What To Fix

After chatting with somebody online the other day, it appears to me like a lot of people are confused between ethics, manners, morality, and the law.

I'm not sure if this is deliberate or not. Perhaps it's just ignorance. I don't know. But I thought I would go over my working definitions for each of these.

These definitions may or may not agree with the dictionary. Quite frankly, I could care less. They work for me, and they help me deal with complex issues. Perhaps they'll be useful to you as well.

I'm not even going to comment.

If I ever meet this guy, I'm going to punch him right in the nose

I just spent the last week at the beach, and my kids love TV. They like getting out and doing stuff, but the minute they come back the TV comes on. It's like they are incapable of self-directed enjoyment.

I wonder if other people notice this in their kids too?

While we're on the subject of TV, I'm really getting annoyed at these commercials I see everywhere. It seems like everything is fair game and there's no common decency. Call me a prude, but I would think that commercials should be viewable by kids. But we're getting disgusting, intimate, crass, and ugly stuff shoved at us during almost every commercial break no matter what the time or what the underlying show. It's enough to swear off broadcast television completely.

Here are several commercials that I would like to shoot with a bazooka:

I just spent the last nine days in Myrtle Beach. It was a welcome vacation.

Myrtle Beach has been called the "Redneck Riviera" due to the fact that it is convenient to the Bible Belt and is known as a lower cost family resort vacation.

I think the term is a little overdone. Myrtle Beach, located in the southeastern United States, is a good example of what happens when government gets out of the way of progress. As somebody who has been coming every year or so for the past forty years, it's been interesting watching things change.

South Carolina is not a rich state, but it does have beautiful beaches. For some reason unknown to me, the city fathers of Myrtle Beach decided not to have overly restrictive zoning regulations. They decided to let the place grow like it wanted to grow. What happened next was an interesting experiment.

/* BEGIN GRUMPY RANT */

I blog for myself, mostly. I'd like something for the great-great grandkids to read about me, and I enjoy putting my thoughts on paper. If you like any of this, I'm happy.

My latest reading mission has been on web marketing. I want to find out why and how some people start with Google and end up buying something. We all do it, yet I really don't have a clue as to how it happens!

After years of creating some pretty good programs, the light finally dawned on me that promotion and marketing is as much, or actually much more of an important skill than just slinging code. Being a code monkey is fine, but it's more fun to build a code zoo. I'm finding something similar in web marketing.

Not that everybody else knows. Some folks seem determined to ignore reality.

Many, many times somebody at Google says something like, "Well, the best way to get people to visit your site is just to have good content."

That's total horse-hockey, and Google knows it. Let's get real.