DVC.EDU

Re: Twitter Profit House Review (reviewopedia)

2009-08-09T01:43:00.000-07:00

This is really funny. Reviewopedia has a new "review" up about another scam. Here's what they have to say:

These people will stop at nothing to legitimize their offers as shown by the way they advertise their products. The classic characteristics of these campaigns include using fake blogs, developing websites to resemble newspaper articles, and using IP reading scripts to regionally customize their offers.

Fake blog? Doesn't that sound familiar? Reviewopedia itself is essentially a fake blog. In fact it is more of a fake community review site. Posing as a review site where people could share opinions about various opportunities, it is in fact all written by one author, Steve Albright. Every article ends the same way: "This opportunity is a scam, but check out mine." Steve collects your email address with a link at the bottom of every article and then sends you his "opportunities". One of them, partnerwithpaul is COMPLETELY deceptive. (see my post about partnerwithpaul) As it turns out, partnerwithpaul is just a way to charge you money and then tell you to join Herbalife. His other opportunity, "operation payday," looks like a clone of partnerwithpaul.

But what about those comments at the bottom of all the reviewopedia articles? They are cherry picked. Notice how they all agree almost 100% of the time. Besides, whether or not Twitter Profit House is a scam is not contested. Sure it is. But Steve Albright is attempting to take advantage of those who make an effort to research it. Of course, no comment exposing HIM would EVER get through on his own site.

See more details on reviewopedia and the scam trend.

Myspace phishing alert: false positive

2009-06-17T19:31:00.000-07:00

Myspace did something stupid again. They automatically blocked my account, labeling it as a phished account. They think I entered my log in details elsewhere on the internet and it was collected by spammers.

Problem is I didn't. And now they want me to change my password again?

The false positive is because I replied to a message that was from someone who was phished. It contained a link that was obviously trying to install a virus. I was telling them to get their account fixed. The reply automatically contains a quote of the message and ergo the virus link. Because I sent a message containing a virus link, myspace has automatically declared me a phished account.

Teleportation

2009-05-25T22:43:00.000-07:00

Until today I found the current understanding of teleportation to be disturbing. A copy of you would be made while the original was destroyed and, along with it, possibly your soul or your soul's connection to the universe. But today I have read more about the subject that changed my mind. The destruction of the original is inherent due to laws of quantum mechanics. In order to make the "copy," the "original" has to be destroyed.

This is what I didn't understand before.

I had thought that a copy would be made, and the original destroyed as a convenience in order to prevent problems of two people with the same identity. Clone and kill. Disgusting.

But this is different. Your state is perpetuated, never existing in two places at once, and never ceasing to exist. Just as it would if you were never teleported. I believe the soul travels with this perpetuating state, not with the atoms that comprise it. But I would like there to be a greater understanding of the relationship between the soul and the universe before this is taken as fact.

Scientists of today do not often speak of souls. Instead they have observers. To me, the soul is the observer and it is the single most fundamental aspect of existence. Everything known comes through perception, which is observation. To me, a vivid dream is more real than a distant spiral galaxy.

It is of utmost importance that the soul (or its connection to the universe) be preserved throughout any use of technology. Otherwise, it's not really you coming out the other end. Much like the movie "The Prestige," this has disturbing implications.

This is exactly what I found to be disturbing about teleportation until today. But today I find that the quantum laws that do not allow this information to be copied without being destroyed, nudges my intuition towards the concept of soul as a function of structure state. Here I speak in math terms because they are familiar to me and are analogous to the current situation. The state of the structure of your mind is what determines which particular soul is plugged into it. The output of a function is not ambiguous, it either has 1 value or 0. The soul is determined by the structure of your mind without ambiguity. And the mind perpetuates itself into the next instant in such a way that the same soul is output. This continuity would not be interrupted by a teleportation process that recreates the structure exactly.

A possible test would be teleporting a person and storing their information. Then recreate their structure twice. If both persons have the same soul, my intuition is confirmed.

Fanbox! Jeez!

2009-04-26T15:16:00.000-07:00

I kept getting these annoying emails from fanbox. They give you the option to change the frequency of your mail between receiving mail always or never so I changed it to never. But I still got their stupid emails until I found the link to permanently delete the account they had automatically made for me. Jerks.

Sweatguy

2009-04-06T13:16:00.000-07:00

this integral will make you sweat

Often Imitated Never Duplicated

2009-04-05T17:04:00.000-07:00

Irony Completed

Jim in the box

2009-03-11T18:38:00.000-07:00

I saw a weird Jack in the Box commercial featuring Jack's incarcerated and lopsided brother Jim. I thought it might be some weird pun about his incarceration being "Jim in the box" so I searched for the term. Instead, I found a bizarre youtube of a clown feeding wasps to a guy chained to the floor.

More Bad Drawings

2009-03-11T12:40:00.000-07:00

Return of Classroom presenter

2009-03-04T12:57:00.000-08:00

its back!

3-space

2009-02-23T12:34:00.000-08:00

Death of YTMND?

2009-01-16T12:36:00.000-08:00

Just like Expage and then Ringo before it, YTMND, a site that relies on user-created content seems to be suffering greatly in popularity. It reached a peak in 2006 and has been declining ever since, the novelty having worn off. You can see a comparison at google trends of YTMND and 4chan, another site with apparently a similar fanbase. YTMND seems to be just another fad now although it once surpassed 4chan, 4chan has surpassed YTMND several times over. YTMND was the source of a lot of internet jokes that are continually repeated today. I was pretty into YTMND for a while, I was well known on the forums and had a prolific portfolio of nearly 200 sites on my main account and dozens more on other accounts. I was even a mod. But the question remains, will YTMND suffer the same fate as Expage and Ringo? Doubtful, I say. For one thing, YTMND is far less commercial. The owner, Max Goldberg, has emphasized that he prefers to run smaller sites, rather than larger ones. So he will probably enjoy having YTMND become a smaller community of friends and die-hard fans. He has also complained about server costs and such too.. So maybe he will shut it down. Who knows? Another example site by Max is http://www.dustindiamond.com which stood against the test of a lawsuit from Dustin himself. Good luck YTMND. I still check back every now and then. I wonder if this is a microcosm of what will happen to the likes of youtube and myspace given enough time. Web 2.0 has not been documented long enough to know what fate these sites will ultimately realize. Sites that are driven by user created content can easily go under when people get bored of the same old content being repeated. Then a new site comes along that offers new ways to post content and they all leave. Which means the original site loses what little new content it was receiving. Perhaps this is a new phenomenon that could be called "content saturation."

Flip Phone

2009-01-14T17:44:00.000-08:00

Blue Brain: A thinking computer?

2009-01-10T02:58:00.000-08:00

Blueprinting the human brain

Research has already started on a computer simulation of a human brain. What will happen when this is completed? A computer running through the motions... just so happens to create what we would call a thought? If the computer is truly running an accurate simulation of every cell in the human brain, then another way of looking at this is that the computer is thinking like a human. Would emotions manifest in the data? Happiness? Love? More possibly threateningly, greed? Ambition? Would it have a soul? (Or is a soul something more than what can be contained by a number of brain cells?)

Hmmm perhaps I should bite my tongue. It's only a matter of time until they would hook it up to the internet and it could find my blog...

Infinity 800 scam

2009-01-04T18:13:00.000-08:00

Infinity 800 is a naked pyramid scheme. It barely does anything to hide the fact that it is a pyramid. Take a look:

A 2X2 Matrix here refers to a pyramid which must be 2 levels deep, each level doubling in size. The problem of course is that for any new member to achieve payout, they must recruit more members. When you join, you pay $260 for 2 figurative hot potatoes that you have to pass on.

As this continues, an increasing fraction of members will receive payout, however it will never exceed 1/4. When the system stops, more than 3/4 members will never see a single payout.

Now you might be thinking about this as being the same as a $260 lottery ticket. But that doesn't quite sum it up. In a lottery, you buy your ticket and wait to see if you're one of the lucky ones. With Infinity800, you have to actively find other people to pass the risk on to-- most likely people who trust you. You're taking advantage of someone else's trust AKA scamming. No matter how you look at it, the joining members are on the short end of the transaction.

Don't get sucked into this scam. They will tell you that once you complete a pyramid, the people below you will cycle and you will keep getting payouts for the rest of your life. Don't be fooled, each cycle requires more and more people to join, increasing exponentially. You cycle when you complete a pyramid, but for you to cycle again, the 2 below you then have to complete their pyramid, then the people 2 levels below you have to complete theirs! That's 6 times the number of pyramids that must be completed for you to receive payout #2 as compared to payout #1 which requires one pyramid (which is hard enough, and will already make you feel enough like a scumbag). The next cycle is going to require 24 pyramids. Then 96, 384, 1516 and you can see where this is going (multiply by 4 for each successive payout).

Most of the people you talk to won't want to join, those who do probably won't build their own pyramid, and even when they do, it only takes a few lazy people (or people who just decided they don't want to scam anymore) to be a weak link in the chain-- essentially shutting down the cycles.

Obama's new nickname

2008-12-31T11:04:00.000-08:00

The O-BOMB!!

Discuss.

Moral Poverty

2008-12-31T01:48:00.000-08:00

I'm always stricken by the poverty both physical and moral in the world. In what situation is it ever OK to kill someone? Let alone someone who has nothing to do with you? So why do we allow bombings of civilian homes to go on? It makes no sense. I read a statistic today that 50% of women cheated on their husband and 70% of men did, while 80% of women thought of cheating and 98% of men did. I don't know how true this is but I find this disturbing as hell. What's wrong with us human beings? It would be different if we weren't jealous. But as it stands I can't believe how few people are really decent people. I still feel like the answer isn't going to come from negativity like feeling bad or guilty about this stuff. I think we should always be looking toward the future to create new connections and improving the world one step at a time. If everyone could take one step it would be 6 billion steps in the right direction. A ridiculous notion? Maybe, but it is one I hope I can live by. Just realize that no action is too small to be worth doing. The smallest thing as a well placed smile could improve someone's day.

Jung on the Shadow

2008-10-13T12:54:00.001-07:00

Today I was googling on a whim, a curiosity about a certain theological subject arose in my mind. Couldn't the world be saved by saving the soul of satan? I decided to search for the phrase "saving satan" and I was struck by what I found. I believe it to be from God himself. Because, last night, as every night, I prayed for a sign from God, but now my prayer was fueled by an intense emotion arising from the events of that very night. What I found on the first site I visited after googling that phrase, was a quotation that fit so aptly into the situation that I now must share it with you.

If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in the "House of the Gathering." Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.

Jung - On the Shadow

It seems so uncanny. This quote tells me that I did the right thing. I need that. No one will understand deeply enough into this situation to understand that what I did in the end was right. Everything that I did before this was my shadow. It had built up. And I became aware of it. I let go of my projections. And there I was with no choice but to face the shadow. And I did. This is how I became real. I could no longer complain about those who were fake to me. Because I was equally fake. And now I've done something real for the world in some tiny way. But people will always see the shadow. Few people will see my recognition of the shadow, but I accept that as part of doing the right thing.

Usana scam an unethical business

2008-09-30T12:44:00.001-07:00

If you ever hear someone recommending Usana I suggest you cover your ears, say "lalalala" and run as fast and far as possible. A friend of mine brought me to a few of these meetings. The whole thing is an embarassment, I was asked for a payment of $1250 in order to join(after refusing for a couple weeks, the price dropped to $220). It was for a shipment of nutritional supplements that would also put me in some kind of business position (Network Marketing, AKA MLM) that was supposedly superior to conventional forms of working. From what I can tell, you have to work your ass off and not to mention be quite lucky in order to succeed with this. Everyone said that for the first year or so you will be devoting a lot of time and effort and not getting much in return. After that point the "average" member of this MLM will become a gold director or, "hit gold," and start gaining large amounts of residual income. In order to do this, you and your team would have to acheive over 10,000 points for 4 weeks straight. I'm not sure of the exact conversion, but I believe this amounts to selling several thousand dollars worth of supplements PER WEEK.

So you have to build your team by finding other people and convincing them that this works (by the way, Usana members hate it when I use the word "convince") In order to join, you have to buy the supplements. That's what gets your upline(someone who brought you) a commission in the form of "points." (codeword for money, some Usana members seem to hate the word money too...) I think they also get points whenever you (in their downline, having been brought in by them) get points. The compensation plan is excessively convoluted and confusing, what it boils down to (I think...) is a 10% selling commision. I tried to calculate this but my friend who brought me there kept telling me that "you can't" because of about a thousand gimmicky, unpredictable bonuses and rankings.

For the sake of my own sanity, I had to decline on two bases. I needed proof that "hitting gold" is something that would actually happen to at least a significant number of the people who attempted it. They had shown me a time vs money chart which showed a linear graph depicting on ordinary job with a 3.5% raise each year, and a sky-rocketing exponential graph of an "average" Usana member, surpassing ordinary, run of the mill "wage slaves" in less than a year, and then proceeding quickly to millionare status. Of course this graph was referred to by someone who hadn't yet "hit," and the details were scarce, I believe the 3.5% figure to be arbitrarily thrown in as an example. This was just to display an idea. In fact I believed it was meant to alleviate potential recruits (another hated word!) who were worried about the fact that they have to PAY to be in this. They would then see that you start on the graph well below typical working joes, in fact you start below 0 in the minus realm, but that this wouldn't matter in the long run. But some people (myself for example), must demand facts. Where did this graph come from? Who made it? Where is the data and how was it gathered? I went to one last Usana meeting after hearing about the graph. I asked one of their high ranking directors, who redrew the graph and told me the numbers were on the website. I still don't know who made the graph, and neither could I find the data on the website. It seems that a large portion of their site requires you to log in, which of course requires you to purchase their product.

Update: I was recently allowed to view some of the videos that Usana members get to see when they log in. It showed the graph, but had even less details. The 3.5% was gone, it only showed the two lines. Pretty dissapointing.

I know that the only way for this to work is if a large percentage of people fail, but if the only requisite of not failing is not quitting, as I was often told, this WOULD be an impressive opportunity. So I began to think about WHY people might fail. They might just fail because they realized what they were doing was unethical. That's right, despite Usana members constantly mentioning the ethical superiority of their company, I think it's marketing strategy is HIGHLY unethical. This was my second basis for declining, for which no proof has yet been shown. You see, Usana wants it's marketing to occur purely through word-of-mouth. However unlike natural word-of-mouth phenomenon, where you tell a friend about something you like simply because you like it, and you want them to try it too, this word-of-mouth advertising is highly systemized and controlled. And it is used ruthlessly by Usana to their advantage. The truth is, you hold more influence over your friends than a TV commercial. This presents a unique advantage. If we wanted to, we COULD get at least a few of our friends to buy something they don't even really want, at a much higher price than they would otherwise. None of my friends in my age group want or actually need to take nutritional supplements. So why would I want to sell it to them?

But suppose they DID need them? Maybe they would feel a lot better taking supplements. But then let's re-evaluate:

My friends need supplements.

I want to help my friends.

I will find supplements for them.

But not just any supplements, they should be a good deal.

Now let's look at Usana. $100 per month for a health pack?!? All of Usana's products are severely overpriced! Other supplements are much cheaper. Now I would feel REALLY bad knowingly supplying my loyal friends with a rip-off product.

Now, any Usana rep will tell you that this is because of Usana's vast superiority over the competitors in the supplement market. They cite Usana's presence in a Physician's Desk Reference and a few articles in various magazines that mention Usana. They love to cite it as being the number 1 network marketing company, according to Network Marketing magazine (a yearly editorial pamplet written by one person) What strikes me as the most odd however is that they often cite an experiment done with apples. Three apples were sliced open and stored in water, one with Usana, and the other two mixed with other leading supplements. After a few days, the apple stored in Usana water of course came out the cleanest, the others oxidizing into filth.

I later found out why that is. My friend told me that Usana products contain 2000% of FDA reccommended dosage for their vitamins and antioxidants. This is supposedly "optimal," however I think I know the real reason for this. They pump their product up with 20 times more than you need, so that it can stop rotting fruit from oxidizing, and they can show this off to the world. I believe it also probably works faster in your system, but ultimately most of the vitamins will be (and are) rejected by your body, so they are a complete waste. When you buy Usana, you are paying a MUCH higher price on the dubious claim that excessive amounts of vitamins will make more than a trivial difference in how your body digests them. And to sell this to friends and relatives? To convince (yes I said it) them that they need it? And that Usana is the only supplement that is right for them? I would have to have a heart of stone, or simply be ignorant.

I asked some more questions, it took me forever to get them answered. Usana members tell us often that we should focus on building a team rather than getting customers. Building a team means recruiting, and what I finally found out is that in order to receive a pay check by recruiting, you need to bring in 2 people. Usana says that the team should duplicate their team leader. So this means that in order to make money, you have to bring in 2 people who are now in the red. (They've made their investment, but haven't gotten a paycheck yet) Each of those 2 people would then have to bring in 2 more people to get their paychecks. What does this mean? There will always be more people in the company who haven't made any money than people who have, as long as we are focused on team-building rather than sales. Doesn't this seem unethical? You bring someone on the basis of trust, telling them that they will make money. This person may very well be a good friend of yours or even a family member. You tell them this, knowing that some of the people you bring won't make a dime, and if it's not them, then it's someone who trusts them, or someone who trusts that person, or so on, to someone who vicariously trusts you.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't decline simply because I'm an extremely altruistic person who cares only about ethics. But I DO have a conscience. Therefore I cannot devote energy and time to something I think is wrong, without feeling bad. I could have just simply not thought about it that much, then I wouldn't really realize that this is wrong, I'm sure that's how most Usana members are. (I was told quite often by at least two people at Usana to "not overanalyze" and "just run") I don't believe these people are evil, I think they are just pawns of the corporate marketing of Usana itself. They don't realize that what they're doing is deceptive, that someone is going to pay the price for what they are doing. There is some kind of dogma that shows itself nakedly at Usana meetings that Usana is a superior company, ethically and business-wise. Usana reps for the most part believe they are helping the world become a healthier place, while helping themselves and their friends become wealthy. They are given no space to doubt or even re-evaluate their situation. There is a psychological phenomenon at work here called cognitive dissonance, they can't begin to doubt what they've already spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on. And there is a cult-like energetic frenzy that keeps everyone neatly distracted. Their meetings are extremely thick with the use of psychological tools. The deeper you get and the higher your rank, the more tricks they will teach you. I already had a taste of this at "training." They wouldn't let me attend director training despite my best efforts. Instead they told me how to manipulate my friends into coming to a meeting. I believe this may be why so many people drop out before hitting gold. They finally give it some thought and allow their conscience to be heard.

PartnerWithPaul, another deceptive scam like site

2008-09-25T12:12:00.000-07:00

I was reccommended to this site by Steve Albright, creator of reviewopedia (you can see what I think of that site here. I haven't tried partnerwithpaul, so who knows if it works. All I know is his page is covered with lies and he sells your email address to spammers. I confirmed this by using a unique email for his service which resulted in receiving spam.

So after signing up for the newsletter at reviewopedia, which promised to let me know what the best system of making money online is, I got an email telling me to look at partnerwithpaul and some other site called project payday. Since the email made a bigger deal out of emphasizing Partnerwithpaul, I decided to look at it. The first thing that caught my suspicion was the fact that Paul claims repeatedly to be a normal guy who is just creating this system to help himself expand his business, rather than opening an office and hiring employees. Despite having no employees and just looking for a handful of partners, the site is very elaborate and has a very strong marketing feel to it. Everything on the site is done so carefully, even the video showing his screen when he showcases the sums of money he has made seems quite professional. Paul himself is extremely careful to conceal his identity. He covers his face and modifies his voice in all videos, and a whois report on his domain reveals that extra services have been used to conceal the owner of the site.

The next damning example of outright lying on the site is something at the bottom of the page that says that Paul intends to close the offer in a couple days. It states a specific time and day when the offer ends, however after googling the site, and looking at the cache, I saw that the deadline HAD AT ONE TIME been the date BEFORE I was looking at it. So in fact there isn't any deadline, it keeps getting pushed back. So do you really want to trust someone who is trying to trick you? It's made all the worse by the fact that he keeps trying to come off as a friendly guy. Kinda makes you not wanna trust anything he says anymore. But just for the sake of investigation, I signed up. I didn't pay anything of course, I just crossed the first hurdle of his site by offering him my email address. I don't reccommend you do this with your personal address, use a cjb.net domain and make a new address for each site you sign up, or else use gmail and use the + to make a note of who is getting your email address. I did this, and sure enough I began getting unsolicited messages to partnerwithpaul@{myusername}.cjb.net.

So once you get in, you get to see another video about how he has made even MORE money. Of course he still doesn't trust us enough to see his face or know his full name, but that's ok. He's only asking for our money after all. Wait a sec, didn't he say he wouldn't do that? Well of course it's only $10 in comparison with the large amount of money that we should, at this point, have "no doubt" is around the corner. Although fortunately his disclaimer is honest enough to say that there is a chance you may lose money, despite his site constantly claiming you will make at least 5k per month. At this point I also found an FAQ, which didn't add any transparency to the situation, as expected, and surprisingly a contact page. Unsurprisingly, no "live representatives" (hey didn't he say he didn't like to hire people?) were available, and I have the lurking suspicion that none EVER are. So it redirects to an email field which lets you write him a message without finding an email that you can really use. (most of the emails he sends out come from noreply@partnerwithpaul.com) The form guarantees he will or a representative (hey??) will get back to you within 48 hours. So I figured, why not give him a fair chance to defend his offer before I completely trash him on my blog? Here is what I wrote:

Let me first say this, I am very interested in the opportunity. That being said, there is one thing that bothers me, which is the very first transaction occurring in the program.. the payment of $9.95 for shipping of the starter kit. If you are willing, I would like to pay FedEx directly rather than pay you. This is not out of spite or anything like that, I would just enjoy the peace of mind of knowing beyond any shadow of the doubt that your primary income is not just charging people for "startup kits." I'm aware that this is a small amount to pay but the nature of the transaction, as I'm sure you would understand, makes your offer somewhat suspect. Please understand I mean no offense by this, it is just a fact that people seeking business opportunities with strangers must be cautious.

I didn't receive any response back, all I received was a form letter signed "Rebecca Hoffman/Paul's Support Team" asking me why I hadn't paid up yet. The letter contained yet another lie:

You can take the next step with no out-of-pocket costs, so this
really should be a no-brainer for you.

Paul has made millions online, and there's no better person to
help you get started and help you reach your own goals.

If there's something holding you back, please let me know?

Sincerely,

Rebecca Hoffman
Paul's Support Team
http://www.partnerwithpaul.com

P.S. Please do not reply to this email as your response will not
be received. To contact us, please use the contact form at:

http://www.partnerwithpaul.com/contact.cgi

So a few days later I get tired of waiting for a REAL response, and I send him the following letter to followup:(once again, through his contact form)

I thought I had made my question fairly clear, however you haven't answered back at all. It's been several days. At any rate, I have another question for you. Of those that pursue this program, what approximate percentage do indeed make $500 in a month? and what percentage struggle to do so or in fact lose money? (of the people who actually pursue it, i'm sure many people will give up after the first or second steps.) Please note, I am writing a review of your site for my blog. Both of the emails I have sent you as well as any you send me may be included in my review.

All I received after this was a nearly identical letter again from Rebecca Hoffman, but this time with an ominous warning at the beginning that the window of opportunity is "closing," followed by an endorsement from Paul himself about someone named Nick Marks about something equally irrelevant to my questions. I sent him one last pleading email asking him for some support.

I have already sent you 2 emails. You have answered neither, but that's ok. I just want a confirmation that you are open to communicating with me before we start. That's all. You keep sending me emails about how to get started, however you fail to aknowledge the fact that I have asked you a question, or even that I sent you anything. I hope these generic letters are not what was meant by "get back to you within 24 hours." Please let me know if I should continue or not.

"Poor me" I didn't get a response. Until Rebecca finally sent me that form letter again on our "month" anniversary.

It's been about a month now since you first created your account
at http://PartnerWithPaul.com, but you never really got started.

Maybe you've found another opportunity that is working well for
you and you're making money. If so, great!

Maybe the timing just isn't right and you're busy with other things.
I know how it goes, and that's fine too.

Mainly I just wanted to touch base and remind you to bookmark our
site so you can easily find your way back if and when you're ready
to take the next step at some point in the future ...

Followed by the same exact junk as before. Well good luck Paul and Rebecca. It would've been nice to know whether your company is run by human beings. But I guess that's too much to ask of making money at home "opportunities" with flashy websites.

reviewopedia and the scam trend

2008-08-30T17:56:00.000-07:00

This is a true story which I hope will expose some scam artists out there. It all started when I recieved a bulk email message describing an opportunity of processing rebates. I usually ignore such blatant junk but it was curiously similar to data entry job scams I had seen before. More out of curiosity than anything else, I googled something about rebate processing jobs, and google's first result was a review on a site called reviewopedia.

Now the name of a site in many cases may not tell you much. But in this case it was clear what they were going for. Two things come straight to mind, a review site, and a wikipedia-like site. There are numerous sites for user review of products and services. If this were one of those, it might've been helpful. But it's not. It is a facade simulating user-to-user communication while in fact being run by one profit-seeking individual. His name, Steve Albright is at the end of every article. At first I thought he was one user of the site. But he is the sole reviewer. This is how he aims to get your trust.

And if you only look on the surface of the site, it is a convincing facade indeed. The first review I read, (that of the rebates job) was a negative review. This is another tactic to gain your trust, to make you think Steven Albright is "selective" and "looking out for you" when in fact he only writes positive reviews of sites that pay him to net them suckers. You can tell this simply by the fact that he never links directly to one of the sites. There is always a redirecting page on his site which then leads to the link (look in the status bar when you put your cursor over the link, it has reviewopedia in the address) This means that records are being kept of who goes from his site to the "program" or "opportunity" in question. And I'm sure he gets paid for anyone who signs up.

There are even user comments at the bottom of each page. Whoah wait, doesn't that mean that if he is being dishonest, users can refute whatever he says? Well to test that out I tried to post a comment to an article about something called profitlance on his site. This one had an almost flawless record of user comments, not a single one rating it less than 4 starts out of 5. I posted a reply saying that it wasn't working for me and surprise surprise:

He obviously filters out any comments that don't support the statements he makes. I'm convinced as well that he has added some of the comments himself.

The whole purpose of this? He makes money by promoting certain sites based on what they pay him. Not how useful they are or how successful their users are at making money with their "program." Personally I wouldn't trust anything that called itself a "program" or "system" for making money. It's some kind of bull shit buzzword that has been made up to make it sound like it's easy to make money. Like you can follow some secret formula and you will guarantee success. Well the world isn't like that, it's dynamic and you have to use your head. Sure, there are ways of making money. There are ways of making lots of money, but the ones that are easy can't be kept secret for long. You shouldn't pay for such "secret" information, research it yourself. You have no guarantee at these sites that the "program" works, until you pay them and find out for yourself. It's not a good idea to pay for something if the seller of this thing won't tell you what it is to begin with.

Open letter to the team behind Yahoo Messenger for Mac

2008-08-09T07:39:00.001-07:00

I believe that your team is missing a very, very important issue. I am aware that Yahoo messenger is supposed to report all crashes to you, however there are problems which specifically go unreported. The reason for this being that Yahoo does not crash, instead it hangs indefinitely until it is forced quit. After restarting yahoo, no error reporting occurs. This problem occurs almost everytime I am viewing more than one webcam (including my own). Sometimes it happens much faster than others. I think it may be a RAM issue because it seems to happen more quickly when I am using more than one program. This could be a sign of a major memory leak in whatever controls the webcam.

Circumscrimination

2008-08-07T06:44:00.000-07:00

Discrimination aimed at those associating with or in proximity to another discriminated person or group.

Living Coca-Cola Cap

2008-08-07T05:44:00.000-07:00

Ringo (D-5) I snatched pacman!

2008-06-25T18:24:00.000-07:00

Ringo was having technical problems, when they do, they put up a little flash pacman applet where you eat little ringo logos instead of dots. It requires another layer of skill because you can't tell pacman where to turn ahead of time, he will just simply stop! Anywayz here it is!

Ringo is closing (D-8)

2008-06-22T12:35:00.000-07:00

Ringo is closing and the wheels are turning. June 30th the site will be gone, but something will take its place in August. Subscribe to my blog to the left to stay up to date on the new site to be.

Ringo.com is a photo sharing and social networking site. It focused mainly on photo sharing and keeping your contacts up-to-date with your contact info. However, some time ago they announced that they are ending the Ringo service. Note the similarity of expage, a small community website creation site that went down after alerting its users of termination.

The site itself had some impressive features such as several convenient ways to upload photos and videos. The upload form worked in an interesting way in which you did not have to click the "submit" button like you usually do. Instead, simply selecting the file would cause it to upload and simultaneously produce another upload field. They also had a program you could download to automatically upload entire directories of images at once, kind of like a one-way ftp. Until now, they haven't offered any convenient ways to download photos, however.

When they first mentioned closing, they also mentioned their service of creating CD's and DVD's of a user's photos which could be purchased. At first I thought that the closing letter may have been a deliberate hoax to convince people to purchase something they would have otherwise ignored.

I myself actually used the ringo service to store large amounts of photos for easy access on other computers, due to their free unlimited storage and easy upload solutions. I had long since deleted my local copy of the images. I actually suspected this would happen, considering Ringo is a small site. At least they told us in advance! I knew I could create a script that would download all my photos, but the task seemed daunting.

Instead I opted just to pay the 7 or 8 bucks for a CD. Only weeks later to find out that they now have a service which you can download your entire set of photos as a zip file for free. Of course, it is nice to have a hard copy. Would have been cheaper for me to download and burn but eh just a few bucks.

About Ringo(mirrored)
Ringo Closing Notice(mirrored)

At any rate the site will be closing in 8 days. So much for their guarantee of "never be out of date with your friends again" or something like that. Whatever.

More drawings from classroom presenter

2008-05-26T12:47:00.000-07:00

Real Live IFO's

2008-05-01T09:21:00.000-07:00

Lately, a lot of people have expressed interest in UFO's, or "Unidentified Flying Objects." Some of these people go so far as to call themselves UFOlogists. Well frankly, I've never seen the allure. I mean, who really cares about boring old mysterious aircraft? Personally, I would consider myself an IFOlogist. IFO's, for the unsavvy, are known as "Identified Flying Objects." I get chills from thinking about well-known objects that populate our skies day and night. The sheer variety of IFO's out there runs the gamut of human-engineered to natural phenomena that have been clearly defined by scientists. To give you just a taste, here are a few pictures. I get goosebumps everytime I look at them. A flock of what we IFOlogosts call "birds."

A passenger vehicle known as an "aeroplane."

Miscellaneous

This fascinating image was thought to be a rare weather balloon sighting. Dissapointingly, it turned out to be nothing more than some mischevious extraterrestrials performing a hoax.

Well that about wraps up my section on IFO's. If you have any questions or info, you know what to do, leave a comment!

Broken Beaked BlackBird

2008-04-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

I was walking through the Plaza when I walked by a blackbird that was sitting amazingly still on the ground. I walked within inches of it and it didn't fly away. My first instinct was that it was somehow injured, and I noticed its beak looked a little crooked and there was blood on its eye. Also when it hopped, its foot dragged on the ground and an awkward angle. Everyone else seemed to be ignoring the bird but I decided to do something about it. I went to Chef's and got a napkin, and after a couple attempts I caught it in my hands. I carried it to the nearby pet store where they proceeded to put it in a box. They then called animal control, which I'm still not sure is a good thing. I have a feeling that they would find it inconvenient to send such an animal to a wildlife center, and instead might kill it. =( In retrospect I could've brought it to my basement where I could take care of it while it's safe from cats, until it healed or I could send it to a proper wildlife center. But at least I did something. Here's some pictures from before I picked it up.

A little explanation

2008-04-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

In Calc class we use a program called classroom presenter. The teacher sends a slide to everyone's computer which we can all write our answers on, and then it gets displayed anonymously on the projector. So having extra time on my hands, I draw some random stuff in my slide to.. um.. keep people interested in math! Yeah. Enjoy.

Hindenburg

2008-03-31T13:24:00.000-07:00

I was there. Where were you?

Fat Guys on little mopeds

2008-03-31T12:32:00.000-07:00

What is this world coming too? A scathing expose on modern biking gangs:

Backlog!

2008-03-31T11:29:00.000-07:00

All the pics drawn in math class so far!