not a spam blog (officially)

does this look like a spam blog to you? well it officially is not. who said so? Google did. that's right, big G. they emailed me this:

Hello,

Your blog has been reviewed, verified, and cleared for regular use so that
it will no longer appear as potential spam. If you sign out of Blogger and
sign back in again, you should be able to post as normal. Thanks for your
patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

yes i'm back. i have not been able to post while my blog was being investigated for spam. Steve Rubel quotes a Microsoft study that states 75% of blogspot blogs are spam. my ramblings are obviously in the other 25%. maybe Google are cracking down on the other ne'er do wells. what is a spam blog i hear you type? according to big G:

As with many powerful tools, blogging services can be both used and abused. The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.

Spam blogs cause various problems, beyond simply wasting a few seconds of your time when you happen to come across one. They can clog up search engines, making it difficult to find real content on the subjects that interest you. They may scrape content from other sites on the web, using other people's writing to make it look as though they have useful information of their own. And if an automated system is creating spam posts at an extremely high rate, it can impact the speed and quality of the service for other, legitimate users..

well posting at an extremely high rate is not something i'm sure i could be accused of, but maybe i will post more soon as am jobless. more on that later. for now i'll leave you with this (anti) spam monty python advert made by Matt Beightol and Tor Pedersen of the academy of or art university in San Fransisco.

Thunder and Lightning, Very, Very Frightening

friday the 1st June was my last day in the lighting department. i had been with the company for nearly 6 years. time flies when you are having fun. it wasn't a full time job, my hours varied from week to week. sometimes i would work full-time (over 40 hours), and others i would only work a minimum of 12 hours. 99% of the time i would be in the lighting department, but now and again i would help out and work for other areas of the store. the second best place to work was in the plant area. orchids were possibly the nicest thing in the store.

over the past 6 months i was not there as much due to my health (fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, joint hyper mobility, whatever the hell i have). it was sad to leave on my last evening, but it's time for a change. Nic made me a "lightsabre of creativity", creatively fashioned with acetate and cardboard, along with a lovely card made from "recycled bits." Jaclyn went around the store with a notebook asking many of my coworkers to write a mention and cheerio. Gemma went to all the bother of writing me a poem for goodness sake. i was quite moved.

working with certain people, and interacting with the general public are the memories i will take with me. companies change over the years. people come and go and the atmosphere changes. Seth Goding speaks of "the vibe" of your company and asks "could it be better?"
hopefully i contributed to the vibe of the place while i was there.



on the way to work that day was a torrential downpour, even for Scotland. the rain that comes down so hard it bounces back up into "upwards rain." lighting flashed across the clouds, and thunder roared. i haven't been out in weather like that in quite a while. it cleared up by the time i got to work but maybe it was the Great Flashlight in the sky saying "so long" too? at least that's how'll i will remember it.