Day 3 of the Great Moan. Cold/flu things continues. Mood: generally bitchy. Activity: generally sleep and nose blowing. Ugh ... I'm too freakin' irritable to write this now ... Make it stop! Make it stop!

Well, the Cocktail page certainly needs some cleaning up. I haven't linked to it for a while. Today, I linked from a home page blurb and discovered a very old look to the page. Numerous apologies for it's appearance. When time allows, I'll fix it. And speaking of fixing things ...

I swear, I'm never adding new programs to my computer ever again. (I've said this before.) I tried Yahoo Messenger 5 and nothing but frozen screens, crashes and heaven knows what all else. I think it's a problem of the firewall really disliking it intensely. Whatever it is, it seems anytime I add something new it buggers up everything else.

By the way, re: my moans and groans about fall on the home page, I was in Vancouver yesterday and it was warm and sunny and damn 'em all for it! It's cold and crappy here!

A Little Something About Basic Web Effectiveness

Not that anyone cares a lot about this, but ... I went to a site and, waiting for it to load, I see it's also loading a popup ad. Tiresome, annoying but not unusual these days. But here's the thing: Suddenly a window pops up and asks if I want to run Flash 6. Apparently I don't have the latest version. But here's the question ... why would I update just so I can see an ad?

I said no and now I had a popup window (the ad itself) which, except for a blank yellow box in the centre, was empty. It didn't even have text saying who the company was or the name of the product. Nothing.

So ... why did these guys spend money creating and running this ad? Yes, there are loads of people on the Web with more recent versions of Flash and capable of running the popup. But there are many more who don't. Why run an ad when half the audience can't see it? It's not that it's in Flash; it's that it's in a version of Flash that isn't ubiquitous on the Web yet. It's like making a television ad and then running it in only some markets. Why exclude half your potential audience when you don't need to?

And this doesn't even touch on the question of how effective a popup is to begin with. Yes, there are all sorts of marketing guys who will throw numbers at you about the effectiveness of popup ads but very rarely do they have numbers that show a relationship between how many people click on an ad and how many actually ending up buying a product or service. Return On Investment (ROI) is the only stat that matters and this is the one they can't show.

Anyway ... it seems a huge waste of everyone's time and money. This popup was similar to grabbing someone, harrassing them by yelling, "Listen to me! Listen to me!" and when they, irritated, finally say, "What on earth do you want?" the answer is, "Uh ... I don't know."

What a world. I saw a news item today about a report concerning kids, tv and behaviour problems. The report recommended parents encourage their children to, "...participate in active peer relationships." Huh? Does that mean something like make a few friends? When I was younger, I don't recall ever having active peer relationships. All I had was friends.

Maybe the behaviour problems have more to do with the behavior of adults who can't communicate like real people. What kind of bonehead talks about active peer relationships? Whoever these clowns are, I'll bet they're the life of the party. I'll bet they have loads of active peer relationships.

On this day, one year after, I am most struck by the gap between what the media would have us feel and what people I meet really feel. This bears some scrutiny, but not tonight. It's too late and I'm too tired. But I'm thinking it may be time to finally talk about this business since what others are saying, more and more, simply pisses me off by the self-serving nature of the sentiments.

Yes, I'm slow with the updates. Except for some images. I have been watching new movies, though. None particularly overwhelming, but not awful either. The reason for the lack up updates is the addition of a cd-rewriter to my set up here. As usual, all kinds of issues due to the fact I'm stuck with a Microsoft O/S and not nearly enough RAM. I've been meaning to get more RAM since time began but, frankly, tooling with and tweaking my computer is a pain in the ass. I'm not a techno-guy. I just want someone to, "Make it go." Problem is, I'm the someone.