Scam Alert: DLSCORP.NET

I received this official looking form from DLSCORP.NET claiming to offer website listing services in exchange for cash. They promise to "submit your domain name to 25 major search engines, eight keyword/phrase listings, and quarterly search engine submissions" in exchange for 75 dollars.

First of all, there is no way you'll get value for your money (assuming you'd get anything at all). Search engines are in the business of finding your website. They crawl through the web in order to find new content to index. Search engines do have a way of entering your site into their listings to get you crawled for the first time, but that service is free. You can sign up for Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft here. Search engines make money when they find your site and serve your content effectively, so they want to find you. You shouldn't ever have to pay for them to find you.

You may pay for the rights to have sponsored links at search engines. I can buy the keywords "kenny" and "giants" and have Google (or a competitor) put advertisements next to the search results linking to my site to get more traffic.

There are two reasons this scam works. Most people who own domains don't understand how search engines work. Secondly, this looks a lot like a bill. There is a small amount of text on the back saying this is not in fact a bill, but it is tricky to find it. DLSCORP.NET uses lots of official sounding language that makes you think this fee is required to have a domain name. It is not.

They most likely crawl the public domain registry for addresses and then mass mail people who own domains. When you register a domain, you submit your physical address to a public record of domain names.

If you don't believe me that this is a scam, ask these guys or these guys.

Avoid pushing people at work, unless you are powerful

Kids, you should become famous, because then people are much easier on you. Take a look at baseball for example. Lets compare two players, Manny Ramirez, the greatest right handed hitter on the planet, and Shawn Chacon, a recently demoted pitcher. Both of them pushed club officials, one of them is released and the other has put the "incident in the past".

Chacon grabbed and pushed his general manager after being asked to come talk with the manager and GM in a private office. It also didn't help that he lost his job in the starting rotation after going 2-3 with a 5.04 ERA in 15 starts. That isn't terrible for someone pitching in Houston, but apparently not good enough. He was immediately suspended and then cut the next day.

Ramirez pushed the team's traveling secretary when he was told he might not get all 16 of the tickets he requested. He is not suspended and fully on the team. There is a good chance he got his tickets. The Red Sox cover-up of the incident is clear from the fact that all players who speak on the record say this is a past clubhouse issue. If I go to work for the Red Sox, I'm going to make sure to have and extra 16 tickets on hand.

Manny made two good decisions here. First, he didn't push the club's GM. Second, he's hitting .288 with 16 HR and 52 RBIs and has a $20M contract. Its good to be the king.

Grip it and rip it

It was windy at the Santa Clara Golf Course today and I was ripping my driver. I was routinely hitting 275 yard (wind aided) drives. I reached a 475 yard par 5 in 2, which is something I've never done before after crushing a driver and puring a 3-iron hybrid.

My timing was excellent on my driver swing today. I was able to control my ball flight and get my shots to bend with the fairway giving me the oh so fun combination of being able to hit the ball really far and also really straight.

I'm going to have to buy some hybrid clubs or at least a 5 wood I feel good about hitting off the fairway. If I can only hit my driver 275 consistently, I can start thinking about reaching some par-5's in 2 if I have a good 200 yard club. Then the game will get really fun :).

I also birdied a charity hole where if you put your tee shot on the green, you can win a sleeve of balls. I put my tee shot 3 feet from the pin, which is about as close as I've ever come.

You've probably figured by omission that I didn't set a personal scoring record today. I shot a 92 that would have been lower if I didn't take a 9 on #1 or miss two three-foot putts. I need to play more.

Dell Desktop Buying Guide

While I'm not a big fan of their laptops, I do really like Dell desktops. A few days ago, a friend asked me about buying new desktops, so I'll do a brain dump here.

Dell desktops are well constructed, run quietly, are cheap and customizable.

Dell boxes can be opened without tools and all parts can be replaced without tools. The innards are easy to find and replace and they have good thermal dissipation to keep everything from getting too hot. They also are quiet, so they can be run overnight without keeping you awake.

Dell desktops have very aggressive pricing because they sell them on the web. They also have a lot of coupons that can allow you to get free upgrades, free shipping, or a percentage off of your purchase.

Finally, what I enjoy the most is you can fully customize your computer. Instead of having a few models to choose from, you can get more memory and less processor if you want. You can add a BlueRay drive if you want. I like the flexibility as a consumer, but I can understand how less computer-oriented people may find that customization as a way for Dell to up-sell one extra feature after another.

The obvious drawbacks from buying a computer online are the lack of instant gratification and the pains you experience to get support over the phone. These issues don't really bother me because I'm my own tech support and I'm fairly patient by nature. That being said, if you want to scare yourself with Dell customer support horror stories, you can check out this page of Dell customer experiences. Most of these are written by not so computer literate people who don't like having to debug their issues over the phone, but if that sounds like you, maybe you should head on down to BestBuy or another brick-and-mortar retailer.

To supplement this post, be sure to check out this Dell buying top 5 list. I was going to write up more or less that post, but Dealhack does a good job of summarizing how to optimize your purchase from Dell (or any other hardware manufacturer). Its amazing what you can find when you do a Google search for "[Company I'm buying from] coupons" right before you check out.

What happend to summer?

No, this isn't a post about global warming and weather change, but it is about the meaning of summer changing. Back in the school days of my life, summer used to mean something. It meant days of setting on the floor, playing X-Com for hours at a time, listening to Hank Greenwald broadcast Giants games, traveling and generally not going to school. The month or two leading up to the end of school was always a special time, filled with anticipation that could only be rivaled by Christmas.

When you are in school there is a giant chasm between school and summer. Life is genuinely better when you have much more control over your time and you don't have to learn about biology and post-modernism.

Now that I've been working, the only difference between summer and non-summer (other than teacher friends bragging about not going to work) is I get to drive home without using my headlights. I find that quite sad.

Here's to summer vacation.

AMD Laptop Follow-up: HP Pavilion dv2810us

After the AMD Laptop Buying Guide post, we finally went to Fry's and got a laptop. In the end, the selected machine was an HP Pavilion dv2810us. It had several features that were not covered in the first AMD laptop guide.

Size:

When you buy a laptop, you really have to try out the actual one you'll buy or else concepts like how big it is and how much it weighs are hard to grasp. The standard laptop size is 15.4" widescreen, which works out to about 6 lbs. The dv2810us has a 14.1" screen that reduces the weight to just north of 5 lbs. I've always purchased 14 inch laptops, because a 15.4" laptop is pretty big and weighs enough to hurt your shoulder. My friend quickly came to this realization too and she could narrow her focus down to the 14" and below models.

Webcam:

My friend uses skype to keep in touch with friends in other countries. Having an integrated webcam was a big plus for her. For me, instant messaging with far away friends is good enough, and I view this as an add-on that I don't really need. For the record, she does have better social skills than I do, so maybe getting a webcam would be good for me.

Negatives:

The only negative of the dv2810us appears to be the weird circle pattern on the top of the case. As part of HP's "the computer is personal again" campaign, you computer now comes with someone else's personal artwork scratched all over the top of it. Somehow both of us completely missed this when we were in the showroom. If you are buying an HP, be sure to check out the top.

So there you have it! If you are required to buy a laptop with an AMD processor, you can do a lot worse than the HP dv2810us. It has the horsepower and memory to get your work done, is small enough to carry around!

Prepare Ye for the Rapture!

As a alumnus of The King's Academy, I'm aware the end of the world will soon be upon us. I spent 8th grade Bible reading Revelations and understanding that the end of the world is both real and imminent. Several families from that school spent New Years of 2000 at church to prepare for their elevation into heaven. I spent it in LA waiting to watch Stanford play in the Rose Bowl. Fortunately, God didn't pick Jan 1, 2000 as the end of the world, otherwise the prophecy that Stanford will never again play in the Rose Bowl would have come true.

Now when the Rapture happens, all of the believers will go to Heaven and a lot of bad stuff will happen on earth. Much like one dies today, all of the believers will now have no need for their worldly possessions. You might as well give them to someone who is left behind as compensation for eternal damnation.

For only 40 bucks a year, you can arrange to have all of your assets gifted to the hell raiser of your choice with You've Been Left Behind. After 3 of 5 Christians fail to log in, the Apocalypse will be declared and 6 days later, all assets will be transfered to the doomed person of your choice in hopes of bringing them to Christ. Hopefully at least 3 of the proclaimed Christians have satisfied the requirements to get to heaven. They'll have to be better than average Christians because its been proven that only 2.5% of the world's population will go to heaven in spite of the fact that the world is 7% Protestant. So hopefully enough of them will be saved to accurately trigger the Apocalypse without any false positives from things like earthquakes, floods, or internet outages caused by Chinese Cyberwarfare.

If you don't trust absent Christians with your post-rapture finances, you can always entrust the job to sworn atheists.

All this stuff is starting to shake my beliefs that everything on the internet is true.

Hat tip to Bruce Schneier

Zito well on pace to lose 20

Zito earned his 10th loss of the year on Friday. Through 14 starts (out of 34 barring injury) he is the first pitcher in 2008 to get to 10 losses. He has some of the worst run support in the majors, but he also hasn't been exactly dominant either. He's got a 1.86 WHIP and opposing batters are hitting .320 off of him.

He's got a really good shot at losing 20, provided he doesn't get hurt, sent to the bullpen or more run support.

How MacGyver Fixes a Case Fan

The past couple of weeks, the case fan in my web server has been going crazy. It makes an unbearable grinding sound that only goes away when you kick the case. The culprit is the case fan shown below:


The fan is a monster complete with a large air duct that vibrates against the case. It spins at a very high RPM which makes it a very loud broken fan. The fan is a big reason why the server lives in the laundry room instead of under my bed or in my closet.

I decided to fix it and had two big problems. First, you can't find a replacement fan for a computer that is 8 years old. Second, the fan is rectangular (about 120x90 mm), which means that none of today's square fans are going to fit.

I ended up going with the Antec Tri-Cool 80mm fan. What's great about this (other than it being quiet) is that is has three operating speeds so I can trade off noise in exchange for cooling power. More importantly, it was only $6 at Frys.

Installing the fan is a challenge because of the fact that no standard fan today fits in the odd-sized hole left by the old fan. I decided to hack it together with what are essentially plastic coated twist ties. I attached four of these to the corners of the fan, which caused the fan to be attached at an angle to the mount.


I'll keep you posted on how this works, but the early returns are quite promising. The machine now operates silently and has yet to crash from overheating.

Feed the hungry on the internet: Free Rice

The price of rice is out of control right now. It is threating to destabilize most of the rice-eating third world, especially heavy rice importing nations, such as the Philippines. Rice producing states are limiting exports and everyone is hording rice, especially at Costco. High rice prices are threating world food aid. Its a good time to stop worrying about gas prices and be glad you aren't worrying about food prices.

To make matters worse, Americans are suffering through a record lack of complex vocabulary. Great English words such as, "supple" and "unsavory" just aren't used enough anymore.

To counter this growing food and vocabulary problems we must turn to the internet! It has given us freerice.com to educate generations of Americans while giving rice to the impoverished parts of the world.

In all seriousness, Free Rice is a fun website. You answer increasingly hard vocabulary multiple choice questions. For every question you answer correctly, you donate 20 grains of rice. The site is paid for by advertising at the bottom of the screen. One could make the argument that playing freerice.com is probably more productive than some days in the office.

Do you know that poteen is bootleg whiskey? How about if caragreen is an Irish moss? The correct answer will help the worlds needy while simultaneous getting you prepared for the SAT/GRE.

There is also a leveling system. For every three consecutive correct words, you increase your level, but for every incorrect word, you fall back one level. I made it to 41 in about a half hour. Given the leveling up algorithm, you have to get more than 75% of the words right consistently just to maintain your level. By 41 the words got pretty weird. I would guess I don't have any vocabulary rockstar blog readers, but if you beat 40, leave a comment so we can see who is the makethebestofwhatsaround.com vocab champion. May you feed and vocab with great vigor!

Vegan Cookies: Sweet and Chewy

Today after a long and windy hike at Shoreline, I had that distinctive low blood sugar feeling. I hadn't eat too much and decided to stop off at the little snack bar. They had vegan cookies and a bunch of junk food. After a brief warning from my sister, I bought a vegan cookie for $2.50, paid with a $20, and got 17 one dollar bills and two quarters as change.

Amy's warning related to here experiences working in a movie theater, where they sold the same vegan cookies as I had just purchased. Customers inevitably would return and complain about the cookies and as there are no eggs (or other animal products) the cookies taste a bit strange.

The cookie I bought was the "Explosive Espresso Chip Cookie" from the Alternative Baking Company. With a name like that, I expected them to also sell special brownies or cookies made with green energy. The cookie definately tasted different as it was much denser than a standard chocolate chip cookie (eggs help make cookies rise). It was also really chewy and you had to work hard to bite off chunks of it. It was very sweet in an intense sweetness kind of way. It was somewhere between chocolate chip fudge, chocolate chip cookie taffy, and a chocolate chip cookie. Overall, it exceed my Amy-dampened expectations in spite having a different texture than your standard cookie. You should definately check them out if you get the chance.

Now that I've eaten vegan food, I am concerned about what I might become because you always are what you eat. I attempted a Google search for "vegan" to see what might happen to me if I were to morph in to one of these "vegans":

I'm reasonably confident that this won't become me, but it is over the top enough to merit blogging about:


Kind of like PETA and their "I'd rather go naked than wear fur" campaigns, this puts veganism in a good, but less family-friendly light:

Giants Update: 94 losses

After sweeping the Dbacks, then taking one out of three from both the last place Padres and the Mets, the Giants are now on pace to win 68 games, which has them losing only 94! This just proves how hard it is to lose 100 games as you can lose 4 games to bad teams, but as long as you get a sweep every once in a while, you are well on your way to 63 wins.

Ironically, they are in third place in the NL West, ahead of both the Padres and the Rockies and only 7 games out of first place.

Thursday is always a good day for a baseball fan because Jason Stark has his weekly article "Rumblings and Grumblings". This week featured a sidebar that says 4 Giants might make the All Star team. Can you name them without looking?

Someecards: Clever and contemporary e-cards

Recently, I've gotten some very amusing online greeting cards from someecards.com. They've done a good job targeting the 18-30 year old market with smart-ass cards that generate humor with pictures from the turn of the century superimposed with comments from today. Most of the comments are things you'd love to say, but for societal reasons you keep to yourself.


They have quite a few categories of cards. They have all of the usuals from the standard birthday, anniversary, and thanks cards. But they also have a new group of cards including, "somewhat topical", "flirting, and the always popular "cry for help".


I've had some bad experiences with e-cards as some are nothing more than glorified email address collecting schemes. Someecards has yet to send me any spam requesting that I send more cards to people. I hope it stays this way.

There is a reason you never hear of an e-card company going IPO and e-card billionaire 23 year old CEOs. These guys seem to have a revenue model that is adverting driven and given their ideal target market, this could work. We'll see if they can turn this clever idea into a profitable business. To hit the mainstream market, they'll have to grow beyond their current niche.

Drinks on a train!

While not quite "Snakes on a Plane", drinks on a train have been in the news lately.

The world's finest city, London, has just banned booze on their underground subway system. Now instead of just minding the gap, you also have to mind that open container. Concerned citizens had 3 hour parties on the train to celebrate/protest. The BBC reporter got a good number of well reasoned comments from those involved in the train-drinking.

In New York, another of the world's finest cities, you can drink on the Long Island Railroad, which has been a blessing for some of my friend on a Friday at the end of a long week.

In sunny Northern California, the local WAKA kickball leagues just finished their biannual Caltrain pub-crawl. It takes one from Sunnyvale to San Mateo, making 6 one hour stops for beverages. As one can imagine, it can be a struggle to make it to the end without either good company or a hearty constitution. Even at an unrealistically low rate of one drink per stop, that is still a considerable amount of drinks by the time you get to the cold weather stops of Bellmont and San Mateo.

The biggest take away from these stories has to be the age old question of is society better off if we allow drinking on our public transportation? Do lawmakers have something better thing to do with their terms that ban drinking on trains? Is train drinking banning really just "typical Tory middle class policy" as one British pro-train-drinker said?

The cost of drinking on trains is likely the increased cost of cleaning up trains, increased volume levels on trains, abuse of fellow non-imbibing passengers, and increased chance of drunken passengers being run over by a train. The positive effects of train-drinking is safer drinking in a controlled environment, increased fun levels for drinkers, lower percentage of drinkers in automobiles, increased ridership amongst those looking to have a good time, and more drunken bleacher fans at Giant's games telling Andrew Jones that he is a bum.

The key question here is do all of these bad things get balanced out by the good things that drinking on trains do? Your comments?