Monday, June 30, 2014

Choosing a camera

Of all the things that have never been discussed on this - a photography blog - is how to choose a camera. That's going to be rectified right now!

Just how do you choose a camera with so many out there and so many different varieties of camera available? What is your aim in getting a camera? Why do you need or want a camera?

Let's begin by breaking down the market available to see just what kinds of camera are available:

  • The cellphone camera. This is supplied as standard on most cellphones. This is pretty much all that's needed for Facebook, Instagram etc. The pictures are not of great quality but are generally acceptable for most online use and many family scrapbooks. They're OK for online auctions too, where professional quality really isn't required.
  • The digital compact camera. This is a dying breed. Cellphones with climbing quality have pretty much taken over from digital compacts. Thus, the few surviving digital compacts have to offer something unique so most are either superzooms with incredible zoom range or are ruggedized so that they can survive any brutal treatment or being submerged in water.
  • Interchangeable lens compacts. These are the new kids on the block. They range from truly horrendous to quite good. Some have the same size sensor that many of the digital SLRs have and some have smaller sensors. Generally though smaller and lighter, the better models currently aren't so much smaller and lighter that they're greatly advantageous - particularly for the models with larger sensors.
  • Digital SLRs. These are the big cameras so often used by professionals. They come in a range of sensor sizes and are generally about the best for image quality without stepping up to larger sensor cameras.
Sensor size does tie in with image quality. The bigger the sensor, the better the image quality. Having said that, the quality of images from smaller sensors is climbing greatly. The current crop of digital sensors of about 14 megapixels is probably going to yield better results than the images produced by 35mm film cameras. Having said that, the range of light to dark for digital sensors is smaller than that of film. It's possible to get even more latitude out of film than from any digital sensor, even using the RAW format.

It may be important to choose a camera that has a RAW format - this allows for greater post-exposure adjustment and correction of an image. Most cellphones and superzooms do not allow for usage of a RAW format, with the manufacturers supplying solely JPEG images.

There are many factors involved in choosing a camera. One of the things that would steer me away from the Interchangeable Lens Compacts is that the lenses are crudely made and aberrations are fixed using software rather than by making a good lens to start with. That combined with the price of the lenses and bodies which in many cases are more than the price of a digital SLR really does put me off them.

I'll be honest - my camera gear is years old. I still use an 8 megapixel camera. I can't afford to go buying new (or even secondhand) equipment. I really don't see any purpose in high megapixel counts either. 8 megapixels will print to 16x24 quite easily and without showing any pixelation. 90% of the time I use my smartphone though as it's just so much more convenient.

To choose a camera, the things to bear in mind are:
  • Size/weight
  • Image quality
  • Price
  • How often you'll use it
For me - I have a digital SLR because I like taking photos. I don't take photos every day or every week. I take my camera out on occasion. I go for photo trips a few times a year. I'm always open for people to pay me to take pictures though this happens so rarely that it's not worth having a business license. Possibly the best advice is just to get a basic digital SLR or ILC and just stick with a standard lens. The real dog lenses have gone off the market so any lens will produce decent quality. Most often my preferred lens range is between 17 and 85mm though on occasion I have used solely a 17-35. 

Fools rush in and buy everything under the sun - usually the top of the range gear. Buy one body and one lens and learn to make the most of it. Sure - you can buy more lenses and so on but then you have to carry them. The fear of missing out is why so many people spend way too much on camera gear.

A point to bear in mind is that the value of modern camera gear rockets downwards. A digital camera that cost $1,000 is a $1,000 thrown away because even selling the camera after just 6 months the most you'll get is $750. Wait 2 years and it drops to $400. Wait longer and it drops below $100. Brand is immaterial.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

Business emails - Presentation and style

It does not matter who you are or whom you are addressing. All email recipients require the same level of diplomacy, consistency and correctness. Writing an email laced with profanity is the same as an email laced with grammatical and spelling errors. It screams amateur or ghetto or uneducated. It does not matter what your own personal feelings are toward the subject or the recipient. An email is the face of your business. Emails can and do get published online and their demerits discussed thoroughly.

The email above was received today from John Carson with the title "Mic drop from President Obama" and CCd to President Obama. There are several huge blunders in this email. 

The email sender believes I am a friend which I am not. I am a citizen of the United States of America. I have never met the sender nor met President Obama. Thus a claim that I am a friend is entirely baseless. Friends have to meet in order to consider themselves friends. 

The sender commits the ultimate sin of including gratuitous profanity in the email. As this appears to be sent with the authority of the US President, it tends to lend an air disproportionate to the office. Indeed, it could be said to appear very ghetto in its approach.

I respect the office of the US President as the office in charge of the country. The incumbent totally lost my respect today by permitting such a ghetto-esque email to be published on their behalf.

In business, you absolutely cannot afford to upset customers and prospective customers. Bad news travels faster than good and much more effectively. While I accept that the email was written by some irresponsible hothead, it does leave a worse impression of the current US President. Pay attention to your business emails - they matter  more than you can imagine. 

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Zephod's Gazette series

In addition to the existing Zephod's Gazette (now renamed Zephod's Photo Gazette), now there are several Zephod's Gazettes - one for each day of the week.
Published once a week, these are your best bet for keeping up with current events.
  • Zephod's Sunday Gazette - Sundays 6am Eastern Time. This is largely of interest to the churchgoing folk of South Carolina and beyond. A collection of church announcements, church news, religious news, photos and videos.
  • Zephod's Business Gazette - Mondays 8am Eastern Time. Aimed at the business community, this contains politics, financial, business information and commentary from established and respected sources.
  • Zephod's Photo Gazette - Tuesdays 8am Eastern Time - Concentrating primarily on high-speed and astrophotography with videos and news items, there is some political and business content also.
  • Zephod's Medical Gazette - Wednesdays 8am Eastern Time. Aimed at the medical community there're articles from all over the world on medicine, medical specialists and medical jobs.
  • Zephod's South Carolina Gazette - Thursdays 8am Eastern Time. Concentrating on politics and eventa around South Carolina. This brings news and views from the people that matter.
  • Zephod's Book Gazette - Fridays 8am Eastern Time. A roundup for the weekend of books worth reading, new books, how to publish books and generally anything to do with books and reading.
  • Zephod's Travel Gazette - Saturdays 8am Eastern Time. Anything to do with travel - destinations, articles, videos, photography. All ready to get your weekend off with a bang.
It is unknown at this time whether these gazettes will become popular or not. They should but there's just no telling. This is largely an experiment but if it proves successful then who know what will happen. They're each published once per week and focussed on individual topics - hence the names of the gazettes.

Being that I am a hobby photographer, hobby author and a hobby blogger but a professional in the medical field, living in South Carolina, the above gazette list makes a load of sense. How much I'll actually read those gazettes remains to be seen since they're auto-generated.

Friday, June 27, 2014

Zephod's Gazette

Yesterday, on my Twitter feed I noticed somebody had included me in a tweet. Normally I disregard such tweets as I have all retweets turned off and don't really regard Twitter as much other than a spammer's paradise. Generally I don't believe much that I read online but it transpired that my inclusion in a tweet corresponded to an extra 500 hits on my blog. Now that was pretty interesting.

It transpired via an online search that I had not been included in an online magazine but it transpired that it was somebody's hobby newspaper generated automatically from Twitter feeds. That wasn't exactly a crushing blow but I could definitely hear the hiss of air escaping from a rapidly deflating ego.

Needless to say, I had to have a go at producing my own online newspaper. This one's called "Zephod's Gazette". How long it'll remain in operation is unknown as it's a freebie website. It took all of twenty minutes to put together and auto generates with auto publishing at midnight every night. It would be nice to combine it with adsense but that doesn't seem possible.

Meanwhile, my second disappointment of the day was some hair removal cream. It was bought in the men's section of a dollar store. The result - it didn't do anything. This seems pretty standard for stuff from dollar stores. Razorless is the claim. The UPC is 072790000188.
Sadly the results proved that the stuff doesn't work. It's supposed to be for men. It's supposed to remove beard growth. It didn't actually work.
 
Clearly it didn't work! I can't say I'm surprised. Women complain all the time that hair removal products don't work. The fraud continues unabated with fake hair removal products on sale. I wouldn't mind betting that there's no potion in this packet that will remove any hair. It's cheap enough that nobody will get upset enough to complain formally about it to whatever consumer ombudsman exists in the US and expensive enough that the peddler makes a tidy profit.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Photography is a scam

Yes - you did just read that correctly. Photography is a scam. It is a scam like no other - I don't mean that the taking of photographs is a scam but everything surrounding photography is a massive scam.

In an earlier article I wrote about the incredible ink rip-off where in costs more than vintage champagne. Consumer Reports studied ink and declared it to appallingly expensive at $9,600 a gallon. Thus, printing out photos is going to be a huge rip off.

In another earlier article, I wrote about the great digital rip-off where the camera manufacturers have been ripping off the public for the best part of two decades with drip-fed improvements in cameras that really amount to nothing. 

The same nonsensical "improvements" have happened to lenses and flashes equally. The value of equipment purchased just a year or two earlier will plummet as soon as the newer edition comes out. There is no such thing as anything in photography that maintains value. Older film equipment always used to maintain a good level of value and was better made. Digital by comparison is like handing your wallet to the nearest alcoholic. It does no good to blow the money whatsoever. Given the excessive cost of today's camera equipment, it becomes a lark for those with no money sense.

How about the so-called professionals that advertise on Facebook, Craigslist and on eBay? They're just trying to make their cameras pay for themselves. They care nothing about image quality - they want a fast buck and that's all. Indeed, some buy cameras having been told it's the way to riches and end up selling $100 wedding photography. What about the "professionals" at wedding shows and who advertise in the Yellow Pages? Same story - just rip-off merchants trying to make a fast buck from something with essentially no value.

Oh but we have missed out printer manufacturers - another sea of grasping greedy hands looking to empty the pockets of the unsuspecting. Printers are designed to last but a few short years before they die. Indeed, experience of a Canon inkjet proved this. It worked perfectly right up until the end when it came up with an error message that could not be cleared. It had had about 4 years of sporadic printing. Normally way before the ink jet becomes out of date, the manufacturer ceases to supply ink, thereby killing it dead.

Just about every which way you look for photography, there's a scam. Look at the way you're channelled into buying ever more expensive gear by virtue of the cheaper gear being so designed that image quality is deliberately lacking. The whole of photography is a scam from top to bottom.

Photography is an expensive hobby. If you want to practice photography as a hobby then choose secondhand equipment and choose it wisely because the only way of offloading it if you don't like it will be to dump it in a garbage skip. The cheapest camera you can buy comes on your mobile phone. That is largely all most people really need.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Navigation - how do you find where you're going when you're out with your camera?

What kind of phone do you have and what do you use it for? My best guess is that like a lot of people you use a smartphone but never actually use it as a smartphone.

I'll admit - I use a smartphone because I'm forever forgetting to write down addresses - which I can look up on my smartphone. I also use it for navigation because though I have a GPS unit, it is rather elderly and a bit temperamental. It's an old TomTom One that was purchased some 8 years ago. It does work when it eventually locks onto a satellite though that can take between 2 and 30 minutes. During the winter, it seems to lose its voice directions which is interesting. Hence, of course, the GPS in a smartphone comes in very handy - especially since the maps are constantly updated.

Time was when everybody used a map and a compass for navigation. Most cars these days come with built-in compasses which are largely now a novelty than a useful feature since the advent of GPS systems. It's still worth carrying alternative modes of navigation however. Satellites etc are not all that reliable. They're good but it takes only one solar flare to knock them out for a few hours.

As many of you know, I don't pay much for my cellphones. I can't afford to. Thus I do encounter areas where there is little to no cellphone reception. In these areas, cellphone GPS just does not work. The elderly GPS that I put on the dashboard when needed does work but requires constant powering since the units batteries failed many moons ago. Off the track though and on foot in these areas, I rely upon my oldest GPS unit. This is about 9 years old and takes a couple of minutes to lock onto the satellites and runs for about 3 hours on a pair of AA batteries. Needless to say this is used solely when I head off the track on foot. It would be nice to update the maps but the software uses a version of OSX even older than my laptop and a 9 pin D connector that is never now seen on computers.

Some while ago there was a news story about a taxi driver that spent two days lost in a swamp with his children. They'd wandered off the beaten track. They were found after a day of searching by a large team of Park Rangers only about a mile from the visitor center. Had they had one of these units, they could have backtracked along the path they had already taken or taken a short route to the exit and not been lost for days.
How do you navigate? If you follow my route of having several backup systems then you'll never get lost. Maybe there's something more modern that'll do it all for you - I don't know. I can't afford new stuff so I just don't look.

Now to the main point... How in tarnation do you use a map and compass? It's actually not that hard:

  • Step away from all possible sources of magnetism. The earth's magnetic field fluctuates and can be weaker in some areas than others. Thus, step at least 20 feet away from a vehicle. Put down any guns or metal walking sticks etc and walk away from them too. Avoid all sources of magnetism.
  • Lay the map out flat and put your compass on the ground flat.
  • Turn the map so that the top of the map (often marked N) is lined up with the North point of the compass. The purist might like to turn the map a couple of degrees because magnetic North is slightly different from true North but for short distance navigation like most people do, there's no real worth to it.
  • Look at the features marked on the map such as hills and valleys and see what's around you. That should pinpoint your location fairly readily. It's very rare that you'll be in a landscape without features.
  • In a featureless landscape or seascape, it's normal to use a sextant, a compass and a clock for precise positioning. That's for another article though.
  • Looking at a worst case scenario - your plane crashed in a desert and nobody knows you're lost. Aside from simple survival strategies, if it's necessary to walk out then walk either North or South since most deserts are wider from East to West than they are from North to South. 
The good thing about maps and compasses is they are cheap and lightweight as well as needing no power source other than sunlight or lamplight. 

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

The education scam

It is absolutely true - education is worthless unless it gets the student a job. There are any number of colleges, universities etc willing to train people in just about anything. It is by far the biggest scam industry going. Look at the local college prospectus. How many utterly worthless courses are on offer? Not just that but how many are offering courses in industries that are already oversupplied?

Take a degree in Theater, Arts and Drama or a degree in Photography. Just how many jobs are there going to be for graduates of those courses? Packing groceries in Publix is not a career yet that is all people with such degrees are worth in the workplace. Better to have taken the money blown on worthless degrees and spend it on something that's actually going to have future benefit. Taking a worthless course means debts that are never going to be repaid from the minimum wage job that they will attract.

How about computer courses? Hold up there - they sound good because everybody uses a computer. Well, yes most do use a computer. The Best Buy computer technicians are paid minimum wage to fix them. Bang goes any idea that being a self-employed computer technician is going to help anybody.

Generally, the best courses to study in college or university are the standard, traditional courses: Accounting, Science, Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology & languages. Things like computer security, computer programming etc are all things that can be learned as short add-on courses after graduation.

Computer programming like photography, acting and videography are hobbies rather than anything serious. There are so many people doing them as hobbies that are really quite good at them that anybody trying to break in as a newcomer is fighting all the amateurs that do it at weekends. It's not worth the bother or the expense of taking a degree in such worthless subjects.

Perhaps the most worthless degree ever has to be one offered by the University of Southampton some twenty years ago. It was a degree in "Coronation Street". That, for those that aren't already laughing, was a British soap opera of the day. The other day somebody offered me a free course in computer networking and security with free gas to get there. I turned them down. The computer course had no guaranteed job at the end so it would most likely have been three months totally wasted with a qualification that nobody wanted. How many unemployed computer people are out there? Lots - that's how many. That's why the course was free. If it had been a needed subject, that course would have been at a premium price.

The moral of the story - if you're going to study, study something worthwhile - not subjects that are "in demand" or subjects that are trendy. The demand will be satisfied ages before the course will be finished. The trend will have gone. Be boring and study traditional subjects - they have far more use in the workplace.

Monday, June 23, 2014

83 Best Social Media Tools - eBook review

This is another book by 60 second marketer. As always I approach books with an open mind when I review them. Flipping quickly through its 14 pages, I saw no immediately apparent chapters or overview which had me wondering what on earth I was looking at.

Reading this on a 7 inch tablet is not really recommended - the format works better on a bigger tablet as on a 7 inch, the text is small unless its panned and zoomed. This is just a layout issue that's not really a big problem. It'd be nice if it was addressed since most tablets are 7 inch.

Looking more closely at the content of the book, its actually a rather nifty list of resources available online. I can't say I have used many of them. In fact I've used maybe half a dozen. Some I really like such as Twitterfeed which feeds this blog to Twitter so it reaches potentially 14,000 accounts. Some I found less useful but I really like what the author has done here.

Ages ago, I used to rate things on a star scale. I used to award five stars for the best and five blackholes for the worst. These days I just give my opinion. My opinion is that this is a bloody excellent resource. Full marks on this one, 60 second marketer.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

Preparations are underway

Preparations are underway to dump the domain names. Over the next few weeks, blog entries containing links might have to be updated. The Facebook link has been eliminated from the bottom of new blog entries.

Domain names were a flight of fancy that cost me $7.98 and which proved to be rather worthless. It was just so much easier to say "britphoto" than "tehisp". Really and truly though, I've come to the conclusion that pushing people toward my blogs is a futile exercise. Going back to the age old phrase - you can lead a horse to water but cannot make him drink. It was like my photography business - I could wave photos in front of people's noses, shout about my photo website, scream about discounts and wonderful service but couldn't make people look. It was pretty futile.

More and more I have come to the conclusion that dedicated domain names are rather frivolous that might help in "branding" but that for the vast majority of hobby websites are just a complete irrelevance.  Let's face it - most websites are hobby websites. Some are more aimed at making money than others. I'm not selling goods nor services so this is definitely a hobby website.

Time was when I really cared about massive hit numbers and agonised over why they weren't coming. I struggled and fought to raise them. I agonised over low hits and tried every which way to raise them. I noticed several interesting things

  • Sites that gain the biggest hits are entertainment websites
  • People aren't going to the internet to buy things - they're going to be entertained.
  • People look for information or humor online. 

Facebook reportedly has 2 billion users. This is a testament to how people want to be entertained. They want to write about their boring little lives and post pictures of food they've just eaten or things they photographed on the way to work that amused them.

The way people find things has changed. Labels are now quite important. Labels are the search terms people may use to find an article. It's no no longer good enough to use Meta Tags. If I do a search then I'm not going to search for coffee shop, columbia. I'm going to search for "coffee shop in columbia sc". Searches have become much more specific as people are more specific about what they want.

Search engines look for exactly what you type. If I type "coffee shop in kathmandu" I get a list of coffee shops in Kathmandu. If I qualify that by "worst coffee shop in kathmandu" then I get a list of 1 star reviewed coffee shops and restaurants. If I simply type "photographer, washington DC" then I get about 28 million results. If I qualify it then I get closer to what I want. For example "newborn photographer washington dc" which gets me 383,000 hits. If I wanted specifically a male photographer then "male + newborn photographer washington DC" gets me 5 hits all of whom are female. Somebody there is missing a trick.

People don't like to hunt through massive lists of pages on the internet. They will add extra phrases. If you're afraid of missing out on potential search traffic then put "a" and "and" in as individual search phrases and your site will come up amid the millions of sites but it won't likely be at the top of the list. Only the most popular sites are at the top of a vague search. The more specific the search terms are, the less likely they are to be searched for but the more likely your site is to be at the top of the list.

Where most people go wrong, including myself, is in using very short search terms. We're all afraid of missing out. By being afraid of missing out, we use shorter terms and do miss out. The trick is to use search terms that aim for niches. There's no point in copying the masses and being buried at the bottom of a search - particularly if you're an unknown website.

Thus, search terms are becoming more specific since searches are how people find things these days rather than via domain names. Slowly references to my old Facebook page are being eliminated. As I find them, links using my old domain names will also be changed.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Fake photography job.

Somehow, a photography position came to my attention. It was discovered long enough ago to forget how it came to my attention. It was interesting enough to turn up to find out about though there were reservations about it. The office turned out to be one of the shoebox offices that seem to be rented by the hour. There are a lot of these in Columbia. While there may well be some genuine businesses there taking full advantage of the low rent, these are also the realm of the scammer. It's not really fair to say not to visit such places ever because that would harm the genuine businesses. Perhaps it's more a case of just taking extra caution.

The modus operandi is the same for pretty well all of the scam businesses. The office is rented and furnished with ready-provided Ikea furnishings. The lights are seldom switched on. Frequently advertisements for positions are listed via notices and flyers or online. Sometimes they are even posted on government employment agency websites. Usually the scam involves parting fools from their money or from personal information.

Two men in their 20s and 30s were involved. One was hiding behind a pair of women's sunglasses (in an office that had no lighting switched on). The other was sitting behind a desk, conducting the "interview". Neither had any interview or management skills. They advised that in order to work with them, it was important to pay $15 cash to join their "organisation" and then another $15 to obtain a permit of some kind that I'd never heard of before. It would be a total of $30 which had to be paid in cash, there and then. To cap all that off the two demonstrated some very fake looking permits.

Clearly that was a scam. It was not a well organized scam either. The scammers were opportunists and not professionals. It was also quite likely their very first scam. It had me in mind of a scam a few weeks ago where a "company" had broken into a disused bar after advertising on a jobs website. The phone had run early one morning with an invitation to an interview that afternoon. Turning up, the door lock on the bar had clearly been broken. Inside were a pair of men who did not look at all businesslike. There were no lights on and only plastic picnic tables and chairs set up to use. The application forms required to be completed were badly photocopied generic forms with no company name. Quickly finding an excuse that crime scene was quickly left behind. There was clearly no real job there.

Similarly, two more positions on jobs websites. Both were with a company that I did find a bad reports about online. That company did not actually appear to have anything more than a website and did not appear to be anything more than a trading name. Entering the office, the lights were on. The whole place had the feel of temporality. During the "interviews" I had a feeling that everything could be thrown into the trunk of a small car and gone within moments. Both were promises of management positions as long as a "trial" period was carried out. The first position turned out to be flogging cosmetics, door-to-door and the second was flogging car care products door-to-door.

The comment generally is that there are so many fake adverts out there, particularly on general jobs websites that it makes job applications very fraught. It doesn't matter whether it's a photographer looking for a position or anybody else. The chances of finding a scam are greater than the chances of finding a real position advertised. As I said a few days ago, avoiding the general jobs websites is the smart thing to do. I don't continue with an application if a 3rd party website is involved.

Friday, June 20, 2014

60 seconds of complete garbage

This is a cartoon book by 60 second marketer that I had the misfortune to encounter. I normally take books like this apart and work through them section by section but this miserable affair is just 19 pages of two or three sentences per page. There's hardly anything worth reading in this garbage.

Essentially what this is, is a plug for 60 second marketer. It talks about ROI (Return on Investment) but doesn't ever specify what the investment consists of. Logic dictates that the investment would be something along the lines of:
  • Office space - provision of the office, the fixtures, the fittings.
  • Manpower - having some unwashed, smelly computer geek playing Space Invaders while pretending to work and soaking up company money.
  • Computer - providing the smelly computer geek with expensive equipment, electricity and light.
The return on investment had better be pretty damn good for that. Let's work that out over a year.
  • Cost of a computer $600
  • Cost of electricity for lighting $60
  • Cost of electricity for heating/cooling that office $2400 a year
  • Wages for smelly, unwashed computer geek $7.25 an hour for 30 hours a week over 52 weeks is $11,310.
  • Cleaning costs for cleaning up after unwashed, smelly computer geek $100 a week ($520).
Total expense over a year $14,890 and that's not including the cost of the internet connection nor the liability issues in case said low-wage staff member says something highly inappropriate online.


Gauging return from such a dubious investment is mind-bogglingly hard. This is what the book promises to provide but fails spectacularly to do, instead offering a course in ROI. I'd say give this book a complete miss.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Retail me not!

Every photographer is familiar with retail - where you go in to buy something and are served by a not terribly competent person who really couldn't care less if you bought something or not or whether it was even the right thing. Really and truly that shop assistant probably wishes you would go away so they could continue texting their friends.

Looking at it from the manager's point of view, they know the staff are low quality and unmotivated. They're not allowed to pay them enough to get good quality staff so the service is always going to be sucky. All the managers can do is threaten staff with dismissal if they suck too badly.

From the employees point of view, it's probably about the only company that would take them on amidst a mass of unemployed people. The money they receive does not really pay their living expenses so they have to bunk and sometimes double bunk with others.

A few days ago I wrote an article about telephone etiquette. Yesterday I had a phonecall from somebody that said I'd applied for a job with them and they wanted to interview me today. Needless to say, I turned up and was appalled at what I saw. The place was dirty and a gambling establishment. My role there - should I ever accept such a role - would be to run around for 8 hours a day for possibly the giddy heights of $8 per hour. Given that it's 25 miles from me and would use 2.5 gallons of fuel per day at a cost to me of $10.50 (or an hour and a half's wages) and that my rent is $525 a month, that job would have me paying to work. The hours were 25 to 30 a week and without tax that would represent a maximum of $240 a week out of which I'd lose (since it's a 4 day a week job) $42. That leaves $198 a week out of which $131 would be rent. That leaves $66.75 left for food, medical, clothing etc. Of course since tax would be charged I would be getting a lot less. One of my old paychecks from a store where I earned $279 in one week gave me $238 after tax. If we therefore assume that tax will be 15% then that would leave me with $31 for food, expenses, car insurance, car tax etc each week. That is of course not counting unexpected expenses which do crop up on an almost weekly basis. Nor does it cover vehicle maintenance etc.

I guess the moral here is I must remember to ask questions before agreeing to attend interviews - especially for jobs that I don't believe I applied for.

So, retailers - don't call me. I'll call you if I want to work retail again. Retail is OK as a hobby job or a part-time job for stay-at-home moms. It's not a job anybody can live on for an extended period.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Dumping social media

Ban linkedin, ban foursquare, ban twitter, ban facebook
Ban linkedin, ban foursquare, ban twitter, ban facebook
Today I looked at my Facebook usage. I've had my Facebook page for about 8 weeks. I put it up on April 21st and had regrettably, to set up a Facebook account in order to control the feeds. Needless to say the Facebook account was 100% automated with postings coming automatically from blogs, Twitter and Foursquare. As per normal with what I call the social media garbage accounts (Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook) I don't care at all about them.

In the two months the Facebook page was up, it had a grand total of 17 likes and during that time I began to question what the Facebook page was for. Originally, it was there to publicise my blogs. As it has so few likes (mostly obtained in the first week), there seems singularly little point in continuing with the Facebook page or the Facebook account.

As far as Twitter goes, it might get viewers to my blogs - as long as I link to specific posts. I notice that specific posts seem to work. The rest of it - no way does it work. Clearly I need to work on Twitter scheduling and posting frequency - reducing the frequency and targeting posts to specific blog entries.

As far as Foursquare goes, I just have no idea what need that actually fulfills. Aside from being a massive security loophole where you tell everybody where you are so they know you're not home, I see nothing else that Foursquare does. I certainly don't see anything positive. As far as I'm concerned, it can take a hike. Sure - it's fun watching my tour around North Korea - for blog viewers who view my Twitter account as the feeds come in from Foursquare. That's about it though.

Facebook has a similar geo-location feature that I've turned firmly off. I fact, I wouldn't allow Facebook on my phone because of its geo-tracking features. Twitter has had them turned off too. There is no reason on earth for any of this geo-tracking other than it has been sold heavily to young people as being trendy without mentioning that just about anybody now knows your location.

The way most people use Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare is to publicise every aspect of their lives for anybody that wants to, to see. This is largely why I have dispensed with LinkedIn, Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. Nobody needs to know what I am doing, 24 x 7. Nobody needs to know when I am visiting my friends, where I'm having lunch etc.

LinkedIn was dumped a few days ago. I'm not sure quite what happened as the communications didn't make an awful lot of sense. It seems that somebody probably didn't like my disagreeing with a blog article and decided to have a go at me. They chose the weak points - my profile photo was not of a human but then quite a lot on LinkedIn aren't either. Then they claimed my LinkedIn name wasn't my real name and that I'd been spamming. All very interesting and all big stretches of the imagination. Thus LinkedIn suspended my profile and refused to let me copy my recently updated profile until I agreed to change my name (what to, God alone knows). I agreed, went in, copied my information and just told them to delete the account. In my 8 months on LinkedIn, it had generated no interest at all. It was pointless to continue.

A few weeks ago, I chatted with a recruiter. He apparently checked people's linked-in profiles against their submitted resumes and rejected those that didn't match. Honestly, how many people even look at their LinkedIn profiles? It seems employers regularly check up on people online. Yet another reason not to have this online garbage. I'm pleased to say that I don't have very much of a trail and where there is a trail, it's easy to clean up. Twitter is easy to delete - there are no real Twitter archives. Pretty much the same for LinkedIn, Foursquare and Facebook. And a darned good reason to be rid of them.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Why photography and why not something else?

I don't really know the answer to that one? I guess I'm a pretty visual kind of person. I love color and plenty of it.
I was given my first camera by my grandmother and it was a Kodak 126 that took cartridge film. The film was really 35mm but with different sprocket holes, encased in a plastic drop-in cartridge. It was about as foolproof as possible. If the cartridge was removed prematurely then only one frame was truly lost. The photos were square and at that time (the 1970s) printed on stippled paper to about 3.5 inches square. 

The first photos I took have been lost in the mists of time. I remember taking a lot and my parents becoming quite agitated about the costs of film and processing. There was a kind of magic about taking a picture then months later seeing the images on paper and remembering the day.

Fast forward a few years and my mother gave me a Rollei 35LED camera. This was pure luxury. My first proper compact camera. I used that no end. Sadly though as it took mercury batteries, it is now a historical item that can't really be used. Mercury batteries went out of production many years ago.

I was hooked on photography and joined a photography club where we shot B&W film and printed the film in a little darkroom in the middle of the local YMCA. There, we used Praktika MTL3 cameras with screw-on lenses. That was great. I wanted more - ever more.

I did get my own screw mount camera but sold it quickly and bought a Pentax setup instead. That was fine until I went for a more modern camera - the Pentax Super A. That was where the problems started. The first model out of the box was broken and had to be exchanged. The exchange model also had a fault so that had to be sent off to be repaired. It still was unsatisfactory so I sold all the Pentax equipment and went for Nikon instead.

Using the new Nikon equipment I managed to earn some money for the first time with my cameras. It wasn't vast fortunes but it was enough to offset some of the purchase price. I remember saving for new lenses fastidiously. I would walk instead of catching a bus. I would skip lunch instead of eating in the college cafeteria. Each lens was purchased with sweat and suffering. Each lens had a sense of worth and pride. Those lenses kept their value too - even when the new-fangled autofocus things came in.

Roll on a few years and I was pressed to start a photography business, purely because I wanted to buy a digital SLR for myself. I'll draw a blank over the business and why a business that I never wanted in the first place was started. It didn't work out and I cannot really say that I was surprised. The only thing that surprised me was that I didn't lose more money than I did. I will say this - I did give it my best shot but could never get anybody to look at my work nor my website. There was just a total lack of interest from the public. There's just no way to make a disinterested public look up a website or look at a portfolio.

During the photography business, I'd been pressed to purchase everything that could possibly be of use. As soon as the pressure was off, I dumped the ridiculous business license. I actually waited two years too long to do that. The first year I thought that maybe just possibly if I changed the focus from family photos to commercial images - well, that didn't get any interest either. The local businesses were quite happy with lower quality images shot on their iPhones. The second year I was a little slow off the mark and only decided to dump the business license in March which meant that I hung onto it until December just in case a miracle happened.

So, the business license became history much to my great relief. I no longer had to file zero every month. I no longer had nasty letters demanding $2,500 of assessed tax if I actually forgot to file zero. Life became so much better. Slowly I began to enjoy photography again.

During the interminable 5 years of having the miserable business, I managed to write two books on photography. Those actually sell quite reasonably. When I wrote them, I considered any sale at all to be a vindication. As it is they are making quite a nice little income every year.

The equipment I amassed for the business - I've been selling that off as fast as I can find buyers. I dumped all of the studio equipment into a job lot. I think the guy got a real bargain. I was glad to be shot of it - I'd struggled to sell it for so long that I was all set to toss it in the dumpster when suddenly somebody showed interest. If only I can sell the ridiculous flashes that would be wonderful. They were something like $550 new and I'll be lucky to get $350 for them now. Most of them are still in their plastic wrap, having never been used.

I developed an interest in high-speed imaging and did reasonably well at it and even wrote a book. I'm now quite interested in images of the Milky Way. That's my next project. From the photography business I did learn one thing - I really prefer to photograph landscapes and technical subjects. I don't have the patience to photograph people.

Monday, June 16, 2014

Domain names - the countdown to abandonment

www.britphoto.us will become www.tehisp.blogspot.com in a couple of weeks. www.britinthe.us will become www.britishphotography.blogspot.com in a couple of weeks also. This change has been perpetuated by Name.Com requesting more than double the domain name fee. When the domains were purchased in 2013 they were $3.99 each which is why I bought two and why I bothered with domain names. Now Name.Com wants a ludicrous $10.99 each. As these two are purely blogs, there seems singularly little point in paying $10.99 for each blog domain name. I can get along quite satisfactorily without them. Certainly many of my old links won't work any more but who really truly cares?

As far as I am concerned, $10.99 is better in my pocket than in somebody else's. As far as I know, I have 3 domains due to expire between the beginning of July and the end of October. One is a domain I know I don't use. The other two are domains that I use but could quite happily live without. They have all risen to $10.99 so that means I now have $32.97 available for use on such frivolous things as groceries.

Are domain names really needed? These days with the speed of a Google search, I don't really believe they are. I notice that all the things that I have done to help my blogs to become popular have all backfired badly. I used domain names that were short and easy to remember so that people could access the blogs easily. Those could actually be the salvation of this blog. When I started it, I had no blog entries. Thus I wanted to make it easy to find. Now I have plenty content so online searches should be finding the content. They're not finding it that often at the moment. I suspect because there are too many links going to and fro. I'm not sure that all this linking is a good thing.

As with everything, look online and one writer swears by one technique and another by a different technique. None of the techniques tried so far have gained a single extra visitor. I've acquired a load of bots visiting but that's all. I'm going thus to call bullshit on all of the SEO techniques and popularisation techniques and just say that content is king. I have very much a feeling that Google searches have largely made domain names entirely redundant.

In a way, losing the domain names is a bonus as not only does it save me money but it also kills off all the linkbacks. I'm leaning toward the philosophy that my blogs should not be found as blogs but as individual articles. After all, when I hunt online, I look at individual articles. I don't pick a blog and read every post. I pick the articles that come up in an online search and read those articles if they interest me. To my mind, hit generation created by pasting the links to your blog are the most worthless kinds of hit creation. Instead, paste links to individual articles. That way the search universe runs the way it should.

Domain names, SEO and all that malarkey are, in my opinion very much over-hyped. My blog hit numbers dived after I dumped all the "popularisation" widgets. Income rose despite the fact each page now has fewer viewers. I notice a great number of hits from some of the camera discussion websites. Interestingly, those hits do not correspond to income. That's another darned good reason to dump the domain names. I'd rather have meaningful hits than meaningless hits. I can't make every hit a paying hit but I can eliminate the fake hits. I suspect that camera forums just generate fake hits - probably as the camera forums own search engine indexes my site as it searches its own site. I think I'd rather have people that find my blog through searches than people that just blindly follow links. That way I should get people who're more interested in what I have to say.

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Play nice on the phone - honey attracts more bees than vinegar

You are the voice of the company. When you pick up the telephone, act responsibly. This was a phonecall I had today...

<caller> Hello Rachel
<me> There's nobody here called Rachel.
<caller> Oh... *click*


What was wrong with that call? More than that - what was right with that call? The whole call was horrible. This is not how anybody should act on the phone. Needless to say, I googled the number and found it was one of those miserable little recruitment agencies.

What the caller should have done is...

<caller> Hello, This is John from Acme Inc, may I speak with Rachel please.


People just don't give their name and their company name. The rule of good etiquette is that you state your identity so people know they're dealing with a human then the company so they know it's a business call then identify the purpose of the call. "Hello Fred" just doesn't cut it!


In fact, I hang up on people that don't state their name, who they're working for and the subject of the call. If I have to ask, I get very surprised responses. Maybe I need to set up a course in "telephone operation" because most people don't seem to understand it - not even half the receptionists I speak with. 

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Color correction and sharpness

Today there was a rather ridiculous assertion online made that 8 megapixel images look "fuzzy". Thus, here are two versions of the same image taken a few days ago. The subject isn't anything particularly stunning nor is the equipment. The camera is a very elderly Canon XT from 2006 coupled with an older Tamron 17-35. Even the printer in the picture isn't made any more, replaced by a wiFi model.
If the option to zoom in to 1:1 is taken, it's possible to see that there is no fuzz at all on the image. It's a pretty good image that would print to around 8 x 12 at 300dpi or at a more realistic 150dpi to 16 x 24. It's way bigger than most need to print and way bigger than is needed for online usage. It's largely why the camera has not been upgraded to one of the new 36 megapixel units. Needless to say, this image was straight from camera.

There is indeed a color cast from the compact fluorescent lamp in the office. In the following image, the image has been corrected for color cast, sharpened a little, the contrast has been tweaked. The saturation remains largely the same but the exposure has been tweaked by 2/3 of a stop. The result is quite pleasing and all the more so since it was all done with Canon's File Explorer.
Yes, the shelf is bowing under the weight of the books on the shelf - it is not a function of the lens. At 24mm there should be no distortion at all on a 17-35. The exposure was 10 seconds at f16, 100ISO.

Checking the image closely, it's possible to see what might look like halation on the printer but what that is in actual fact is dust. There's plenty dust in that office. The following is a crop from the center of the image.
Even though this is not quite at 100%, it's possible to see just how sharp the image is. The idea that 8 megapixel images are at all fuzzy is completely disproven. The color correction, sharpness etc were all adjusted slightly but not majorly. The top image was a JPEG straight from the camera. The second and third are a RAW image, created by the camera and then converted during post processing to JPEG.

Friday, June 13, 2014

Why I dumped LinkedIn

Ages ago, I joined LinkedIn. I really can't remember why I joined or even when. Yesterday evening I had just updated my profile to make it livelier and suddenly found my account had been locked. Well, that was very strange because those of you that know me will realise that everything posted online is pretty mild - especially given that LinkedIn was the only account that I published under my own name. I'm not sure what the problem is but that doesn't really bother me to be quite honest. The whole thing is that though I'd put a lot of work into LinkedIn yesterday to try to spruce it up, I really, truly don't care about LinkedIn. It never generated traffic for my blog. It never generated traffic to Facebook just as Facebook never generated traffic to my blog. It never even generated interest in what I can do for people.
When my LinkedIn account was blocked, I asked what the problem was and was pretty much told "somebody complained and we're not going to say what they complained about or why but you're blocked so nya-nya-nya". There are really only two things to consider there - either there's a troublemaker or there's been an error on LinkedIn's part. If it was a troublemaker, LinkedIn is welcome to them. If it's an error then it'll likely happen again and it'll happen to somebody else because I'm not going to return.

As I told a friend, mentioning LinkedIn: I was commenting on articles and getting some feedback. Lots of people seemed to like my anti careerbuilder article. I don't think that LinkedIn has been at all worthwhile though. Like all of this online stuff, it eats time and promises a lot but produces nothing And that is the soundest condemnation anybody can ever give anything online! I never had any contacts about work out of LinkedIn - there were many agencies that promised to look at my resume but never did. It was in terms of gaining or changing employment, utterly valueless.

Being without LinkedIn is more of a relief than anything else. It's another one of the interminable pieces of online dross gone that I don't have to keep updated or worry about. I'm not the only person to think little of LinkedIn either.
Linkedin has endorsements and I found I was getting endorsed for really strange things that I'd never handled. I never put anything on my profile about accounts receivable yet had 15 endorsements for it. I never put "telephone skills" on my profile yet had 30 endorsements for it - all from people I don't even know and have never even communicated with - including some from Russia.

Over the past couple of years I have systematically removed anything with my real name on it from the internet. I have a strong suspicion that posting under a pseudonym is much to be preferred. I did meet a recruiter that used to look up applicants online before interviewing them. Having done a quick check just now, I am relieved to find that there is nothing visible for at least the last five years other than some out of date telephone numbers.

One of the craziest things is that people on LinkedIn write recommendations for each other. Out of sheer curiosity I had somebody I didn't know from Adam to do an recommendation for me. They got my gender completely wrong and I wrote them a recommendation too. With that level of fakery on LinkedIn, it's well worth doing without it. To cap all that off, I still get spam from LinkedIn groups and when I try to unsubscribe, it tells me I am not authorised. LinkedIn has become spam.

The other crazy thing about LinkedIn was the way people wanted to become my friend. Well, wasn't that special? I allowed about 850 people to become my "friend" on LinkedIn. After they became my "friend" they just slipped into obscurity and I never heard a word from them. I don't even believe I knew many of my new "friends" in real life. This is supposed to be a "business" forum. Nothing there sounds remotely businesslike - especially if there was somebody going round looking for reasons to be insulted or slighted or whatever.

So to recap: On LinkedIn I had
  • People wanting to be my friend that I'd never met nor heard of.
  • The people that became "friends" never interacted with me.
  • Fake references witten for me at the drop of a hat.
  • Fake endorsements by people I didn't know and for skills I didn't even possess including pottery, basket weaving and taxidermy.
  • Anonymous people going behind my back to complain to LinkedIn instead of sending me a message directly saying that they had an issue with whatever issue they dreamed up.
  • Inane articles about business that had holes a mile wide.
  • Inane articles about business that were really infomercials or sales gimmicks.
Perhaps the thing that made me laugh the most was the following (taken from an email interchange with LinkedIn support)
As a courtesy, I've gone ahead and temporarily removed the restriction from your account so you can make changes. Please know that if no action is taken by you to update your name fields, your account may be subject to future restrictions. Here's a link that will let you check and update your name fields:
Clearly using my real name wasn't a smart thing to do. I should have used a pseudonym. Apparently my real name is no longer good enough. Goodbye LinkedIn, you won't be missed.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Gain more blog readers and more blog comments

More blog readers and more blog comments mean more people are clicking on adverts and increasing income from the blog. It makes sense. Thus most people will list their blogs with all of the blogs listings services that are plastered all over the internet. Some even pay to popularise their blogs. This blog even had several popularisation widgets attached.

Did the blog popularisation widgets do anything? Absolutely not. They do increase apparent visits to the blog but those "visits" are just phantom hits. There's nobody actually viewing the blog. As an example, somebody listed one of the pages on a Romanian website. Within two days, that page had racked up 1,500 viewings. Now if those had been genuine visitors then at least 3% would have clicked on an adsense advert. That would mean 45 clicks on adsense adverts. Instead, try zero clicks.

Getting visitors for a blog is a matter of constant promotion. Some people will return. This blog gets about 24% return visitors. Of course, what screwed the figures up for a long time was a cyberstalker that used to click pages before and after work. All those hits came from a roadrunner user in the Irmo area. There'd be between 180 and 200 a month. Heaven knows what that was all about but those seemed to drop off around mid February and have not returned.

Promotion consists of getting as many back links as possible without having to give away forward links. That means, getting people to link into the blog rather than anything else. Content is another issue. The blog has to have content people want to read. In bewilderment at the lack of interaction on this blog, the problem was put forward for free marketing advice since a link had been placed on LinkedIn. That link led here. It transpired that there's absolutely nothing wrong. The articles are of high quality. There could be some links to other sites (which are commencing today) and the layout could have been better. The layout has been changed. The old layout looked very newspapery and was quite pleasing to the eye but the number of advertisements shown plummeted as did income. Now the traditional templates are back in use and while less visually stunning, are easier to navigate.

The goal of any blog is to gain engaged readers. This blog is failing spectacularly at that. In fact, both this blog and the other blog are failing. Controversial posts and posts with a perceived sexual edge seem to be popular. The rest just don't get many views at all. Posting links to pages in discussions that people are engaged in online does get views - sometimes hundreds of views. Very few of those views seem to result in advertising clicks. Clearly the target audience has not been reached.

Microblogging, using Twitter has the same issue, namely lack of worthwhile viewers. Ages ago, a Twitter follower adder was used and across several accounts, 14,000 followers were amassed. None of those "followers" was at all responsive. Then auto-retweeters and auto-tweeters were added. There was absolutely no engagement. Then a new Twitter account was started. There was no auto follower adder used. Largely people known were added and yet - very little engagement. It was only when politically controversial tweets were added that engagement levels rose slightly. Whether that will lift blog engagement levels remains to be seen.

The general look of things is pretty dismal. The blog is interesting. The posts are of good quality - and that's according to independent reviewers. Visitors are just not arriving. Perhaps photography has had its day? It could well be that since 90% of people use smartphones for their photography that photography has become so commonplace that few take any real interest in it. This would be a bit like calligraphy - people try it and play with it then put it to one side and carry on as normal.

So, blog readers and more blog comments? Most of the tricks suggested have been tried and found not to work with these specific blogs. Perhaps they will work with others? If anybody has any suggestions, please feel free to comment below.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

From American Dream to American Nightmare.

The American Dream has slowly evolved into a living nightmare! Not one person is secure in the knowledge that their dreams won't turn into nightmares. One day living in the lap of luxury and comfort, the next in unbridled misery and grinding poverty where hopelessness is the order of the day and slowly the trappings of a life savored are sold off to provide for the most basic needs. Some descend even further from top players to living on the streets, out of a plastic bag. It can happen seemingly in the blink of an eye. The catalyst may be many things - a company downsizing, a family illness, a family death, a divorce, burglary, a downturn in an already shattered economy or just intense competition.

I swore I wouldn't put anything personal in what is or was a photography blog. It seems to have become a bit of everything blog at the moment though with the emphasis on business and a slight hint of photography. Occasionally I'll do a book review too - usually to do with photography or business and always an e-book. Cutting to the chase. Back in January my position was eliminated when the company I worked for closed the premises that I worked in. Since then I have applied for every job I could find that I can reasonably do and completed training meanwhile to be a certified Medical Coding and Billing Specialist. That's in addition to the Bachelor's degree I earned years ago and the TESOL certificate I also earned, years ago.

At the beginning of my hunt for a new position, I opened a new email account, dedicated to job hunting. Since then it has had 1,374 emails posted into it - mostly acknowledgements of receipt of an application. No personal email goes into this box. This means that since January (aside from a month when I had a temporary position) I have applied for over ONE THOUSAND positions. During this time I have had perhaps three job interviews and that is all.
While I was in my previous position in which I was chronically underemployed, I applied for at least 5 positions a week - for the five years that I worked there. That's 250 jobs applied for every year for 5 years or to date approximately 2,750 jobs. If I include the number of applications it took to get my previous position which was 600 then over the last 6 or 7 years that's around 3,000 - 3,500 job applications resulting in one retail position that I was supremely overqualified for. I took that position as it was the only company that said yes.

 Since the biggest hurdle before I took the retail position was my lack of US citizenship, I took on US citizenship. Thus the only position I am unqualified to do is to be President and that is merely due to the geographical location of my birth. It seems to have changed nothing. It doesn't matter how many bits of paper I have nor how intelligent I am. I did pass the LSAT with a good score but couldn't afford to go to law school. Given the difficulty I have finding employment now, it would be foolish to take on debt.

I have jumped through hoops like a performing seal. One company demanded I accompanied my application with national and local background checks plus a driving record check - all of which cost a small fortune and proved that I'd not got as much as a parking ticket and had never had any interactions with the police. That application went in and I heard nothing. I visited to nag them a few times and nothing. That's the last time I do a fool thing like paying for something like that!

Of course, applying for jobs is fraught with ludicrous websites. Honestly, websites are probably the biggest reason why people don't get jobs. This is one I tried to complete today. Apparently South Carolina is not a member state of the union any more. Perhaps the Governor sold South Carolina to China and we're all going to have to learn Mandarin?
Getting political, my dental hygienist is a full blown Republican. She was telling me that everybody on Food Stamps should be prosecuted for fraud and made to repay the money. The same she said for unemployment insurance. I kept my mouth shut rather than take on such a narrow-minded individual. Wake up and smell the roses - it's almost impossible to get a job these days!

By now I bet you're thinking - he must be a really nasty person. How could I have been a nasty person when my previous job involved retail sales and when during that job I was promoted? That argument falls flat on its face. If I was truly objectionable then I would not be working as a volunteer with a hospital either.

The other day, I was offered a scholarship to do a computer networking & security course. The course was free, assistance with transportation fees were offered if my daily journey was over 50 miles round trip. My daily round trip would have been 42 miles so I would have been ineligible. In any case, the course would have been full time meaning I'd have had to abandon my current voluntary patient advocate work at the hospital. Not only would I have had to do that but there was no guarantee of work at the end of that course. Needless to say, the offer was declined. Past experience has shown that there is no work in computing despite what everybody thinks and hears. It's a skill that out-dates so quickly that it's not worth pursuing. Indeed, I regret that I didn't follow one of the others on my computer courses of the 1980s and switch to accountancy. That had a future - computer courses have no future unless work is there as soon as the course is done. 6 months later is way too late - the knowledge gained is so out of date, nobody wants it. Of course, it's great business for colleges - selling washed-up, worthless courses because there are always suckers that fell for them wanting to retrain in something else.  What I need is not yet another qualification but a job.

Since December last year, the number of companies shutting down or shutting down their Columbia South Carolina location has exploded. I have a feeling that South Carolina never really recovered from the Civil War, over a hundred and fifty years ago. The big plantations are mostly gone, replaced by towns in which the population eke out a miserable subsistence lifestyle.

So, what are my plus points? Intelligent (IQ of 133), qualified, easy to get along with, amenable, kind, considerate, compassionate, logical. My resume has been redesigned and redesigned so many times by so many different people that the resume cannot be a problem. The problem has to be something else since nobody ever gets back to me for an interview. I'm beginning to suspect that the "jobs" have already gone before they're advertised and go to people that the recruiting officer already knows. I also suspect that the "jobs" on many of the recruiting sites are just advertised in order to get resumes for agencies. I remember applying for one job with an agency. That ended up with an interview.

During the interview I wondered exactly why I was there since the company was entirely woman run. There were no men anywhere. Needless to say as I knew some of the other people being interviewed, we chatted and amazingly enough, none of the men got hired but all of the women did. Sexism in action. The men were just sent along to give things the air of equality.

And yes - I am absolutely fed up with the situation. I want a job. I like working. I enjoy making a contribution do come out with suggestions as to how to improve productivity etc. I hate this enforced idleness - it's cruel and unusual punishment. I was born to do things with my brain, not just to sit around like a lemon in front of a computer, applying for mythical jobs. Nobody ever got a job applying for it through some piece of electronic junk yet that's what I'm told is the modern way. Where are the Human Resources personnel that are willing to meet and chat with real people? Where is the human element in all this abominable electronic garbage? We have succeeded through computers to turn the American Dream into the Never Ending Nightmare.

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Do we have too much faith in the internet?

A long time ago, a friend who was a psychiatrist commented that many patients were chatting away online to "friends" who they didn't know, couldn't possibly know and didn't even know whether they were human or a computer at the other end. Asserting that it was impossible to determine that there was a human at the other end, it transpired that the psychiatrist considered internet users to be somewhat suspect mentally, in believing that there actually was a real individual answering them or that the individual was actually what had been claimed.

It is interesting to note that many women complain that men on dating sites are there just to get sex. All will promise undying love but the reality is that is a ploy just to get sex. Often it is a short-term goal with several women in the plan rather than a monogamous relationship. In olden days, this used to be the preserve of bar flies. Now just about anybody with access to a smartphone can do this. Thus it has become much more prevalent. Various studies have shown that the rate of infection with sexual diseases has skyrocketed with greater ease of access to online dating sites.

In the 1970s, when the author was a youngster, mobile phones had not been invented and the internet was limited to boffins in expensive labs. Computers were for geeks that hand built them and pored over circuit boards for days on end. The rest of the world got on just fine without. This was a time without spam, without junk phonecalls, withought Nigerian scammers - a simpler time and a more productive time.

In the 1970s, navigation was done with a street map, a pencil and paper. When a tradesman was summoned via the telephone or by visiting their store, just one tradesman was summoned. Sometimes it could take days. People took responsibility for knowing where the stop-cocks and off switches were for things. There was no casual browsing of the internet at work nor surreptitiously checking of Facebook on a mobile phone while pretending to work. More and higher quality work was done.

Today, people come to work and work very hard but achieve very little in comparison. The day starts with checking email - a largely pointless task of sifting through 20 emails for Xanex, another 20 for "male enhancer" or "breast enlargement" a few from Crown Prince Unpronounceable from Nigeria whose entire family was horrendously killed in one of the daily plane crashes in that region (remind me never to fly if I ever visit Nigeria) and 20 requests to view some superstar's naked body. Having sifted through all that, the genuine emails that have not accidentally been deleted through this filtering process are reviewed. Most are a complete waste of time yet have to be replied to, wasting even more time.

Jobs are advertised daily on the internet as companies find dissatisfied staff, unhappy with having to fiddle around with computer junk and irked that the company's computers keep crashing and losing their work, leave for other positions. Meanwhile, scammers place fake job advertisements in order to steal the identities of applicants for their nefarious purposes. Many job advertisements are copied by a plethora of agencies that have sprung up, all trying to claim a piece of the prize. Some agencies are less reputable than others. Occasionally, emails from agencies that have produced nothing worthwhile and that have been long forgotten pop up in email. The following example is for an agency that hasn't checked their books in over a decade.
User Access Administrator - London - 12 Months
From: Hina Hussain (Hina.Hussain@mbauk.com)
Sent: Tue 5/27/14 4:46 AM
To: '<removed>' (
<removed>)
Dear 
<removed>
User access administrator urgently required to work for a Leading Trading organisation on an initial 12 month contract.
You will be responsible for the administration of Windows accounts and the clients in house and external applications/systems, including user
permissioning, authentication, and authorisation, identifying and reporting back on security and compliance issues within the Security Operations area to
the Global Logical Access Manager as well as creating and maintaining adequate procedures and controls, to ensure that the Security Operations function
supplies a quality and efficient service to the Business and IT departments. The candidate will be expected to assist in and help drive efforts and initiatives
to simplify and automate logical access administration.
The ideal candidate will have experience in a highly pressured environment and the candidate should feel comfortable working at a fast demanding pace.
Must be enthusiastic with a willingness to learn and pay attention to detail. Ability to strictly adhere to security regulation, procedure, and policy
surrounding logical access and account management at all times. Strong working knowledge of MS environment required - Outlook, Excel, Word, and
accurate typing skills. Detailed experience and exposure to information security requirements, primarily in Logical Access and SOX security
requirements is also key for this role.
If you are interested in this position, please can you contact me, also providing a update profile and a overview of your experience in relation to the role.
MBA do have a policy to fulfil job requests within 24 hours therefore a quick response is important.
MBA does apologise when this job does not match your profile. However, if you have any colleagues who may be interested in this contract opportunity;
please forward this email to them. If they are successfully placed at our client site, we will award you with £150.00 (180 Euros).
Thank you for your time and we hope to hear from you soon,
Kind Regards,
Hina Hussain
Recruitment Resourcer
Tel: 00 44 (0) 207 749 5627
Mobile: 00 44 (0) 7715578017
Email: hina.hussain@mbauk.co.uk
Website: www.mbauk.com
12 Brook House, Chapel Place, Rivington Street, London. EC2A 3SJ
London - Amsterdam - Brussels - Den Haag - Eindhoven - Geneva - Munich - Paris - Rotterdam - Utrecht - Zurich
Disclaimer The views expressed in this mail are entirely those of the sender, and do not necessarily represent the views or position of the MBA Group of
companies. The information contained in this communication is confidential and may be legally privileged. It is intended solely for the use of the
individual or entity to whom it is addressed and others authorised to receive it. If you are not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any
disclosure, copying, distribution or taking any action in relation to the contents of this information is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. Neither the
sender nor the represented institution is liable for the correct and complete transmission of the contents of an e-mail, or for its timely receipt.
Please refer to our website www.mbauk.com for a list of all Group Companies and registration detail
This email did indeed arrive this morning. If it's a genuine email then it's an agency that never purges its books of out-of-date resumes. The very fact that the email states "MBA does apologise when this job does not match your profile" indicates that the company has a vested interest in just spamming out job descriptions that don't match anybody in particular as they never check whose resume matches the job.

Just about everybody suffers spam like this - exemplifying the earlier statement that a lot of time is wasted every morning by staff going through junk emails. Many junk emails actually look genuine, such as the one copied herein. It's unclear whether it's a genuine email or just spam but the fact no UK based agency has had a resume originating from anybody here for over a decade would suggest pure spam.

Just about an hour of daily activity is wasted on e-garbage. Of the remaining time, based on a few minutes here and there, looking for "information" for projects on Google, probably another hour is wasted. Much of the important information sought for projects will be of an immensely trivial nature and definitely not worth reading nor incorporating.

Social Media is discussed widely. Indeed it is hyped. Twitter is mentioned extensively and yet the number of genuine Twitter users is dwarfed by the spamcasters. Indeed, @NikkiHaley (the Governor of South Carolina) ostensibly uses Twitter but judging from the complete lack of interaction with humans responding to messages, has a totally automated account. Being automated, even the Governor's account is not worth following. Unless there is interaction on Social Media, there is no point whatsoever in the public following accounts. Thereby hangs a problem - in order to engage users, somebody or indeed a team of staff need to operate various social media accounts in conjunction with a social media planner.

How much income does Social Media generate? Little to none. As an example, this site is advertised to 15,000 Twitter accounts via several Twitter spamcasters. This activity results in perhaps one hit a month from humans actually being reached by the spamcasters. Another account is handled manually and little to no interaction happens unless discussion of politics or something unrelated to photography occurs. That account yields less website hits than the spamcasters that yield virtually none.

Staff have their mobile phones in their pockets all day. Before smartphones, staff idly texted friends and family when allegedly working. With smartphones, staff now idly play interactive games interspersed with "back in a bit - boss is coming". Staff attention spans have dropped to the lowest levels ever. Productivity has dropped yet people are working harder than ever, trying to catch up with all the garbage.

Has the internet been beneficial? Not really. There is little that cannot be done without it. People have become slaves to the internet. People are not the masters of their technology, rather they are the slaves to technology. Look at wedding photographers as an example. This is a species that has been utterly wiped out by digital imaging and the internet. Photographers now randomly run through weddings taking hundreds if not thousands of random photographs then retire to a sweaty office for days on end working themselves into a frazzle just to produce from those thousands of images, maybe 20 for a wedding album. In olden days, photographers mindful of the cost of film made each photograph count and took up to six rolls of film or 216 images. The ease of technology has meant that photographers capture now and then spend days sifting through the spoils rather than concentrating on taking good pictures and having less time in the office. Technology has made photographers much less productive.

Has the mobile telephone had a positive effect? Not really. Its introduction has heralded a lack of patience and a must-have-it-now attitude which is totally counter-productive. It has also allowed rioters and criminals easy access to a secure communication system that can be used during the conduct of a crime.

Will the human race return to a golden era of staff working productively or will the time-wasting technology era continue?

Monday, June 9, 2014

Humans apply within, robots not required.

This blog is currently hosted on a Google Blogger server. It has been a constant struggle to raise viewer numbers. Last month was an all-time high of over 7,000 but how many of those hits were genuine? That's a question that was puzzling as although hits and page views were increasing, revenue and interaction were very low. In fact, revenue had actually dropped.

Looking at the site on a content level, there were modules included that allegedly listed the blog on blog directories. Now blog directories were something that in regular everyday browsing are never encountered. Out of sheer curiosity, they were removed and the effect was pretty fast. Not only did "visitor" numbers plummet but revenue increased. This sounds paradoxical but does make sense if the reasons behind this are examined.

Adsense - which is the revenue creation medium for this blog - is set up to reject fake hits. If it wasn't then just about every site owner would be sitting clicking adverts all day, every day, creating revenue for themselves which really wouldn't be fair on the advertisers. The problem with automated systems is that very often they don't really work. Thus, genuine advertising clicks are often missed.

Previous articles have discussed various aspects of fake hits but not the damage caused by fake hits. Veritassium makes some excellent points about fake Facebook hits by way of example. For Facebook pages, fake hits actively reduce the number of people viewing the pages. This leads directly to a reduction in visibility. With blogs, it's different. Fake hits bump up the hits figure and give people a sense of positivity that their blogs are making the rounds. They encourage people to produce ever more content which in the case of Blogspot, Google likes. For Google, more content means more chances people will see something with advertising and hence make them more money. Thus, it pays Google to get people hooked on blogging even if it means supplying the means to generate fake hits.

The downside of the fake hits is that while it looks like there are readers, it does count against adsense. It's a little perverse - Google supplying the means to generate fake hits and then deleting genuine hits from adsense revenue because of the fake hits. The evidence is clear - as soon as the "blog listing" component was removed, adsense income rose.

Fake hits are a curse for Adsense. For Facebook users, fake hits are a curse too. Amazingly, people are prepared to pay for fake hits just as they are prepared to pay for fake followers on Twitter, Instagram etc. Fake is fake and a total waste of time and money but worse than that, the fakes actually harm the integrity of what is being achieved. In many ways it's similar to the analogy of a smoker once given by a university friend, Paul Portway who declared that it was like somebody stabbing themselves in the back with a knife while declaring that though they knew it was bad, they enjoyed it.

For businesses with few hits, the idea is that people will think more if the business has more hits or likes. The point of a like is somewhat elusive. For this blog, readers are what is required. It's not possible to force people to read. Fake hits are not required. Interaction is desired but not frequently forthcoming.

What is your experience of fake hits or likes?