Jason To The Rescue

I get scam emails. Such as messages that say my email account is completely full and soon they won't be able to jam any more letters in it, but if I click here they can straighten the whole thing right out. The email will appear to be from my ISP Admin but if you check on the actual address it will say something like bambi@bonerville.fishnet, and in any case I'm no random clicker. Not me. I know that much.

That's about all I know. So when I got a letter from an outfit warning me that Google would soon terminate Feedburner for email subscriptions to Murrmurrs, but that they'd be happy to take over the job for me, I didn't click on anything. Especially since it was signed by "Marina, the Happiness Manager." Happiness Manager. That just sits wrong. I always thought "fulfillment" was a little fancy for the shipping department, too.

But I did check around for the fate of Feedburner because although I don't know what it is or how it works, I do know it's involved with getting subscriptions to my blog. For email updates and the RSS feed too. I don't know what an RSS feed is but I know I have one.

I feel the same way about my spleen.

Turns out nobody even agrees on what RSS stands for. Could be either RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, or maybe Ripe Squid Suckers. It takes my typing here and squirts it into your phone. I need it if I'm going to communicate with you all. And Feedburner manages my RSS feed. Guess what? Sure enough, I found out Feedburner's going into Maintenance Mode in July. Someone will be sweeping up for a while but nobody's at their desk anymore. I have no idea what any of this means.

One of the problems with the internet is a whole lot of companies got rich by figuring out dummy-proof ways of wielding it. They made great Out Of Box Experiences so all you had to do was plug in your new toy and it played with itself. You didn't have to know any dang thing to operate it.

So when things went wrong you had to go to your rental house next door where you keep your stock of young people and have them come over and fix it. You'd lean over their shoulders and ask what they were doing and they'd say something like "Oh, I'm just pinging your server" and you'd holler at your husband and say "Hey Dave, come look! Jason's pinging!" and he'd say "I always figured him for a pinger." Later we'd watch him walking down the street and wonder if he was still pinging. How would we know?

At least Jason knew how it worked. Now Jason's kids can send a pizza to their friends in Stockholm in five minutes, all paid for, but they don't know how it works any more than you do. This stuff is so slick you do not have to use any of your brain cells at all. Your brain cells are getting farther and farther apart from each other all the time. It's downright breezy in there.

Does it matter? If everything works by itself, does it matter if we get in a car that drives itself across the country and we can motor right through the Grand Tetons with our noses buried in our phones? I think it matters. I'd like to have more of a grip on things. And see the Tetons.

So I went to the Feedburner website and discovered it has all your-all's email addresses in it right where I can see them and maybe I should look into copying them down, in case I ever publish a novel or something and want to tell you about it. Also at the Feedburner website? I have the options of Buzzboost, Pingshot, and Chicklet Chooser. I do not know what to make of that.

I'm not touching anything. I'm taking my spleen on faith too. At some point, not that long from now, my spleen will go into Maintenance Mode and then give out altogether. I'm just glad in the meantime that I can't reach any of its option buttons.