lonecity.com

About a year ago I finally broke down and bought an HDTV.   I really wanted one but I just couldn’t make myself pay the two or three thousand dollars that it was going to take to get one. I ran across a deal on a marked down return at sears and just couldn’t pass it up.  It isn’t a large tv by most peoples standards, but a 40″ sony LCD was big enough to put the itch to rest.  I payed just over a thousand for the set. 

Everyone knows that electronics go down in price rapidly as new ones come out.  Nowdays you can get visio’s and a few other brands with bigger screens than my sony for the same price as I got it on markdown for.  It really is a beautiful tv though, even if it isn’t the latest model with all the bells and whistles.  It does make for one hell of a cool monitor though.  I’m actually typing this blog on it right now. 

Anyhow what I wanted to blog about this week was the outrageous price of tv wall mount kits.  Now I know after having worked in retail for numerous years that the price of a product has nothing to do with what it is worth.  Pricing is directly correlated with how much the average sucker can be made to pay.  The guys going out and buying three thousand dollar tv sets obviously have big money they are able to spend.  Therefore the accessories cost big money.  Even if they are just a stamped steel bracket…

For the last year my big screen lcd tv has set atop a cheap plastic shelf that used to be home to my old small screen tv because I couldn’t bring myself to spend $150 or more on five dollars worth of steel.  As mentioned before, I have the computer connected to my tv.  I also have a ups system powering both.  (Uniterruptable power supply)  Yesterday it decided it was time to put in a new battery.  The UPS is a flea market special that I payed a dollar or two for so there is no chance I’m going to hunt down a new battery to go inside.  Unable to tolerate the beep every three seconds it became time to make a change.

Since I had decided I was going to have to get behind the tv stand and replace the UPS with a surge protector, and I knew the horror of wires and such I was about to enter I decided it was time to go all out and hang the tv from the wall.  I still haven’t overcome the unwillingness to pay $150 for a couple of metal bars, so I decided to head on down to the home depot and build my own tv wall mount bracket. 

Was it a success?  Well I’m typing this now, so you know the tv didn’t fall off the wall and break.  Was it cheaper?  Maybe,  I spent about $30 altogether for all the hardware.  The tv sets exactly where I wanted it, and it It looks great.  Then why only maybe?  Because it took me about fifteen hours from start to finish, counting in the hour or so I spent stopping off to grab a bite to eat.  Running back and forth to the hardware store, Drilling holes in the steel, designing it and redesigning it in my head, ect. 

Lets do the math here: 15 hours x $12 per hour + $30 in parts = $210.  Now I’m sure it would have taken me at least two hours to hang the tv even with a premade mount.  So the cost would be more like $175 if I had bought the mount.  At the end of the day, this diy project was more expensive to do it myself.  I have $120 more in the bank now because I concider it as having paid myself but it really wasn’t cheaper.  That is just one more day out of my life I spent working that I could have spent doing something fun. 

Overall the most important question is: Was it worth it?  This is a firm yes.  I’m a glutton for punishment I guess because even though I figure building the mount should be counted as work, at the end of the day and after looking back on it, I was doing something fun.

Just for posterity and to save anyone who stumbles on this article looking for information about building a tv wall mount some searching, here is what I finally settled on that worked and was strong enough.  There is a kind of metal beam that is sold that has clips to attach conduit to it.  I ended up buying one of those rails and cutting it into four pieces.  Two attached to the tv and two bolted to the wall.  Then I used the clips that attach to the conduit and two pieces of conduit to attach the rails from the back of the tv to the conduit, to the rails mounted on the wall.  Now if this were mounted on the cieling that would have been enough, but since it is mounted on the wall, the tv would slip down the channel if using just the clips.  The last part of the design was to drill a hole through all four rails in the same place on the sides.  I put a U-bolt through the rail, half inside and half outside.  That way as the tv slides down the rail the clips set onto the ubolts. 

I would post a picture, but there is no way I have the energy willpower or stupidity left to take the tv off the wall to take a snapshot today.  Perhaps that will be a topic for a future blog post.  How to build a tv wall mount for under $30…

The other day I was stumbling around on the web, and I saw something that caught my attention.  Of course bieng the forgetfull dumbass I am I didn’t bother to bookmark it.  So last night when I wanted to go back and look into it further I found myself searching google to find it.  I’ve been using the internet and google for so many years now that I just instinctively found myself keying in syntax strings in the search bar to find what I need quickly.  In a brief moment of inspiration I realized that’s probably not something a normal user would do.  Then it made me think about what else I can do with google’s search bar.

The particular sytntax I am referring to is the “site:” command.  It just happened that I knew what website the information I was looking for was on, but I didn’t know exactly where on that site to find it.  The “site:” command lets you use google to search for results only from one website.  While I am sure it is well documented, I discovered it when using googles webmaster tools to see if my website was indexed. 

The other commands I’ve picked up over the years are “link:” and “define:”  I’m not entirely sure where I picked up the latter one but I use it all the time because it is much faster than looking for a dictionary.  I can pull up what I want to know on google faster than I can find a bookmark to an online dictionary.  This is especially true if what I’m after is how to spell something.  Not to imply that I bother correcting my spelling very often…

So to get on with my story I got the idea to research and find out just what else can be done with the google search bar.  Here’s what I discovered:

• intitle: If you add this to a keyword in your search it will find web pages that have what you are searching for in the title of the page.
• inurl: This will find results that are are an exact match for something in the url (link) So if you were looking for the keyword legal, you could search “inurl:legal” and find pages that have the word legal in the filename
• filetype: This is an interesting one.  If you are looking for photos you could try something like filetype:jpg or you could try filetype:pdf if you know what you are looking for is in an adobe brochure format.
• + an -: I knew about these already but I hadn’t really thought about them with respect to google.  If you use them in conjuction with some of the other strings it can become very powerful.  For example there is a particular site that always seems to pop up when I am searching for hardware info or drivers.  The site doesn’t have any valuable content but they make you register just to find that out.  It burns my butt every time they pop up at #1 for something I search.  A simple change to my search string “-site:experts-exchange.com” will keep all their pages from my results list. (amen) 
• intext:  Finds results that are in the text of the page.  If you use this with a quote you can find pages that are either the source of the quote or about the quote.  Intext:plurbus intext:unum would bring up results about the quote “e plurbus unum” which is printed on most (all?) USA currency.
• allintext: allinurl: allintitle: are the same as the intext: inurl: and intitle: except that they are for the entire search string instead of just one word.
• inanchor: finds keywords in the anchor text of links and images.

There are litterally dozens of others and probably millions of creative uses for these simple string filters.  One thing I came across researching these was a guy who demonstrated how to use these tags to find good available domain names.  (probably doesn’t work anymore because as soon as someone releases a trick like that it gets used to death…)  Anyhow, it used the intitle tag to search through massive lists of old expiring domain name auctions.  He would find lists of names with good keywords.  Then the lists were fed through some filtering and checked for availability.   In just seconds his little trick could come up with thousands of expired domains that didn’t get re-registered.  You probably won’t find any natural trafic gems this way as great names are always picked up on the drop, but if you are looking for a good name to develop there is potential.

Another interesting thing I came across is how to use google to find mp3’s.  Using the search string intitle:”index of” will find directorys of files.  Mix that with filetype:mp3 and you have a quick google search that finds open directories of mp3 files. 

Of course with good also comes the bad.  The less scrupulous types will use these same tricks to search the web for sites that have known vulnerabilities.  If you have a website that uses script that is vulnerable you can just about bet that google is telling some turd how to deface it right now. 

A few posts back in my blog I admitted that I am an anime fan.  This may or may not seem like a big deal to all of you, but to me it is.  Why you ask?  Well I am a very private person.  I seldom reveal things about myself.  To speak out to the world and declare “I am an anime geek” is a pretty big thing to me.  To get a solid idea of what I mean you should think of it like going to the mall nude.  I have a hard time wanting anyone to see me that way. 

The thing that gets me past that hurdle is how much I want others to join me.  It is time the american people broke the stupidity factor and moved on to some more intellectual televison.  Now I’m not saying there isn’t some really stupid anime out there.  I’m just saying that even the worst anime is better than the torture we call American Idol, and Americas Next Top Model.  I recently found myself in a position where I was at someone’s house working on their computer.  At the same time they were in the room watching america’s top model.  I actually had to ask them to turn it off because it was giving me a headache.

The current crop of this crud is an offshoot of survivor who is the bastard child of daytime court tv.  With each generation the content gets worse and I am positive it has reached the point where there is no longer any value in it.  Reality tv is like smoking.  At first it gets people hooked with a bit of a buzz then they go back because they are addicted.  There never was anything good or cool about it.  I wonder if I can start the class action lawsuit for the mass brain damage that will certainly be pandemic.

Anyhow, I didn’t start this post wanting to talk about Reality Retardity Tv.  I just sort of went off tangent on a rant there.  sorry…  What I really wanted to blab about was how I’ve been spending my time lately.  I have been watching what my fellow nerds have coined “AMV’s.”  What is an AMV you ask, well its an acronym for Anime Music Video.  Basically some pasty skinned computer geeks with way too much time on their hands have found a hobby in taking clips of Anime and mashing them together with popular Music to make their own videos.

There are more than a few videos that are simply thrown together by some kid and arent of much value.  However there are also a few real gem’s I’ve come across.  I’ve decided to post the Youtube videos of a couple of my favorites here.

I gave some thought to making my own amv. I doubt it will happen, as I can see just how much effort has gone into making these. I don’t like to do anything half assed, and I’m sure I don’t have the time or patience to do full assed. But just maybe one day you’ll see one of mine. I do have the talent / skill to do it. I’ve also got some great ideas. I just find it far too easy to spend my precious time doing things either more or less productive. Anyhow, if you are so inclined, drop by youtube and have a look. Let me know what ones you like.

It probably seems strange to the people I know that I have started to write a blog.  I really don’t enjoy talking to anyone.  In american textbooks the man who invented the telephone is revered.  You can see it everywhere you look people pack around cell phones as if they are an attachment of themselves.  I on the other hand don’t fit nicely into that niche.  I really honestly believe the telephone is among the worst inventions ever to plague mankind.  Sure it has its good points, but as a whole it hurts human development. 

If you take a room full of people (say a jury for instance) and give them a topic to argue about, eventually everyone will come to a consensus.  This is a powerful tool when deciding legislation as it finds ways to be fair to almost everyone.  However say among this group you needed to develop a creative new idea.  Almost instantaneously all creative developments get averaged out among the group.  Unique individual advancement cannot thrive within a strongly connected network. 

To relate this phenomenon to computers concider a shared task networked between two computers.  In this task both computers have been assigned half the work and they need to communicate their calculations regularly in order for the other computer to continue its operation.  Now concider that both of these machines have equal specs.  This creates a situation where both machines can perform optimally.  Now change the scenario and make one computer run half as fast.  What happens?  Well now both computers can only do as much as the slower machine can.  The combined eficiency of the entire network is only equal to the number of stations multiplied by the speed of the slowest station. 

You’re probably thinking that this computer networking talk doesn’t really relate to people, but in fact it does.  If you gather together a group of athletic teens to play basketball and then stick one guy in a wheelchair on the team, what happens?  The guy in the wheelchair feels great to fit in.  The rest of the team feels good about making him feel good, and we all picture this ideal world where everyone is equal.  At the same time we turn a blind eye to the fact that we lose every game and spend alot of time talking about our teamwork.  This shows both a good quality and a bad one of human nature.  Its great that everyone wants to be connected, but it will ultimately be our downfall as a society.  Picture two teens, Suzie only wants to hang out at the mall, and has no apirations.  Jimmy is brilliant and could be an astronaut or engineer.  He wants to study.  Stick them together on the telephone.  Jimmy and Suzie end up going to the mall.

My point in going into all of this is that its important for us as individuals to find a way to disconnect from the social network from time to time.  You can call it “Me time” or simply think of it as shutting the door and focusing on your work.  Many of the worlds greatest inventors are thought of historically as eccentric.  What this eccentricity really means is that they didn’t conform to the societal network and found a way to explore a separate path amidst their group.  Not everyone is capable of producing something great, but even those who are won’t be able to do it stifled within the boundaries of polite society.

A number of years back I believe that someone higher up on the political chain recognized that there are people out there like me who feel the need to not be connected all the time.  Getting back to what todays blog is about, there are times when I simply don’t want the phone to ring.  (more often than not)  I need to have it there for an emergency.  I can forgive an interruption if someone is in the hospital or something like that.  However telemarketers really aren’t someone I need to connect with.    A national do not call registry was created for people like me who simply don’t want to be disturbed with stuff like that. 

At first the do not call registry worked surprisingly well.  I suppose the threat of bieng fined thousands of dollars got some of the more aggressive companies to back off.  What prompted todays rant is how the registry is beginning to fail.  I don’t know whether the law has changed, or if telemarketers are beginning to find loopholes in the law, but I have started getting regular solicitations again.  I count five this week alone.  I have dutifully reported each occurance in a despirate hope that someone will find these callers and leave their corpses in a ditch somewhere.  I know its hopeless though.

A word of advice to those of you still calling me…  I really don’t care if you are collecting money for breast cancer research, the local fire department, or just to put it in your bank account.  I put my name on the do not call registry because I DONT WANT TO BE CALLLED!  I make it a habbit to NEVER EVER give any money to anyone who cold calls me. 

As for the politician who drafted the bill, you need to go back and fix your work.  You left one big gaping loophole in your bill.  The part where it exempts non-profit organizations and surveys from bieng fined for calling me is just wrong.  They are soliciting me just the same as everyone else.  Do your constituents a favor and fix it!

If you are going to take away people’s rights or property, you better not let them know until it is too late. If you are going to take away people’s rights or property, then it is best to hide your intent under the banner of a fight against something so bad that no one dare oppose the fight. For example, suppose that you operate a nationwide furniture store chain and want to eliminate local competition from independent operators. You could ask your Senator to sponsor the “Wipe Out The Little Guy Act of 2008″ but it is unlikely that your Senator or the public would give you much support. A much better strategy would be to hide your intent to wipe out your competition inside a bit of legislation that appears to fight a battle that everyone would support. For example, how about the “Furniture Consumer Protection Act of 2008″ in which you tout the benefits of protecting consumers against deceptive furniture sales practices and price gouging etc. Then in the middle of the Bill you hide a provision that would allow you to press charges against anyone who tries to sell the same types of furniture that you do — effectively putting out of business the pesky independent stores across the country that compete with you. If you read the “Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act of 2008″ carefully, you will see that this is exactly what it will do. It will let government and big business take away websites (the virtual equivalent of store fronts) from individuals and small businesses — without the due process protections that exist in the current domain name resolution protection and even the current trademark law. It is a brazen grab by the big to take over what belongs to the small. Everyone should support efforts to reduce phishing and online fraud. No one should support the anti-competitive power grab hidden in this Bill as currently worded.” - Bob Connor

By now, we all take the internet for granted.  We just assume its going to work when we turn on the computer and that when we type in a dot .com its going to get us where we want to be.  The web is a great thing and it provides an avenue for everyone to get their voice heard.  My rant Blog is an example of that.  You probably won’t belive it, but right now the internet is in danger. Seriously!

Truth be told, nobody can be right about everything.  The answer to that dilemma is to take everyones ideas, mix them together, and come up with a consensus that works for almost everyone.  Then take the few who don’t agree and force them to conform with the general consensus.  The Snowe bill, an anti phishing act introduced by senator Snowe seems at its surface to be aimed at stopping phishing scams.  This pice of trash Legislation is so full of loopholes that it actually becomes a risk to free speech itself. 

The changes introduced by the bill are supposedly aimed at making it harder for a scammer to register a domain name and use that domain name to perpetrate their scam.  One would hope we all know that this won’t actually stop the scammer.  Someone smart enough to purpotrate a Phishing scam wouldn’t register the name legitimately in the first place.  What it will do is unbalance the way the domain registration and arbitration system works strongly in the favor of trademark owners.  Which by the way has nothing to do with Phishing.  As an example of this, say a Hewlet Packard spots someone re-selling an HP computer on ebay.  If the seller didn’t get explicit permission to use the trademark”Hewlett Packard” in their ad the seller is in violation of the Anti-Phishing Act of 2008.  Furthermore, for letting the seller post the listing, Ebay is also in violation.  Now HP can legally file criminal charges against the seller, Ebay, and sue for up to $6 Million in damages.  Futhering the problem, if the Snowe bill passes HP can take Ebay.com away because it is bieng used to infringe on HP’s Tradmark rights.  The icing on the cake is that HP wouldn’t even have to prove that their trademark was abused for Phishing.  All they would have to do is say their tradmark was used without permission and they’ve already won. 

The example above is probably never going to happen.  Why?  Because Ebay can afford expensive lawyers and even if they fought it out the matter would be settled.  But now think of this what about the same scenario except instead of ebay you have a mom and pop computer shop going up against HP.  Chances are Ma can’t afford all them fancy lawyers.  The end result will be a bankrupt competitor that HP shut down just because Ma can’t afford to fight back.

Presently if someone really had a grudge against Ebay they could register EbaySucks.com and rant away.  (Yes, I’m sure its already taken.)  Under current trademark law this is acceptable, and rightfully so.  The person isn’t infringing on the companies business.  Trademarks are there to prevent other people marketing similar products and confusing consumers about what they are really buying.  (Trade - Mark)  Think about the meaning of the words.  The Snowe bill will effectively kill these types of websites by allowing companies to take away the domains that contend with them without any type of arbitration.  In the end its free speech on the internet that lies in danger here.

To summerize I urge everyone to write their congressman and quash this bill.  Hopefully this senator can find himself a good telephone and then hang himself with the wire…  Seriously this isn’t the first piece of anti-internet legislation he has been involved with, and its downright shamful that he had the nerve to pitch it as a consumer friendly anti-phishing bill.  I’d much rather have the guy in office who just got busted for whoring it up.  He may have hurt a few people’s religeous sensability, but he wasn’t hurting everyone. Snowe is dangerous.  He is risking damage to the world economy and may even succeed in breaking the internet. 

For more than half my life I have worked in and around the traditional brick and mortar retail business.  I’ve gotten to know the trends and can easily see when items will sell or will not sell.   Sadly with the massive growth of the MegaRetailer Walmart and the bursting out of the internet into retail markets, many traditional retailers don’t have alot to look foreward to.   Traditionally a store’s sales plan would be calculated by taking last years same day sales, adjusting for a few economic factors, then adding a few percent for the growth in the community and in trademark recognition.  All in all you could pretty much expect that the sales plan would be a few hundred or a few thousand more than it was last year.  The trend I’m starting to see is that retailers are no longer able to make these increase plan goals.  The brick and mortar system will probably never die but I think it has reached saturation and many retailers will start to plan on making less if they want to survive.

It is with that knowledge that I have started my own foray into the business world looking at online retail as the way to make my fortune.  Everywhere I turn I see the potential to make money.  Many investors were scared away by the big DotCOM bubble burst, and thats a good thing for me.  The problem with most dotcom business models is that they based their ideas on the possibility of infinite growth. To take for an example pets.com they saw astounding increases in sales after launching their website.  Everyone wanted in because everyone wanted a part of the massive increase. The underlying problem is that every day there are a finite number of people who will buy a bag of dogfood online.  At launch pets.com hadn’t come anywhere near that capacity.  Still with massive growth they fumbled right past the point of saturation and found themselves with more goods than they could ever hope to sell.  This same situation plagued most dotcom startups until massive failure swept the market.

One of the most important things to have in business is your brand.  Anyone can tell you that pets.com is a million dollar name.  Even if the company behind it folds and folds again there will still be people every day who type in the name looking for that bag of dog food.  Likewise, everyone has heard about the guy who registered some short easily memorable domain name and sold it for millions.  But what has happened to the entreprenuer who wants to start an online business.  What do we do now that there isn’t any stellar names left.  In recent years companies that once made profits by registering domains for end users have taken to buying up domains.  At first this was to mark them up and soak end users for the profit.  It sucks, but I agree with their entreprenurial spirit.  However now many have gone one step too far.  Instead of marking up and selling the domains at a profit some companies have begun refusing to sell.  One of these companies name media has gotten to the point where they have registered tens of thousands of names and they are holding them for ransom.  So far they haven’t broken any of the rules, but were only talking the rules that exist today.  If these giant companies who aren’t playing fair continue to grow at some point the internet itself will break. 

Instead of bieng able to build a brand small business owners will have to buy visitors from companies that own all the brands.  The benefit to small business is completely gone and soon they won’t continue offering their products.  Business are there to make money and having to pay for each person who walks through their doors just doesn’t make sense.  (except to the guys getting paid)  As business starts to decline because companies can’t effectively market their products at a gain, the internet will stagnate.  Our only option is to change the way people find what they’re looking for online.  I like the type in “something.com” setup and I’d hate to see it go away but the nails are already in the coffin. 

 So what do you think?  Is creating some sort of anti-monopoly domain law the only way to turn things around.  One thing I came across while researching for the article I wrote on fidel castro was an interesting concept he put in place while ruling in cuba.  He made it a law that nobody could own more than 5 acres of land.  This puts an interesting spin on the domain monopoly idea.  If we were to limit the number of domains any one entity could own to say 200 or so every business or individual could reasonably compete and we still wouldn’t be unfair to the registrars and companies that are presently monopolizing the domain names.  They could keep the names they really want but they would be forced to concider what names they really want.  The older brother is hogging all the toys even though he doesn’t have time to play with them all.  Its time mom reached back and made him share with the younger siblings…

Anyone who has been using the internet as long as I have has fallen prey to at least one scam.  My first experience online I was ripped off.  I was just a kid then, but its sad to think of how many good deals I probably missed out on because it made me a skeptic for dealings online.  What kind of a *&$# would rip off a kid for $30 worth of trading cards anyways?  Still, even with my hardened skeptecism recently I managed to fall for another scam.  I was buying a domain name in a field related to my business that supposedly was receiving a lot of traffic.  The seller inflated the price and percieved value of the domain by showing statistics that lead me to believe I would be buying a substantial potential customer base along with the name.  The reality is that he was forewarding the traffic from another domain he owned and as soon as the name was transferred the traffic dissapeared.  Anyhow I took my lumps as I was the one stupid enough to fall for such a scam.  I put down the scammers name to memory just in case the opportunity to recover a loss or get revenge ever came up, and I moved on. 

A few days ago I recieved a SPAM email promoting tvboxnet.com   This was an unusual occurence because I recently changed my email address and hadn’t given the new email to many people.  This was the first SPAM email I had recieved since the email address change.  It didn’t take long to figure out that the spammer and the scammer were one and the same.  He was even so bold as to sign the bulk email with the same name as he used when pulling the domain scam.  Under most circumstances I would just add an email rule to filter and delete future spam, but since this was so brazen I decided to visit tvboxnet.com and let them know what I thought. 

Upon visiting their site, I found the section on affiliate marketing and read through their legal page. Their terms of service specifically prohibit their affiliates from promoting with bulk email.  I wrote a short email to the site administrator explaining the situation, and provided both the email and affiliate link of the offender.  Within a few short minuts I got a canned response quoting the no spam section of their T.O.S. word for word.  I was expecting something like “thanks we’ll look into it” but the response I got was rather confusing.  So I wrote them another email asking if the affiliate account had been banned, and offered to foreward the the spam I was sent as proof.  The response to my second email was “No thanks, Were going to give him another chance.”

The only way we are ever going to eliminate the scourge known as SPAM is to eliminate the people who are funding it.  From the time I first received the email I had already decided I wasn’t going to buy anything from tvboxnet.com simply because I had heard about it from a spam email.  It doesn’t matter to me if what they have to sell is the next up and coming tech toy that everyone is going to want.  The fact that they weren’t willing to take a strong stance against SPAM has earned them a boycott.

So why am I writing this post?  Its simple really. I am hoping that the next time someone decides to search on google for tvboxnet.com my post pops up in the search results right along with the words scam and spam.  This is a warning to all companies who advertise online.  If you are paying for advertisement you MUST take an active roll in defining how your products are marketed.  I fully intend for this article to do as much damage to tvboxnet.com as is possible.  At the onset of all this I would have been happy with an apology and the knowledge that they were taking action.  At this point it will take a lot more than an apology to make me go away. 

As a parting thought, I urge everyone who reads this to boycott tvboxnet.com.  Take it one step further and please stop buying things from companies you heard about through unsolicited email.