Bingo! Have a cigar! Pass go! Collect $200!
I've been hacking out a living as a freelance journalistworking from home for the past year, since the job of
CTO for a local ISP went titsup and the market went into
a nosedive. I'm lucky; I've got a cable modem. But I
work on linux boxes -- mostly a year or two behind the
state of the art curve -- and your crappy Word 2002
document or PowerDrool presentation is SOL if you want
me to write about your product.
Nor am I going to fill out six zillion registration forms
in order to spend two hours searching your PR stacks in
the hope of pulling a single quote. That takes Time, and
Time is Money.
I also get pissed off when PR people keep playing musical
chairs. The PR people at Corel on the Linux side were
great -- until they downsized three in a row and I lost
track of who I was talking to.
Nor do I want to subscribe to a generic email announcement
list. For some reason O'Reilly mailshot me whenever theyannounce a Windows title ... a fat lot of use, seeing that
I'm the UK's only goddamn full-time 100% no-shit eat-your-
own-dogfood freelance LINUX journalist.
If you want to see a _real_ example of stupid mailing listtricks, look here:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/pix/wtf.jpg-- Charlie "Spider Jerusalem is God" Stross
