Back in January of this year, Joe Castaldo published an article through Canadian Business magazine. It has a relatively innocuous title — “The Last Days of Target” — but the sub-title gives you a hint of the content…”The untold tale of Target Canada’s difficult birth, tough life and brutal death”. I didn’t see the article at the time, and I’m not even sure I would have clicked if I had. After all, wasn’t the demise of Target relatively straight-forward?
It seemed so to the casual observer. Towers, K-mart, Woolco, Zellers…all of them went down-market, bottomed out, and couldn’t make it work. Enter Target to try and tread the same path with a hopefully different ending. One more akin to Walmart. I’d been curious about Target when it opened, in the same way that I am curious when I see a coffee shop open and close in a location, only to be replaced a few months later by, yes, you guessed it, another coffee shop. Particularly when it isn’t part of a chain that will sustain it through the lean start-up months…somebody else just tried the same thing in the same spot and went bust. Yet here is someone else dreaming their dream, and repeating the same process, options, and outcomes.
When I visited Target, I saw slightly better clothing options than the previous Zellers, prices were good, nothing that stood out in electronics, toys, etc. that said: “buy me”. And, while I did buy a few things over time, I did notice a lot of empty shelves at times but far more importantly? Empty stores. No one was shopping there. You could shoot a cannon through the store, just as you could have through most Zellers outlets, particularly the one in the same location previously. Some people said Target would make money off the groceries and household consumables, but that’s not really a draw for me. I like shopping at PC stores or other various grocers. And Shoppers Drug Mart serves me just fine. I wasn’t their prime demographic, true, but I’m not against saving money if the place is reliable.
Yet reading Castaldo’s article is like reading a mix between a Harvard Business Case and a Stephen King horror novel. The errors and screw-ups and just complete incompetent management behind the scenes are mind-boggling. Back when I was in university, we did a “practical” strategic analysis of a local recycling company. We were all young business students, wanting to help them plan their strategic future, we were going to help them figure it out, bring our academic excellence to bear. After working with them over a few weeks, it became painfully obvious — their biggest threat was their own operation. They needed to make sure they could get the big doors open at the factory reliably EVERY morning so they get the trucks on the road for pickups, long before they could start thinking, “What’s next?”. And that was our recommendation…forget the future, you got to make sure the doors are open. After reading the article, I’m left with the same reaction — forget all their business acumen, how did they even get the doors open on the first store?
The article is awesome, but here are some of the highlights:
they couldn’t figure out basic distribution from warehouse to the retail stores, and to be able to restock … basic principles stores have been doing for years yet they ended up with extensive empty shelves in stores…it even took them 2 years to figure out that dates for delivery from vendors were being interpreted as shipping dates instead of when they should arrive…2 YEARS????;
choosing SAP to integrate all their systems with a two-year window and not paying enough attention to data integrity (see this excerpt: A team assigned to investigate the problem discovered an astounding number of errors. Product dimensions would be in inches, not centimetres or entered in the wrong order: width by height by length, instead of, say, length by width by height. Sometimes the wrong currency was used. Item descriptions were vague. Important information was missing. There were myriad typos. “You name it, it was wrong,” says a former employee. “It was a disaster.”)…end result? Only 30% accuracy;
registers spit out the wrong change or charged the wrong prices or oftentimes confirmed credit card payments that hadn’t actually gone through;
massively ambitious launch schedules; and,
insanely optimistic sales projections, particularly when they decided not to try and compete on groceries to get people into the store given the level of existing competition on groceries in Canada.
The standard explanations for the scope of the disaster are there…nobody wanted to be the bearer of bad tidings, they tried to make something work with new untested techno systems rather than adjusting working solutions, leaders were not experienced battle-tested problem solvers, over-extension happened before solidifying the basics, a lack of training…the usual suspects. All knowable though.
However, two examples really stood out for me. First, their internal business analysts switched off the “warning” indicators in their software for stock replenishment so that they wouldn’t look bad (not unlike removing the battery in your fire alarm because you don’t like the noise instead of seeing why smoke is filling your house). Second, one week they released their new flyer and every item on the first page was out of stock before the stores even opened that week.
While they fixed a lot of the issues, it was too little too late. Kind of like the classic cliché, they didn’t get a second chance to make a good first impression.
As an aside I love the reference to their decision to use SAP though…that decoding it was like peeling an onion, there were many layers and it made you want to cry.
Hard to believe that a company the size of Target could get SO many things wrong, and some of them pretty basic as well as known pitfalls to avoid.
Again, no, it’s not a baby or a pet. It’s a new BBQ. We went with the Sovereign 70 from Broil King, Natural Gas version instead of propane, no side burner, and just because they didn’t have the model down from it that we wanted but could give us a decent deal to move up to this one, we have a rotisserie rack too. I won’t be surprised if I never use it, or try a roast or something once, but for now, it’s there.
The fun came when Andrea informed me as we were getting it that we needed to have it professionally connected. I didn’t know that. I just thought I’d be responsible for connecting hose to nozzle, and I wasn’t really thrilled about it. Some might be more annoyed with paying someone else to do it, but when it involves connecting a fire source to the natural gas feed that runs through the house, I’m okay with having it done properly by someone who theoretically knows what they’re doing, not by me after watching some YouTube videos.
Apparently though, nobody wants the business to do this. Andrea worked through 3-4 people (two or so private referrals, two or so businesses) and while I could understand the individuals not doing it, the businesses didn’t even want to phone us back. We’ve had the BBQ almost three weeks and there was still no joy.
Yesterday I called a fireplace store on Carling, and after a bit of scheduling adjustments, they could actually fit us in today or next Wednesday. We opted for today.
The install was relatively straightforward. They started in the house to look for shut-off valves, and that was a learning experience for me as I got to find ones I didn’t even know about or how to reach them. In the end, none of them were for the BBQ. So out to the back. Yes, as we knew, the line was there, and the shutoff valve is right there too. I confess I wasn’t as happy about that, even with the capping on the end. In theory, anyone could have toggled that switch at any time — me, landscapers, Jacob. No gas would have leaked because of the cap, but if the cap wasn’t perfect…
They connected the hose, tweaked the BBQ a bit, ran the gas, lit fine. Tested the hose and caps for leaks with soap and water, all good. We paid and off they went.
Except then you’re supposed to run the BBQ for 20 minutes to burn off any residue, and we couldn’t get it to light. We could smell gas, but no joy again.
Called the store, they called him, he called me, we tried a couple of things, nope, he had to come back. Turns out when he was testing for air leaks with the soap and water, he disconnected the one hose and when he put it back on, it didn’t go “all the way” on. Small tweak, fired it up again, and then Andrea tested it with success this time.
We burned off any grease and oily residues, and then cooked hams and hots tonight (hamburgers and hot dogs for those not up on tailgate slang). Worked great.
Although I find it a bit odd…this is the first BBQ in the history of every bbq that I have ever used that seems to have the “hotter” spot at the front of the grill. Sunday night it will be time for pork chops and steak.
Oh, and there was a small bonus in there. The guy is also a fireplace technician, so while he was there, we talked about our fireplace “problem”. It worked okay when we first bought the house, but then it stopped lighting. The pilot light was there, the fireplace would come on, and then it would go out. We’d reset, start again, it would come on, and then it would go out. We had it looked at a year or two ago, and they told us that it was a broken part, tried to get replacement, couldn’t, probably need a new fireplace. Not what we wanted to hear. But Andrea would like it working, and we figured if it went well with the BBQ installation, we would willingly consider them for our next business transaction. The guy thinks it could very well be the switch, and even though the company is out of business that made the furnace, he said they have a guy who custom adapts switches and things to fit out-of-business designs. Certainly worth a check anyway, so we’ll likely pencil him in before Labour Day (he told us they get crazy busy from October through December). Great service, working BBQ, what’s not to love?
As I mentioned in my earlier post this week (Version 3.3 of my websites: the technical side of things), I have tried various applications to “run” the website. Early on, I used Microsoft FrontPage. Then I tried some out of the box HTML and ASP applications with names like GPEASY or EZ107. I eventually went bigger and tried various content management system (CMS) applications like Drupal, Joomla and even MediaWiki. None of them were quite right for me.
Some people have opted for commercial platforms like Blogger or WordPress.com and those were all viable options. But I always came back to running my own site with my own set of installs. I started small, I went bigger and bigger, I went up to a WordPress install, I dropped back, and then finally, I went all in on WordPress.
I would be the first to confess that it is WAY more power than I need. People run full company sites with this thing, including full e-commerce capabilities or thousands of users with forums and discussion groups.
Me? I need a blogging platform, comments, and just a bit of capacity to show videos and images. Occasionally I get fancy and run a poll or something, but mostly it is just me blogging and the sound of a dry lonely wind blowing across my front page, maybe with digital tumbleweeds rolling along. It is not high traffic. One of my favorite Pearls Before Swine cartoons suggests the one character’s blog would have more traffic if he wrote it in crayon on a bathroom wall, and that is probably true for my site. Once in awhile I touch a nerve and garner an uptick in viewers, particularly if I’m talking about HR or development. Other than that? Mostly me prattling on into the digital ghostlands of the internet.
Yet I still want that power of WordPress. As I mentioned in the previous post, I tried separating my various musing into two camps for awhile but my approach to my site was still pretty diffuse. Blogs I would write with a specific angle in mind on one site often would end up fitting better on the other site under a different heading. Not a big deal to move, just illustrative that my approach to my separation into two blogs was not very concrete.
And when I rearranged my setup into a single blog, I thought, “YES! This is what it is all about. Everything I write in one place. Awesome!”
However, I realized over time that it wasn’t quite as awesome as I had hoped. I post in bursts and spurts, often on a single theme. Someone looking for HR info doesn’t particularly care about the latest quote I might share or what’s going on in my personal life (sob). And the balance didn’t seem quite right at times, particularly when I started adding quotes or humour. So I started thinking again about separating the blog entries into two groups.
The first group is what you see here. The more personal side of my musings:
Posts about family or just daily experiences…the truly personal side of my life;
In the same vein, but a little less “directly personal”, some of my approach to life like goal-setting, learning including photography, and spiritualism;
A science and technology theme, in that I will be writing more about astronomy (a hobby) and computers (mostly about this site, but not always); and,
A general set of posts around humour, quotes, recipes, and a catch-all around “ideas” (often involving principles and current news items).
The second group of blog entries is over on my other site (polywogg.ca), although at the time of writing, it isn’t really properly formatted and set up yet. For these ones, the groupings are not quite as defined yet either, but they are my more professional topics as a writer:
Of course, there is my main theme around Human Resources, and more specifically, my HR guide to federal competitions for jobs…I’ve considered even making this a theme for another single purpose site, but I don’t need to do that yet, and I’ve included the proceedings from an HR conference I helped organize with some friends from university;
Key insights that I can write about, since I can’t write about some aspects of my work life, are around the role of the civil service, governance, and international development;
I like writing reviews, and people seem to value them on Amazon and elsewhere, so I wanted to collect my book reviews all in one spot, along with musings on reading in general, and eventually expanding so that all my movie reviews, music reviews, and regular TV reviews are together too;
I read voraciously at times about the world of publishing, and I have some views I want to share regarding publishing, marketing,pricing, and even the role of libraries in society; and,
Finally, what probably pulls all of this theme together, I want a place to post some of my own writing — shortstories, maybe some novel excerpts, some non-fiction guides, etc.
The funny thing is that deciding all of that still left me with a major choice.
A choice of branding
Which site would be “PolyWogg” and which site would be “ThePolyBlog”? Technically, they are both PolyWogg, as they are both my musings, just on different topics. And I could certainly tell myself that if the first site had entries about my personal life and family, and I’m “PolyWogg”, it made sense that PolyWogg would be the one that was more personal.
Yet ThePolyBlog is a far more informal title than PolyWogg, and if I used the personal for PolyWogg, and put the HR stuff on ThePolyBlog, well, the guide isn’t really blog entries. Plus it would then make sense to call it “ThePolyBlog’s guide to …”, and that doesn’t sound right to me at all.
In the end it doesn’t matter of course, or at least not to any one but me, but it would be a major pain in the patootie to change it around later, so I wanted to try and get it right the first (well, actually the SECOND) time.
In the end, my wife cast the deciding vote. She felt that ThePolyBlog was more informal too, and PolyWogg did seem to be more about my writing normally. So the Blog title goes to the personal informal stuff (site 1 above) and PolyWogg goes to slightly more formal “public writing” (site 2 above).
I have to confess, I was a bit surprised by how easy everything divided up once the decision was made.
Making the move
Of course, making the move was more complicated than saying “site 1 is this”, “site 2 is that”. It was all on a GreenGeeks platform under PolyWogg.ca. I needed all that content moved to WHC.CA, and I needed it split.
In the end, I settled on a two-step move. First and foremost, I migrated EVERYTHING to ThePolyBlog temporarily. WordPress has some tools that help you move everything from one place to another, including the install, but since I couldn’t be sure the GreenGeeks site wasn’t all screwed up from the myriad of changes, I decided I would do a fresh install and just move the content. I had hoped to have both PolyWogg sites (old and new) running simultaneously and bop back and forth from one to the other while the new remained in sandbox mode, but that didn’t quite work out the way I had hoped (I would have had to play constantly with my HOSTS file, too much trouble).
So I did OLD POLYWOGG and NEW THEPOLYBLOG setups, got everything all moved over, tested, all the content fine, and then I deleted the old PolyWogg site, moved to a fresh install at NEW POLYWOGG, *and* what was really cool? I then just copied the NEW POLYBLOG content over into NEW POLYWOGG and started deleting the stuff I didn’t need from each.
I even got to play with plugins as I went to make sure everything was relatively identical. In the end, my goal is that the back-end will be relatively identical, it is just the content and names that will change. “My branding” will be relatively uniform across the two, just mild differences in colours and menus, etc.
Setting up the new WordPress sites
One of my goals in setting up the new sites was to completely clean up a bunch of old plugins that I might not need anymore while streamlining certain bells and whistles too.
As a small digression, I’m often amazed by the number of people who blog, “Hey, I use this great plugin called ACME WIDGETS”. Which is great that they want to promote something they like, but it also starts giving out information to potential hackers about how your site is set up, what it is running, etc. I break this rule myself as I say I’m running WordPress, but that isn’t that big a surprise — while it doesn’t say it on my site, anyone doing a VIEW SOURCE on any page would see WordPress references pretty fast. But I don’t feel like I should make it easy for anyone to tell them things they don’t need to know, so while I will talk about plugins, I won’t talk about their names, just about the functions I’m looking for…
Obviously, one of the first decisions people make in their design is what theme to run. Lots abound, and most add functions I don’t need — sliders, magazine setups, etc. I’m a pretty vanilla guy whose posts revolve around words. A lot of words. I was using a theme that I subscribed to a long time ago, upgraded to pro, upgraded to a new version, upgraded to the pro version, now it is available in regular free mode and another pro version. The regular free mode is more than good enough for my uses. Not quite as “clean” looking as the previous one, but lower load time. It will easily meet my needs. And free is good.
The second piece people need to think about is protection. No glove, no love, and that applies to websites too. Spam protectors, firewalls, login blockers, ongoing monitors, backups, and my personal favorite? Changing the default login page so that the bots can’t even find it to try and log in. Of course, if you screw up or forget where you hid it, you can get locked out too. Oops.
My next set of tools are around beefing up the look and feel from the default theme options to add a few bells and whistles. For me, this is mostly around adding some custom widgets, some better page navigation, maybe a tool for polls and charts, and even ones around helping identify other posts that are like the current one to help encourage people to stay on your site longer.
Of course, if you don’t write anything, there’s nothing to see. So I added some basic tools for improving the writing and editing experience, adding in shortcodes to simplify certain functions, making it easy to clone or copy posts into a new post, and even controlling how quotes look/work and adjusting how many revisions to keep in the database.
One of the hottest categories in the plugin world is social media, but I keep mine pretty basic — some simple sharing links, something to help with printing, adding in some contact forms to make it easy to contact me, improving the way links are done, and just for fun, tweaking integration with major sites like Twitter and Facebook.
I added some functionality to one site to allow me to more easily facilitate downloads of some documents, but mostly I am more about the back-end — statistics, word counts, checking for broken links.
Lastly, I add a few plugins that are usually not active, but help me with certain functions you have to do from time to time like managing a database, optimizing setups, or in the case of the “big move”, duplicating and importing another WordPress site.
The agony of defeat, the thrill of victory
One of the reasons the “move” went well is that I made a painful decision a few months ago. I finally accepted that part of the frustration of the last few years with my site has been constantly trying to integrate my large photo and video gallery into the same workspace. Sure, WHC offers galleries too, and like most hosters, block video hosting (you can import links, but the files have to be stored somewhere else). In the end, I bit the bullet.
I moved my photos and videos to SmugMug. It has been the best decision I ever made. Of course, if/when SmugMug goes under, I’m screwed, but in the meantime, it is working flawlessly. Videos, pictures, all together, easily controlled, nice layout. It just works. And allowed me then to concentrate on addressing more gaps in years processed than in figuring out which plugin or theme wasn’t working. I wish I had it working well in a self-hosted site, but it was just sucking too much time to get it right. We recently had a birthday party for a 90 year old member of our family, and I put a whack of photos all up on the site, ran the app, and voila, instant slide show for the party. Worked great.
For the first time in several years of trying, I feel like I’m organized for processing photos.
However, with the pain of the move, and the thrill of it working, I then moved into the renewed pain of fixing my WordPress site for photos. I know what you’re thinking, “Wait, you put everything on SmugMug, didn’t you?”. Of course, I did.
But some of my blogs LINK to those photos and use them in posts. This means all the old links for any photo in my OLD SITE which pointed to a page on my self-hosted site now point to dead links — I had to re-add all my photos back into my blog entries.
Mostly these were entries where, for example, I talked about my honeymoon, and what I was putting in the blog were samples of the things we saw as we went. Almost like a trip blog with pics added. I tried a couple of plugins that were designed to make it easier to link, but it wasn’t required. After testing several methods, I realized that the link available on SmugMug integrated seamlessly into WordPress just by pasting a certain form of the link. It was almost instantaneously PERFECT. Really happy with it. What I thought would take possibly weeks to fix was all done in a couple of hours, and not very strenuous either — most of that time was re-reading the original blog!
Where am I now?
This site is basically done for layout and configuration. Which is why I’m blogging again. I didn’t bother blogging on the old site since back in May, partly as I didn’t know if I was going to be able to keep the content. Now that I’m up and running again, I’d like to get the word count on this site up to the 250K mark this year. Particularly now that I’ve fixed a small formatting glitch as two conflicting plugins tried to format the same text. Bye-bye to one plugin.
Now, on to fixing ThePolyBlog, a bit more challenging for some of the plugin tweaks.
Some of you probably saw Adam van Koeverden’s post earlier this week on his blog, as many people shared it across Facebook (http://www.vankayak.com/blog/2016/8/12/feminism-in-sport.html). It even got picked up by the Huffington Post, which guaranteed a lot more clicks and sharings.
And when I saw the theme, I really wanted to like it. The basic premise is he had seen an interview between Ron McLean and Adam Kleek on CBC, and in the interview, Kleek had criticized Eugenie Bouchard’s focus at the Olympics. So van Koeverden was writing to take Kleek to task for what he perceived to be sexist commentary, with the backing principle that men should call out men when they do this. It shouldn’t just be women saying, “Hey…..”.
I love the premise. I do. And so I saw the headlines, jumped on the click, started reading, and then faltered. Because as so often is the case with these things, the blog entry makes a few claims that seem to me to be sweeping generalizations that weaken the call-out. You can read the original post linked above, so I don’t have to repeat it here. Let me instead summarize the argument into a few key points so you’ll see where my hesitancy lies.
Kleek shouldn’t comment on tennis as he isn’t an expert.
Kleek shouldn’t judge “focus” or “commitment” by a person’s social media presence, etc.
Kleek suggested she may have a stronger desire to be a media darling.
Kleek did a “girlish impression”
Three Olympian women objected to the commentary.
Symbolic of other sexist behaviour, such as asking her to “twirl” (Australian reporter faux pas) or the Sun calling Penny Oleksiak “Pretty Penny”.
Men should call out men, not just leave it to women to object
Men don’t get asked these terrible questions.
Men don’t get asked about performance vs. social media distraction
Eugenie is doing amazing so no basis for criticism.
If three women object, accept their view and apologize. If they’re offended, an apology is required.
Okay, so I summarized a little too much, too many sub-points, but you get a pretty good overview of his argument. But I’m going to deal with them in groups, and somewhat out of order. If you have read my posts before, you know I’m long-winded, so there is a nice little recap/summary at the bottom before I get to the part that actually matters.
It doesn’t happen to men (6, 8, 9) — This is the most popular line out there, since if it only happens to women, it must be sexist. Except it does happen to men. Regularly. For example, at this Olympics, what was one of the most shared images? A photo of Michael Phelps supposedly glaring at his opponent, along with EXTENSIVE commentary about the apparent social media war between them … and guess what sort of questions came with it? Oh yeah, that it might be a DISTRACTION from focusing on the races.
The number one male swimmer in the history of the Olympics, his medal count outweighs numerous country totals, and yes, they’re asking if social media distracts him from his focus. I guess too that Adam missed the comments on the CBC during London and Vancouver and Sochi about the “hotness” of some of the guys, including Canadian female Olympic athletes joking about the guys on the air. And I’m certain no female commentator anywhere would have dared comment on the oiled-up Tongalese flag bearer. And certainly not on CBC. Oh, wait.
I don’t want to be too harsh though, as most people perpetuate this “myth” that it is exclusively only happening to women. It shows up in politics — Hillary questioned about her wardrobe but never Trump. Why? Because the media spent two months discussing his hair and the size of his penis.
It shows up in Hollywood, with red carpet divas objecting to fashion questions when they are wearing tens of thousands of dollars worth of accessories, greater than many viewers’ annual income, for one night of the year where they go for high glamour and glitz and sparkle. But that should be off-limits because no one (except the 1000s who buy fashion mags and tabloid coverage of the events) could ever care about such silly topics on such an important day as Hollywood paying expensive tribute to itself. Of course, if you followed that line of logic, you should also probably never comment on a bride’s dress on her wedding day because that’s incidental to the importance of her making a gigantic personal commitment to someone.
People might argue though that these are isolated incidents, I need more evidence. Okay, let’s take women out of the equation for the moment. Even the Olympics. Let’s look at a widely covered sport like football in the NFL. If “focus” and “outside distractions” commentary only happen to women, there would be no mention anywhere in NFL coverage. Right? That’s the logic. Except every year there are multiple stories about this running back or that wide receiver, often rookies with money in their pockets for the first time, often with the bright lights of the big show in their eyes, not being able to focus on the game. That their off-field behaviour is a “distraction” from their “job” of competing at the highest level. Every single year. And yes, lots of references to social media as part of the “problem”.
If the blog said that we do it MORE to women, I would be happy to agree. I think we still have a sexist society, and I think it is reflected in journalism and particularly sports journalism. Saying it is “only” women is pretty selective interpretation.
If it was “sexist” to question Eugenie about social media because Kleek was male, should Andi Petrillo apologize to Phelps for any on-air discussion of the social media stuff he was involved in? Does the CBC owe an apology to Tonga?
I’ll come back to the “twirl” issue later.
Don’t comment on tennis / Eugenie is doing great (1,11) — This one is hard to get behind on any level. There’s this little thing called freedom of speech and it lets you comment on any topic you want. Usually, if you do, and you sound like an idiot, it’s pretty obvious. And people cough, turn away, and ignore the idiot. I find it hard to think it benefits anyone to “call anyone out” because they don’t know something. Particularly when you start by saying “Hey, I don’t know anything about the topic either.” Okay then, if so, maybe you should shut yourself too, if you’re calling someone else out about it.
And if we want our talking heads of any form to always know what they’re talking about, there are going to be a lot fewer employed talking heads and a lot of dead air coverage of some sports. Not necessarily a bad thing, just that I have some sympathy for those paid to be on air for a lot of hours with a microphone and no script. And Kleek may not know anything about tennis, but he does know what it is like to be a professional athlete, to get ready for big events, to try and focus on a competition while the world swirls around you asking you to do silly things like 30-second interviews to tell people “what it’s like to win/lose/compete”.
Digitalism/Social media presence is poor evidence (2, 3, 10) — On this point, I agree wholeheartedly with van Koeverden. Generations view it differently, just as younger people travelling often want to check in on FB while older people often are like “relax, unplug!”. It’s part of their digital life. And if van Koeverden wants to say Kleek is out of touch with modern life, sure go ahead. I won’t join in the piling on, for a simple reason. If I have to respect a younger generation for valuing social media, I have to respect the older person for not doing so. Doesn’t strike me as a reason to “call someone out”, nor in such an aggressive fashion. Not to mention there are already 1000s of articles out there about generation gaps and how the older generation doesn’t understand horseless carriages / rock ‘n ‘roll / drugs / sex / digital worlds.
Three women objected so he should apologize (5, 12) — If his mom taught him that, he should go back and have a chat about how people end up being doormats. Cuz that is the same attitude that forces many women to stay with abusive husbands. It’s their duty to apologize because, well, the other person says so. No, that’s not how life works, except in the world of “we have to be politically correct all the time”.
Sure, we have a stereotype out there that if someone bumps into a Canadian, the Canadian will apologize. And I don’t disagree that it would be a “good” thing for him to do. Nice. Canadian even. But that’s not what the blog says. It says he SHOULD do it, i.e. there’s a right from women to an apology and whether he was right/wrong or entitled to express an opinion, he has a duty to render the apology.
So I’m offended by the post implying that men do this to women all the time. And by the assertion that if I don’t agree, I’m part of the problem. Well, I don’t agree to his lines of argument, does that mean he owes me an apology? No. It means we disagree.
The test isn’t simply whether one feels offended, that’s one’s subjective bias. If that was the test, everyone everywhere would have to apologize for everything ever said on TV as there is someone somewhere who will take offence. It happens. And lots of times we shake our heads at them and think, “What a whackjob, that isn’t what that means”.
The test isn’t who objects, it is what was said and to whom. Kleek didn’t comment on the three women who objected. He commented on Bouchard. So, the question is does he owe an apology to HER and HER ALONE, not all women everywhere who might be offended on her behalf.
I said I would come back to the “twirl” example, and this is where it comes in. Just as van Koeverden says he doesn’t need to defend all women, they can do so themselves, so can Bouchard. When the Australian reporter, for whatever stupid reason, asked her do a little twirl to show off how cute she was, Bouchard had a choice to make. She could object and say no. She could object and explain why. She could walk away. She’s a big girl, more than capable of taking care of herself. And what did she do? She laughed it off, did the twirl in a cheeky little fashion (which to my mind was done as much to mock the reporter, not satisfy him), and went on with her life. Was it the most “feminist” response? Was it the best response? Not me to judge. Her life, her choice.
Was she offended? I have no idea. Just as with this one. While it is fine for van Koeverden, or any of the three Olympian women, to take issue with the statement and suggest it was inappropriate, the only person who can truly say if it was offending is Bouchard. And if so, then we move to analysis, somewhat more objective than the rhetoric of van Koeverden’s blog, to say, “Does the evidence (like in the blog) suggest there is something there?”
Quick recap — criticizing focus or digitalism happens to men and women, it is not inherently sexist. The fact Kleek was a man and Bouchard a woman didn’t make it so either. Sexism requires it to be BECAUSE Bouchard is a woman, not just of the opposite sex. It’s a symptom, perhaps, but not the basis. Equally, commenting without expert knowledge of social media or tennis isn’t inherently sexist either.
So, if all that is true in my mind, why would I want to support the blog?
Because Kleek didn’t just question her focus or media or commitment.
He did a “girlish impression” that was meant to be demeaning and belittling. Because “girlish” was bad. That only “girls” worried about hairstyles and fashion. Because it meant she wasn’t a real athlete. And that it was a way to mock her, that her sex made her less.
THAT is sexism pure and simple.
And if van Koeverden wants to call out anyone for doing THAT, without the other misplaced rhetoric, more power to him. Or anyone. Male or female. Because that kind of behaviour is unacceptable.
And it deserves not only an apology from Kleek, but it also deserves an apology from CBC for allowing it to air and once aired, not immediately denouncing it and banning Kleek from all future broadcasts.
You shouldn’t get a second chance to make a lasting sexist impression on the millions of Canadians tuned to watch the best the world has to offer, not the worst.
Often it is because one feature of the site works REALLY well, and draws me in a certain direction, only to later have that feature either be less important relative to other features, or just stop working well. Sometimes it is an issue with the hosting company.
I didn’t do separate blog entries for version 3.0 where I basically had WordPress all up and running, or version 3.1 where it was a combination of two WordPress sites, one Piwigo subsite for photos and videos, or even version 3.2 where I merged it into 1 WP site and one photo subsite. Things were working pretty well, and I had transitioned over time from Spelunking Web Design (too little bandwidth and storage) to Netfirms (solid for a while until I ran into some config issues with storage) to Greengeeks (which let me host all my pix and integrated well with Google Storage for video). Usually when I have transitioned from one site to another, it has been either my needs outgrowing the basic offerings or the costs associated with my needs being much cheaper elsewhere. Each hoster has slightly different rules and offerings, and as my needs changed, I switched to keep costs down on what are basically personal sites with no commercial value.
This past year though, going back to February, I’ve had a small battle with Greengeeks. Things were going along mostly fine, after I had switched to them last fall (Cutting the cord – Part 5 – Internet hosting). Then, suddenly, things weren’t fine.
The beginning of the end of a relationship
I had consolidated my previous two WordPress sites — polywogg.ca and thepolyblog.ca — into a single site (polywogg.ca and redirected thepolyblog there too), and with the previous focus of what the two sites were about, I was able to more cleanly integrate them. It just made sense at the time for me to have everything together, no need to separate out “personal” from more “professional” musings, and separate menu options to help keep things sorted.
But then I noticed a problem in February with something rather small initially. I was running a “to do” list app on the site…well, actually three of them. One for work, one for personal, one for “other”. Plus a calendar that my wife and I could share. Like with hosting my photos on the site, it seemed to me that if I had a whole site to myself, why would I use other sites, commercial or otherwise, to host my info?
One day I went to do something on the to-do list and the subsite wouldn’t load. Dead. Fatal errors out the wazoo. This was odd, it had been working the week before just fine. Two other lists were also “dead”. And the calendar. WordPress loaded fine, but the look was a bit off. I checked the photo site and it too was acting weird for layout. Connected to the help desk, asked a few questions, and they located the problem almost immediately. They had auto-upgraded my site from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.0.
If you’re a layperson, you might think, “Sweet! Free upgrade!”. If you’re a little more knowledgeable about sites, you might think, “They upgraded you automatically?”. And if you’re way more hardcore than me, you likely are thinking, “WTF??? Why would they upgrade you automatically? Did they tell you so you could test your config? What kind of hoster would change your site without warning, notice or testing?”. Guess which camp I fell into.
The upgrade broke my todo list installs and the calendar as they weren’t 7.0 compatible. WP’s core is 7.0 compatible, but all the plugins apparently were not. Hard to tell, precisely, but WP was a bit off. PiwigoPress, that I was using for my photos, also didn’t completely like the upgrade tweak in the background, but I’ll come back to that.
They switched me back to 5.6, lists seemed fine, calendar loaded, everything else worked, it seemed like “no harm, no foul”. At first. Then about a week later, I started noticing my photos didn’t seem to load properly. The layout screen for a gallery, for example, would load, but not all the photos. Some were just placeholder symbols in Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer/Edge. Definitely a server issue if all three were treating it the same. But it wasn’t consistent. Sometimes everything would load fine. Home seemed fine, work seemed more intermittent. Then I tried it on my tablet, worked great. Decided it was a temporary bandwidth issue, moved on.
Then I uploaded a batch of new photos, and all hell broke loose on my site. Pics wouldn’t render at all, any format, any location, any connection. It just did NOT want to load right at all. Then some would, others never. I tweaked, I checked, I tweaked, I checked. No idea what was wrong. I hadn’t changed anything in almost two months, but now, suddenly nothing worked? I went back to Greengeeks support to see if anything else had happened? Nope.
The larger investigation begins
I thought it might be the PHP version, as they were going to phase out lower support. So I transitioned all my lists to a new app/site temporarily and then from there more recently to one called TickTick. Accessible from work, comes with app, updates in real-time reliably between Andrea’s phone and mine (we share shopping lists for groceries, for example, so she can make the list and I can buy the stuff), good toggle options to switch things on and off. I moved our calendar to Sunrise, which then was closing shop, and now to Google, since we can both run reliable apps to synch. So I was down to just WP and Piwigo, and they seem to like 7.0 reasonably fine.
Yet wonkiness remained. Over time, I narrowed a feature down that wasn’t working in Piwigo. Photo conversion wasn’t working right. It didn’t seem to be adjusting the size, and the rendering was taking forever.
Apparently, unbeknownst to me, the switching from 5.6 to 7.0, and then back, was not a simple switch. The switchback was actually a complete reset of some sort. Features in PHP setup that had been “on”, like one called GDIMAGE and another like IMAGEMAGICK, were now switched off by default. Now that is not something I would ever play with — once I get the initial setup right, there would be no reason for me to go into that extremely technical side of the configuration. It’s almost like going in and editing the Registry in Windows. You *might* have to do it for something specific, but rarely manually. And I found the default change by accident.
Why would they matter? GDIMAGE and IMAGEMAGICK are library functions for PHP (not quite the right term, but close enough) that add image conversion to the list of things PHP can do. Such as enabling Piwigo — I uploaded photos in one size, and it would convert them to other sizes so you have the thumbnail for small viewing on one type of layout, medium for another, large for a third, and then the full image (if you tell it to keep it, which I did). I had unlimited storage, and having those different sizes is supposed to make everything load better/quicker without having to do resizing on the fly.
But with them off, Piwigo wasn’t working right. It was trying, but I configured and reconfigured things out the wazoo before I found the missing libraries problem. Then I tried to put everything back to the way it had been, but things still weren’t quite right.
I started getting warnings that the server load was too high. Too high? How could that be? I had a WP site that had double-digit visitors on a good day, another that had visitors once or twice a year that I host for someone else, and a photo site that might have visitors once a month. No way could I be overloading the server. Yet the logs didn’t lie. 10K hits in a single day, most asking for pages that didn’t exist, lots of redirects, some attempts to log in. Spam attack in some ways, access attacks in others, and just a lot of pic loading. Sort of. Some of it was just Piwigo still struggling with the load to convert graphics sizes.
Greengeeks and I started a series of exchanges as we tried to nail down the problem. They, like any bad hoster, start with the premise that it’s all the user’s fault and that they didn’t do nuttin. Except they had. The original PHP switcheroo. Then, on a regular basis, they would try to help, and they would tweak a setting they thought would help. Except they would do it without telling me. I would be in the middle of testing multiple configs, resetting things, and suddenly one of my changes looked WRONG. Something that shouldn’t have caused that change. I’d undo it but the change would remain.
And I would go down a rabbit hole for a couple of hours or even days trying to figure out WHY that changed with my changes, only to find out it wasn’t my change. It was them changing background settings in the middle of my testing and not telling me. Meaning I would have to go back to the beginning and start the testing all over.
I was getting increasingly hostile about their support. Particularly after they swore it was PiwigoPress causing the problems. I finally gave access to one of the actual developers to check the config directly, something I was floored he was willing to do. I had been all over the Piwigo forums trying to find a possible cause, and then he offered to check since none of the things I was looking for should have been the problem. Everything was set properly. No issues. And Piwigo is being run on literally hundreds of thousands of installs without issue. The problem was NOT Piwigo.
I finally started to figure out what had happened. This is a bit simplistic and misleading description, but basically it was a combination of several features. WordPress liked PHP 7.0 but a security plugin within WordPress did not. Sort of. It basically changed the way it handled sub-directories — since my WP install was at the equivalent of WWW.SITE.CA, and my Piwigo was in WWW.SITE.CA/PHOTOS, the WP security plugin was trying to control the photos site too. It wasn’t designed to do that, but it wasn’t expecting virtual subdomains to be located below the main root. At least as far as I can tell. Equally, the PHP 5.6 to 7.0 to 5.6 switcheroos turned off my image processors, which sent Piwigo into a tizzy. Between the two, i.e. the image processing and the overly active security plugin, I was really struggling to find the source of the reconfiguration issue.
Adding in multiple changes without Greengeeks telling me they changed something, the problem was impossible. I couldn’t be sure my “testing” was working, and frequently it wasn’t — cuz they changed something in the middle of my efforts.
Ratcheting up to a governance issue
This seems like an odd way to describe it, but I was now dealing with a governance issue. I explicitly told them they could do diagnostics if they were helping, and identify things I might look at, but UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES were they to make any further changes to my actual setup. They did anyway.
So I opened a ticket of complaint. Someone deleted it. Literally, it disappeared out of the tracking system. I opened two new ones — one with the same info and one to find out what happened to my original ticket. Both were deleted.
At this point, the relationship was basically toast, but I’ve paid for three years worth of hosting to get the lowest price, and while I’m willing to eat that cost (decided that upfront when I paid it), I wasn’t willing to go gently into the night. I tweeted a couple of their major customers who provided testimonials on the “greatness” that was Greengeeks, I tweeted their CEO, I tweeted their IT specialist. Suddenly people started paying attention to my tickets.
I didn’t get any better service, but they were at least paying attention. Now, separate from the pain and frustration, many of you might jump to the obvious two solutions:
Kill the account, move on;
Delete everything, reinstall from scratch.
I was hoping for (2) still, but there’s a small problem with that plan. I had no way of knowing that if I got it all working and installed right, another change from GG wouldn’t come along and swamp my setup. So I wanted to know how to mitigate that risk. I started asking a series of Qs of the tech group that I wanted answered sequentially so I could get to the point where I would say, “Okay, if I blow off WordPress, and reinstall, AND I blow off Piwigo and reinstall, how do we do this in the least painful way possible?”.
Backups were fine for WP as I could “reload” the database options i.e. import all the content again. However, Piwigo was now so corrupted in the install that I had no confidence the backups wouldn’t produce the same result — I needed a brand-new fresh install. And reuploading of 7000 photos! With descriptions re-added for albums, etc. Now, I have a good setup for sorting pics at home, it was easy to reupload, and I could have done a DL and new UL of the existing structure, but I figured going nuclear on my install would be easier.
About this time though I realized that I no longer trusted the host. I had transcripts from the same guy, the one I complained about, where it said “A”, then “not A”, then “A”, then “not A”, then “A” and finally “A because you told me it was A”. The guy was a lying sack of excrement. And I still had no accountability response from GG to say how the guy was allowed to delete my complaints in the system, nor were my outstanding issues addressed.
It was time to break up
I started shopping for a new host. I talked to a few, explained some of my problems / frustrations, told them what I needed, and what I was willing to spend. I zeroed in on WebHostingCanada, partly as when I asked some technical questions, they jumped immediately to the problems it took me 3 months to solve on my own. The guy told me up front that one of their cheaper options wouldn’t be enough as the hosting industry didn’t always truly tell the right stats on certain things, essentially telling me that while it says “x”, it’s partly throttled (which isn’t advertised). The exact problem I seemed to be having with GG and which 3 months of testing had revealed but they wouldn’t admit. He even made me laugh at one point…I told him the specs for something technical in my current setup and he said, “Oh, that’s so sad” i.e. that the setup was so limited.
The transition didn’t go completely smoothly, but it did “go”. But that’s the basis for another post.
In terms of Greengeeks, I left my hosting account active for the remaining 2 years — I’m hosting another site through there, bare minimal load, and if their server has problems, it won’t affect me. At the end of the two years, I’ll transition to a site I already have.
While I’m now on my fourth hoster in 18 years, and my third one in 3, I’ve made some other config issues which should help. And I’m still paying less than I was previously, and getting more power. I can (hopefully) live with that.
