slamboard

I have to apologize to all the old friends, dear relatives and tangential acquaintances that are on my list of friends on Facebook. I do not participate to any appreciable amount in this social website. I actually kinda HATE it. My hatred of Facebook is actually a profound enough reaction that I am looking for a way to channel it into something useful.

This blog is not my Facebook. I am thinking of formally proclaiming another blog as MyFacebook.

I have a confession to make. I have a full and rewarding life and I do not obsess about the continuing story of Kimkins and Heidi Diaz. In fact, I do not even lurk on some of the most active venues for news, opinion and speculation related to the woman, her diet and her website. I am in regular contact with a person who does look at the LCF almost everyday. I go to blogs like that of Jimmy Moore to find a sort of best of synopsis of what is going on. Sometimes there several days where the story does not cross my mind. If you are someone who is devoting too much time to tracking the minute details I would suggest that you make some kind of commitment to step away from it.

The only thing that I ever became engrossed in to the point where it was an unhealthy obsession was the Gulf War. I was a college RA and I spent many of my duty nights glued to CNN. When the physical and mental effects manifested themselves, I was shocked and scared to realize how unbalanced my life had been for those weeks. I made up my mind to avoid being sucked in to coverage of an event in that way ever again.

Fat acceptance advocates’ positions have sparked criticism and mockery.

This is a very accurate statement in the Wikipedia entry for fat acceptance movement. I recently approved a comment on this blog that was hateful and derogatory towards fat people. I don’t approve of the comment, but I had said from the outset that I was going to publish all comments that were relevant to the Kimkins controversy. The comment made me curious about the two extremes of fat acceptance and fat hatred. When I went to the Wikipedia article for the Fat Acceptance Movement, it was immediately obvious that it had been vandalized.

You can see a screenshot HERE. There is some obscene language.

So, I was sitting here having one of those brain stalls. I wasn’t really thinking about anything. When that happens, I usually take it as a cue to check on World events. Instead of hitting the news tab, this time I hit the image tab on Google. I thought to myself “Why did I do that?”

Since I was there, I decided to type in a word and see what popped up. Set your filter to ’stun’ Scotty…

Anyway, I settled on the word “photograph” I had done that before and been rewarded with some striking images. Today was no different.

I write for more than one blog and I almost always put my more personal or humorous items in my general blog. I have noticed that lots of A-list bloggers who focus on technology and/or business throw in the occasional whimsical aside. It makes the blog seem more human. I have decided to to this as well. If I run out of other stuff to do tonight, I may come back and edit this post so it includes some kind of business metaphor. Don’t count on it though.

I have already published a short post about the increase in reblogging. I delete trackbacks everyday that come from ‘blogs’ that are nothing but a collection of excerpts from real bloggers who are creating real content. Given the automated nature of this method of creating a website that appears to have relevant content to the search engine spiders, I can assume that they occasionally feed off each other. I have noticed in the past few days that the reblogs that are set up to have a little attribution blurb are attributing it to the wrong author. A post that I wrote discussing LAP BAND surgery was incorrectly attributed to CarbWire. This attribution is in the form of unlinked text. The rebloggers get to exist in a gray area of ethics and legality because they link to the original source. They do not add to the discussion in the blogosphere, they simply feed of it to gain ranking for their URL so they can be monetized.

Why do beautiful, educated single russian women sign up and create profiles on all of these Russian Bride sites? Here are a few understandable reasons:

• The desire to move to a place with a more vibrant economy with better job prospects
• The perception that Western men are more considerate husbands and more sophosticated individuals than any potential Russian prospects
• The desire to move to a place with more natural beauty/better climate/more exciting culture

I think that the women are mostly correct in their assumptions. I think their opinions related to the character and personal hygiene of broad groups of men may be a case to the grass being greener on the other side of the curtain. I hope that the realities of the situation, both good and bad, for Russian women who come to America on a Fiancee K-1 Visa filters back to women who are considering this life choice. Marrying someone from a different culture has its challenges. Considering the fact that a best selling book claims that men and women are on different planets, a little perspective is in order.

The men in America and Western Europe live in a culture where there is a 50% chance of a marriage, ANY MARRIAGE, failing. I certainly hope that most of them have a firm enough grasp on reality to know that looking for a wife in a region with a depressed economy is not a panacea. A marriage is a lifelong commitment and a life long negotiation.

Forums or boards are communities. Almost every bit of advice that you could give or receive about moving into a new community in real life applies to online communities as well. The main difference is that we can move into as many of these online communities that we want to at the same time.

Just like in real life, some of these communities are welcoming to everyone and some of them are virtually gated communities. Just like in real life, the cost of living is higher in some communities than it is in others. Just like in real life, some communities are more tolerant than others. If was writing all this boring stuff on a forum thread, somebody might make an ad hominem upon me. In online communities, several trusted members are given the ability to kick people out of the community. I’m not sure if there is a real life counterpart to this practice, at least not a legal one.

Big-boards.com has an ordered and searchable list of all the most active boards on the Internet.

Why isn’t this woman a celebrity? She has such a great personality. Her rant covers a number of topics to which overweight woman can relate.

Joy Nash makes one argument that really fits well with my business and marketing focus. She thinks that woman that are ‘plus-sized’ should boycott boutiques that do not carry good looking clothes in their size. I like her attitude about living an active, healthy lifestyle in which your weight is not being used as an excuse for not living. Her YouTube video has over 11,000 comments. I have not looked at them carefully, but I suspect that there are some mean ones, some cheerleading ones and probably a few that make reasonable arguments against some of what she says. Obesity is a condition that puts people at a greater risk for several adverse health conditions.

I write several blogs. The degree to which I insert my personality and my identity into these blogs varies.

In this blog, I am faceless but not nameless. If readers are interested in my face for some reason, they can go here. I participate with a dozen or more other bloggers in a meme where we publish a picture that we each take of ourselves every Sunday.

With Slamboard, I try to stick to topics that are at least tangentially related to business and technology. That’s pretty easy, everything tends to be about business in some way, shape or form.