Mandy's Blog

Photo © dpa via n24.de

"I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an Emperor - that's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone, if possible - Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there's room for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone.

The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me I say, "Do not despair." The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers: Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel; who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate; only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural.

Soldiers: Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written, "the kingdom of God is within man" - not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men, in you, you the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power! Let us all unite!! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie! They do not fulfill their promise, they never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people!! Now, let us fight to fulfill that promise!! Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.

Soldiers: In the name of democracy, let us all unite!!!"

Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin Jr., KBE, playing "The Jewish Barber" playing "Adenoid Hynkel" in "The Great Dictator" (1940)

Dear Google,


Thanks for the sound advice. Have you positively lost your mind?


Regards,
Mandy


(Those who don't get it, click on the picture for a bigger view. If that's not readable enough, right-click on the bigger image and choose "Open image" or "Save image". Note entry #40 in the directions.)

See Misha... I do post something new sometimes... never said I'm a blogger writing a blog anyway...


It happened a few times lately that I encountered people who wanted to chat (not necessarily with me, natch) from somewhere else than home, and couldn't do so for a variety of reasons. Say, they're at work and can't run an IM client there, or their company firewall blocks it altogether. Or they're on travel and don't carry a laptop with them, and only have access through shabby Internet Cafés. Or whatever reason there may be.

Well, for one, most big IM networks offer a web version of their chat in the form of Java or Flash - where and which is up to you, depending on which network you're using (Yahoo, MSN (also here), AOL, ICQ, Google,...). But then, you also might want to try alternative services that let you pick and log in to your favorite IM network without much ado, to simply chat right inside the browser. Web-based IMing really works surprisingly well these days. Maybe check out:

http://www.meebo.com/
http://www.koolim.com/
http://www.iloveim.com/
http://www.ebuddy.com/
http://express.instan-t.com/

HTH.


~//~


Break and hijack, because this sometimes irks/amuses me:

People are occasionally miffed about things not working right with their Yahoo account, something breaking, bugs of some sort appearing for a while, whatever. The general twist to that often is not so much the fact that things break, but rather that they complain to Yahoo about it and then nothing happens. No fix, no communication worth mentioning. And then folks go on to compare this to other sites and services they're using, and how you maybe get a personal response from a site owner within minutes and your problem is being taken care of in all detail and individually to make you happy again.

That's certainly somewhat understandable, and I definitely don't want to play the resident Yahoo apologist. Over the years, I've had my share of bad experiences with Yahoo like you too. Small and big annoyances that occurred or persisted, or keep reappearing all the time. Things that broke arbitrarily and took endless time to be taken care of, if at all. Things I ended up fixing myself in some erh... deviant ways... because Yahoo wouldn't cooperate. Stupid pre-formulated generic responses I got sent that didn't adress my issue at all. And yeah, eventually that sometimes pissed me off, and still does. But Yahoo gets no money from me, and you get what you pay for. (That said, I get no money from them either, so my willingness to help them fix and improve things -which I absolutely could- and notify them of issues is, in a word, diminishing.)

Look, you cannot compare Yahoo to any other smaller random website you might be using. Say, a site that maybe has about 20.000 registered active users, attracting a low six-digit number of visitors per day at best. A service run by two or three people semi-professionally and barely generating any profit at all. Even at that smaller size it's difficult to micro-manage every user problem individually and respond to everything you send them no matter how insignificant, so consider yourself lucky to be getting that. That's not the rule, that's the exception. But it's also not entirely a matter of quality and dedication, it's also a matter of feasibility. The bigger the service, the less feasible it is to deal with everything and everyone personally and directly. If you compare a small(ish) web service to a major global player, you're comparing apples and oranges. And you can't expect to get the same kind of fruit salad from both.

Yahoo nowadays is the website with the most visits per day on the entire Internet. They have something in the order of 420 million (that's 420.000.000 for you) registered unique users worldwide. Their global network website counters -if you want to call it that in simple terms- clock at a staggering figure somewhere north of 3.5 *billion* (3.500.000.000) daily pageviews - that's almost 41.000 hits *per second*. Trend: growing. Besides dozens of homegrown services under their own roof (Search, Mail, Photos, 360, etc.), all of which want to be maintained and improved and filled with content and function and new ideas, Yahoo owns and (co-)operates such massively popular sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, Geocities, Altavista or Alltheweb - and all of that wants to be integrated smoothly into the general Yahoo account shebang too so that you the user hopefully can -duh- use it all together as one slick blob of seamless web experience. I don't want to even try to imagine what a mess that is under the hood for people who run and work it, and how hard it is to make it work together, or how easy it is to break something while fixing something else. That's a Frankenstein variant of Godzilla. A swiss army knife in the shape of an Abrams battle tank monster truck. (Insert Tim-Taylor grunting here.)

They're listed as having 11.000 employees. Let's generously and falsely assume for a moment everyone of those would be in a job and function where they had to respond to user inquiries (in reality that's true only for a tiny fraction of those employees, in the order of hundreds or less). That would mean every Yahoo employee would be responsible for over 38.000 users and all their accounts and concerns and problems - again, in reality rather 10x that or more. Worldwide, in all imaginable languages, covering every nook and cranny of every Yahoo service and sub-division under the sun. Pure chaos.

I mean, seriously, the next time your Yahoo account coughs somehow, maybe cut them some slack and don't wait for a personal response dealing with your exclusive problem within 5 minutes. Or if you don't want to cut them slack, cut yourself some and be realistic with what you expect. Helps your blood pressure too.


pic is /w thanks to Get Fuzzy

To those who left, and to those who were left,
To those who I just can't reach, and to those who are out of touch,
To those who I never seem to manage to catch up with,
And to those who I haven't seen around in a long time,
To those who reached out but slipped out of my fingers,
And to those who deserved more and better than what I was able to give them,
To those who think they're not being thought of,
And to those who believe no one is looking for them, at them, or after them:
Whatever you call this holiday, and whether you celebrate or observe it or not,
I wish you, and everyone you choose to extend this wish to, family, friends,
A happy and joyous, quiet, and peaceful season,
And I hope you manage to shape it to your liking and make the very best you can of it.
May you have strength and comfort, and find all the solace you might be seeking,
And may the next year be a good one for you.
You have my respect and my recognition, and my gratitude for your trust.
And if you want it, you have my love and my friendship.
You are not forgotten. You are not alone.


Merry Christmas, my friends.