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Social media

Computer Spoofed…we think…

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So I got an email, apparently mailed to my Mac inbox from one of my Gmail addresses, from some jerk claiming he’d seeded my computer with ransomware and demanding a fistful of bitcoins.

Heh. Apparently hadn’t noticed what’s happened to bitcoins. Oh well.

The reason I spend top dollar to buy Apple hardware is Apple’s customer support. So it was on the phone again to Apple, this time to seek advice. James, the guy who answered the phone this time, said he thought it was spam nonsense. However, we changed everything in sight and then some, deleting stuff I’d never heard of and updating others. And of course I had to change my gmail password, another PITA.

We never had to do this stuff with an IBM Selectric… 😉

DropBox supposedly provides some protection against ransomware. Unclear exactly how reliable or thorough that is…but it’s better than nothing. It doesn’t back up your programs, though it’ll hold most or all of your data and images. However, Time Machine does copy your programs.

So anyway, James didn’t believe the threat was real, but even if it was, we apparently addressed it.

Yet another tedious techno-time-waste.

In that department, I’ve made a couple of moves to cut some of the endless time suck.

Earlier this week, I dropped a particularly active Facebook group. That was too bad in a way, because I kind of enjoy that group. But as a practical matter, I diddle away altogether too much time on Facebook, and the various “notifications” the site sends out create huge logjams in my email inbox, even though I set the thing as best as I can to divert incoming FB messages to “Junk” or “Trash.” All that does, really, is simplify the opportunity to kill even more time deleting literally hundreds of pieces of email detritus. The other day when I cleaned out the email I had to delete well over 600 useless, redundant messages.

So this will help save some time on two fronts.

Meanwhile, another diffuse time-suck went away when I decided to post the rest of The Complete Writer chapters waiting to go up at Plain & Simple Press and set WordPress to schedule them for publication into the future. Then did the same with enough If You’d Asked Me squibs to last until the end of 2019, publishing one chapter or squib per bookoid every three weeks. This, then, creates three weeks in which to write Ella’s Story chapters, rather than trying (unsuccessfully, of late) to crank out one a week.

This will provide at least a shot at making some progress on Ella.

But of course having to dork around with protecting my computing empire from a real or spurious threat creates still more time suck: Every-goddamn-where I go on the Internet, I have to sign back in with passwords I can’t remember and so have to look up, or with passwords that no longer work and so have to be reinvented. GOD, how I hate this stuff! Like there isn’t enough to waste your time on…

Deleting all the cookies on both computers kindly caused the Washington Post to forget me on my two favorite time-wasting online games. I was aiming for 100,000 points and had just reached 95,000. So that’s discouraging enough to bring a stop to diddling away more time on that stuff.

And this will free up some more time for another 2019 goal: to send the “Drugging of America” proposal around to a bunch of publishers. Or an agent…really, you don’t need an agent to sell nonfiction. I had no trouble selling the three books I have in print through real publishers. But times have changed. Unfortunately, my agent passed away some time back, and my editor at Columbia UP disappeared awhile back. But…the woman who was senior editor when I was holding forth is still there, only as a much higher muckity-muck. She just sent a request for a donation (university presses are de jure if not de facto nonprofits). So I may send her a reminder of my existence and see if she or one of her underlings will agree to see a proposal.

Meanwhile, word just came down that Quora has given up some 100 million users’ data. Went there to try to change my password. I can’t find the original PW, so I must have failed to write it into the 20 goddamn pages of single-spaced passwords that resides, coded within code, on my hard drive. Godlmighty. Another time suck. Unless, o’course, I decide to just let that one go, too.

How to Reduce Facebook Ads

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I hate Facebook Ads. I especially  hate the ones disguised as posts forwarded from or recommended by my friends. As soon as Facebook figured out how to defeat Adblocker, my FB feed was swamped with annoyances —  about one ad for every three messages from friends or acquaintances. Then I figured this out: though you can’t get rid of the damn things, you can vastly reduce the number of Facebook Ads you see, at least temporarily.

Here’s the trick. When an annoyance comes up, click on the down arrow that appears in the ad’s upper right-hand corner.

1-adkill-arrowA menu with several choices will appear:

2-adkillSelect “Hide ad.” Another menu will come up:

3-adkill

Click on the circle next to “It’s not relevant to me”; then click “Continue.”

4-adkillFinally you will see the annoying message above. Of course, you do not want Facebook to show you “better” ads, because there’s no such thing as a “good” intrusion.

Now, here’s the thing: you can rid  your feed of almost 100% of Facebook Ads — temporarily — if you run down the page  (whatever it’s called in Facebook-babble: the page that comes up when you click on “Home”) and do this for every single ad that comes up. If you tag every ad as “it’s not relevant to me,” you’ll find that almost no ads will appear while you’re visiting Facebook.

This lasts for about a week to ten days. Then you’ll start having to “hide” ads again — but there’ll be a lot fewer of them.

Will this eventually get rid of Facebook Ads in your feed? I don’t know. Could be. Or…sooner or later, Facebook may tumble to this and negate your option to “hide” ads. That, I suggest, is the time to quit patronizing Facebook altogether.

This strategy does not get rid of the ads that appear in the right-hand sidebar. However, if you’re like me, you’ve already learned to mentally filter out sidebar ads, thanks to the nuisance that is Google Adsense. I don’t even see ads (or much of anything else) in a website’s sidebar. You can train yourself to do this by focusing solely on the content that interests you, which usually appears in the center column.

What will happen if you click “I keep seeing this” or “It’s offensive or inappropriate”? I don’t know.

Facebook claims it will quash content that you find “offensive,” whatever that means. But most FB ads are not naughty in any way — they’re just intrusive. Repeatedly labeling ads for fabric softener or some such offering as “offensive” may get YOU in trouble. As for “I keep seeing this”: Suuurre! Facebook and its advertisers give a damn whether you don’t like seeing some ad over and over. Elephants are pink, too. 🙄

Facebook tells its advertisers that if a user clicks “it’s not relevant to me,” the ad’s “relevancy score” drops:

If a user submits feedback on your ad and reports It’s Not Relevant to Me, your relevancy score will go down. Conversely, people who engage with your ad cause the relevancy score to go up. If your ad’s relevance score is high (with 10 being the highest), your ad is more likely to be served than other ads targeting the same audience.

This suggests that by labeling an ad as irrelevant, you’re likely to cause it to appear less often in your feed. It also is less likely to appear to other people that Facebook deems are “like you.” So with any luck, maybe the damn thing will appear less frequently in everybody else’s feed, too.

Take a little time to make your FB experience more enjoyable. Who knows? Maybe it’ll help do the same for all of us.

🙂

Why Do I Dislike Social Networks? Am I a Curmudgeon?

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So the church has obtained this social network thing called “Realm,” a proprietary platform available to nonprofit groups. They want everyone on the choir to join up. Just now they have a campaign going to have everyone in the parish get photographed so your picture can be posted on the system.

The other morning while we were lining up to process, I ran into a very charming young marketing type, a greeter, who urged me to hurry and join Realm. I said I’d tried to do so but was unable to get it to accept any credentials or allow me to create a username and ID. She suggested I needed to download Chrome, install it, learn to use it, and try to get in with that browser — though she allowed that FireFox (the browser of choice) should work.

Others around me really started to apply a lot of pressure to get on Realm. That I said I do not want to join yet another social media platform nor do I enjoy the platforms I have to use in my business was irrelevant. Nothing would do but what I have to join up this thing.

Well. I think not, thank you very much.

I find myself wondering why I dislike and distrust social media so much. Twitter? God, I hate it! Facebook? Okay, so friends post a few photos of their trips or their kittens or whatever and that’s nice, but I can take it or leave it. Google+? Total mystification.

But what IS the problem?

I think the problem is that in my mind, a computer is not a toy. It’s a tool. It’s something you use to do work. And you know, I feel I , do quite enough work, starting at around 5 a.m. and grinding through till 6, 7, 8, or 9 at night: all of it on computers.

I don’t want to socialize on the computer. I just want to get the damn work done and get OFF the computer! Far from making me feel “connected,” the social networks feel like just another component of something that keeps me from having a life. Twitter, with its torrent of spam; Facebook, with its unending stream of trivia, false wisdom, and sappy sentimentality; Google+, whose reason for existing at all is inscrutable:

Here’s a post by an employee of Constant Contact plumping in favor of Twitter. And yeah, I get it: she finds an expensive doodad — a cell phone — that she’d lost in an airline’s overhead compartment; she figures out how to escape a traffic jam; she gets the very LATEST latest news; she asks a credit bureau to correct an error; she apologizes to some famous guy for offending him.

But…really? Are there not more direct, less time-sucking, less “social” ways of accomplishing these things? For example…

  • Don’t put your cell phone in an overhead compartment — take it out of your jacket pocket and put it in your purse or your pants pocket. Listen to the local radio traffic reports, or simply avoid routes prone to traffic jams.
  • Recognize that most of what we think of as “news” today is trivia, and that you can do nothing about 99.999% of any news that really matters. You don’t need to have instantaneous Tweets about any of it.
  • Email or snail-mail the credit bureau; it’s a lot more private…and again, does that error really need to be fixed right this very minute?
  • Don’t insult celebrities (or anyone else) in public (or in private).

When you consider what the writer’s saying, you’re inclined to think that over time her growing dependency on Twitter surely must erode her problem-solving skills. What does she do if she can’t Tweet up her lost phone? If she stumbles across a news report that really does concern something important and urgent, how does she find out all the details, and how does she get a fully reported, credibly accurate accounting of events? And how does she (or her husband) ever learn common courtesy?

Last year Lifehacker posted an article by Alan Henry that offered a number of very good suggestions for keeping the social media plague more or less under control. I like his ideas…but again: t.i.m.e…s.u.c.k!!!! The amount of time it would take to clean up your accounts and organize them in the ways he suggests: oh, ugh! Once you got the mess under control, though, these strategies probably would help cut the amount of time you then continue to waste on Twitter and waypoints.

If I follow the guy’s suggestions, I’ll have to “unfollow” about 600 Twits. That could be even more time-consuming than luring them to follow me in the first place. To say nothing off pissing off a lot of Twits. Organize them by “Lists”? I know Twitter Lists exist, but I also know finding out what they are, figuring out how to work them, and deploying them in any meaningful way represents yet another huge time-suck. Is that really what I want to do with the shrinking number of minutes, hours, and days left to me on this earth?

Well, no.

Therein lies the problem. And I don’t want to spend any of those fast-dwindling minutes, hours, and days on learning a new social media platform, either.

Social Media U

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So today I’m going to a class on “Leveraging LinkedIn.” There’s something that’s escaped me for quite some time…like, “since I first signed up for LinkedIn.”

And Friday it’s off to another class, “Social Media Time Savers.” That, I can use!

Monday: a telecon with a local book marketer who has a pretty good reputation. Someone to take over or at least spearhead the marketing venture is much needed. But I’m afraid I won’t be able to afford her services: money is tight, everybody has a hand out, and so far not much is coming in from the FireRider opus.

However, I didn’t expect much to come in. It takes time to build readership, and really, the erotica is infinitely more salable.

Learning the intricacies of social media marketing is extremely difficult. I still haven’t figured out how to insure that a FaceBook page created for Camptown Races Press will not slop racy content over onto the page that includes a raft of my coreligionists.

I suppose I could just save a list of present FB subscribers who will not be offended by erotica and who are not part of the church’s community, then close or cancel the current Facebook page, and then create a new page, so two potentially overlapping pages don’t exist. Then re-“friend” the likeliest suspects.

Like…I don’t have enough time-suck in my life already?????????

I think a post that went up on the “secret” FB group I created for my writing team may have somehow posted itself on my regular FB page. But I can’t tell. Apparently what you see in your “timeline” or “news feed” or whatever-T-F is NOT what you actually are getting. Is there a difference between a “timeline” and a “news feed”? What is it? Why? Why should there be a difference? And why why why does FB have to be so bloody convoluted?

LinkedIn, I can tolerate. Twitter, I’m getting used to. But Facebook? I truly hate it.

At any rate, The Girls (@RacyLadies  follow them now!!) continue to make headway on Twitter. The idea of rarely planting sales pitches there but instead publishing various pleasing kitsch seems to be working. Our Racy Ladies attract about ten new followers a day. Now all I need is about five similarly successful ideas…

This is getting retweeted through the wazoo as we scribble:

The Girls @RacyLadies
How to escape the political hoo-ha: Sit back and relax with a good book of erotica. 🙂

Stephanie&BonnePreview

Not bad for an amateur job, eh? The image is a public-domain painting by Jules Scalbert, who did a number of very lovely nudes.

Last I looked, it had been retweeted six times in less than an hour. I may put it up again later on this week.

Stephanie and Bonnie is still under construction, I’m afraid. Between riding herd on the work that needs to be done to get this enterprise under way and undoing my own screw-ups (of which there are a-plenty), I haven’t had many minutes to do my own writing.

However, we have ten books almost ready to go. I need to format them, and will start doing that around this noon’s foray to south Phoenix and “publishing” the remaining three Fire-Rider serials at Amazon.

A-n-n-d it’s after 8:30. Other than building and posting the Scalbertized ad, posting a couple of new unillustrated tweets, retweeting a few, wrestling with the e-mail, walking the dogs, and feeding myself, I’ve gotten nothing done so far this morning.

So, to work…