Oh Amazon

I had to flip the links in another post because I felt like listening to "Nice Guys Finish Last" by Cobra starship, (I like to treat my own blog as a playlist) and the copyright bastards had deleted the the song from youtube, the website that I consider to be my personal music server.

I spent about 10 seconds despising the copyright bastards and lamenting the fact that they could be making money but aren't because they are idiots that tried to legislate away the future. Which reminded me of this amazon affiliate program thing--when I edit my blog I see this add saying I can "monetize" my blog if I becone an "amazon affiliate."

I decided to check it out just now.  Here is a list of stupid questions that I was forced to answer:

1. What is your website(s) about?

Its not about anything.   Oh...thats1 a product.  I should link to it.  Wait, no, Despair Inc doesn't list that product on Amazon.  <-- that was a lot of work


2. "How to you drive traffic to your website?"

I don't was not an option I could select.

3. Which of the following topics best describes the topic of your website(s)?

Yeah, none of the options applied.

4.  What type of Amazon items do you intend to list on your website(s)?

So they expected me to go through each of their categories and know ahead of type what category whatever I feel like linking to the stuff belongs to.  So...I checked them all.  I'd like to imagine that somewhere in the amazon data centers, an application written by somebody I'm not going to like is now patiently waiting for me to link something in the Home and Garden section.

5.  How else do you monetize your website(s)?

This...ok this was wasn't too painful.

6.  What is your primary reason for joining the Amazon Associates Program?

"On a whim" / "to try it out" / "i like clicking on links" / "I don't have a life"
are not answers you can select.

7.  How did you hear about us?

Blogger has this entire big integration thing going on, with annoying and specialized editors for clicking links, and a big tab that says "Monetize," but the people writing the survey didn't think to include blogger as an option.  They also neglected to include any general category that could describe the process of how I became aware of the amazon associates program.  So, I told them I read about it in a blog.

Conclusion

Because I became an "amazon affiliate" there is this big...whats an antonym of handy?  Oh.  Unhandy.  I didn't see that coming.  Anyway, there is this big, unhandy amazon link editor search box thing on my screen now.  It takes up a fair bit of space and I have a feeling if I ever use it, I am going to have to open Amazon.com in another tab first to find what I'm looking for, and then use this miserable little toy once I know exactly what to search for.  I hope I'm not revealing some kind of trade secret here, but little do you know Amazon actually uses unique identifiers to...identify each of their products.  They are text, and are roughly the size of the identifiers that everyone else with a database in the 21st century uses.  You would think that all I need to do is tell blogger that I want a link to a particular product, and identify that product via its exact identifier.  But no.....they wanted to make this easy to use.

Also, because I was an idiot and signed up for the amazon thing, Blogger switched me from the Old Editor that Worked to the New Fancy and Awkward Editor That Doesn't Work As Good.  Creating a link on here used to take me roughly...0.75 seconds (not an exaggeration).  With this new editor, creating a link takes...well, when I press ctrl+v to paste the web address, that address ends up anywhere on this page except for the text box where I was trying to paste it into.  So, if you happen to see a url in thehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimiddle of a sentence, that is why.  Is this...is this really that difficult?  Seriously.  We've had text editors that can cut and paste since...well, since 1976 apparently.  Let me fire up a calculator.  Yeah, thats 34 years.  We've had cut and paste for 34 years, but apparently the iPhone could only do it recently, and blogger is still working out the kinks.  Wow, in fact...everything is more difficult with this editor.  And its sllooooowwwwww.  I am edging closer to just writing my own software to do this.

Well, anyway, here is the entire point of this post.  Well, first I want you all to know that in the time it took to write this post I could have watched an episode of Dollhouse, and then...done something else for the remaining 20 minutes.  Ooh, dollhouse.  Let me link that.  Ok.  I'm not sure what I linked, but I think it was the right thing.

Well, anyway, take two:  Nice Guys Finish Last, by Cobra Starship.

you got style

you got grace

but kid you try so hard and she just laughs in your face

yeah you're a...

nice guy 

with the wrong attitude

she want a bad boy

Footnotes

1. When I wrote that "thats" in this blog post, meaning "that is," the missing apostrophe in the contraction is not a grammatical typo but in fact a deliberate omission, both to annoy people like you and also because I was too lazy to hit the apostrophe key, even though its right here next to my pinky finger.  Say hi pinky finger! '''''hi'''''