I know, I’ve ranted in here about email before, but seriously, the messages I receive sometimes send me around the bend.

In the last week or so I’ve had the following (paraphrased) gems:

• One man asked me for some help in building a complex website. He sent his first message on day 1 and when I hadn’t had a chance to answer it, he sent it again on day 2. I finally responded to his question suggesting an answer and that if he had more specific questions, he should post them to my forum. Over the next 3-5 days he sent me numerous more questions, and if I didn’t respond within 24-hours, he would resend the message. Finally, after getting tired of answering his questions (he really needed to take a class on how to use a computer before he’d be able to build a basic website, let alone the complex one he wanted to build) I just stopped. After four days of no answers from me, he started over. Yes, he sent message 1 (which I’d already answered) to me again. Messages? Meet the spam filter…
• I got a long (LONG!) letter from a man who wanted to build a complicated photo-submission website. He seemed to have a good idea of what he wanted but no understanding of how to do it. I was getting ready to ignore his message when I saw that at the end he asked me if I knew anyone who could help him. Phew! I sent him my “hire someone” spiel talking about RFPs and Freelance Switch. He wrote back saying thanks. This one was unusual because of that thanks. Most people never respond at all.
• Then I got an email from someone asking a bunch of questions that indicated that he really had no clue how to use the interwebs or describe his problem. The questions were along the lines of “I tried for 2 hours!! to read your email, but I couldn’t open it. Um, buh? How the heck should I know what is preventing you from opening an email message? And telling me how long you flailed blindly at it doesn’t improve my chances of figuring it out, but it does improve my ability to ask the last question you asked—“Do you have to be a computer science major to understand this or am I an idiot?” Uh, I’ll take answer B!
• So, then Mr. Idiot answers my reply. His way of saying thank you “wow! I didn’t think I’d get an answer!” does not inspire me to great heights of desire to answer more stupid questions from him. Now he wants to know why my article doesn’t work on his web page. Of course, he doesn’t include a URL. Unfortunately my psychic powers are on the fritz, so I ignored that message.
• He emailed again today, this time with a URL, and to tell me that because of my site 2/3s of his entire site is gone. I think he also mentioned that he spent 16 hours working on it. Maybe I’ll answer this one, um let’s see… [DELETE].

Here are some tips if you want to get an answer from me by email:

1. Remember that I’m not paid one penny to answer you by email. In fact, in my last analysis my time is better spent picking my nose than responding to you.
2. This means that if you want a reply, sending your message a second (third or five thousandth) time is not going to bump you to the top of the queue, but it might bump you into my spam filter.
3. It also means that I respond much better to friendly emails than to rude or sarcastic comments. In fact, if I respond to mean people, it’s often to be mean right back. You have been warned!
4. If you wrote to me thinking I was not a “real person” and you say so in your message, you will be relegated to my robo-reply list. If you want to email a “real person” go call your mother. She’d probably appreciate the gesture—definitely more than I do.

I was reading an article yesterday about how facial recognition is getting so good that there are apps being built for cellphones that can identify random strangers from photos (taken as you walk along with your cell phone).

The article was bemoaning the fact that this was a “further invasion of our privacy” and that pretty soon nothing we do would be private.

I then moved on to another article that talked about how Google(?) was working on an algorithm that could evaluate the writing style of someone online and make a good correlation as to who actually wrote it. Even if the author had posted anonymously or with a pseudonym.

The article was bemoaning the fact that this was a “further invasion of our privacy” and that pretty soon nothing that we do online would be private.

But is this idea of “privacy” such a good thing? Ultimately, what it really is is the idea that we can go out in public or online and be anonymous.

And some people see anonymity as the same as the freedom to do anything they want. And as we saw in London over the past few days, anything they want seems to cover a wide swath of things that most civilized societies consider wrong.

Some examples of things anonymous people do:

• looting and destroying property
• verbally harassing people
• generally behaving like boorish trolls

And people who are willing to stand up and say who they are, thus taking responsibility for their actions, tend to avoid these actions, not necessarily because they don’t want to do them, but because they know that they are impugning on their good name if they do so. Because they are not anonymous.

I think of the (moronic) individuals who went looting in London and then posted photos of themselves and their spoils online. With face recognition software, they are no longer anonymous. And they can be held responsible for their crimes.

Internet trolls who write hateful comments on forums and blogs just because they are anonymous might think twice if they knew that their comments would be identified as being from them. And even if they didn’t think twice, their friends and family might have a better idea of what thugs they are friends with or related to.

I wish more people would stand up for their actions, and stop hiding behind anonymity.

I was hoping for a long morning alone with my writing. But instead I got to help clean up a flooded bathroom and attempt to fix the washing machine that hit it’s planned obsolescence date today. Mark thinks the pump cracked.

We bought an expensive washer 3 years ago thinking naively that if we paid a lot for a good brand it would last longer than the cheaper model we’d bought 3 years before that.

Nope. This time, if the repairs cost more than the cheapest model we can buy we are going out and buying the cheap, no frills model. At least that way in 2014 we will have paid less on our rental.

In 2008, we did all this research, but the reality is that washing machine reviewers don’t have 3 years to evaluate a machine. So they really don’t know if they will last a reasonable amount of time. And no, I don’t think 3 years is reasonable. We had the same washing machine my entire childhood with a family of four. My three-year-old son has seen two machines die in this house! (Yes, the last one died about two weeks after he was born!)

Our current process with our son goes like this:

1. wake up between 7am and 8:30am
2. play hard all morning
3. lie down around noon for around 15 minutes, but don’t fall asleep
4. play hard all afternoon until about 4pm
5. fall asleep hard, and nap for an hour to two hours
6. play hard until mom is exhausted (any time after 10pm) and then lie in bed fighting with her because he’s not tired at all

8 hours of sleep is barely enough for me, and I’m not convinced it’s enough for him.

We have determined that if we can get him to stay awake at 4pm he’ll go to bed and sleep around 7:30 or 8pm. But that period from around 4pm until 6pm is killer. We can’t seem to keep him awake. He has fallen asleep while eating, while playing, watching a movie, reading a book, and more. We then shake him (gently), talk to him, carry him around (hard when he weighs nearly 60 pounds), try to get him to play, and nothing wakes him. Yesterday he fell asleep on the couch, and when we told him we were going to feed the animals (a chore he loves to do) he woke up enough to say “I want feed animals” and then he was asleep again, and continuing threats did not wake him again.

Any suggestions? How do you keep a toddler awake when he doesn’t want to be so that he will sleep when we want him to be asleep? I’m desperate (and tired).

The most common complaint I see about content farms is that they serve up lousy information written by under-paid (or non-paid) writers. I can join the ranks of people who will tell you of the lousy results they found on eHow (or insert your other favorite content farm to bash) here. Yes, I don’t like doing a search for “how to build a web page” and getting a result that says, essentially: step 1. build a web page, step 2. put it on the internet. step 3. there’s no step 3!

But I am equally tired of the writers saying “I make a living writing and they are turning writing into a commodity!” And other such statements. Guess what, Virginia, writing has always been considered something anyone can do – and as such paid as little as possible for. Yes, every writer I know, including myself, recognizes that writing is hard. To get up in the morning, stumble to the computer and stare at that blank screen is a fate all writers share. To know that you may or may not get paid a living wage for whatever pearls make it to that screen puts even more pressure on. And to then go out and read about how some moron was paid 3 cents to write the above “article” on how to build a web page is both depressing and demeaning. Some days, I start thinking that I should just start writing tutorials that are that meaningless (and I’m sure some of my “fans” would argue that I already do…). After all, that “tutorial” took me longer to think up than it did to write.

But ultimately I believe in market forces (says the woman who has been known to rant for hours, yes hours, on the evils of laissez faire capitalism). If the content that is created by these under- and non-paid writers is lousy people won’t read them. And if it gets too bad, people won’t visit the sites that generate them. Then the sites won’t make any money and they will either focus on getting more non-paid writers to flood the internet with crap or they will come around to the idea that paying good writers something slightly more than peanuts is a way to get better quality content. Personally, I am hesitant when a search result feeds up an eHow or wikipedia article. Not because the writers are underpaid but because I’ve found the content to be less than stellar.

And the other thing to think about: how much are you paying for the content that you read? I have friends who are proud of the fact that they view all websites with ad blockers on. Others that refuse to pay any subscription fees for content. And others who think that buying a book that was “just their blog posts” is tantamount to complete idiocy. I had a discussion with my brother a while ago where he told me he didn’t want to work with a money manager because “they just want more money”. And I thought, “well, sure, who doesn’t?” I mean seriously, how can one complain that writers aren’t being paid enough when you aren’t willing to pay them yourself? I buy and read over 100 (probably closer to 200) books per year. I have donated to websites and blogs that I find valuable, and do so every year. In this case, I think paying it forward means literally paying. And I’m okay with that, because if I like a writer I want them to keep writing so I buy their books.

And another thought: what makes Wikipedia so damn popular and “content farms” so not? I have found the content on Wikipedia to be just as questionable as eHow. And the writers there aren’t paid, in fact every year the Wikipedia founder asks them to pay him! But that’s a rant for another day.