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Can Everyone Do Anything?

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First things first, if you are interested in the photography pieces I put up, this one might not be for you.  This is one of those things that has been making me think for a bit and I felt like blogging about it since it might provide some interesting feedback from anyone out there.

I have seen a number of things recently that seem part of a trend.  The death of Steve Jobs was one of these stories but it is by no means unique.  The general theme is that with hard work and commitment, anyone can achieve their goals and ambitions.  This is a very nice feelgood kind of thing but I wonder if it is really true.

I certainly do not disagree that, to achieve high levels of success, you are probably going to have to put a ton of effort in and make sacrifices along the way to get what you want.  (There will be occasional cases where the great stuff falls in the lap of someone but I don’t think they are the rule!)  For those of you that like logic options, I wonder whether one implying the other is being misconstrued as an equivalence.

A friend recently tweeted a link to a motivational speaker that I checked out.  They had the same message:  anyone can achieve their ambitions with hard work and determination.  I just don’t think that is true.  The fact you hear these messages from people that have achieved something gives it credence but, are they natural achievers and not a fair sample of the population?  Are they telling everyone to never give up and never settle when, perhaps, that might actually be a good thing for them to do?  Do you know someone who you suspect could never achieve their goals however hard they tried?

This is part of a general theme I notice today about wanting things enough being what matters.  A parallel to this is sickness, particularly cancer.  There is a common theme about fighting cancer and not giving up.  Cancer can be a vicious illness and there are times when it is going to be fatal however hard you try.  Are we now judging its victims as people who didn’t try hard enough to live?  I don’t believe that is right but it seems to be the subtext a lot more these days.  Phrases like “He finally couldn’t fight it any more” get used and imply that they could have done more.  What a rotten message to send and a poor impression to leave the bereaved about how you view what happened.

What is all this to say?  My point is that we can strive to do things and to overcome situations.  However, we don’t all have some preordained right to achieve everything we want that can be attained only if we try hard enough.  Try, yes!  If you don’t always make it, you are not a failure.  You are a human-being, just like those telling you how wonderful they have been doing something you couldn’t do in the end.

The Spam Has Evolved!

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I previously wrote about how I would get spam comments on this blog.  Since I wrote that piece, my spammers have moved on.  Some times they leave me alone completely.  Nothing for a day or so.  I get quite perplexed by what must have gone wrong.  However, they always show up again.

I wonder whether they read the previous piece on spam since I get a lot less spam for the bio image they used to use.  Maybe they track responses to spam and lay off those that are not any use.  I do still get some, though, so it can’t be that entirely.

Now I am getting some far more varied spam efforts.  They pick on any post and they come in three categories.  The first are the weirdos that have huge messages about everything from movie downloads to fake passports.  They are so obvious, I can’t imagine why anyone would accept them.

The next group are the SEO crowd.  I get so many messages from people who are offering to improve my website from a search engine optimization point of view.  They all come with similar templates so whether I actually need their help or not, I have no idea.  I don’t want it anyway!

The others are brand sellers.  Right now I am getting a ton of Ugg merchandise sites showing up and have started to get NFL jerseys now the season is underway.  Again, since the title of their comment is the website, they are not too hard to spot!  I sometimes read the contents and that can be hilarious.  They write something that is designed to sound like they have read the post and found it the most inspiring piece of work ever.  Fantastic stuff.

What I am hoping for today is to see whether I can get a nice dose of irony and get some of them to comment on this post.  We shall see!  Meanwhile, congratulations to the one spammer that described my site as awful!  Originality is appreciated.

Meeting a Hero?

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I am an idiot! This is a strange piece to write but it is a bit of a mea culpa when it comes to being unrealistic. Even why I am writing it is a bit of a mystery but I guess this blog has become a surrogate diary – odd given that I have never kept a diary bar one futile effort when I was about 10 years old. Anyway, here is the tale.

Last week I popped along to a club called Martyrs. The reason for my being there was that Thomas Dolby was playing. He was undertaking a short tour across the US playing a number of small venues. This wasn’t a full show. Instead he was talking about his new album, how it had been written and how it tied in with an online game he had created. A lot of the people present had been participants in the game. He played some of the new songs and also threw in a few faves from older albums to please the old guard.

It was a good event, interesting and enjoyable and I continue to enjoy what he creates, even if I was not interested enough to get involved in the game. He also said he would be back for a full show with a band in the spring.

The source of my downfall was what followed. If you bought a certain amount of merchandise, you were given a wristband that let you in to a meet and greet afterwards. I was buying the CD anyway, so a t-shirt was enough to put me over the threshold. I went along.

At this point, I want to make something very clear. I am not in the least bit angry at Thomas for anything. I am just disappointed in myself. This was my first experience of a celebrity signing event. I have never been to a book signing at Borders (RIP) and I have never been to any of the big events like Comicon or a Star Trek convention so I haven’t seen how these things go. As it was, people lined up to get their stuff signed, get a photo taken and have their moment with Thomas.

I waited until near the end. First, I wasn’t in any great hurry. Second, propping up the bar was more comfy than standing in line. Third, I wanted to see how the whole thing worked. This is where I learned my lesson. It is obvious really. This is part of the job for the person involved. They aren’t your buddy, they don’t want to chat, they want to do what is required and then get out again. So would I looking around that room!

Thomas seemed to be polite to everyone and did what was expected. However, he never looked like he was having fun. I watched many people have their picture taken with him and, while he looked at the camera dutifully in each, I bet not one of those shots had a smile. When my turn came, he signed what I had with exactly what I asked him to write, exchanged a few pleasantries and we were done. Someone was nearby at that point trying to get things wrapped up so we weren’t in doubt that we would be gone quickly but that is fair enough.

So what is so odd about this that I have written all of this? I have blown an image up. I have been a fan of his work for many years. I have heard interviews and read some of his writing and I have always found him an interesting type of person. Of course, you never know whether that is actually the real person or not but you never can know. However, in your mind you come to think that this person could actually be someone you got on with. When you finally get to meet them, you imagine that there will be some sort of friendly spark. Of course, they have never heard of you or any of the other few dozen people lined up to meet them and you get your minute and then you are done.

Any common sense analysis of this suggests it would work exactly the way it did. Why was I disappointed? Because your mind sometimes likes to ditch reality and replace it with something more interesting. After leaving the venue, I was quite dispirited. Maybe if I went to lots of these things, I would get used to it but this isn’t really my thing so I doubt that will happen. Instead, I just learned a brief lesson in not being a fanciful idiot. If I had left after the show, I would have been a happy camper. Oh well, maybe at my advancing age it is time to grow up a bit.

Saugatuck

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Took a trip around the bottom of Lake Michigan to visit Saugatuk.  We have been there a couple of times before but this was a visit to take my Mum there.  We went during the week which certainly made for a quieter day than the weekends when things can get quite busy there.

Saugatuck is a nice little town.  Nothing terribly dramatic about it but it has a nice harbor, plenty of little shops that have some unusual bits and pieces, a few good places to get lunch and as much fudge and/or ice cream as you could conceivably want!

The harbor separates the majority of the town from a section on a thin spit of land that edges on to Lake Michigan.  The beaches are on the other side of this spit and there is a small chain ferry that takes you across if you want to go to that side.  It is a passenger only ferry and is hand cranked across.  A quaint little addition to the town.

If you are in to motor yachts, there are also some nice examples to spot around the harbor.  Obviously a fair few dollars tied up in some of them and it can be nice to sit by the water eating lunch and planning your life if you were one of the people who owned one of the boats!

The joy of spam

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One of the delights of having a blog with comments enabled is spam.  When I first set up the blog, I had an email notification whenever someone posted a message.  This didn’t seem so unreasonable until the blog was found by someone’s spam system.  Suddenly the emails were coming thick and fast.  Needless to say, that notification was soon switched off.

I now get two types of spam.  The smaller quantities are scattered around any type of post and they are of the sort that says they are interested in my opinion and are looking forward to what I write next.  They also happen to be a link to some crummy site or other.  It will be interesting to see if I get one of those for this post.

The more common type is a massive amount of text with keywords for whatever people must search for on a regular basis.  Lots of film titles for download show up along with some rather bizarre pseudo short stories.  The easy thing about this is that they are all posted on the same comment thread.  This is actually associated with the picture of me from the bio page.  No idea how they even found a way to comment on that but they did.  Of course, this makes spotting them as spam unbelievably easy.  Thanks guys!

Of course, getting lots of spam has one downside.  I am enthusiastic about deleting them.  Spotting the occasional genuine comment is a little tricky.  Hopefully I haven’t got rid of anything real yet.  If I have, send me a comment – I will try not to delete it too!

Offline for a bit!

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If you are a a regular reader of this blog (and thank you if that is the case) I owe you an apology.  I have had a bit of a gap in my postings.  There are a couple of reasons.  First I have been tied up with a couple of other things that have meant I wasn’t always able to get back to writing something.

However, the bigger problem was that my desktop started to show signs of impending death.  The OS must have been corrupted somehow and so a reinstall was called for.  Never had to do that before and trashing the system to start again was a bit nerve wracking.  Of course, it didn’t go totally smoothly but, courtesy of some good backups I got most things back up and running.

I also took the chance to think about what I really needed on the machine.  Yahoo! Messenger has not made it back on.  When do i ever use that these days?  The priority was getting the most important stuff back up and running so writing blog posts was relegated.  However, things seem to be back to normal (mostly) so hopefully I will be a bit more reliable in future.

Building an article

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Originally I started drafting this post while I was in the middle of putting together an article. Since the article was due to go to press in a magazine, I was circumspect about exactly what I was writing. That made it hard to write anything that was terribly interesting since I was always trying to avoid saying anything specific.

Since the piece has now been published, I can be a lot more open about it. The article is in the latest edition of Warbird Digest and, if you want a copy, you can go to their website at www.warbirddigest.com to get the latest issue and back issues (I think!). The topic is the great operation at the Warbird Heritage Foundation based up at Waukegan IL, people who have appeared in a bunch of things I have done.

In putting together the article I spent some time with the people who are the subject of the story getting their perspectives on what they do. This can be such an interesting process. When you are working with people who are so into what they are doing, you can’t help but get swept up in the whole thing. In writing about them, I obviously wanted the piece to reflect well on them as well as me but when you find out how willing they are to be helpful to get what I need, you do feel very grateful.

Getting people to sit down and talk about things is often a little more challenging. Not everyone is a self-publicist but the heart of the story is the people involved and so their story is what I was after. It is surprising how quickly people will open up when given the chance. We were also trying to get a little bit more of the background to the team included so I hope they are glad to see the way their role is portrayed.

Since it is a combination of text and photos, were were able to show the aircraft at work and the people doing what they do. Some of my shots were sued but WHF also had access to many other shots that had been taken by others. If time (and aircraft availability) had worked out, there are some other shots I would have liked to take to illustrate the piece but you can’t get everything every time. However, it still came out reasonably well and I hope they are happy as a group.

Browser Wars

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This isn’t much of a post unless you are a bit of a net nerd. I was recently looking at the stats of the visitors to this blog. One of the stats I can get is the browser people use to visit this site.   The key data is that over two thirds of my visitors are using Firefox.

If you are reading this, the chances are you already know this since you are using Firefox yourself.