Author: Miriam

When your boss finds your blog

Miriam2 Comments

Hack on Triple J had a story regarding blogs on the 3rd of March (17min20 in for those playing at home) They were citing the dangers of blogging and how your workmates or boss could google you and find out things about political ideals, opinions etc that you might not want them to know.

Now for me personally this isn’t really a problem. I tend to be very open about my opinions, and I would never say anything on my blog that might compromise my position at work. (well, once work consists of anything other than being a checkout chick)

The thing that really disturbed me was their story of an Iranian man on his way to America for a conference on blogging. Apparently as soon as they found out what he was in America for the googled him and started reading his blog. Then, on the basis of a few entries in his blog they decided that he had been working illegally and gave him a 6 month ban into America. Wtf!
I’m all for national security and all that but googling people as they go through customs is ridiculous. Not to mention what happens when they don’t find you, when they find a different Miriam Parkinson, or Peter Smith etc who happens to be a complete psycho.

Another problem that clearly exists is that what they find on the internet could be years old, opinions shift, angsty teenagers grow up and life changes. Years ago I googled a friend for shits and giggles and came up with a post he left on a Beetles fan site when he was 10. Does that mean that he still has the slightest interest in them? No.

I believe that we should all stand by our opinions but I’m worried about the possibility of a world where noone can get by in life without their opinions being judged, and decisions being made on the basis of them.

Out of interest I googled myself. Nothing particularly worrying comes up fortunately. Just two rate this teacher sites, Camerons blog, a genealogy site and a photo of me from a play I did years ago. My blog doesn’t feature until page four and we all know that noone makes it past the first page of google.

A curious fact

Miriam1 Comment

Since Cameron Reilly referenced me from his blog my daily hit rate has doubled. Gotta love that for causality which makes me consider the best ways to get people to read your blog.

  1. Stick the url in your signature and become an interesting person on various forums – tried that, not even nearly interesting enough.
  2. Tell all your friends about it – only gave me a slight increase in activity right at the start. They all went once but as they see me every day they don’t tend to be that interested in regularly reading my blog. Seems there’s only so much of my sharp wit and dazzling personality a person can take in one day.
  3. Link to people from your blog – actually works quite well. Its a well know fact that most bloggers are at least a little bit narcissistic so they all google themselves or at least check out who’s linking to them on technorati.
  4. Taunt people on your blog and then link to them – linking means they find you, taunting means they get sucked into a large scale blog argument – would probibly work quite well but I’m not quite that obnoxious and I would rather be known for something other than being a bitch.
  5. Starting a blog conversation with someone famous in the blogosphere. Actually did this somewhat accidentally but the second they post a reference to you… Bam!! 5min of fame. or so far in my case a 48 hour spike in page views. Hooray!

The Problem with Skype

Miriam3 Comments

I’m sure Skype is fantastic and brilliant however I have one teeny tiny little problem with making the most of it… I don’t actually know anyone who uses skype. I could just chat to randoms as some people apparently do however as much as I love to chat to randoms in writing I have a bizarre fear of talking to people I don’t know on the phone.

Funny story: I used to telemarket for Optus.

Yes, despite knowing that I had a fear of talking to people I didn’t know on the telephone I decided to get a job as a telemarketer.

I lasted about 2 weeks. For the first half of every shift I would be visibly shaking. The first person I called thought it was a prank call. By the time I had calmed down enough to cope properly it was time for break and the second half of the shift wasn’t much better. Then some horrible woman called me impudent for referring to her by her first name – as we were trained to – and she made me cry. Then I finally decided that telemarketing wasn’t for me and quit.

Worst two weeks of my life I swear!

Anyways until I convince my sister to download skype and buy a headset etc it will probably remain unused.

Falling asleep listening to the Geeks of Hazzard gives you weird dreams

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Last night I was feeling somewhat sickly and tired so I went to bed early, like 10.30 early. However given it was so early I decided to listen to a couple of podcasts before I went to sleep. Halfway through an episode of The Geeks of Hazzard I fell asleep. This resulted in several hours of subliminal Geeks of Hazzard listening before Colin came to bed and tried to get the mp3 player off me whilst, startled from my unexpected awakening, my eyes darted around the room like a crazed lunatic.
The general result of this was bizarre dreams which may or may not have included bad Star Trek sound effects, a groggy awakening, and a flat battery on my mp3 player.

So if anyone saw a rather confused looking girl in black trackpants, a pink hoodie and a large empty backpack wandering around Richmond this morning that was probably me on my way to the markets, not a drug addict preparing to shoplift.