Most people will never see a launch of the space shuttle live. We went two years ago to the Cape and saw one, and I have to say it is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever witnessed, being a space buff – I’m very happy to have gone, sitting in the blazing hot sun waiting, hoping the countdown would not stall. This one was likely no less a treat for the folks on board.
|
|||||
|
Let us have an object lesson in How Not to Do Things. The business and goodwill to which I refer in the title is not my business or goodwill – those are both fine. It is, rather, the business and goodwill previously generated by the Dervaes family in Pasadena, CA. I’m not linking to them, now or ever, for reasons that will become clear soon enough. You can do a search and find them easily enough, I imagine. These people – a father and three adult children who all live at home – run a site that used to be called Path to Freedom and that is now apparently called The Modern Urban Homestead (or, as their header seems to suggest, Path to Freedom, with a subtitle of The Modern Urban Homestead). They have been mastering the art of self-promotion and solicitation of donations to their “nonprofit” organization – which is incorporated as a church – for years now. I stumbled across them a few years ago, checked out the site, blog, and whatnot, and never became a frequent visitor. I never linked to them, either, from my site. I would pop in from time to time, but that number could be counted on one hand in the past two years. The fact is, I found the site to not be terribly useful for practical applications, and heavy on the self-righteousness, aren’t-we-cool meter. I’ve never thought the writing was particularly good, and it certainly isn’t well-proofed before being released. In addition, I always caught a weird, almost cult-like vibe from the site, something echoed by others here and there. This is not to say it’s strange for adult children to live with their parents. These days, it’s more and more common given the economy and other circumstances. But reading the posts and watching a couple of the videos from the press they’ve managed to attract just made me think more “cult” than “commune”. I give them credit for doing the work necessary to do what they do, for building themselves a brand of sorts, even though they’re not as huge as they’d like to believe, and for the nonstop self-promotion. It takes time and energy to do that. The constant “donate” vibe and/or “purchase stuff from us” I’m not terribly fond of, but if they want to always seem like a fund drive, so be it. It’s their thing. It also takes time and energy to do incredibly foolish things. In the past several days – while I was working on my own urban homestead (or rural homestead, or, as I like to call it, “the ranch”), apparently the Dervaes, in a serious case of myopia combined with arrogance, began sending out cease and desist letters because they managed to get the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to allow them to trademark the terms “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading”. Now, to hear them tell it, those were not actually c&d letters at all. Oh no: they were “informational notices” designed to tell the recipients just how they should be using these terms, among others, complete with the trademark symbol and acknowledging that they belong to the Dervaes. There is even a helpful suggestion of alternate phrases to use as “generic terms” rather than the very same generic terms people have been using long before the Dervaes family decided they need to suck up to every media tit they could find. Here’s a sample of one of those quaint “informational notices”, sent to Google. Notices were also sent to individual bloggers, a library, a Denver-based community, and others, including to the authors of a book called The Urban Homestead, published before the trademark was even granted, and to Facebook, which instantly pulled down at least four pages, without regard for the validity of the claim. Here’s a tip to the Dervaes family, trying to defend this: you don’t have to use the words “cease and desist” for it to be a cease and desist letter. Here’s another tip: urban homesteading is not your “intellectual property”, as you claim in your silly notice. It is an idea and movement that has been around longer than you have. It will continue to be such. So what happened? As you might imagine, the community of urban homesteading people didn’t care very much for this strongarm tactic. People began to comment negatively about this on Twitter, on the Dervaes’ Facebook page, and on their site. A new Facebook page sprang into life, garnering (at this point) almost 3500 people who like the page in just over 24 hours. A Twitter feed urging people to dump the Dervaes, and other general Tweets about the issue.. Numerous negative posts have been made in all sorts of places about this incredibly stupid move:
After all this negative publicity for their boneheaded move, did the Dervaes see the error of their ways, pull the trademark application, and apologize for pissing off – and pissing on – the very community that made them what they are? Nope. In the spirit of politicians like Sarah Palin, they doubled down and went on the offensive. They posted a series of posts on their own blog whining about how people are misinterpreting their protection of their “unique” version of urban homesteading, whining on Twitter that people should try to see “the truth” and not be taken in by “hoaxes” (hey, you sent out the notices, that’s no hoax), blamed bloggers and rivals for the issues and accused them of not reporting the “facts”, when the “facts” were their own words, claimed to be doing this out of the good of their hearts, by trademarking the phrases before some corporation did – ironic, given that they are a corporation and are acting like one – taking down their facebook page, turning off comments on their blog, taking down the forums on one of their other sites for “database work”, posting strawman arguments about plagiarism as if this has anything to do with trademarks and as if there is no mechanism to deal with copyright infringement, and not replying to questions sent directly to them. They then began weaseling their way around their own words by claiming they were not suing bloggers or sending “stop or pay” notices – and yet in the notice they themselves posted to show what they had been sending out, the legal threat is clearly there, indicated by the boilerplate “we can resolve this without resorting to legal action” phrasing. On their latest blog post, they disingenously link to what they call “news” but which is their own press release, and which represents the ultimate doubling down on this. You can find the press release on Yahoo or via a link in the comments on some of these sites, or you can get to it from the reaction from the OC Weekly, which is worth a read itself. Let’s examine part of that so-called “news item”: “No threat was made against anyone’s first amendment rights; yet, there has been a heated argument in the media against what should have been the Dervaeses’ normal rights to protect their trademarks.” If there is one thing that drives me absolutely bats, it’s people who cannot or will not understand what the First Amendment actually means. Here’s another tip for the socially and legally challenged Dervaes: you cannot make any threats against someone’s right to say what they want based on the First Amendment. You are not the government. The First Amendment was written to prohibit the government from infringing on the rights of people to speak their mind (with certain common sense limits). And amazing as it is, peoples’ ability to speak their minds also allows them to comment on your idiocy in this matter, while you have the ability to cry about it. Isn’t that wonderful? As it turns out, when you irritate a large group of people, they’re going to go off and start finding out anything they can about you. Like the fact that Jules Dervaes appears to be some kind of end of the world religious type, based on the sites found – and now, mostly removed or redirected to attempt to sanitize history. This would explain that strange cult-like vibe I was getting, after reading through some of these pages via archives. The next tip for you: it’s very, very difficult to completely sanitize your history, and your history speaks volumes. You remind me quite a lot of the guy complaining to us that his name came up in a search as appearing in several posts on a site we host and demanding the removal of those posts and for us to forbid the user from the mere mention of his name. That, of course, was something we certainly were not going to do. I suppose he, and you, should have picked battles more wisely. As a topper to this ego-fest, Jules Dervaes claims to be the “founder of the urban homestead movement” on his eponymous site. Just because you tell yourself something like that, it does not magically make it true. You are not the “founder” of urban homesteading. You’re someone trying to capitalize on it by engaging in litigious and egregious practices by attempting to trademark common phrases you did not coin, and a movement for which you are no leader, and by trying to shut down other sites you deem as competition. Also, sorry to break this you, but your site was certainly not the “first” ever about urban homesteading. What has it gained the Dervaes family by trying to strongarm people people, businesses, and organizations with this silly trademark battle over common, generic phrases? Disdain, disgust, and an avalanche of negative publicity from the very base that used to support them. People have already removed their Facebook page from their lists, unfollowed them on Twitter, started a petition to the PTO to revoke the trademarks, removed links to their sites from their link pages/blogrolls, stated they will never donate another cent to their constant fundraising, and publicly refused to purchase another item, whether it’s a shirt or a seed, from them.For my part, now that I have finished my research across their site, I will never visit it again, just like so many other people who have now seen them for what they really are. You want to know what real community is? You’ve just seen it in action: it is bold, it is swift, it does not forget, it votes with its dollars, and it ensures that searches for your family name or site names will reveal the underhanded nature of this attempted power grab. I am refusing to use the trademark symbol next to the common phrases urban homestead and urban homesteading. I am refusing to substitute any of the phrases helpfully provided in the nonsensical notice that has been sent out. If you would like to contest this, feel free to send a notice to my web host – oh wait, I AM my own web host, and I’d tell you to pound sand. So, Jules, feel free to try to sue me over use of your so-called trademark. I’d be delighted to pull examples of prior art from those very same Mother Earth News magazines you note on your own site in your fluffed up bio page, which were around long before you decided you were king of the urban homesteading mountain. I’d be just as delighted to collect attorney fees and court costs from you for such frivolous action. Yes, I can certainly see this catching on. It really makes me wonder if people like this sit in their offices trying to come up with stupid ideas to sponsor a bill on in whatever legislature they happen to be in. Sorry, our SC clients: even if this nuttiness passes there, you’ll still need to pay with gold old US dollars and not Palmetto Bucks. Another tip from your neighborhood tech: you do not need to have all your high scoring spam delivered to a special mailbox under your account. Especially if you never clear said mailbox and jam up tens of thousands of messages in the system spooler. All you’ll be doing is pissing off every other person on the server because their mail is being delayed due to you. Then we will will have to go in and reset your settings to delete the junk you’re never going to look at in the first place. You’re welcome. If you refuse to listen to us after asking how to solve a problem, then bitch at us because “our” application – which is not “ours”, genius, something the giant COPYRIGHT notice at the bottom of the application clearly states – is broken because you can’t use a singular function you’d like us to believe you’ve used before but clearly have not since otherwise we wouldn’t have had to tell you how to get into it in the first place, tell us about some hugely convoluted series of steps you took to get around the problem instead of the single step we gave you, and then tell us our support is “poor” because you didn’t like our answer and chose not to do what we told you to based on our much higher level of experience with the application in question…. …don’t expect a lot of sympathy from us. If you then follow it up with a snide comment about how you “hope [we] have other skills” because in your esteemed opinion we shouldn’t be in the business of giving valid answers to technical issues…. …you’re not even going to receive a response to that bullshit. Know why? There are other clients who will actually take the advice we’re giving them based on our being in tech support forever, because unlike you, we know what the fuck we’re talking about and those others know that when we say “do xyz”, doing xyz will solve their issue. But hey, you know everything anyway, so why are you asking us for help in the first place? It’s always nice to have new toys. That was a test done with the PlantCam, a time-lapse cam I picked up because I’ve always found time-lapse photography fascinating. This is a very simple version of more extensive setups, of course, but really all I want is to be able to capture certain things without a giant, elaborate system – because of course, most of my attention will be focused on the actual growing and tending of things, not with fiddling with equipment. I get enough of that sort of activity in my day job. I decided after the ice test to try capturing the sunset. If you watch closely, you’ll see a bird appear and disappear from one of the tree limbs. The first video is composed of images taken every minute for right around an hour. The second is from images taken every five minutes for almost two hours. Both were put together with Windows MovieMaker rather than the onboard video converter, as it appears the onboard converter will only do low-res output. I can’t wait to put this among the seed flats and then out in the garden proper, especially on something like okra, which can grow insanely quickly. Who knows, maybe we’ll have several cams scattered about, capturing life on the ranch when we’re not looking. Facebook went down for a bit today, and apparently yesterday as well. Since I don’t hang out on facebook all day, every day, I didn’t realize they’d been down yesterday, and only noticed today because of the posts to one of the admin-type lists to which we subscribe here. I was kind of waiting for a snowball effect of twitter taking a dive as everyone flocked there to tweet about how facebook was down… So, you write in, telling us that you’re getting all sorts of trojans in your email. Mind you, you don’t bother to provide any evidence of anything of the sort, but someone on the staff tells you (quite correctly) that the virus definitions are always being updated, and if for some reason the server where you’re located needs an updated signature set, we’ll take care of it. You go away. We check, everything is up to date. Three days later, you’re back, telling us that you’re still getting these mysterious trojans, you’re not satisfied with the service, and you want to cancel. After five years of us hosing the account – during which you’ve opened very few tickets indeed, and which gives you plenty of time to know how we work, knowing that we do the things we say we will – instead of just saying “Hey, I’m still having this problem, what can we do”, you just want to cancel the account entirely. Then, when you’re asked, multiple times, for the headers of the mail you’re claiming is trojan-laden, so we can look at the logs, claim you have no idea what we’re asking for – this is even more ironic if your site indicates you’re claiming to be some kind of software developer. Then tell us we are “unconcerned”, “harsh”, and have “email security issues”, and continue to ignore the requests we’ve made of you to provide any sort of information whatsoever that we can use. In the meantime, we’ve been going line by line in the mail logs finding every instance of your domain, including the system rejecting all kinds of crap from known spammers/spam locations, and, as it happens, deleting outright things found to have trojan-laden packages attached. That just makes us feel all sorts of warm and fuzzy around here, to be insulted while we’re trying to figure out, sans any useful information from you, what exactly you’re talking about, wasting our time because clearly you have zero interest in actually addressing the issue. And then to top it all off, claim that two of your systems were “damaged” by these so-called trojans, after telling us in response to our query about what it is that you’re seeing as trojans is whatever your antivirus says they are. That, of course, will make us wonder which of these situations apply: you foolishly didn’t actually have any antivirus applications installed previously, and someone stupidly opened some random attachment. You didn’t keep your antivirus application up to date, so it didn’t trigger by whatever you claim was damaged when someone stupidly opened some random attachment. Or, the antivirus signatures were not updated in response to whatever the latest crap is being sent out – which, ironically enough, is exactly what we ourselves told you was a possibility and which we were checking on. Somehow, though, I figure in the latter case, you probably didn’t bother to write to the developer of whatever antivirus app you’re using to insult them in the same manner you insulted us. However, it’s a very interesting, although quite idiotic, way of dealing with a vendor with whom you’ve had a relationship for years. I’d say we’d keep that in mind, but pointing to an issue for which you won’t provide any investigative material, and which, remarkably enough, no one else has reported, is probably not a good framework on which to base just dumping a vendor without even bothering to make a good faith attempt to determine what is going on. But hey, best of luck with the next host, who perhaps will be able to read you mind. I know people like to claim or think that tech support folks don’t like people. But that just isn’t true. They just don’t like you. When you are contacting us for support, because you’re working on a site for one of our clients, here are some tips on how to piss off the very people you’re asking for help. Open a ticket saying you can’t upload to an application you’ve installed. Don’t include any other information. We love trying to figure out what the hell you’ve done to break something that’s been working just fine, and love even more rechecking ownership of and permissions on files, and tracking back through the logs. While we’re working on that, open yet another ticket saying the site is entirely down. When we look at it, the site is in fact down, because it can’t establish a database connection. That seems odd, since the site has been working just fine. Until… After we tell you the problem is the configuration file and the credentials the file is trying to use to connect are incorrect, tell us you haven’t changed anything. Except, oh, you changed the password for the main account user. When we repair the configuration file to use valid and proper credentials, and then tell you that if you change little, minor things like, oh, PASSWORDS, you need to update configuration files that use those passwords, ask us how you’re supposed to change the file without FTP or control panel access. This will surely make us ask you what the hell you’re talking about because you just told us you were in the control panel and changed the password, and this has nothing to do with us correcting a database configuration file. Ergo, you should be able to do whatever it is you need to do, since presumably you were just in the control panel doing whatever it is you were doing. An HOUR later, complain that you still can’t access FTP or the control panel. Since both are working fine, and the site is working just fine because we repaired things, this will make us even happier as we go hunting through the logs only to find you locked yourself out – and locked out the actual client as well, since you’re at their location – by continually attempting to log in with an incorrect password. A password that you changed from the control panel. A password that you should know. You kept trying to log in with an obviously incorrect password instead of stopping and just contacting us, which triggered the firewall. When we tell you what you’ve done – without pointing out the definition of futility, I might add – and then tell you we unblocked your IP and reset the password, respond with a request to rest the password to “changeme”. Nothing delights us like easily guessed, massively insecure passwords. And finally, when we tell you that we’re not resetting the password to that, give us a snotty “Fine.” followed by a haughty “I want it on the record” that you find our response insufficient and too slow. This despite the fact that the entirety of the issue, start to finish, was created by you, and it took you an HOUR to respond to something we managed to reply to in exactly seven minutes. All of this will certainly ensure that we put you at the top of the douchebag list, and further will ensure that we let the client know – because they also contacted us about the site being down – exactly why everything was a mess. There was insufficiency going on here, that is certain. It is equally certain that it had nothing whatsoever to do with us. Why must people be so freaking rude? Let’s assume some things here: let’s assume you’ve been a client for quite some time, that you know how we operate, that every single issue you’ve ever raised has been addressed, and that we’ve gone outside the normal bounds of technical support to assist you. Let’s assume that I am up at 4AM because our monitoring has picked up some issue on your server, and that I go about trying to repair that problem instead of answering one of the five tickets you open, because I am not in a position to update those, and anyway, getting the problem solved is my highest priority. Do you a) say thanks and go away, problem solved; b) say thanks, ask for more details than those provided in the first ticket you opened after the problem was solved; or c) tell me it is “unacceptable” that you have to take the helpdesk’s autoresponse as an indicator that something is being done, despite the fact that you have been around for awhile and realize this means we have received the ticket and are likely already working on it before you even noticed there was a problem? If you answered (c), then you have managed to match the asinine retort we received, before we received a further retort that we were sarcastic and rude. Good luck finding a host with proactive monitoring who will immediately bounce out at 4AM to fix your server, who owns their equipment rather than leasing it through some third party (meaning no waiting on relays of information, and so forth, cutting out the middle part of all that), and who will go outside the realm of what is normal technical support as we have done in the past, without charging you a dime for it. Life is much, much too short to be dealing with people intent on being unhappy because Shit Happens. I am well aware – more aware than some others, at this point – that Shit does in fact Happen. You don’t see me being an ass to people around me because I’ve been affected by some random problem happening on a server. Calzone for dinner, on the last of the pizza dough batch I made earlier this month. No mushrooms (Shit Happens!), but just as tasty with sauce, onions, pepperoni, mozzarella, and three year aged cheddar. It was probably larger than usual, and I ate almost the entire thing, which has now made me feel stuffed, but that’s nothing a good cappuccino can’t solve. Or at least help. Made a double batch of dough earlier today, to tide me over until we’re in post-surgery and into recovery time around here. I hope so, anyway. |
|||||
|
Copyright © 2012 Seasons in the Soil - All Rights Reserved |
|||||
