Tag Archives: internet

Information overload…

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The problem with the internet is it puts every little thing you want to know right at your fingertips. Sure, that’s also the very best part of the internet, but that’s not the side of the coin I’m dealing with just now. In the opening stages of House Search 2015, I’m finding some decent places – or at least places to start… but then my damned inquisitive mind starts to wander.

It wanders to issues of property tax and leads me to the state government websites. It wanders to issues of boundaries, zoning, and planned nearby development which leads me to the county planning website. It skips towards flooding and hazard mitigation which leads me to FEMA’s notoriously inaccurate maps. And then there are the pictures – The fuzzy ones taken by the realtors and then on to the satellite imagery, bird’s eye views shot from airplanes, and Google’s evil car cam. As a side note, Google has not yet reached many the back roads of Ceciltucky. I find it oddly comforting that they actually don’t know everything.

I know more or less what I’m looking for in a house. I’ve moved enough to know what I like, what I don’t, and the fact that it’s all one enormous compromise in order not to totally blow the budget. I suppose it’s time to bring on a professional to help me narrow the scope a bit. From what I gather the good ones make pretty decent coin for sifting through the data I’ve been trying to manage on my own for the last few weeks.

I have to keep telling myself it would be a shame to just hand over their commission without really putting them through their paces to earn it.

Master of my domain…

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I just renewed my domain mapping agreement with WordPress… which really only means that your bookmark to http://www.jeffreytharp.com will continue to work for the next year and you’ll be able to avoid tracking me down using the half-mile long default address assigned by WordPress when you start a free blog. Nothing online is really permanent, but through next February I’ll continue to be the master of my domain.

Distracted…

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So I sat down after dinner and started dinking away at the computer and somehow the last three hours just kind of evaporated on me. It’s possible that the internet is the devil. Regardless, it’s safe to say that you won’t be seeing any kind of actual commentary or discussion here tonight as I’ve got a chocolate lab nudging me every 23 seconds wondering why we haven’t gone upstairs yet. Sometimes I think the dogs have far more sense than I do about such things.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Grown adults. I’m totally on board with kids being excited to see the snow. I’ll even forgive students who are excited at getting the day off. What I don’t think I will ever come to grips with are grown ass adults who crowd around the window eyes agog whispering and tee-heeing. Yes, it’s snowing. No, it’s not all that exciting. If you don’t stare askance out the window on a typical rainy day, there’s not much call to do it just because the temperature happens to be below 32 degrees. I know not everyone has gainful work to do on the day before a Thanksgiving, but I’m over here madly trying to get something wrapped up and off my desk before everyone makes a break for it so if you could at least pretend to be productively engaged that would be great.

2. Internet legal experts. You know, I’d have a lot more respect for the deluge of legal “opinions” smothering the country if I had any sense at all that the people behind those opinions had any sense of the purpose of a grand jury or the basic concepts of how the legal system works. Although I taught basic civics, I’d never have the audacity to claim undisputed knowledge about the intricacies and vagaries of the American judicial system. I do however know enough to be certain I’m not expert. That’s why I’ve not made many comments on the particular case du jure. While I haven;t hidden my opinion, I opted not to take to the interwebs to dazzle the world with it. I’d far rather stay quiet and be thought a fool than open my mouth and remove all doubt. It’s a shame the average American internet poster isn’t as circumspect.

3. Email. I was away from my desk most of last week, so when I stumbled in to the office on Monday I had approximately 900 emails waiting for me. Of those, I reduced 600 that were either overcome by events, spam, messages I was copied on for no apparent reason, or otherwise emails that didn’t require an action on my part besides hitting delete. Of the 300 remaining messages, 2/3 were of minor importance directly to me, were confirmations, status updates, or otherwise information that required little more than a “yes,” “no,” or “acknowledged” in way of response. That left approximately 100 messages that legitimately needed my attention, that required substantial thought, or that I needed to farm out to others in an effort to generate a response. We all could have saved a lot of time this week if the first 600 “so what” emails had never been sent. We could have saved a little more time if we collectively stopped to consider if we really needed to send any one of the next 200 messages. More importantly, I wouldn’t be scrambling around at the end of the 3rd day of mailbox clearing trying to respond to the 100 that really mean something if I hadn’t needed to wade through the other 800 emails to find those little gems. My point? Email is a tool, but you don’t have to be. Please use your distribution lists and the reply all button for good instead of evil.

Renewed…

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Based on the email that arrived overnight from my domain registrar, it looks like http://www.jeffreytharp.com will be sticking around for at least another year. I suppose that could be good or bad depending on your point of view.

Taken wholly out of context, the email left me thinking about the issue of renewal in more general terms. It strikes me that this is a chance to evaluate where this blog has been and where it’s going, what’s worked well enough, and where I’d like to nudge it in slightly different directions. None of that is the work of a single day and certainly not of a single post.

Lately I’ve been kicking around the idea that I need to tighten up the focus of my writing a little bit. As you’ve no doubt seen, what shows up here tends to be sort of wide ranging, off the cuff ideas and commentary. That’s one of the aspects of this blog that I’ve always enjoyed. It has occurred to me, though, that in order to make it more than just whatever happens to be on my mind at any given point in the day (and to broaden its appeal beyond people who know me and want to see what I happen to be ranting about), there needs to be some kind of method overlain onto my particular brand of madness.

When it gets right down to where the fingers meet the keys, I don’t know exactly what I want this space to say about me and what I’m trying to do with my small slice of the internet. I have a hard time imagining that I’d be able to stay focused on just one or two main themes after I’ve spent the last seven years blogging about whatever notion captured my interest. With all that said, I want to believe it can be more than what it is currently. You might say I have a passion for this kind of writing. The commitment I’ve made to keeping this page current – now racing towards it’s eighth anniversary – is the longest commitment I’ve ever willingly made to anything in my life. If that doesn’t speak to passion for an activity, I’m not sure what would.

Now if I could just gin up a way to make this work a little less pro bono and a little more income earning, we might be on to something here. Then again that one time when I tried to make my living from history, my first passion in life, it quickly turned into work and a situation other than fun. Maybe I’d be best served by not trying to make a buck off of this one and just keep doing it because it’s what I love.

All of that because Go Daddy sent me an email. Sometimes I really do wonder just how the hell my brain works.

Culling the herd…

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This morning, I did something that should have been done a long time ago – I culled the list of blogs I follow as well as the ones I link to here. It was painful.

As an active blogger since 2006, no one knows better than I do the challenge of keeping a blog alive week after week, month after month, and year after year. Writing, even when you don’t want to is work. Keeping content fresh and topical is a killer. I tend to think most people who start blogging just have a few things they want to get off their collective chests, or think that writing is something they want to do, or just get busy doing other things. I get that.

I’ve written before about bloggers that just disappear. As a reader, you learn not to take it personally when one of your favorites just stops posting. Still it’s a decidedly unfulfilling way for things to end. That being said, you can’t hang out forever expecting that someone is going to realize they haven’t posted in months or years and suddenly get back to the grind.

While I had some time this morning, I ruthlessly slashed the blogs I had bookmarked, followed, and linked to over the last decade. I can’t tell you how many there were to begin with, but right now there are less than 10 still on the list. To put that in perspective, well under 10% of the blogs I started following over the years are still active. That’s more than a little disappointing, especially because even a few of those are on the cusp, having not posted in the last month or two.

So there you go. Life happens. Bloggers move on. Not me of course, because I refuse to be one of those who just fades away quietly. I like to think my last post will catch me in full rant and provide the internet with the full list of reasons I’m giving it up for good. I’m fairly sure that when the time comes to fold my tent here at jeffreytharp.com, it will be for a far better reason than I just ran out of stuff to say.

I have no idea…

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Most days I muddle through with one eye on the news, social media, and a few choice blogs just to keep a grip on what’s going on in the world. The news makes me crazy, but the only thing worse is not having a clue what’s happening in the world. On days like today, though, I emerge at the close of business like a mole – eyes squinted, vaguely confused look on my face, and a general confusion about the world that everyone else has been inhabiting. The days when I’m tethered to PowerPoint, email, and God help me, to meetings are really the bane of life in Cube City. I’m not saying I expect vast swaths of free time in the middle of the day, but a few minutes now and then to come up for air might be nice.

Worst of all, of course, is that blogging on near-daily basis means I burn through a lot of ideas in a very small amount of time. I rely on the news of the day and unfortunate dealings with other people as a primary source. When neither of those two things happens, it means the well runs dry pretty damned quick. That’s how you end up getting a post about not having any idea what’s going on in the world instead of one about what is actually happening. It’s a small matter of semantics, but it makes a big difference.

So there you have it. The Russians could have overrun all of Ukraine and we could have made first contact with an alien species all at the same time and I’d not have a single clue any of it was happening. In some ways I’m probably better off for it… but posts complaining about not having anything to post about will only cary me so far. Eventually, I suspect someone is going to want some actual fresh commentary and content around here. Or maybe not. The interwebs are a fickle place.

Comcast, once again, sucks…

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If there’s are recurring threads to this blog, one of them must certainly be my ever increasing disdain, annoyance, and hatred of Comcast. Last year, I argued, cajoled, and bullied my bill for internet and television down to a svelte $97.04. That bought me 80 channels, “performance” internet, and HBO – the one splurge that’s non-negotiable (at least until HBO figures out a way to let people subscribe to them as a service instead of as a cable add-on). When I opened my bill this morning and found the price jumped to $124.09, well, let’s just say that they’ve given me one more reason to be less than impressed with their service.

Sure, business costs increase. Got it. Understood. Yet somehow, I don’t think the cost of delivering television and internet here to scenic Rental Casa de Jeff increased 25% year-over-year. Cutting the cable seems like a more and more realistic option for me every time they dish out such asshattery. Of course I’d still be saddled with a business relationship with Comcast because they have a monopoly on high speed out here in the wilderness. They suck, but sadly are the least bad of a host of truly god awful alternatives.

We can land a goddamned man on the goddamned moon, but can’t seem to come up with a way to watch Game of Thrones and surf the interwebs for less than a C-note a month. Maybe when the Chinese take over they’ll figure this mess out for us.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. CVS. They’re getting great acclaim for making the decision to stop selling cigarettes. It’s their business, I say God bless if that’s what they want to do. I’m left wondering if they’re also planning to stop selling Coke, Doritos, Snickers bars, and all the other items on their shelves that have been identified as cancer causing, bad for you, or just socially “inappropriate.” Let’s be honest with ourselves at least. CVS is a drug store. Their whole raison d’être is selling medications, many of which themselves can cause untold amounts of harm even when taken as directed. Call me cynical, but I don’t see them taking a principled stand in the name of public health so much as I see them making a public relations and marketing move.

2. Bugs. No, not the kind of creepy crawlies that sneak into the house and needs dispatched with the closest available newspaper, magazine, or shoe. I’m more agitated by the kind that live in apps and cause mysterious and damned near impossible to track down battery drain on my phone. Thanks to these gremlins, I get to spend a few hours backing up everything I have on my phone, tricking the thing into believing it’s once again fresh out of the box, and then reinstalling each app one by one so I don’t accidentally reintroduce whatever power hungry gremlin resided in the old version. For a device that “just works,” I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time poking around under the hood to keep things humming along without the need to recharge it every four hours.

3. Passwords. It took me five attempts to log into my own damned website today. That’s mostly because two days ago the site forced me to create a new one. It couldn’t be any old password, of course, but one that was at least eight characters included upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, special characters, hieroglyphics, quadratic equations, and the square root of pi rounded to the nearest non-repeating decimal. I get it. Internet security is important. It’s so important that apparently the best way we can manage not to lose all our secrets to the Chinese, or the Russians, or the NSA is creating the illusion of a random string of characters. If security is as important as the internet thinks it is, can someone please explain to me why we’re not using retina scanners, fingerprint readers, blood samples, or something, anything that would be more convenient than needing to remember a new 742 character password every third day?

Happy Christmas

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This would probably be a longer Christmas post if the internet connection here at the Jeffrey Tharp Historic Childhood Home, Library, and Giftshop weren’t so problematic this morning. Since it’s come down to needing to post using nothing but thumbs and a 5-inch screen I’ll simply say happy Christmas. Enjoy the day and all that comes with it.