Big Dan’s Site

Thanksgiving was great we had a quiet meal at home; Mom did almost all the cooking all in all it was a great holiday. Dinner was so good that I took a 3 hour nap afterward. That nap meant I couldn’t fall asleep last night so I was carousing around the internet, catching up on MySpace, emails and all that stuff. Around 6 AM, I check my feeds and the local newspaper has a story that one of the local Wal-Mart’s parking lot is full. LINK

What makes this news? What the hell makes a parking lot being full news?  Later this evening when I awoke there’s a story in that same newspaper about how a Wal-Mart worker was tampled to death by people breaking down doors to get in for sale (Note: This is not the same wal-mart mentioned above). How sad is that people are so hungry for a few dollars off 3rd world made, electronic junk that they kill someone in the process.

Personally I think black Friday is one of the biggest media perpetuated farces going. Anyone who’s ever watched TV or picked up a Sunday newspaper in America knows that retailers will use any excuse for a sale. We’ve got President’s day sales, Memorial Day Sales, Labor Day Sales, back to school sales, hey it’s sunny outside today sales well maybe not that latter but you get the point any excuse to move more products by feigning a sale. Black Friday is just another sale except that you hear about it on the news, the sale all of a sudden comes news worthy. The week of Thanksgiving no doubt the every single night the evening news will have something about Black Friday sometimes the “reports” could easily be mistaken for a commercials. “News” programs start plugging products around the beginning of November under the guise of gift guides. Wal-Mart and other retailers send cease and desist letters to webmasters who list it’s black Friday sales on their websites. No doubt knowing full well that you cannot claim copyright on prices but hey it drums up more publicity. It’s ridiculous.

Black Friday the epitomizes of the commercialization of Christmas. I’ll write on the commercialization of Christmas at another time, it sad but not the focus of this post. Retailers advertise lower than usual sale prices for black Friday yet never seem to have enough stock to keep up with the demand. As Black Friday happens every year I have a had time believing that retailers cannot source and plan for it. I wouldn’t doubt if they only stock 5 or 10 of those drastically reduced price flat screen, made-in-Korea TVs just to get you in the store to buy other stuff. If you woke up at 5AM in order to trek all the way to the mall and then they don’t have what they advertised why not get something else any way right? Why waste a trip? We already know that big chain stores have products called loss leaders. Those are popular products that they deliberately sell at a loss just to get you in the store to buy it where more than likely you’ll buy something else too; chances are at a considerable profite for the retailer. It’s the old razor sales model. Sell the razor handle cheaper then cheap then charge an arm and a leg for blades. Consumer printers do the same thing with ink.

What really irks me about black Friday is that people are so stupid. They don’t seem to see it coming. Do people not realize that there are sales all year round? Do people not realize that retailers just want to lure them into the store? Do they realize that you can sit at your computer in your underwear and find sales any day of the year? Do people really enjoy waking up at 5 AM, going out in the cold, battling crowds, and traffic just to save a few dollars? Even if you save $20 on an item is it really worth all that aggravation?

Keep in mind, this is coming from a guy who goes shopping as late as possible in the evening or sometimes in the middle of the night to avoid crowds. I love kids but cannot stand them running around and screaming like Indians in stores unchecked by their parents. I don’t like being bumping into by carts, nor do I like feeling rushed and not being able to just browse people everyone’s in a rush to go wait on a checkout line and fight their way out of the parking lot. Heck I wear my headphones when shopping so I don’t have to hear the rude people yelling into their cellphones, broken English over the loud speaker, and kids throwing temper tantrums. Chances are if I have to wait more than 5 minutes on a checkout line, I’m gonna be pissed and not very pleasant to the cashier even though admittedly it’s normally not their fault; more than 10 minutes and the cart is getting left there with everything in it while I head to the nearest exit.

Yet I participated in Black Friday once before I became so hardened to, sham sales, crowds, traffic jams, and shopping in general. I think it was 2001 or 2002. I really forget the reason but I agree to go with my friend’s mother to help her I’m not sure if I was supposed to help her pick out the electronic gifts, drive, lift furniture, or a combination of all 3. I remember getting up at 4:30AM leaving the house by 5 to get to a store with an already packed parking lot, fighting for a shopping cart. 4 hours in the store and 3 full shopping carts later but the time we got to the checkout counter I felt like I’d been through a battle. The battle of crazy mom’s vs. sales clerks. Only everything before the checkout line was the ‘calm before the storm’ every freakin’ customer in front of us (of where there had to be about 20) had questions about prices 1/2 ‘needed’ a manager to fix some perceived error. Literally after an hour and a half on line, 20 minutes to check out. We headed out to the parking lot which was utter chaos. A half hour of packing the car later we were on the road only it took 20 minutes to get out of the parking lot. People straggling all over the place, no doubt just as frustrated as me made backing out of the parking space daunting and getting out of the parking lot was just as fierce with three or four separate fender benders being tended to by the police whom I felt really sorry for was way to much for this guy.

A half hour after getting out of the parking lot we were home and unloading the car. Get this my friends mother wanted to go for another round. I think I could’ve killed her just for asking. I declined and spent the rest of the afternoon helping to wrap and hide gifts. Ever since that one black Friday I’ve swore off Black Friday and generally try and stay out the stores between now and January 2nd.

You all know me I spend a lot of time online and on a daily basis I probably read the equivalent of 3 or 4 newspapers with all the various reading I do. Aside from my sites, I visit about 8 or 9 forums every day although I only contribute to about 2 or 3 it’s still a lot of reading and writing. I track many blogs via RSS, my feed reader lists over 90 subscriptions to be sure not all are posted to daily but some are high traffic and get 30 + posts per day and most of it I just scan through titles to see if anything interests me. If don’t read my feeds for a week on Saturday I have over 1200 new items.

I’ve found that a lot of it is just plain noise. That is stuff I don’t need to know or am not interested in for one reason or another. A few of the feeds I subscribe to are aggregator feeds, that is they pull feeds from a number of sources and incorporate them into their own feed. Planet Ubuntu is one of the aforementioned aggregated feeds. Now I’ve picked up many great Linux tips from Planet Ubuntu but still the signal to noise ratio for me is probably 1:20. That is on average I find one post out twenty useful. Lifehacker is probably about the same for me.

One thing I found myself literally wasting time on is reading comments on blogs. I’ve literally lost an hour or two just reading comments that had absolutely no value to me. Now please don’t get me wrong sometimes blog or news site comments are good and useful but most of the times I actually feel stupider for reading comments. Sites like Youtube, Lifehacker, Slashdot, Digg, etc all seem to have some of the most juvenile comments I’ve ever read and I feel dumber for reading them. A couple of the marketing blogs I follow like Shoemoney seems to have a bunch of commentors that are so far up the owner’s arse they mise well just bend over. Shoemoney is obviously a very successful internet marketer and I’ve picked up some good information from his blog but some of the commentors bow to him like he’s a God and I cannot stand reading it; Matt Cutts blog is the same way too at times. Get over your man crush and add something useful!

I found that multi-authored business oriented blogs tend to have the best comments. Forums often have a much better signal to noise ratio. Blogs are more broadcast oriented where as forums are conversation oriented. I’ll give you 10 to 1 odds that any forum trafficked by adults has more productive comments than any blog. Blogs tend to be more ‘clicky’ where as forums are more open to new members and conversation.

In conclusion, I’ve pretty much completely stopped reading blog comments unless it on a topic that I’m very interested in. I read more on forums and less on blogs these days. I’ve shaved about 2 hours off of my daily reading time. What are you reading habits online?

My favorite hosting company’s invoicing practices tick me off. Every month they send me an invoice around the 20th. The invoice says amount due upon receipt but then they list the invoicing date as the first of the following month. It really doesn’t matter much to me as I don’t pay them until the first of the following month anyhow BUT it annoys me because I always worry about them considering my payment late and possibly suspending the account. It hasn’t happened in the 2 years that I’ve been with them but it still worries me none the less. I’d be satisifed if they listed the due date as the first of the following month. It makes more sense to me because by listing the invoicing date as the first of the month they’re effectively saying it was sent out on the first of the month even though I receive it 9 or 10 days ahead of time.

After posting my Spammer’s Creed I look in my spam folder here on Word Press and find this site which scraped my Netbook post. The only problem is he did it wrong, he only scraped a snippet of my post and linked back to me twice. I’ll take the link, thank you dummy.

Now look at my name (the first link) in this screen shot.. I lol’ed

Idiot Scraper

After posting my Spammer’s Creed I look in my spam folder here on Word Press and find this site which scraped my Netbook post. The only problem is he did it wrong, he only scraped a snippet of my post and linked back to me twice. I’ll take the link, thank you dummy.

Now look at my name (the first link) in this screen shot.. I lol’ed

Idiot Scraper

I got my greasy little paws on a copy of Windows 7, installed it on my laptop and writing this blog post with it. I have lots to say but I’m going to try and be consise to I can fit a lot in without boring the crap out of you. Before someone asks how I got a copy, yes I pulled it off a torrent and no I don’t feel bad about it because I will be buying two copies when Windows 7 is released provided it’s as nice as it is now.

First off the install process was amazingly streamlined and a heck of a lot faster than both XP and Vista. It can be left unattended as one you start the install process no questions are asked until the system is completely installed and you are ready to enter your user name.

Once installed you’re asked to choose a username and password which is quick and easy. One thing I do notice is a password hint is required. After choosing a username and password my laptop showed me a list of wireless networks available to me and asked me to choose which I wanted to be my default, that’s a nice touch and makes since. After that it asked me to setup something called a “Home Group” which I skipped but it looks like a way to share files and folders with other computers on your network more easily.

What struck me at first was how fast I went from creating my user account to a usable desktop with Vista it took even my powerful desktop more than 2 minutes on first log on. Windows 7 is much much faster than Vista, it feels a lot more polished and smooth. I’m hoping it stays this way when it’s RTM’d (released to manufacturing). I hope a whole bunch of fluff is not added to gum down the system. The second thing I noticed is the side bar is completely gone. You still have gadgets but they float on the desktop as opposed to taking up valuable screen real estate. The weather gadget is very nice and even expands nicely with a forecast.

Windows 7 Weather Small

Windows 7 Weather Big

After installing Win 7 I installed a host of programs I normally install. Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, Putty, WinScp, Filezilla, Open Office, Abiword, Songbird, Winamp, Adobe Reader, cCleaner, Yahoo Messenger, Pidgin and the Gimp and a few others which I forgot about.  Almost everything just works, even Avast Antivirus works out of the box.  I just found out that Chrome won’t connect to the internet, it loads fine but cannot find any websites.

Most window’s programs interfaces have been over hauled, not completely overhauled but more-a-less polished. Here are some screen shots for you:

Windows built in apps also got a make over: Wordpad and Paint both got the new ribbon interface like is in Office 2007. I like it but Paint still doesn’t do anything all that useful. It would be nice if it could resize an entire image! Wordpad still doesn’t have spell check, I guess they want you spend a couple hundred on Office for spell check.

Windows 7 WordpadWindows 7 Paint

Other than that the Wireless network popup from the task bar is a lot nice, you can actually connect to networks from it rather than having to open another window as you current have to in Vista.

Windows 7 Wireless Networks

Next up Window’s now has themes ala XP. In Vista there were no themes just individual elements that could be changed via Right Clicking on the desktop and hitting personalize. It looks like Windows 7 will have packaged themes that change the desktop background, Aero color, and points with just 1 click.

Windows 7 Appearence Preferences

I’ve saved the best for last: UAC preferences! Finally the uber annoying UAC isn’t just an on or off setting you can tweak the level and therefore number of User Account Control in Vista.

Windows 7 User Account Control

What are you hoping to see in Windows 7? I’m hoping Paint gets some new features and maybe even spell check in Wordpad. Other than that Win 7 looks on point thus far.

Is simply to make the most money with the least amount of energy. Whether it be email spammers, link spammers, or search engine spammers they’re all the same. In lots of ways it’s no different than any wise businessman keeping overhead as low as possible and maximizing profits is just good business sense.

However most spammers aren’t business men. We have come to think of them as scum of the earth. The main reason we think of spammers as scum of the earth is because they use other people’s hard work for their own gain. Look at sblogs (spam blogs) who often scrape others blogs and then ping the blog back vying for a track back in the blog’s comments they stole content from. I see these all the time in my wordpress spam. Most bloggers spend time writing and researching posts and along comes a spammer to copy the posts word for word and then try and get a link from the original poster.

Forum spammers come in four varieties:

1. Some register and post a bunch of spam right off the bat; this is the easiest to combat for moderators simply delete the posts, ban the user, and IP.
2. Others register and masquerade as a regular member, often posting decent content and after a while start dropping their own links in posts. These are the hardest to manage because in some respects they do contribute arguably good content but the link spam is a problem. Who knows where those links are going to wind up going in the future. Is your average member going to be tricked into clicking the link and winding up in some kind of trouble?
3. Post Padders/Sig Spammers: These are especially prevalent on webmaster’s forums that limit signature links to members with more than X posts. A new member will sign up and post a slew of one liners in order to get up the number of posts required to have a signature then 1 of 2 things will happen either they will create a signature and never come back again or will stay there posting nothing useful just to increase the number of times their signature is shown. Post padders do nothing but waste your member base’s time by having them read through the drivel. Forum admins are split over this some will let it go on because it inflates their member and post numbers thus makes them seem busier and gets them better advertising rates other like myself are more strict and delete the posts then warn the member.
4. Cookie Stuffers: Also prevalent on webmasters forums. The spammer will embed a 1×1 transparent image that puts a cookie on the users computer. Most often cookie stuffing is done with eBay and hosting companies with affiliate programs that depend on user’s cookies to credit the affiliates account with a percentage of the sale. Cookie stuffers are really hard to spot and often the only way to catch them is by viewing the posts in plain text some how. When I see a post padder on a vB forum I always search for more posts by that user the search results page shows a snippet of each post in plain text. If the spammer is lazy and stupid, as most are the image shows in image tags right in the beginning of the post.

Search Engine Spammers are simple they try and game the search engine to display their spam blog, made for adsense site, or affiliate site first in the listings. Search engine spammers are for the search engines to deal with and there isn’t much decent webmaster’s can do about it.

Now for something that’s going to probably get me a lot of nasty emails: What’s the difference between a spammer and internet marketer? Not much. Decent marketers don’t cookie stuff of course but decent hardworking internet marketers are what keep the internet going they spend money to make money by hiring other people to work for them with site development, graphics, and copy writing. Pay for ad campaigns, buy domains, and usually have information on their site in addition to plugs for products. Without internet marketers the internet would probably be a very boring dull place. If any thing all marketers add a certain spice to things.

NOT!

I cannot be the only person in the world who thinks that if a business cannot survive on it’s own it should fold. We bailed out that banks, the bail out failed a month later we got the secretary of the treasury saying we need to go a different direction so obviously those hundreds of billions you handed out like candy on Halloween did squat. Now you want us, the American people, to believe you’re going to rescue the auto industry, a dinosaur that is no longer relevant?

Now don’t get me wrong I understand there is a whole ecosystem surrounding the auto industry; Hundreds of suppliers that have thousands of worker and factories. Perhaps for that reason we should rescue them but here is what I say we do: Let them go bankrupt and restructure to get the blood sucking united auto workers union under control and manageable.

I think the biggest part of the problem is the union. These guys are getting paid way too much when you add in benefits the manufactures are utterly screwed. When you have some guy getting $40/hr plus benefits and retirement to put tires on a car you’ve got problems. Wal-Mart has guys changing tires for less than $10 an hour and it’s more work than just putting on a set of tires.

Japan, China and all the other nations that are leading the sales numbers for cars don’t have the UAW to deal with and on top of it have much cheaper labor to boot. Detroit just cannot compete with that. Don’t get me wrong unions had their place back when (legal) immigrants were getting taken advantage of because they didn’t know the system and in some industries labor unions still service their people well however UAW union has Detroit over a barrel. The UAW has serviced it’s members well but screwed over the auto industry and is now we’re risking the UAW screwing over all Americans by bailing out Detroit.

Secondly Detroit is putting out utter crap in the last 3 years I can only think of maybe 4 models that appealed to me. I can think of a lot more foreign models that hit my eye. Why?

I say let ‘em fold, get their labor situation under control, and then hire some overseas talent for design.

NOT!

I cannot be the only person in the world who thinks that if a business cannot survive on it’s own it should fold. We bailed out that banks, the bail out failed a month later we got the secretary of the treasury saying we need to go a different direction so obviously those hundreds of billions you handed out like candy on Halloween did squat. Now you want us, the American people, to believe you’re going to rescue the auto industry, a dinosaur that is no longer relevant?

Now don’t get me wrong I understand there is a whole ecosystem surrounding the auto industry; Hundreds of suppliers that have thousands of worker and factories. Perhaps for that reason we should rescue them but here is what I say we do: Let them go bankrupt and restructure to get the blood sucking united auto workers union under control and manageable.

I think the biggest part of the problem is the union. These guys are getting paid way too much when you add in benefits the manufactures are utterly screwed. When you have some guy getting $40/hr plus benefits and retirement to put tires on a car you’ve got problems. Wal-Mart has guys changing tires for less than $10 an hour and it’s more work than just putting on a set of tires.

Japan, China and all the other nations that are leading the sales numbers for cars don’t have the UAW to deal with and on top of it have much cheaper labor to boot. Detroit just cannot compete with that. Don’t get me wrong unions had their place back when (legal) immigrants were getting taken advantage of because they didn’t know the system and in some industries labor unions still service their people well however UAW union has Detroit over a barrel. The UAW has serviced it’s members well but screwed over the auto industry and is now we’re risking the UAW screwing over all Americans by bailing out Detroit.

Secondly Detroit is putting out utter crap in the last 3 years I can only think of maybe 4 models that appealed to me. I can think of a lot more foreign models that hit my eye. Why?

I say let ‘em fold, get their labor situation under control, and then hire some overseas talent for design.

If you don’t follow tech news you may have not heard of netbooks yet unless of course you watch QVC who was selling one as a special value the other day. In a nutshell netbooks are small form factor mini-computers bigger then a smart phone but smaller than a regular laptop. For the most part they have single core processors, limited RAM, and not all that much hard drive space. The current models run either Windows XP or Linux.

What interests me with netbooks is it’s really the first time that computers have been put onto the sales floor that don’t sell based on power. Since the PC has been in production tech-savvy people have bought on raw power of course price was always a factor so geeks would always buy a computer that they felt had the most bang for the buck. Historically laptops are more expensive than desktops. For most users laptops have more stringent requirements than a desktop. They must be portable enough to not weigh down users when traveling yet powerful enough to run Windows and productivity apps. Couple those requirements with the battery life and you get great technology that suffers on based portability. Laptop processors are almost always lower powered then desktop processors. With desktops you don’t care much about size and for the geeks among us desktops are all about raw power and expandability.

Enter netbooks these are small, mini computers if you will without a whole lot of processing, memory, or storage space that pro port to do all that most users want to do: Email, Browse the web, and instant message. On the “computing scale” netbooks fit somewhere between smart phones and laptops. Sure netbooks can run the latest MS Office but you probably wouldn’t want to wait for it to load or deal with delays whilst working with documents but they do serve a great purpose which is letting users do lightweight work with a lightweight machine no muss no fuss.

When I look at the specs of a higher end netbooks I chuckle because I launched and managed some of my best websites with a computer that had worse specs than these netbooks. Sans screen size my old computer had a marginally faster processor, less memory and a little more storage space than the high end netbooks available today.

What particularly interests me about netbooks is the fact that we’ve moved from the most power as we can squeeze into a computer mindset to a task oriented mind set. When you look at computers in terms of power, the people who need really powerful computers are mostly people who work in multimedia; graphic and video production and even then they don’t need all that power all the time. Netbooks represent just that we don’t need a Ferrari when a Chevy will do the job. I’m interested to see where netbooks go as far as penetration, usage, and market share.