sad

i'm sad.

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I'm back and further reflections

Offline for four days, or was it five? I'm re-amazed every time how easily I adapt to a world sans net. Sans keyboard. Sans even writing. Especially when I go to Rochester, where, except for the weather, life is simpler than it is here in the megalopolis of atlanta.

The first funniest part is driving. How in other places, people work together on a highway to make sure no one dies. How in Atlanta, it's you versus me, and if I don't look in my rear-view mirror, it doesn't count if what I do kills you.

I was telling george, it's like the motto of Rochester in all things is: We do our job. On the highways, in the schools, shoveling snow, work, shopping, cooking, whatever. It is an industrial age town caught in time between how things were and how things are. I don't know what will happen to a place that has lost so many jobs from defections of Kodak, Xerox, and Baush & Lomb and soon General Motors that the University of Rochester is now the largest employer. But when you've lived in hyperthrillville of "the city that doesn't hate" (now: "every day is an opening day") for a dozen years, feeling good about getting by and surviving another blizzard sounds kind of nice.

I visited my dad's grave for the first time in a decade. My grandmother's for the first time ever. They're together in the family plot. I hadn't seen the big stone with her name on it. I try not to fill in the the name for the remaining spot in my head, the empty one. Never mind.

----

My dad's headstone is overgrown with grass, clumped around the edges so you might miss his stone altogether, one solid clump of sleeping winter green covering up the cross at the top of the headstone.

I don't understand. Look around: The Tomaselli's are so well groomed, and the Fischers. Maybe it's the family's job. With all the death and dying, I forgot to learn who manicures the headstone. I think that job has been bought and paid for.

Whatever--I cry.

I have no tools. I'm a tourist.

But I have the key to the PT Cruiser rental car in my hand. That's all, except for the Kleenex, which is soaked and yellowed now.

Kneeling, I use the key to dig, a crude edger carving a path around marble, shove my fingers deep until I feel the stone's edge, and pull away dirt, grass, clumps. Three more sides to go.

The grooves in the key fill with dirt. I don't care.

When I finish, I see the grave of someone dead too long.

Family doesn't come often. The least visited is the least tended to.

My uneven uncovering of unforgiving marble makes this all the more obvious.

The dampness remains on the stone too long covered.

I brush away twigs and broken limbs, collect two pinecones to bring home, and say I love you still.

Tags: going home, death, dying, remembering = Powered by Qumana

Let's see how we do... thanks to blogger support

Over the last two weeks, this blog has gone through more poking and prodding than a proctologist's girlfriend (i dunno, just let it go) at the hands of Jason and the gang at blogger.com technical support.

If anyone's blog would get the bird flu, it would be mine.

How fitting.

Seriously, allied came down with the malady the likes of which no one, with their high-tech eyes and MILLIONS of blogs, had seen before. I like to call it blogus interuptus. Readers would attempt to do their daily deed here and be abruptly  interrupted by a blank screen.

RSS worked. Feeds were fine. You could get to any individual page, but not main URL. In essence, mine became the first no-blog, RSS-only weblog on the net. No blog at all, just RSS. Nothing but feed. How slick is that?

Except I didn't want to be slick. I wanted my house back.

SO, Jason and his team have now done everything humanly possible, and then some, to get this place cleaned up and running. The next couple of days will tell a lot. I'll be on vacation, so blogging will be light. Hopefully, you'll still be able to get here.

And I want to thank the blogger.com/google folks for stepping up and trying to sort this out. AND for the folks that spoke up for me and this blog when it was broken.

Tags: blogger, google, blogging, allied, jason = Powered by Qumana

Big News for Qumana, Bigger News for Lycos

If there is something that can help rejuvinate the legendary Lycos' positioning versus The Newer Bigger Guys, it's today's news from Lycos re: Qumana:

Lycos, Inc. (www.lycos.com), a leading media destination for creators and consumers of quality content, today announced a new desktop blog editing tool, powered by Qumana, making blogging easier and more profitable for bloggers everywhere.

With the new Lycos-Qumana Desktop Blog Editor (http://lycos.qumana.com/), Lycos enhances the freedom of blogging, allowing users to publish to their Tripod and Angelfire Blogs on Lycos, as well as to other major blogging sites, from the desktop. Additionally, the Lycos-Qumana Desktop Blog Editor works with Qumana’s Qads, an integrated ad program, allowing bloggers to insert ads into their blogs, while revenue from these ads is shared with the bloggers.

In a landscape of hyper-acquisitions and VC bulimia, it's nice to see an old-school-netco-meets-web-2.0 alliance where both companies gain--and so do their end users, especially those million++ Tripod and Angelfire folks who now have easy access to a super-easy blogging platform.

More on the alliance on the Qumana blog and at Jeremy's place..

Cool cool news.

Pass it on: Lycos just got lucky. ;-)

Tags: Lycos, Qumana, Search, Blogging, Tech = Powered by Qumana

cgm, ugc, ppm, pms, let's call the whole thing off.

Hey, I got them off of "consumer-generated media" back in January. Look on the bright side already. A rose by any other name... ;-)

Tags: bad marketing terms = Powered by Qumana

congrats to the bubbleshare bubblewrap contest winners!

Check out the winning entries from our recent BubbleShare BubbleWrap Appreciation contest. You're gonna dig em. And they're pretty fond of BS too.

The Winner of the iPod Nano is Brandon of One Child Left Behind. I'm a frequent reader of One Child now and glad to have found Brandon's blog, and our other winners' blogs, through the contest. That's the best thing about being on this end of a contest--you get to find new folks to read that you might have never happened on otherwise.

Check out Brandon's take from his side of the contest. You sorta gotta know the guy. ;-) When Joey told me that Brandon had chosen "satiragram" for his free domain, courtesy of Tucows, I thought: Hmm, makes sense. Satire. Satiragram. Sending a telegram of satire. Nice. Depressing. Nice.

Wasn't 'til I read Brandon that i got why he really chose satiragram. heh.

And the guy never heard of Scoble til last week.

What all of that means is not the reason I'm ending this post with: If you're a photo buff or frequent photo sharer, BS's new Desktop BubbleBar is right up your alley. We did that weird thing-->put out a release on it. Which makes it easy for me to say: read more here!

BONUS LINK: I don't CARE if you've seen this already. RB sent it and he wonders if everyone over 12 has seen it but i don't think so BECAUSE I ALMOST WET MYSELF. SO watch it.

la la la la la la...

luckiest bear around

i would not mind being a stuffed bear in this house. you get to do some beary beary cool things. like eat toast and watch tv.

{mmmmm, magic genie, mmmmmake me a bear!}

didn't work.

crap.

blogdisappeario

Everytime you go away,
You take a piece of me with you.
-- daryl hall


Jason with Blogger.com support has been a champ over the last week and a half. And you know it has to be true if it comes out of these hatin' lips: Blogger folks have been working very hard to figure out WTF is wrong with my blog. Last night they think they may have hit on something that makes sense. So stay tuned and please stay patient, and if you miss something, check jeneane.net, my soon-to-be-home for all the news that's fit to pimp, or something. I haven't quite figured it out yet.

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Q makes it easy to cross post

A great part about using Qumana right now, as we sort out why allied has been disappearing and I play with blogging on wordpress, is that it makes cross posting to different blogs on different platforms painless and so fast.

It's as easy as writing the post and choosing allied from the drop-down menu, publishing, then selecting jeneane.net from the drop-down menu and publishing there. It doesn't matter that one blog's on Blogger and one's on Wordpress. It just works.

I never figured I'd need a feature like that. I've been kind of a type-in-the-url person forever. But when you're trying to keep one blog going and one blog starting, it's pretty freaking neat!

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Ra-Cha-Cha Bound

Can't really imagine who would head NORTH instead of SOUTH on spring break, except me and jenna, who are heading off to visit family in Rochester, NY this thursday through monday. I'm really weighing the pros/cons of NOT taking my laptop. Votes?

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The Rest Get the Best

Converseon makes the smartest new hire move I've seen in the whole of web 2.0 bru-ha-ha by bringing on board class act and new media smartguy, Constantin Basturea. I'm a little disappointed that Constantin won't be running the entire PR industry, but will DELIGHT in following (and referring clients to) his new adventure.

smart move by what must be a smart firm.

Tags: constantin basturea, converseon, PR, tech, new media, social media, new PR wiki = Powered by Qumana

Tell it like it is.

"Godin is fetishizing the bossman - the love of the Corporation trounces all other loves, including the crass love that is born of the declasse need of filthy lucre. This is the clean, self-enslaving hard love of White Respect from the guy who drives a Sunday car worth more than your mortgage. This is love of the workplace, of the Gaze of the fellow citizen of the corporate state, which has no citizens, the burning endless gamed homemade shitforbrains give-it-to-me-one-more-time Amurikan Maleasshole. Takes all that respect home and mows his lawn."

--tom matrullo

That's so good i can't leave it in quirky Blogger comments.

Tags: Tom Matrullo, Seth Godin, Amerika, Lost Wages, MONEY, Innovation My Ass = Powered by Qumana

Just Skyped AUDIO to Jon above North Dakota

Jon Husband of Qumana just called from just above North Dakota via skype, on a Lufthansa jet bound for Paris. Freaking AMAZING! Free. Clear. Ear to Ear.

I could hear Jon better than I can hear Albert on the ground in Toronto, or George on his cell phone from the grocery store, for that matter. Oh LORDIE I love the net.

Think I should let Lufthansa know that they'll be arriving ahead of schedule? I heard the captain say so as he made the announcements.

Tags: qumana, jon husband, lufthansa, lufthansa wireless, skype, WOW = Powered by Qumana

Until you grow up and get real.

Seth Godin says that money is a demotivator in the workplace -- at least in the form of bonuses. I guess in terms of salary increases too given the lead of his post:

"It's not about the money."

Usually, when people say this, they are lying.

Except, it turns out, at work.

Money, it's been shown time and time again, is a demotivator. I'm not talking about a fair or even generous salary. Being a cheapskate is no way to find a great employee. But once people have joined your team, incremental money--bonuses and the like--usually demotivate people. They demotivate because sooner or later, people feel as though they're being treated unfairly.

Exsqueezeme?

Thanks, Seth. What HR department isn't going to hang THIS news on the wall next to the fair labor practices bulletin and minimum wage posters?

Money is the reason most grown-ups work for a living. If creativity and love were all we needed, we wouldn't be working in corporations AT ALL. Most of us would be either relaxing on a tropical island or chasing our dreams and opening animal shelters and orphanages around the world.

I have participated in bonus programs that were well thought-out, fair, and well received. I have also participated in bonus programs that were LAME, funded with pretend money that was never intended to wind up in the savings account or college funds of employees.

With the draw to independent living and work (thank you, Interweb), corporations have to find NEW and BETTER ways to motivate employees to stay -- and that INCLUDES MONEY. Try telling employees with mortgages, families, kids, pets -- in other words, real-world responsibilities -- that the chance to work on a new project should be reward enough and see how fast the revolving door can spin.

People who really and truly love their jobs are in every single industry. And people who do great work because they love their jobs are paid at every salary level. What they have in common is a boss that gives them respect and freedom and responsibility. A boss that listens when they have something to say. Which, not coincidentally, is exactly the way the best companies treat their customers, too.

They also have managers who act as advocates in making sure they are compensated and incented properly.

Do you want to reward creativity? Then tie bonuses to innovation. But don't you dare take the sweat and intellectual flesh of your employees, pat them on the head, give them a plaque with a flaming torch on it and call it a day.

Tags: seth godin, bonuses, incentive, tech, employee relations, HR, MBOs, Incentive, Creativity = Powered by Qumana

I think they're wrong

i turned off comments and republished and it STILL disappeared.

wtf.

Blogger Throes and Wordpress Knows

 jeneane.net /  jeneane.net /  jeneane.net /  jeneane.net

I don't blame the folks working on the "problem" with this Blogger blog -- really. They are great people.

But for crying out loud, you can't keep a blog from disappearing with Google's resources behind you? What. What?

For me, this is like trying to start my car and having the Highly Annoying problem of it not starting and not being able to go where I walked out of the house with my keys intending to go.

SO, what they they HAVE uncovered is the possibility that as soon as someone leaves a comment here, the blog disappears.

Isn't that ironic for a chick who was just bitching about not getting comments.

damned if you do, damned if you don't - the stuff madness is made of.

THAT is why I have turned off comments for now. To see if it helps or not, and if it does help, I'll find another comment utility. Or go back to YACCS.

In the mean time, I'll be writing over at my adjacent wordpress blog, jeneane.net. Come and play with me there until they figure out what's wrong over here. And maybe longer.

Tags: Blogger support, wordpress, tech, blogging, Jeneane Sessum, jeneane.net = Powered by Qumana

weirdest damn thing ever

So ten years ago we bought this house that we still live in, right, and poor 30somethings that we were, we set out to paint the inside, up down and sideways, ourselves. Now you may not know George personally, but you should know that he would rather not do something than do it half-assed, which means, you guessed it, he sanded (ask him about taping the shop vac to his forearm to suck down the dust as he used the electric sander) and we primed all of the rooms -- the whole damn house -- before painting the two coats of paint necessary to make it look good.

Which it DID look. Ten years ago.

Unfortunately, the little exercise RUINED both of our right shoulders and we vowed never to do it again, which is why our walls look like homemade shit today.

But back to the shoulder thing.

For the last TEN years I've suffered with pain in my right shoulder every day and every night. To lift my arm near or above shoulder height has been something I avoid at best, and suffer through mostly.

I sleep with two pillows under my right arm so that no pressure is on my right shoulder when I sleep on my right side. It hurts. It always hurts. I live with it.

Today, I was talking to my sister as she put some things in the back of my van, and I had my right arm on the headrest of the passenger's seat. She was saying, "Look at these pants I got for Jenna," and I twisted WAY back putting my right shoulder in a raised, painful predicament, then I stretched even further backward, when, suddenly: SNAP, ZING, GASP something popped in my shoulder and the zing of pain literally knocked the wind out of me for a second after which I anticipated SEARING pain. I heald my breath or it held me.

The pain didn't come.

And all of a sudden I realized in the quiet between anticipation and what-is: HOLY HECK, MY SHOULDER DOESN'T HURT ANYMORE.

For the first time in 10 years. It didn't hurt!

Could it have been out of place all of these years? I mean, can that possibly be? Through childbirth and carrying baby and swimming and getting laid off and blogging and grieving and all the stuff I've done over the last decade?

What happened? How? And can it possibly last?

For now, I'm celebrating. I can't believe it. It really and truly doesnt hurt.

holy holy cow, thank you Jesus, amen.

Tags: Rotator Cuff, Shoulder, Snap, Jesus, Holy Heck = Powered by Qumana

With Apologies to Frank Paynter

THIS is perhaps the cutest dog I have ever seen.

It all makes sense now.

Werner Vogels has revealed that he is Strumpette. In the blogbreaking announcement, Vogels said that he was simply trying to put some "warm and fuzzy" back into blogging.

AMAGATOR - go ahead, make my day.

amagration's an idea i left in werner vogels' comments - see it's an actual GOOD use for RSS, the particular technology which seems to be the only way to consistently read this blog now that it's taken to disappearing several times a day. so amagration (or amagation--heck i don't know a big alligator with a book or something) is this awesome new concept where by amazon builds the world's BEST aggregator where PLOP they're on the desktop of the customer -- or optionally it's web-based on amazon.com -- and using this amagator or whatever we call it, customers can use the power of RSS not to visit other people online in their blog homes, but instead to get the latest author interviews, book reviews that THEY care about, product price changes that THEY care about, posts from authors THEY care about, research on topics THEY care about, and even feeds from related sites outside of amazon.

MAN WHAT IF you could subscribe to "Search Inside This Book" via RSS, so it's not just multiple instances of "borderline personality disorder" within a specific book, but multiple instances of BPD across EVERY book. It's an RSS feed to the amazon TAG for BPD that means EVERY mention inside EVERY book (current and future) inside Amazon flies itself into your amagator. On your desktop or inside amazon. Take your pick.

THAT'S how blogging fits. ALL KINDS of cool ways. And think of how the little feature above would help BLOGGERS at large with a STOREHOUSE of new fodder for writing.

because a lot of amazon's customers could benefit from blog fringe activies (i.e., beyond write-and-post), and they don't even know WTF RSS is. Or what podcasting is. Or what aggregators are.

And with truly two-way feeds, right, then customers can feed comments BACK to those folks who care about what they have to say (merchants, amazon itself, other reviewers, etc.). baby slap THAT on my desktop. I now live with you 24x7 amazon, and how much more likely am I to BUY YOUR SHIT now?

there's your roi.

Tags: werner vogels, amazon, scoble, israel, naked conversations, blogging, dave winer, rss, holy shit = Powered by Qumana