I’m deep into rewrites on my book, under a May deadline to turn in the first reworked chapters. I turned the manuscript into Houghton-Mifflin in September, before I headed off to Australia for a month (side note: I miss Australia). Then I didn’t get anything back for a long time, which means part of my frustration is that when I get a note like “more examples here” I think “yeah, I could have given you twenty six months ago, when all this stuff was fresh in my head”. And then there’s the notes to myself I didn’t catch when I turned it in, like [Derek: should I move that other chapter here?] and now I’m embarassed when I see the note and feel twice as bad when my editor’s written “yes” next to the note.

Yeah. You work on something that closely for over a year, you start to develop blind spots.

Anyway, most of the criticism I get when I write for the internet is crazy. Like “You’re an idiot for totally ignoring the issue of player service time” when there are three paragraphs in the middle of the article about the implications of player service time. Sometimes, I realize it’s me not being clear, but a lot of the time, I really just want to respond “hey, screw you for skim-reading”.

So, the book revisions. Here’s the problem: there are notations all over. And they’re all right. Some of them I knew were right because I spotted them when I gave the whole thing a fresh read, but a lot of them I recognize immediately as things I should have seen all along. And this is the worst part, the realization that for all the work that went into it, it is still not nearly as good as it is, and that I know how much work it’ll require to be as good as I want it to be.

I feel like I’m doing some huge day-long bike ride, tooling along kind of tired but still cruising, knowing that I’m only a couple hours from being done, and being told that I’m about 45 miles off and I’m going to have to really haul because the finish line’s closing in two hours and change. And they’ve got a map and everything.

All you can do is stand up in the saddle and charge up the next hill.

To meet a spring 2007 date, I need to do some serious sprinting, and I don’t come home with a lot of energy after work these days.

I’ve been playing around with Google’s AdSense over at USSM, tinkering with various layouts and trying to see if it’s possible to scrape up enough money to pay for a server upgrade.

It’s been kind of a pain, for a variety of reasons.

Anyway. One of the things I hate is the ads for places offering “free” stuff if you complete 20 offers. So I use the competitive ad filter to block them.

The problem is, the same place runs a ton of these as different companies. So you may get Google putting up racks of essentially the same ad from nominally different companies.

media-offer.com is onlinerewardcenter.com is sports-offer.com

Compare, for instance, their terms of service.
http://media-offer.com/info.htm?tp=tos
http://onlinerewardcenter.com/info.htm?tp=tos

They’re all exactly the same company. They place the same ads. But I have to block each one of them, using one of my limited filters. Ugh.

Also: man, we are not earning money off AdSense.

I read everything. My parents used to make fun of me when, for lack of anything better to do, I would read the cereal box labels at breakfast.

So I read EULAs, and privacy policies, and all that stuff people count on you not reading. I came across a gem today, in the disclaimer for a replacement cleat for my clipless pedal.

LOOK declines, within legal limits, all responsibilities in the event of direct or indirect damage resulting from an incident involving its products. In certain countries or regions, limitation of responsibility for injury resulting from material or immaterial damage is illegal. The previous paragraph therefore would not apply.

Wait, what?

So a) if crazed EPO-freak cyclists go on a killing rampage in your town, Look wants you to know that they take no responsibility for either their superior mobility and pedal power or the indirect effects of the spree.
b) unless it’s illegal to say that. Then pretend we didn’t just say that, though we pretty clearly just did.

I love the semi-lawerly slinking tone.

c) technically, “previous paragraph” is the warning that the “Good operating guarantee” only applies to products made by Look International, thus leaving the illegal disclaiming of responsibility intact.

So a long time ago, when I briefly quit my job before I came to my senses, I put my resume up on Monster and sent it out around town. I got some really stupid queries — do I want to sell insurance for a company that went out of its way to hose me on a settlement for years? Or be a financial consultant?

Anyway, I sent Google a nice note with my quite-nice resume, and said, essentially, “Hey, here’s my pitch about who I am, check out this great resume, blah blah blah…”

It took them a while to get back to me, and when they did, I got an email that didn’t even have my name as a salutation.

This is not a huge deal. I wasn’t really surprised I got rejected — they hire people who do my job, but not where I wanted to work, so I was kind of asking for someone to read it and be willing to talk to me about the position in general and maybe even discuss working out interviewing or whatever — and I’m sure Google’s swamped with resumes from great people applying for exactly the right job at the right time.

And I know their hiring process is broken and takes too long to get back to people.

What struck me as notable, though, is that Google, of all places, with all the importance they put on personalization and tailoring search results, all of that good stuff, couldn’t manage to put a name in there. I guess I’d expected that they’d put the kind of care and thought into hiring that they put into, say, Gmail, or Google Earth.

I have trouble trying to write here in part because I know that writing about work is going to get back to work, and right now, work dominates my life. I’m reluctant to even say that I’m really stressed out about work, because that implies that things aren’t going well, and that… you see where I’m going.

This is interesting because here’s a situation where online community can’t cover: I can go out with a friend and whine my head off, and no harm done. Email to trusted parties is a little more reliable, but there’s pretty clearly a line between discretion and disclosure.

Acceptable level of whining:

Over a beer –> Over a blog
I hate my life –> I could be better

This was all easier when I worked for a huge telecom that was largely blind to this sort of thing, and I didn’t care if my job was affected.

Stupid internet.

The opening of Badly Drawn Boy’s song “Everybody’s Stalking” sounds just like an Alice in Chains song… I think it might be “I stay away”. “Got me wrong” maybe?

There’s a pretty large contingent of people who read USSM and hate it. For whatever reason, good or bad, it just reaches into their brain and throttles the angry part. As a result, they spend a lot of time writing us horrible emails and bad-mouthing us.

Whatever.

What I don’t understand, though, is why they insist on coming back. They clearly think it’s a waste of their time, but they’re unwilling to do anything else.

Some people hate and love us. You can go back through the comments and find that the guy who likes to savage us for not being on the right side (their side) of topic X have written comments about how much they agree when we’ve written articles about the subject. The sin, it appears, is to not be on their side all the time, or… I’m not not sure what it is.

Some of these people I’ve had conversations with, and they go like this:
Hater: “I hate you guys, you’re all a bunch of morons and I don’t know why you have any readers…”
Me: “I’m sorry you feel that way. There are many other places you might find yourself happier, like x, y, and z. In the meantime, please consider not reading our site, as it clearly makes you very angry.”
Hater: “No way, I love the site!”

I don’t get it. I feel like we should have some kind of CNN/MSNBC/etc-style news ticker that scrolls by the top, constantly repeating obvious things like “We condemn use of steroids — We’re not stathead zealots –” with each one linking to an article where we handled the topic at length.

I’d update the FAQ, but no one reads that anyway. Oh well.

When you run a web site, you never want to ask people for more information than you have to. If you’re signing them up for an email newsletter, you only really need their email address, and that’s all they want to give you.

King 5 is a local Seattle TV station. To register for things like being able to see some content, and junk like that, you have to provide:

Email address
Confirm it (bleah)
Password
Confirm password

That’s reasonable enough.

Then it requires:
First Name
Last Name
Gender
Year of Birth

So immediately, in that first section, that’s too much information that you can be fairly sure they’re going to use to go out and buy up your demographic data. THis is then followed by (still required):
Select your favorite hobbies or interests. Check as many boxes as you would like

and still more personal information.

Address
Country
City
State
Zip Code
Telephone
and
Typically, how do you get your copy of a local newspaper?

If you weren’t convinced something fishy was going on before, well, this should set off all kinds of alarm bells. Telephone number? Really? What possible reason do they have for requiring my phone number?

It’s crazy. I suspect King 5 must suffer a massive abandon rate. There’s nothing they could possibly keep behind such a registration wall that would justify me giving up that kind of information (unless I make it up).

It’s almost as bad as their newscasts.

I realized that there’s another hidden cost to hiring bad people that shows up when they’re forced out: they give a company a bad name. I hadn’t thought much about this until today, but it’s true: my opinion of a set of companies is colored greatly by the people I know from work who’ve left that company.

Say your employer hires a couple people from Company X over a few months, and they’re all competent but the most inconsiderate jerks: they insult people in meetings, spend much of their time forming little conspiracies, and in general act badly. That’s absolutely going to affect your opinion of that company — even if they were forced out of that company for not being good fits.

This makes for a particularly weird phenomena. Consider a dying company with a large, reasonably competent IT department.
Healthy: normal flow of people out of the company.
Early signs of decay: increasingly more of the best people leave. The outside perception is that employees leaving the company are unusually good.
Getting sicker: more and more of the good people take off. They join other companies and help bring other good people on. This company may not be viewed as a goldmine of potential high-quality employees
Needs hospitalization: employees of all stripes are leaving voluntarily and being laid off or forced to leave. These quality of leaving employee drops in general, and so does the opinion of those leaving it.
Deathbed: all the last rats who couldn’t get a job gnawing on any other corpse swim to the job marketplace. No wonder the company went under, if that’s the kind of person they had working for them.

This is another reason why it’s so important to be super-selective in hiring. Even if you’ve got an unusually frisky HR department that’s good at forcing people out when a bad hire gets in, those bad hires then carry your company’s name at the top of their resume when they start pounding the pavement, and you get a reputation. Then when you want to get a new job, you may find that the market’s prejudiced against you, so if only for selfish reasons you should look out for this possibility.

So I wrote a short story and posted it on USSM today (tonight?) about trying to erase the stats of players on steroids. I posted it at midnight, and it took 16m before I got my first complaint email. It’s almost like writing for Prospectus again.