…no blogging, it’s because I’ve put in 38 hours at work since Sunday. Tomorrow looks like it might be a bit more reasonable, but you can never tell for sure.
What have I been missing?
Tag: blogging
Well! That was Fun. What Did I Miss?
I heard something about a mini-fillibuster, and I understand that there’s a threat that the .gov may be forced to shut down.
This about covers it for me:
So, how’ve y’all been?
NO BLOG FOR YOU!
I’m absolutely swamped at work, so there won’t be an update here probably until Saturday at the earliest. Sorry about that, but the free ice cream machine is on the fritz. Enjoy the archives. Read the old comment threads! Ah, the memories…
“How Much for the Blog Little Girl?”
So, a few weeks ago, several bloggers received the same email from a David Smith at GunAuction.com, with the header “We want your blog”:
My name is David Smith and I work for GunAuction.com. Your website, http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/ has sparked our interest. Recently we have realized that we are in need of high ranking blogs about guns. Our company is working to build a blog network that will be seen by millions. With gun rights under attack, we want to create an effective network for letting the public know about current legislation, and new gun products. We’ve started some blogs from scratch, but as you know, it will be months before they develop a following. With the work you’ve already done, we would like to acquire your blog so that we can release our content quickly and effectively. In order to maintain your page rank and not alienate your reader base, our intention would be to keep the content of what you have – just use your blog as a base to release even more gun related material.
If you are willing to utilize our content or even sell us your blog, please let me know. Depending on your ranking and quality of blog we would be willing to compensate you accordingly.
David Smith
GunAuction.com
This, as you might imagine, did not go over well in the gunblogosphere. The general reaction was as if the question were this one:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvZgwtpPmLY?rel=0]
My personal response was short and to the point:
David:
No.
Shortly thereafter, a follow-on email arrived:
Dear Kevin,
Thank you for your response to our proposal. GunAuction.com respects the major contributions that the gun bloggers have and continue to make to Gun Culture 2.0, bringing important new viewpoints and an entire new generation into the broader gun community. Your efforts have allowed the gun community to step beyond “preaching to the choir”.
We support your hard work and we want to help it have even more impact. With the tools below, including our content writers and content exchange with our online gun magazine GunNews, we think we can help your blog grow and you can help our online presence grow at the same time.
We are working on offering more options to bloggers and are open to suggestions. We’ve already identified some options (below) that may work for you. Call me and let’s talk about what works for YOU.
• Banner Ads or Text Links
– We offer this option as a per click program. (I.e., a fee paid for each click-through to GunAuction.com) but are willing to discuss annual lump sums in special cases. We will provide both artwork and guidance on setting the text or art up so you will be compensated.• Content Sharing
– We provide, at no cost, relevant gun content for your blog, helping both parties build ranking. You would retain editorial control – any financial agreement would need to be individually arranged. This also includes mutual content sharing as an option, where we would exchange articles with you.• Recruiting Partnership
– We provide a steady income stream for recruiting new users to gunauction.com• Purchase of blog
– We leave all previous content the same including URL and use our in-house content writers to build readership and online visibility. (Our content writers would post on it daily). Depending on the agreement, you would continue as a contributor.If this interests you, give me a call. I will also be at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous with the GunAuction bowling ball mortar, leading the Frosty Beverage Initiative in the evenings. If you can’t attend GBR or we’re not able to meet in person, know that I am grateful for your efforts in helping to protect our gun rights. Please contact me through email or phone!
David Smith
GunAuction.com
My response remained the same.
However, GunAuction.com was a sponsor of this year’s Gun Blogger Rendezvous, and so I promised to speak to Mr. Smith if he was one of the attendees – and he was. He’s the young gentleman standing here, next to the bowling ball mortar his boss brought along to the event:
As you can see, he’s a young(er) guy, and after talking with him I think I can say confidently that he was hired for his enthusiasm and search-engine tech savvy, and NOT for his experience and feel for the blogosphere – the gun blogosphere in particular. He had a hard time understanding why those of us who had gone to all the trouble to create our blogs would not be interested in selling them!
“How much for the little girl?”
I am convinced that no insult was intended (that was pretty much a given, anyway) but the tone-deaf nature of the email and its follow-on was precisely that: tone-deafness. He really didn’t get it. Isn’t the internet for making money? So, while Linoge has sworn an oath to the third generation of GunAuction.com’s descendants, I’m willing to cut the kid a little slack. Everybody’s new at their job once.
Home Again
Got home about 4PM. Another great Rendezvous, thanks to the efforts of Mr. Completely. There will be a couple more updates once I get all my pictures and the (very) few videos I took uploaded, but let me start you with this one – the four fastest times from the steel shoot on Saturday, at least from the people who actually turned in their score sheets:
Jaci and Robert were drawing from the holster, Derek was drawing from CONCEALMENT. I was shooting from low-ready, but I was shooting a REVOLVER. Yes, I am VERY happy with how I shot the Smith that day.
The guys from Gunauction.com brought professional-quality video and still equipment and there promises to be some really good coverage from them on the GunNews.com site that I will be stealing borrowing or linking to when it goes up. I’ll also be writing about my conversation with David Smith, the guy from Gunauction who wrote that “We want your blog” email that caused such a fuss.
However, tomorrow comes early and I have to drive 101 miles back up to Phoenix in the morning, so this is it for me today.
0-For-8
Gun Blogger Rendezvous VIII is winding down. The pizza dinner and prize raffle was last night, and once again I didn’t win a gun. However, Crimson Trace really came through in the prize department this year. I got one of their Railmaster universal-mount green lasers, and a certificate for anything in their catalog. I also found out that I had the best aggregate time in the steel shoot for the day (the two actual competition shooters either didn’t shoot the course, or didn’t turn in their timesheets.) Not bad for an old guy with an iron-sighted revolver.
I’ll have much more to report, pictures and links later after I get home. Now I need to finish packing, go get breakfast, and then launch some bowling balls WAY the hell downrange!
Seriously, y’all need to come to this thing next year.
GBR Day 3 – And a Blast is Had by All
Just got back from the steel shoot, where I’m quite pleased how well I shot my S&W 327. I loaned my new(er) Kimber Target Match to the guys from Gunauction.com, along with my 3/4 full .30 caliber ammo can of reloads. The three of them burned through around 400 rounds, and the gun ran fine all day except for a little bit of user error on the part of one of them who is new to all of this (but is a natural, once he got the idea). An empty ammo can later, and lots of smiles all around.
I’ve got time for this post, a quick shower, and then it’s time for pizza and door prizes, and the raffle benefiting Soldiers’ Angels.
Now don’t you really wish you were here?
Tech Bleg: EeePC Chromebook?
I have an EeePC 900A that I bought four years ago, and shortly after I got it I put Ubuntu on it. It’s been running like that since, but I understand it’s possible to install the Chrome OS on a bootable thumb drive and make it a Chromebook. All I use it for is web surfing and blogging when I’m on the road. I tried going to Hexxeh and using their latest and greatest (build 4028) – no bueno. Doesn’t seem even try to boot from the thumb drive. (And yes, I think I have that part set up properly.)
Anybody successfully done this on a 900A and know which build works?
Bueller? Bueller?
Vacation Starts NOW
OK, I’m off for the next TEN DAYS!!! Maybe I can get a LITTLE writing done before I head off to Gun Blogger Rendezvous VIII.
I Love My People…
Erin Palette writes a powerful post. Short excerpt:
God bless the Internet. Online, people judge you by the quality of your output, and not by appearance. They get to know your soul before they let the prejudices of the eyes and the flesh influence their judgement. It was on the internet that I finally found not just acceptance, but solace: people liked me for me, and they weren’t looking at me or judging me. I was safe. I had found my armor, my mask, my perfect little seashell, and I polished its interior until, shining like a mirror, I could fool myself into thinking my social prison was boundless and infinite.
A mirrored cage is still a cage.
Thus I toiled, happy in my self-induced solitude, until I stumbled upon the world of the gunblogs. All it took was for me to say “Hey, I like shooting too!” and suddenly I was one of you. It didn’t matter what I looked like or who I wanted to have sex with; I was part of the Tribe of the Gun. That I could write well only made me popular, but it didn’t make me any more likable.
And that’s when I noticed the walls of my cage were keeping me from meeting people who wanted to meet me, and that made me ache in ways I thought were no longer possible. I had rediscovered loneliness.
Slowly… very, very slowly… I started to come out of my shell. I decided to take a chance on people who seemed like good sorts, expecting that every time I made myself vulnerable that I would be hurt beyond my capacity to recover.
This never happened.
RTWT.
As Breda once said on an episode of Vicious Circle:
I’m one of those people – I like people, I’m personable, but I don’t really have “friends” friends, because I just don’t connect to people really that well. But then blogs happened, and I found a whole group of people that I fit in with because I’m weird and they’re weird in kinda the same way, and yea for our mutual weirdness. So, thank you for being weird with me.
Can I get an “AMEN!”?