Postcards From Myself

Harper Collin’s is making an electronic version of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods available for free for a limited time. A poll was taken on Mr. Gaiman’s website as to which book should be made available, and American Gods won. It is a great book, so I have included the link below.

Browse Inside this bookGet this for your site

It is a fairly lengthy book, so if you are like me, you won’t be into reading the entire thing electronically. But at least this will give you a really good taste of it and let you know if you want to buy it.

There are lots of posts and even websites dedicated to GTD. For the uninitiated GTD is the productivity system found in Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. I will admit that some of the methods work for me, but then again some don’t. Call it a personal failing, but I end up with multiple lists in different places and thinkg break down, the center cannot hold, etc. Now I have found what I really need! Yes, the palm to-do list. Notice that the “P” is not capitalized.

Take a look at the picture, it is worth a thousand words.

If we throw out all the creeds, dogmas, and names of the deities and only concentrate on what is left, might we not come to find a true religion of hope, love, and charity? This struck me a couple of times in the past few days. Once was during the morning’s sermon at my church. And yes, for those of you who may be bewildered, Unitarian churches can have sermons. Anyway, this sermon was on love and inclusion. One of the things that struck me was a statement that, “we find enemies when we ourselves feel weak or unsure.” That really hit a cord. Yes, this can certainly be taken on a national level, but I won’t go into that here – at least not yet.

What I really thought about was my personal relationships. Many of the people I have bad feelings toward are not bad people at all. They can’t be. They have nice friends and families and live fine lives. So perhaps the reasons for some of my feelings come from the fact that something about them makes me feel weak. Or points out insecurity in myself.

Now, if we take that further and look at why some religions are so venomous in their attacks on others, we may find the same thing. An article in The New York Times yesterday talks about the shifting faiths of the American people. What would make an organized religion feel weaker or more threatened than members leaving the ranks? Perhaps by looking at those people or groups that we dislike or even hate we can find out what our weaknesses or vulnerabilities are.

Finally take that a step further. When we now those problems, when we have found what it is about the other that triggers those distasteful feelings, it is then that we can rise above them. We can move beyond those problems to find our commonalities. We can move beyond the dogmas, creeds, dress, and dance to find that we are focused on the same thing. For example, what do most major religions care about? Be they Eastern or Western, the core of most religions is love, good works, care for the family and community, and the importance of world beyond one’s own self. Concentrate on those things, and maybe we won’t feel so threatened. And if we feel less threatened, maybe we will have fewer enemies.

We have developed a society where interruption takes precedence over planning and where activity is mistaken for action. OK, I will admit it, I have had a messed up week. Too many things going on in all the wrong directions. But here is the thing – too many people think that if there isn’t constant motion going on, then you aren’t doing anything. This not only leads to lots of people running around spewing nonsense, but it also means that no one is sitting down and forming a plan.

I am working on a project at the moment that is running behind. This is a software installation where for the most part we are at the mercy of the vendor. That is bad enough. But every week I hear from people at my office complaining about the delays. Well, the delays were caused by requested changes to the software. If we had been willing to take it as initially demoed, there would have been no delays. But we wanted changes – so there are delays. So people complain about those delays.

Next problem. The software is delivered and there are some bugs. Oh my, how can that be?! Software is supposed to be perfect. And there is no documented training program from the vendor and the installer is not familiar with how the changed system operates. Not a great situation to be in, I agree, but one that is understandable due to our making changes and then pushing the programmers to finish faster. But wait, the complaints from my office are now on the order of, “why don’t they have all this figured out? Looks like they just rushed it out the door. They should have slowed down and made sure everything was right and everyone was trained.” Excuse me? You are the same people who were screaming to hurry up and threatening to withhold payments.

Yes, we corrupt ourselves. We rush and rush and then complain about our stress levels and the lack of quality in our lives. We yell at traffic and scream at the dogs and then wonder why our children are so loud and insensitive. We put tree hugger stickers on the bumpers of our 15 mile per gallon SUVs that are larger than some houses, and that never haul anything bigger than a book bag. We carry our cell phones everywhere with the Bluetooth headset stuck to our ear and then complain about the lack of quality time with our kids and the interruptions from our work.

As Walt Kelly’s Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.“

This is a serious question for other bloggers and web people. I want to know your real experiences with EntreCard. For those of you who don’t know, you can see the EntreCard widget off on the left-hand side of my page. It is the square box with a picture in it and a yellowish gold bar across the bottom and an “E” in the corner. Think of it as a business card fishbowl for bloggers, much like the business card fishbowl at your local restaurant.

Now, my question for the EntreCard members out there is this – has it done you any good? Have you looked at your traffic or income since you started using it and done any analysis. For my part, I have made a couple of interesting acquaintances through it, seen far too many “Make Money Now” and “Help Me Make A Fortune” websites, seen a lot of widgets with half naked girls on them that have nothing to do with the content of the blog, and gotten a small but non-sustainable bump in traffic. That is about it unfortunately. I was really hoping it would turn into something more, and maybe it will over time, but right now it seems to be just so much spinning of the wheels.

When I go back and really analyze the traffic I am getting from EntreCard most of it is a quick hit for someone to drop their card and move on. They don’t go to multiple pages. They don’t comment. They don’t click on ads or subscribe to my RSS feed. The EntreCard traffic is empty calories. In other words, I get a nice rush that gets my traffic stats up a bit, but no lasting nutritional value.

So, when I compare both the value to my site and the value to myself of EntreCard versus searching out other people’s blogs and leaving serious comments, the result is obvious. Instead of clicking through EntreCard and going to hundreds of blogs per day that aren’t really of interest or in my subject area, I need to go through and only hit the ones in my group that I would have wanted to find without EntreCard. Steve Whitehead’s Inspiring Quotes is one of those. So are ProBlogger, Eavesdropping On Life, and a few others. But in general, the whole drop 300 cards per day just doesn’t seem to work for me.

As always, that is just my opinion and I could be wrong. And things may change over time too. So please, let me know what you think and what you advice is. Is EntreCard working for you?