Category Archives: Swag

The Deadbeat Club

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Well, I’ve never been one to dip a toe in when I could plunge over the cliff taking an entire bus with me instead.

So…Facebook.

MistressCowfish suggested I start a group, because after Friending people, Grouping is teh hawtness on Facebook, which sounds to my elderly ears like a rave gotten completely out of control, but whatever.

I have Grouped.

If you’re on Facebook, you’ll find me at The Deadbeat Club (cue Metro‘s bitter humour…).

Inspired by glorious deadbeats throughout history such as the authors of Frugal Indulgents, Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, Quentin Crisp, Vincent Van Gogh, and that guy … you know … that guy whose name I can’t remember, who destroyed his priceless collections and then killed himself rather than let the collection fall into Ceasar’s hands. See, if Boris would join the group he could tell us who that was.

Yes, surely in a Deadbeat Club there’s some room for rich, sore losers. Especially if they’re buying.

Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Undecided, please raise your glasses, mugs, or sippy cups to our anthem:

The Deadbeat Club by The B 52’s

I was good, I could talk
A mile a minute,
On this caffeine buzz I was on
We were really hummin'
We would talk every day for hours
We belong to the deadbeat club

Anyway we can,
We're gonna find something
We'll dance in the garden
In torn sheets in the rain

We're the deadbeat club
We're the deadbeat club

Going down to Allen's for
A twenty-five cent beer
And the jukebox playing real loud,
"Ninety-six tears"
We're wild girls walkin' down the street
Wild girls and boys going out for a big time

Let's go crash that party down
In Normaltown tonight
Then we'll go skinny-dippin'
In the moonlight
We're wild girls walkin' down the street
Wild girls and boys going out for a big time

Anyway we can
We're gonna find something
We'll dance in the garden
In torn sheets in the rain

Chorus

Oh no! Here they come
The members of the deadbeat club

the swag report: the email totality

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Oh yes, I have my Zune. I got my Zune on Monday. It’s now Friday. I still haven’t gotten my Zune to work.

Why?

System Requirements Windows XP

My system? Windows 98.

I do own a laptop. It does run. It does, in fact, run Windows XP. But it cannot get online.

You see, the Ethernet/dialup/anykindoflandline connector is busticated beyond repair and, while the gracious, benevolent and decorative Kendra took me out and bought me a wireless doohickey for it, alas I have only a cable connection and there is no free wireless in my apartment building. I am exactly one block too far East and South.

And, you see, the Zune will not operate until I download some software onto my computer. And no, they didn’t send it on a disk. Maybe I should ask Lori to burn it onto one and mail it to me.

The Zune didn’t even come charged!

Steve Jobs, methinks, would have gotten that right, no? To take something out of a box, to press the button, and to have it just turn on (maybe with a song preinstalled? is that too much to ask?) would be teh ossum.

Instead, we have teh roadblock.

So, tomorrow I shall be carting the laptop (along with the five-pound cord with solid lead transformer thingy, because the battery, also, does not work) down to the Waves cafe and trying to get this thing to work. Presumably, I’ll have to charge it first.

BTW including only online conversations about the Zune, I have a total of 65 so far: chats and emails back and forth between me and my friends and me and Matchstick and me and Chat Threads and me and other people from Chat Threads. But it seemed rather pointless to go fill out all the forms before I’d actually gotten the Zune.

By the way, it took so long to get here I had almost given up. Lori had hers long before mine arrived, and when it did FedEx had an odd knack of arriving when I was either in the bathroom our out on the patio, where I could not hear the phone. So although it arrived last Thursday, it wasn’t till Monday I got my grubby little tentacles on it. Why do they insist on delivering things between 8am and noon, when all decent people are abed? I fear they know little of the ways of bloggers.

Additionally, it’s been a rather crazy week, what with work, starting as Lower Mainland rep for the BC Federation of Writers, trying to get the paragraph-form mailing list into a more easily-utilized form, trying to host the Shebeen Club in a city without electricity, learning the new job, preparing to install my own independent WP blog, attending WordCamp Fraser Valley out in deepest, darkest Langley, and getting over this full-body infection from this bizarre bug bite, I haven’t really had the time to make a special field trip to get this Zune working, however much I want to get that Amy Winehouse album on it.

Ah, also, most of my music is on the desktop computer, the one that can get online but cannot connect either to the laptop or to the Zune.

And all my musical friends have moved away. Lori suggests I toss it on a Greyhound and send it up to her so she can load it up for me. I’m seriously considering it. We shall see how tomorrow goes.

And this concludes your boring, verbose haircut blog post for today.

The Swag Report: Swag Yourself!

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Attention girls, women, womyn, ladies, and Eddie Izzards of the Blogosphere: over at TeenyManolo we are giving away a super-stylin’ Stila lip glaze stick, worth $16.50 in American Greenbacks. You put out for us, you win a chance to get us to put out for you. Which is kind of like gender reversal, but whatever.

The Swag Report

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Those loyal readers who can boast personal acquaintance with raincoaster know that if there’s one thing I’m all about, besides Squid, it’s Swag.

I swear, I only worked at Starbucks for seven years because they kept giving me t-shirts! Sometimes I lie awake at night, thinking about all the t-shirts I’ve missed in the last decade…I mean, blogging for a living is all very well, but The Manolo is not handing out the Giuseppi Zanottis right and left, however much we might hope and pray, and so we, the humble blogslaves, take what we can get.

Which, apparently, includes a Zune.

Well, haven’t I said repeatedly that I’d never pay Microsoft another dime of my money? Yes. Yes, I have. And I’m not, but I AM getting their stuff for free which, after the hell they put me through with Windows ME, is only right and just.

Here’s what I got in an email last week:

Hi What’s up?

I stumbled upon your site today and thought you would be great for a promotion that I’m working on for Matchstick, a word of mouth marketing company.


Basically what Matchstick does is put products in the hands of people that are most apt to talk about them, especially online.

The item in question for our current campaign is an high profile mp3 player that has just launched in Canada. You can take the screening survey here, www.matchstick.ca/mp3, and pass it on if you have other friends in the blog community, specifically in Canada (we are based out of Toronto).

If you qualify, you will be receiving the device,

Cheers,

Jesse Ship

www.matchstick.ca

FYI BC bloggers: it’s a Zune. And they want to give it to you for free, provided you tell everyone on god’s green Earth that they did. And you know me: I can’t keep my mouth shut anyway, so here I am, doing so.

Dale raised a cautionary yellow flag, passing along this link from Miss 604, but to my thinking people emailing me monthly or so, offering me free stuff, is something I’m willing to live with.

I’ve defended Matchstick since 2006 (even mentioning them in my panel at Massive Tech Show) and I have to say that in the last few months they really blew it with me. I know there may be some people who just milk the free stuff, but given the readership of my blog and that it’s an Apple iPod accessory they’re wanting to promote, I know it’s definitely their loss (and their client’s loss) not mine.

– Miss604: Vancouver Girl’s Guide to the iPhone
– Miss604: Mac vs PC series
– Miss604: iPod Lightning Bolt Message Help
– Miss604: iPod Disk Mode

If you would like to know about this latest campaign, please talk to me offline as I refuse promote the product publicly due to Matchstick’s policy and their handling of this situation.

I have no plans on dealing with them again in the future, unless my inbox gets inevitably spammed by their team about promotions in which I cannot participate…

Update: After reading email communications between one of the account reps at Matchstick and me, I received a phone call from the Senior Accounts Manager at Matchstick. Here are a few items of note:

– They were truly concerned about my experience and wanted to get my feedback on their processes.

– Just to clarify, the campaign this month would have been for a competing product of the Samsung T10 I already received so that was another conflict. Usually bloggers can participate in two campaigns a year.

– If you do fill out a survey for a campaign this does not mean you are getting the product. They will review your answers and contact you based on the results to ask a few more questions then confirm if you will get the product or not.

– They are aware of the benefits of having a steady database or pool of bloggers with which they have had successful campaigns.

Matchstick read all the comments on this blog post and already has plans to smooth out some of their communication kinks. I appreciate that they took the time to call me back and address my concerns. If they’re willing listen to the voice of the bloggers – or “influencers” as they call them – and take our advice to heart, I’ll certainly be willing to give them another chance. We’ll just have to wait and see if the phone rings (and how many times).

No, I was not paid off to write this and I did get permission from the company to post this update.

It looks like Rebecca isn’t nearly as used to asking for special exceptions as I am. I totally don’t qualify for this one, but I simply said, “I’m too old for this promotion, but my demographic is not, they are perfect for it” and POOF, I was in.

Story of my life, really. I’m not what you’re looking for, but I can connect you with them, so put out for me.

Step Two was not so cool; in fact, I’m not cool with it at all.

UPDATE: see comments on this post for the company’s response.

I was told I’d be contacted by a separate company which tracks conversations about products and I’d just need to tell them who I talked to and what I said and then they could track that buzz across the buzziverse, which sounded like an impossible proposition but whatever, not my business model, is it? So I dutifully signed in to tell them about the people I’d forwarded the notice to and saw my first problem:

There is no log out button that I can see. Ev-ar.

As a part-time security blogger, this does not take me to my happy place and I felt no compunction whatsoever rooting around until I found the right code. For the record, the sign out is

https://www.chatthreads.com/zune/?action=logout

Not only that, but when I said I’d talked to Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice the next screen demanded the email addresses for all of those people, so the company could contact them and track THOSE conversations. Now, last I recall signing people up for a mailing list without their permission is a violation of the Criminal Code of Canada’s anti-stalker provisions. And this does not take me to my happy place, so I left that blank.

I’m fully aware this throws not just a monkeywrench but an entire gorillawrench into their business model, but that is really not my problem, is it? Maybe this will get me bounced from the program and maybe it won’t, but I’m not giving out the contact deets for people. If that’s what they want, I’ll confine the conversation to my blog, where (thanks to WP.com) I don’t have access to the IPs of my readers in the first place.

So: the swag report is, maybe I’m in, maybe I’m out. But now you’re both equipped to apply and forewarned. Bookmark that signout link!