Does Only the iPad Matter?

My local NPR affiliate, New Hampshire Public Radio, is holding one of its frequent fund drives. As it often does, it’s offering entry into a number of drawings for those who pledge (or, as I think is legally required, for anyone who sends the requisite contact information via an alternative method such as email). There are no fewer than nine separate drawings, yet only one prize ever gets mentioned on air or the front page of their website.

Not a goat!

Of course Apple’s iPad Air is a trendy item, and at $499 retail value for the 16GB version they’re giving away, it’s no mean pull even if you hock it. But there are other prizes, some with higher concrete dollar values and some perhaps more desired by many listeners, that get short shrift. Fortunately they’re all detailed at the radio station’s 2013 December Fund Drive page, along with the progression of drawing end dates. (The iPad Air drawing ends Dec. 17 at 9am.)

King Arthur Flour gift card – $250
Dec. 17 at 2pm

No joke, this is on my Dad’s Amazon wish list. Not the $250 part, because he’s not a greedy jerk leaning on his family to feed his bread-making addiction, but yeah, the dude likes King Arthur Flour. An iPad is a one-time purchase, and most Apple fanatics have purchased this latest iteration of the tablet already. Flour, on the other hand, is a consumable. You can heat and knead it into delicious baked goods only once.

Settler’s Green Outlet Village gift card – $500
Dec. 17 at 7pm

Not only is this prize worth a whole dollar more than the iPad, it can be spent at “over 60 nationally known factory stores” in North Conway, NH. Clothing! Shoes! Jewelry! Home furnishings! Food, glorious food! There is no app for stepping out in sexy, bargain-priced pumps. None.

Four Loon Mountain ski passes – ???
Dec. 18 at 9 am

Let’s not descend into reckless stereotypes about iPad users and skiers and the narrow sliver of joined space in the Venn diagram that describes them. The fact is, plenty of athletic folk enjoy their Internet and their touchscreens and their sleek aluminum casing. They probably shouldn’t be tapping away while careening down the slopes, but heck, winning both prizes is pretty unlikely. There’s no exact value for these passes, as it’s not completely clear what exactly one wins, but if it’s four lift tickets for the regular winter season, that’s worth up to – cripes, $324? It’s really $81 a day to sit on a chair that’s going up the mountain anyhow?

Super Fan Pack – ???
Dec. 18 at 2pm

Comprising “an NHPR Bluetooth Nano [speaker], NHPR Fleece Blanket, NHPR Baseball T-Shirt, an autographed Carl Kasell Pillow, Car Talk Shopping Bag, Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me Mug, a book by Diane Rehm, and many, many more items,” this package is even more impossible to precisely value. From the picture, this prize seems to include three bags as well as three cups or mugs and a small bottle of maple syrup. Delicious.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8″- $249.99
Dec. 18 at 7pm

Okay, never mentioning this prize is clearly favoring the iOS software ecosystem over Android. Enjoy your ghost check from Ghost Steve Jobs, NHPR.

Burque Jewelers Gift Card – $600
Dec. 19 at 10am

What’s this? A whole $101 more retail value than the iPad Air? For products that in the long run might just appreciate rather than plummet in value? Baubles with no practical utility, perhaps, but when humanity is inevitably reduced to roving hordes of barbarians, sparkly stones will be worth much more than metal and glass slates.

Four Attitash Mountain Resort ski passes – ???
Dec. 19 at 10am

Apparently Attitash is only 86.4% as awesome as Loon Mountain, because even weekend one-day lift tickets are only $70 each, or $280 for four. The market doesn’t lie.

Bose Wave Radio III with Bluetooth Music Adapter – $399.95
Dec. 19 at 7pm

As far as overpriced electronics go, Bose gives Apple a real run for its money (no pun intended). Both brands make good stuff, sure, but a load of money goes into large ads with lots of white space rather than product engineering. This Wave Radio probably does sound very nice. And it’s, you know, a radio, which you’d think a radio station would be psyched about.

Not everyone’s idea of the ultimate prize is a new tablet, is all I’m saying. It’s too late for this fund drive, but shoot, think about your messaging, NHPR.

Maybe offer a goat? Granite Staters would totally love winning a goat.

6 Lessons Learned from Going (Slightly) Viral

A recent entry of mine – an infographic from October 8 detailing certain, ahem, similarities between ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Torchwood from the BBC – suddenly started receiving a lot of hits two months later. (I say a lot. I mean a lot for me, a humble writer lazing away in the wilds of New Hampshire with blog technology from last century. So a lot, relatively.)

Scale omitted to preserve dignity.

Apparently it was shared by someone mildly influential on Facebook. My own site visits, however, were dwarfed by the amount of activity the graphic itself attracted on Tumblr. Over the course of two days, a single post was liked or reblogged nearly 4,000 times. Sometimes both by the same person, so we’ll say 3,000 people actively engaged with it. (Yes, that’s big for me. We’ll also say a billion jillion people saw it and guffawed without clicking anything for my ego’s sake.)

From the response, I’ve gleaned some valuable wisdom. As I share, feel free to re-share.

1. A little influence goes a long way.

I have no idea what Facebook post set off this mini world tour. Maybe someone saw the post when it was first published and remembered it in a later online conversation. Maybe someone stumbled upon it in completely unrelated search. I do know that one person with a strong network can create a ton more views than your average introverted blogger. Just like multi-level marketing schemes, a viral hit depends upon more people sharing at every subsequent fork.

2. It helps to be visual.

It’s unlikely an essay detailing the same parallels between two TV shows would have spread so far. Summing up an idea with easily digestible images gives viewers the chance to quickly get your message without talking them to death. As a writer by trade with what I often refer to as only rudimentary graphic design skills, this is yucky medicine, but it’s the whole concept behind sites like Visual.ly and GraphJam.

Not to mention random cat pictures.

3. You don’t have to be first.

There were plenty of people drawing parallels betwen Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Torchwood long before my little infographic. Long before Agents even aired, in fact. But a spin that readers haven’t quite encountered before can tickle their fancy enough to share it with the world.

4. Include attribution.

I really must thank the Tumblr user who included a link to my original blog entry when she posted the infographic on its own. Without a few people clicking on the source link, I might never have known that the content was making its way around. When I made a previous infographic for Star Trek‘s 47th anniversary, I had the presence of mind to include a shortened URL leading to the original entry in the image itself. It’s not perfectly trackable, or even impossible to edit out, but it’s much more likely to lead to an actual site visit than an image without any attribution at all.

5. Be very sure of your facts.

I could try to parlay it into a conversation about “what is race anyway?” or a justify it as shrewd commentary on “passing” or just admit that I didn’t really think to research Chloe Bennett’s ancestry. That kind of thing can make you look a little stupid.

Excerpting all these responses took way longer than a visit to IMDb would have.

6. Don’t expect a sustained bump.

The Internets, they are fickle. Frankly, there’s so much good content out there, it’s amazing any non-aggregator sites still have followings at all. See the sharp decline after the spike in the traffic graph above? Yeah. Don’t worry, if you read this blog, you’re still totally underground.

Never Do Anything Because Someone Else Is Better

Two pieces of sage advice hit my browser on Friday. First up, from Gawker’s feminist site Jezebel:

Apparently weddings are competitions now? This particular wedding was so geeky it had Batman and Iron Man (that’s two totally different comic universes, y’all), plus ninjas and medieval armor. No sign of the 6,979,231 other things deemed “geeky” these days, so really it shouldn’t be that hard to one-up this couple. Makes me want to go out and get married right now, just so I could combine retro video games, Star Trek, the TCP/IP stack, quantum physics, and designer board gaming into a single ceremony. Anyone with similar interests, a burning desire to win, and not necessarily any need for a lifelong loving relationship interested in collaborating? I think we could take the title.

You would be Mario. Obviously.

Publicly mourning heroic figures, on the other hand, has been a competition ever since Matthew added an earthquake to the moment of Jesus Christ’s death on the cross, making Luke and Mark’s “darkness” sound pretty tame by comparison. So it’s fortunate that victory could be declared so soon after last week’s passing of South Africa’s greatest statesman and civil rights leader.

The winning status message was plastered across all 20 stories of the Texas hotel’s facade in bright lights: a glowing reproduction of the South African flag. A fitting tribute, to be sure, and one that might not have reached beyond city limits without the amplifying power of the Internet. With the need for posting influential quotes and heartfelt remembrances of the man to TwitFace thus eliminated, social media users the world over were free to honorably retire from the contest and go back to taking selfies and sharing provocative headlines without reading the articles.

Write whatever you like to try and win the comment thread below. Winner will be declared by a self-appointed judge and will award no tangible prize.

When Did Wi-Fi Get So Difficult?

It all started with a misbehaving wireless connection. Every now and then, I was told, the connection would just drop and resume a few minutes later. A couple firmware updates and date/time adjustments later, the router still wouldn’t provide consistent signal. Fair enough; it was so old that it didn’t even have “2013” as an option in its “Year” dropdown menu. Time for a new router!

Unfortunately, new hardware came with new problems: rather than cutting out unexpectedly, this router just wouldn’t connect with one particular laptop. Its maddeningly simplistic setup instructions worked, sort of, on a convenient smartphone, but the only thing that got the laptop connected was totally disabling all security on the router, and that wasn’t a permanent option. Back to the store it went.

You might notice that the brand and model of the offending router were not disclosed in the previous paragraph. That’s because it was not, in the end, at fault. Oops.

For the next router setup, I wanted to be prepared. Was the problem the laptop? Was it the router? Was it a localized distortion in the space-time continuum? The answer would come with more data, and more data would come with more devices.

What every bookcase should look like.

The final inventory was something like this:

• Three Windows laptops
• One MacBook Air
• Two Android smartphones
• One Android tablet
• One iPad
• One Nintendo DSi
• One Roku
• Four wireless routers

Later I had a cookie. It was the best day ever.

By connecting and disconnecting each device to various routers, I came to the inescapable conclusion: that one laptop was messed up. I’d previously changed its wireless driver to one available on the manufacturer’s site, but a newer one was available through Windows Update. That, and also possibly upgrading Internet Explorer from version 7 to version 9, finally got the thing connected.

(For all you browser evangelists out there, IE wasn’t current because it was never used. Logically it shouldn’t make a difference to the network connection itself what version of a browser is installed, but we all know how deeply IE hooks into the Windows operating system.)

Any home networking horror stories to share?