I have decided that one great way to do this would be to make it easier for my readers to tell me about interesting posts that they come across and feel are worth my time to read or worth my linking to in my next weekly round-up post. I have set a few ground rules to try and remove some temptation to abuse my system. However, if people do start abusing it and I begin receiving suggestions to read a ton of crappy posts, I might have to discontinue it’s use.

Anyway, you can read more about the rules and what exactly the submission entails on my Submit A Post page. It’s a pretty simple page that has a few rules and some information at the top and a submission form at the bottom. You might want to bookmark it to make it that much easier to use when you do come across those gems that I should link to.

For future use, the “Submit A Post” page will be accessible under the “Pages” section of my sidebar.

If you’re using IE 6, you might have a hard time reading Beyond the Rhetoric due to a recent theme change, but if you dare to brave it (or are using a different browser) you might like to read Michael Kwan’s adventures as he unplugs from the matrix and reflects on the experience.

If you’re looking to edit your WordPress theme to show the number of comments a given post has without the viewer having to click through to the post itself, an excellent tutorial was written and published this week. Reading it also gave me some other ideas regarding themes I’m considering designing. So not only is it a good tutorial but might be a source of inspiration as well.

One “Happy New Year” post that was a little late came from Enkay due to some computer problems. However, since he doesn’t have quite the readership that Shoemoney has, I have a feeling that his pleas to Intel are not going to be answered.

Over at Singing the Sky, Michelle turned her “Happy New Year” post into a short review and photo gallery from her recent trip to Houston. While all didn’t go as planned (stupid data plan) along the way, they had a good time and we all get a chance to see the evidence of her mad photography skills.

While he won’t give us the winning lottery numbers or his various online username/password combinations, Dennis wants to know what you would like to see on his personal site since he apparently cannot come up with content on his own I have experienced similar sentiments when it comes to posting but haven’t ever received much response when I asked this question, so click on over and give him an idea. Perhaps he is too busy leaving comments throughout the blogosphere to come up with post ideas…

Well, there you have it: a smattering of posts from places within my usual haunts in the blogosphere. Much to the dismay of these bloggers I regularly feature in these (not quite) weekly roundups, I have an idea that may increase the variety of sites you see linked to here so be sure to subscribe to my feed and not miss anything.

Readership

The first goal I’m looking at is to increase my readership in 2009. By the end of the year, I hope to have 250 subscribers (RSS and RSS by email) as reported by Feedburner and be over 150 visits per day. Right now I’m sitting at about 26 subscribers and 17 visits per day (thank you everyone who is included in these numbers) so this will be quite an increase, but I think with a bit more regular posting and some additional promotion/marketing I should be able to hit this goal. If you haven’t subscribed yet, subscribe to my feed and help me reach this goal.

Posts

In 2008 I didn’t post near as much as I would have liked and I’m not sure that other aspects of my life will slow down enough to make much difference in 2009, but I am going to try and post more as well. I only had 109 posts in 2008 and I am going to make it a goal to have 250 posts this year. Also, I am changing my target post frequency from two posts per day to one. This way, when I do have time to churn out 2 or 3 posts on a single day I can schedule them for future days and have less days without posts.

Additional Sites

While this isn’t a goal for this site, it is related in that it is an online goal for myself for the coming year. I do have a couple of site ideas floating around in my head that I have yet to launch, and I want to get those 3 sites up and running, but they will not be sites that I expect to make much (if any) money from. In fact, I probably won’t even be monetizing two of them but I want to develop them anyway for my own personal reasons. In addition to these, I am making it a goal to come up with and develop 3 additional sites that I haven’t thought of yet that will be niche sites developed with the intention of making money. I might have an idea that will work for one of them but that is yet to be seen. Thus, by the end of 2009 my goal is to be running at least 7 or 8 sites including this one.

Money

While I haven’t been too successful making money online so far, ok I haven’t actually made any, I am making it a goal to be making at least $200 per month online by the end of the year. This is a combined total between any and all sites that I am running at that time. Hopefully an increase in readership here will help this site begin earning an income. Also, getting some additional income bearing sites up and running should make this a fairly easy goal to reach.

Well, I know they’re not as indepth as the goals some of you have been posting, but these are my goals for 2009 and hopefully I’ll be able to find the time to fulfill them all! Wish me luck and I hope everyone had a safe and fun time celebrating the new year!

I must admit that while I’ve heard the name several times throughout the blogosphere and most everyone has probably either heard of him or knows who he is, I’ve never really taken the time to find out more. This means that until reading Dennis’s review I don’t know that I’d ever been to his personal site or Blogging Questions before. I may have been to one or both of these sites once or twice and just not remember it, but you get the idea. However, after briefly checking them both out and leaving a couple of comments on each, I will likely be subscribing to both of their RSS feeds before the end of the week.

I really like the idea of Blogging Questions, it is a great place to find very comprehensive information about blogging and the blogosphere. One of my favorite things about it is the fact that due to it being a sort of community site with multiple authors as well as all of the individuals who participate via comments, multiple points of view as well as discussion of those ideas can be found about any idea.

If you’re interested in blogging at any level from considering starting your first to experienced and well seasoned, you should check out Blogging Questions to share your thoughts and opinions and interact with other bloggers.

As far as his personal site, I haven’t taken as much time as I would like poking around yet, but he shares his experiences, thoughts, and ideas. Oh, and he shares a bunch of internet and blog related stuff there too. This combination makes it a very well-rounded blog that will keep you entertained as well as informed. Like many of the other personal sites I read, he shares his life with his readers and makes the site a place where there is a major sense of community.

If you have some free time (not just a minute or two) and are looking for some new sites to visit, I highly recommend you check these sites out. I know I’ll be becoming a regular at both of them! I may have had an ulterior motive for writing this post, but the content of this post is 100% honest!

For the most part, I agree with what Derek said, especially the last section “Sorry, that doesn’t fly in our house.” However, like Derek, I do foster some disagreement with the facts presented in the section “So what does that have to do with television and video games?” So many times, facts like these are used to try and show a cause and effect relationship when in fact, all they are really showing is a correlation. While Derek’s article focuses more on parental involvement and raising children, this article is more focused on the misconception of a causal relationship rather than a correlation.

What is shown by the multitude of studies and statistics available relating to violent video games and violent behavior in real life is a correlation, not a causal relationship. These studies need to dig a bit deeper to discover the true cause of this real-life violent behavior. Those individuals who seek eliminate violence from the video game industry in hopes of eliminating it from society are on the wrong track.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not one that believes that video games or sexual television programs are to blame for the problematic behavior of children.

Actually, I believe that the children playing these games and watching these programs have a larger problem - parents that are not involved in their lives.

Even though the above is a direct quote from Derek’s article, I feel exactly the same way. it’s not the movies or the video games, it’s not the television programming or the music, none of these things are the factors that are causing youngsters to become aggressive, violent, promiscuous, or dissident. The largest factor in these people’s lives is their parents.

The parents are to blame on several levels: involvement, home life, rules, morals, etc. A brief set of questions that can be used to evaluate how much blame should be place on the parents could look something like this:

Of those individuals who become violent, agressive, and all the rest:
How many had parents that were involved in their childhood?
How many had a home life that included family time, outings, and activities?
What kind of rules (if any) did their parents set and enforce while they were growing up?
What efforts did their parents make to teach them morals and right vs. wrong?

I don’t have any statistics or answers to these questions because they are not the statistics that people try to gather, it seems to be much easier to find a more superficial cause no matter how accurate it may or may not be. I guess this makes a bit of sense though, it’s easier to ask and/or find out if a person found entertainment through violent video games than to go through all the questions above.

The studies that have been done show that those individuals who watch violent programming and play violent video games are more likely to engage in those acts than individuals who do not regularly watch violent programming and play violent video games. There have been many different studies that have come to this same conclusion and it is evidence that is hard to argue with. However, note the keyword “likely” as in it’s likely (not guaranteed) that you will get exactly what you asked for this Christmas. In the same way that not everyone will get everything they wanted for Christmas, not everyone that watches violent programming or plays violent video games will engage in violent behavior.

It is my belief that there would be a much higher “likelyhood” and probably even a causal relationship between having a lack of rules and parental involvement at home and engaging in these behaviors. If an individual has few or no rules to follow as a child, he or she will be less inclined to follow rules elsewhere.

The studies that have been highly publicized thus far, have expected outcomes that individuals who play violent video games engage in violent behaviors and individuals who don’t play the games don’t engage in the behaviors. However, in doing their research and gathering this information, there have undoubtedly been many examples that did not fall in to these two categories. I know there are many individuals who play violent video games yet do not engage in violent behavior, I personally know many people in this category. Also, it would be my best estimation that there are many people who engage in violent behaviors that have never played a violent video game, perhaps they didn’t have/couldn’t afford video games. Furthermore, people were engaging in violent behaviors (armed robber, assault, murder, etc) long before video games were even available so it would be a bit far-fetched to say that the games are the cause of the behavior. I have no doubt that there is a correlation between the video games and the behavior and the studies have left little room for doubt, but this does not mean there is a cause and effect relationship.

In today’s western society, there is a correlation between gender and hair length. The correlation is that men have short(er) hair and women have long(er) hair. However, being male does not cause one to have short hair and being female does not cause and individual to have long hair. There are men with long hair and women with short hair. Nonetheless, if I were to take a quick survey asking participants their gender and the length of their hair, it would probably show that men have shorter hair than women. What would not be shown by a 2 question survey, however, are the underlying factors that determine hair length (occupation, personal preferences, etc) even though these are the things that “cause” a person to keep their hair a certain length.

In closing, I’d like to leave you with one final thought, knowing that it’s more about the parents and how a person was raised than the games they play that cause a person to engage in socially unacceptale acts, by blaming these behaviors on the video games we are only increasing the correlation that the studies show. I say this because the people (parents) who pay attention to the “warnings” and “studies” and limit what games their children play or movies they can watch are the same ones whose children would have not engaged in violent behavior to begin with. The children that are most likely to engage in violent behavior will continue to play the violent video games no matter what studies show or what warnings are published because they are the ones whose parents are not involved enough to do anything about it.

So, as I was penning my previous post, I had the Chrysler Financial website in my browser and switched over to it in an effort to describe them better than:

the company that handles dealer financing of new vehicles and other such issues

I was hoping that I would be able to find some sort of description on their website saying who they are and what they do. I did find the following description on the website:

Chrysler Financial and its trained professionals offer a broad range of financial services including wholesale finance plans, dealer finance plans, dealer services, retail consumer finance plans, lease programs and insurance programs.

However, for the purposes of the rant/story that I am telling decided that my original text would be sufficient. Then, tucked away at the bottom of one of the pages (not on their homepage) I saw a link titled “News & Media” and decided to investigate. I didn’t expect to find the information I was originally looking for, but figured it couldn’t hurt to look and clicked on it.

Not surprisingly (based on the corporate blog and news site) the part of the site it took me to is not updated on a very regular basis and had no reference to my original questions. However, there was another link (titled “Chrysler Media Site”) that I thought might be worth checking out. Amazingly, this appeared to be the portion of the corporate site that relates to Public Relations and there were even some press releases there that I could read.

After looking through the available press releases, I did not find the information that I was looking for, however, I was able to locate contact information for two separate individuals presumably within the public relations department and decided to give one of them a call.

Fortunately, I was able to get ahold of Shawn Morgan in the Media Relations department of Chrysler LLC and she had a few moments and agreed to let me do a brief phone interview. My questions (the same ones that started this adventure) and her responses along with some additional thoughts that I thought of while typing this up are below:

Me: How is this going to affect the employees that work in these factories?

Shawn: Normally, they would have December 24th - January 2nd off for the holiday season. Due to market conditions, this break has been extended. The affected employees will still be getting paid through state unemployment agencies and Chrysler will be supplementing that state unemployment. At this time it hasn’t been discussed what percentage of their normal pay they will be getting, but that all goes through the UAW (or in Canada, the CAW) and the contracts with the unions. Plant managers, their staff, etc may or may not be coming in to work depending if they have things such as paperwork and planning that need to be done. It is the production that is being suspended.

Additional Thoughts: I should have asked how the pay structure normally works from December 24 through January 2 and how that normally affects employee wages as well as if those days were going to be treated as normal so that the only affected days would be December 19-23 and January 3-19. Also, I wonder if the managers and such that still have stuff to do will be getting regular pay or still qualify for unemployment or how that would all play out.

Me: Is this going to affect other employees that don’t work in the factories (i.e. yourself, accounting department, etc)?

Shawn: No, we will all be off from December 24 - January 2 as usual. The rest of the time, we will be working as usual according to our regular schedules.

Me: How much is Chrysler going to save by doing this? Is there a figure available as to the cost savings?

Shawn: That is unknown, the reason we are doing this is not necessarily to save money, but because we don’t have as many orders for vehicles as usual. People are buying fewer vehicles so the dealers are not ordering as many and therefore we need to cut production.

Me: How many fewer vehicles are going to be produced as a result of this shutdown?

Shawn: We don’t discuss our volumes with the public.

Additional Thoughts: This could probably be approximated by looking for approximate numbers of vehicles produced by Chrysler in a year and dividing that number by 12.

Me: This is going to affect all brands under the Chrysler LLC (such as Dodge and Jeep) and not just the Chrysler brand, correct?

Shawn: Yes

Me: It is just the manufacturing/production shutting down and other departments such as advertising and research & development will not be affected, correct?

Shawn: That is correct.

Well, that pretty much sums up my interview. There was a bit of additional discussion in regards to some of these issues, but nothing pertinent to this post so I have left it out. I hope this gives you a little more insight into exactly what it is that is going on in regards to Chrysler closing their plants for a month. I know I am happy to have found this information and am able to share it here with all of you.

A huge “thank you” goes out to Shawn for allowing me to interview her and provide us with this information. I just wish the contact information would have been a bit easier to find in the first place.

Update: It seems that there have been some updates to the various company news and blog sites for Chrysler LLC and their various brands as a result of their getting approval for $4 billion from the TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) as a loan to help bridge the current financial crisis.

I’m sure that by now everyone has heard at least something in regards to fact that Chrysler is shutting down it’s factories between December 19, 2008 and January 19, 2009. However, how many additional details are known? In my quest for additional information, I haven’t really been able to find a whole lot and wanted to share my adventures with you all.

When I first started seeing this story come through my RSS reader Wednesday, the above information was about all that was available. Of course the AP and other sources included some numbers in the article that talked about the amounts of money the different companies have asked for in the “bailout plan” and overall sales reports, but there were no specifics to be found anywhere. Some of the articles mentioned that this was announced in a letter that was sent to Chrysler employees, the UAW, and it was supposedly also posted to their website. However, I was unable to find the letter anywhere on the internet.

This left me with a few questions that I wanted to get answered:

How is this going to affect the employees that work in these factories?
Are other employees that don’t work in the factories going to get special treatment?
How much is Chrysler going to save by doing this, does this really cut costs?
How many less vehicles are going to be produced as a result?
Is this going to affect all of the brands under Chrysler LLC or just the Chrysler brand?
Is just the manufacturing shutting down or are there other departments such as advertising and research & development that will be affected as well?

Looking through the company blog and news portions of the Chrysler site painted a picture of a company that does not update their website on a very regular basis and very little information (about anything at all) was available there. Finally, I happened to stumble across this New York Times article that partially answers one of the questions by including the text:

Workers at the plants will be laid off during the down time, but a supplemental unemployment program ensures that they will continue to receive most of their pay.

So we know that the workers that will not be working will at least not be completely without a paycheck during this period and for most purposes can view it as an extended vacation over the holidays. In that case, it might not be such a bad deal and most people might not mind being in their shoes. However, what is considered “most” of their pay? If you get 51% of what you were getting before, you’re still getting most of it. So, in retrospect, perhaps the question isn’t answered after all.

Well, back to these unanswered questions. Since the internet was not helping to answer these questions, I thought perhaps I could get the answers and put them on the internet. If not, perhaps I could at least get the answers for my own knowledge and not put them on the internet if I was told not to. However, I still needed to get the information. In order to attempt to do this, I looked around Chrysler’s website for a public affairs or public relations type phone number that I could call to ask some of these questions to and/or perhaps be pointed toward the letter that was supposedly online. However, I was unable to locate a Press Release section and I was only able to locate one phone number.

I called that number and it connected me with a Warranty and Recall department. I knew these phone agents would not have the information I needed and explained to the individual who answered the phone that I was looking for a Public Relations office. He told me that he didn’t have that number but he could give the the number to a different department that would be able to help me out. Well, the number he gave me was the number for the financial division of Chrysler, and by financial I don’t mean investor relations (they are privately held by the way) or dealing with company finances. This was the number for Chrysler Financial which is the company that handles dealer financing of new vehicles and other such issues. The agent who answered the phone advised me that he did not have any number or email address for a public relations department but that I could send an email using the customer service contact form on the website.

Well, I thought, that’s the end of that story. I have no numbers left to call and I don’t want to send a generic customer service email that may or may not get a response from someone who can help me. I was going to write the above post, be done with it, and just watch what happens with the rest of America.

However, that was just not meant to be, check back tomorrow to see what happens in the next part of this adventure.

Those of you who are visitors to not only my site, but also visit Derek Semmler’s website on a regular basis and pay attention to the comments may recall some conversation in the comments of this post regarding my giving PerformancingAds a second chance.

Well, the time has come that I have reinstalled the required code so that a PerformancingAds ad region is again displaying in my sidebar. However, it appears, at least for the time being, that I am experiencing the same issues that I had originally. I did email the representative that was commenting on Derek’s site so it will be interesting to see what he has to say about the situation or if he will be able to get this all resolved for me.

I will give the program another couple of weeks to see if things get straightened out. If not, I will just remove the ad code again.

PDA and iPhone Plugin Adjusted

Awhile back, I read a post somewhere (I thought it was at Jason’s Random Thoughts but can’t seem to find the post now) that talked about a plugin that would help a WordPress site load faster and be more viewer friendly on cell phones, PDAs, iPhones, and other portable computing devices.

I loaded the plugin onto this site and after testing it out thought that it was working pretty good. However, it’s not always possible to make everyone happy and Apple-product-loving Andrea decided that she didn’t like the way the plugin made my site display on her iPhone. since I personally perfer the way it makes my site look on my HP iPaq, I didn’t want to disable it. I did want to account for the only feedback I have received on the plugin so far and decided to adjust the “user agents” that the plugin is applied for. Those of you viewing this site on iPhone and iPod products should now see the site without the plugin applied and anyone else viewing on a portable device should see it with the plugin.

I hope this is a happy medium and if anyone has any additional requests or thoughts/comments on this plugin, feel free to let me know and I will see what I can do to accomodate you!