Lessons

So not everyone who reads my daily diatribes is in on the blog explosion directory / traffic exchange thingy. I've been fairly impressed with it so far and as you can see by the ever growing paragraph of links at the bottom of each page I've found quite a few like minded lunatics.

My only problem to date is the rating system. The scale goes from 1 to 10 with one being the worst and ten being the best. If somebody gives you a 1 you know they are either ideologically predisposed to disliking you or perhaps you may have just pushed their buttons in the wrong way. It is rarely a statement of just how good or bad your writing skills and html presentation are. Anything from say a 3 - 8 will make me sit back and review the posts available when the rating was made to see if perhaps I've been doing lazy stupid themed rants or was just generally offensive stuff. I know my problem is never profanity as I follow Kurt Vonnegut's advice that I found in Hocus Pocus about never giving anyone that excuse to ignore you. I do try to improve not only the style but the vocabulary and occasionally I look at my punctuation books. (I'm pretty random with a comma).

The 9-10's while flattering I ignore as they are usually either people trying to get you to go back and rate them equally well, or people who just don't want to be critical. That's one thing that always drove me nuts about writing workshops or any sort of group project. Everyone has to be ever so sensitive to each other's feelings. They could neither name what they liked in particular about a piece or say what it was they felt detracted from the piece or just didn't work. They would always say, "I just like it."

I put a lot of time, but not a lot of effort into my rants. That is to say I'll spend as much time as it takes to put together what seems a cohesive argument. I'll let the words flow until they hit some sort of logical end but I don't plan out what I'm going to say. I don't rewrite. I barely spell check and proofread before hitting the publish button and heading up to sleepy land. So there are any of a number of things a person could pick out about any given post and give good criticism.

So today someone rates the blog as a 4 but is kind enough to point out the reason for doing so which is, "The small grey font on the black background is hard to see...at least for these old eyes." At first I laughed because as a guy who has been playing text based games on computers for almost 10 years, I've always found white text on a black screen easier on the eye. After an hour of staring at a white text editor screen,I must walk away from the computer and give the eyes a rest. They almost hurt. I can go hours and hours witha black screen.

So then I thought about it a little more and I got a little angry. I thought. Maybe somebody needs to use a browser that will enhance the size of the characters or perhaps maybe somebody needs to use 640 X 480 resolution. To do this we right click on the desktop and go down to properties. Go to the settings tab and click on it. There will be a little slider bar there. Shove that thing all the way over to the left. Push the apply button. Wow look at how much easier it is to read things now.

I thought about doing the old retribution rating. I'm not above revenge. I am not one to deny my barbaric male nature and the need to make the snow wet with the blood of my foes. (So sayeth the Dungeon Master).

Then I got a call from my cousin and she had got into a car accident not to far from the house. So I closed all my windows and walked to accident scene to keep her company while she waited for the police to do their thing and to make sure she was in fact ok for myself and the rest of the family. Nobody got hurt but 3 out of the 4 cars will probably be going to the scrap heap.

So when I got home and thought about how absolutely petty my concerns from earlier in the day were in comparison with the reality of an automobile accident, I still wanted to do the revenge rating. I wont though. I'll just think mean thoughts and perhaps one of these days I'll write a plea to all computer owners: Please learn at least a little bit about the desktop and operating system. Please. Do it for the children.

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