Two articles about the wonders of the MU Health Care saving lives right next to each other? Mmm hmmm.
How To Make Your News Look Like Unannounced Paid Promotions
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Month: March 2026
Now What?
I spent about 20 minutes yesterday installing Linux Mint on an old, out-of-date Mac Mini as I mentioned. It’s an older model without a wireless adapter, so I had to connect it to the Internet via network cable. I stretched an overly long for the distance piece of Cat5 cable between the little box and the hub under the desk, and…. It could not find the network.
So I spent a couple hours today going through forums, asking the clankers, and typing Linux commands to troubleshoot the connection.
And then I thought, huh, I what if I just connect it directly to the router on the hutch? The cable run is about the same. So I did, and it worked.
Well! Good to put my A+ Certification to use. I know, I know! A+ is computer hardware. But about the time I got that certificate 25 years ago, I was still taking networking classes, too. I did not put them to work (have not had to rely on them for a living yet), but I’ve built computers and pulled cables/crimped connectors. But, in the intervening time, I’ve gotten old less practiced in it.
So: Now I have another Linux box (the other is a developer-caliber machine with 32Gb of RAM, for example).
What should I do with them?
The funny thing about having a testing lab here is having so many devices that one only uses sporadically.
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Book Report: Enshittification by Cory Doctorow (2025)
I actually ordered this book because I’ve been noodling on writing something something about how the Agile manifesto destroyed software, and I was aware of this book, so I wanted to see if the author touched on it.
Oh, but no.
Here are the biggest reasons, according to Doctorow, about why everything has gone to pot:
- The breakdown of government regulation
- The weakness of labor unions
- Elon Musk
- Donald Trump
Doctorow’s focus is fairly narrow–he’s got a mad-on for the big tech platforms, formerly known as FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google). No, wait; Netflix doesn’t piss him off, so maybe it’s MAAAX if you use their current names and throw in X. When he talks about consolidation, he does mention poultry producers, and he mentions healthcare consolidation, but, man, does he focus on big tech mostly. He’s a former bigwig with the Electronics Frontier Foundation, so that’s his experience, I guess.
And his solutions are:
- More government regulation. Not the bad kind, like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, but the good kind, like the stuff the EU uses to extract money from American companies. And regulation to ensure safe spaces, nonharrassment, censorship, etc. And not by Congress, oh, no! Sometimes the Republicans control it. The rule should come from the executive agencies which will remain in place even when the political tide shifts.
- Tech workers should throw their wooden shoes into their companies’ processes when they, the employees, don’t like them. Or whatever the political cause they have, probably, since we’ve seen that happen in the past, but it’s not cited in the book (nor here, because I’m not a paid public intellectual, man).
- Unions. Which will bring prices down and quality up through wishful thinking.
Yeah, basically, that’s it. Break up the monopolies, I guess. He mentions Mastadon, which was briefly talked about as an alternative to Twitter after the devil Elon Musk took it over. The book was perhaps written to early to mention Bluesky instead. But it doesn’t seem that Musk ruined Twitter except renaming it “X.” I guess we should be thankful he did not create an unpronounceable glyph.
You can tell he’s real, man, because he swears in the text (and the book title!). And he wears his politics on his sleeve–calling people who voted for Trump cultists, etc., which really means the book is targetted to his side of the political aisle (his biggest fans!), so it’s not convincing. And because he’s describing a real problem, but has all the wrong answers to it (well, mostly the wrong answers), I wished that I had ordered the book in paperback so I could beat the hell out of it.
I mean, you get similar messaging from Substacks like Your Brain on Money, even down to the policy solutions, but without the political invective that prevents discussion and conversation.
I mean, one could argue, and were I public intellectual who made money from his glib fingertips instead of a backwater blogger who pays for the privilege of writing book reports nobody reads. However, since we’re both here (me and the cat), let’s look at some of the things that have also contributed to us old people saying things were better in the old days:
- Government regulation in every domain has made things worse. Whether it’s mandates for what health insurance has to cover or improved safety/efficiency in cars, lightbulbs, appliances, and seemingly everything you can buy.
- He does mention rent-seeking, and somehow he thinks more regulation will fix things–but large organizations that get the government to regulate industries by requiring credentials or licensing make it harder for people to become cosmeticians, sellers of real estate, and more.
- The aforementioned Agile Manifesto which had its heart in a right place but which lead to minimum viable products as final product and to rationalizing technical and business failures whose consequences are not only felt by the businesses but by the users who might have come to depend upon them.
- Importing large numbers of people and tech workers from non-Western countries whose mores and ideals do not necessarily match Western thoughts of quality or fair play, especially in the tech field, might lead to lesser outcomes.
- Changes in generational mindset, from the effects of having phones from toddlerhood to changes in the “education” system.
- The long-term impact of putting “diversity” on the same level, or higher than, competence in hiring.
Etc., etc.
Unions and government regulations aren’t going to fix it. If it is to be fixed, it will likely take a long time and a cultural shift which I’m not sure is possible any more.
(Oh, and I would be remiss not to self-referentially post other mentions on this blog: I read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in 2019 and thought it was okay, and apparently, in 2010, a proto-clanker thought that I write like Doctorow.)
Oh, and another thing: I came up with the he is a Canadian who does not like hockey as a perjorative to apply to Doctorow, but apparently, he has become a British citizen (according to Wikipedia), and I’m pretty sure he mentions getting US citizenship in the book (and later says, “As a Canadian, I….”). So make of that what you will. Still, I’m going to use that to denigrate Canadians with whom I disagree in the future. “You have forgotten the face of your father” is the only thing I remember from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.
And! I’ve been kind of putting of going to the eye doctor because I think this time I really will need glasses for distances, and I’m afraid wearing glasses will make me look like a public intellectual of a certain type. Although, hopefully, a public intellectual who can do finger pushups like Bruce Lee. But not one-finger pushups because I do not have kung fu hands.
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Tech Shepherd Might Approve
So after writing the post yesterday about old Commodore computers and magazines, I actually dug into my closet to see if I had the issue of Compute!’s Gazette that Tech Shepherd mentioned (I do not, at least not at this cursory review).
I did, however, find the Mac Mini that I’d recently (well, a couple years ago, recent in old-timer years) replaced because it would not update. And it had it’s power cord right atop it. So I wondered…. Could I put Linux on it?
I have two USBs on my desk with bootable Linux distros for installation. Mint and Ubuntu. Because we retired a couple of laptops, and when I got my new big box (what, almost a year ago?), I put Mint on the old box (and solved its cranky sound and it needing 45 minutes to boot, so undoubtedly some crypto mining was lost in this event). And I had Kubuntu on a USB drive because we had a finicky HP laptop…. Where has that gone?
At any rate, I went into the storeroom and its cable bins, and, brushing aside the tangles of VGA cables, DVI cables, KVM cables, PS/2 extenders, and other assorted cables and many, many video switchers and KVM switches, I found an HDMI cable to plug it in. So I…. Installed Linux on it.
Well, mostly. I’ve swapped a wireless keyboard and mouse combo from another machine (I need to get a couple more wireless laptop/mouse combos, or I need to find a wireless KVM switch somewhere–I probably have enough adapters to use a PS/2 and VGA KVM, actually…. Let me go back into the store room….) But! The old Mac Mini does not have a wireless networking… chip? Too small for a card.
So I will have to go back into the store room for a networking cable to stretch to the hub. I do have a couple, and maybe a crossover cable or two, but, ah! I have given up the kilometer box of Cat5 cable and the connectors I bought around the turn of the century when I thought I might go into networking. Given the nature of the QA job market, I still might. But the network cables I have are probably a little out-of-date. Ah, but so is my equipment! And, maybe, so am I!
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Looking Back
I don’t currently have a subscription to The Licking News, so I don’t get to read Scott Hamilton’s column in print any more, and I’ve been light in stopping in on his blog, but really I should do so more often.
He recently had a couple of posts that interested me, of course.
- Commodore 128 Hardware Review. Growing up, he used his in Commodore 64 mode a lot because the Commodore 64 had more software titles to run. Ah, me, too, gentle reader, me, too. But I programmed some in Commodore 128’s BASIC 7.0 because it made it easier to make high (for the time) resolution graphics, sprites, and sounds. No need to poke and peek one memory location at a time. You can see some of my greatest hits in BASIC 7.0 here.
- Language of the Future. He goes through an old Compute! magazine. As I mentioned in the Noggle Library 2026 Edition, I have several years’ worth of Commodore and other computing magazines from the 1980s as well. Including Ahoy!, Run, Power Play and, yes, Compute!s Gazette.
You know, a couple of years ago I bought an old television so I could hook up Triticale’s Commodore 128, but I never seem to have the desk space. I’d hoped when I got the new development rig that I could move things so that the printers on the desk were under the desk, but the new machine is too darn big for all of that to fit. So maybe I’ll have to hook it up to the big television again. The big television, after all, has a Computer/TV switch on it already for the Atari and NES that we have out there.
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Book Report: Able Team #9: Kill School by Dick Stivers (1983)
As I am deep in some thicker books which I am not really enthusiastic about reading, so I picked up this bit of pulp for enjoyment, kind of like having a bite of the sweet corn whilst eating the liver. I picked this book up in 2012 at Hooked on Books–a year later, I would really pad out my collection of the books in the Executionerverse, which includes the next title in the Able Team series, but who knows how long it will take me to get to it.
Able Team is three of the members of the Stony Farm team that helped Mack Bolan, the Executioner, out on occasion. Note that the Stony Farm series is a separate line in the Executionerverse, and who knows when I will get to them–since I finished the last of the Executioner books I accumulated in 2022, I’ve been slow to really delve into the men’s adventure paperbacks. Maybe I’ve gotten old and switched to Westerns. Anyway.
So Able Team is sent to El Salvador to hunt for a guy who has eluded their grasp in the United States, a big drug dealer or what have you, not part of the government but a powerful man with his own private army nevertheless. It’s a story ripped from today’s headlines, where today is almost forty years ago. The El Salvador civil war was going on. Is it still? Maybe. Central and South America, neh? Although they find help from various rebel groups with their own agenda, they find that the hard site is too hard for their small band, and the bad man has gone to a meet-up in Honduras with other similar fellows from across Central and South America who are looking to bring about a Fourth Reich. It’s a story ripped from today’s pulp fiction forty years ago.
You know, strangely enough, the plot is not necessarily that dated. Not that there’s a great swell of Naziism, but it never really went away in thrillers, did it?
At any rate, it’s an ensemble piece with characters who are almost ciphers, just bundles of characteristics, whose characterization, I guess, takes place over time. The book alludes to events in previous books, and the bad guy gets away again, which means I can guess what Able Team is doing in their next book. Which I’m not sure when I will get to. Unless, of course, I dawdle in the thick books stacked beside my chair for any length of time.
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Good Album Hunting, Monday, March 9, 2026: Relics Antique Mall
On Saturday, Brian J. was a good, good boy and completed all of his weekend chores, which included dusting and vacuuming the common areas of the house and doing a quick, expensive wipe of the hall and foyer. After a martial arts class, too.
So I thought I would head up to Relics and buy a couple records using the gift certificates I received for my birthday (like I did the previous weekend). However: Relics had an event of some sort, and parking was at a premium, so I did not go in.
But: I had an errand (coincidentally!) that took me to the area yesterday, so I stopped in for twenty or thirty minutes, just pawing through the same booth, and picked up 9 records.
I got:
- Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield. The song from The Exorcist. Looking at it now, I think I might already have it. Which so often happens. But generally not at these prices.
- The Baddest Hubbard by Freddie Hubbard.
- Surprises by Herbie Mann featuring Cissy Houston.
- Μαζί Με Τον Σταμάτη by Σταμάτης Κόκοτας. Because I cannot tell the difference, at a glance, between Hebrew and Greek. I thought I’d troll my oldest who is steeped in podcast politics and would be scandalized by a Jewish album. But this is Greek folk music by Stamatis Kakotas.
- Low Ride by Earl Klugh.
- The Changing of the Gard by Stargard. I told the young lady ringing me out that buying this made me the biggest Stargard fan in Springfield.
- The Beginning and the End by Clifford Brown. Hard not to type Jr. behind it, but this is the DJ’s father. Apparently, the booth was not rife with them–this is the only record they had.
- Reunion by the Ramsey Lewis Trio.
- Land of the Midnight Sun by Al Di Meola.
A couple of trumpeters, a couple of jazz guitarist, a flutist. Left behind: A couple of Moody Blues records. A couple of David Sanborn records, as I mentioned. No further Billy Joel records in evidence.
The total was $73 and change, which is the perfect amount in one sense: As it was just under the total of the certificates I had, I paid two gift certificates plus some cash. But I don’t expect to go next weekend. Let’s let the stock turn over for a month or two. Or I can find another booth and give myself permission to spend more than three dollars a record.
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A Brief Note On Consumer Art
As you might know, gentle reader, for major pieces of wall art, I’ve favored prints of master works from, er, the masters, starting with three prints I bought in college on a fresh new credit card in 1990 (The Man with the Golden Helmet by Rembrandt, Christina’s World by Wyeth, and A Saturday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Seurat) which I got a deal on (3 for $18–and by the time we paid them off, in probably a decade later if we consider the money paid to the credit company first-in, first out, we probably paid $100 each for them including interest). Or personal relics which were gifts and/or inherited from family members now likely departed. My beautiful wife, however, favors consumer art which is mass-produced art of a topical theme, whether it’s the mere decorative squares and textures, Mediterranean landscapes, or Mediterranean cafes.
We have two such works in the bedroom, and, gentle reader, they are the same picture.
- Cafe facing out: ✔
- Alley upstage right: ✔
- Shopfront on right facing left: ✔
- Covered cafe tables: ✔
- Flowers: ✔
- Awnings: ✔
Basically, the artistic expression difference is packed dirt vs cobblestones, ainna?
Ah, I cannot talk; I inherited two H. Hargrove prints from my aunt and then bought another at a garage sale, and we still have two on the walls (one has been stored to make room for one of the cafes above). So they come from a personal relic source and not just a catalog or home goods retailer.
Because I like to look at them and think about them, not just have them as visual background music. But maybe that’s just me.
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How To Spot A “Who?”
I am probably slow to discover this, but newspaper stories about death announcements, especially on the front/home page, come in to flavors.
“Neil Sedaka dies” (and for or five news items about it), and “Iconic Folk Singer and Woodstock Legend dead at 84”:
It’s Country Joe MacDonald who passed away. Have I heard his name? Probably. Would I consider him some sort of legend or icon? Eh….
It’s all about the click-through rates, no doubt. When the name is known, people will click to learn more. When the name is kinda known, maybe, the key is to hype up the person’s fame to get us to click through to find out more.
I wonder if there’s a scoring algorithm for the dividing line, or if it’s still a gut feeling by an editor somewhere.
But, hey, it worked on me. Not often, and mostly in this case because I wanted to write this post.
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I Brought This Upon Myself
Well, after watching all those Bruce Lee movies, I planned to go into my martial arts class yesterday morning and say that I’d watched them and picked up some bad new habits for sparring:
- A lot of kung fu kata peacocking between strikes.
- Happy feet making like Irish dancing before beginning.
- Making single strikes instead of combinations, and making them big so the people in the last row can see them.
- Using my forearm to block everything: Spin heel kicks, bo staffs, sticks, speeding trucks, anything. And the forearm stops them cold.
- Hooting when I strike. You’re supposed to exhale to tighten everything up, which leads to the “hi-ya!” Which my school has seemingly stopped emphasizing. As it stands, I already make martial arts sound effects a lot of times when I strike.
- Thumbing my nose mid-bout. Although it will be harder to do with boxing gloves on.
At any rate, I didn’t get to lay the spiel on anyone since renshi asked me what I was listening to (my question to him often is “What are you listening to?” because, in the past, he’s been in charge of the martial arts playlist and picked out metal). So I had to talk about the new Frozen Crown CD instead.
And, as part of our warmups, we had to run to the edge of the mat, do a couple pushups, and then run back. Across the room, kyoshi joked with someone about doing them on fingertips like Bruce Lee, so down on my side of the mat, I tried it. And I could.
So that has been delighting me and bringing a smile to my face since. Because, you know, I am just like Bruce Lee. Although I will likely never get to one finger pushups because I do not have kung fu hands.
And, the same day, I was listening to my workout playlist whilst dusting the lower level, and Eminem’s “Monster” came on, and it mentions Bruce Lee.
Fame made me a balloon ’cause my ego inflated
When I blew, see, but it was confusing
‘Cause all I wanted to do is be the Bruce Lee of loose leaf
Again, it’s an illustration about how outsized an influence Bruce Lee had. The man only made a couple of movies, but what an impact on the culture that he’s mentioned fifty-some years later in a martial arts class.
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Movie Report: Game of Death (1978) and Game of Death II (1980)
These are the other two Bruce Lee films from the box set I bought (The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, and Way of the Dragon were the first three). Bruce Lee only made three films–the previously noted titles–and although he started Game of Death in 1972, it was re-imagined after his death using footage they’d filmed and “doubles” for him. The second one was made using body doubles and clips from other films. So when I watched Fist of Fear, Touch of Death in 2024, I didn’t realize that there was a whole industry of remixing Bruce Lee material into new movies.
So, in Game of Death, Bruce Lee is Billy Lo, an international martial arts film star whom the syndicate wants a piece of. I say “is” instead of “plays” because the scenes he shot were apparently for a film with a different plot entirely, and it’s only in the remixing that they got meta with it. The confrontations with the syndicate become serious so after he is shot, Lo fakes his own death to get revenge and to protect his girlfriend played by Colleen Camp (whom we saw in DARYL and who contributed a song to the soundtrack, I think). Also, parenthetically (but I already used parentheses in the previous sentence, so I have to just say parenthetically in this sentence), although she has scenes with Billy Lo, she did not have any scenes with Bruce Lee because he was long dead. At any rate, the climactic scene finds Bruce Lee ascending the levels of a Chinese restaurant to get to the big boss, and one of the level bosses is played by Kareem Abdul Jabbar. So if you’re keeping score, Lee defeated Kareem, and it was Arnold Schwarzenneggar who defeated Wilt Chamberlain in Conan the Destroyer.
So part of the film was, again, meta as I was watching to see where Bruce Lee actually appeared. And it’s in several of the fight scenes, including the final assault on the Chinese restaurant. But otherwise it was (apparently) two other martial artists playing in disguise, filmed from behind, and a variety of other tricks to try to hide that it wasn’t Lee.
Game of Death II has Lee as Billy Lo again, but not the same Billy Lo. He’s friends with a martial arts master, Chin Ku, who is getting challenged to fight to the death a bunch recently as is Lo. Chin dies, and, at the funeral, a helicopter flies over with a Skill Crane cage and snatches the coffin, and Lo leaps onto it, but falls to his death when struck by a dart. Which is how they turn the film over to Lo’s younger brother, a ne’er do well who was not studying kung fu very dilligently. He goes to the compound of a rival martial arts master, who is a suspect but is cleared by getting killed in his sleep. Lo suspects the one-armed valet, whom he finds at a nearby temple and discovers the man has two arms after all–and the temple is the entrance to the Tower of Death, which is an futuristic underground bunker. Lo2 fights his way in, discovers Chin faked his own death because he’s a drug kingpin whom Interpol was closing in on, and they have a long fight where Lo triumphs.
Wow, this really was a cash-in. And low budget. We get scenes where Bruce Lee is talking to a mentor, and then they switch to a closeup of the mentor delivering lines pertaining to this plot, and it’s obviously a different guy. We get some of the filmed-from-behind, big sunglasses, and distant shot scenes to fill in gaps in the Billy Lo portion of the program. We get the changing shirt colors on Bruce Lee when two different films are spliced together. We get a lion attack where it’s obviously a guy in a lion costume. Jeez, Louise, I should have waited to watch Kung Pow: Enter the Fist until after I watched this film so I could see exactly what they were spoofing.
At any rate, I feel some sense of accomplishment in finishing the boxed set, and I’m kind of glad it wasn’t an Urban Action Cinema Collection kind of thing where I had to get through 15 movies. I like martial arts films, but watching too many of them in a row gets a little tedious. But, as I said, I feel a sense of completion from making it through the set, and I could use that.
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Whom Do I Know On The News Today?
It’s better than looking at crime stories and finding someone I know, which happens, but I watched this story expecting to see someone I knew: Nixa, Mo., Dungeons & Dragons event raises awareness for multiple sclerosis
And I did, sorta: Christopher Wilson, author of The Wards of Iasos Book 1: The Leftovers, makes an appearance.
This story was easier: On Your Side: Conduent Data Breach: What to do if you got a letter–my oldest son makes an appearance, and he was very excited and told me so.
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One Of These Things Is True
Walmart switching to digital shelf labels nationwide:
Walmart said the digital shelf labels are controlled through a centralized system and will allow for faster price changes.
The digital labels will also help employees stock shelves and fulfill online orders more quickly.
It’s not about the stocking, and it’s not about the picking.
Hey, did you notice that the aisles in Walmart are wider these days? Remember when they narrowed a few years back, which made it hard for us to get through them, but now they’re wider? I don’t suppose that has anything to do with the giant carts that the online ordering employees have started wheeling around? Of course it has. For your convenience.
You know, an aunt of mine by marriage got a promotion out of being a checker at Walgreens in the 1990s into being a Price Administrator. It was her full-time job, in a Walgreens (not a large department store), to adjust the prices of sales items for the week and to audit the prices on the shelves to make sure that they showed the actual price for the item. A full-time job. The electronic tags would eliminate that position, if it hasn’t already been eliminated.
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Movie Report: Way of the Dragon (1972)
This is the third of the Bruce Lee movies in the boxed set I bought in 2025 (The Big Boss and Fist of Fury were the first two), and it’s the last one he finished before he died. “Last one” makes it sound like he made a lot of movies, but he really did not–they just made a lot of movies with him in them.
So: In this film, Bruce Lee plays a young Hong Kong man sent to Rome to help with some ex-pats who have started a Chinese restaurant but are running into trouble from “the syndicate” who are trying to muscle in. The young men who work for the restaurant are trying to learn karate to protect the restaurant, but Lee’s character shows them that kung fu is better. So we have some confrontation with various toughs of the syndicate culminating in the well-known–well, among people who watch martial arts films–fight between Lee and Chuck Norris at the Colliseum. Which Lee wins, but it helped Norris break into film, so really, we’re all the winners, ainna?
It was the last on he finished according to the Internet–he’d taken a break from The Game of Death to film it but died before resuming that film (we’ll talk about that by and by).
So, yeah, if you’re into martial arts films, you really probably ought to see it. I’ve seen assertions that Lee’s films defined or redefined the genre, and I won’t argue the counterpoint.
I do want to point out that all three films to this point have starred Nora Miao as the love interest such as they were.
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Like a Frozen Lazy River
Red Arrow Park could see changes, with skating path replacing rink:
Milwaukee’s Red Arrow Park could undergo big changes – including replacing its skating rink with a “skating ribbon” running throughout much of the small downtown park.
Not sure how that’s an improvement over a traditional skating rink, but.
You know, I have good memories of that park. I might have been taken there ice skating with my aunt and uncle when my brother and I were very young. I do remember sitting in the coffee shop next to the park on a couple of occasions in the winter, with a fire roaring in its fireplace, watching the skaters. I probably started a poem about it, once. When I was young.
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Book Report: The Judge’s List by John Grisham (2021)
I got this book for my birthday this year, and after kinda sounding like I was slagging on the gifts, I decided I’d prioritize reading the books. So I picked up this book, the first of the two Grishams; my son thought I was a Grisham fan, and although I listened to one of the early books–A Time To Kill? It’s the one with the attorney in it. You know, aside from reading Perry Mason books from time to time and in bulk in my youth, I never really got into legal thrillers. I mean, I probably have read some Scott Turow, too, but I’d be hard pressed to remember, and it would have been a long time ago.
So: A woman on the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct is getting bored with the job which is getting starved of funds. The BJC investigates judges suspected of wrongdoing–and in a previous book, she’s nailed one such judge for corruption, but not without cost. An attention-averse woman approaches her with knowledge and some circumstantial evidence that a local judge is a serial killer with a list of victims going back several decades. As they begin to investigate, the judge kills again, but makes a mistake. Which leads them to more investigating, and going to proper investigators in the FBI, but….
Okay, so the first part of the book deals with the investigator’s doubt about the woman bringing her the information, but eventually she gets going on looking into it. The second part of the book introduces the judge as a character, so we get into his mind as he prepares his crimes–he’s hopped up on bennies, a hacking genius, a compulsive type who cleans enough to make the guy from Gattaca look like a slob, and kind of unbelievable. Then, after he makes his kill and has to kill a witness (which I guess is the turning point?), he figures out who the woman who intially discovered him is, and he gets the drop on her even though she’s supposed to be almost as paranoid as he is (his super hacking helps), and he sets a trap for the investigator. But deus ex machina thwarts the trap, deus ex machina saves the kidnapped girl, unsatisfying resolution to the pursuit of the judge, and a denouement which includes the winding down of the team (not an unexpected twist to the unsatisfying resoluton to the pursuit of the judge which would have been unsatisfying in itself, but it’s somehow worse without) and a lot of jibber jabber, talking to families of victims to offer them resolution, which is jibber jabber and not a shoot-out where the good guys triumph.
Ach, this is a chick book. Not sure if JG has a girl ghost writer or if he just knows the market that gets him forty-something consecutive bestsellers, but the book has a lot of talking, self-doubting, other-doubting, and then more talking as though the talking and overcoming self-doubting were heroic in themselves. But, uh, yeah. Not making me want to delve into the backlist (except where gifted).
But, ya know. He’s sold more books than I have books, apps, t-shirts, related CafePress sundries, blog traffic (including bots), and social media impressions that I’ve gotten in a comparable time. So take it for what it’s worth, but in my opinion, he’s no John D. McDonald.
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Brian J. Gets Funneled
Ah, gentle reader. I fell into an Internet lead generator and feel dirty.
I’ve worked for one, and I might again, but I try to avoid them when I can because I don’t like someone making money off of my contact information since I’m not making any money of my own. And my experience with what I thought was a real company that had subcontracting appliance repairmen but was probably just a lead generator where independent contractors bought my job took a turn for the worse when a repairman drove down from Marshfield, an hour or so away, to give me an estimate which was more than the washing machine cost. So when I need something, I don’t do an Internet search only to see that the six or eight (or more) top results are funnels. I do the right thing: I remember who advertised on the radio or whose trucks I have seen nearby (but the cost of buying leads might be built in).
So: We need a new roof at Nogglestead, and given our current circumstances, we were going to need to finance it. I called the roofing company we’d selected, and I expected the estimator to come with application paperwork because the last time we did something like this–but that was probably 25 years ago. The adjuster told me I could use the Web site to apply for financing through their partner.
So I got on the Web site, and the link in the heading navigation to financing was broken–it led to a 404 error on the Web site of a local bank. So I thought the “partner” was the fancy tool used by that bank. A little later, I got to exploring the Web site a little and found another financing link which led to a form with the tool’s name on it. I entered basic information, and….
Immediately I was presented with a list of 400 different loan offers from Internet lenders of various stripes. And my inbox was immediately blitzed by marketing emails from the tool and from the people to whom it had sold my information.
Aw, hell. So now my name and Social Security Number are everywherer on the Internet again.
So, yeah, no. I went back to what I should have done in the first place: Go to my various banking institutions and see what their offerings are.
I don’t know why I’m so averse to lead generation and management. It does, almost, make one’s life easier if one doesn’t want to research services in their area. But the cost of buying leads is now priced into services everywhere, so it’s not helping me enough to offset that.
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The Best Intersectional Italian/German Pun You’ll See All Day (Perhaps)
So I am listening to Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition and got to the lecture on Michel de Montaigne, and he quotes Dante in it (from part of The Divine Comedy which was not quoted in the lecture on Dante) which led me to post the following on LinkedIn, which has belatedly replaced Twitter for my brief “wit” as well as the occasional longer professional blathering.
But here’s what I posted:
“…doubting pleases me no less than knowing!” — Dante
Bitte.
I guess it works better read, because Dante is not really pronounced like danke (German for “Thank you”). Bitte is German for “You’re welcome.”
I read a couple of books that dropped German into the text for the Winter Reading Challenge (An Amish Marriage Agreement and 1632), and I feel like I’m qualified to make German puns. Or Italian/German puns. Or whatever it is I do here.
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Latest Exercise In Invisibility Plus Practicing A Rant
So I have released two apps to the Apple App Store this week:
Goal-Task-Chore is a to-do list app which not only lets you add one-time tasks to the list and to mark them off but also lets you create multiple-time chores which can appear on the list at intervals you set and Goals, which are groups of step tasks working toward a larger outcome. You can find it on the App Store here. I use it every day, and to be honest, I’m sometimes not pleased with it because there’s always something to more to do.
PhrazeMaze: Proverbs is like a word search except you have a whole phrase or sentence to find in the letter grid. This particular app has 120+ puzzles from the book of Proverbs in the Bible. You can find it on the Apple App Store here. If it proves to be popular, I can easily build similar apps with different puzzle phrazes.
So, to launch them, I announced them on LinkedIn and Facebook (and here, obviously). And if they sell four copies each (total to me: $5.60), they’ll be the biggest selling apps I’ve produced.
I’ve been attending this weekly entrepreneur meeting which features a presentation from a new businesses on Wednesday mornings. One of the questions that the audience, generally coaches and other service professionals who would sell to the presenters who are generally coaches and other service professionals trying to sell to the audience, one of the questions that the audience often asks is “What is your social media strategy?” Because someday I might pitch my apps to the group, I’m preparing my answer rant in that regard:
You know, I had an email newsletter in 1997 which got me…. nothing.
I had one of the top 500 blogs in 2004, and after many years of posting, often multiple times a day, when it came time to sell books, I sold…. What, 100? 150? Mostly on Kindle, and certainly not enough to pay for the cover of the book (professionally designed) or the outlay on books I sent to magazines and various bloggers for review and comment–not to mention 16 years of hosting (starting with the move from Blogger in 2010.
I joined Twitter in 2009 and was active there, professionally (well, sorta) for nine years, posting multiple times a day and getting to around 5000 followers organically. And it yielded me, what, a couple of paid writing gigs and a sub-sub-sub-contractor gig that did not go well. Total business closed in almost 10 years of social mediating? Maybe $2000. Which is the high water mark of the “value” I’ve gotten from it.
I’ve been on LinkedIn for over 20 years, and I’ve written articles and posts on it throughout, and although a recent post got almost 40,000 views–which I’ve been told is a lot–I’ve not actually gotten any work from it, whether it’s responses to job posts or people I’ve met there. I’ve been on Facebook for fifteen years or so, and it was not supposed to be a thing to build “my brand,” and it is certainly not doing that any more. Nor is it really showing me updates from people with whom I’ve connected over the years.
So what is my social media strategy for my yet unnamed app venture? To not.
Because they’re structured so that they will take all the content you want to provide for free and, when you want to share something saleable to your connections, they’ll bury it unless you pay the money to boost it (which is thousands of dollars for “impressions” which will probably not yield conversions). TikTok? Instagram videos? Make authentic videos or silly dance videos? What, spend hours and money to sell a $.99 app? No thank you. Doing that, you’re working for the social media platform, providing free (to them) content which might or might not increase its user engagement.
I get it why some people think this is a way to go: Because it’s fun, and it’s easy. Clearly, I’ve gotten something out of writing a blog all these years (mostly memories that I can scroll through). I had fun with Twitter back in the day (and my other blogs). You can spend hours on it and get some dopamine when people like and respond to your content. But that doesn’t necessarily convert. And I get why so many people promote it–because they work in the space, and they will make money off of it if you hired them to do your social media.
So, what to do, what to do? Continue to show the app to as many people in person as I can stand to (which is probably less than could stand it) and hope that one catches fire. Think up an idea for a brand name and maybe spend a couple bucks on a Web site.
But social media? Nah.
So, if you’ve got $.99 and think they look interesting, give the apps a try. Or my books there in the sidebar, for that matter–you can get them for $.99 digitally, too. And as the Philosophers said, “Thanks for your support.”
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Brian J.’s Recycler Tour, Accidentally Meta In More Ways Than One
Fifteen years ago:
I probably did not intend to include a copy error in that post on Facebook. I was just hearkening back to the fact that, in early proofs of John Donnelly’s Gold, the gun also had that special feature–a revolver with a magazine. It also featured a week that was eight days long.
I’m told it still contains three typos. You’re welcome to order it and find out.
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