Typing is Easier Without an IV Needle in Your Arm

I’m stuck in this blasted hospital for at least one more day while they double check enzyme levels. At least they have some Wi-Fi and my daughter was kind enough to drop off my laptop.

I was really sick of that stupid IV. Waltzing Matilda to the bathroom. Waltzing Matilda to the window. Waltzing Matilda to bed. Argh! The stupid line gets caught on everything. The first thing I asked the doctor today was, “Write an order to have this thing removed!” He put me on solid food and out came the IV.

Now when you haven’t eaten for 3 days, any food will do, even hospital food. But I think the doc lost his mind here. I should have gotten some tea and jello to start, not that chicken-like slab, mashed potatoes, and green beans. And where do they get off giving “bread pudding” with raisins to someone who might be diabetic? Dumbasses.

I first ask the doctor if I could just go home today. He said he really wanted to see how I did on real food first. Then he had the nerve to say, “Do you not have insurance?” WTF? Admitting screwed up, has me down for “no insurance” and this guy wants to keep me one more day? You’d think they’d be rolling me out in a wheel chair at midnight with my hand propped up in the “hail a cap” motion.

Did I mention I hate hospitals? You know I almost died to put myself in here. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Never again. Force of will…what ever it takes. Never again will I be such a dumbass. Hey, we all get one, may two if we’re lucky. I will miss the Demerol though.

Associated Content Bug Roundup Update

Here’s an update on the previously reported bugs at Associated Content.

Submitted articles raped and pillaged by the submission template	Fixed
Are experiencing extremely long waits after offer acceptance and publishing	Somewhat Fixed
Can not leave comments on articles	Fixed
Can not use the private message system with any reliability	We’ll never know if this is ever going to be fixed
Can not rate articles	Continues for some browser/OS combinations

New bugs since the “fixes.”
Payment conformations are not working for all browser/OS combo.
Some pictures were crossed with the other fixes.
The forums were rearranged once again, but still are difficult to navigate, locate new posts, and have been declared dead by more than one user.

WaMu Guy Does Chevy. Your Random Synapse Firing of the Day.

I don’t know the actor’s name, but the guy who did all those WaMu commercials with naked bankers is now doing Chevy commercials. Who can blame him? You have to go where the money is and it obviously isn’t at WaMu any more. I guess all those free checking accounts sent them into bankruptcy.

Look out Chevy! This guy is the harbinger of doom. He killed WaMu and now he’s out for you. And while we’re on the subject, why is “Chevy as American as apple pie?” Wasn’t W.C. Durant a French dude? Sure, he hired a fellow French dude to race his cars, but when both he and Louis Chevrolet got to Ellis Island, Louis became just plain, old Chevy. Etymology was never a strong suit of mine. Forgive me.

Now that WaMu has sucked the life out of us, let us now join Chevy bumpers across America and jump start ourselves. Crap, the whole “join bumpers” thing fails when bumpers are not made of conductive metal. (Kids, in the old days, you could hook up one jumper cable between batteries, touch metal bumpers to complete the circuit, and jump-start your car. Stay in school. Anodes and cathodes may save your life some day.)

My point? The WaMu guy is going to kill us all! If you see him, phone 911 and/or terminate with extreme prejudice. As a wise presidential adviser once said, “It’s all about the stupid economy.”

Associated Content Bug Roundup: We’re All Doomed

Based on current forum chatter, Associated Content is experiencing a slew of bugs right now. Some are new, but others we’ve seen in the past. If the threads are believable (and by the sheer number, I’ll take them at face value), currently AC participants:

• Are having submitted articles raped and pillaged by the submission template
• Are experiencing extremely long waits after offer acceptance and publishing
• Can not leave comments on articles
• Can not use the private message system with any reliability
• Can not rate articles

Template Trashing Articles
By far this is the most serious bug. This is more than the old “I pasted directly from MS Word and now it looks funny” complaint. The template parser seems to be doing consistently violent things like rearranging/deleting entire paragraphs. This bug seems to be related to Firefox and/or Display Only articles, but who can say for sure. Forum complaints are notoriously light on details so a complete picture is hard to paint. I can only say that the complaint-o-meter is off the scale suddenly.

Article Processing Lag
The time between accepting an offer and the article publishing on AC has grown exponentially in the last month. AC tried to explain away this issue by saying they have instituted new policies where someone is double-checking copyright issues, but if that’s the case, they need to hire three or four more reviewers. Complaints about this show that the current processing time is approximately 10+ days. If you are trying to submit time-sensitive information on to AC, you might as well forget it. Combine this with the bug above and you might as well not even submit anything to AC.

Comments
I don’t consider not being able to leave a comment a huge problem, but, judging from the fact that a new thread about this complaint is started about every hour, this seems to bother a lot of people. The real bug here is that this is a reoccurring bug. It’s happened in the past and will probably happen again. It always seems to crop up right after AC makes some other minor tweak else where.

My biggest concern with this is version control. We know that different AC techies are responsible for different aspects of the site. When bugs like this get fixed then pop up again, it usually means one programmer is stomping on another programmer’s code. Here’s the scenario.

1. Programmer A and B are both given their own copies of the baseline code, version 1.0
2. A bug like “Can’t leave comments” is reported
3. Programmer A fixes the bug problem, rolls up the code, and deploys it
4. Now we have version 1.1a
5. A change is made by Programmer B, He rolls up the code and deploys it
6. We now have version 1.1b

The crucial step missed is A did not share his changes with B. If he had, we would now be at version 1.2 which would include both the fix from A and the change from B. The sad thing here is there are simple, free software packages like CVS that would handle this situation.

Private Message System
At best, it’s spotty. Some are getting through, some are not. Probably a result of the scenario outlined above combined server load balancing.

Ratings
I haven’t experienced this bug and really don’t care if it’s bugging or not. The silly ratings don’t mean anything and if they don’t work, who cares?

Summary
The Bugs and Complaints forum has gone crazy and there isn’t an ACer in sight. One of the techies did post in one of the threads, but no one from AC has even acknowledged the submission template problem. The upside is the Other Online Writing Gigs forum is still going strong as the processing lag time is forcing writers to seek other outlets. The forum design/layout still blows. At no time in my two-plus years with AC have there been so many bugs simultaneously.

Associated Content Forum Debacale Update. Baby Steps.

I said seeing is believing so in fairness, I have to report Associated Content (AC) is making some progress with their forum. AC made some minor changes today. Nothing too spectacular, but enough to let the community know they are listening and trying. It’s still a pain to navigate, but they did list all the sub-forums on the main index page. You still have to navigate back to home plate to go off in another direction. There aren’t “new posts” indicators, yet.

Here’s what they changed or added:

• Search Posts by CP
• Javascript buttons fixed when editing/replying more than once on page
• updated breadcrumbs
• added forum links to Forum Index
• User information added to subscription emails
• added ability to embed images

I haven’t found any way to search for post by CP so I don’t know what they meant by that. The image embed is new, not really something that was holding up progress, but nice. We’ll see what other changes are coming. Baby steps today. Maybe the next round of changes will have the rest of the community’s suggestions incorporated.

ETA: I stand corrected by clickers more adept at clicking than me. If you click the “number of post” under a avatar, you get the history of that CP’s post. Why to make it subtle AC.

AC also introduced a new bug with their latest round of fixes. No one can start a new thread in the forums. Unfortunately, this is typical for AC. Fix one thing, break another.

It’s a SUV world and I’m short.

I’m used to pulling up to the coffee kiosk in my sexy mini-van. All the world’s on plane and I can look Barbie barista in the eye, until today. Today I rolled up in my sexy new Honda Civic. Yeah, baby, it’s dark blue and…WTH?…you’re three feet taller than me. I’ll just have my coffee in my lap, thank you. Barista Barbie won’t give me a second look now. My car is so small and new and paid for. I can afford this tire smoke. ERRRRR. No I can’t. These are new Goodyears. WTH was I thinking? Damn, I spilled my coffee. Mother of Pearl! These were clean khakis.

What’s up with your blog, Barefoot?

I’ve been asked this multiple times during the last few days. The color has changed and the Associated Content pages are gone. It’s pretty simple. It’s a protest. Not that I think I have some influential blog, but I have to walk the talk.

If you saw my post on 30 Aug 2008, you know I’m none too happy with how AC handled their new forum rollout or the forum design itself. I pulled my AC pages including the many tips, I’ve blogged over the last many months. I took the AC orange off as further disassociation. The phrase of the week is “guilt by association.” I ain’t havin’ none. To all who accused me of being an AC cheerleader in the past, this is the real me. True to myself.

To their credit, AC made apologies to their writers/community. They asked how they can make it better. They incorporated a few minor, easily executed changes. I know a re-vamp of the overall navigation design will take some time, but therein lies my trepidation. I’ve seen this before at AC. I’ve seen AC offer many words and platitudes without any follow-through. I’m still in “believe it when I see it” mode.

There are a few bright spots. The staff is a bit more engaged. I say “a bit” because it is no where near the involvement needed to moderate such a forum. The mind-boggling thing is that with all the new sub-forums, all with their ridiculously minute themes, the AC staff itself is dumping most of their posts in the General Forum when the thread topic clearly matches one of the subs. The only reason I can think of is AC knows that everyone goes to the General Forum and no one will see their announcements if they really posted them in the Announcements Forum.

Then there are still the silly AC Connect forums. Previously, we all got along well with one Non-AC Forum and one Just For Fun Forum for a catch-all. Now there are things like Health and Wellness and Pet Lovers. I predicted they would become dump-and-runs for article links of shameless self-promotion and it has already started. The amusing thing about this is one newbie-spammer already figured out that no one was reading the sub-sub-sub forum and reposted his self-promotion in the old Just For Fun forum.

The newly participating AC staffers are trying to post their own starter threads to guide these buried forums, but fighting foo is hard. The aging “last post” timestamps on those forums are telling. Some only have one thread, the sarcastic protest thread I posted on day one, in them. Unfortunately, those forums are there to stay, no matter how or how often they are used.

I’m still hoping they will take all of our feedback and make the navigation easier. The suggestions from the community are almost identical so AC has a template. The only positive feedback I’ve seen was from a couple of people who keep to very few threads. At least AC made following only one or two threads easy. Yea…no wait…that leads to isolationism. People end up only following threads they start or a couple started by their friends. They never get the big picture and miss so much freely-offered information.

In short, hope is still only hope. AC staff participation is still low (I only saw one complaint addressed today, but several new announcements.). Navigation remains impossible. Communication from the staff about the progress is still the sound of one hand clapping. One the upside, I’ve had time to explore some other forums and sites that I’ve been meaning to parse. Let AC deal with the disinformation trolls. They’ve already started coming out of the cracks.

AC PV Converter 2.4

If you are looking for the AC page view report converter, the one you’ll want is v2.4, hopefully located on the Accentuate web site. AC changed the report format and the converter required some minor adjustments. Remember 2.4 is the version that currently works.