Archive

All for Homeland Security!

   I really do love my job, you never know what will happen next.

   Mondays are always fun at work (yes, that was sarcasm). Yesterday, I walked in the door and was immediately bombarded with the fact that one of our people had her voicemail box hacked. There were messages left on the box. They were quite odd. Most of what was said was in broken english, highly accented and sounded like it was part of a conference call.

   So, I reported this to the FBI. (No, not kidding) I called the local office, got through to someone pretty quickly, but then got something of a cold shoulder with no real detail as to what was going on or what the next step would be. A kind of "don't call us, we'll call you" attitude. I didn't expect this. I recently read an article about another voicemail system that was hacked and the FBI was on the scene in minutes. Five hours later I still hadn't heard anything from them.

   It's bad enough that I had to take the security concerns of my company in my hands, but then to get no real response from a group I have always respected, I was pretty stressed over this. I called back, hoping to get a better response. I was told to call back on Wednesday, hopefully by then they would decide wether or not to take a case on this! A crime has been commited, certainly by hackers, possibly foriegn nationals, I have a ton of info and the FBI may or may not look into this! Plus I have to wait two days to find out?!? Who the hell is running this show!?!?!?

   So, yeah, if Bush's Homeland Security stuff will give me an organisation with better response than this, I'm all for it! Of course, I'm not sure what I should be expecting after reading this from local news yesterday!

Posted by: Jericho - 7/30/02 - 11:45 pm -

Hell with it!

   IWDC isn't going anywhere.

   This is a good thing and a bad thing ...

   IWDC will remain. I'll continue to write out here. Why? Well, frankly, I've missed it this week. I kept thinking things like "Oh, this would be a good thing to write about" - then I would remember the last post. Repeat this process five or six times a day and you might begin to see my point. I'm not sure how Max feels, but for the moment I will continue.

   I have no bloody idea what will become of the site. I think the blog will fade to one side. I mean, it's fun and all, but I think the blog should be a Feature like any other. I want to put more fiction out here, maybe some art and photography. Maybe Irate Weirdos should be an on-line magazine. Either way - change will happen. Maybe not fast, but there will be some kind of change.

   As for renewal in February, well, we'll see. Of my hobbies, this ranks as one of the cheapest. Maybe the holiday season will see our readers buying their gifts through our affliates here (Hint!)

   It's only been five months, I should give this more time. Even with my doubt and gloom, the numbers remained constant. You all are out there reading this. You are steady but silent. I don't know what you want out of this site, but we must be providing it because you keep showing up.

   This may sound silly, but I think this was good for me. I got to vent a bit and retain something I like at the same time. I invite all of you to participate in whatever way you wish. Hopefully, we will be able to continue bringing you the best from our worst parts. Enjoy!

Posted by: Jericho - 7/24/02 - 3:25 pm -

Just nod if you can hear me ...

   I'm having a slight crisis of faith. I may not be a religious person, but faith is important in every life. You have to have faith that the sun is not going to go supernova today - otherwise why would you get out of bed? For those of you who answered the last question with "sex", I ask you, would you really want your last sexual experience to be rushed, awful, oh-my-god-I-am-gonna-die-real-soon sex? I wouldn't. I'd rather stay in bed thinking about the best sex I ever had as the Sun's coronal mass sweeps through and obliterates our little world.

   Anyway, faith is important in every life. When one loses faith, it can be troubling. I, my readers, have lost faith in IWDC.

   So what? Right? What does that matter? Well, it matters to me. I have hoped for sometime to bring up IWDC, grow it into something terrific. I realise I'll never make a living off of it - especially since I must share it with my partner. But, if I can turn it into something that entertains a lot of people and makes enough money so that I can get better hosting and a little advertising now and then so that I can keep growing it, we'll call it a good thing.

   I spend a good deal of time on this site every week. Whether I'm posting or archiving or just answering comments. I commented earlier that I easily spend an hour a day - that would be an average, but it's not far from wrong. This is time I could spend doing other things, like pursuing my writing, but I spend it here attempting to entertain myself and you all as well. I assume Max does as much. Call it 15 hours a week that the two of us put in together - maybe more.

   In the five months that IWDC has been up, we have indeed grown. We've gone from a few of our friends reading to the heady results of the Scott Kurtz interview where thousands of people came out to our site over just one week. As it stands, our readership is pretty steady. We consistently get twenty or so hits a day. I was hoping to hold onto some of the people who came out from PvP - but even without those readers, we are still showing some growth over the month of May.

   However, if Max and I are putting in 15 hours a week, and if we do have 20 steady readers, this means that each reader is getting 45 minutes of our time. That's right, if you read every other day or more, you get nearly 18 minutes of pure Jericho a week - plus nearly 18 minutes of molten Max! Aren't you lucky? To me, though, this seems like a lot of sweat going out to too few.

   What do we get from you? I've said time and again that this is a community. This site is as much yours as ours. When I set out to find tools for this site, I knew commenting was going to be the most important way to make this something great. This would allow all of us to converse, share ideas and be part of the IWDC thang. Yet, we see fewer and fewer comments and fewer commentors. Max and I comment the most, followed by Hud and Laura. Denise brings up the rear. Then, there are others who comment here and there. I can count on my hands the number of people who have left a comment who I have not met in person - I may be able to count them on one hand. If I have never hugged you - maybe you should leave a comment.

   Why aren't you commenting? What do you hate about this site? What do you love? We need to know these things. Max and I have email addresses plastered all over these pages, yet, again, I have gotten few emails. I can't speak for Max, but I don't want to work in a vacuum. I gotta know what you like and what you don't - please tell me. Do you want more humor, less bitching? More fiction less politics? More Max less Jericho? Would you like us to publish your rantings? Whatever it is, let us know. Tell us. Comment!!!

   And those of you who do comment, I'm not letting you off the hook, either. Have you shown us to your friends? If you liked the site, you'd show us to your friends, right? Are you ashamed of us? Why haven't you shown IWDC to your friends? Do we suck? How do we suck? Is it the poor spelling? Gotta tell us these things! We need the word of mouth advertising if we are gonna grow. If you loved us, you would have already passed us around!

   I really don't mean to be a downer or a jerk. But, as it stands right now, IWDC will not be renewed in February. I am a performer, when the audience stops clapping, I want to know why. When the audience is dead silent, the smart thing to do is leave the stage. I may turn the domain over to Max or somesuch, but IWDC will not return in it's current format, at the very least, unless something happens. If this plea for participation gets the usual response, I may stop writing out here altogether immediately. This would not be my first failed experiment. I know when to cut my losses.

   Is IWDC a loss? Only you can answer that.

Posted by: Jericho - 7/19/02 - 3:25 pm -

This Is A Dark Ride

So, my life is pretty much a festering load of crap.

Well, not really. I have my house, my wife, my dog. I am in the middle of a pretty good book. There is Coke in the fridge and ice cream in the freezer. There is a lot to be said for some aspects of my life.

But there are some things I am deeply frustrated with. I know that almost no one has a dream job. There are a few people in this world who don't have to give some things up to make a living. I learned a long time ago that there is nothing that does not come at a price. But, quite frankly, I am tired of despising what I have to do for 8 or more hours a day. There is nothing at all enjoyable about any of the jobs I have had recently and I am about to embark on yet another one that does not look to be any better.

I guess I have come to yet another point in my life when it is time to do a major reassessment of the course I am on. Only, this time, instead of a stream of recriminations about the large pile of opportunities I have pissed away, or complaining how what I am good at, what I know, tends not to be of much use in the job market or for starting a business.

I'm not quite sure where I will go from here. I know what I want from life. I want to get more from my job than a paycheck. And I want the time and resources to do what I want to do in this life, like travel, study whatever suits my whim at the time and add to my ample book and CD collection. Among a few other things. I just need to consider what paths might take me there. And this time actually take the risks necessary to get going on one of those paths.

And I will most likely fall on my face.

Too bad pessimism isn't a marketable skill.

© 2002 by the Gentlemen known as Max and Jericho