Category: Blogging

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Just Not My Type

I’ve been a but sporadic here on the blog lately.  I’ve got all this stuff in my head that I want to write about but to be honest, I guess I just haven’t felt much like the physical act of typing lately.  I’m actually a pretty lousy typist, despite the fact that I’ve tried, seriously tried, to develop a good typing technique over the years.  I’ve had typing lessons, I’ve used computer typing tutor software, and I’ve tried to force myself to use the right touch typing technique.  But all of that, and I still can’t really type all that well.

When I was at school as a student, I actually did a proper typing course.  In fact, I’ll digress for a moment and mention that my school offered something that I’ve not really seen in too many other schools since… every Thursday afternoon we did “activities”.  We all got to choose from a wide range of activities to do for a few hours every Thursday. Some students went off to play sport, running around the basketball field or ripping each others’ heads off playing football.  That was never really my scene.  I was one of those other more nerdy and anti-social children, who pretty much avoided sport wherever I could.

There aren’t all that many things I actually remember about school, but a couple of things stand out.  I remember going off to the AGL gas company in Hurstville where we did cooking lessons on Thursday afternoon.  I thought it was neat, being a 14 year old kid, jumping on a train to go the two stations up the line, finding the big AGL building, and having some other adult besides my regular teacher showing me how to cook a different meal each week.  At the time, learning to cook didn’t quite have the same prestige as being on the football team, but over the long haul I know which one has been most useful!

Back to the typing story… the other memorable Thursday activity (call me weird) was doing a typing class.  I remember being taught by our library assistant, Mrs Sobb.  She was a older lady and boy could she type!  I remember going through all the usual finger training activities – asd, asdf, asd;lk, dad, sad, fad, gad – and so on. I particularly remember that she had a set of large white mens hankerchiefs with long thin ribbons attached to each corner.  She’d tie two ribbons together behind our neck and the other two ribbons were tied to the typewriter (yes, you heard it, typewriter!)  The hankie would then be suspended like a square hammock between the typewriter and our bodies so we couldn’t see the keyboard.  We just had to place our hands on the home row, by feel, and bang out our lines of sad dads.

Anyway, enough wandering down memory lane. Suffice to say, sometimes as much as you try to learn the “right” way to do something it doesn’t always stick. But even as a “bad” typist, I’ve still written a book of 60,000 words, and a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that since I started this blog I’ve probably typed well over 300,000 words here as well.  Add in the other blogs, wikis, emails, discussion forums and various things I’ve written (typed) over the last few years and it’s interesting to consider that someone can be fairly average at something but still produce something relatively worthwhile.

I guess the lesson is that sometimes it’s more important to actually just DO something, rather than worry about doing it perfectly.

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Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

If there’s one thing I hate it’s when people assume I’m an idiot and try to rip me off.

So when I got home today I opened the mailbox (yes, the real one!) to find this letter from a company called the Domain Renewal Group.  Their letter – which looked very much like an invoice –  was addressed to me as the owner of the domain betchablog.com and kindly informed me that this domain was due for renewal soon and that I should pay this as soon as possible.  The wording on the letter said that “the domain name registration is due to expire in the next few months“… and that… “Failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identity.”

All of that is true.  Betchablog.com IS coming up for renewal, and I DO need to renew it. The problem is that Domain Renewal Group are NOT my domain registrar, and they never have been.  I happen to have all of my various domains registered with GoDaddy, and I’ve never even heard of this other mob.

A closer reading of the letter reveals that all of the statements in their letter are technically correct, but written in such as way as to be misleading and underhanded in their deceptiveness.  The letter reads just like a regular renewal notice, but is in fact a transfer and renewal notice.  By signing it and sending it back with payment it would authorise them not just to renew the domain, but to take the domain away from the current registrar and move it their overpriced services.  How overpriced?  Well, I just took a look at GoDaddy’s site and it seems the going rate for a new .com domain is USD$10.69.  Their price for a domain transfer with 12 months renewal is only USD$6.99.  For the same thing, the Domain Renewal Group were about to charge unsuspecting or careless domain owners AUD$45 (about USD$41.50).

The thing is, there are many organisations where the bills are often paid by a different department to the ones that register the domains, that wouldn’t even question such an invoice when it arrived. The wording is sneaky enough, and the format looks enough like an invoice, that many people would just pay it without even questioning it.  I find this notion of trying to trick people into doing things they don’t mean to do is an appalling business practice.

There happened to be a Toronto-based phone number on the form so I rang it using Skype. The guy who answered asked what he could help me with, so I told him that I was very unimpressed with this deceptive and misleading way of doing business.   He sounded both surprised that someone would bother to call just to complain, but judging from his tone this was not the first time he’d had a complaint about it.  His response was a careless, “Like, whatever”, but he incorrectly assumed that there is nothing I can do about it other than complain.

He forgets that we live in an age where everyone is a publisher. He stupidly neglects to consider that the very customer base they are trying to mislead – those domain owners who own blogs and websites – are the exact same people who own their very own “personal printing presses” in the forms of blogs.  If you’re going to pull this scam-like crap on people, how stupid do you have to be to do it to people who can publicly tell the world about it?

My advice?  NEVER do business with the Domain Renewal Group.  Tell your friends never to do business with the Domain Renewal Group. And if I did have any domains registered with them I would be immediately transferring them elsewhere.

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The ACEC Conversation Starts Here

In a bizarre and unexpected turn of events, I had a call from the good folk from ACEC a couple of days ago asking if I’d be interested in presenting something at the Friday keynote session. Apparently there was a spot available and someone suggested my name.  That was great news for me, since I really wanted to go to ACEC… not only does it sound like it will be an awesome conference, but there are so many people from my online world who will be there that I want to meet up with in person.  Naturally, I said yes.

The hard part is that I was told I can talk about whatever I like. That’s dangerous enough, but further complicated by the fact that I’ve been busy lately presenting some stuff for several other conferences and I don’t really want to just reuse the same stuff.  I realise that I’d be talking to a totally different group of people so it’s not the overlap that’s the problem, but I’d just rather come up with something specifically for ACEC.

My problem is that I’m such a dilettante and I tend to dabble around in so many different educational ICT-related things, that I have no real idea about what I might focus on.  And of course, Friday is the last day of what will doubtless be a pretty full-on conference schedule, so the chances of me saying anything intelligent about anything that hasn’t already been talked about by people way smarter and more eloquent that me is pretty slim.

I asked Tony Brandenburg from ACEC what he thought might make a good topic, or what gaps might exist in the program that perhaps hadn’t been covered.  His view was that although the conference has plenty of great stuff from lots of great people, much of that was from overseas visitors so it would be good to have a bit more of the Australian perspective.  “Just give us a brain dump of whatever is on your mind”, he said.

So, feeling a little daunted by the idea of it all, but really keen to have the opportunity to add something worthwhile to the ACEC conversation, I’m asking for some suggestions. If you read this blog at all, you know that I rave on about all sorts of stuff here.  If you were going to hear someone speak on the last day of the ACEC conference, what sort of things would grab your interest? If you could drop any thoughts you have into the comments below, that would be greatly appreciated.  I like the idea of a presentation for ACEC growing out of a conversation that starts here on the blog several weeks prior. To engage in some conversation here, which can then evolve into a presentation there, which can then be followed up with more conversation afterwards, seems to be a much more interesting way to do it.

I’m keen to hear what you’ve got to say… don’t be shy.