Monthly Archives: October 2012

Dealing with spam on WordPress blogs

Social Networking, Technology, , , , , ,

One of the things that has bothered me with blogging is the overwhelming amount of spam I receive from bots and what I suspect just might be aliens from the Planet Xenon. Every now and then, for the sake of living an existence that equates to paddling upstream at the bottom of a waterfall, someone actually sends me a real blog comment. And most of the time, it would not surprise me if I delete it because it gets caught up in the tons of spam I receive as well.

I was reading an article today that was published a year or so ago by Mark of Bloggersjournal.com, and he made a bunch of interesting suggestions. I’ve always used Akismet, which is a pretty good spam collection service, but now I’ve installed a challenge (CATCHA) service that asks a random mathematical question (an easy one) before someone can leave a post. Let’s see how that works now. Of course, if you’re completely mathematically challenged, I apologize, but as I love math (those who know me definitely know that), it’s kind of my thing. I did decline the advanced calculus version, however, and the Sports trivia one would have kept me out of posting on my own site, so again, let’s see how this works out.

What amazes me is that this type of junk (the spam) actually exists. It serves no purpose, and I can’t imagine a SINGLE person in the world who actually buys anything that’s thrown at them with spam. Other than scamming someone who accidentally clicks on their junk links, I’ve not seen a single purpose behind it whatsoever.

But that’s just me, and people have often said I’m a bit strange. And not just the spammers either.

FTC offering $50,000 reward for someone to come up with a way to stop robocalling

Business, Technology, , , , ,
Now, honestly, if THEY were robocalling me….

The article from PC Mag (here) states that the FTC, frustrated by its own efforts to stop robocalling (translation: Throwing in the towel and hoping someone else can figure it out) is hoping you can figure out how to solve the problem. So, starting next week, you can sign up with the FTC and then upload your solution in all sorts of different ways.

However, I’ll come straight out and tell you how to stop this because most reader responses have been along the lines of “make criminal charges that stick” or “fine them into the Dark Ages”. Those solutions won’t actually stop it because the fact is that they’re usually calling from blocked numbers or from out of areas where we have no jurisdication. The solution is simple: Make it mandatory that phone service companies (landlines or cell phones) allow you to block numbers from calling you if you don’t want to hear from them. Right now, the majority of my advertising calls (that I don’t want) come from phone numbers that if I could block them, I’d never hear from them again. Sure, they could call from another number, but I’d block that, too, and then they’d have to keep paying more and more money to be able to call me. Their best alternative is to just stop calling me as it becomes cost prohibitive.

The problem is that if you have any cell phone, good luck making that happen. I’ve had an iphone with AT&T for years, and they don’t offer the service. It should be standard with your phone, as it doesn’t take any effort for them to implement this whatsoever. When I left AT&T during a short six month period when I was trying something different than the iphone, I was with Sprint, and they didn’t offer the service either.

Because no phone services allow you to do this (unless you jailbreak a phone, which a lot of people like me aren’t comfortable doing), you are forever hostage to anyone who has your phone number. Right now, I am getting nonstop phone calls from a bill collector who is trying to collect for someone named Munroe (sic). No idea who Munroe is, and I can’t get them to stop calling me. Instead, they say: “If this is not Monroe, hang up.” That would be fine IF I CALLED THEM, but in fact they called me, which means that no matter how many times I hang up, they call back a few days later with a robot caller asking for Munroe. I have zero way to shut this down, other than turning off my phone and going back to live in a cave.

The problem I perceive is that there are companies out there who don’t want to give us the freedom to stop these types of calls. That’s why it will never happen. That is why no amount of work the FTC does to come up with a solution, nothing is going to be done about it. If the FTC was serious about stopping this problem, they would have turned to the phone companies and asked them to come up with a solution (OR THEY WOULD DO IT FOR THEM). But the FTC has no backbone, so they’re trying to pretend they’re actually doing something about it when they’re not.

Why I won’t be buying the new Kindle Fire HD or whatever it’s called

Books, Business, Technology, , , , , , , ,

For some bizarre, masochistic reason, I have bought practically every version of the Kindle that has been made. The last one I bought was the Kindle Fire when it first came out. And that device is the reason I have decided to pass on anything in the future made by Kindle.

My needs are pretty simple. What I wanted was a device that could allow me to read books (which it does), maybe listen to a bit of music (which it kind of does, as long as you put your entire music library on Amazon’s cloud), and can place certain documents I need to read onto it as well (that one completely fails). For days, I have been trying to get my Kindle Fire to recognize a pdf document that I need to refer to quite often at work. It can’t. Or it won’t. Not really sure if it has a mind of it’s own, but it won’t read the document, no matter how many times I have tried to make it do so. I sent it using the email address they gave me to upload documents. After establishing that the email account I sent it from was legit, it should have been a breeze. I mean, my old Kindles did it just fine.

But no, it doesn’t see it no matter what I do. The document shows up on my “Manage Your Kindle” page, but my Kindle Fire just pretends it’s a stupid rock whenever I try to upload it/download it/pray to the Gods of Shaniaism, or whatever. It just won’t do it.

The truly sad thing is that my Kindle app ON MY IPAD 2 reads it just fine. But I bought the Kindle Fire so I could use these documents that can’t be read.

And don’t get me started on wifi access. It has the ability to connect with wifi, but 9 out of 10 times, it can’t seem to do anything once it connects. It doesn’t matter if I’m at work, at home, at the Pentagon, in the front lobby of Amazon. When it comes to wifi, they need to stop using a ten year old child hacker to develop their infrastructure.

Which tells me that whatever NEW Kindle they created is as fubar as this one. I mean, this was the expensive baby that the Kindle was selling as the be all Kindle. If they can’t make their best model do something simple, then I’ve given up on them. I’ll still use a kindle app, but I’ll be doing it on other devices, because, to put it succintly, Amazon sucks big time when it comes to making products.

“Rich Dad/Poor Dad” Media Sensation Robert Kiyosaki author files for bankruptcy–Another Oprah-inspired trend of fake experts

Business, , , , , ,

The article

Basically, Robert Kiyosaki, an author I’ve read in the past because I fell for his Oprah-inspired, get rich rhetoric until realizing he wasn’t really saying anything that actually seemed usable, owed $24 Million to the Learning Annex and didn’t pay it, so he lost a trial over the issue, and even though Forbes claims he’s worth $80 Million, he went the bankruptcy route to avoid actually paying his bills. I’m thinking of doing the same thing to keep AT&T from collecting on that cell phone bill they send me every month, but I haven’t pulled the trigger on that one yet.

This reminds me of a story I’ve mentioned before in the past concerning my adventures in South Korea, when I came up against the businessman known as “he graduated from Harvard”. I was working for a for-profit school at the time, and I kept hearing about this infamous Korean businessman who everyone talked about with great respect because “he graduated from Harvard”. Then the school I was working at fell into financial hell, and it was astonishingly bought by none other than the man known as “he graduated from Harvard.”

The whole curriculum was changed because “he graduated from Harvard” had great ideas for what was going to make this school as great as he was. A few months later, a new change was implemented, which consisted of paychecks forgetting to be filled out and management forgetting to answer any of their phones. One of the co-workers at the school (who was new), mentioned that she knew the man known as “he graduated from Harvard” and she wasn’t sure she would be talking about him because she was still trying to get her backpay from a previous place she worked at which he had owned as well. Hearing from other people, I started to discover that the guy known as “he graduated from Harvard” had stiffed quite a few people in the past, and this was most obviously his next attempt at grabbing a bunch of cash and running away before anyone figured it out.

I remember talking to him one day, when he was being heralded around like Caesar after returning from Gaul. He actually introduced himself as “Mr. Kim. I graduated from Harvard.” I said, “Great, I worked on my Phd at Western Michigan University and went to West Point.” He smiled, pretended he didn’t understand me (even though I spoke to him IN KOREAN) and then wandered off to introduce himself to someone else as the great Korean man who graduated from Harvard.

Soon after that, after not receiving my next month’s paycheck (two in a row), I left Korea and came home. Not even sure what happened to that school and the infamous “he graduated from Harvard”. What I found fascinating is that he had an entire life schtick of ripping people off by informing everyone that he graduated from Harvard.

This is the same sort of feeling I get from Robert Kiyosaki after having read his book. I’m sure the Learning Annex has its own version to tell as well. Hey, maybe everything was on the up and up with him, but he’s going to have a difficult time attracting people to his cause in the future. Although if “he went to Harvard” is an example, there are suckers born every minute, meaning that the money flow just never ends.

Does Censoring Profanity in Music Diminish the Musician’s Message?

Music, Writing, , , , ,

I picked up the new Pink cd the other day for her album, The Truth About Love. What I noticed is that a lot of her music this time around is filled with profanity. Personally, I don’t mind because I really like her music. But then it got me to start wondering about the purpose behind swearing in music, whether it was necessary, and whether or not the song would change its meaning by filtering out the swearing. This was brought home to me on the shuttle bus trip from the parking lot, when I heard “Blow Me (one last kiss)” on the radio speaker playing on the shuttle. The song, from Pink’s new album, is the first release, and the words “fuck” and “shit” appear quite frequently, including a part where the chorus sings: “I’ve had a shit day/You’ve had a shit day/We’ve had a shit day”. The radio version doesn’t even try to address this, basically sounding like: “I’ve had a it day/You’ve had a it day/We’ve had a it day”. In other words, they just removed the voiced part of the song to make the word miss the “sh” sound to it. This got me to wondering if the song actually still maintains the same meaning. The complaint in the song is that she wants to break up with whomever it she’s with and it’s part of the realization that she had a bad day, he had a bad day, and they both had a bad day, but she still needs to pull the trigger on the relationship. With “I’ve had a it day”, I’m not sure the point is completely made.

But going back to her previous album, Pink Greatest Hits…So Far, her hit F***** Perfect was probably the best example of the problem inherent in a musician trying to be mainstream, sell records, AND be played on the radio.  The actual song was titled Fucking Perfect, and she sings those words throughout the song, but in the radio version, the word “Fucking” is aired out, and all you hear is silence during that moment while she’s saying “Perfect” so you get the impression the song is called “Perfect”. What’s significant about this is that the whole song is about forced conformity, and her real dilemma is that people are forced to be “fucking perfect”, not just perfect. It’s somewhat ironic that the song is changed on her to conform to radio standards, and I would not have been surprised to hear that there were probably radio and studio executives who might have been advocating for her to call the song “Perfect” just to avoid the problems of disc jockeys not being able to say the correct name on the radio when announcing the song. What I did notice on the few radio stations I listed to was a tendency to just call it “Perfect.”

So, my question is: Does changing the author’s wording also change the meaning of the song? Granted, in some genres of music, and with some musicians, there is a tendency to add profanityjust to look cool or hip, but one thing I’ve always noticed about Pink’s lyrics is that she doesn’t appear to be doing it just to get a reaction. This latest album appears to have more blatant profanity than the previous one, but I’m still left thinking that that is just a part of her writing style, and that she probably talks a lot like she writes lyrics.

Am I Wasting My Time With This Blog (does anyone even read it)?

Computer Games, Memoirs, Relationships, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , ,

For some time now, I’ve been wondering how many people actually read my blog, if any. I mean, I know a few people read it, and those are mainly my close friends. But other than a half dozen, I’m not sure what I’m doing here really equates to a useful use of my time. Considering I’ve been doing this blog for years now, one would think that it would have received a bit better of a reception than absolutely little to none.

Strangely enough, I get lots of responses to my posts. But they’re all from spammers. And I mean A LOT of responses from spammers who are basically trying to sell their stuff, attempt to steal my ID, or whatever else they’re doing when they attempt to get people to click on their useless links.

But not so many people. Every now and then I’ll get a 1/10 vote on an old post of mine, where someone generally didn’t understand I was being ironic (or sarcastic) and then thinks that when I argue that Iran is doing good things by hurting women again, I’m being sarcastic, in that I don’t support them in their actions. Instead of any response from anyone, I’ll get someone who gives me a 1/10, a thumbs down, or a rant about how men like me are keeping women in the Middle Ages of sexual politics, meaning they didn’t understand the article, or didn’t read far enough into it to care enough to try to understand it. That gets really frustrating when that kind of stuff ends up being the only responses you tend to get.

This blog was designed as a place for a political scientist/communications person who sees the world through really bizarre lenses (including an anarchist one as well) to talk about all sorts of issues, ranging from politics, to game design (I used to work as a game designer years ago), to academics (I have more degrees than I can count, which is really an appeal to our horrible educational system that didn’t teach me to count very well), to humor, to my comic strip The Adventures of Stickman and the Unemployed Legospaceman (which you can access from the links on this page), to technology, to my unusual dating history (in which I end up having to fear almost every woman I’ve ever dated), to pretty much anything else. Yet, I don’t think this blog gets out to anyone. Or to very few.

I’ve tried all sorts of “have your blog seen by millions” techniques, but I’ve mainly failed. No one but spammers seems to know I exist. If others are seeing it, they’re being very quiet, like that strange person who sneaks into my house and steals all of my left socks.

The blog was originally a showcase for my novel writing, but that never seemed to do much either. Years later, and a dozen or so novels later, I’m as popular as someone who has yet to write his or her first word.

So, I’m going to throw this out to you all. If you read it, let me know. If not, I’m probably going to give this a few weeks to make its way into the cobwebs of the web and then close down my blog for good. Why waste time and money on something nobody is enjoying?