I'm Just Browsing

Off and on over the past few weeks, I've browsed for kitchen chairs. I'm not serious yet about buying any, but I want to see what's out there and how much they'd cost. However, because of cookies and overly aggressive marketing, I'm being bombarded with ads for chairs. Not just on websites I visit, but also in my email.

All of the sites where I've looked at chairs are now competing with each other for Facebook ads to display to me. I think they're on rotation right now as I see a different site pretty much every time I check my feed.

Other websites that that personalize ads are also displaying pictures of chairs I viewed on the websites I visited. It's pretty creepy and it puts my back up, making me less inclined to buy anything. When I mentioned this in a tweet to two of the sites which have been really bad about the cyber hard sell, one of them said clear your cookies. Sigh. I have cookies turned off on my laptop, but don't on my iPad. Clearing cookies there means having to login again to all my sites and I don't want to. I also feel I shouldn't have to do this to avoid all this personalized marketing crap.

One of the sites I've looked at has been bombarding me with emails every day highlighting the various chairs I've clicked at to view more closely. This is one avenue where online shopping falls down in comparison with in-store shopping.

In the store, I can tell the sales associate that I'm just browsing and that I'll find them if I need any help. They then leave me alone to check out the chairs in peace. When I walk out of the store after I'm done browsing, they don't follow me and hold up pictures of the chairs. They don't pass me notes warning me that they only have six sets of chairs in style A and that I better buy now. Nope, they let me leave and that's that.

Online... Sigh. Too needy. Too intrusive. Too much nagging, pestering, reminding. I wish they'd figure out an algorithm that would differentiate when someone is seriously looking with intent to buy and when someone is merely browsing. Then the site could target the serious shopper and leave me the hell alone. Gah!

Am I the only one that hates this so much that I'll probably spend my money at the least obnoxious store rather than the site that won't leave me alone? The price would have to be drastically better at the obnoxious site before they'd see a penny of my money.

Spammed!

I've talked about my organizational challenges here in the past and have mentioned a couple of attempts to get myself on track. Well, guess what? It brought me organizer spam!

That's right, some professional organizer from Australia sent me a newsletter I did not subscribe to, and when I tried to click the unsubscribe button, I got an error message. Guess who's email I labeled as spam?

Even if I lived in Australia and was looking to hire someone to organize my home for me, this woman's name would have been crossed right off my list. The thing that's especially annoying is that she must have hired some bot to search the web for people talking about organizing. I'm guessing here, but since the email didn't come through the contact form on my website, it's a good bet some bot ferreted out my email address and sent the message.

Author spam is bad enough, and unfortunately I get a ton of it, but this is somehow worse. Maybe because I feel as if I've been spied on then marketed to against my will.

Do people seriously not get that spamming someone is not a good way to drum up business? Or do they really get enough bites to make it worth their while to do this?

Spam Attack

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed a huge increase in spam the past few weeks? Even accounts that I never had spam on before are suddenly getting two or three or four spam emails a day. My writing account? Forget about it. Spam is almost out of control.

It made me curious enough to do an internet search and after some browsing, I found an article with graphs showing that spam is at the highest level it's been at since October 2010. This article is from May 2014, so I guess I'm lucky that it took until July for the spam increase to catch up to me. Even so...sigh.

I've also gotten a good look at what kind of attacks have been directed at my website.

Those of you who've been reading my blog for a while might have noticed that I switched back to Blogger. I used to have a WordPress blog attached right to my website, but after it was hacked four or five times, I decided that was enough. I'm very computer savvy, but nothing I tried protected my blog.

I also switched to a new web host around the same time. Not because of the hacking, but because my old host had raised their prices dramatically. My new web host has different programs to look at stats and I was suddenly able to see what kind of assault my site took every month. And by far the vast majority of the attacks were aimed at finding WordPress or one of it's vulnerable plug-ins.

Yikes!

It really makes me glad I ditched WordPress even though I loved the flexibility and features it offered. I'm just sorry that some people out there have to ruin the web experience with spam and hacking attacks.

Suspicious Attachment

I don't know about you guys, but I have been getting a ton of email with suspicious attachments over the last two to three weeks. I have my website email filtered through Gmail to help deal with the spam issue and over and over recently Gmail has sent a warning saying that this or that email was left on the server because of the attachment.

I'm not sure what the virus/malware senders hope to achieve because I think most people now are too savvy to open attachments from people they don't know, no matter how legit (or not) the mail might look. Oh, sure, it's cheap to send email and there are a few people around who don't know any better, but is the number really large enough to warrant a barrage of suspicious spam? Maybe it is, but it has become annoying to deal with the onslaught.

Just an FYI, I delete these emails right on the server so they are never on my computer so even if the virus is in the email itself and not the attachment, I'm still covered. I'm very careful with my laptops.

I've been weighing the pros and cons of changing my website email address to something different just to thwart the spammers and virus emailers, but I'm afraid this might cause more work for me than dealing with the emails.

We'll see what happens, but I wish these people would use their powers for good and not evil.

The Blog Where Patti Rants

First, I updated my website today and added a new Extras page. This is a work in progress, but so far I have a glossary for the Light Warriors series, a list of the theme songs for all my books, and the videos are grouped together. I used bookmarks so it's easy to access the information you're interested in seeing.

Now, beware, I'm about to rant.

Today, I received an email from an author I have never heard of before in my life. I most definitely never signed up for her newsletter nor did I enter any contest she might have been running because I don't enter contests from other authors. I figure they'd rather have a reader win than another writer and I do them the courtesy of not throwing my name in the pool. Yet for some unknown reason, this woman thought it was okay to just add me to her newsletter list. Grrr.

To say this irritated me is understating things. The only way people get on my newsletter is if they sign up for it, or they enter a contest where they are given fair warning that entering will put them on my newsletter mailings--and I haven't even held a contest in a couple of years. You'd think the law of karma would protect me, but I guess not.

Where do some people get their idea of proper online etiquette? Just because my email address is available on various loops (and this was the email address I use for loop email) does not mean that I'm fair game. If she harvested this address from any of the writing loops I'm on, she violated list rules on top of spamming, and given the genre of her book, I have a fair idea from which loop she might have gotten my name.

This author accomplished thing--she ticked me off. Big time. Enough that I will never buy a book from her. I don't appreciate spam whether it's for Viagra, penis enlargement, or an author.

Now extrapolate. She harvested my email address, so odds are good she harvested others--probably a lot of others--and they were spammed, too. Probably a lot of these people are as angry as I am about it. Does she really think she did herself a big favor by sending out this email to all of us?

Don't spam, people, it's not nice.

Vagina Locked and Loaded

Today I received a spam mail titled Brittany Spears Shoots Down American Spy Satellite With Vagina.  Now I've received some strange spam in my time online, but this gets my vote as weirdest.  No, I didn't open the email to see what it was about--the last thing I need is to trigger a beacon letting them know they have a real live email--but the imagination runs wild.  :-)

Just think of all the Kegel exercises you'd need to do to strengthen those muscles enough to shoot down an orbiting satellite.  I mean seriously, you'd have to do them like 24/7, wouldn't you to get that kind of power?  We're not talking 30,000 feet here; we're talking Earth orbit. And of course, that begs the question of what position does one assume to shoot down a spy satellite in this manner?  On your back?  One leg up?

Can you see the Army enlisting women with these incredible pelvic muscles to launch missiles at terrorist cells?  Or how about shooting down an encroaching asteroid before it can smash into Earth and obliterate all life?  What would the movie Armageddon have been like if they didn't have to go to the asteroid in a space ship?

Okay, it's late and I'm tired enough to attempt to be funny.  Probably not succeeding either, but then I'm not funny--it's my characters who put the humor in my books.

More seriously, who the hell writes these spam mails?  And the bigger question is who the hell is opening them and buying whatever these people are selling?  Because no matter how cheap and easy it is to send spam, if no one is biting, it would stop.  That means someone somewhere is messing up email for the rest of us.  :-/

How Did I Survive Dial Up?

As God as my witness, I'll never go back to dial up ever again! (To paraphrase Scarlett O'Hara.) OMG, I had to use dial up to test load times on various versions of my banner and it was absolutely excruciating. I love broadband and I can't believe it took me so long to get it. Of course, I still believe they charge way too much, but I think I'd beg on street corners before going backward.

Anyway, the original banner took 1 minute and 30 seconds to load. Absolutely unacceptable. I messed around with gifs and jpgs and compression until I came up with what's currently loaded. I lost quality--boo--but it's loading in about 30 seconds. Still too long, but much better than the original. I'll have to mess around again over the long weekend to see if I can trim the load time some more, but for the work week, I've done as much as I can do.

This, of course, took far too much time and I didn't finish until nearly 7pm. :-(

I volunteered to approve comments on the group blog that I'm a part of and I have to say that I absolutely can't believe the amount of spam that comes through. We've heard about car sales from Socrates and assorted other dead Greek and Roman guys. Fortunately, pretty much all of it ends up in the spam folder, but good grief. Do these people not have better things to do than build spam bots to go around touting used cars? None of it makes it through, so what's the point?

My red amaryllis is growing nicely. It's really actually kind of fun because they're coming up so fast, I can see the difference overnight. When I have flowers, I'll take pictures. Of course. :-)

Sunny Sunday

It took me forever to write about two pages yesterday, which was very frustrating, but at least the work on the actual scenes that needed fixing went quicker. I have a couple of comments from my writing buddy that I have to work on today, but once that's finished, it'll just be a final polishing read through.

After working for hours and hours, I went outside yesterday and sat on my deck for about an hour. Fabulous. There was a light breeze, the temperature was comfortable and I was able to watch the birds flying around. It was a nice way to unwind.

Has anyone else been getting the latest spam? The one where the note says, "I found you online and want to chat with you. I'm a 25 y.o. girl and want to show you my pictures." Or similar type words. This is lame enough, but what I find hilarious is that this 25 year old woman has first names like Jose or Carlos. Um, yeah, you might want to tweak your spam-ware so that it only uses female first names.

Timber!

The next time I start talking about how boring my day was, remind me that boring is good, okay? Last night, I had a refresher course on why excitement isn't a good thing.

It was windy here yesterday. Really, really, really windy. We were supposed to have severe thunderstorms to go with the wind, but some dry air was sucked into the storm and we missed out on that--which is probably a good thing with winds gusting above 40MPH. From early in the morning till into the evening, things were really blowing. After I got home from the EDJ, I watched the tree in my backyard (the one with the tree ring) really swaying around.

Well, yesterday evening, one of the trees couldn't take the stress any longer. Not my tree ringed tree, but the one on my property line with the house next door came down. Not the entire tree, just one of the trunks (It's a maple tree with multiple trunks going up together.)

We were lucky--it didn't hit anything except grass and it was one of the smaller trunks.

I've been thinking of all the good things this morning. Thank God it didn't hit anyone or anything. At least it wasn't the tree I'd just put a retaining wall around. It didn't hit any power, phone or cable lines. The list goes on.

But even though things turned out pretty well overall, boring is better.

I saw on the news the other day that the spam king was arrested. They said that we'd probably see less spam email because of it, but I have to tell you, I've had more the last two days than I've had in a long time. I still get the penny stock spam and the drug spam, but now I'm getting spam from "25-year-old girls" who saw me online and want to meet me. Rolling my eyes. First of all, can't spammers learn to target their audience better? I'm tired of getting email meant for men. (Okay, actually I'm sick of receiving spam, period.) And second, who is stupid enough to fall for this?

I've been reading fiction since I finished my WIP, but today I've switched to nonfiction. I brought my Polynesian mythology book to work to read during lunch. It's a textbook, but I'm hoping it's written in an entertaining style and that something in there triggers my Polynesian heroine's story. She's loitering on the fringes of my consciousness, but not talking. Yet.