Douglas Castle Apologizes for Loitering and Littering.Dear Friends:
As a man born with an irresistible propensity for apologies (I have actually apologized to neighbors about the weather), I had to take this moment to apologize to all of my readers. Please read on.
I spend a great deal of time railing and carrying on about being heard and being noticed in this noise-filled, e-media world. It is nothing short of magic to hear, and to be heard amidst the constant full-sensorial assault on the senses imposed upon on us in a promotion-obsessed high-technology society. It seems, too much of the time, that everyone is promoting and no one is producing...that everyone is selling, even if no one is buying. Ironically, if you truly want to purchase something, it's almost unimaginally difficult to get service -- "All of our representatives are currently assisting other callers..."
Two days ago, I tried to contact a domain registration service by telephone. I called the number for "Immediate Customer Assistance." The first time I phoned, I held for 15 minutes. The second time, 20 minutes. The third time, I started yelling into the telephone (at no one) after hearing a musical tape loop of Dave Brubeck's immortal "Take Five," which was, until very recently, one of my favorite songs. While I waited on the telephone, I went through in excess of one hundred emails which had accumulated in my computer inbox in the space of two hours.
Approximately one in every ten messages was spam. Ironically, in going through my spam filter's collected entries, I have generally found that approximately one in every twenty five spam messages is a miscategorized legitimate email. My computer can no longer effectively differentiate between them - the machine is as overworked and confused as I am (Note: I plan to publish the results of my study in the International Journal Of Useless, Unsponsored Research, August Edition. Adam J. Kovitz, of THE NATIONAL NETWORKER refused to finance this endeavor when I offered him a right of first refusal, citing it as "crap," or some variant thereof). Anyway:
Several days ago I started featuring several different newsfeeds on a number of the blogs which I administer, co-author or write. While International News is very important, the feeds have been posting to these blogs many times each day. Enough is enough. To make matters worse, the hyperlinks to the top news stories are not live [by the way, if you want to bring any of the links on these posts to life so that you can read the entire story, all you need to do is paste them into your browser].
I have been quite a hypocrite...filling my readers' blogs, widgets, RSS feeds and email with this avalanche of sobering and saddening news, instead of heartfelt, informative and stimulating content. I have been loitering and littering, and I am deeply sorry.
Starting tomorrow (because nobody ever starts today, whenever today may be - we Humans are prone to procrastination and indecision, which I should probably write about if and when I can get around to making up my mind about it), I will decrease the frequency of these feeds to once daily for each. The feeds in question are from Associated Press (AP), The Financial Times (FT) and Digg.
Please stay with me. I will make it up to you.
I am deeply in debt to those people who read what I write, and I will not abuse the privilege and honor of your interest and loyalty.
Faithfully,
Douglas Castle
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