Evangelism II

Returning to what I wrote about evangelism on July 1, it occurs to me that perhaps gurus and pundits also feel annoyed when we use their titles out of context.

Popups and popunders

Here's a direct mail challenge: send mail to boys at summer camp every day for a week. Mailing pieces must be brief, if recipients not avid readers, unsentimental, preferably humorous. If you don't feel like going to the post office for a weigh in every day, must fit in #10 envelope and weigh less than 2 ounces. No candy allowed. Ah, and did I mention that you must begin mailing four days before the camper even boards the bus?

One year I thought I distinguished myself with a series of cartoon postcards depicting what said camper was doing every day at camp. Said camper informs me that he did not in fact appreciate these miniature works of art.

This year I took a shortcut and looked on the internet for camping jokes. Usually I search for things like "material handling systems" or "apply for DUNS number." These webmasters know that I am not there for fun. I need the information they provide. Their sites make no desperate bids for my attention (if they make any at all).

This search was a new experience for me. Try this yourself: go to Google and enter "camp jokes" in the window. The quantity of popups on the sites I found flabbergasted me.

Pity the poor maligned engineer who invented popups, probably in answer to a real problem. Some popups are blessings. I am grateful for a popup telling me "System going down in five minutes; please save your work".

It all changed, though, the day the first salesperson saw a popup and said, "Wow! I can use this device to put my message right under the user's nose! It won't go away until the user clicks on the little x! Hey, we can get the programmers to put lots of these on our website!"

"But-" the programmer sputtered. "Popups are for emergencies!"

"Yeah, and it'll be an emergency for you if we outsource your job to Bangalore."

And popunders do not even pretend to carry important messages. You just look down at your screen and realize that you suddenly have eleven open windows. No wonder your screen refreshes so slowly.

I am pleased to say that Google agrees with me about pop-ups. Apparently they find them as intrusive as I do. Which is why you will never find pop-ups on this site, other than the fact that Google hosts Blogspot, and I do not know how to program pop-ups. Yet.

CraigsList Foundation Boot Camp

Does anyone want to join me at the CraigsList Foundation Non-Profit Boot Camp on August 16 in New York? I want to learn more about social entrepreneurship and big ideas for non-profits.

Wetpaint Has Winner

The Wetpaint.com Millionth Site contest that I announced on June 24 has a winner. Even though you are no longer eligible for the carbon offset prize, I still recommend going there if you want to learn to set up a site.

Just Say No to Flash

I remember when CPU time was so precious that researchers at Stanford and Berkeley had to eke it out on shared servers. Now I marvel that I can carry a gig around in my pocket. A terabyte if I wear cargo pants.

Still I’m shocked when a site tells me that it has to install Flash or ActiveX. Usually I navigate away. I have a modest computer. I try not to store much on it. If I allow you to install QuickTime or Flash or ActiveX, I might have to give something up, either speed or memory.

I don’t want to sacrifice space on my computer so that some kid fresh out of college can show off what she learned in programming class. Don’t ask me to slow down my computer so that your site performs better.

But, hey, I’m the woman who refuses to carry a drugstore discount card. I refuse to make my wallet fatter so the store can track my purchases. (Sometimes I give them my ex-husband’s phone number if I’m buying lipstick and hygiene products, just to confuse Big Brother.)

If you’re marketing to me, don’t ask me to inconvenience myself on your behalf.

AdWatch--yikes!

Yesterday I installed AdAware. Twice. Lavasoft no longer supports my free copy of AdAware SE, so they urged me to update. When I got to the update screen, they offered me either (1) a free copy of AdAware SE or (2) a free copy of AdAware Plus if I took a free trial product from TrialPay.

It took me a long time, because I didn’t really want any of the free products. I really did want the AdAware Plus because for reasons we do not need to go into here, I no longer had a working copy of VirusScan.

So I downloaded my free copy of AdAware Plus, and I clicked on AdWatch, which was billed as a real time security program, sitting quietly in the background, making note of potential problems.

After running AdAware I started my browser, and AdWatch started nagging. “Iexplore.exe is trying to make changes to” (inscrutable file name here). “Allow or block?”

“Holy cow!” I said! “I must have a terrible virus problem if AdWatch is bringing it to my attention right away!” But then I concluded that iexplore.exe was probably Internet Explorer, the very application I was trying to run, and I allowed it to continue. There were three questions like that, to which I trepidatiously responded, “Allow.”

AdWatch continued its menacing litany. “Qtask.exe is trying to make changes to” (inscrutable file name). My eyes narrowed. I hadn’t started any application that began with a “Q.”
“Block,” I commanded.
“Qtask.exe is trying to make changes,” it insisted. I wish the CIA had been so dogged in the summer of 2001.
“Block,” I repeated sternly.
“Qtask is—“ it warned.
“Block.”
“Qtask—“
“Block.”
“Q—“
“Block.”

I didn’t get the second lowest score in my Pascal class for nothing. Eventually I figured that I was embroiled in an infinite recursion.
“Allow,” I said wearily.

Was AdWatch worth it? I looked up the reviews, praising its silent sentry duty. Maybe other users enjoy the security of knowing that AdWatch will slay intruders in their tracks. Maybe others don’t mind micromanaging their computers. I did, and I resented it.

But what was qtask? I looked that up, too. It was a program called QuickTime. Aha! It had something to do with iTunes. Why was it coming up at startup and refusing to be swatted down?

Once I logged on to the sites I needed to visit, AdWatch did not obtrude. But when I started logging off again and closing tabs, AdWatch went wild. At one point I had 29 notifications stacked one above another. AdWatch, I resolved, had to go.

I was a woman on a mission. I went to “add or remove programs,” determined to root out AdWatch forever. But AdWatch and AdAware were so tightly bound together that I could not cleave one from the other. I would have to remove the whole thing and reinstall it, which I eventually did.

I took my speedy revenge on QuickTime, though, and I haven’t missed it yet.

Evangelism

I remember the polite, quizzical looks on my audience's face when the Summit Old Guard welcomed me as a guest speaker in 2004. My introductory speech presented me as the "evangelist" for my church, and they weren't quite sure what that meant.

I felt more comfortable saying that I was an "evangelist" in that context than that I "marketed" my church. "Marketing" has an air of manipulation. Who wants to be manipulated into a house of worship?

Now, with social networking, "evangelists" are a dime a dozen. I just hope they don't give the original evangelism an unsavory name.