Category Archives: Ramblings

Long story short

01_Currency_SymbolsYesterday was a strange day. I went to a meeting for a contract renewal. There have been some personality conflict issues over the last few months and I was under the impression that the contract was not going to be renewed. In fact it was renewed, and modified with an unsolicited 10% increase!

In this unstable economy it is nice to have annual contracts, even if they have quarterly reviews. All of my other contracts are month-to-month which makes things a bit too loosey-goosey for my tastes.

Any way, the big nut is covered. Today, it’s off to Maker Faire for a bit of steamy goodness.

~FBJ

Closing MySpace Accounts

no_myspaceI set up MySpace accounts for several businesses with the intent of promoting them, in part, with social networking. After 3 months of constant porn spamming I killed all of the MySpace accounts. I have accounts on several other social networks, Livejournal, Spaces, Facebook, Blogspot, just to name a few. I have never gotten so much in-your-face porn spam on any other site.

When the net was still an infant, back in the USENET days, there was lots of porn, but you had to go looking for it, It wasn’t hard to find, It was actually rather easy to find. It wasn’t however in-your-face. Okay, when the web was introduced if you went to a porn site you got tons of pop-ups and the like, but you where already looking for it. Then there was the email porn spam, that got real annoying real fast. That was reaching out to everyone, but more often that not it was text only.

What I don’t get is why they spend so much time and money on social network sites. If you are looking for porn its easy to find. If you are not looking for it, and you are doing something in particular, will you stop what you are doing when you get spammed with it? Not me. If I wanted to find it I would go looking for it. If I come across it in a place I conduct business, I look for a new neighborhood to conduct business.

It’s a business, I get that. It’s advertising, I get that too. I even get that a LOT of people use the social networking sits to hook up, in the eyes of the porn industry, that is a prime market space. What I don’t get is the blanket spamming that they do. I haven’t seen it on other social networking sites. Why on MySpace? What is the fascination with doing it there. Are they paying MySpace to not shut them down? There is a report as spam feature. I used it a lot. I have gotten friend invites and the account is closed before I view it. Why MySpace?

I guess the only important thing for me is that I don’t play in that neighborhood any more. There are plenty of other business friendly streets to walk and enjoy the view.

~FBJ

Daedalus

A friend posted a comment in her blog about Steampunk Star Wars the other day. I have been thinking about the genre ever since. I spent just about all of today doing period research, genre research, story development and just a whole lot of relative poking about on Wikipedia. I did come across some very interesting things.

sp_z-group-hero

On Wikipedia, under analog computers is the Antikythera mechanism, discovered in ship wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete. It was found in 1900. This item dates back to 100-150 BCE! That is an old computer.

I have always been fascinated by this genre, I just didn’t know it had a name. I love history, archeology, mechanology, steam power, and the period most commonly associated with steampunk, the Victorian era. I had several ideas for a story, and decided, this is a direction I would like to go. So, off I go.

Some of the basics have already been put to paper, as of yet there is no plot or hero’s journey, Just a very rough outline. I do have a plucky pair of historical protagonists with a cadre of cohorts picked out, along with a few antagonists ranging from government agents to industrial tycoons.

There are several directions this can go.  I will just have to keep developing at least a short story along each of these lines. Once I get something less vaporous, at least a solid outline or short, I will post it.

😉
~FBJ

Welcome to April

I was going to post this on the 1st, but time got away as usual. So here it is, at 1:40am. Does it count as the previous day if you are still awake?

Any way, this is just a short one to welcome the new month. Funny that this April Fools Day there didn’t seem to be a lot of fooling around. One might think that was due to politics, or maybe the economy, mayhaps even the proximity of the 5th anniversary of the war in Iraq. Whatever the cause, It has not gone by unnoticed.

I bid welcome regardless, and offer well wishes to all that would accept them.

~FBJ

An Opening Post

Hello out there in the blogosphere!

Digital Dilemma

I am creating this blog for several reasons. Some are technical, others are experimental, and still others are to develop ideas for other works. One part of the experimental plan is to post in an “off the radar” environment and see if / how it propagates. I have many projects in the works, from motion picture, to books, to events and a variety of other things.

One of the primary projects for this blog is a book on a subject that has a pet peeve of mine for years, Political Correctness. As you will undoubtedly learn if you read this blog, IMHO, PC is the cause of many of our current social ills as a nation. But more on this later, for now I will sign off and toddle off to bed as the hour is late and my eyes are slowly closing weather I like it or not.

~FBJ