hi roe...
i honestly don't believe that all people are capable of independent thought or of expressing their thoughts independently of others around them. i believe that being able to stand alone is an acquired skill that usually comes from being on your own and having to fend for yourself. not everyone has that opportunity and it can come under good circumstances (choice) or bad (by force).
anyway, i also think that all the fuss that arises occasionally is like a cold or flu for the site - it comes, there are some snuffles, and then it passes. it's no more worth getting upset about than a bad comment.
so my advice is to keep things in perspective...
cheers!
:)

Hey Roe, keep on keeping on, this is a silly trend that will wear itself out.
Real 'thoughts' will reassert itself when people get tired of this drivel.

Do not worry about me sweet mr stick,
I really do have all of of this in perspective
and I am not loosing any sleep over the matter.

Although I do appreciate the fact that you are always so supportive and forever positive%u2026.and
You are more than right%u2026this is no big deal!

We lost a dear friend last night who worked for my husband and was like a mentor to two of my daughters, she lost her battle with leukemia after an unsuccessful transplant%u2026

now, that is a very big deal%u2026.one of my daughters is inconsolable%u2026
The family went out for a bit so I stopped in on thoughts and this whole baloney thing started off as a comment on another%u2019s post
and well, I know
You are just not going to believe this,
My little comment
grew way too long%u2026
and I had to post it,
consequently, I am doing what I was trying to discourage others from doing%u2026.and that%u2019s another story

Roe, you rock. Lately, I've reading only blogs with personal story and thoughts.
I found out that is so much more interesting.
I am 100% with you

ok
when I wrote my comment, my only comment was from Mr Stick and wow, it was influx's post I was making a comment on...Influx, I am glad you are just taking the good, thats what we all have to do!

and circe
since you always keep on keeping on, and you are my role model, you know I agree with you...its a trend
we have so many trends!
who knew thoughts was such a trendy place!
and virtalife, you are virtually here too, Together we are 200%!
you rock too ans so much in fact, you are upside down!

um, has anyone noticed those crazy little symbols in the middle of my comment...it has been happening in my e mails too?
...I suppose I am the only one experiencing this new trend...????
anyone else out there having little bugs mixed in with your thoughts?

love ya

I suppose it really does take all kinds. If someone wants to fluff their feathers by posting unoriginal crud, that's their perogative. I have the luxury of ignoring it. By the same token, if someone wants to whine about popularity (ACK!) or write some other sort of boofarginhoo post, well...then I get to laugh at them. And you KNOW how much I love to laugh! So lettum pound their little keyboards and blow their internet noses. Makes no nevermind to me :)

I'm so sorry for your loss, my friend

Love, BL

Roe, I fully endorse and agree with you... but *laughing* I hope you'll take this is the right way and the way I mean it - with tongue in cheek and mischeif in my eyes - aren't you doing what others are doing? Complaining about it in a blog? lol.. just kidding.

:) hope you are well xx

thanks boot
...but how do you know which ones to ignore?

...you must have a knack for this...a nose for good news, you are a natural funny finder%u2026actually you happen to be
very funny
so I guess its
goes along with that old saying...
to know one%u2026is to...oh, what is the rest of that?
anyway

...I love to laugh too and I am not posting funny stuff lately.
I must make note to self!

e2s, yes I am doing the very thing I was posting about%u2026.I%u2019m sorry,, you are absolutely right, and I did admit it in one of my comments...but that%u2019s no excuse,
I am quite a bit embarrassed about it%u2026actually
although, please Don%u2019t worry mr stick
I will get over it

Lets see
we tell our kids, do as we say, not as we do. Or???
...well
I always hated that expression

I like
A winner never quits and a quitter never wins%u2026

Roe I say lets give them some bread and cheese to go with that bologna:) Let them eat sammiches:)

now, does anyone want to discuss those bugs in my words...
people
what is that about?
anyone want to tell me?

Roe, while I was just about to make a broader comment on your blog, with which I wholeheartedly agree, let me pluck this low lying fruit.

The programmers of this website need to reevaluate their usage of character sets. There's a clear disconnect between what we can enter onscreen and what is later displayed and the display environment is not supporting an adequate character set. I've been getting the same problems too. As I result, I have to avoid using quotation marks in blog titles and other such normal marks of punctuation. In an extreme example, yesterday, when composing a blog on Obama's use of the traditional Muslim greeting, I had cut and pasted the Arabic script along with the romanization from Wikipedia. In editing mode, the script displayed fine. But once I saved the draft and published it, I had an ugly trail of "bugs" as you put it.

Whose attention should we bring this to?

good idea Pitapie

pita bread perhaps?
and an apple pie!

I have to log off for a bit, and I just realized my favorite thing to do, besides write, is to comment on comments either my own, or others, thats why, I had better log off or no one will get a word in edgewise

edgewise....what is that?

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They have a bug in the system right now causing the distortion of the comments plus are working in the 'comments posted' area... 'they think'. (I just know I can not get into that area with IE or firefox)

Anyways, you make a good point but I feel it's all tied together with the forums too. Some people would like to know where they stand and if you are number 101 or higher you haven't a clue. Others want popularity pure and simple. Still others use the 'funny' stuff to draw people their way and hope they will remain interested to come back. And the list goes on and on which includes being denied some privileges in the forum if you have less than 4 stars.

Take care. :)

Well said Roe it is an area for creativity. All this nitpicking stuff is useless.
Lets have fun.

Onto my expression of regret for the loss of your dear friend, employee, and daughter's mentor to leukemia. That's a nasty one. May she rest in peace.

And to your frustrations, they're shared. This is thoughts.com, not the comments columns of MySpace. Much as I may enjoy some of the cartoons and clippings which leaven the offshore pharmacy ads of my inbox, I really dislike cluttering up this space with them. At the same time, though, since they are not obscene, just offensive in their superficiality, and as I believe in the freedom of speech, and not just because it's on our Bill of Rights, I've taken influx's approach -- I ignore them. There are some of our community members whom I simply never pay much attention to anymore, no matter how loudly they may clamor for it (actually, in large part precisely because they clamor for it). I suppose if I got into a really snippy mood one night, I might suggest spinning off another site "scrapbooks.com" and, er, encourage them to emmigrate!

[Oh, I lifted this comment from someone else and reposted it as my own, without giving them credit! NOT ;^)]

oh no!
say it isnt so!
I just wrote a long comment to david and when I hit submit
this is what I saw

Error handling page missing - please notify system administrator.
and that's exactly what I was telling David we should do...darn...ok, deep breath, I did write most of this in another location, (I have learned my lesson after watching long comments vanish before my very eyes! ...thats another story...but in this case, once i made it back here, I added to it...oh well, at least I will not have to start all over...be right back David!
I have to run around the corner and look for my comment and then find some paste...

be right back

While awaiting your reattached comment, I just had to share a humorous aside.

On a lark, inspired by this blog, I checked out the most popular blogs of the day, and was shocked to see myself staring back in amazement. It wasn't for any of my tortured, introspective blogs, nor those of great length or seriousness, no, it was for the SONG I DEDICATED to someone, which set off a happy comment conversation.

Whatever fame this achieved will evaporate overnight, and it's so meaningless. Not to dismiss the blog, it was a nice gesture and was better received than I'd imagined, but it is distinctly less substantial than others.

Just a case in point, at my expense!

Im back!

David, your comment was not here when I wrote the comment in response to Pita's comment...ok are you still with me? let me rephrase that for you, on my screen you were no where to be seen)
And that%u2019s not all%u2026. In addition, I was told I had x amount of comments and when I checked, I discovered at least half that number.

When we log on, we are notified who made a comment and where it is located, %u2026well, I checked that baby, and still did not see the comments of the people I saw in the notification%u2026are you still with me?
I figured, perhaps, some members made a comment and then deleted it? I am not quite sure%u2026but we need to tell THOUGHTS.COM asap.

They get on it right away, if you give them an adequate description of the problem and exactly where it occurred.

I think you might know a bit more than I do about computers and the internet...especially the lingo...because I was not sure what you were talking about when you said the site needed to "reevaluate their usage of character sets. There's a clear disconnect between what we can enter onscreen and what is later displayed and the display environment is not supporting an adequate character set.%u201D

When you gave an example, I knew exactly what you meant.

I noticed that the very same thing happened to me quite a while ago,. When I wrote a blog it appeared one way, yet when it was posted, many changes had occurred,
(all crazy ones)

Words would wind up on a different line, and whenever I used a punctuation mark, bam, the mumbo jumbo would return%u2026.oh and dot dot dot, a personal favorite of mine%u2026 would wreck havoc on my poor post.

The problem disappeared for a while only to reappear. In the very beginning it was only in my e-mails, (which was quite a few months ago) I asked the people on the receiving end of my e, if they saw the same things that I saw%u2026.and most replied, %u201CWhat in the world are you talking about?%u201D (remember that particular e%u2026 Mr. Stick and Ben?) Naturally, I deduced, that it took place on my end only %u2026 consequently, I thought I had contracted some kind of virus while the rest of the community happened to be perfectly healthy. In time, the bug seemed to vanish. It was safe to use my dots again.
Once, when I went on a hunting exposition searching for an old blog in the dusty archives, I stumbled upon another odd thing%u2026(I felt like Nancy Drew%u2026.ok people... I know I am showing my age%u2026I digress, sorry, some of my old posts had somehow developed the same bug, and I would never have known the poor posts were sick, if I hadn%u2019t been looking for a particular one. I told thoughts about it, and they sent a repairman out right away. The guy wanted to know where the problems were and I must say, it took me quite awhile to locate all of them. Another story!

Now where was I, oh yeah, just last night, I noticed it again, but forgot about it until tonight, so I believe its time to give the repair man another jingle.
I kept asking everyone tonight if they saw it and you were the only one that did, and I never knew it because your comment was missing until just now?

Excuse me, but does anyone remember what we were discussing in the first place? Ive been at this so long, Im exhausted!

oh my
they are back big time, do you guys see it?
and is anyone else a bit frightened when you hit submit and see a long long chain of numbers instead of your words?

The long chain of numbers is unsettling. It's like watching sausage being made; we don't want the gory details. But it's harmless. The computer translates all of our characters into those short tags for its internal purposes. Usually, you never see them unless you need to be debugging something. But here, we are shown them raw as our comments upload.

They should probably cover it up, to stop freaking us out. It's bad enough comments vanish from time to time because of network glitches. We don't need to see this.

Davids gone, and I don't blame him, but its a good thing I checked, or I would never have noticed all the extra stuff in my comment, one comment ago!

David, you were gone when I last looked, but somehow, you made a comment while I was looking for some paste and when I returned, you were not there and when I checked to see if anything wierd happened to my last comment, I saw yours...
hey, are you still awake?
if you are, we are both out of our minds!
sorry david, I didnt mean to insult you
hum
so are you thinking of dedicating a song to me?
... just wondering how bad you want to be popular again...

LOL! Just imagine, in an effort to remain perpetually popular, I go around dedicating songs like some lounge lizard! Oh, that's too funny.

I'd need a better sense of your musical tastes to be inspired. With her, it just came together intuitively because it fit, and it turned out I was right.

I can see it now, "Oh yeah! Dave! Music guy." "Doesn't he write about other stuff too?" "Nahhh"

I have also seen the lag between email notification and comments posted. There's a disconnect in the way data is getting updated and refreshed. Part of it is tied to this new feature of how we can comment back on comments, which I think is an improvement. In fact, I'd written about it in one of my comments before it was implemented. But I digress too.

Computers use these funny %xxx strings to stand for punctuation marks and the like. When the programs use the right character sets, these are translated into the punctuation marks we want to see. When the programs aren't using the right sets, the computer will just display the raw string representing the internal code for the punctuation mark. Something has been messing with the character sets being used in our website's programs, and that is messing up what's shown.

Hmm, I would guess, for instance, that an ellipse (the dot-dot-dot you are fond of) is represented by "%u2026" Here I think the percent sign indicates a character tag or descriptor is about to be declared; the u refers to the Universal character encoding schema, and the 2026 would translate into the position in the array of characters where the representation of the ellipse is supposed to be.

But thoughts ought to have people who know this for sure, and can fix it. How do we tell them?

wow, here you are!
I just returned from the popular block of bloggers to see you standing there, proud as a peacock and still holding that black thing, your arm must be pretty tired. I digress!
OK OK, you are more like CSI%u2026you have this all figured out%u2026.just send an e mail to thoughts staff and copy paste what you said here%u2026if you need paste I will loan you some of mine!

I%u2019m starting to wonder what you do for a living? I might have to go check out your profile,
please do not think I am a stalker%u2026but you sound like you might work in the high tech industry? Actually, you sound like you are very high up in that high tech industry! But, that%u2019s probably another story! Now I am going to hit on your face, but I promise I wont hurt you, its a short cut!

now I hope you know, when I mentioned "short cut" I did not mean "tiny incision" I I was not going to actually cut your face...

we would not want to do anything to ruin your chances at being the most popular boy on the blog block, after all, when you become, "Dave the music man" you have to look your best...
and may I add, once again, that last comment was not there, when I posted the wow, here you are comment!
this is getting out of control!
but for all of the rest of you, David is one smart guy, you should check out his profile!

oh dave, the dj, did you know my real name is Rosemary? Have you ever heard of the very popular song, by Edision Lighthouse, called "Love goes where my rosemary goes?" just checking? actually any song will do, I have that one embedded in one of my posts, found it in u tube.

now if things are going to continue as they have been, you have probably written 2 or three comments here that I am unable to see, ..where are you getting the invisible ink? dont answer that......I have to go to sleep..after I ask you if you ever plucked that low lying fruit. was it an Apple? Don't answer...I'm out of her!
well, you could answer, I just wont see it till tomorrow...

LOL, I think you're asleep, so our comments can stop passing each other like ships in the night.

Not to worry about hurting my face, in addition to its camera and Qwerty keyboard, that cellphone I hold aloft seems to deflect profile punches. I think there's some Aikido application loaded on it.

As a silly aside, some African tribes actually do cut their faces to both identify themselves and to ward off evil spirits. My last ex-wife had a few crossing her left eyebrow.

As to the whole popularity whirlwind, I just had a daydream of being in some church basement with a large urn of coffee and a box of jelly donuts. It was for a 12-step program for people recovering from popularity addiction. "It all started over a lovely pair of legs!" I moaned...

But the daydream vanished upon hearing the song title. I know that one. Now to think of something complimentary to accompany it.

I was actually writing the staff about the problems we've noticed in how the comments were displaying.

The low lying fruit, or easy pickings, referred to the issue about the character display errors, which has actually overwelmed your blog's point about frivolous postings and popularity contests. Thank goodness this isn't a forum thread where we could get locked out for straying so far off topic!

Sleep well, Rosemary! Don't let the text bugs bite!

I agree with this blog 100%

I prefer more personal emails myself, the rest gets to be like junk mail at times.
Hard way to put it, but the forwards clog up and sometimes bug up the computer.
Send me a line from your own mind, I would say.
Good topic and you said it in such a particular gentle way.
Hope all is running well for you.
All Love...

As usual eloquently expressed. This is indeed a problem when you are starved for time. I have my email clogged with those forwards. In the beginning, I too was bitten by the forward bug but realized soon enough that a word from our heart is much more valuable. However sometimes even forwards are sent with great love and care after being sorted out painstakingly. Then I am compelled to read them thinking about the original effort put in by a friend.

An original topic indeed!

Hope you are fine. Take care. lv

AMEN to that bloody well said!!!!!.

**Sara wipes sweat from her brow as 99% of her blogs are her own art in original raw form and takes her ages to compose with music and pictures to accompany and hopes that's why she is in the top ten :))**.

Love to you Roe excellent post!.

PS:I dont draw the pictures here just takes me ages to find the right ones on the net and to find the right sounds.

All my poems and stories are my own :))).

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I like it
I will have remember that one!

hey thanks everyone for sharing a bit of baloney with me!