I was directed to Walmart’s free sampling site, by people who assumed that you got the little tin from that sample site, since it’s pictured in the offer:

Kotex offers a similar sample on their site.

Today, my samples came in. Both samples from both places, in nearly identical boxes, containing almost identical items.

In the sample from Kotex, I received two regular tampons, one pad, one liner, a booklet advertising the product, a card warning about TSS and tampon use, and a coupon at the end of the booklet. No free tin, but that was ok. Kotex didn’t promise me one on their offer.

The same from Walmart, I received ONE regular tampon, one pad, one liner, a booklet advertising the product, a card warning about TSS and tampon use, and a coupon at the end of the booklet. No free tin. WTF? The ad leads people think that they will be getting a free tin of tampons! And Walmart sent one less tampon in their free sample.

The samples are still pretty bold and bright and pretty. If I still had periods, I’d probably be one of the many women I have encountered on the web who are actually excited about getting their period just to try these out.

This was what I was really expecting:

See that? I had to join a free stuff auction site and get those. I won’t link to the site because it’s become a drama hole where people like to jump the asses of the newbies who haven’t been to a post office in several months, but that is where I found those. Yes, I opened and toyed around with some of the Super tampons because I was curious as to how they worked. I’ve saw the auctions for liners and stuff in different coloured tins. I’d love to get the complete set, including a pink and green tin. That way I could keep gum and candy in the tins and not have my husband or Matt come along and try to steal my mints and gum. *evil grin*

1. Treasure what you write.

2. Write your own content.

I’ve always written my own content, even when I was writing in an old NeatBook in the fourth grade with a flimsy felt-tipped pen. I don’t have to steal from other people to have great content.

The joke is on this person who is interfering, because I’m not a high-strung anything. I just think people are amusing and I’m not afraid to say that under my real name. The only thing I regret is the person didn’t exactly use Corny’s name. They made it seem as if it were him hiding under the cloak of anonymity and reporting me. Amusing. I won’t go into the ways they hid who they really were, or the repercussions they felt for lying, but they were amateurs.

Doesn’t excuse the whole “ghost droppings” things though.

Before I continue, I feel the need to point out that I somewhat know what I’m talking about when it comes to Blogger.com. I was the 49,107th person to sign up for Blogger, and I have used the service on and off for nearly ten years.

Moving on, I see a few things wrong with this. For one, if I were still dependent on Blogger to publish my site, and my hosts are set up to use Blogger.com specifically, I would be in a pickle right now. For you see, my hosting expires on February 2end. To keep my site, I would naturally, pay for a year’s worth of hosting. Blogger sent out the notice to FTP users, that they were discontinuing the service on March 26th, on February 3erd. Unless they transfer their domain and hosting over to Google’s webhosting. Well, I’ve already paid for my hosting, as have 99.9% of the .5% of the “affected” FTP Blogger users, for the year, and I can’t get that money back. No refunds. $120 gone. I don’t know how much Google webhosting is, but I’m assuming they’re expecting their users to jump over to blogspot.com for free. Huh? I’ve just renewed my hosting for a year, with no refunds, and I’m either going to have to be forced to go to a free, non-professional site, or uproot everything and go to a new CMS. Which isn’t a bad idea to install something on your server so you have 100% control.

Then comes this part of Google’s excuse: “FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger.”

Ok. Well. When I was using Blogger back in 2000/2001, there was no bells or whistles for Blogger. Not even a title box. You had to do every little piece of HTML by hand. And I did, starting with the title tag at the top of my post, then typing everything out. I still do that in my WordPress entries. I’m not that lazy. Posts were numbered references on a page published once per month or week and updated periodically throughout that month or week. Blogger also featured a list of updated blogs on the front page. A Blog of the Month. A blog directory. The front page of Blogger was updated by people with souls, not Google drones.

Blogger was great.

Then in early 2003, Google acquired Blogger, and it became the abomination that it is today. Limited everything. One thing that really made me turn away from Blogger was the fact that in 2003, Google disliked something I published with their software to my personal, privately owned domain, hosted on a server other than their own, so they took the liberty to log into my account, delete the post from my domain and then delete my blog from my account. I never got it backed up. I had to just link to my old archive page. After that violation, which was not even against my hosts TOS and they should have had the final word on whether my content was removed or not, I went into self-hosted publishing platforms.

The moral of the story? Get your blog and go with WordPress. Or something that you’re comfortable with. Blogger is on it’s way out. You can thank Google for that.

It’s not compatible with FireFox 3.6:

Thunderbird 3 is a great upgrade. Everyone should go get that.

Like many of the .com boomers, I despised advertising on my sites so badly that I broke away from Blogspot.com completely. Back in those days, they put annoying animated GIF graphics on your blog. There was a paid option, but I figured if I was going to shell out $50 for an ad-free, free blogspot site for 12 months, I might as well just get hosting for my neglected domain (this one here) and be done with it. Why not have a fully hosted site for just $10 more? I could put all my files on there, and get a custom email address, and never, ever have to deal with advertising again! Then the froobs moved in. They wanted free blogspot.com sites, so the paid blogspotters were blotted out. They got their free blogspot sites when Google took over (no, I will never, ever get over that!). Then they started making money off of their free sites. They paid nothing for the site, but they want funds to advertise on it because Google blogs are at the top of Google? Makes a lot of sense!

Then we come across Spott Advertising. The ‘anything goes’ advertising that brought us Cassie’s World, complete with a picture of a woman giving a blowjob next to an entry about keeping kids safe and off of adult sites. Hmmm. Now comes along a Christian site, that says some of the songs she is posting are not Christian, but we should keep an open mind. Her Spott Advertising suggests that we should keep an open ass, too:

And that’s why I love the internet. XD

Today Crimsonsparkle.net is ten years old. My blog’s birthday isn’t until June, and I’m aware that probably everyone who’s ever had a site online has already celebrated the 10th anniversary of that site and I’m the last to do it. But it’s still some kind of an accomplishment to me. I know people who have had sites for a decade and the site isn’t really about them. My site has been 100% by me and for me. I hope that it continues on for many more decades.

Sorry if anyone was expecting anything really ‘big’. This is somewhat big. To me.