Makiko Itoh : Not a nameless cat.

Tech support, especially by phone, needs to seriously screen the callers beforehand for their level of knowledge. This would save a lot of time for both sides.

How many times have we called up tech support and had to endure going through the steps of inanity?

Yes, I know how to reboot the computer or modem.

Yes, I have already checked for loose plugs/cables.

Yes, I know the difference between Windows and Mac. (Well, forget about calling your run of the mill tech support drone, unless they work for Apple of course, and telling them you use a Mac.)

As the owner of a couple of mildly popular blogs (not this one,obviously) I, like many others, get my daily dose of PR email. I usually skim and dump them. Most of them are barely worth that amount of attention. (I don’t even count the lame ones sent to the address where the domains are registered, asking for a ‘cooperation’ (translation: link exchange) with a “top rated web site with a Google PR of 0”. Huh?)

Recently, a few PR pitches came in that really illustrated examples of good, bad, and really, really bad PR things. They are presented here in case they may be of help to the universe. Actually, I just wanted to bitch.

I am far from being a horse kind of person. Horses generally scare me when I meet them in, uh, person. But I do think they are the most beautiful creatures on this earth, especially when in full stride.

the filly Eight Belles having to be put down after the Kentucky Derby, a tragic event indeed. By a rather eerie coincidence, the trainer of the most famous filly racer ever, Ruffian, died on Friday.

MacUpdate is having another bundle sale. If enough people buy (they always do) you’ll get Parallels Desktop for $64.99 instead of $79.99, plus 10 more apps worth a total of $474.76 or $278.77, depending on where on the screen you look - a bit confusing but I guess it is a discount. Even if you just want Parallels it’s a nice discount. Ends April 29th. (App bundle-blowouts like this are pretty popular in the Mac community. Do they exist for Windows?)

The fun thing about house hunting in Europe is that you run into all kinds of fascinating old places. You don’t really get that in the U.S., or in Japan either, where people tend to knock down houses and rebuild (the land is the important thing).

This place for instance, is a 12th century stone built manor house that used to be owned by the Knights Templar. It is near a village called Villedieu (literally, Godtown).

I am house hunting.

Fairly sure I wouldn’t want to live here though.

I truly wonder what was going on through this person’s mind when they uploaded not one, but three slanty-pics like this.

Amen.

I’ve had the pleasure of being informed that my pages do not validate a number of times. I suppose it’s because way back then I used to write about web design and stuff, and my old articles are still floating out there on the interwebs. Guess one reason why I’ve basically stopped writing about such things.

(I know exactly where and why my pages don’t validate. Go away.)

A part of my post here about Drupal is quoted on a BlogHer post about the lack of women at the latest DrupalCon in Boston. It’s all because I left a comment on Shelley Powers’ site. Rats, I need to hide more.

I’m just kidding, sort of. But that whole discussion of why there aren’t enough women at tech conferences….which has been going on for years now…hits me in a blind spot.

I don’t get the fuss. I don’t really see why gender has to do with of all things, a blog/CMS platform choice, even though I know that pushing the female agenda, as it were, is part of what BlogHer is about.

I recently got an email from yet another site that wants to rank blogs. Yawn.

Their pitch went something like this: “We rank blogs according to how many incoming links they have from other blogs. We do not count sidebar links.”

In other words, yet another thing that attempts to rank how much inner-blog circle crosslinking/circle jerking there is.

This kind of thing totally ignores the fact that a blog is not necessarily a platform for inner-blog conversation anymore, if it was at all in the first place. Blog programs nowadays are used for easy publishing and updating of any kind of web site.

I occasionally like to post polls on my food blogs. Polls are an easy way for the comment-shy reader to express their opinion. So, I recently put up a poll on Just Bento, What kind of recipes would you like to see more of on Just Bento? , just to get a general idea of what people wanted. Now, the way Drupal polls work is that they restrict votes to one per IP address. Simple enough.