Wheel of Lunch - another casualty in the death of the Web as we knew it...

A moment of silence please...

I like fun single-use websites. I've written about The Useless Web and other sites like it a few times, and they are fun and goofy. But there have also been a number of effectively useful single-use websites over the years that I've frequented. And right now I find it hard to believe that I've never written about my absolute favorite.

The Wheel of Lunch

Imagine you are with your coworkers or a group of friends and it's getting close to lunchtime. "Where should we go?" you might ask. And then a long discussion begins.

And here's what you should know about me. I am pretty open to most restaurant options, and don't have a strong preference. Basically, once we've decided to eat, I'm pretty agnostic as to the where. When the conversation goes on longer than 2 minutes, I'm politely ready to pick something at random. And for this exact reason exists the Wheel of Lunch.

The screen shot I've saved here does not do this justice. This website has existed since at least 2009. The original version that I was familiar with used Flash (R.I.P.) as a technology. It was later remade with <canvas>. But that was just the front end. The backend technology was pretty genius.

Loading the site at default would give a wheel with ~20 generic options for what to do for lunch (or dinner). You could spin it and get a generic result (like "hamburgers"). But optimally, the site had a connection to YELP, and if you gave it your local ZIP code, the best feature was triggered. Results for the top 20 local restaurants got loaded onto the wheel and then it would get a spin. If you were interested in a specific type of restaurant --for example, BBQ-- you could enter that as a search query and get a list of thosrestaurant types on your wheel.

This was great! Of course, you weren't forced to eat at the first random option. You can always spin again. In coworker groups, the list at least facilitated inspiration and quicker discussion on available options. It was fun for "hey, have you heard of this place?" New adventures could be had.

My wife and kids? Funny enough, they were not fans. They didn't want to trust the wheel for dinner, and they didn't like the clicking sound the wheel makes. And probably didn't want to hear me suggest the WHEEL. OF. LUNCH. one more time. But they are spoilsports who hate fun! 😝

---

I guess all good things must come to an end. Tonight, I went to try it again when we were discussing dinner options and was greeted with the familiar wheel, missing the search options. On the left column was this note:

July 22, 2024

I am sad to report that after 15 years of The Wheel of Lunch, Yelp has decided to no longer provide free API services to the wheel. Yelp’s cheapest API plan is $230 a month! I can't afford that.

The Wheel of Lunch has always been a labor of ♥, and provides zero $ to me (I stopped running ads a while ago). I have no desire to “monetize” the Wheel.

I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the Wheel, while it existed. It was from an older, friendlier version of the World Wide Web that was not exclusively about commerce. Many of these sites are shuttered now, and the Wheel of Lunch is just another casualty in the long march to the death of the Web as we knew it.

Have a nice day! :)

Oof. I felt that viscerally. And it triggers a nostalgic feeling for the early web 2.0 peak of the 2010s or thenabouts. I guess the Useless Web is still around, but I'd suggest we all appreciate it before it fades entirely.

For a Developer, What Does Identity Theft Look Like?

I love the Internet, I really do. deep breath But...

It does by it's nature allow a certain kind of terrible identity theft to take place. Please read through the following blog post and collection of investigative material. For clarity, the "me" in the headline is not referring to me personally.

Someone is pretending to be me.

-Source: hackernews

The commonly understood version of identity theft as far as I'm aware of it, is that someone gets your personal information, like your address, birthdate and social security details and signs up for accounts or credit in your name. This steals money from the creditors and steals (or ruins) credit reputation for the victim. The goal is usually short-term and monetary.

However, the story described in the linked post seems much more insidious. In this era of remote development work that has been around since well before the pandemic, there have been many a developer or coder that has worked for a company and never actually met any of the stakeholders face-to-face. Online portfolio websites, online resumés, and public LinkedIn profiles have created an option for some nefarious actors to entirely pretend to be someone else specifically for the sole purpose of soliciting development work based on the reputation of the victim. The specific victim in the blog post linked above was luckily warned by a potential accomplice that was refused to be roped in.

Long story short, a supposed freelance development company (the bad actors here), were attempting to hire a developer named Andrew (the accomplice) to interview and interface with potential clients (so far, so good), all while pretending (uh-oh) to be a developer named Connor (the victim). Once Andrew got the full picture of what was going on, he backed out and contacted Connor directly to warn him. Connor was lucky.

So I previewed the document and it was scary. It was a document intended for someone to have a cheat sheet for an interview on how to act as me.

• It included a subset of my personal information.
• It included my education history.
• It included my employment history.
• It included my certifications.
• It included a fake cover letter.
• It included a fake email/address that was "near" mine.
• It included information about the company interviewing for.

-Source: connortumbleson.com

Connor was very lucky, and smart enough to follow up and investigate all the possible details of the bad actors, and put them on blast. It's a good job of shaming them publicly. But ultimately the criminals in this case can simply move on, rebrand and start working on gathering work on the reputation of the next victim. Ultimately, the independent developer victims lose money because they aren't really the ones getting hired, and their reputations are most likely hurt given that the work is shoddy.

This is very scary. The only way to combat this is to raise awareness of the existence of this scam. I don't exactly have a big reputation or portfolio footprint at this exact moment so it's unlikely I'd be a target. But it's important me and professionals like me to be aware. It's also important for corporations large and small to be aware and do a proper investigation of who it is they are hiring. Since the bad actors are getting hired as "independent contractors" there's no HR investigation or other due diligence, no verifications. Here's more from Connor...

So it seemed like I was starting to understand the picture now.

• A person/company sets up fake Upwork profiles of real people.
• They apply to jobs in hopes to get an interview using that fake profile.
• They find suspecting victims on GitHub who are willing to go along with this.
• That person uses the identity of someone else to land the job.

-Source: connortumbleson.com

Connor's blog post was only first published a few weeks ago, and updated 9 days ago, so this is all very new and continues to develop. He will likely update the post as more details become available. Everyone be careful out there.

Boredom - I'm Bored of the Internet Now

I wrote a most recent post of alphabetical websites I like for a reason that I'm struggling with. And it's tough to admit, but I'm very bored of the entire Internet. At least I'm bored of the stuff I visit almost daily. This is all entirely my fault of course. The modern web, the social web has evolved through design so that it maximizes the attention-grabbing dopamine triggers. And I gobble it up in my free time with ridiculous speed. The alphabetical list came about because I often found myself opening a new browser tab --usually on mobile-- and thumbing my through each letter one at a time and catching up on the latest updates, if there are any. But I found myself going in circles, bouncing around so much and getting nothing from it. You know that meme where it says something like "Browse Facebook for an hour until I get bored. Then I close Facebook. Wonder what else is going on,... so I open Facebook!" Ba-dum-tish!

But that struggle is real. And as I've mentioned before I'm not on Facebook (since Jan. 20, 2017) anymore. But I go to reddit.com, then imgur.com, then m.twitter.com, then tumblr.com and back around again. I go in circles a lot and it's sad and I'm not enjoying myself. I mean, I'm doomscrolling the latest news and it sometimes feels like it's important. But when I'm busy with these sites, do you know what I'm not doing?

• I'm not learning anything new.
• I'm not reading anything new or important.
• I'm not building anything for myself.

This is all outside of work time and is my leisure time so it's okay to escape sometimes during this. But I'm starting to recognize that I don't have anything to show for it and it's not nearly as much fun as it used to be. This isn't a criticism of any of my actual friends on Twitter, or the quality of the content anywhere. I used to find the Internet, as a whole, inspiring and fun and full of possibility. Now I feel like it's all been collectively squandered and monetized and compartmentalized to such an ugly degree.

And yes I do recognize how fucking WHINY I sound right now.

I hesitated to write about this, because I know how it sounds. Part of it is the devisive politics of the last few years, of which I've wanted to write so much but instead just tweeted. Part of it is how much else I've got going on, most of it very good by comparison. A great number of the fun services that I've relied on in past years are folding up or no longer useful; Google Music, Flickr, and so on. And it bums me out.

What I want to do is turn all that negativity around and build stuff. Learn some new skills (career-relevant and/or not), reading more books (fiction and non-) and build back up some of the fun. Now to take that goal and divide it up into manageable pieces.

Removed Flickr Badge

Another bygone web site service that I must lament is going away is Flickr. Technically not going away, but certainly becoming less than useful.

As of today, I'm removing the code for a Flickr photo badge from the footer of my blog, because it has not been working for a while. This was a rotating set of photos of Lucas, so it comes with some amount of extra grief. I'd even done something neat with some photo frames. Anyhow, I'll save the code here for my personal historical note, but I don't expect it to magically start working again.

<!-- Code starts here -->

<!-- Code ends here -->

Delicious Bookmarks - What's Happening Now?

My favorite social bookmarking service, the one and only original Del.icio.us has sort of languished for a while without any real obvious development or changes. Stagnant. The mobile app had stopped working for me and possibly others. There has not been any blog posts from them in over a year and their social feeds are also non-responsive. But that suddenly changed earlier this month.

Now there's been a sudden flurry of blog posts since the beginning of June. Mostly they are a review of del.icio.us site history and some evolution and foibles. They seem nostalgic without being unrealistic.

• Those who went before us: Web 1.0 bookmarking sites
• The elaborate scam of automated bookmark spam
• The April Fool’s joke that caused data migration headaches

But... what does that mean? Are we going to see some improvements / changes / new features? 

Update

No. We are not going to see updates. After a little more digging, I found a tweet that announced that Delicious had been sold again! And upon further reading I gather this will be the last time.

Delicious has been sold again! Details here: https://t.co/3oiYxX5C1Y

— Delicious (@Delicious) June 1, 2017

You can read more on the Pinboard Blog. But the short version is that del.icio.us is going away. And though I'm saddened, perhaps it's time. I can lead cheers for free web services at the top of my lungs, but some of them just can't last forever. Perhaps none of them can.

The longer version of the announcement is that the company was purchased by a competitor. The new owner has updated and reactivated the export feature but that's probably it. The site is going into "read-only" mode (should already be happening, but to my tests has not yet) and I'll have to find another social bookmark service eventually. Perhaps it will be Pinboard? My initial read of the new owner's blog posts gave me the impression that he's a bit of an arrogant snob, but further along and I have decided I was being hasty. He's knowledgeable and seems to have a good strategy with Pinboard's minimalism. There are other options I've looked at briefly, but $11/year is cheap compared to most other options.

Ow, This Speedtest Hurts

Thankfully this happened at work and it lasted only a short period of time. Our main ISP was having a major outage and we were on a secondary, which is really only rated for the most basic of tasks. But check that out, "0.30Mb/s Download Speed"...

Just for reference, that's less than a 56k modem from back in the dial-up days. Thirty kilobits per second. Ow. How did we ever survive back in the day on speeds like that?

PSA: Charter Bumps 30 Mbps Customers to 100 Mbps, For Free (Speed Test)

One of my Facebook chums posted the following public service announcement.

If you have Charter home internet and are in the STL area, you should call them and see if you can have them upgrade you to the 100 Mbps download speed for free.

And I thought this was at least worth looking into. I found this:

Effective Tuesday, June 10, 2014, existing eligible Residential Charter Internet customers in the St. Louis, Missouri, metro area will receive an automatic increase to their Internet speed for no additional cost, the notification states. The St. Louis market is the only Charter area to provide New Pricing and Packaging (NPP) customers 100 Mbps of download speed and upload speeds of 4 Mbps.

So I made a phone call. Here's my speed test results beforehand.

The first rep I spoke to was not native to the US and did not seem familiar with the special increase. I asked more directly and was transferred to a more local rep. He indicated that my account should be at 60Mbps (not 30) but that a quick modem reset would get me the 100 Mbps. A few minutes later and...

Wow! Okay, that phone call was definitely worth it. And this is all for no increase or change in my plan or price.

Just Another Charter Speed Test

I could get organized and do these speed tests daily and post my results... but there's one problem. I have a life.

Still, it would be nice to know that I'm getting what I pay for on the regular. Thoughts spring to mind of getting a script or browser plug-in or router tool that does a regular speed test and graphs and charts it. Or perhaps I could write something like that, but my guess is that my nerdy desire for this is not singular and someone has already invented that wheel.

I feel strange. Am I really this nerdy?

Why yes, yes I am.

Not Upworthy

For the past few months, I've noted that a highly popular site that is being shared and reshared on Facebook is called Upworthy. Invariably, the pages are video posts embedded from YouTube. The pages are highly engaging, entertaining, thought provoking or whatever. It's generally good content in the videos.

However, the site Upworthy is crappy and annoying and I'd prefer it go away. They curate and post the videos themselves and I guess that's okay, but what bugs me is they have not one, not two, but three --no, I'm sorry, FOUR-- "share this" on Facebook/Twitter buttons. One set above the video, one set below, one set overhanging the left side of the video and a "Follow" set that variably displays by the curator's profile at the top right. There is also a "Recommended" box that appears in the bottom right and overlays the video a bit. Additionally, they mess with the YouTube embed just a bit to interfere with the built-in "Like/Share" features from YouTube.

All taken together, I find it to be way too overbearing. The videos are great, high quality stuff but they didn't create any of them, just curated them. Their site adds little value, and although this isn't unusual, their promotion and sharing features are too jumpy and obnoxious. I've done similar stuff with my blog and other pages I've written, but this is just way too far.

Please stop sharing their video pages. Instead, start the embedded video and click the YouTube icon in the bottom right of the embed to take you TO YOUTUBE. Then share them on Twitter/Facebook or wherever you want. Here's a crazy idea! Post them to your blog. DO it now!

Here's a video that's on Upworthy's home page right now. It's brilliant and beautiful and worth sharing...

And it was worth sharing when I first saw it back in 2009. I probably saw it on this Boing Boing article. Whatever, I'm done. *drops mic*

School Supply Fiasco

Congratulations Internet. You've now become a parody of yourself; a marketing ginmill with very little that is actually useful.

This weekend is the tax-free weekend, specifically set for this time of year to coincide well with back-to-school shopping festivities. Apparently some folks make a big fun event out of this and dress silly in costumes and go to Walmart right at midnight. I'm not sure if that's an isolated thing or if it's becoming a trend like black friday. Not sure I approve, but to each their own. Years ago, I worked at Office Depot during back-to-school days and let me tell you that this is the most important time of year for an office supply store --certainly more than the holidays.

But I tend not to think of shopping as fun in most cases. In our case, we are sensible and download our school supplies list on Friday, print it out and take it to the store with us on Saturday. At least that's what we are trying to do. But it turns out there's a snag. If you go to the school district's web page, you can get all the lists you need for the elementary and middle schools. But they don't have a list for any of the high schools. Go ahead and check. At least as of this very moment, there's no high school list.

Well no big deal. Being intelligent enough to solve our own problems, we do a web search for oldest daughter's high school name and the words "school supplies" and assume that the first result will be the right one. There are several results and though the first one isn't actually on the district's web page, it does look official enough. There's a list and there are even some handy links and ads to buy them immediately online if you are so inclined.

Wait a minute. Wait just a minute...

Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that this site isn't official at all. It's a generic domain like SchoolSuppliesList.com and they have a profile page for the right district and school. They even have the address and phone number along the top header. And there's a download link there in a prominent spot. It seems legit. But it's not. And this business model is a new one for me.

They've taken the freely available yellow pages business listing for the school and probably many thousands of other schools and auto-generated pages for all of them. Then they loaded them up with auto-generated fake lists of grade appropriate school supply ads dressed up in just the right way to appear to be official lists. There's also a big green DOWNLOAD button, but it either downloads spam-ware or other malware of some kind. The final giveaway for me was a small text message directed at teachers or school administrators instructing them to upload their own list. That means they don't have the actual list either. But they've set themselves up in the perfect spot to take advantage of the unaware parents who just search Google for <school name>, <grade> and supply list and then start quickly buying stuff on the first page that comes up.

In review, here is what is likely going down...

1. The school and district administration have not or will not publish a school supply list on their website in time for the right shopping weekend. That's bad, but probably not uncommon across the nation. The disconnect between the decision makers and the IT department is probably wide enough that either this isn't a priority or a deadline got missed.
2. The district doesn't have a page in place for that school's list, so scummy tricksters swoop in and post an easy-to-make page which pretends (within legal parameters) to be the official page. Since nothing else fills that vacuum, these sites make it to the front page of search engine results for the right search.
3. Parents and students will be searching on their favorite engine for their proper supply list for this year and will find a modern, easily accessible site at the top of the results that not only lists out what's necessary but includes the right links to buy them. So they print out the list or buy them right on the site.
4. Unfortunately, not only might they be buying cheap pieces of crap, but the random list they've found has no connection whatsoever to the school or teacher or classroom their student will be in this year.
5. Students will show up on the first day of school with the wrong stuff and all parties will be scratching their heads wondering why. I got the list online, the parents will claim without remembering specifically where. The teachers will stare perplexed.
6. Money has been wasted. Education has been moderately interrupted until the correct supplies can be acquired. A lousy time was had by all... except of course the scammers who pocket the affiliate earnings.

But Jim, you say plaintively, there can't be that many people out there dumb enough to fall for this trick, right? Oh man. I wish that were true. If it was, then these sites wouldn't already exist in abundance waiting to catch the falling fruit. If a business model exists, that means it works or has a likely potential to work. Ergo, my guess is that yes, a lot of people are falling for this. If the axiom is that there is a sucker born every minute, then if there are traps for suckers found in the wild, you know suckers can be found traveling that path.

But not me. And hopefully now that you've read this, not you either. At least do me the favor to post a comment below with your promise of vigilance. And here's hoping that either the district gets wise or the search engines do. Thanks.

I'm listening to Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? by Chicago on Pandora: http://t.co/qVNKrA2Nbn #pandora

— James A. Arconati (@ArcoJedi) August 3, 2013

Thanks for Nothing, Technical Support

I made a call to my cable & Internet provider (whose name rhymes with "Garter") this morning because both our TV and Internet are out. She checks into my account and comes back with Oh, you are part of our new program where you won't get TV unless you have a digital box. Which I don't have and don't want.

Would that cause my Internet outage too? I ask.

Well... no, but it seems like your modem isn't getting a signal either. She pretended confidence.

Okay, so my TV is going to be out until I get a box? When was that already delivered prior to today or how soon in the next 20-30 minutes can it be delivered? I said a little forcefully. She started to stammer a bit. I continued. I don't really want a box at all. I'd hate to have to cancel over this. Can we at least fix the Internet?

She started through the script of checking the lights on the modem and so on, which I'd already done. But then I noticed that the line amplifier that was originally installed on the main line coming into the house (which feeds TV, Internet and phone) had slipped out of the outlet. I plugged it back in without telling her and power cycled the modem. This fixed the issue.

Final note: I don't want a cable box. My television has a built in channel tuner which should be good enough for what I need. If they ever DO make me add a box, they will likely lose a customer.

Is Everyone Using Speedtest.net?

I swear I'm not a corporate shill for these guys. I'm a fan for a quick speed tool that will give me a reliable answer to the question of How fast is my Internet right now? The question comes up frequently at our house.

Check out Speedtest.net today and bookmark them for future use.

Online Marketing is Still The Wild West

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog*

People who don't know or don't pay attention may think the web has gotten to some level of maturity and development, but I keep getting reminded that things are still in their infancy. For those that don't know I have a smattering of web sites. A lot of them are just there without a lot of promotion or development. I have a full-time job and a family among other stuff, so I don't devote a lot of time to all of these sites. One of them is Arconati Kid Korner, which I built ostensibly for my kids to share cool stuff with them, but also to showcase kid friendly websites.

Recently I received the following email.

from: ___@guardlex.com
to: ___@gmail.com
date: Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 12:29 PM
subject: Links removal request

Hello,

My name is Michael Jonson, I work in the Anti Piracy Department of Guardlex (http://www.guardlex.com), we provide anti-piracy and Intellectual Property protection services for our clients.

We represent allkidsgolfclubs.com company which is currently experiencing problems with search engines because of the penalties. Our client has received an “unnatural links warning” which says that they need to remove some links pointing to their website from other web resources.

It has come to our attention that your website (or website hosted by your company) contains one or more links to the allkidsgolfclubs.com company website (http://www.allkidsgolfclubs.com) which may be causing this issue.

I kindly ask you to remove from the following website http://kids.arconati.us all links to http://www.allkidsgolfclubs.com website as soon as possible to help us deal with the search engine penalties and restore our client’s website in search engines index.

Please see the list of website pages in question:

• http://kids.arconati.us/2006/05/all-kids-golf-clubs-junior-golf-clubs.html
• http://kids.arconati.us/2006_05_01_archive.html

In order to find those links, please do following:

1. If this is an online website directory. Use directory's search system to look for "http://www.allkidsgolfclubs.com" links.
2. If there are any hidden links in the source code of website. Open the website's home page and view its source code. Search for "http://www.allkidsgolfclubs.com" in the source code. This will reveal any hidden links.

It is our understanding the links in question may be authorized for use by our client or its agents, but now needs to be removed in order to restore our client’s website from search engine penalties.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you are unsure how to remove those links. We will be happy to assist you in any way to resolve this issue as soon as possible.

Looking forward to your positive reply.

Regards,

Michael Jonson
Anti Piracy Department Specialist
Guardlex company
2820 West 8-th str,
Brooklyn, NY, 11224
Tel: ____
Fax: ____
E-mail: ____@guardlex.com

This smelled a bit like crap to me. Sure, my website may not be the best in the world, but I find it hard to believe that it could actually negatively impact this site. In fact, my immediate reaction is that it would be darn near impossible for a link to a website to have a negative affect. This makes no sense to me.

Still, I feel obligated to at least check out the facts. Additionally, I had to think back a bit to why I linked to them in the first place. And after spending a few minutes looking into it, I decided to reply. Note that I also included the first email I could find for the site owner.

from: James A. Arconati ____@gmail.com
to: ____@guardlex.com, ____@allkidsgolfclubs.com
date: Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 12:04 AM
subject: Re: Links removal request

Hello Michael Jonson,

I am the blogger at KIDS.ARCONATI.US, among other sites. I've looked over your request for removal of the link / post to ALLKIDSGOLFCLUBS.COM. I am not sure when and why that link was originally posted but based on the timing and the details of their site, I'm guessing that I created that post when I worked in ecommerce support at their host, Network Solutions. I was in charge of intro consultations for all new clients at the time. Most likely, I saw their site and target market and added them to my blog regarding kid-friendly websites and stores. My link was not authorized or requested by the client, but was posted only with good intentions. For review, the post is here:

http://kids.arconati.us/2006/05/all-kids-golf-clubs-junior-golf-clubs.html

Your email was very detailed and outlined the request clearly, however you failed to properly explain exactly how my direct link to their home page could actually hurt them. Whereas I may not know everything about online marketing, I'm from the school of thought that just about any inbound link is better than none. In fact, in my research on the matter, the worst that an irrelevant inbound link could do to a site is to have zero effect. Perhaps in very, very rare circumstances a very spammy site could end up hurting sites they link to with no relevance, but I can't find any actual proof of this ever occurring.

Let's look at two industry leading resources on this subject.

Let’s Kill the “Bad Inbound Links Can Get Your Site Penalized” Myth | Search Engine Journal

There are few certainties in SEO, but you can stamp this one in steel: An inbound link from an evil or spammy website cannot hurt you, unless you’re dumb enough to link back.

This post did get updated with a reconsideration based on feedback and comments the writer received regarding the possibility that there may be a small rare possibility that it could happen.

Still...

Stop Linking to Our Website or We'll Call Our Lawyers

Funny enough, this article mentions your company specifically.

Saying an inbound link isn't good for a website is different than saying it's bad for a website. There are inbound links that don't provide value for a website -- those that are contextually irrelevant, from domains with low authority, or contain poor anchor text, for example. We've written about it in full in our blog post "Deconstructing the Qualities of High Quality Links" if you'd like to learn more. But those links don't actually hurt the website that's being linked to. In other words, just because someone doesn't provide great anchor text doesn't mean your website will get dinged by Google for it.

The HubSpot post is more recent and I trust their experience.

All this being said, I could understand the link removal request if I was infringing on the intellectual property of ALLKIDSGOLFCLUBS.COM, but in my opinion this is not the case. The heading tag links as follows:

<h3><a href="http://www.allkidsgolfclubs.com/">All Kids Golf Clubs - Junior golf clubs and equipment</a></h3>

And the body of the post contains some content from their site at the time, but it's properly cited in a blockquote.

<blockquote cite="http://www.allkidsgolfclubs.com/"> <p>Providing high quality, unique junior golf products so kids can have more fun learning the game of golf!</p> <p>Just arrived...Rising Star Junior Hybrid Sets...Now kids can get better quicker by benefiting from the same over-sized Drivers, soft face Putters and the latest Hybrid club designs adults have used for years!</p> </blockquote>

This is only two paragraphs of content and I feel that this falls within the definition of "fair use".

In conclusion, Michael, considering the open question of whether or not irrelevant links can actually harm a legitimate site in a measurable way, and considering the fluid nature of these search engine variables, it seems questionable to have a business model solely based on seeking these links out and asking them to be removed while charging your clients for the service and time. I'd seriously reconsider your process and methods.

To whomever it may concern at ALLKIDSGOLFCLUBS.COM, if after reading this far and carefully weighing both sides, you feel you'd still like the post and/or link removed, it won't take me very long at all. I only wrote this long of an email to help benefit you. Despite the fact that I haven't worked at Network Solutions for the past three years, I still have a great respect for my former clients and coworkers. I work with a few of them to this day on a consultation basis. A better idea might be for us to work together to alter the post a bit with inbound links you'd find relevant. In fact, I'd be happy to offer a guest blog post to you OR perhaps a permanent relevant link in the sidebar or footer. If you are curious, the site only gets about 100 unique visitors a month all total.

Regardless, best of luck and success to you in everything you do. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

::Jim

I haven't heard back at all, but I did get a bounce on my initial email to the golf web site. It would seem that they are in the process of switching hosts or something and all of the public email addresses I'd found for them bounced. I did a quick whois search and forwarded my message on to the domain owner, so hopefully it gets to the right place.

To keep on top of this concept, I did research it a little further the next day. It seems the most recent authoritative article on the subject came from SEOmoz, specifically regarding Google's Unnatural Links Warnings. The TL;DR is that you may seen an unnatural links warning, but unless your traffic has taken a big dip, you should be fine. But I don't see how this can work in the long run. Google can't tell the difference between spammy links that a business owner set up themselves versus spammy links set up by their competition. Additionally, I should be able to link to whomever I want to link. If you have spammy links, don't chase them down. Build up your high quality links and improve your content. If I'm wrong, someone let me know.

---

Note: Since you asked, the answer is no, I have never seen Dr. Strangelove. It is on my list and I'll get to it when I get there.

I Still Use Del.icio.us

I'm writing a quick blog post regarding Delicious and all the possible news and changes that are in the works for my favorite social bookmarking site. But I published a little soon. Please return later tonight for the finished post.

I've mentioned Delicious on my blog before. I've used the link sharing site for research, community and a number of extensible features in websites I build or maintain. Check out my latest bookmarks:

---

---

In the middle of last week, a screenshot of a product roadmap was leaked from an internal all-hands meeting at Yahoo. As part of the slide, Delicious was listed among other services that they were planning to sunset. I saw the story posted first on TechCrunch. At first, it was just speculation and rumor but it was later confirmed. Also, there was some noise about the employee who leaked the photo being in trouble if they caught the culprit (*yawn* Get a clue, Yahoo! This is the more open 21^st Century.).

A number of blog posts circulated about it and eventually, the smart folks started compiling lists of alternatives (none of which excite me right now) and tutorials on how to export your bookmarks and migrate them. I made a note to come back and go through these steps resignedly.

There were several reasons cited for the shutdown. Yahoo is feeling the same economic strain everyone else is and recently laid off a large group of people. Speculation is that some of them may have been the entire Delicious team. Other speculation / commentary was that since the user forums on Delicious were so full of spam and lacking in usefulness, things were already really bad. It made me scratch my head, because I was not really aware there was a forum!

Then a day later, Yahoo / Delicious posted on their blog that indeed they are not shutting down the service, but will instead be selling it to someone else. In other words, my favorite free service was not (er, probably not) going away. At least, not today. I still backed up all 7000-plus bookmarks in one file here on my local hard drive just in case.

Ultimately, it's a free service so it could *poof* at any point and I'd have no one to complain to --except for you blog readers. So let that be a lesson to you. In fact, I'd suggest you read or skim this post on The Decline Of Web 2.0 and keep that in mind as you are updating your profiles and so forth out there. At one point long before Twitter / Facebook, MySpace was the place to be. Before that, AOL was the place to be. Before that, Usenet... well, you get the idea.

Blogger Says Goodbye to Full FTP Feature Support

Blogger has delivered more work for me to do for free. Thanks!

By now, this will be old news in the technology universe. But by the end of the month, Blogger will be phasing out support for blogs published over FTP. You can read more at Blogger Buzz. Previous to this change, you could use their service to host your blog at an "example.blogspot.com" address on Google's servers OR your own domain pointed at Google's servers OR published over FTP to your own hosting account. But the FTP option is going away.

There are changes and improvements internally to how they're systems work and the FTP option has always been a bit unstable and difficult to support. Too many engineering resources are being assigned to fixing these specific problems when only a small portion of the users of this free service need it. Basically, this means that they removed one optional feature used by only 0.05% of their users. This small percentage included me.

Six of the blogs that I use for different sites are posted over FTP this way. It was late at night and I was pretty tired when I found out about this. Before I cooled off and thought about it, I got a little irate trying to post constructive comments.

ArcoJedi said...

Well, I'm so very very very glad to see we finally dropped that very problematic and difficult to follow rule about "doing no evil". That's been slowing you guys down. Do I have your attention now?

I've been using Blogger since 2003. I have a mix of FTP and custom domain blogs (total on Blogger: 17) that I use for a variety of my hobbies and interests.

One of the things that I've used to my advantage is that you can post via FTP to two separate blogs into the same hosting account or even the same folder. For instance, these blogs were all in different sub-folders of the same main site:

• Friends of ArcoJedi
• Musical Holocron
• Mudhorny
• R-Quotes
• Lisa is 30!!!

Since all of these were posted with .ASP file extensions and my own includes on the back end, I got to do some more advanced stuff over the years that 'widgets' just aren't going to cover.

One of my blogs - http://arconati.net/ - is even hosted in the same site as a separate WordPress site - http://james.a.arconati.net/ - and the two do not interfere. I could have the first site also be .PHP, though it's just .HTML files right now. With your plans to drop FTP, I'm not even sure there's a way to continue what I'm doing now. Unless of course, I simply install WordPress and import all posts and be done with it.

Additionally, for clients that want a simple blog added to their existing site in a sub-directory, your FTP was a lot easier to implement than WordPress. I've got some projects on complete hold now because of your changes.

The more knowledgeable 0.5% of us who know what we are doing enough to get FTP to work and care enough to do more advanced things with the blogger tools on our own hosted sites, we are your most loyal fans. When asked the WordPress vs. Blogger question, I have always stated that they both have very valid and useful features with plenty of expansion. I have recommended Blogger just a little bit more because I simply had more experience with it and I couldn't think of anything I couldn't do with it.

Now? Yeah, not so much.

Okay, wow. That's a lot of venom considering this is a free service. I don't normally go that far, but I've loved this service and used it for ... huh, 7 years now! Has it really been that long? Well, anyway, I didn't get a response comment but I owe an apology to whomever might have had to read that poison.

The good news is that the migration tool is actually pretty promising and I can easily get five of the six blogs that this affects moved over with a minimum of effort. The last one, Arconati News, will be a little harder to somehow get migrated properly. As I mentioned above, it's posted to the same account as a separate blog powered by WordPress. I'm not sure yet how to get the DNS settings right for this to work. But I'll keep hammering away until I get the option to work.

And coming from the other side of the fence, I can understand why they need to streamline things and simplify what they can and cannot support. From their point of view, it's got to be hard to continue to support a feature that doesn't work as well as they'd like and to get it to be up to standards will require way too much development and engineering resources than they can commit to a free service.

It still stinks. That's it, I guess.

Update (2010/05/25)

I've gotten all the blogs migrated over except the last one. I've tested some settings that proved to my satisfaction that I could get it to work. I'm a little tied up with other stuff right now to finish this last one so I'll let it sit on the back burner for the time being.

Retrospective 2009

I decided not to make an actual New Years resolution this year. Doing so has never really been my style. And when I have made some public or private resolution, it has never stuck and I've just ended up momentarily disappointed. It's good to have goals and it's good to have benchmarks, but January 1^st is just not good timing. I may change my mind by next year at this time, but we will see how that goes.

That all being said, I did plan to do a lot more writing this year. I even thought that perhaps I'd aim for at least one blog post per day, or more conservatively one post per week. But now we are a week,.. two weeks, three weeks, a month worth of days into the new year and I've not published a thing... At least, not here on my personal blog (more on this later).

It should come as no surprise to anyone that knows me that I've been rather busy these last few weeks. Stick with me a moment and I'll get a good retrospective on my life and my family's life for last year put together and that will be a good starting point for this new year.

January

If you recall, one year ago was when it seemed that everyone -- and I do mean EVERYONE -- got Facebook for Christmas. As a blogger, web site hobbyist and general technological snob, I'd resisted the lure of both Facebook and Twitter with a bit of misappropriated disdain. I thought, Why would anyone who already has a blog or website (or multiple blogs and websites) need a micro-blogging service? I used social bookmarking through Delicious and StumbleUpon but that was it. Up until January of last year, I'd lumped them in with MySpace and ignored them.

But then my wife signed up for Facebook. Her coworkers were on it and had bugged encouraged her enough that she signed up. I soon followed and I felt like a bit of a sheep to do so. And I have regretted my previous snobbishness on many different occasions. The site provides a simple way of reconnecting with old friends from college, high school or wherever. But it also has a lot more than that. And it's free. I haven't used my dumb Classmates.com account in years, for the simple fact that every other feature I tried to use they asked me to sign up for their paid service. Facebook is free and it really is the "database of everybody" in addition to all the fun integrations, games and applications that exist there. For instance, a link to this blog post will appear on my wall moments after I publish through Blogger. My Delicious and StumpleUpon accounts are also integrated.

It's cool. But in fairness, one of my first posts was to reference that Facebook as a website had become THE biggest name on the Internet, just like AOL was 8 years ago. Everyone has an account on Facebook, just like AOL 8 years ago. And Facebook will be around forever, just like ...Oh, oops.

Okay, enough about that. The other much more important thing that happened in January was that Lisa and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary. That evening was entirely too awesome for words. Whereas I had help with some of the arrangements --my dad got us the room at Harrah's using his club points-- I planned the whole darn thing and it turned out pretty well. As I sit here typing away, the next big item on my to-do list is to plan our 11^th anniversary for two weekends from now, which probably won't be quite as involved but to my mind still needs to be special for my special lady. &heart;Lisa&heart;

February

My niece Lillian and I both have our birthdays in February. Lilly will soon be THREE YEARS OLD! I'll be turning 34 this year, which is much less exciting compared to three. I'm not really bothered this time around by getting older. I think it bugged me last year and even the year before, more than it ever had before. But this year all I can muster up is a shrug for reaction. Meh! Perhaps I'm just happy with where my life is right now.

March

More birthdays for our extended family happened in March. Both Linda K. and Zöe V. share this month. Lonny and Tami had their son Bryce, so there is one more birthday. Additionally, both of our kids got invited to birthday parties for their friends at school. On some weekends they were double-booked! There was also an awesome Orchestra concert for Reese.

April

It's getting to be a regular thing that both Lisa and I sing in the Easter Cantata every year. I never thought of myself as a singer, but it's fun. Also in April of 2009, as in 2008, we had a day at the cemetery celebrating Lucas on his birthday.

May

More birthdays happened in May. I still can't believe this, but my oldest child turned 10 years old! Olivia had her Girl Scout Bridging ceremony and then school went to break for the summer.

Although Lisa and I knew for a few weeks, May was when we announced that God had answered a prayer we'd had for several months. Lisa was once again pregnant! So began a whole new journey and chapter of our lives that I'd given up hope of coming true. There was a lot of worry and trepidation that immediately settled into my mind, but trust and faith have been carrying me and still do.

For more global news, May was when the news regarding Swine Flu, the vaccine that was being developed for it and possible shortages started making the rounds everywhere you looked. My dad had some ruminations on the news and how it echoed the 1976 flu season. I came to understand that my parents' experience of the vaccine from that year was rather negative. I'd vaguely heard the story before as a youngster, but suddenly it was topical again.

I also took a day off work to be one of a dozen Career Day Presenters at the elementary school where my mom is the counselor. This was a really fun, empowering day for me.

Right before May ended, my brother and his wife Kelly had a new addition to their family, Sophia Louise Arconati. She was so adorable and it was starting to look like a really good year for new babies.

June

We began going to very regimented doctor appointments for Lisa that would eventually get as regular as every two weeks and more. Due to Lisa's diabetes, previous c-sections and so on, she has one of the best medical teams due to her high risk status. Still, not a day went by without a few moments of worry.

There was a week of PROBE for Reese, a week of VBS for both my girls and Isaiah V.'s birthday rounded out the month.

July

This is always a busy month for birthdays in addition to Independence Day. Lonny, Kelly, Lisa and my great-aunt Ruby all celebrate their birth in July. Lisa's folks came down to visit us for about a week and to see the fireworks. For the very first time, Reese went away to summer camp for an entire week! My mom, my wife, my kids and I also spent an entire week at the time-share at Lost Valley Lake. Come to think of it, we were also joined by my aunt and uncle for a few days.

August

My step-brother Lonny and his wife Tami came into town from New Jersey for a baby shower for their son Bryce, who was born in March. Lisa's dad and her twin siblings Kate and Nate have a birthday in August. My little brother Jon also was born in August. If you want to know a weird coincidence, Jon and my wife's siblings were all born on the same day. Of course, Jon was born years earlier but they all three share a birthday. And yes, I'm aware of the fact that twins are normally born on the same day. The coincidence is that my little brother ... oh, nevermind!

Going back to Lost Valley Lake for a moment, you may have seen the news in August when the news was the fire at the main sports complex. It's a pretty big deal for them and a little weird considering that they had another large fire that gutted an entire building back in 2004. It's bad luck and they are just in an area of the county that fire departments have trouble getting into. A lot of people in St. Louis have been to LVL over the years. But for our family it was a little more eye-opening to see because we had just been swimming and playing mini-golf at that very building only a few weeks earlier.

September

Lisa and I had planned a second trip to LVL for a weekend in early September. It was just us four: Lisa, myself, Reese and Olivia. Well, four and a half, if you count the pregnancy. We got a chance to see the completely destroyed building. We spent hours swimming at the pool and had tons of time for fishing. Both my girls caught fish. Even my wife caught a fish with my pole while I was walking back to the car to fetch the cooler. I caught nothing except mud and weeds! At night, we slept in a rented trailer and told ghost stories around the campfire. I told a few that I know, but Olivia made one up completely on the spot that was very involved and in depth. I wish I'd written it down.

By this point in the year, it was clear that Lisa was growing with pregnancy and this was really going to happen. I mean, we had been watching the baby's progress on regular ultrasounds and everything was going smoothly. But in the back of both of our minds, it still seemed so unreal. We waited silently for the joke to be revealed. We waited for some sort of tempering mildly bad --or really bad-- news. We held our breath and waited for the other shoe to drop...

Something I should mention is that when you have infant loss, there is a blissful ignorance that you no longer possess. The veil of security, the idea of invincibility and the boastful claim that "this will never happen to me" is no longer possible. We'd experienced loss of an infant, and we'd also experienced miscarriage. So we could no longer be blissfully ignorant, even if we wanted to be.

Near the end of September, I was let go from my job at Network Solutions. My former coworkers and supervisors may still read my blog, as so many of them are still my friends on Facebook. I'm not going to bad-mouth or complain about the company, though others have done so both privately and publicly. Things happen and (allow me this analogy) like a recently divorced marriage, accusations of blame could be tossed around recklessly. In reality, it may have been time for both parties to part ways. But hey, that's just the truth for me and should not reflect on the confidence of my buddies in their jobs or of any of NetSol's clients (who hopefully don't read my blog anyhow). For my own personal reasons, this change to my life might be the best possible news in the long term.

October

The first financial thing we did prior to wading through the unemployment benefits stuff, was to call our mortgage company and reapply for the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan. We had initially applied back in the summer at some point, but our combined wages were too high. Now that I was not gainfully employed, it was very simple to ask them to reprocess our original application and we got a positive result quickly. Our monthly payment was reduced by about $400/month. By the end of the month, I was also earning unemployment benefits through Illinois and it was a good percentage of my previous wages. I haven't computed it to the exact dollar, but I feel like I'm actually ahead if you don't consider the medical and other associated benefits.

In the job market, I knew before I started looking that things weren't great. But I began to find some new avenues that I hadn't considered before on various smaller job boards as well as Craigslist. Realistically reevaluating my skills, I've begun to look at my favorite role as more of a designer, developer and consultant with tons of small business expertise that I have not yet been able to fully wield. This is opposed to or in addition to my more limited role as a technical support software expert. I've mentioned that I'm reading Covey's First Things First and using it to Dream Big. This is only one of many reasons why.

Halloween was lots of fun. Thinking historically, this holiday is becoming less of an open door-to-door kind of day and more of a closed party style of day. We hung out with the VanMeters for a little while once again this year and then we gathered candy. There are two houses around the corner from me that throw a combined open house. They barbecue hot dogs, have a half-barrel of punch and some teenagers actually put together one of the worst punk-rock bands I've ever heard. They have a "stage" and even closed off part of the one cul-de-sac for a mosh pit of sorts.

November

My dad, my mother-in-law and my daughter Olivia all have November birthdays. I believe that both Ryan and Heather also have their birthdays in November in addition to their wedding anniversary. Against our better judgment, we caved to Olivia's request to have her birthday at Chuck E. Cheese. We celebrated Thanksgiving at my Aunt Jeannie's house with the traditional hike.

During the hike, Olivia was complaining that her feet hurt and she wanted me to carry her. In a joke, I said something about Bilbo not needing to be carried for his whole adventure to reach the Lonely Mountain. One of my cousins asked with some suspicion if she would even know what I was referring to. And that's something else I'm proud of from the last year. By Thanksgiving, I'd been reading to the girls from the Hobbit every night. We normally read something right before bedtime, but this was the biggest and longest book we've read so far. I started reading from J.R.R. Tolkien's great work after Reese had gotten so excited about the Percy Jackson series that she found. Reese likes Tolkien just okay and usually it lulls her to sleep. But Olivia listens with rapt wide-eyed attention! She asks questions too and is so taken with the characters that she is writing her own version in a little pocket notebook, which she calls the "girls version".

Lisa continued to grow more pregnant and the baby continued to grow in complete health. After a minor scare which proved to be nothing, we decided to find out the gender of the baby. We had originally planned to wait until the end and be surprised. But we changed our mind and until the technician confirmed otherwise, I thought we were going to have a third girl. Instead, I was floored that we would have a boy! I would have been happy either way, but admittedly we wanted a boy.

December

My mom has a birthday early in December. My son, who's name was going to be Samuel, was also going to be born in December. Plans for the cesarean section and the hospital stay were firmed up. A last few ultrasounds and other tests were performed and everything was great.

An interesting scheduling act was performed as the date approached. Lisa's due date was the 20^th, but the doctor we prefer was only available on Wednesdays, so that meant scheduling the birth for the 16^th which was a perfect time for us. However, we were also going to be singing in the Christmas Cantata, which was scheduled for the 13^th, the previous Sunday. Lisa even asked to do a short solo. In the past, my wife had scheduled c-sections for both girls, but she went into labor a few weeks early with Lucas. There was a very real possibility that Lisa would go into labor early and we'd miss it.

Ultimately, the day of the performance came, we sang and when the service was over, Lisa was still pregnant. The last few weeks of pregnancy are always the most uncomfortable and seem to take the longest. Even so, the feeling that this was all so unreal and precarious made the whole nine months actually fly by way too fast. It seemed like I was still reeling from the fact that the tubal ligation reversal was in fact successful, and then to learn the news that we were going to have another son... and then:

He's pretty dang handsome isn't he? Samuel Joseph Arconati was born 21.5in tall and weighing 8lbs 5.1oz. And he just keeps on growing.

In the days that followed, Lisa's mom and sister came down from Chicago to see Sammy and to stay with us through Christmas. They arrived two hours early, Lisa was still in the hospital with Sammy and I'd had about four hours of sleep. My mother-in-law, who I adore on most occasions, immediately started barking orders at me in regards to home maintenance. In the end, it was all sorted out and all was forgiven. I did get some sleep later on and I got a cleaner house in the bargain, just in time for Samuel to come home.

The girls spent the night with my mom on New Year's eve (a tradition, it seems) and Lisa, Samuel and I spent it with each other just doing nothing but a bit of cuddling.

Overall

Throughout the entire year in 2009, there was much more involvement with all kinds of activities for the girls. In addition to Pioneer Club, the girls were both involved in Girl Scouts and Reese joined chorus and Celebrate Children (think show choir) at school, in addition to Cello in Orchestra.

We continue to read from the Lord of the Rings series at night among other books, and I'm eagerly anticipating the day we complete them so they can watch the extended edition DVDs. I've been watching the bonus features when the girls go to sleep and it's really sinking in how huge these stories are.

So it was a pretty great year throughout. The highlight was getting to hold my son for the first time and to realize that he is alive and healthy and vital. And the moment I saw his face I knew he was not Lucas. I'm still worried, and I will likely continue to be until his first birthday. But I'm not as panicked as I expected to be. Our little family of five is complete and blessed and together. I will continue to thank God every day for these "small" miracles, which by my account are not small in the least.

If you've really read this far, it should be counted a Herculean task for which you should be proud... or perhaps ashamed, depending on your perspective. I can just hear you saying "There's 20 minutes I'll never get back!" Thanks for your time and I pray also that God blesses you this new year at least as much as he's blessed me in the old.

Now to see about getting some sleep...

Internet FAIL!

So my home internet has been down. It was intermittent there for a few days. At first, I couldn't use any browsers (Firefox 3, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer 7) but email (Thunderbird) and instant message (Pidgin) worked. I'd reboot and it would start working again. Then the whole thing failed. The AT&T representative named "Norm" (from India?) was surprisingly helpful the first time I called. We went through a number of steps and tests, removed the router from the setup and suddenly it started working again. He tried to help me with the router too, which I didn't expect, but his documentation on my router was out of date and we couldn't really get very far. Still, I was impressed that the guy helped me as much as he did. He was pretty helpful, but I just didn't believe that it was the real issue. I put the router aside for the moment planning to revisit the issue later.

I thought that it was fixed, but it was still acting up. Days later, it quit again entirely. I should have known that this wasn't really the issue. It feels like two separate issues. One is that the browsers are all locking up in the middle of loading a page. I could surf for a while and load page after page. Then one more link and the new page just spins and spins and never loads.

So on my next call, I spoke with "Andy" (again, I doubt that was the name his parents gave him). He was helpful, but he got to a point where he decided on what the issue was a little too quickly for my taste. He told me simply that my router might be broken or ready to quit and suggested they send me a new one. He'd have to extend my service for another year if I wanted a free modem. But it was either that or buy my own. Or cancel. So I told him to send one. I'm hoping it works and works permanently.

If you are reading this, then it's now back up! Or at least, it was up long enough for me to publish this. Wish me luck.

---

Oh and hey, let's try something new: Technorati Tags: internet, at+t, technology.

ArcoJedi's Messy Stuff Central

One of the very first web sites I ever created is closing very soon. ArcoJedi's Messy Stuff Central is being forcefully shut down in a manner of speaking. I got an email at the end of September that AOL was shutting down it's 'hometown service' for good.

We're sorry to inform you that on Oct. 31, 2008, AOL® Hometown will be shut down permanently. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

I became aware of this service for the first time way back when I first used the internet post-college at home on a black-and-white-screen Macintosh II.

Do you remember those? Well, I really got into the internet beyond just email when I got home from college. Dad got me an AOL account because they were next-to-free through his work. This would have been about 1997 or so. I was working on a group project with the Dark Sun Mailing List, but lamented that I didn't really have a place to host the files. Someone suggested that I use the hosting that AOL included. I looked into it and found out that AOL subscribers (which technically included me) had 10mb of free space online at - members.aol.com/USERNAME - and I took advantage of it. What it amounted to at the completion of the project was about two dozen wordpad files (.rtf), most of which I'd written myself. They were uploaded to a folder and the server built a directory listing which I linked to for the mailing list.

Fast forward about two or three years. I'm married, a father of one and a member of a small-town garage band called Rod & the Satalites. When we lived in Quincy, Illinois at this time we didn't really have much when it came to a computer and I didn't have time for it anyhow. However, when we moved back to St. Louis, my first hobby project was to build a long overdue web site for the band. I posted pictures of the band members, short three-line bios, a few upcoming show dates and contact information. I created this all on my mom's computer using Windows 95 Microsoft Paint and Netscape Composer 4.5! Yeah, good times.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to visit back at Quincy as often as I'd hoped and I eventually stopped contact with the band members. The older free-form Dark Sun Mailing List got replaced with a more official corporate one and it wasn't much fun. They had also halted Dark Sun as a product line. My site sat dormant with few updates until probably 2003 or so. That's when I became a member of MonsterCommerce and really started learning about websites.

I wanted to create something new and was going to just use the AOL space, but it turned out to be a little difficult to manipulate without being signed into AOL at the same time so I found an alternative in the space my cable provider and earthlink made available and started work from there. Eventually those other sites became the family sites you see today with domain names and everything. But I never forgot those older projects.

So, get yourself caught up to the present day. In case you haven't noticed AOL is way down on the list of successful internet companies and is completely repurposing themselves into an entirely different animal; a content and portal provider instead of an ISP. At least, I'm surmising that is their plan. I'm not really following it all that closely. Since the hometown/journal operations don't really benefit anyone at AOL, they did the smart move and retired them. I'm honestly surprised it took them this long. At least I got wind of their warnings and saved those files. AOL also had a blog tool at one time that I tested out and they made it easy to import these blogs into Blogger.

So, my Dark Sun Net Project and Rod & the Satalites pages will have to find a new home in some archive folder somewhere. I have all of the files saved to my local computer and will probably post them somewhere, just for the sake of history. The AOL Journal has been imported properly too, just in case I ever wanted it (which, at the moment, I don't).

My AOL email address still works for those old college friends that still have it, though I check it infrequently. There's some life lesson here about impermanence and growth through destruction, ... or something. Anyhow, that's how it happened.

More Information

• Attention AOL Hometown Users - People Connection Blog
• We're Closing Our Doors - People Connection Blog
• How to Download Your Hometown Files - People Connection Blog
• arstechnica.com - AOL axing two more services this month
• Macsimum News - AOL Hometown
• Anti-AOL

AT&T Rant

Don't work in customer service. It makes you intolerant of bad customer service.

In my previous post about my DSL, I mentioned briefly that I did something to my account that could likely alter the speed of my connection speed somewhat and I was guessing that it would not be better. Let me elaborate.

When we signed up for DSL, we were on the $15/month introductory residential rate. When the first year ended we expected to be bumped up to a higher rate and we were. However, we didn't look at it real closely and it turns out for the last six months or so we have been paying a very high business rate (around $70 just for DSL), rather than the equivalent residential rate (around half that). Well, I finally called them last week about that and explained the situation and the billing rep I spoke to was very confused as to how that could have happened and very polite and apologetic about it. She changed our rate to residential very quickly. I jokingly asked about a credit for the past overcharged amount and she couldn't help me with that and I hung up.

Later I decided that wasn't good enough. I called back again and explained the situation anew and the rep that day explained that I could get the past $200 or whatever credited, but I had to bring my current past due amount up to date. Nevermind the fact that if they credited the $200 they owed me, we'd almost be even. I couldn't do that at the time but wanted to call back at my next paycheck.

I called today and paid the past due amount with the hope that I would be transferred back the DSL folks and get the credit. Keep in mind I waited on hold for 10 minutes for the billing department and then 10 more after transferring. The next conversation I had went kind of like this...

---

A guy named Brian: Thank you for calling. Unfortunately, since this is a business account and not a residential account, and the business account representatives are not here on Saturdays, we will not be able to help you.

Me: Wait, you do realize that this whole problem was caused by the fact that I was mislabled by your company as a business client and not a residential client? There is no way that you can help me today?

Brian: I'm sorry sir, but no.

Me: Well, since you won't credit my account the money you owe me until Monday, can I have the money I just paid you back until Monday?

Brian: I'm sorry sir, but no.

Me: Is there anything else you can say except I'm sorry sir, but no?

Brian: I'm sorry sir, but no.

---

The thing that I find funny is that business clients pay double, but can't get service over the weekend. Does that make sense? Anyway, I'm irritated about this. I'm tangentially concerned that my connection speed will drop a bit, but I haven't noticed any difference as of yet.

As a customer service experience, there are so many things wrong with my experience here that I can't even begin to enumerate them. Congratulations, AT&T! You win the lame duck award for the month.

Go Trillian!

Trillian is one of my favorite pieces of software and I found a fan / community based site for Trillian.

For those not in the know, if you use multiple pieces of software for instant messenging online, Trillian should be your new best friend. Through one program you can connect to AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Chat, MSN Messenger and many more.