On blogging

Despite the fact I find them nauseatingly folksy and over simplistic - not to mention befuddled and somewhat mind-bogglingly dull to read, that Sierra woman's blog is a comfort for people against whom I have no grudges so I left a positive message there.

I still won't be completely satisfied unless she apologises to Chris Locke, Frank Paynter, Jeneane Sessum and Alan Herrell for the damage she caused their reputations, though it is highly satisfying to see how well they've managed to restore their own good names through their own efforts. Perhaps endorsement or positive acknowledgement from Kathy Sierra might actually be a bad thing.

In the next week or so, I suspect the full nature of her bullshit will come out in blogland, by which time it'll be beyond yawn material for the likes of CNN.

In other news Luma Mufleh was out of her office this week on a team building retreat. You remember Luma Mufleh? You remember any team building retreats? I do. They were mostly a waste of time. They seemed to me to be about merging differences to create cohesion within a team when my idea of having a good team about me was being able to rely on everyone else to do their jobs so I could concentrate on doing mine. Thus, as far as I was concerned, the cleaner was as important to me as my boss so I made a point of making things easier on the cleaner as well.

I don't care about special circumstances or divergent interests and abilities of which some boffin says I should be mindful. All I care about is being able to do my job as well as it can be done. If someone isn't pulling their weight, I don't want to have to deal with it, I don't want to have to find out why, and I sure as shit don't want to compromise my work to accomodate them.

If the whole system isn't working satisfactorily, I'm not going to try to change it. I'm going to talk about it with my workmates, guage their attitudes to it, then if enough people hate the way the system has been established, I'll just leave and find another job. If management can't handle the six degrees of separation between marketing and production, that's someone else's problem and I won't be back on Monday to fix it up.

Team building? Bite my crusties.

I suspect Luma Mufleh's team building retreat won't be an exercise in marketing and management though. Come to think of it, I suspect the team building isn't for her at all, but rather for the soccer teams she founded. I'll send her an email and find out how it all went and hopefully I'll have something besides yet another hot air fest to add to the pot of gold at the end of the corporate rainbow. If Luma tells me it was "interesting but not entirely relevant" I'll be disheartened but aware of another warpath to tread at some time in the future. If it were team building for the soccer teams, it could have been a brilliant exercise. I haven't found out yet if she has a blog or just posts relevant updates on the website. Slackness on my part.

Speaking of teams, I've made it off the front page of messages at Liars Team HQ. Second time in 5 months they've found something else to talk about that isn't me. They're talking about what they had for lunch, posting pictures of plants that look like sex organs, youtube links and other such purely intellectual subjects as vaginas and song lyrics.

A couple of days ago, they were as busy as ants taking my stuff out of context, putting their sexual slants on everything, posting anonymous comments here and generally being pathetic. I mean, talking of drawing long bows, the creep whose address and phone number one of the kids found for me is now suggesting I like Chris Locke because his alter ego is Rageboy.

See the little highlighted bit with the arrow pointing to it? He's suggesting I thought Chris Locke was 12 and jerked off over him.

As yet another counterpoint, here's a bit of a conversation I had with one of the teenagers earlier today...

[14:11] Seth: I need to go to bed, but I have one question before I go. I just want a simple answer. Do you think that my generation has the power to change the world as it is? Does not ever generation have the ability to change the world? Simple answer for tonight..if you really want to explain a lot emails always open or we can talk more tomorrow...and I'vee be able to explain my math work.
[14:12] Rat: Simple answer - no.
[14:13] Rat: But your generation can open the way for change.
[14:13] Seth: itersting..food for thought while I sleep.
[14:13] Seth: later Paul

The Liars Team will duly jump all over this and turn it into something it isn't and something I'm not - because that's what they do.

Even though I'm not the day's hot topic over there, this crap has been going on for 5 months. They congratulate themselves like a Dubya cabinet meeting as if they're making the slightest difference to the overall problem - which, incidentally, they haven't even defined for themselves beyond broad concepts yet - and they make the occasional raid on this blog posting out of context and bullshit comments.

If you have a blog and allow comments, that's what blogging is all about.

The smart bloggers delete the comments that have no value either as abuse or as positive feedback. If you get thousands of comments, as Kathy Sierra did, don't have them appear as an appendix to the actual blog entry, but open in a new browser window. Let your readers argue the point for you.

Create passionate users - even if they do all look like they're on crack.

I was going to copypasta a few snippets from Sierra's undead blog and post them here as examples of how being on crack might appear to people who read blogs but I'm over it already.

One of the seven principles of blogging should have been "don't just blog for the sake of blogging and if you do, don't spin it out and don't add unsophisticated graphics and don't have those unsophisticated graphics disconnected from the subject of the blog entry and each other and don't use jargon and... oh fuck it... just don't blog for the sake of blogging."

If Luma Mufleh blogged regularly, nobody interested in life for its own sake would ever bother reading Kathy Sierra's blog again.