Behavior I Don't Want to Encourage

Since I'm a blogger who has a handful of people reading his rants -- even though those rants have been thin on the ground lately -- I get the occasional pitch from marketers, asking me to promote this whatzit or mention this thingamabob. I'm entirely in favor of people sending thing to me for free -- e-mail me if you have anything in that line -- but I'm grumpier about offers that don't include the sweet touch of the Package Fairy, or which have that faint whiff of shadiness to them.

(A few days ago, I was offered untraceable money via PayPal -- though, tellingly, it was only after the fact and "if the client was happy," which I assumed meant it was just as solid as it sounded -- if I would post a link, recommend it, and never mention that it was sponsored. I politely demurred, of course -- I probably could be bought, but I don't go that cheap.)

But, today, someone asked me to post an infographic about an oscilloscope. Why? I have no idea. I guess SF is congruent to real science, if you squint really hard, but that hardly seems like a good enough reason to hit me up for it.

It was completely random, there was no whisper of quid pro quo, and oscilloscopes are pretty neat. So what the hell -- here's an infographic about oscilloscopes.

The maker of that particular oscilloscope -- Tekronix, which I thought also made some kind of consumer computer peripherals (networking stuff, maybe), though their website shows only technical measuring tools and similar gee-whiz Buck Rogers stuff -- would really like it if you clicked here to learn even more about oscilloscopes, including a spiffy Tutorial page!

But the next time a marketer wants me to do something, I'm going to be looking for some tangible benefit out of it.