Friday October 01, 2004

Hal, welcome to blogs.sun.com! I am going to add you to my blogroll right after this entry. Your credentials and hard work precede you.

Hal is the kind of guy I look up to. He tooke the role of Sun Systems Engineer and leveraged the heck out of it (by solving really hard problems) to work his way up the corporate ladder to spread knowledge and dedication. I look forward to blog entry #2.

I have only met Mary once at the bloggers meeting at JavaOne. A very brief encounter as we moved around to meet as many bloggers as possible. I am learning more about Mary through her blog.

Her blogging style is quite uplifting. Her exuberance has surely rubbed off on me, not to mention her techno-vocabulary (my Looking Techno-famous entry was really a take from her techno-celeb wording).

I do have one concern though, Mary. That your exuberance is going to land you in jail. I can see the headline now: "Sun Blogger in Jail for stalking techno-celeb". Notice though, they still use techno-celeb :)

Just got through reading a C/Net News article "Hanging up on Telemarketers". This struck a nerve with me, not the article but telemarketing in general. I am a happy subscriber to the national do-not-call list. I bet most readers are. 64 Million of us. Now that's a community :).

I don't even fight with them anymore. Sample dialogue:
Phone: Digital Ring .... Digital Ring ...
John: Hello?

Guilty Party: Hello, my name is [a lie] and I am calling on behalf of ...
John: Click

I do not even bother to say "not interested" anymore with the inevitable "I understand, but ...". That's how annoyed I have gotten. Companies with existing relationships with a customer are exempt from the do-not-call list (or so they tell me). If you get your cable or phone subscription from company X, then company X can market to you.

There is one group of callers I do not hang up on. That's pollsters. One company called me two weeks ago asking about cell phone service in my area. I was happy to answer those questions (except the "how much don't you make" question). I don't know why I make a distinction between pollsters and marketers, but I do.Probably because there is a chance they will make my life better overall.

According to the article, the Gov't may expand the do-not-call list to SPAM. That would be awesome. Telemarketers and spammers say this goes against free speech. But when it costs the consumer money to sift through all that junk, there is a problem. They are forcing me to take valuable time out of my day to listen to what they say, and time is money. Uh, uh. Nope. Not me. I'll fight back. A good compromise would be forcing and enforcing "Ad:" or similar in the title. I rarely see that. Then everyone can set up an "Ad: > /dev/null" filter in their inbox. I get my time back and they get their free speech. How does the saying go? "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it fall, is there a sound?"