Category: Adventures In…

Life is awesome.

In Which Netflix is mean to me and then I write about it

All of a sudden I couldn’t stream any Netflix titles instantly so I called their support line. Found out they put my account on hold December 30th. During our conversation, the operator said I wasn’t being punished and that they were just trying to find a way to make the service work for me because it wasn’t working if so many of their discs were going missing. You think? Well, why if it is a physical disc issue does my complete account have to be suspended? And why did it have to be suspended over the New Year weekend? Even Time Warner wouldn’t do that. I acknowledge the fact that I live on what might be one of the worst USPS mail routes in the USA in a building full of people who might or might not be “borrowing” my Netflix discs and never returning them. But to put someone’s account on hold over a holiday weekend is not very nice at all.

Of course I can’t prove that I’m not building quite a tidy DVD collection at Netflix’s expense. But if you were looking at my account history you’d see that I have returned all of these TV shows:

  • Mad Men:Season:2 (all discs),
  • The Wire:Season 5 (all discs),
  • Damages:Season 1 & 2 (all discs),
  • Jackie Woodman: Season 1 & 2 (all discs),
  • True Blood: Season 1 (all discs)
  • Squidbillies: Volumes 1 & 2 (all discs)

Film:

  • Frozen River,
  • The White Ribbon,
  • The Ghost Writer,
  • Five Easy Pieces,
  • The Secret in their Eyes,
  • The Hangover,
  • District 9,
  • The Hurt Locker,
  • Blindness,
  • 28 Days Later,
  • Black Book,
  • The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Considering the fact that I gave all of these movies and shows at least a 4 star rating – why would I then keep a bad movie like Expired when I could have kept 28 Days Later, one of my all time favorite movies?

Even though I know it probably wasn’t a person with the power of logic in charge of putting my account on hold and that more likely a computer somewhere keeping track of my missing discs triggered the decision, I am still very much put out.

Normally I would try to spare my 4 subscribers from having to read this sort of of thing but Netflix doesn’t have a contactable email address and so now you have to know what happened,too.

My New Issue: Falling in Public

Yesterday I went to meet a potential new client with a work colleague and felt so grownup for not wearing ripped jeans and being 15 minutes early instead of 15 minutes late as usual. Thank you taxi cab driver for picking me up on Park or it would not have happened. The meeting went well. My colleague did most of the talking which is probably why. When it was time to get up to leave I fell down. I still do not know why. I was not drunk and I don’t have an inner ear infection.

Another incident took place near my house while walking Bozzio and Luna, a largeish female Akita. Luna decided she had had enough of the stop and chat with Bliss’ owner (Bliss and her owner saw the whole thing) and yanked me off my feet to try to get to the park a bit faster. I fell and fell on Bozzio’s leash and we both tumbled around on the ground for awhile and Bozzio squeaked so I know I bashed him pretty hard. I got up and of course I’d ripped my jeans and had a nice cut on my knee. My palms felt pretty good, too. And then I felt awful for hurting Bozzio. I didn’t care about hurting myself. Poor Bozzio.

Then there is one more incident. Less fancy but possibly interesting because it might have been the beginning of the trend. Again, walking Bozzio but wearing my Kork Ease wedges, unusual footwear for dog walking, I stepped onto either a pebble or twig the wrong way and went down, stupid shoes. Of course there were about 60 people waiting for the bus who saw me. It is much more awful to fall where lots of people can see you. But of course falling in complete privacy can’t always be arranged.

Experiment: Unique, Quality Content instead of SEO


For years SEO tricks made it possible for a completely useless web site to beat out a useful Web site because they were cleverer with SEO (whitehat, greyhat or blackhat) mastery. Not surprisingly masters of SEO did not necessarily help the searching public get to the content that they were actually looking for. Consider also that knowing SEO to this extent became a business in and of itself. What if they had been delivering relevant content instead of SEO, all along?

Why not try crafting your content with the same ingenuity you drew from to create such a unique product or service? Wasn’t this product or service the reason you needed a Web site in the first place? So why aren’t you writing about it in your own voice using your own words?

  • Even if you didn’t personally create the product you must like it or you wouldn’t be trying to sell it.
  • Even if it is just a popular item so that is why you’re selling it there are ways to present it and write about it that no one else is using.
  • Fact: most people reselling online copy the same product images and description text from the same wholesaler Web site or from each other.
  • Fact: being lazy with your product images and descriptions is going to translate online.

With digital cameras being as affordable and taking as high quality photos as they are capable of now, there is absolutely no excuse to re use product images from the wholesaler.
And as far as writing copy for the product description you don’t have to be Jonathan Franzen, just be natural. Try to use correct grammar and sentence structure and above all use SpellCheck! I do not care if you are the worst speller in the world – misspelled words should never make it into your product descriptions.

Where have I been?

Designing Web sites. Where else would I be? I’ve been so busy I haven’t been writing much and have been neglecting this site -there are 6 plugins that need to be upgraded and loads of ideas for a new design for this site that I don’t have time to implement. My client list has grown extensively many came through contacts that my blog posts generated. So when I catch a breather I will get back into writing new tutorials. And uploading more Photoshop brushes & ecommerce type buttons for people to download. I have tons of both. More freebies coming soon!