The world as it should be

I have been getting more and more ticked off about spam in my inbox, unwanted text messages (I have one loser who keeps changing his/her phone number to avoid the block on my phone, all to send me a “Hey-y-y” text), and robo-calls. Gads people, leave me alone. WTH?

I use Norton anti-virus, so I have been free from viruses and worms, though my computer has been attacked. I use Ad-Aware and occasionally have to remove something. So with all this hoo-hah about Facebook’s new privacy guidelines, I got fired up about being followed online.

This brought me to Ghostery. Ghostery is a browser-based plug-in tool (I use it with Firefox, but it also works with IE, Chrome, Safari and Opera). It scans each page before loading and looks for scripts and other elements, such as tracking cookies and even iframes.

The neat thing is that you can customize what you want to block and what you want accept, down to individual companies and/or web sites. For instance, you could allow Google Analytics or AdSense to run while totally blocking ad-tracking sites.

It does slow down some page loads while it sifts through the list of what you allow and what you want blocked. But we are talking a half-second at most. I can live with that for feeling a little safer online.

All in all I am happy with it, but then again, I seem to be the only one I know who is happy with Norton. Your mileage may vary.

Ghostery can be found here

“If it’s free, then you are the product being sold.”

I have said before that the media don’t sell time or space to advertisers, they sell eyeballs. Our eyeballs. And the attention we give to their advertising.

Level 1 is when people make “things,” such as furniture, automobiles or food. In economics, I have heard this referred to as “use value.” In other words, people produced items that had value because they used it.

Level 2 is when people work for someone or a company and receive money for it, their labor has “exchange value.” This is at the heart of the capitalist system. This holds true even in the current Information Age in which people move ideas from place to place instead of physical items.

Level 3 brings us to Facebook. How in the world is Facebook worth $1 billion? It’s free. Facebook sells some ads, but $1bn? Level 3 is when a company sells US, or rather sells information about our online behavior. So people aren’t doing any kind of work. Their mere existence and day-to-day activities are what produces value, BUT they themselves don’t get any value from it.

It is a B2B money-making situation using people — us — as the method. I suppose you could argue that we do get some value out of using Facebook, connecting with friends through posts or messaging. But is it worth selling a record of your behavior by a company who is in it only for the money.

But I find it most distressing, almost as in the film The Matrix, that we are being used by a large corporate entity to make it money. Google is kind of the same situation. If you are still allowing Google to track your searches, then it is selling information about you and your interests and making good money by watching you and what you do online.

It’s kind of creepy if you ask me. I may have to opt out. If that’s even possible in today’s world.

The Republican primaries for President are a joke, but at least all that spending is helping the economy – especially for media companies.

I could have told you six months ago that Mitt Romney would be the front-runner by now and the eventual nominee. The American people like to play around a bit, but they always end the love affair and come back from the political plaything to the political spouse. Ultimately, the edges of the continuum are more frightening than someone a bit closer to center. Kind of political entropy.

Willard M. Romney is fooling no one with his johnny-come-lately conversion to conservatism. He has all the qualifying characteristics the American voter likes to see in a President: tall, not bald, great smile, genial loquaciousness and comfortable on television. Left or right? Stance on issues? Doesn’t matter. He’s “electable.”

A story in the WSJ Saturday, January 14, pointed out that Romney is doing better in the “monied ‘burbs” than he is in other parts of America. The monied burbs are where, generally speaking, the stakes are highest, the desire to hold on to what they have the strongest. Conservatives, or even sham conservatives, always do well with haves who don’t want to share with (or become) have-nots.

It is also easy to be politically liberal when you are young because you don’t own enough or make enough money. When you get older, making more money, are paying a mortgage, are married with kids, and so on, you don’t want to share. Taxes suddenly are onerous and government intrusions into your life, although you likely benefitted from tax breaks and other “intrusions” to get you where you are. Now that you have “stuff” you don’t want to be told you have to share. So you pout like a 3-year-old and say that you want a new daddy.

Of course Obama is evil and must be defeated: he is currently steering the boat. Let’s blame him for the bad weather. Let’s elect another captain, one who will promise we won’t have to share our blankets with other passengers, the ones shivering and alone in the wind and rain.

For the past year or so, I have noticed more and more instances of someone saying, “I graduated college” instead of “I graduated from college.” It’s worse than hearing fingernails scraped down a chalkboard; it’s more like listening to Donald Trump talking about — uh, well, talking about anything.

Admittedly, I am old enough to remember when it was considered correct to say, “I was graduated from college,” because it is the college that confers the degree on you, not you doing something to the college. It slowly became more acceptable to simply say, “I graduated from college.”

I suppose that grates on the ears of some members of the elderly cohort, but I hadn’t yet received my Curmudgeon’s license so the sonic pain didn’t register when that change occurred.

Now the phrase is being made even shorter, dropping the “from,” something I consider a major annoyance. (I am easily annoyed.) I believe that in 10 years, it will be considered correct to say, “I gradded coll, LOL.”

I know grammar changes over time. Language, in a sense, is a living thing. But I don’t have to like the grammatical evolution. I am allowed to complain falling standards. After all, I gradded coll.

NEXT POST: What’s the difference between the pelt of a dead muskrat and The Donald’s hair?  The answer may surprise you.

Seriously, Florence. You’re a mess. Hair is a rat’s nest. Dress color is terrible. Go away.

Ruffalo – you NEVER should have let your wife/hooker/girlfriend out of the house in that dress. Ignoring you the rest of night.

Giuliana looks like an alien! I can’t even look at her!

Are those boobs real?

I think Ryan and Spacey are secret lovers. But it’s not such a secret.

Effin Celine is doing the song during the dead people montage. Makes me want to vomit

What the hell is that? Looks like a leftover from a Charo appearance on The Love Boat.

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Well, that’s enough. All the above are tweets from an Oscar night Twitter feed, or from at least as long as I could stand to follow along. The main “snarkers” carried on this screed for about 7 hours. People joined in on the fun as the evening progressed as they saw that all present embraced the obnoxious. I could stand only about an hour.

The fact that people think it is funny to rip into other people’s fashion choices, hair, etc., is not a surprise and even calling someone’s wife a hooker or claiming two men are gay (just for fun…) is, I suppose, a fair game in Hollywood. People can say what they want to say.

What surprised me was that the newspaper’s management seemed to support this effort by highlighting it in ads, as if they thought the “snarkfest” was a solid, journalistic idea. Is this what newspapers have become on the web and on social media?

I have let this blog slip a little. Dr. Design and The Muse have been bugging me for the last couple of months. They are used to more publicity. The Muse even complained about me to Lady Gaga. Her response: Meh.

One of the things I have been working on is my social media site and blog. That and preparing for a move and my first cold in probably a decade put me behind the proverbial eight-ball.

But more posts are coming soon!

…and may you have a happy a wonderful 2011!

I realized with a bit of horror yesterday that I had jumped the shark. Getting old without realizing it was apparently not enough pain for the universe’s troll that runs my life. It was an awakening.

Jumping the shark, of course, comes from an episode of Happy Days in which Fonzie jumps over a shark while on water skis wearing trunks and a leather jacket (don’t ask). It’s a saying in the idiom that stands for the moment when — in this case — your favorite TV show starts to lose quality and popularity.

In my case, it means that I have lost relevancy as an academic leader and teacher. I’ve lost whatever mojo I once had. At least it appears that way to me, and maybe even to my colleagues and my students.

But I am going to try what Fonzie never did: jump back over that shark, not by backing up, but by making a U-turn and facing the great fish head-on. Stay tuned.

What about you? Have any good jump-the-shark or pmuj-the-shark stories to share? Tell me below.

UPDATE: Southwest provided me with a money-off voucher for a future flight. That was the right thing to do.

The saga with Southwest continues. You may remember that they broke something I had in the middle of my suitcase, something packed to a fare thee well, and it was a pretty beefy decorative plate, so to break it took some conscientious effort.

I called and got the runaround and finally got the response that said, rather cold and lawyer-like, check the rules of carriage or whatever: Southwest isn’t responsible for breakage of any kind whether it is in the overheads or in the belly of the plane.

I finally broke down and called Customer Service (did you ever notice that the Customer Service and Complaint lines at most companies are never 800-numbers?) because I was promised I would receive a response from them in 5 business days. At this moment it has been seven.

A woman told me that she personally would corner the e-mailer who never wrote and make sure she called me by end of day. She was in a meeting. Of course. About an hour later, as the hour of closing appeared, I figured I would make a pre-emptive phone call and after a longish wait, got a third person in the Customer Relations Dept. She told me that the woman who was supposed to call me was still in a meeting, and that she thought she would call me before she left for home….

But she could sense that I was ticked off (I told her that I was), so she offered to escalate it to one of her bosses to be sure I would get a phone call tonight. Yeah, right.

It’s now been two hours since I called and it’s an hour past their closing time (which is mis–stated on the web site by an hour: clever). Have I gotten a call from Southwest’s Customer Relations office? From either person?

What do you think?

Yeah, bags fly free, but the real question is: will they actually reach their destination without being trampled?

Much to my complete surprise, I was not awarded a “genius grant” of $500,000 again this year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. So it remains on my bucket list.

They picked a bee breeder, a jellyfish scientist, the guy who wrote “The Wire,” a stone carver, and a violinist, among others. They did not pick the owner of News Design School, an institution that brings the light of newspaper design to downtrodden small daily and weekly journalists.

Since 1970, there have been 828 recipients, and I still am not one of them. I need to find out that group of anonymous nominators and see if they even read newspapers. Even the judges are anonymous. Probably not a newspaper person among ‘em. Sheesh.