Jason’s Random Thoughts

Happy Birthday to you,
It’s amazing how you grew.
Happy Birthday,
(It’s a work day),
But Happy Birthday to you!

Two years ago today, Jason’s Random Thoughts was officially born. Though it was originally put together on a simple Synology DS-106j NAS device sitting atop my refrigerator, this blog has been the stepping stone to re-shaping my online identity. In this time, there have been almost 700 posts, 20,000 spam comments, 1,800 real comments and 450,000 visitors (not including scrapers, search engines and every other type of non-human “visitor”).

I never really expected it to survive this long.

Okay … Now What?

Since getting married this past May, I have not really had the opportunity to put a lot of content on here. On top of this, the subjects have been a little stale or written without a proper second reading. While there are several reasons for this, none of them are appropriate for this post. That said; one of my goals for Season Three of j2fi.net is to improve both the quality of the writing, as well as the content. I’ve been working on a new writing style for some other sites and, when I think about the direction I’d like to take on here, it seems only natural to give it a try. What this means for anyone who reads this site regularly is that the writing will become a little more creative, focusing less on ranting and more on providing. This doesn’t mean that I will not complain about things that bother me, however, rather than type out a poorly laid out gripe on a given subject, the article will focus more on looking at first as a narrative and perhaps followed by some type of editorial-style piece. I’ve been practicing this on some other sites, and the results are rather positive.

However, these other sites will continue to remain anonymous, as will the pseudonym that has been slowly building a following. Eventually it will all come to light … but the social experiment is not yet half finished.

Passive Income Streams

There has been some advertising on j2fi.net since the spring of 2007 and, despite the amount of effort I’ve put into earning an income online through various ventured, I’ve managed to collect a grand total of $710 USD. Some of the arrangements I’ve made have yielded nothing more than a goose-egg, while others have offered enough to pay for site upgrades and server additions. That said, after a few email exchanges with Nick Ramsay, I’ve decided to make a more concentrated effort at earning an online income. While j2fi.net will not be the host of this money-making scheme, you can be sure that I’ll promote and talk about it from time to time on here.

Who knows … it might just earn enough money for me to cut back to “part-time” at my day job

In any event, I’ll be eliminating a few of the non-paying programs from this site. That should reduce loading times by a good fraction of a second.

Giving Back … Kinda

I’ve mentioned that I regularly guest post on other sites, and it’s something that I enjoy quite a bit. Not only does it offer the chance to write about subjects that might not really fit in with the hodgepodge of articles on this site, but it offers the opportunity to build stronger relationships with people online. To mark the beginning of j2fi’s 3rd Season, I’d like to offer my services as a guest poster on your site. All I ask is that you contact me and let me know what subject you’d like the post to discuss, and approximately how long it should be. Once we get the basics worked out, I’ll try to have something submitted before the end of the week. A link back to this site will not be necessary, so long as my name is left on the article.

On that note … Nick, if you’re still interested in that UTF-8 post, just let me know. Although it was technically resolved with the release of WordPress 2.3, there are many people that started their blogs on previous versions and are now stuck with the less-forgiving database structures.

Alright … on to year three!

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As the old saying goes; when it rains, it pours. This was the case for me yesterday when it came to the application I use to read the 60+ RSS feeds that I’m subscribed to. I use an application on my HP iPaq called Egress, and it’s perfect for me because I can download updated feeds from wherever an internet connection exists, and follow the current trends and topics that abound across the blogosphere and on various news sites. However, yesterday there was a slight hiccup with the system and the main channels file which contains the feeds I’ve subscribed to became corrupt. This usually isn’t a problem as I create backups of my PDA every Sunday and Thursday but, unbeknownst to me, the backup file was corrupt and the software I’ve been using to archive my mobile device has been failing regularly for over five weeks without notification.

Of course, this is completely my fault for not paying closer attention to my automated backups, but it was an unwelcome sight nevertheless.

So, taking this as the perfect opportunity to clean up my subscriptions, I went about re-entering 43 of the 67 RSS feeds I had subscribed to. What about the other 14, you ask? Good question. These feeds had started to fall off my radar due to the changes they had made regarding RSS delivery.

See, because I rarely read a post while connected to the internet, I’m limited in the amount of secondary information sometimes required to read a post. Take, for example, the one of the originating WordPress developer’s blogs. While his RSS numbers are through the roof, it’s impossible to read while on the go because the post is really just a few sentences referencing other websites through the use of two or more links. How the heck can a mobile reader participate or otherwise be aware of a subject when they’re forced to visit two or three sites (on a portable device) before understanding the context of the poorly delivered paragraph to begin with?

On top of this, visiting some of these linked sites can be exceedingly costly from a mobile device. Even if you have one of the oh-so-trendy iPhones, you’re spending over a megabyte in data just loading some of these the graphics and flash-intensive pages. If the link is going to a C|Net or Reuters page, then the amount of data transfer is doubled or tripled because the articles are often (needlessly) broken across two or three pages for the sake of boosting advertising impressions. Despite the growing popularity of mobile web surfing, most sites fail to take into account just how annoyingly expensive it is for a person on a mobile phone or cellular-equipped PDA to visit their pages. It doesn’t take a genius to make a site mobile-ready. Heck, just visit j2fi.net from a mobile device and see. The site will automatically switch to a mobile-friendly version and consume 1/5th the data of the desktop edition.

Rant aside, there are really only three ways to lose me as an RSS subscriber: going partial, going video, and going NFL.

Going Partial

My good friend Ayisha would say that partial RSS feeds are for baboons and chimps, and I couldn’t agree more. There have been a good number of wonderful blogs out there that have captured the attention of thousands, only to later squander their new-found popularity with over-monetization of the site. One way to do this is to change the RSS feeds from full text to partial, thus ensuring that people visit your site to read the content rather than “get it for free” through an RSS reader. While this might be alright for people who have the luxury of reading their syndication feeds from a net-connected computer, really mobile users aren’t so lucky. What this means is that the people who enjoy reading the content but don’t have the opportunity to visit the pages during the week will often feel excluded from this new clique that the blogger has created and, eventually, drop the subscription.

Humans are social creatures, and we hate feeling excluded in any fashion. If a blogger wants to use partial RSS from the start, that’s up to them. However, if the site starts out with full text RSS and later switches to partial feeds, prepare to lose some readership.

Going Video

Nick over at RomanDock recently wrote about some of the reasons why it’s not always best to use a video post, and it’s easy to agree with the man. Video posts are okay in moderation, but when a site begins to be little more than a collection of embedded YouTube videos, it’s not always possible for a faithful RSS subscriber to enjoy the new direction. Videos are hard to watch because they require a good amount of attention. On top of this, most videos are not portable. While it is possible to carry videos and podcasts on a PDA for later consumption, who really wants to spend 15 minutes watching something they could have consumed in three? Also, how are we supposed to make use of this information in the future? It’s much easier for me to enter a quick series of words into my RSS search utility rather than recalling what video and which vlogger might have given me the information I want to use or comment on.

While it’s not always possible, I’d like to see sites that make the transition from blog to vlog offer a typed transcript of the video. Yes, this would double or triple the amount of work for the blogger, but it would also give that person a greater reach across the web. As far as everyone knows, Google does not penalize someone for saying the exact same thing in text as they did in a video.

Going NFL

There is one technology blog that I really enjoy which is readable only four months of the year. The other eight months of content is almost exclusively reserved for the NFL. While it’s true that I’m not a fan of American Football, I can certainly appreciate that there are millions of people out there that truly love the sport and get right into it. Unfortunately, when a site that advertises itself as a niche technology blog transitions to a 100% football blog for two-thirds of the year, I’m forced to stop reading it until some time after the Super Bowl.

One could argue that I’m just as guilty of this, writing about one subject for a few weeks before switching gears to something else, only to return to a previous topic at some later time in the future, however, I do not advertise this site as being niche anything. I have other sites for niches, and write content for two others whenever inspiration strikes.

Going … Going … Gone!

Of course, the other reason a mobile-reader would unsubscribe would be a lack of updates. This is always something that strikes me as odd because, considering all the blogs I’ve followed over the last four years, only two or three dozen people have really stuck with it. There are some people that get right involved and earn a decent second income {link: http://www.dereksemmler.com/ }, while there are others that gain a large amount of attention and fame only to disappear completely {link: http://www.bloggingthemovie.com/ }. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since the average lifespan of a blog is supposedly around 8 months. However, it’s something many other bloggers pay attention to as they watch their sites getting older, while others fail to make it past the first year.

What triggers you to clean up your RSS subscriptions? Is this a weekly thing? Do you do it whenever a site begins to bore you? I’d be interested to know what it takes to keep you interested in a site.

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An interesting phenomenon has been occurring the last few months and I, for one, am not happy to see it happening. After a few months of relative peacefulness, my server is starting to face an inundation of spam. There have only been a few services that I’ve signed up for since my last rant on the subject and, considering how both are rather popular social networks, I doubt they are responsible for selling my email addresses to spammers based out of Russia, North America and Kenya. What I don’t quite understand, though, is why spammers continue to use the same tricks over and over. It’s as though they think the average internet user is about as daft as two wingless mantises on the precipice of some grand canyon.

But then, with the sheer number of scammers out there, perhaps some of us really are unaware of the persistent plague of pestilent people who prey on copious quantities of uninformed customers.

I currently host email for about 190 people on three continents. The average person receives roughly 80 messages per month and anywhere between 200 and 5000 spam email messages every month. While I can certainly understand why some addresses are spammed to death, what I can’t tolerate is the sheer amount of processing power that’s going into identification and elimination of these malignant messages. Here is the breakdown on the email messages for the past two weeks:

Total Messages Received: 6,920
Messages Marked as Spam: 6,193
Messages Sent: 590
Messages Flagged by System: 1

So in two weeks, my server has received almost seven thousand messages. A good portion of these were marked as spam and deleted before arriving at its intended destination. 590 messages were sent from the same server, and only one was marked as being potentially spam. The only reason it was marked that way was because it was an actual spam message that got through, and someone was forwarding it to PayPal to see if it was a real warning.

As a disclaimer, I will mention that I do not read the emails of people on my server. That would not only be a huge invasion of privacy, but the act of a stupid SysAdmin. While I’ve done many stupid things in my life, this will not be one of them. When my spam checker identifies something as spam coming from my server, it sends me a message with the name of the person who sent it, as well as the subject line. If I think someone is sending spam from my server, I will talk to them about what they’re doing with the free service I’m providing and get clarification. The last thing I want to see is my server going back on the black lists. It took months to get it back on the white lists with MSN, Yahoo and GMail a few months back thanks to IP sharing with my host provider.

That said, I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of spam messages are being sent out this month. Have spammers learned from the past and become more sophisticated with their techniques? Are they using well-written messages in an effort to entice us with sex, cheap goods, drugs or some combination thereof?

Oh, if only it were true.

Type One: The Sexy Offer

We’ve all seen this one. The subject line looks something like “[MSG: 83921] I want to see you right away” and is supposed to be from someone with a rather seductive looking name. “Foxy Brunette” and “Penelope Wilson” seem to be the two most common names found in my spam filter and, despite by best attempts to understand, I just cannot wrap my head around why someone would respond to something that clearly looks so fake.

MSG 83921? Would you put this in an email to someone you want to get into bed with? I can just imagine how stupid I would have looked to my Reiko had I sent emails with such ridiculous subject lines when we were still dating.

Anyone who is begging someone they’ve never met for sex is either a crack addict, a prostitute who’s being threatened by a pimp, or someone you wouldn’t want to be involved with in the first place. If I ever meet someone who responds to these kinds of messages, I’ll probably vomit in rage before passing out due to a severe chemical imbalance in my brain while trying to parse the fact that the person before me is really so gullible.

Type Two: The Sales Pitch

“Exclusive Offer! Best imitation r0l3x watches you’ll ever see!” This is a subject line I can understand. The Rolex brand has been trashed so badly online that even mentioning that you bought one will earn your email an unhappy trip to the Junk folder, if not deleted outright. Other brands such as Viagra, Gucci, Prada, Cialis and just about everything else that is considered up-scale have received the very same treatment. It must be damn near impossible for advertisers from any of these companies to market their products online thanks to scammers and spammers the world over. Luckily, rich people don’t use the internet.

Have you ever known someone to buy drugs from some unknown vendor on the internet? How about a nice-looking $500 replica Rolex watch? If you do, send me their email address. I have a bridge in Nagoya I’d like to sell them, and perhaps I’ll even part with some land on the moon.

Type Three: The e-Card

What started out as a nice little industry where people could send animated “cards” to each other to celebrate all the little things in life turned into the most effective way to transmit viral infections and just about every other type of unwanted software online. One of these managed to sneak past my spam filters a few weeks ago and looked pretty convincing … until it asked me to click a link. The message looked a little like this:

You’ve received an eCard from your sister!
To pick it up, just click on the link below, or copy and paste it into your browser: http://nonsensical.com/e-card.exe.

Your card will be available only for a few days, so be sure to pick it up quickly!

Wow! My sister sent me an eCard? How thoughtful! Wait a minute … it’s an exe!

What’s really sad about this last one is that I can actually picture my parents clicking the link and being infected with whatever code the executable file contained. The way I look at it, if my parents would click it, then so would tens of millions of others.

No wonder bot-nets become so massive in such a short amount of time.

What’s the Solution?

Like many other people (who are far more intelligent than I), I’ve been looking for some possible solutions to this issue, but have yet to find any that would be workable on a grand scale. Limiting people to one email address in a lifetime would be difficult to ensure and maintain, not to mention troublesome for those of us who need separate addresses for whatever reason. Having people manually confirm an email address by traditional mail or phone call would be just as troublesome, as some companies would pop up offering to bypass this for $20 USD or whatever. At the same time, we don’t want email to become something that is darn near Orwellian in nature, as the communications method has lots to offer both individuals and companies.

So what’s a workable option?

Unfortunately, I can’t think of a single realistic alternative to our current spam-filtering technologies. Sure, the filters will continue to suck up a large amount of processing power, but what other methods could ensure a spam-free mailbox?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

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Another year has passed since the last Blog Action Day recognizing {something} and, in that time, we’ve seen very little progress towards a solution. While this might make Blog Action Day seem more like Blogger Inaction Day, it shouldn’t stop us from raising awareness and recording the current state of affairs for future posterity. Who knows … perhaps someone in the near future will read one of the 7,000+ blogs that will take part in this years B.A.D. and put the potential solutions to use. Perhaps someone will take their own words to heart and do the same.

Who knows? Only time will tell.

So, with this year’s topic covering something that is going to be all too real for billions of people around the globe in the coming years, I’d like to perform a little fortune telling and talk about why this current economic downturn is good for the average person.

Money Doesn’t Make the World Go ‘Round

Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs in the last sixteen months, and untold thousands have lost their homes. Not only have those without credit suffered a tremendous blow to their financial future, but those who have worked hard to earn a level of trust with banks are forced to put their future dreams and goals on hold. While this could be a bad thing, we can look at this as an amazing opportunity for wealth re-distribution.

For so long, people in industrialized nations have enjoyed a relatively comfortable lifestyle, complete with relatively easy access to education, health care, housing, food, and money. Many of us have forgotten the true value of a dollar and have squandered away untold amounts of cash at coffee houses, restaurants, HMV and places all over. After decades of this behavior, millions of us have managed to accumulate quite a bit of material items, and replaced them just as quickly.

Before getting too far, I don’t mean to imply that people have been pissing away their money on largely unnecessary purchases. However, quite often we’ve had the luxury and power to go out and replace an item just for the sake of having something newer. How many times have we replaced cell phones before the older one broke? In my case, I’ve done this seven times in the last 12 years. How about replacing computers before they’re truly obsolete? I’m guilty of doing this nine times in nine years, despite having a 5 year-old notebook. Buying new clothes before our current clothes are unwearable? Well … I’ve seldom done this as I don’t really keep up with fashion, but I have many friends that have seen no trouble with dropping $2000 on clothes every season, only to discard them after two or three months.

Is this a bad thing? Should we be a little less consumed by consumerism? That’s not for me to decide. One thing is for certain, though … many of us may not be able to afford this lifestyle for a little while.

Spreading the Wealth

Now that the United States of America is losing its position as the place to go for business, developing nations are starting to pick up the pieces of what’s now becoming a golden opportunity. As an example of this trend, many Japanese companies are starting to have their employees learn other Asian and European languages in an effort to open the doors to commerce with previously “less-interesting” nations. While English will continue to be important in the future, it’s not going to be the only language of business in the long-term.

How is this a good thing? Well … if countries around the world start investing more in other nations, then the global standard of living will begin to rise. This isn’t to say that the collapse of the existing banking system is going to usher in a new era of equality or financial responsibility, though. Instead, this little hiccup will give developing nations who want to open up to the rest of the world an opportunity to make themselves marketable. Not only as a nation that can produce something cheaply, but as a nation that will also consume reasonably affordable goods. Over time, these rapidly progressing nations will develop the social and economic platforms required to have a stable and prosperous future. Some will implement universal health care. Others will build schools that devise ingenious ways to collect water from a barren landscape.

Regardless of how we will be affected by the current market downturn, one thing is for certain: the world’s wealth will be much more distributed going forward.

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Last week I was having a rather heated discussion with someone, let’s call him Kenji, at the local coffee house regarding online bullying. He had been rather adamant that people under the age of 17 should not be permitted to join chat rooms or have blogs, in the event that they’re bullied to the point where suicide becomes the only option of escape. Having been bullied quite often in my youth, I said that such protectionist measures would do nothing to solve the real issues, and would not eliminate the constant cajoling and taunting that goes on from the moment we’re born.

So what’s the most workable solution to bullying?

Kenji’s Opinion: Dismiss and Punish to Prevent

Having spent his entire life in Japan, Kenji has first hand knowledge of growing up in a society where the youth are often pushed to extremes by everyone around them. Students must be part of at least one club activity in order to “fit in” at school, and parents are always pushing their children to get phenomenal grades in every class before sending them off to a juku (cram school) after the day’s lessons are complete. From the age of 12 to 17, students often get by on just five to six hours of sleep, and are out of the house or studying intently for the rest of the day.

Although we all hear stories like this about schools in Japan, the reality is really quite different. Sure this might happen with some students, but most have a little free time here and there so that they can enjoy their youth. That said; the average Japanese student still has about 1/10th the free time of their North American counterparts.

Regardless of how much free time a person has, the type of bullies that exist here in Japan are just the same as you would find anywhere in the world. Many bullies do what they do because they’re not happy at home, or they’re not happy with themselves, or they just enjoy being bigger than everyone and want to flex their muscle in any way possible. Regardless of the cause, the effects of bullying are quite real: people are made to feel inferior.

When students go online to write a blog post, communicate with friends, or be part of an online forum, the last thing they want to deal with is abuse. To combat the growing rise of bullying on this medium, Kenji feels that it would be best to prevent students from participating in any online communities. Not only would this give them more time to study, but it would prevent students from being targeted by bullies and sexual predators. When these students reach an appropriate age, which is supposedly somewhere around 17, they will have a better handle on their emotions and be able to handle bullies more effectively.

How would students be better able to handle bullies at 17? I asked.

“Students should be given the power to immediately report bullying to a teacher or police officer in order to bring the offender to justice in a swift and orderly manner,” Kenji tells me.

Essentially, Kenji feels that we should dismiss the rights of the individual by banning the use of a (relatively) safe communications medium and promoting the act of tattle-tailing in order to quickly bring bullies in line with what society expects of them. Rather than let our young people use the internet as a communications medium and learning tool while showing them how to handle idiots, we’re supposed to keep our net connections locked down just in case somebody hurts their feelings?

I can understand that some parents want to protect their children from all harm, but this level of protectionism is just lunacy.

My Opinion (Not That It Matters): Educate and Encourage

Until the age of 14, I was always “the fat kid.” Forever wearing track pants because jeans would seldom fit long enough to be worth the money, I was the butt of every joke. It didn’t help that I came from a poorer family, nor did my rather explosive temper. However, with the help of some great teachers and role models, I learned how to control my rage (externally) and deal with people who wanted to see me dead. Without the guidance from people I respected, and the encouragement I received from my parents whenever I accomplished something worthwhile, I never would have enjoyed my youth and would have likely become a very dark and negative person with pent up rage and a grudge on life.

To this day, the lessons that I had learned from teachers like Mr. Robinson, Mr. Neil, Mr. Castle and Ms. Laidlaw continue to help me get through the most difficult situations where I am being discriminated against or otherwise treated unfairly. Rather than tattle to a superior about how so-and-so said this or that about me, it’s much simpler to just let it slide. One of the best ways I’ve found to handle personal slander is to respond in a direct fashion, while giving the impression of misinterpretation.

“You’re such a @#$!ing douce, Jason.”
“What’s so bad about being clean?”

“I’ve never seen such a pitiful excuse for a report. You expect me to pay you for this?”
“The numbers don’t lie. Clearly you can’t manage a business. I do expect to be paid but, after seeing this report, I’d rather receive cash than a cheque.”

Well … I don’t recommend using that last one too casually, but the fact of the matter remains. So long as a person is confident in themself and knows how to handle abusive dolts, bullying online will be less of a problem. Kids are pretty tough and don’t need to be protected as much as some people think. All it takes is a little education and encouragement from others.

Of course, online bullies can sometimes seem larger than life. Rather than have one or two people attack you, like in most real situations, it’s possible to have thousands of people attacking you simultaneously. In the case of some recent online suicides, some mocking dolt would happen upon a blog post or live video stream of a person who was feeling particularly depressed and send the link to friends around the world. From there, friends of friends would receive the link and the number of people following something would quickly snowball into the thousands. Regardless of what the depressed individual says, their words are twisted and spat back at them in a devastatingly deriding fashion, which would then lead to an unfortunate circumstance. In a few cases, people have actually hung themselves while people watched through the webcam. Even in death, their mocking laughs and hurtful words filled the screen of the recently deceased. Quickly bored by the sight of a cooling corpse swinging from the ceiling, they congratulate themselves and move on to the next unwitting victim. Never once will they give a second thought to the fact that they were responsible for a person’s death.

I’m disgusted every time I think of the news story.

The media response to this is always the same, too. They scream and holler that Kenji’s “solution” should be put into effect to save the lives of countless other people. They point fingers, blaming everything from rap music to video games to the de-humanizing nature of the internet. But never once do they ask the real questions: where were the parents, and why didn’t they see the long-term patterns in their own children?

Should we prevent kids from living through this solitary horror? Oh, yes. But we shouldn’t do it with restrictions. Again, education and encouragement is the only way a person can bounce back from those days where it seems there’s nothing left to live for.

Your Opinion: <Insert Keywords Here>

What do you think we should do about online bullying? Bullies have been around since life began so many years ago, and they’ll continue to be with us until long after the sun goes cold. Should society attack bullies with reason and compassion? Should parents be held more accountable for the emotional and psychological well-being of their children? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

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