Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge

I forgot to tell you guys that the new TripleTred tires drive really well in the rain. They have a better feel on the road and I’m really glad I sank the money into them. Yes, they do corner better and I feel like they improve my handling at higher speeds. They were worth the money.

Even better is that there was an offer for a $40 Visa card as a rebate on my purchase. (It’s a promotion that’s still going on. I saw a sign for it again today at the Goodyear store.) I came back from the holiday weekend and found that my Visa card was waiting for me! WOO HOO!

So the plan is to use it to buy a trickle charger for my motorcycle, which I ordered from a small repair shop that was highly recommended to me. (I hope he takes Visa. He actually might not. I didn’t even think of that. Who doesn’t in this day and age?)

I spent my extra day off going to banks in VA and MD, ordering the charger, getting a car wash, buying a new shredder, catching up on blogs, and cleaning my apartment. Wednesday was a good day.

The ding is that the shredder was a lot of money. But I think it’s worth it since I’ve broken two home office shredders already, and the tall industrial shredder at work doesn’t like me either because I dump fistfuls of paper into at a time. Who has an hour to wait for shredding? I am Fawn Hall on steroids. (Please God, I hope my readers remember who she is. I’m not *that* old.)

The other ding is that I used the local car wash place ($14) that’s ‘touchless’. Honestly, it’s not that much better than the car wash place ($8) at the gas station by my office. The wheels are a lot cleaner, but still dirty. They don’t do the greatest job, so I was still wiping them down with Armor All and hitting up the windows with Rain-X when I got home. There is getting a good value from an awesomely powerful new shredder, and then just wasting your money between two things that are roughly the same. Now I know. I won’t use the place near home. Always get a wash at lunchtime instead.

Check out this article at Wired Magazine about a new social networking site called Spock.

This frightens the bejesus out of me because I have a fairly generic name, I still found myself in the first 100 results from a business networking site. CRAZY. (Thank god for the faceless yellow masses who share my name! Anonymity = GOOD!)

One of my friends got me really paranoid about online privacy and most of my Facebook/MySpace/Friendster stuff is scrubbed off of actual personal detail. I don’t even use this nickname on those sites because of strangers that lurk and one particularly evil ex-boyfriend who has been known to troll sites and leave really disgusting and scary remarks about people I know.

If you are a recent grad, I am sure you know that your profile information at online social networking communities should reflect your professional personality now that you have been kicked out of the warm womb of academia into the cold world of capitalism.

But if you haven’t, make it the top of your agenda now.

And if you want a daily dose of privacy and security issues, check out Politechbot. I will admit, sometimes the nerdery makes my eyes glaze over. It’s a very good resource though for a wide range of topics and he often points to other places for more information.

For the last few months, I’ve been holding back an off-topic post about privacy and the Internet. I’ve been trying to keep this blog afloat and on topic as much as I can and still hold down my day job and have a life.

But on Tuesday, I was reading an Oracle blog by Tom Kyte and was tipped off to a post by Kathy Sierra. She’s being victimized by a commenter and then further victimized in a vile fashion in images at another website. For those of you who don’t read a lot about the blogging medium, Kathy is a proponent of the Internet as a community building place. Her blog is called ‘Creating Passionate Users’. This is a woman who really cares about the community of people on the Internet and making it a welcome place.

I’m a b*tch. Plain and simple. I’m not a nice person and I have email exchanges from commenters that prove it. I didn’t mean to start off on the wrong foot, but I guess I should stop trying to be funny because I sound like a haughty wench all the time. I suppose I thought that’s why people were reading this blog in the first place. Guess not. I never should have engaged my commenters and readers at all, but I was showing my own naivete in trying to be interactive and helpful in the near utopian way that I remember the Internet being back in college 15+ years ago. But how quickly I have forgotten USENET flamewars and their idiocy.

This thing that has happened to her is disgusting. It is beyond the pale. It is verbal abuse and terrorism. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. It may possibly be NSFW depending on your workplace policy. I know I was greatly disturbed by the graphic image she reposted, and remember, IT WAS DIRECTED AT HER.

News posts covering the topic directly at BBC News and Slashdot. The Washington Post has their own article about anonymous commenting.

I hope and pray that the person who did this to her grabs a clue and stops. I hope he gets help before he actually hurts someone. He is sick and deranged. I hope and pray that Ms. Sierra can overcome this, but I’m not sure how. I know that after reading it, I seriously thought about stopping blogging altogether and permanently. Before finding out about Ms. Sierra’s situation, it’s a thought I’ve been having for a few weeks now for various and sundry reasons related to being out there to be attacked, ridiculed, criticized, labeled, blamed, threatened, stalked and terrorized.

If you think I’m overreacting, please read Mindhunter by John Douglass and Mark Olshaker and The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker. (I’ve only read the first one, but the second has been highly recommended by a friend of mine who teaches self-defense.)

I was recently walking with a friend who is a former Marine. He’s 6′2″ and upwards of 200 lbs. We were talking about doing some solitary activity and I had to remind him that women don’t do that sort of thing by themselves lest they inadvertently make themselves a target. He paused and told me that he hadn’t thought of it the way that I do since physical threats are not part of his every day assessment of the world. Despite what I write in my blog about emergency preparedness, I’m not actually a nervous nellie. But I am street-smart about not looking like a victim. My natural mean b*tch look comes in handy that way.

Much thinking will commence. I am deeply ambivalent about blogging now.

If you do anything after reading this blog, buy yourself some pepper spray and a flashlight and keep them accessible at all times when you are out of the house. Yes, I even carry it when I take trash out to the dumpsters in the parking lot. Nothing’s ever happened to me and hopefully, nothing ever will. I wish the same for all of you.

If you are a blogger, publicize this. Repost about it. Express your disgust and return some civility to our world. Get angry dammit!