I love four-day weeks and weekends; I'm sure I get more (or at least, just as much) done in four days than five days at work, and it's great to come back to work after a nice lengthy break feeling properly rested...
But it's already well into April, and I haven't been out with a lobster fisherman yet! To sea, that is... I really need a trip every month if I can, because a lot of the patterns I want to see are seasonal. Requiring, you know, seasonal coverage. It's a shame that the weather won't oblige. Instead, I spent today doing useful things in the office, which is always nice because I can go home for lunch - stretch my legs (it's a five minute walk home), see the cats, watch 15 minutes of quality daytime tv.
Home feels odd. L has gone away for a while (I don't know how long) to sort himself out, and it's strange going back to living a single crazy-cat-girl existence. But I've been busy trying to sort myself out, and have both applied for a job and successfully lobbied my boss for support to do a PhD at work. So not much time to be sad, really!
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maple_clef- The world is your lobster
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What is this Amazonfail business? I keep seeing it mentioned but no one has said what it is!
Amazonfail sort of exploded over the Easter weekend, and is to do with Amazon stripping lots of books of their sales rank, making them effectively "invisible" to searches, etc. with the potential to do quite a lot of harm to sales. Many of the books contained some sort of LGBT content - including nonfiction (i.e. guides to explaining homosexuality to children, biographies, rape survivor accounts) and literary fiction, such as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit as well as erotica. The initial stock response from Amazon was that the titles contained "adult content", although this wasn't often the case - and many het erotic titles far more "adult" and potentially objectionable were unaffected. This caused a huge shitstorm, which has only started to be addressed by Amazon (mostly because of the holiday period).
It was theorised that there might have been a concerted attempt by certain fundamentalist religious types to blacklist titles they objected to, taking advantage of Amazon's complaint system by bombarding it with requests which - given the short staffing over the holidays - weren't vetted as thoroughly as they might have been. It has been pointed out that Amazon is on the whole a fairly liberal corporation, and doesn't have a track record of being discriminatory.
On the whole, the overwhelming impression I got is that they mostly failed by handling it really badly, underestimating the huge offence the whole affair was causing (although the timing wasn't in their favour, to be fair - and bad news travels at lightspeed on the internet). The responses I read ranged from extremely angry to cautious "let's see what they say". A lot of the damage was done by the absence of any explanation from their PR department, and all there was to suggest what had happened were some rather glib replies to authors who'd objected to what had happened.
I gather that they've now apologised, and put it down to a glitch, although I reckon they'd be advised to be a little more specific than that, because they risk losing a lot of custom.