Yes, Another Blog

The world can always use another blog.

If you have ever posted anything on any of the social community sites (Craigslist, Backpage, Kiijji, eBay) you will sooner or later get an email response from a a person that usually makes no sense whatsoever and always includes a picture with an email address for you to respond to.

For example:

Now, I know this is some sort of SPAM fishing email that wants to snare you into some devious, evil, trap therefore I have never responded to the email pictured. But, I really want to know who the woman behind the little signs is. Actually, I really don’t want to know her, I want to know what she really looks like. I mean, come on… take a look at that chest!!! She reaches out of the computer screen every time she emails me and hypnotizes me with her enormous endowments.

From what I can tell in the pictures is that she must be in her early 20′s, about 5’2″ to 5’6″, somewhere between 110-120lbs, and due to skin tone and fingernail shade I am willing to bet that she is either a natural blonde or a ginger.

Yes… I am obsessed but I will not fall into her devious trap. She will not get my email.

Yes, I am weird… but someone has to ask these questions.

First of all, did you actually think I was not going to post today. Check your calendars.

I’ve been telling people about this when I heard that Cox was actually thinking about doing this back in 2007. People told me I was nuts.

Time Warner then went out and actually did it in January 2008 in Beaumont, TX. And now they are rolling it out in four new cities. (DSLReports.com, The Consumerist.com, BusinessWeek, Austin360.com)

Metered Billing Internet is here.

Basically this means that you pay a set price and you are only given a pre-determined amount of bandwidth. More likely it will range from 5 to 40GB per month. If you go over that you will pay an additional $1 per each GB you go over.

Why is this such a bad thing? With the advance in video streaming and especially high definition streaming, your bandwidth will continue to go up and you will pay dearly for it.

Right now, the iTunes HD movies are about 3GB each. Think about it. If your ISP caps you at 40GB for $50/month that means you can only download 16 movies before you are charged extra. That does not count whatever bandwidth you use for regular surfing and email. You will begin to see some serious bandwidth overage charges coming real quick.

Why are they doing this? As my Cox contact told me, ISP have realized that people cannot do WITHOUT their internet and will pretty much pay anything to keep it. Bandwidth is the new Gold and they know it. We have become so hooked on our Internet habit that we cannot imagine being without.

From what I have been told, AT&T is next and Cox is ready with a plan but will wait to see how the others do with their rollouts. I can guarantee that Comcast will match any competitor’s caps or rise their prices if their caps are higher than the competition.

BTW… This is NOT an April Fool’s Joke.

This is another sad day in journalism. One of the best newspapers in the West in closing its doors and publishing its last issue on Friday. The RMN was about to celebrate 150 years in print.

So sad.

From the RMN article:

Rich Boehne, chief executive officer of Scripps, broke the news to the Rocky staff at noon today, ending nearly three months of speculation over the paper’s future. He called the paper a victim of a terrible economy and an upheaval in the newspaper industry.

The Rocky was founded in 1859 by William Byers, one of the most influential figures in Colorado history. Scripps bought the paper in 1926 and right away entered into a newspaper war with The Post. That fight ebbed and flowed over the course of the rest of the 20th century, culminating in penny-a-day subscriptions in the late ’90s.

In the past decade, the Rocky has won four Pulitzer Prizes, more than all but a handful of American papers. Its sports section was named one of the 10 best in the nation this week. Its business section was cited by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers as one of the best in the country last year. And its photo staff is regularly listed among the best in the nation when the top 10 photo newspapers are judged.

Even the LA Times had an article about how LA based businesses were getting shaken down by Yelp sales reps that by paying for Yelp advertising they could move or remove bad reviews. And if the business did not have any bad reviews already and they refused to pay the bad reviews would all of the sudden show up.

But Yelp-savvy customers also mean Yelp-savvy competitors. Inzunza at Mamma’s Brick Oven Pizza said she noticed last year that every time a nasty review appeared on the site about her restaurant, a glowing review popped up for a pizza place down the street.

“We decided we had to advertise on Yelp because we wanted to make sure we could play up the good reviews,” she said.

and

On the other hand, Joompong Kongchareon, owner of Joom Bangkok Cafe in Los Angeles, is taking no chances. He said he decided to pay $300 a month for Yelp sponsorship after a salesperson from the website called “over and over” shortly after his restaurant opened about a year ago.

“If you don’t give them money, maybe they will put a bad review up high,” he said. “That would hurt my business. People come to us from Yelp.

“This is insurance that I won’t get real bad reviews at the top.”

This article (from the East Bay Express) is shocking!!! If only a few of the accusations are even true then Yelp will lose all credibility and it will mean that Yelp cannot be trusted for any reviews.

Here are some of the shocking excerpts:

“Hi, this is Mike from Yelp,” the voice would say. “You’ve had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You’ve had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those.”

and

But when John asked Mike what he could do about his bad reviews, he recalls the sales rep responding: “We can move them. Well, for $299 a month.” John couldn’t believe what the guy was offering. It seemed wrong.

and

Indeed, Yelp does pay some employees to write reviews of businesses that are solicited for advertising. And in at least one documented instance, a business owner who refused to advertise subsequently received a negative review from a Yelp employee.

and

Several business owners likened Yelp to the Mafia, and one said she feared its retaliation. “Every time I had a sales person call me and I said, ‘Sorry, it doesn’t make sense for me to do this,’ … then all of a sudden reviews start disappearing.” To these mom-and-pop business owners, Yelp’s sales tactics are coercive, unethical, and, possibly, illegal.

and

Negative reviews are not the only bait that Yelp employees apparently use to attract advertisers. Some business owners believe Yelp sales reps remove positive reviews when they refuse to buy an ad.

and

Robert Gaustad, co-owner of Bobby G’s Pizzeria in Berkeley, said that about a year ago a Yelp sales rep offered to “move good reviews to the top to make us look better.” Since declining to advertise, approximately fifteen to twenty of his restaurant’s reviews — mostly positive — have been removed for reasons he can’t figure out.

Gaustad said his complaints have gone unheard but that a Yelp sales rep told him his complaints would be heard if he advertised.

and

But if the accusations are true, Yelp is compromising the integrity of its reviews to make a buck, which contradicts its identity as a user-generated, consumer-first web site.

First it was their draconian content right grab TOS and now this…

Facebook Won’t let you Remove Dead Relative’s Page, Per “Policy”.

Granted that they changed their tune after they got the negative publicity but damn!!!!

Sometimes you have to take a step back and get your priorities in order.

Blogging will resume soon.

I kept a track of the daily electoral vote prediction for the last week. How close were they?

10/27/2008

10/30/2008

10/31/2008

11/01/2008

11/03/2008

And finally, the final results on 11/05/2008

I honestly think the polls fully underestimated the sheer number of people that were going to turn out to vote.

118,345,383 and still counting. That is one, if not the largest, turnouts in US history.

Congratulation America.

Apathy is dead. Stomped and killed on 11/04/2008.

I will be at my local precint first thing in the morning. I figure it will take 3 hours to vote. At least.

It’s worth it America!

VOTE!!!

Today, The East Valley Tribune announced that it would lay-off 142 employees, 40% of their staff, and cut back to a 4-day-a-week free printed publication. The online edition will continue.

This announcement makes Phoenix officially a one newspaper town. The Arizona Republic will remain the only major newspaper serving the Phoenix area including the East Valley.

Nothing good comes from a one-newspaper town.

Very sad day indeed.

In the last six-to-nine months the airlines have raised their prices due to the high crude oil prices. The price of crude oil has gone down more than $40 in the last couple of months…

Why hasn’t the price of airline tickets gone down along with the oil prices?

The world would be much better place if more poeple were as honest as this young lady. At 22 years of age she shows the wisdom and carefree attitude of someone that has been in the “Hollywood” business for decades… maybe not.

Either way, she has some honest and refreshing views on the this tabloid world we live in.

From her GQ interview:

Sexual double standards make Fox angry, and when conversation turns to tabloid-flamed scandals surrounding other teen stars who’ve been photographed in various stages of nudity and seminudity, she goes off: “With any of the Miley Cyrus shit, or any of that Vanessa Hudgens shit—I would never issue an apology for my life and for who I am. It’s like, Oh, I’m sorry I took a naked, private picture that someone is an asshole and sold for money. I’m sorry if someone else is a dick. No. You shouldn’t have to apologize. Someone betrayed Vanessa, but no one’s angry at that person. She had to apologize. I hate Disney for making her do that. Fuck Disney.”

Can I get that on the record?

“Yeah. Fuck Disney.”

There goes your career.

“Yeah, that was probably a bad move—they own everything. But it’s not right. They take these little girls, and they put them through entertainment school and teach them to sing and dance, and make them wear belly shirts, but they won’t allow them to be their own people. It makes me sick.”

It seems like the closest you’ve come to a controversy like that are those paparazzi photos of you reaching under the table to grope Brian at a restaurant.

“I don’t understand why they’re so scandalous. When they first came out, it was like, Megan Fox was giving Brian a blow job in pub—I mean, uh—a hand job in public. First: Who gives hand jobs? Who’s given a hand job since seventh grade? Not me. And who does it at a café on a public street? I touch him all the time. It’s just like, if you have a girlfriend, you grab her butt or whatever. That’s all it was, but it became a big deal. I don’t know why. For me, touching Brian’s dick for two seconds—that’s not part of our sex life. That’s me playing around; you know, you just cup it a little. For a few seconds.”

Growing up I always heard people tell me that they remembered where they were and how they felt the exact moment they heard that JFK had been shot. They either heard it via the radio or were watching Walter Cronkite break up on the air as he announced that JFK was dead.

I never understood what they meant.

How can one moment in time be so sketched in people’s memories that it would still bring a slight tear to their eyes 20 years later.

I can tell you exactly where I was at 5:46:26am (PST) on 9/11/01. I can tell you exactly where I was for the next few hours. I can tell you exactly how I felt for each of those hours.

Our JFK moment. Now I understand. I wish I didn’t.

So I wake up this morning ready to take on the world when I discover that my high speed internet (HSI) is down. Noooooooo!!!!!

How am I supposed to get any work done without HSI?

Using my iPhone to surf once in a while is great but doing every day tasks at 3g speeds is not my idea of fun. How did we ever survive using dial-up? For those younger than 20, there was a time when we actually connected to the Internet using our land phone lines at the incredible speed of 19-56kbps. Yes, kbps. That’s nearly 100 times slower than the iPhone’s 3g connection.

Of course when HSI is down it also means my cable TV is down… Wait!!! I don’t have TV? Just shoot me now.

I grew up on MTV. I grew up on the VMA’s. They were THE awards show for my generation. But last night they lost every single shred of credibility they had left.

First of all, every single performance was lipped synched. Badly lipped synched I may add.

Second, the show was a third-rate, public-access caliber mess. It was boring, the host was dreadful, and the performances were phoned-in except for a couple notable exceptions (ie, Pink, Kid Rock).

But the ultimate disgrace was the fact that Britney Spears got 3 awards (Video of the Year, Best Pop Video, and Best Female Video) for "Piece of Me". WHAT!!!

You have got to be kidding me. "Piece of Me" was by far the worst video of the year. If you look closely it was edited so heavily to hide Britney’s obvious lack of talent and interest. Yes, I said interest.

Britney stopped caring years ago and her career and performances (if you want to even call them that) show it.

It is obvious that this trio of awards was an MTV plan to get Britney back on the road to normalcy, if that is even possible. They gave her (yes, gave her) the awards in hopes that she will start performing again (did you noticed that I didn’t say performing well) and hope that she will use MTV as her vehicle to promote anything she does.

It may pay off in the revenue department in the months to come but MTV lost something a lot more important. Any and all credibility.