“mumblemumblemumble . . . Stop it!”
“mumblemumblemumble . . . Ow!”
“Mo-om! Lillie hit me!”
“No I didn’t!”
“Did too!”
“It was an accident!”
“No it wasn’t!”
“And I didn’t do it!”

Ahhhh . . . another day in parental paradise. they’ve been at each other’s throats since waking about three hours ago. Happily, no blood’s been drawn yet. Still, there are quite a few hours until they are banished to bed for the night, so a good bloodletting is a distinct possibility.

Every day is a nature special: Survival of the Sneakiest. Without supervision, I am sure one or the other would have been pushed out of the nest, strangled or stabbed or done in somehow. Maybe it is my only-child bias showing itself, but I do not understand how so many siblings survive to adulthood. And no, I have no idea why the wife was asking for sunscreen and a live bat. I may have misheard her. I am getting older, after all.

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The internet, series of tubes and un-truck-like or not, is a funny place. I have just finished my morning perusal of other people’s postings of misery and doubts, and still have enough time for a cup of cocoa (okay, mocha, dammit!) before work. Which is a good thing, too: My eyes keep closing. I think someone’s sewn magnets between the upper and lower lids and I really need to find a way to reverse the polarity on one on each side.

No robin outside my window this morning. I hope the worthless cats haven’t killed it. It is sad enough going out to the orchard and seeing the empty nest they left there. I it weren’t for the mice that keep trying to invade, I would seriously consider de-catting the house. I have to get the wife to sew bells to their necks if they are going to keep slipping out of their collars.

Who would I not want to be today? Ted Stevens, stone-age senator, for one.

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Baby robin hanging out at my office window. He’s been there at least once a day for the past couple of weeks. (soft focus provided courtesy of a very dirty window screen and poor lighting conditions)

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I can feel the terrorists hating my freedom(s) as I sit here typing. Please, DHS, put me and my fruit trees on the list! Really, do they hate our freedom, or do they hate our political and economic policies? I feel more freedom-hating from Jerry Falwell, Rush Limbaugh, GWB and the like than I do from any Achmed Goesboomalot. Okay, back to an exciting day of being the human Tivo. And I get paid for this?

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Last week, Erik introduced me to payperpost, which was being debated on TechCrunch. Per their home page, payperpost offers the following for bloggers:

“Get Paid to Blog. You’ve been writing about Web sites, products, services and companies you love for years and you have yet to benefit from all the sales and traffic you have helped generate. That’s about to change. With PayPerPost™ advertisers are willing to pay you to post on topics. Search through a list of topics, make a blog posting, get your content approved, and get paid. It’s that simple.”

As I write, there are twnety-two opportunities available, four of which require a positive post. The pay per post ranges from $2.50 (the majority) to $10 (only one at this rate). The required word count? 10 to 100, with the majority under 50. I see nothing wrong in being paid to post. Journalists and advertisers do it all the time. Some postings require a positive post, which I could do without review first (and a positive one at that). Make it something I wholeheartedly enjoy and I will wholeheartedly endorse it, however. The majority accept both positive and negative reviews. That I can do. And fifty words? I can pull fifty words out of my arse on ANY subject in a minute or less. That does not sound so unreasonable. Hell, I am at 250 words with this right now!

Why not get paid to write? The argument at TechCrunch tends to boil down to integrity. Somehow, we as bloggers lose our integrity if we submit a paid post. I have seen the blogosphere, and for the most part, it ain’t purdy. In general, integrity, like grammar, spelling and coherent thought, is in short supply. Being paid to post is not going to have a major dampening effect on blogger integrity. Is it the pay itself? Does receiving money for services somehow sully one as a blogger? If so, there is a hell of a lot of Google Ad Sense code that needs to come down NOW! What about being a blogger makes you more pure than being a lawyer, burger flipper or a prostitute? Really, what?

I am not a shill. Just the other day, while I was driving my solid, dependable GMC Sierra K1500 crew cab SLT, with the luxurious leather interior and power everything, I told my wife just that.

“Wife,” I said, enjoying the cool feeling of the leather against my bare thighs (I was wearing shorts. Very rarely do I drive naked), wishing that the air conditioner had not died, “I am not a shill.”

“That’s nice, dear.” she responded. “But I still want you to fix the brakes on my Toyota RAV4 before you become a widowed shill.”

Being paid to post is not a bad thing; I would do it in a heartbeat if I had complete control over what I wrote and actually trusted the organization that I was writing for. And therein lies the rub for me: Trust. I know very little about payperpost, other than what they have on their web site. The one link they offered with external information about them is gone. Why? My guess is because the BusinessWeek online article, “Polluting the Blogosphere”, did not cast them in the greatest light, and they realized that bad publicity is NOT better than no publicity at all. Even without the bad publicity, I still would not trust them. Once again, why? First, they want my social security number. Second, they take ninety days to pay for services. Ninety days is an eternity with an unknown company. If I am going to whore myself for $2.50, I want that money immediately. And I am not going to give an unknown online company my SSN to get it.

Hopefully payperpost is completely legitimate, but I have no guarantee that they will keep my SSN safe. Even if they do not plan on using it for identity theft, or sell it to others who will, how do I know what sort of payperpost has in place to protect my SSN? I still have my VA letter apologizing for their little screwup earlier this year. Oops, your personal data was stolen. So sorry, please monitor your credit and accept our sincere apologies. Gee, I feel better already. Fortunately, that appears to have turned out okay. So glad I am not in the Navy or Marine Corps.

Identity theft happens every day. There is no reason to increase your chances of being a victim by giving out personal data to a questionable company. Payment for services happens every day as well. Still, I am not willing to risk another identity theft incident for a $5 payment that I may very well never receive, and I recommend that nobody else does either. I may not have integrity, but I hopefully have a somewhat secure identity, right?

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The kids are at camp today (the girl-child, Camp Runamok, the boy-child, soccer camp) and the wife is taking this time to go through their rooms and clean up a bit. So far she has hauled six bags of garbage out of the girl-child’s room, and I can still hear her in there, muttering obscenities, gathering more. Since trash, like beauty and cataracts, is in the eye of the beholder, I expect it to be pretty exciting around here when the girl-child gets home. The boy-child and I may go out for a bit after golf camp and come home after bed time.

I was not a camp kid. When I was young, the only camps I went to were a one week half-day soccer camp and a weeklong class camping trip with my sixth grade class. Instead of camp, I was shipped off to Southern California to spend a month or three with my grandparents. I spent the time reading, gorging on coffee and maple nut ice cream, watching television (I was not permitted to do so at home, so I had to get in a year’s worth of viewing by the end of the summer), exploring the mesa at the top of Hillside Drive in Topanga and tromping along various creek beds. Oh, and going to amusement parks: Knott’s Berry Farm, Disneyland, Sea World. I have no idea what I missed by not going to camp. Mostly socialization, I am sure. I can live without the socialization; as a telecommuter, what need have I for social skills? My kids, or at least the girl-child, will hopefully benefit greatly from it. Either that or she will continue to hone her queen-bee skills and become even more unbearable towards those around her. Bless her manipulative little heart . . .

And so the cleaning continues. My hope is that the chaos that is my children’s rooms will suffice to burn out the wife before she notices what a pig-sty my office is. She does not seem to understand the nature of life, the wife: All things tend towards chaos. We work to get in shape, but as soon as we stop to rest, our bellies go to pot and our hair falls out in clumps. We clean and clean, and still the dogs track mud across the newly-waxed floors. We throw out all of our garbage and the mailman delivers a whole new batch, or we buy something at the store. Dust floats everywhere, just waiting for a clean surface to open up so that it can settle and breed. Food? It spoils, or turns to feces and stains the toilet. We pull weeds in the yard and a jungle of them sprouts in the garden while our backs are turned. We are tubes of meat, programmed to procreate and create new tubes of meat, all built to turn foodstuffs into feces. Why fight it?- Build a new wall out of bundled newspapers. Give up on the floors and just use the endless credit card offers and catalogs as a replaceable carpet. Don’t sweep or mop or dust or spray or scrub or wash; embrace the filth and accept that you will die and one day be part of it! If I cannot get her to embrace the filth, I should at least get the kids into longer camp sessions so that she has time to fully muck out their rooms and dispose of the evidence.

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New puppy: $300.00
Bill for jaw surgery after being attacked by older dog: $1500.00
Toys (ignored in favor of shoes, toilet paper and clothing): $325.00
Picking up piles of dog crap from the hallway daily for the past 6 months: Priceless.

(Thanks mom and dad! Oh, and by the way, I just peed on your office floor again! Don’t you just love me?)

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There are certain blogs I read daily, podslug and Mythstory among them. Some (ie Mythstory), use Google Ad Sense, as discussed on podslug here. The idea is targeted advertising, which left me somewhat confused this morning while reading Mysthstory’s ‘July 11th: Mortality “In” and “Out” List’. For this post, which was entertaining and enlightening as always, we (I, if the mouse in my pocket has run away) learned of various people (and an occasional impure thought) who were born or died on this day in history.

The ads, intelligently targeted for this site (and I assume this post)?- Casinos and hotels at Niagara Falls. Not precisely the pairing I would have chosen, but maybe it is because I am not looking deep enough. How does Google associate mortality with Niagraga casinos and hotels? Are they being honest and figure anyone going to Niagara is there to either a)leap from the falls and die, b)hump like happy little bunnies and pop out a kid or two or c) hump like happy little bunnies, then leap from the falls and die? Curious, I looked back a few entries for June 30th, 1859: The Great Blondin Crosses The Falls, expecting to see the same Niagara ads. Instead I found a series of NASCAR ads. Hmmm. Doesn’t seem like Google has much Ad Sense after all.

Mythstory is a great site with a creative author. Please visit it frequently and when done, click on the Google Ad Nonsense links, just to see what incredible pairings they have come up with this time. And be sure to visit podslug afterwards and learn more about “codec silos”. Hopefully I will remember to comment over there about the silo I’ve found myself in with my new Nikon DSLR, which uses a proprietary RAW format, the NEF. Argh! (no, that wasn’t pirate-speak, merely an expression of frustration)

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Just a little youtube to brighten your day (hope I did this right; I’ve never youtubed my site before!):

If nothing shows up above, go here.

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