Filed under: life
I’ve not posted as of late because I don’t have much to say that would be fitting for a blog. Lots of things on my mind, but I don’t think these thoughts are blog material, in that they are highly-charged opinions.
In doing some quick looking for a few friend on Facebook, I found that a few had either outright relieved me of being a connection or wrote me to say that there needed to be some distance between us since the election. Apparently this blog and/or my tweets were too much or hit a nerve or whatever.
Point is that it both pains and annoys me at the same time. It pains me because I’m a conversationalist – I am not one to back down from a good debate or conversation. If someone has a difference of opinion I will do my best to listen, engage, and then blatantly persuade them to my point. But if they stick to their guns, I’m not bothered by that – some of my best friends over the years have opinions on things that are 180 from mine. But it also annoys me because there so much talk about “tolerance” these days, and it would seem to me that the kind of “tolerance” in America today is one with a double-standard.
So aside from the paragraph above, which only touches a little on what I’ve been thinking about lately, I don’t think it’s wise to post much right now.
I also need to make some important decisions in terms of what my media’s point is. I have come to realize that as a creative person I produce media in the literal sense. My creations (design, writing, song, etc.) are a personalized media that in essence brands me, whether I like it or not, and just as I do for my clients, I have to get a grip on what my “brand message” is. Right now it’s inconsistent and not something I’m fond of.
The odd thing is that as my posts get fewer, my blog as a whole is really active with old posts. Right now my 3 posts on Safe Eyes account for almost 500 total clicks. In the wholistic realm of the Inter Webs, that’s a grain of sand, but for one particular brand that is at least noticeable. Every day I have a list of search phrases listed in my stats for things like “how to get around safe eyes” or “unlocking safe eyes unnoticed” or something shady like that. The other popular posts are about Angel Harvey (Paul’s wife) and Obama’s logo/branding. Interesting. All of those posts account for well over a thousand hits from Google searches, and that’s not bad considering this blog is less than a year old.
A month ago I started wondering if my most viewed posts on this blog, regarding Safe Eyes, had gotten the attention of Safe Eyes or their parent company. My Safe Eyes posts account for several hundred views to-date, and literally every day I see the search phrases used to find my posts. Some are very funny!
I was out on my nightly walk last night when I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. Turns out it was one of the founders of Internet Safety, parent company of Safe Eyes! He wanted to personally reach out to me about my bad Safe Eyes experiences on the Mac platform.
We talked for maybe thirty minutes where I was able to set a much more conversational tone to my posts. In the time since my posts I had also arrived at a big-picture conclusion to by brand experience: A general lack of curiosity on the part of Safe Eyes.
This is the theme that occurred over and over – I’d make my issues known to Safe Eyes on my Mac, and instead of curiosity, I heard “Well it works fine on my/our Mac(s).” I think a simple asking of deeper questions would have prevented my blog posts and ultimate removal of Safe Eyes from our Macs.
I should note that we did get some advice for solutions on at least two occasions from Safe Eyes, but the ideas were so obviously not from long-time Mac users that I just rolled my eyes. Even yesterday there was a posted reply to one of my blogs, and while the advice would be appropriate for a Mac newbie, it’s the kind of thing that a long-time Mac user knows and does already (permissions repair).
But all that aside, the reaching out of one of the founders (name escapes me) was huge. I will certainly give Safe Eyes another trial try a year from now once a few more versions have come out, and that will give the developers more time to get accustomed with the Mac.
As I’ve said before, I think Safe Eyes is a great product at its core. I think it has the potential to market itself as a resource for business owners who want to keep their employees off of Facebook or Myspace, etc. in order to keep productivity up. Until the Mac version is stable, those benefits will be for someone else, but I’m looking forward to giving Safe Eyes another shot.
Did you hear the one about the dumb beauty pagent contestant whom didn’t know that Africa was a continent, loved to shop, and had a funny accent?! Stupid women….
While some Americans celebrate the victory of Obama, I’m still a bit in taken aback by how casually sexism was played against Gov. Sarah Palin, and how it’s continuing still by way of viral videos and forwarded links to articles created by sexist cowards.
During her 9 weeks on the national public stage, it’s safe to say that she underwent 100 times more scrutiny than the three men making up the two main tickets. It’s safe to say that more journalistic curiosity went into her alleged shopping sprees than any of the other men’s alleged vices.
I was talking with a friend and Palin-critic whom after going back and forth for a while finally admitted that every critique on the Governor was based on style, and not substance. This person whom I was talking with is someone I have great respect for and whom I like having friendly debate with, yet even this very with-it person couldn’t name a single policy that was part of Palin’s record.
All this person had to offer me was that Sarah Palin is a woman who likes to shop, has an accent that makes her sound like a Fargo extra, is said to not know much about anything, and has the moose-in-headlights look when sitting across from an anchor of TV news.
Forget the politics. This is sexism, plain and simple. If it’s not sexism, then where was all the coverage of Palin’s record as Governor? Where were the stories on the work she has done in Alaska. It’s all public record. There are folks to interview, video to watch, etc., etc.
Yet her story is that she is a stupid woman, a beauty pagent contestant to boot, and oh yeah, she likes to shop.
While I think it was an interesting event to elect Obama as President, I think it came at the cost of sexism that, at least for now, is still a punchline.
Filed under: life
Sometimes I wish I had somehow found a way to save all those Myspace blogs before I closed my account because that was the blog where I kept my “baby blog” posts, and I never bothered to save them after I posted.
Those blogs were all about my son Garrett: From the first pic of Andrea’s positive pregnancy test, to the doctor’s confirmation and due date, to the first sound of his heart beat (at 10 weeks), to his 3D ultrasound photos (the “gun show” pic comes to mind), to seeing him stick his butt up in the womb each night while we lay in bed so we could pat it, and finally into Andrea’s legendary labor and delivery – going 100% natural and delivering him in just over 4 hours. Then the nervousness as he was taken away to a precautionary unit to get the baby poo cleaned up since he had pooped in the womb (which is non-toxic, but can cause breathing problems).
My baby blogs logged all that, and it blows my mind that 1 year ago today Garrett joined us outside the womb.
On one hand it seems like only yesterday because I can remember almost every detail about the day and night of the delivery. On the other hand, so much has happened in these 12 months that it seems like we should be celebrating 5 years of life outside the womb!
The strangest thing about Garrett’s delivery was my first instinctual reaction to his arrival. I anticipated a lot of emotion on my part – God knows the build up was there. But when the moment finally came, I watched his little head crest, then finally emerge from Andrea, and I saw him cleaned up and crying for the first time, there were no tears and no big “moment” from me. When I saw him for the first time I just sort of knew him… it was like seeing a person I had known for a long time but hadn’t seen for some time, and loved deeply. Fortress-deep.
When he was released from the precautionary unit at 4am (or was it 3am… he was delivered on the night of setting the clocks back last year), it was surreal. I was crashed on a pull-out sofa in Andrea’s hospital room, neither of us sleeping when the nurses brought him in to us. When they left and it was just the three of us, I just remember having a smile that I couldn’t contain. After a while we thought he was tired and we wanted to get a few hours of sleep, too, but when we tried to put him to sleep he didn’t want any of it. He wanted to check us out, and we happily abliged.
The emotion hit me as I was driving back to the hospital after driving home for a shower, to feed the dogs, etc. the following morning. I was on I-71 when all that happened finally hit. I was glad for it, too, because I am not a man who believes that being a parent is a right, something I deserve.
I’m not going to try and give justice to what that feels like… to be a father/parent for the first time. All the firsts… and they keep coming every day… but those first few days and weeks… and this first year – wow.
