I’ve kind of sworn off blogging when I’m too busy or too tired to put something coherent together, but this is an exception because I might be awake and coherent tonight, but I’m not sure my Internet will be.
If you’ve been paying attention to my Twitter, I’ve been having problems with the phone company—and over a long series of visits to the neighborhood phone store, the underlying problem has been slowly unveiled: what I thought was a problem with the company’s billing computer turned out to be a problem going back to when I moved—somebody at the neighborhood phone store screwed up my move—and then because I asked a specific question and got a specific answer that was wrong, a problem snowballed for awhile.
My least favorite part was when they tried to blame me for the mistake.
Anyhow, I might not have ‘net access for a day or two while the problem is being fixed—and since I’m about to hit the road, heading to Rotterdam, there might be more than a few days without posts.
We’ll see.
Oh yes, and before I forget: There’s an obnoxious trend of people and organizations directly contacting me informing me that my blog’s been listed on some expat directory or another and asking me to “link back” to their site or somehow participate in some tomfoolery.
I need to put more thought into it, but I think I need to explicitly put up some kind of set of policies regarding comments and link requests. What do you think of this early draft?
All requests for “link backs” will summarily be rejected and any organization or individual emailing me with such a request will be asked to remove my email address from their service. The best way to get me to link back is to leave comments on my blog with links to your blog and, at the same time, write an interesting blog. Links to commercial services made by me are because I like the service and are not advertisements. Comments from commercial services (porn, breast enlargement, expat directories, and penis enlargement) will only be allowed if they are on topic, although the link back to the commercial site will be deleted. Furthermore I will explicitly identify any form of compensation that I receive for mentioning a product or service on my blog. Finally, although I do not currently have advertising on this site, it is possible that I will extend a limited form of advertising on my blog in the future. All advertising will be clearly identified as such and there will be an agent, such as Google Adsense, between me and the advertisers.
I might still be too irritated by the one so-called expat directory—they wrote to me twice, despite one explicit email directing them to remove my email address from their lists—and to make matters worse, they got my name wrong, both times.
Idiots.
I’ve also been getting a lot of those lately. Sometimes the same one two or three times “reminding” me to link to yet another ho-hum expat directory website. Yawn. No way.