than a decade’s worth of experience in my field, having dealt with other vendors looking to work in the same realm, and knowing what SoftwareVendor’s shop charges for custom work on their platform, I settled on $90 per hour as a base rate with the idea that I would be prepared to offer discounts in certain circumstances.

One of those circumstances is not when you’ve sat on a proposal for nearly a month, call me up, and ask me to cut my rate while simultaneously asking me to do your work in less than two weeks. Here’s how the timeline of our relationship looks:

October 6:
I get a blind e-mail contact from ProjectManager with no indication of where they got my name telling me about their new site in SoftwareVendor’s online community, letting me know that they want to “use your service to get up to speed quickly,” and asking about my rates. I replied the same day indicating that I’d be happy to chat with her about the scope of work to determine what the best arrangement for them would be, hourly, by project contract, or a block of support hours.

When I don’t hear back for a day or so I call and leave her a voice mail message explaining that I’m working with a new e-mail client, which I was, and wanted to make sure she’d gotten my reply. She replies the same day that things are busy and she’ll get back to me shortly. [Read more…] about And you will be slow-pay too, won’t you?

“The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”
– Chris Hedges, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning

I remember Veteran’s Day as a child. I remember going to school. It was always hot and stuffy, and the classroom had that particular industrial paint over cinderblock smell characteristic of schools in the 1970s. I also remember sitting quietly for two minutes at 11:11 a.m. It was never a burden.

According to the Department of Veteran’s affairs, Memorial Day is older with claims of first celebration dating back to May 1866. But Veterans Day, or Armistice Day as it was originally called, seems some how more significant to me. It was a specific recognition, however tacitly, that humanity had finally achieved a capacity to do violence to each other that we found subliminally terrifying. After all, World War I was dubbed “the war to end all wars.” Little did we know what was coming in less than 50 years.

In 1954 after much lobbying by veterans’ groups, Congress changed the official name of the holiday in the U.S. from Armistice Day to Veterans Day in recognition of American veterans of all wars. And here is where the celebrations get muddy in the United States.

Armistice Day was originally declared in 1919 by Woodrow Wilson “To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…”

Memorial Day observances were expanded after World War I from originally commemorating those who had died in the Civil War to honoring casualties of all American Wars. In 1971 Memorial Day was made a national holiday by an act of Congress.

So which is the more solemn holiday? Do we honor our dead in May and celebrate those who survived in November? Or is it just all about death? It’s confusing for those of us who remember sitting quietly and contemplating for those two minutes what it meant to be free.

People who serve in the military, for whatever reason they entered, engage in a necessary evil for the good of their country. While I’m not sure I always agree with how necessary what they might be doing is, I can’t help but appreciate the sacrifices they make to do it.