This and that: idle ruminations from the corner office

Hey, wait a minute: that's where I work.

Yesterday when I finally sat down in front of the computer it was after 1 p.m.

I did my usual:

1) Checked bookofjoe's rank on TTLB — 134

2) Checked my Technorati rank — 2,904 (out of 21,700,000 blogs)

3) Checked out yesterday's visits and page views (5,500 and 8,000, respectively)

4) Checked out the percentage of readers currently at the site by their country of origin (my goal is to, ASAP, increase my non–U.S. readership to at least 50% — I figure since the population of the U.S. is about 5% that of the entire world that's a reasonable goal. I'm getting there: a couple months ago the U.S percentage was always over 70%; these days it's consistently between 60% and 50%, though last evening this

was the picture around 10:30 p.m., during the third quarter of the very entertaining Pitt v. West Virginia football game)

5) Read my email

6) Read the five posts here that had already gone up

Much to my amusement and (very mild) dismay I found errors or things that could have been better stated in 3 of the 5 posts.

60%!

They were minor things — a word missing, two sentences which would have read better had their order been reversed, an aside that wasn't nearly as funny as it would have been had I changed the word order — but you know what?

I didn't feel bad about those things — not at all.

Because I'll tell you what: I knocked myself out, working to the very limit of my capability, the day before when I created those posts.

So if I fell short, hey, that's just the way it goes.

What with my having given my crack research team the holiday off (there are some who might say, as did Dorothy Parker when she was informed that Calvin Coolidge (below)

had died, "How could they tell?") it's just me, myself and I until next year.

Yes, I told them to take the rest of the year off.

For all the good they do, might as well.

At least it'll be quieter around here.

Anyway.

I went back and fixed those three posts so they're better.

You probably never even noticed.

On another note, I'm always of two minds about what to do about my "Comments" feature.

On the one hand, it's annoying to get spam and occasionally people hit the wrong button and a comment repeats two or more times.

As a rule, up to now I've gone back and deleted the ones that didn't belong, blocking the spammers and haters.

But you know what?

It's a pain in the butt — it's slow, takes time and energy and focus and detracts from my primary mission here — whatever that is, I haven't yet figured it out but I'm hoping someone will tell me sometime.

A couple days ago I read a Financial Times interview with Takafumi Horie (below),

the 33–year–old Mark Cuban–esque Japanese entrepreneur who founded Livedoor and has become a serious and very vocal threat to the old Japanese way of doing business what with, among other things, his nearly successful recent attempt at a hostile takeover of Fuji Television, one of the country's major media outlets.

Horie is the current rage in Japan because of his totally antiestablishment posture and doings and he has huge street cred and popularity among Japanese youth.

He has a blog that, like mine, is completely open to any and all comments and as he glanced at them during the FT interview he noted how viciously hostile some of them were.

The reporter asked him why he didn't delete them; Horie replied that to do so was too time–consuming and "a pain in the a**," so he just left them alone.

He's right.

From this moment on I'm leaving the comments alone.

Spammers, take notice and get ready to jam up my comments section.

I simply can't be bothered anymore.

Besides, people get mad when I delete their comments and there's more than enough hatred in the world without my adding to it.