Category: Sigh

Another sleepless night

The plan was to go to bed early and then get up at 5a to go to the gym, but that didn’t work.

I found myself wide awake at 11pm, and I still can’t sleep.

I had an itch on my back, and when I went to scratch it I discovered that my entire back is covered with small bumps. I’ve never had hives, so I don’t know if that’s what it is. I know they weren’t there the day before the earthquake.

I really need to get over it.

Right now, though, I’m not over it.

Sigh.

I guess I better get some work done since I’m awake.

Obama birth drama. Spare me.

There is really not a whole lot to say about the whole “birthers movement.”

This is the bottom line…

If it could have been credibly proven, without a shadow of doubt, that Barack Obama was not born on United States soil, he would have been confronted with the information right about the time the television series, “24,” became popular, just to make sure he didn’t get any grand ideas.

If it had been that simple to get rid of Barack Obama before he was ever able to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, they would have done so before he even took his first breath to speak the words, “I want to be President of the United States.”

If President Obama does plaster his birth certificate all over the world, and it’s a million times proven that he was born in the United States, then the next irrational ploy will be to determine if he was born in Hawaii before or after it became a state.

When it’s determined that he was born in Hawaii after it became a state, then the next unreasonable tactic will be to determine whether the date Hawaii became a state is valid or not.

Once the actual, true date of Hawaii’s statehood is validated, then they’ll be trying to determine if his mother’s citizenship in Kansas abridges President Obama’s right to call himself a US citizen when he was not born in the state of his mother’s resident, which will then get blown up into a debate of whether “anchor babies” are enough to keep immigrants in this country, and so on and so on and so on…

It’ll just be a never-ending, nonsensical cycle of some sort.

So…

Those of us who are reasonable and thinking individuals, let’s move on and leave the nonsense to the birthers.

Why I terminated the Kindle Competition

I’m really frustrated right now, y’all.

Really.

This is the second time I’ve had a Kindle Competition, and the first one went off without a hitch. Folks voted and the winner was chosen by popular vote.

I used the same system this time, and the vote counters (yes, I meant to add an “S” to counters) were manipulated to give one participant an unfair advantage over all other participants.

How do I know this?

Each day I checked the counters to see how each story was fairing. The numbers stayed pretty much within the same range, even though some stories were getting more “yes” votes than others.

Then about five days ago, I checked the counters again, and one story had jumped from about 25 “yes” votes to 190 “yes” votes overnight.

The problem is that my site visitor stats didn’t match that much traffic, and the way I had the filters set up on the vote counters meant that there should have been at least as many visitors as there were new votes. Keep in mind that other participants were getting more votes, too. Their votes, however, had not spiked to such unbelievable numbers, though.

I removed that vote counter, but I didn’t deactivate it. I simply put another vote counter in its place, and kept the original counter active to see what would happen with it once it was removed from my site.

At first, the second vote counter on this particular story went up little by little, and two days ago it jumped up from about 15 “yes” votes to 118 “yes” votes overnight. Again, my site visitor stats did not support that much traffic to my site.

In addition to the “yes” votes jumping up on the new counter, the original counter, which I only removed from the site but did not deactivate was at 230 “yes” votes, not its 190 “yes” votes, which was the number when it was removed from my site.

Obviously, something wasn’t right, and this wasn’t happening on any other vote counters except these two; one of which hasn’t been on my site in the last five days.

This is why the Kindle Competition was terminated.

I have, however, decided to enlist the help of five judges to finish the competition. People worked hard on their entries, and I gave my word that I’d be giving away a Kindle, and I plan to keep my word.

I will have more Kindle Competitions in the future, but I will not ever use the previous method for choosing a winner. That process has been tainted.