Déjà Vu anyone?

Anyone notice anything new around here? Oh, how about that title graphic up there? ^^ I made that monster in Photoshop CS (8) and I’m still having second thoughts about it. It looks like my title graphic had one too many mCdonald’s supersized meals and gained weight. It probably looks worse on the last few Amish who are still using, or just now being introduced to, 800 x 600 resolution screens. But that’s my flaw. I never declared myself to be a web designer. I just know what I like, and I think the graphic is cute, and it’s my site, I pay for it, so there. I may even make something more of it for the rest of my site. Maybe finally get something going with the front page? Help all those nutters who come here looking to pick a fight and failing miserably, find my blog. Or maybe it’s because I just don’t care anymore is the key to why they never succeed? Arguing is a lot like the Tango: It takes a willing partner for it to flourish, and I’m just not that interested in e-fighting anymore. Where’s that graphic about arguing online being like the Special Olympics when you need it?

Speaking of the special needs and complaints about webspace that I own (rent?), the person I blogged about yesterday read my post and just knew it was about her. She knew it so badly that she emailed every single email address she could find for me, including the defunct one in the whoIS, and when I didn’t report back to her immediately, which it was 2am when she sent the emails, she emailed my host. Fifteen times between 2:30am and 10am, when he finally answered her and asked her to please stop crowding his inbox. My entry falls under ‘freedom of speech’ and there wasn’t even any links or names given in the post! Oddly enough, she didn’t comment on the entry. I would have approved anything she posted, even if it was just to tell me what a horrible person I am for voicing my opinion of her unlinked, unidentified blog on webspace that I have paid for. Oh well. Live and learn.

Normally, I’m not this brash. I think it’s either the heat, time for Aunt Flo who has skipped out on me since November 2007 and comes in the form of a rush of hormones instead of environmentally unsafe female products and ruined undies/bedsheets from nighttime surprises, or my anti-depressants are changing my personality again. Anyway you look at it, I’ve certainly changed.

My plane is late. Why not blog?

In dropping through EntreCard these past few….months…..I have come across a website that I have to raise an eyebrow at. Firstly, whoever is behind the blog, it’s doubtful that this person is who they say they are: a mom of two. Second, they have very little life experience other than blogging, and that’s sad. For example: “all bloggers spend all day at their computer, and naturally are slouching all day long…” Really? I spend “all day” at my blog? Well, maybe, if the WordPress is screwed up and I have to download all of my stuff and then delete the current install and re-install it from scratch. That gets tedious. But unless I’m setting up a blog or tweaking a layout, which is once a year if that much, I don’t spend all day at my computer, and I certainly don’t spend all day working on my blog and blog posts. A post takes me anywhere from 5-30 minutes, depending on how many links and resources I have and whether the shitty batteries in my keyboard hold up for the entire post. Looking at this person’s blog, they have a lot of PayPerPost entries, so I guess they sit at their computer all day long, waiting for PPP to send them an email to order them what to blog about. Some people would do anything for a buck, I guess.

Another example: This person calls themselves a “mom” yet she encourages plastic surgery and bath houses. Sex parties are a-OK as long as you just go there because you’re curious. Plastic surgery is a must if society thinks you’re ugly. Why not push to have Hitler re-animated while we’re at it? His method of ridding the world of “undesirable” people was far more effective, permanent and cheaper.

Seriously, people need to pass an IQ/common sense test to have a blog. If your views are so shallow and so fucked up that you must put down anyone who objects or posts any comment that doesn’t agree with you, you have to ban them and email them five times “just to get your point across” you have no business posting these opinions on the internet.

After spending a good three hours making CDs for my family and to clean out my hard drive (I don’t trust any disk that can be erased), I got looking at some erotic pictures and blog entries and some videos. All I have to say is: I’m hot and bothered. I want crave Dennis right now. Unfortunately, he’s out with his goony friends for “the last time” before our trip (see my other blog) and I’m stuck at home with his dad and three toddlers. Can life get any more unfair?

I discovered GraphJam.com while I was making my CDs. I love this graph of my stats:

Obamicon.com is fun too. Vote Ziggy!

Or for me:

But only if you’re serious!

As much as I appreciate Entrecard.com, they have yet again asked for user input. I’m afraid to comment on the entry due to the fact that the last time I did, my account was wiped clean and I lost about 600 entre-credits. Luckily, I was able to re-submit my two sites and I was allowed back on their clique of a service, yet I never did recover those credits. Now, the squeaking wheel didn’t get oiled. She got deleted, punished, and all sorts of malicious, immature tactics. So I emailed and asked why my blogs were deleted. The answer? “These blogs weren’t updated enough/kept up to date.” Wow. I can point out blogs on their servers that haven’t been updated since 2008. Blogs that pop up when you surf the rings.

But that’s the least of the complaints.

Little Keira’s Bows’ Craft Blog has no widget, but pops up in the ring on a nightly basis.
Buckserv.com was purchased by a scalper on April 10th, but still shows up in the ring.
Cafeteen.biz no longer resolves to any host.
For a couple of days, several of the bloggers who use payperpost.com had pop ups demanding passwords and there is a blog that has a private Twitter demanding a password. Not to mention, one of the blogs in the ring says the user is invalid.

Yet because I made a nice suggestion to their ring, my sites were deleted, my credits lost, and my advertisements were gone as well. Swell group.

If you can’t take constructive criticism, don’t ask for it. If you want user feed back, but you only want bright, shiny, happy, positive pats on the back, say so in your post. It’s really that simple.

On Friday I got involved in a flame war over Michael Jackson’s death.

It was small, to me anyway. On a popular celebrity gossip blog, there were many condolences to his death. I really don’t feel anything over this. Yes, I have some sympathy for his family, but I didn’t know Michael as a person. I wasn’t one of his fans. I liked some of his older music, but I didn’t really listen to it anymore. The last thing I bought of his was nearly 15 years ago: HIStory. I have nothing of his on my iTunes. It annoyed me that so many people were commenting how he was their favourite musician and their lives were pulled to a screeching halt when it was announced that he had died. When Left Eye died in 2002, I seen an equal posting on blogs about how their favourite singer had died. Ok. That would be fine. Except these people never blogged about these singers! I posted a comment reflecting that on the gossip blog:

“I’m glad so many people are touched by the death of Michael Jackson. He was a child predator and still managed to wound the internet the day he died. I suspect it was more than that, but the idea that news stations reported that it was ‘rumored’ that Jackson had died and people ran to the internet for research purposes. I’ve read the profiles of some of you posting here, particularly the ones who claim he was your all-time favourite artist. These blogs have archives. Numerous blogs go back to 2003. In the past six years, all of you have only blogged about Michael Jackson, your ‘all time favourite artist’ once: Today. *snerk*”

Ok. It was mean-spirited, but I didn’t know these people, and I was sick of seeing all these blogs with the same content: Jacko dead. We get it. It only needs to be blogged about once. One of the people in that thread took the liberty of going to my site and digging around in my content. She found a picture of me and decided I was “fat” and being “fat” my comments and thoughts have no business online. It goes a little further than that. She didn’t reply back at the thread, but in my blog, on nearly every single one of my entries for the month of June, and on a few of my May entries. None of these 70+ comments were published, though I was very proud of her to comment 73 times on my blog, which was nearly twice as many comments that were there before she showed up, she made it a point to dissect and examine everything I wrote.

Of course, because I dared challenge her point of view, she set out “looking for a fraud” on my site, and because she did all of the research herself, based on her disposition of me, and she never left her computer to conduct this research, she found her fraud. No solid proof. No phone calls to my school. She didn’t even Google Chris’ name or my professor’s name. She blatently commented that it was all lies and how she came to this conclusion: she says so. Googling Chris’ name brings up his obituary. In that obituary is my name because I submitted it. It doesn’t bother me that my life was a lie to some stranger on an internet forum which serves as a magnet for brain dead sheepies. It bothered me, however, that in amongst her comments of dissecting my life in her prejudiced way, she took glee in my daughter’s death. She said she deserved to die. She said it was “karma” for me being apathetic towards Jacko’s death.

Last time I checked, Pogo died nearly a month before Jacko, so if anything, it wasn’t ‘karma’ for being apathetic towards the death of someone I never personally knew. Reeling, I checked with the email address she provided in all of her comments. It matched one in the thread on the gossip blog, in a profile that listed a birth year of 1972. I was being trolled by a thirty-seven year old. So I emailed her. Asked if she was leaving me the comments or was someone else doing it. In email, she denied it–it had to be someone else who hated her. Why, she’d never been to my site before, never heard of me before this, rarely visited the gossip blog, didn’t care for Jacko, and felt that I was only emailing her so I’d get more hits to my “shite” site. Alright. Fair enough. I checked the header of the email, and low and behold, the IP that sent me the email was the same IP that had left all those comments. I replied to her with my findings and guess what? She sent me an reply calling me a “stalker”, had banned my email address from sending her anymore email, reported me to my host, reported me to my ISP, called the cops, called the FBI, made a “PSA” announcement on her blog warning the internet population about me, and basically went nuts. I had a good chuckle, blocked her IP and went on. I find it amusing that since then, my blog has been hit by several proxies. I assume they’re proxies; either that or I’ve suddenly gotten a massive over-seas fan-base. Of course I doubt that. The countries that are visiting from these IPs visit every twenty minutes or so, and they’re from countries that don’t generally speak American English. I guess said person wants attention and goes to great lengths to get it.

Why do the crazies come to me? Am I a crazies magnet?

This got me thinking about things online. I’m no stranger to liars in the blog world. I seem to find them. Beccah is the latest in the blog-o-sphere to be a lying thief.

I could spend hours scanning receipts, medical receipts, medicine bottles, digging through my archive of CDs from when I took my digital camera to the hospital, post pictures of my daughter’s tombstone, scan the funeral leaflet, scan the funeral guestbook, have her pediatrician post a page about how she really existed with links to my sites on it, make my Flickr public (showing all the pictures of us dated from 2004 through last month via the camera’s date setting and the comments there), the thing is, I shouldn’t have to, but because people like Beccah Beushausen will spend years defrauding and misrepresenting themselves, I feel like I have to prove my own continuity and my own life and my own truth, just so I can vent or voice my opinion on forums.

My greatest sorrow in all of this is for so many good, kind people whose belief was broken, whose hearts were broken, and whose trust was shaken. Though it was a fiction, it was a beautiful fiction, and there’s no shame in believing the best of people. I still have hope and faith, and it helps me to think that there are people out there who will always strive to find the truth, or ask me to question what I believe.

I’ve been through this before. This too, will pass.

I had to re-download Wordpress again because for some reason, my installation is lagging again. I don’t know what’s up with this buggy software, but it makes me want to convert over to MovableType for this blog as well. I think I might have to. It might be worth it if I have to re-install my blog program every ten days. I don’t know how I’ll get all of my entries over there, but I may have to just so I can blog again. This site may be neglected and abused but I still like to update it every once in a while. *grins*

So I’m off to find a suitable program. Or maybe this will fix itself. I just know I’m sick of doing tech support on this site. A site should be bug free.