Monthly Archives: October 2007

The stump busters are here. Working out in the backyard right now. Getting a birch tree chopped down from it’s mighty heights down to size zero. Taking out two or three stubby stumps left over from trees (much smaller) which we took out ourselves when we moved in here in August. It’s interesting to watch the stumpbusters as it says on their truck. I can’t see much from the window and don’t want to be in their way outside, but I’ve been watching some from the kitchen window.

One of the big parts of the tree came down a few minutes ago. It hit the group with a huge thump, more like a resounding thud or thunder. Now I know how they came up with the word for thunder way back in those cave people days. Likely it was on some dragon hunting expedition when the dragon got tired of the whole hunting then and just sat on all of them. One junior hunter escaped (being light and able to run very fast) and told the village about the sound of thunder as the dragon made the hunters one with the Earth, literally.

I was reading a post today on an email list, they were talking about the death of usenet. Some people won’t even know what that is. I’m back from the days of usenet and IRC. I have used them both. Been semi- addicted for awhile. Gotten over it to the stage where I just look back and smile at the memory of all the silly and just plain lame things I did. I miss usenet and IRC now and then. But it won’t ever come back to what it was. Someone has to force their almighty buck-making strategies on us all and something else is ruined forever. Spoiled if not fully ruined. Like a slow poison which gradually kills it off. Starting at the finger tips and working up to the brain till it is full of spam and nothing alive to keep it going. Why do we let this happen?

Now that usenet is pretty much dead and we should have learned from that (if not other examples long before) why don’t we do something to protect the next body parts of the Internet? Weblogs are especially spam poisoned. Websites are too but mainly in the blog fingertips. It’s been a few years since blogs were just blogs, fun to read, wildly daring and innovative. Now blogs are usually stuffed with junk, like getting your snail mail and finding nothing but advertising and bills. Not worth the trip to the mail box. Why don’t we do something to stop it before blogs are as dead as usenet?

I don’t know what we can do really. I guess that is why so little is done. We let advertisers and get-rich-quick-any-way-you-can types do as they please. Free enterprise right? No matter what gets poisoned and killed off.

Anyway, I am keeping my blog as junk free as I can. No ads at least. I do have some of the things like blog lists and communities. It bothers me how so much of the content of those communities are splogs and people who want to be friends for traffic, the real traffic whores and not in a humourous way at all.

Enough ranting. I’m soon getting ready for work, the last day of my work week. Likely to be a day full of billing questions from people who have had their delinquent accounts disabled. Why are so many of them surprised?!

Happy Halloween for those who are in the spirit early.