January 5, 2005  Bearly There  It's not enough the Sooners disgraced themselves at last night's Orange Bowl, but this morning we also wake up to an ice storm.  In 2002, the power went out for what seemed like four years - February 4, 2002:  The Ice Age Cometh.  Grrreat.

On the other hand, I just finished an exceptional book, The Bear Went Over the Mountain, and my mind is still lurking in those magic pages.  Things could always be worse.  [mini-review]

For example, I have not heard from my friend Frieje, who lives in Jakarta, since December 24.  While Jakarta didn't have any tsunami casualties, Frieje could have been vacationing or visiting or working elsewhere in Indonesia.  I can't imagine what it must be like to know a loved one is among the missing.     

January 10, 2005:  Word from Jakarta  I finally heard from Frieje, who lives in Jakarta, Indonesia.  She has been very ill.

Frieje mentioned something I haven't heard anywhere:  "We can't eat fish from the sea (sea food), because about thousands of fish in west sea of Sumatera died because of Tsunami disaster.  And like (crab, fish, octopus and shrimps) they all eat a lot of people [who] died cause of Tsunami disaster.  In fact they [are] contaminated."

January 13, 2005:  All Mixed Up  Back in the day when each entry went on a separate web page, one of the criticisms of this blog was the fact that links to NEXT or PREVIOUS pages didn't always lead where they were supposed to.  Now I have outdone myself by putting the January 10 entry (above where it belongs) on the 2005 Beading Diary page.  For my next trick ... 

January 17, 2005:  Martin Luther King, Jr.  My friend, Elizabeth, just told me her citizenship examination is scheduled for March.  She's a wonderful person and will make a great asset to the USA.

This country has been fortunate to have so many outstanding citizens over the years.  Some, like Dr. King, gave their lives for freedom.  Others simply do, or have done, their very best to enrich the lives around them. 

Those of us who hope to count ourselves among the least of these good people should take heart today and consider that decent human beings outnumber the bad guys everywhere in the world.  Consider the ratio of terrorists to tsunami relief workers, givers of charitable donations and those who've performed simple acts of kindness in that nightmare.  Terrible things will continue to happen, but most of us will go on doing our humble best in company with the Nelson Mandelas and Martin Luther King, Jrs. who guide us in the right direction.         

January 18, 2005:  Geekliness  I just took the geek test at Fuali.com and found I am only 25% geek.  This will be a relief to my children, whom I have been tormenting with my rapper persona.  I frequently become La Fist and rap all communications.  The girls are sooo mortified. 

My work here is done. 

February 4, 2005:  Lock Up  You can pay all kinds of prices for a domain name, and I have.  At this point, though, I've managed to transfer each and every one of our 14 domains to Hostica.com, where they renew for $9.95 per year.

All would be well on the domain front, except the powers that be in this area have decided to help the poachers, the people who send you domain renewal notices because they got your contact info off the central registry.  Until recently, these notices were land fill bound - unless you accidentally paid one (been there, done that).  You still had to okay the actual transfer of domain hosting to the poacher to finalize the deal.

Not any more.  The "okay" portion of the transaction has been done away with.  Today, one must formally "lock" one's domains or be fair game for the guys who may charge as much as $69.95 for domain renewal! 

Protect yourself.  If you are happy with the company that handles your domain name ownership, contact them today to ensure your domains are locked.

February 8, 2005  Known Comforts  I've accepted for years that I needed to upgrade these pages - not just the look (this process continues at glacial pace), but also from FrontPage to Dreamweaver HTML.

Last night at 3 a.m., I got things in hand and realized things might not go as smoothly as I'd hoped once I actually began the task.

While Macromedia, Dreamweaver's creator, offers free trial downloads and lots of extras, the fact that it took me an hour to download those extras should have been my first clue.  You need special tools to convert FrontPage-generated HTML to Dreamweaver's cleaner code and I had trouble getting to the download pages!

Once I had the software I needed, I took one page of Grace-Light.com to experiment on.  I ended up with a total loss of the page color so dear to Jane Marie's heart as well as very few graphics.  This is not a good beginning.  

February 11, 2005  Everything Counts   I'm always moaning about the fires I have to fight.  It's my own fault, of course, for biting off more than one person could possible masticate with these websites.  But since I'm not willing to close anything down, there are consequences.

I've just discovered, for example, that most of the links in the Grace-Light.com pages are bad.  Hopefully, I've corrected the problem by now, but it goes to show how easy it is to fix one thing (long page names on greenlightWRITE.com) and end up with horrible results elsewhere through neglect of duty.

I also found the domain pointer to AskCaryn.com is not functioning.  That's a separate fix via the site host.

February 13, 2004:  The Price of Free  In the last few days I've added some free (to us) things to the site.

Statcounter.com offers invisible traffic counters, which require cookies, to let us know what pages are being visited.  While we've always known the top traffic getters via our site host Cedant's statistics, it's been interesting to watch this new information pour in.  I wish it didn't have to be cookie-based, but I'm not the boss of this, and the knowledge will help us nudge the site in the right direction.

The other addition is a link on each blog's main page to Technorati.com, a blog search tool.  They gave me the option of submitting a photo, so I used Teddy O's picture and had to remove it from this blog and from the Beading Diary.  The bear is not amused.

March 1, 2005:  Cook That!  Major websites have a person or even a team to manage the ads they carry.  We have me whenever I can spare the time, so I am seriously annoyed when a company we've become affiliated with makes a major change that requires lots of frantic work on my part.

Thus, I send anti-props out to Cooking.com.  We've worked with them for years via LinkShare.com, and should deserve some consideration, but no.  When they decided to move their affiliate program to Commission Junction, they gave us considerably less than 24 hours notice.

And since greenlightWRITE.com is crammed with recipe pages, all sporting a Cooking.com link, I've been trying to remove those now useless Cooking.com ads from our site as quickly as possible - considering that our very necessary site upgrade is moving along at snail-like pace. 

Even though we work with the good folks at Commission Junction, I will not be signing up for their new Cooking.com program.  I simply don't want to do business with a company that has so little respect for small business.

Besides, Amazon Kitchen & Housewares and Wal-Mart - Gourmet & Kitchen sell pretty much the same merchandise at very good prices.

March 3, 2005:  Ice Cream Tears  Anyone who knows me at all understands my chief vice is ice cream.  That means yesterday began with joy when I heard CNN mention the 10th anniversary of Yahoo! would be celebrated with free scoops at Baskin-Robbins.

I logged on, printed out my coupon and hit the road.  But my local shop did not honor the promotion, and I was forced to spend the day in tears and sorrow.  Such is life.

Last night, when the family was out for a fast food meal, we ended our dining experience with ice cream at the local Braum's Dairy Store.  Not only will disappointed customers refuse to go back, but they will also write about a negative incident on their weblogs and tell the story the next time they teach a customer service class.   Such is life.

March 8, 2005:  Irish E-Mail  It's a wee bit early for St. Patrick's Day, but you'll want to start celebrating by clicking on the link below - except you can't because the link no longer works and has been removed as of 10/10/2005.  Keep your ears open for the Irish Email song though.  I love Deirdre Flint, and you will too.

March 12, 2005:  Affiliate This  The other night I listened in on a teleseminar featuring Yanik Silver that extolled affiliate marketing as the best way to sell your product, particularly a non fiction book. 

We are affiliated with lots of companies in our effort to support this site.  While the complete list is located on Martha Bear's main or central page, I have scattered ads, which I hope are relevant, throughout our pages and am constantly attempting to improve on this as I s-l-o-w-l-y upgrade our site.  In other words, I know something about affiliate marketing from the other side of the process.

In all honesty, I had dismissed having our own affiliate program as too much work and expense.  But I have this non fiction book that just needs a fast final edit and there's a huge market for it in the world of human resources, so ...

The first step is to finish the book.  No, the first step is to finish the taxes.  Grrr.

March 25, 2005:  Teleseminars  I've been spending hours listening to teleseminars lately.  The first one inferred that publishers could spam their way to Amazon success.  The one I'm listening to right now says Google's Adsense program is the way to riches.  We applied to Adsense and were rejected generically because we were a porn or hate site or for some other reason they didn't specify.  Since we are majorly opposed to porn and spam, we can only hope Google didn't like us because we are not professionally gorgeous.  We need the riches so I've written to Google for guidance.

"We don't want to anger the Google gods."  Joel Comm

Update:  Now we're accepted, so I'm testing Adsense out at the top of this page, the main Quotations page and the Party Dressing page. 

When I clicked on this page, the ads across the top were all for teddy bears, and the ads on the Quotations and Party Dressing pages were error codes! 

Update to the update:  I fixed the Party Dressing page and deleted the Quotations ad entirely.  It looks like it's going to be a long year.

Note to JM:  Do not click on the Google ads to test them as this could get us thrown out of the program.

March 26, 2005:  March Madness  My fun with Google continues.  The ads on our European travel pages come up suggesting hotels in Nancy, a lovely (I'm sure) city in France.  This is not quite what I had in mind.  However, Joel Comm's teleseminar (see above) said I should be able to exclude certain websites from our results.  I hope that extends to topics like hotels in non major destination cities.  Sigh.

Update:  I don't think I'll be able to narrowly focus the ads - too many factors involved.  This means we'll have to trust to the wisdom of the Google gods.

April 5, 2005:  Life Caching  I just found out Jane Marie and I are super trendy life cachers.  Our lives are out there for the perusal of one and all via these websites.  While this was never our initial intent, the writers' dictum, "write what you know," comes to mind.  We did, we do and here we are - along with millions of you to some degree or another.

My information comes from TRENDWATCHING.COM.  This forecasting company, "believes consumers will come to expect that they can relive every experience they've ever had, and have instant access to any life collection they've ever built, giving them a bit of grip on their lives, which are filled with more content, experiences and data than ever before.  And that spells Big Bucks for any marketer or company smart enough to provide consumers with the means to CACHE THEIR LIVES."

April 6, 2005:  Choices  Judas, Benedict Arnold and Vidkun Quisling were traitors whose very names conjure up treachery.  Their lives were serious stuff.

Scientist and author Robert Zubrin knows serious, but his new play about Benedict Arnold and the American Revolution could go either way.  While it's an historically accurate period drama complete with soliloquies, verse and song; in the wrong hands, lines like "Oh John, look, a rocket!  Are the canaille attacking?" could be performed to provoke a less than respectful audience reaction.  Think about the movie within the movie in Singing in the Rain.  I can definitely envision Benedict Arnold, a Drama of the American Revolution in Five Acts being optioned to a Hollywood studio.  This play goes on our next road trip so we can perform it together.

April 14, 2005:  Serenity Now  Did you ever have to refile one of the millions of (OK, one of the four) tax returns you thought you had completed because one lousy line had been omitted?  (False alarm - whew.) 

Did you ever begin another government batch of online paperwork only to discover the e-mail address on file no longer exists?

Did you ever read Revenge of the Sith before the movie came out so you could find out how Anakin Skywalker becames Darth Vader, all the while willing him not to make the wrong choices? 

If so my friend, then you need good news.  Google's Adsense program works.  Just by reapplying and listening to the (March 25 weblog) teleseminar with Joel Comm, we've already managed to earn a few badly needed pennies.  Wahoo!

But it gets better.  Joel himself lives nearby and sent me an e-mail suggesting we might like to tweak the site a bit for even better returns.  And sure enough, we'd like even better returns from Adsense.  So I'm getting Joel's book, Google Adsense Secrets, and you can too by clicking on the link.  It's a small price to pay for some badly needed help.  

April 19, 2005:  Burned on the Brain  Even as I write this, the 10th anniversary of the bombing of the Oklahoma City Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building is being remembered just a few miles from my computer.  I've never been inside the museum at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, and couldn't bring myself to go to the ceremony today.  I don't quite understand my reluctance to join the mourners this morning.  But as the years have rolled by, I do know I haven't got any answers to the questions of 1995:

• Who chooses to hurt a child?

• Who grants himself the power to take a life for fun or vengeance?

• Who allows himself the right to arbitrarily destroy the gifts of nature or the works of man?

While serial killers roam free, when suicide bombers kill the innocent in the name of a horrified God, we yearn to know how to stop their insanities.  But I remain as clueless as you.  God help us. 

The original construction fence remains to hold personal tributes to the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing - photo taken on the night of April 20, 2005.  Please click on the photo to enlarge it.

April 20, 2005:  Blog Basics  Our dear Bonnie asked me for my definition of blogs.  It seemed like a good idea to post my responses here, too.

BLOG - It's an online diary, a web log.  Weblog or blog.  Initially blogs were just diaries, but now companies use them them as marketing tools, to keep employees informed and to test ideas.

The Google Adsense program (ads you see now see across the tops of many of our pages) are content-based, so bloggers with lots of content (which can grow daily) are using their blogs as a way to get revenue.

And, of course, some people just like to share their lives and bad poetry.

My other blogs:

• Beading Diary - beads and jewelry

• One Bear's Blog - Teddy O's campaign to become the unofficial spokesbear of the Oklahoma Statehood Centennial

April 22, 2005:  Thoughtless Cretins  This morning, I happily trotted off to the Yukon Oklahoma Library Book Sale.  I bought four business books and two cookbooks for $5.  So far, so good.

But this evening I started leafing through the cookbooks, only to discover someone had removed pages from both books - in one case, over 80 pages!

What kind of clod removes 80+ pages from a cookbook instead of just keeping it?

And what kind of moron doesn't examine used books closely before she buys them?

April 28, 2005:  Thanks, Mom  Yesterday was our mother's birthday.  We didn't get to celebrate it with her.  We haven't had that option for many years, but if Mom were still in our lives, we would tell her we loved her and needed her wise counsel.  We would share our joys and sorrows.  We would rejoice in the birth of baby Ava (March 2005 newsletter).  We would say, "Thank you for everything."

If you still have your mother, start thinking about what would give her the most joy this upcoming Mother's Day.  And do it.  You never know when the opportunity to do what's in your heart is your last opportunity.  Don't waste it.

May 1, 2005:  May Day, Mayday or Pangalactic Gargleblaster, Stat!  Jane Marie liked Sahara despite the critics, but the critics pretty much praised The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy.  And it that isn't good. 

Not only does this not bode well for the upcoming Revenge of the Sith, but the makers of Hitchhiker's butchered one of my favorite books.  To slightly misquote Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, "They held their lightsabers (and their towels - inside joke) incorrectly."

And although I've read every book (and there are a ton of them) in the Star Wars series, I have to say Revenge of the Sith was the worst.  Bar none.  So where does that leave us?

May 3, 2005:  Triumph Of The Treacle Side  Awk!  I just bought a hat for a teddy bear.  The lace crowd has usurped total power over my brain.  I surrender. 

click on the photo of Teddy O™, our white hat Oklahoma cowboy, to enlarge it

May 11, 2005:  I just wrote "December" here.  What does that tell you?  On Sunday, my beloved husband and partner loaded webroot's Window Washer onto my computer to clean up my system.

That should have been a better thing, however, in October 2003 (October 22, 2003:  Breakfast with Imelda - please scroll down), a nasty virus forced me to partition my hard drive into two parts.  Instead of reformatting, I pretty much quarantined all I had held dear and built anew.  After weeks and weeks of juggling and jerry rigging, I emerged with a healthy system that Window Washer somehow dismantled in a nano second.

It's always a pain to have to reload software (Microsoft made me call them to reregister Windows XP), but resetting up our ponderously huge site on the accursed FrontPage was a terrible experience I hope I got right today.

This is not a rant against Window Washer.  I'm sure it's terrific.  But whenever you use a product of this type, I strongly urge you to back up your data (I hadn't done it for several days) AND do not necessarily use default settings on anything.  Remember my friend Gail's immortal words: Delete and die.

May 12, 2005:  Customer Service  With two expensive kids and a freelance writer's precarious income, I spend more time than I'd like balancing our checkbook online.  Yesterday morning, I noticed an alien check for $140 had cleared our account.  Yesterday afternoon, I could actually see the check.  And it obviously hadn't been written by a member of our household.

After two frantic phone calls to the bank, I was instructed to go to a branch and fill out a fraud report.  I did so, convincing the branch manager I was a lunatic in the process.  But by the time I got home, she had solved the problem: a counter check was filled out by a bank customer and our account number was encoded on it.

The bank screwed up.  The only reason I'm not publishing the name of the bank is I'm not sure that would be in my best interest.

May 13, 2005:  Update to Bank Problem  I still don't have online access to my checking account.  This was supposed to happen by today.  What to do?  

I called the bank's branch.  They told me to call their Express Banking.  Express Banking said I had to physically go to the bank to get my account unfrozen.  Then they said maybe I didn't have to trek back to the branch - just this once. 

My account is now unfrozen.  The bank said they had no policy to compensate me for the hassle (time, trouble, gasoline).  I think I'm supposed to feel ashamed for asking.

June 3, 2005:  Out of Sync We Are  Either Cary and I are nuts, or Revenge of the Sith is terrible.  The dialogue is wooden, and the acting is worse.  Cary did like the sets, but I only coveted one of Padme's costumes.  Tsk, George, tsk.

On the other side of the acting coin, we watched Vera Drake, a beautiful little film about a good-hearted abortionist and her loving family.  No matter what your thoughts are on abortion, you can't help but like Vera.  Though her cynical go-between charges a little over £2 for Vera's services, Vera herself is unaware of the monetary aspect of her illegal trade.  She simply likes to help poor women who can't afford the £100 it would take to secure a legal abortion.  There are lots of levels to Vera Drake but no light sabers.

June 4, 2005:  I Hate Malware  Every since Mother's Day, I've been battling the bad guys of the Internet with daily scans of every file on my computer.  By quarantining (whenever possible) and deleting the villainous varmits, I'm at least one step ahead.  And every once in a while I run the free version of Ad-Aware, though I can't get it to quarantine anything no matter how meticulously I copy the file name.

June 14, 2005:  I Apologize  Our newsletter, Gracious Jane Marie, the Newsletter, went out yesterday with bad links.  Thanks to our wonderful Bonnie for alerting me to the problem, which occurred because dear old FrontPage added file/// (and a bunch of other characters) to over 100 of our links.  I knew this could happen, but I hadn't checked for it in a while, and disaster happened.  Mea culpa.

We're also having a problem with newsletter subscriptions.  Our e-mail distributor, Bravenet.com, does not filter out bad addresses.  I finally realized I have to do this by hand - a long process fraught with opportunities for error.  Don't worry though, you can easily opt-out (please don't).  It's only abandoned addresses that require my attention.  And I'm embarrassed to say I never realized this until now, so we have several to delete next month if they show up as undeliverable mail again.

July 2, 2005:  To Free or Not To Free  I've been spending a lot of time lately launching my new jewelry venture with Luxe Jewels, but I've also been a listener on several conference calls about promoting your site by giving away free articles for use on other sites.  While I can see the logic in getting links back from all over the net - assuming your articles are well researched and well written - I cannot bring myself to write for free beyond the confines this website.

People, even and especially writers, deserve a fair return for their labors.  Maybe new traffic is a fair return.  But if someone wants to read my thoughts on car insurance or the wonders of Florence, they can locate us through a search engine.  I just can't bring myself to devalue the worth of the writing profession.  Content makes a website valuable.  Doesn't it make sense for website owners to pay content creators for their services just like they pay their phone companies or their dish washer repair services?

July 11, 2005:  Seduced by Delusions of Competency or Why I Am Not the Grammar Police  Yesterday, I not only caught myself misspelling "jewelry" again, but I also deluded myself into temporary Internet disgrace.

As you may or may not know, I recently joined Luxe Jewels so I could teach jewelry making via their kits.  I also, of course, began adding detailed ad-like links from this site back to the Luxe site. 

Last evening, it came to me that I should add an apostrophe of possession every time I used a phrase like "Luxe Jewels classes" or "Luxe Jewels consultant."  This morning (like 3:40 a.m.) I realized (and this without the use of my trusty, if dog-eared, Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual) the apostrophes had to go.  In other words, you would write "OU coach" or "Florida author," and "Luxe Jewels consultant" is no different, right?

Having repaired my error, my next step is this public humiliation.  Mea culpa.  Mea culpa.

July 17, 2005:  24 Hours Later  I didn't actually mean to read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince this weekend, but there it was, so I read a few pages here and there, and I'm done.  Done.  I know who the prince is and who dies.  Now I'm free to hold my breath until the final volume in the series is published.

July 20, 2005  Quoth the Mad Web Lackey  I usually lurk on lists, but the other day I added my valuable two cents to a list discussion about teleseminars about book promotion.  While I'm pretty sure - but too lazy to look - I've posted some of these comments on this very page, here's what I wrote.  Why?  Because it will save you time and money.  You're welcome.

I listened in a bunch of these teleseminars a few weeks ago.  I didn't sign up for the programs, but as I recall, the idea is to spam (my word) everyone you know into buying your non fiction book on the same day from Amazon or B&N so the sales surge catches the attention of the powers that be.  The powers become interested in your success and help promote your bestseller.

You also need to build up the content on your site via cheap or free (horrors!) ghostwriters and set up an affiliate program to drive traffic to your site.

Finally, you need to position yourself as an expert in your field. You will make your real money giving lectures.

Or selling your book promotion program to gullible authors.

 

July 31, 2005  I Am the Etiquette Police  When I accepted the assignment to construct and present a course for young teens about etiquette, I had visions of a nice fee and my own bloody evisceration.  The only constant in my dream was the fee, since the students neither killed nor ate me.

I assumed the 15 hours of lessons to be much easier to plan than they were.  There is a lot more to the world of manners than I expected - it's not just which fork, but also how to apply for a job and how to say you're not interested when asked for a dance.

I knew my students would rather be anywhere than in my classroom, and I feared they would be hard to control.  However, they were lambs - bored lambs, but docile.

The kids absorbed as much as they could, and I wish them very well.  And now I must prepare to present my first class in business etiquette to adults.  I'm thinking they won't want to draw elaborate place settings on the board.  Or will they?

August 6, 2005    I've complained a great deal about FrontPage and its penchant for adding useless HTML code to this site.  I yearn for the version that will eliminate all the HTML repetition that clogs the Internet and subverts the pages I try to set up.  Someday, somehow, Bill and company will give me the FrontPage of my dreams and their advertisements.  Or I will win a lottery and be able to hire a company that will clean up the mess underneath the pages you see.  I'm betting on the lottery.

And don't tell me to convert to Dreamweaver - that strips out all the details and would leave the text of our almost 800 pages naked and ashamed.

Also, the barrister from the Bank of Scotland who promised me an inheritance of millions in strangely bad English did not write back when I asked him for his CV and other personal information.  I was counting on that money to tide me over until I actually won a lottery, so who do I trust now? 

August 20, 2005:  Link That!  When I first started this blog, I wrote every day, but as the hats on my head have not only increased in number but also in size (more responsibility - not a swollen head, thank you), I find myself on this page only when the topic is mega important.

Today, I want to write a short rant on link farms.  Because of the size (now 800 pages) and breadth of our site, we cover a lot of topics.  And almost every day I get an e-mail from someone who has put a link to us on his or her site and demand one back from us.

Not going to happen any more.

All the search engine experts say the only links that count with them are long-term quality links like the ones we've scattered through our pages.  Not those on long lists that can be found on a page entitled "links" that no has ever accessed.

So stop sending me e-mails, you link farmers.  Cease and desist.

August 31, 2005:  Code Choking  I spent the morning wrestling with a bunch of HTML gibberish courtesy of Shutterfly, an otherwise wonderful company (more info in the right column, scroll up) that offers all kinds of fun for people who like to take photos.  For some reason their banner ads were producing offspring on this site that served no purpose and took up hundreds of lines on the underside of our web pages.

I think I've cleaned it all out, but even if I did, something else on the site will, no doubt, be doing the same thing to us.  There is no way I can keep up with all the outrageous slings and arrows, so let's all cry for Nancy.

September 11, 2005:  Meltdown  Between massive internal computer problems and the horrendous news from the Gulf Coast, I've been neglecting all my weblogs.  But like December 7, we will never forget this date.

"What could offer better protection against the forces of darkness - internal, external, eternal - than light and warmth?"  Elizabeth Kostova,  The Historian

  more quotations   mini book review of The Historian

Donate: American Red Cross   Article: Choosing a Charity

September 21, 2005:  On Target  The CDO and I agree Target commercials are consistently the best we've ever seen.  If (when) I win a lottery, their award-winning advertising company, Peterson Milla Hooks, will become our ad agency.

In the meantime, a warning.  I logged onto my checking account yesterday to discover someone in Tallahassee had been using my husband's check card and pin number to empty our account.

Cary still has physical possession of the card, but hasn't been to Florida since June.  Ordinarily, one could assume he was a victim of a phishing scam, but he knows better than to respond to an urgent online request for personal information.  He's a financial professional for heaven's sake.

Fortunately, our ever vigilant bank (see May 12 and 13 entries) is on the job.  We can expect to get our money back in up to 10 business days, and it only took four phone calls to discover that Cary had to initiate the recovery process by filling out an affidavit in the actual bank.  I guess the first three people I spoke with didn't want to trouble me with the information that nothing (N-O-T-H-I-N-G) happens in these cases without that affidavit.

Talk about on target security and customer service.

September 23, 2005 Outstanding Customer Service  I have always been a believer in the call-yourself-a-goddess-and-you-are-a-goddess school of self aggrandizement.  I certainly didn't get to be Lord High Executioner around here the hard way.  But I take exception to following statement by McAfee:

"McAfee is famous for its dedication to customer satisfaction."

Despite numerous uninstalls, rebootings, reinstalls, hard drive searches and muttered curses, I am unable to run an antivirus scan on my computer.  My McAfee VirusScan seems to be catching baddies before they can destroy my life, but when I try to run a scan, I get an error message that the version of Viruscan I am using and my new operating system are incompatible.

Since this particular computer has alway run Windows XP and since I keep downloading VirusScan from McAfee's personal website with no version options, I have been stymied.

But never fear.  That aforementioned McAfee customer service will help me out.

Yeah, right.

• The McAfee site is hard to navigate.

• You have to practice, yes practice, posting to the McAfee message board!  Honest.

• And then you have to hope someone who knows about this problem will be able to help.  I'm still waiting.

• Oh, and McAfee sent me a notice the other day that it had automatically renewed itself since my subscription was due to expire in October.  (This isn't October.)

And I still don't have all my money back from the bank mentioned in my last posting to this page.

Kind of makes you wish you taught customer service classes so you could expound at length about all the shining examples abounding in our lives.  (Wait.  Wait.  I do.)

October 2, 2005:  Software Dream  If you can write code, you could probably make a fortune with a program that cleans up bad HTML without removing formatting.  This stuff from our Press page, all courtesy of FrontPage, needs to go:

</p>
<p align="center">&nbsp;</p>
<p align="center">
</p>
<p align="center">

and this:

<p align="center"><align="center">

and this:

 <font face="Times New Roman">
</font>

I could go on, but then this page would be as packed with useless, space-wasting junk as our source HTML is.  My hope is someone will write a cleanup program that will free us from all the Internet clogging stuff on our site.  Until I can buy that dream program, I will work on our problem one ^#@*ing line at a time.  Sorry, Internet.
 

October 11, 2005:  Lock Out at the Post Office   I exit the post office, get into my car and discover the ignition is locked - I can't even turn the key.  So I pull out the manual and after 10 minutes of reading and cursing and experimenting, I decide the officially programmed car key has been de-programmed.  What to do?

I walk home - it's about a mile and a half - good exercise but there are no sidewalks, it's just rained and 50 mph traffic is coming at me.  Still, our CDO arrives home from school, Cary's (hopefully) programmed key will do the trick and the Ford dealer says the system resets itself in 20 minutes.  I grab a bio of Ivan the Terrible just in case I have to have the car towed to the dealer and we're off.

No need for Ivan, Cary's key works!  I am once more queen of the road.  Wahoo!   

Moral - Read your manual.  You don't want to learn all about your car's really cool anti-theft system in the parking lot of a post office.

October 13, 2005:  Do the Right Thing  I'm glad this is a Thursday the 13th, or I could be in for way more grief than I'm expecting.  Here's the story:

I've been spending a fair amount of time trolling through PayPal's shopping cart lately.  Yesterday, I realized that even though there are many sales tax levying entities within the state of Oklahoma, I only get to input one [1] amount into the PayPal shopping cart system for sales tax collection purposes.  This is the amount that I will charge any resident of the state of Oklahoma who makes an online purchase from my VeryShinyObjects.com's jewelry pages.

In an effort not to defraud my customers, I have been using the lowest common sales tax figure for the state on the premise that I would eat the difference should a customer wish his or her purchase to be shipped somewhere in Oklahoma with a higher per cent of sales tax than I'm using.  Apparently, this is wrong.  It gives me an unfair advantage should someone else copy my original design (don't even think about it) for Briseis N104 and wish to compete against me.

   click on the photo to enlarge it

Mike, my fourth contact at the Oklahoma Tax Commission, is going to call me back when his agency figures out what I can do.  [Mike called back when I wasn't home and we never were able to speak again.]

As I see it, I could charge Oklahoma customers the highest possible sales tax and refund any overages, but I'm pretty sure this is illegal.

I could go out of business online.  Nooooooo.

Or I keep keep on doing what I'm doing until the powers that be fix the problem.  This is my favorite solution.  But just to keep things interesting I made some test purchases online.

On Oklahoma's own Eskimo Joe website, I set up a test purchase of a $24 item.  When I gave my correct address and zip, Joe's shopping cart said it would charge me $2.06 in sales tax.  My sales tax should have been figured at $2.01. 

Then I switched my address to Manitou (I don't know where it is either, but I plan to visit as soon as the price of gas goes down) Oklahoma whose zip is 73555.  Joe did not charge test-Manitou-resident-me any sales tax whatsoever!

I also tested a purchase of $58.66 at

  They wanted to charge me $5.04 in sales tax.  It should have been $4.91!

If Wal-Mart and Eskimo Joe can't get it exactly right, how is Nancy supposed to?  Can you say "can of worms"?   

October 20, 2005  Big Apology 

Dear Newsletter Subscribers,

You already know I sent out our Gracious Jane Marie Newsletter twice yesterday.  I'm so sorry.

Nancy

PS for those who want to know what happened:  I sent out the newsletter before lunch and when my own issue still hadn't come several hours latter, I decided I had hit the wrong key - very possible since I never learned the keyboard (and you wondered why this site is so full of errors?!).

Bravenet, the company that handles the mechanics of newsletter subscriptions for us, has a little notice saying ezine delivery could take several hours depending on the queue.  Since we've always had almost instantaneous delivery, I ignored the notice.  Mea culpa.

PPS We got our first e-mail back marked as spam.  I wrote to the webmaster this morning and asked why.  You all know we have a double opt-in subscription system and can't spam anyone.  Woe is me.

October 30, 2005:  Heroes' Day  The death of Rosa Parks reminded me of an idea I had years ago when there was a great deal of controversy about the celebration of Columbus Day.  (Italians love it, Native Americans not so much.)

Why don't we choose one day a year when people everywhere could celebrate their personal heroes?

My heroes - and the list has changed over the years - include these:

• Rosa Parks, who changed American history by refusing to give in to a shameful and degrading demand

• Mother Theresa, who spent her life helping others

• The Dalai Lama, who leads his people - both spiritual and political - from a dignified and loving exile

• Nelson Mandela, who could have been bitter and vindictive after his years in prison, but choose instead to attempt to heal the racial divide that sadly persists in South Africa

• Martin Luther King, Jr., who gave his life for racial equality

• Robert F. Kennedy because I remember the day he was shot, and it felt like the death of hope

There are others I hold in high esteem, but you get the idea.  While I don't see sports figures or entertainers as heroic simply because of their jobs and talents, you might.  By setting one day a year aside for each of us to devote to those people we'd like to emulate, perhaps we could all join together and be better people.

November 10, 2005:  Sure Thing  I just read that Ryanair, a discount European airline, is thinking of providing each passenger with a personal gambling device.  They expect this would bring in so much money they wouldn't need to charge for the flights!

What are we thinking of, people?

Of course, I can't wait until Oklahoma rolls out Powerball in January, so book a seat for Nancy, Ryanair.

November 18, 2005:  The Worst, Worst, Worst  Every woman who owns a coat hates a visit to the ladies room.  Some sadistic architect, some (no doubt) man who never carried a purse or a baby designed stall doors on 90% of public restrooms to open inwards to prevent us from savagely battering each other with outward opening doors, I guess.  This means you and your purse can't fit through the door opening easily. 

My personal award for the absolute worst public restroom goes to the Cleveland Airport.  The other day I had to maneuver two pieces of carry on luggage in and out of one of those restroom stalls, and I almost got stuck.  (No, I do not weigh 500 pounds, thank you very much.)

Now as I look back on Cleveland, I do not think fondly of Lake Erie or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  Instead, I think of the frustration and embarrassment of jamming my self and my belongings into a tiny cubicle made much much smaller by an inward opening door.

I call upon the schools of architecture of the world to admit more women - or at least more men with common sense.  This intolerable and inept design trend cannot stand - and it certainly has trouble sitting.

December 8, 2005:  Arrrrghhhhhh  I just did a random search for greenlightwrite on Yahoo! and came up with a page that doesn't even exist anymore.  And when you refresh it, it stays the same (because it doesn't exist.  Duh.

We ask the search engines not to store our old pages.  Why, why won't they listen?

December 20, 2005:  Gates of Swell  Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are the Time Magazine people of the Year for their charity work.  And I just found out the Egyptian Book of Gates [right column, scroll up] "was written to guide the deceased king [pharaoh] through the various doors and gates that guard the passages to the Underworld," according to Egypt In Spectacular Cross-Section by Stephen Biesty.  I'm sure that's cosmic.

more about Egypt

• Cleopatra

• Nefertiti

December 27, 2005:  Taxes or Titles  I'm supposed to be doing paperwork, so I have naturally been surfing the net.  Did you know the UK's Prince Phillip is 493rd in line for his wife's throne?  Or that you must be legitimate to inherit in Monaco?  Life is rough for the royals, isn't it?

December 28, 2005:  What is Gimpsy Smoking?  We just got another rejection letter from the good folks at Gimpsy.  They will not be including this site in their collection of all that's wise and wonderful on the Internet because

Gimpsy staff have made the following comment:
The site appears to be a collection of links redirecting to other
sites on the web.

Since we have over 800 pages of original content, we are stumped.  Have we been rejected because our pages link to one another?  Are we being confused with another site?  We can't imagine the problem, but we can't reapply to Gimpsy until January 27, so I, for one, will hold my breath until then. 

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