And this is the Everybody’s free to wear sunscreen video
Now remember give your vote for each of these videos. Hope you enjoy them. I will tell you all my votes when you have all cast yours.
This post is for the Metallica One video. I must say I grew up listening to this and it is one of my personal favorites. Do not let that sway your vote at all though seriously I want your opinion.
This will be the first run of our monthly music video awards. The next few post are going to be videos that I want you to vote for on a scale of 1 to 5 stars 1 being absolute worst or least favorite and five being the one you favor the most of them. The star rating you choose should be comprised of choreography, music, and how well the videos message was portrayed to you. The one with the highest overall average stars will be posted on the first of every month from here on. We got a late start on this idea and are not even done fully implementing the complete idea but there will be a feature videos section added to the site with statistics for the videos. Eventually we may even add the ability for you to suggest videos to us for use in upcoming months.
The first post video is going to be Mad World
Here is something you may find a little oddly entertaining. I know I did 
One time I called this radio station that was doing alright. Nothing really big or anything. I asked who was in charge of marketing. The woman I spoke to told me it was Bill Freemont. I said thank you very much, have a good day then and hung up. About a week later I walked into the radio station and asked to speak with Bill Freemont about boosting the station to new heights. The secretary asked me to take a seat, Bill was on the phone but would be of momentarily.
A few minutes later I was called into Bill’s office. We discussed a few techniques and why they had or had not implemented them yet. You know small talk. So now comes the reason I am here. Bill I am going to take your station to new heights. I sold myself up a bit and told him that I would require a salary of $40’000 a year and $90’000 for a marketing budget. So after a bit more discussion it was agreed he would get back to me.
Two days later Bill called me up and told me I was on board. We went on for a few months and did some online marketing and a few other local fund raisers and so on. So at this point I bring talks of a relocation up. I had found a great spot that would cost about $800.00 less per month to operate from. The only issue was that it would cost the station about $8000.00 to move to the new location.
At this point I have already planned this whole thing out so I have plenty left in my marketing budget for the year and I offer up $6000.00 if they will fund the rest. Bill jumped right on that when I promised that the move would surely save them money and bring them higher than they had imagined possible.
The worst part of all of this was the packing. That was an outright nightmare. So we get to the new location and it turned out being better than I had expected. Without thinking about it the elevation of our new location was 2400 feet higher than before. Just about at the peak of our highest mountain. Before we were stuck in a valley.
The amount of listeners increased by over 180% due to our new incredible reach. Ok, so now here comes the twist. I was fired the next month. Bills secretary found a paper I had written my original ideas on about how I intended to boost the ratings of the radio station. It was a simple plan really. I had no idea just how great a plan it was but I knew it was good enough to work. I had no intentions of scamming the station nor is that at all what happened but they viewed it as such. They ran daily discussions on air with live call in’s. The topics being a scandal on high, about the station being scammed out of 132’000 dollars and now being stuck up in a secluded mountain location against their wishes and so on. Yea ok so this is messed up at this point but I play right into it as they had anticipated from my notes.
This was my idea. Nothing boosts ratings like a good scandal. It was intended that the firing was all show as it was written in my notes. Only issue is that I had not discussed the firing portion of this plan with them at this time and I am now fired so I think that my idea is just not going to happen and it does only in reality. I am hearing this for over a week, people calling in, running me into the ground and then some. I had intended this to be a few day thing I would call in from home, We would get into heated debates over the phone on air. All staged up you know? Yea so it didn’t happen like that. No, instead after a week of this I am nuts and I call in and go off. This is on the air and then they edited my voice to say things I never said. Their ratings went through the roof.
All would be fair and well here except one thing. My salary was cut, I received no severance pay and I am out of a job. This was my idea. It worked way more than I had planned on and they profited from it where I received absolutely nothing but grief. After exhausting every last dollar I had on legal fees trying to originally get my job back and then I dropped down to just my severance pay and so on and never received anything at all. No money left and so I had left that old crook of a town.
Two years later I come back and buy the radio station. I now have 2 since I moved on to another station and pulled the very same thing off only with legal binding contracts this time signing 50% of the shares over to me if the stations listener base could be increase 200% over one year. So now do you wanna take a guess who kept their job at WKLB-99 The Top? Well Bill did for a few months but he couldn’t hack it so he decided to move on to other ventures. Bills secretary on the other hand. Well she is now in Bill’s office. That is a woman that I know I can trust when it comes to the finances. She values her job and when she had seen my notes did exactly what I would have expected her to do. Bill is the one who stepped way out of bounds here without questioning me about it or anything. Oh well such is life and now it is a better one.
That was just some off the wall ramblings for you really. No one mentioned in this post or anything in it was real or exists and any familiarities are mere coincidence outside of myself. I am pretty sure I exist but none of that ever happened. I was just bored. Have fun folks.
We have recently decided to remove all the little hidden tracking images, avatars, mybloglog and any other related items from the website. These have had miserable effects on the websites performance. Whenever one or more of these sites has problems it causes our site to be sluggish and some times not even load at all.
The intent of browserreports.com for instance is the tracking of the most commonly used browsers. Not something we really need here but it was interesting to follow for a bit. The one that is a bit unfortunate that we have to remove is quantserv which monitors our sites inbound traffic and was rather helpful for us but this one as well causes the site to load slowly.
It looks like the web services that provided these things for us just can not handle the load that they experienced and this is most likely the cause. Needless to say they have been removed and hopefully that should take care of the issues that we have been seeing over the past few weeks.
After receiving a comment on this post I made I have decided to rewrite it and retract some of the things that I had stated. I had a miserable week fighting with this issue and I had a bit of an outburst and truly apologize for it. So this is what I do have to say though.
Protect yourself from content theft. This is the only thing that will keep your site going and keep bringing you users. If everyone else has your content why would someone come to your site to find it? This is an ongoing issue in the Internet world. You spend many hard hours coming up with content that was so well thought out and planned for and to find out the next day it has already been stolen. You go round and round trying to stop them. This can be a nightmare. Trust me I know. The people who host some of these sites can be very difficult to track down right away. You may never be able to contact them directly even.
So now what do you do. Well fortunately there are a few things you can do that I will mention here but I also think you may want to follow the comments because there is great information there as well plus a blog that is directly related to this type of thing.
Report them to the host they use, search engines and any advertising program they are using such as google adsense. Well that is not all you can do. Here is another thing you may try. Keep in mind that this is only my opinion and I in no way make claim that this will actually help your situation but here is the other idea that I have.
Make posts that you know will end up on the thief’s website stating very clearly that they have in fact stolen the content. We have done this and even if it does not stop the theft it is surely amusing to knock these guys into the dirt by showing how they have stolen your works. Also I have noticed this that you may want to take note of and use to your advantage whatever that may be. I am yet undecided as to what is better here but if you have href links in your post you may want to make sure the links include the full path including the domain in the url. This will make sure that the content links back to you providing they do not strip the links. Other wise if you use a relative link then your links that were in your post will link to pages on the thief’s website and may only trigger futher scraping of your content. So pro to having an absolute link is that it will be an inbound link to your site. Con it is a link from a poor relationship and that association alone is not really good but I am not an expert so make your own opinion for that. Good luck to you all. I know I will need it
PayPerPost will be announcing real big news in the PPP online advertising
world in a week or two and no one has any idea what it is. They have been talking about big things but everyone is all hush, hush when it comes to what these things are. Boy oh boy do I love a good surprise.
I bet that payperpost has become so huge that they have decided to go out into the internet world and start recruiting bloggers to work for payperpost directly from home to do things such as help maintain and monitor the ever growing forums and even to aid in answering help tickets and various other tasks that can only be done by those who know and work the system.
They are also going to be adding some new features to the system so that bloggers will be able to see who has voted for them. Well that is just a rumor I am starting but we shall see where it leads. I bet you they will do it.
How much do you want to bet that another thing I that they will be doing is upping the $1000.00 rockstartup opp to $5000.00 and adding in prizes for top blog of the week.
We are releasing the final version of the Google Sitemap Parser plugin for wordpress today. We strongly encourage all users of previous versions to upgrade to this version.
With the new sitemap plugin you will not end up with a sitemap page that is overpowered with mass amounts of links. This is actually a bad thing to have more than 100 links on a page. Search engines tend to look at that as link farming.
Now you can browse paginated results of site pages or blog posts with a pre set amount of links per page. You define this in the settings before install and can change it at any time after that. We will continue to offer the last public release for download but we do not offer support for it. The support forum should only be used for version 1.0.
Hopefully this version fixes any issues that were found in the previous release. Questions and comments are welcome.
[18:16] || Stylezed decided to join [development channel I moderate]
[18:16] Stylezed, “$%^# you”
[18:16] Stylezed, stabs Asylum in the head
[18:16] || Stylezed decided to leave [development channel I moderate]
I received a phone call from the owner of the channel a bit after that and then from that performed a whowas due to the user leaving already. Below are the results.
[21:05] || WhoWas info for: Stylezed
[21:05] || Address: xizm@206.222.5.218
[21:05] || Nick: StyleZed
[21:05] || Server: [networkname] Sun Mar 11 22:19:15 2007
From this I find the users ip address and perform a php function call on it like gethostbyaddr(“206.222.5.218″)
This returns aogservice.com
I then browse to the ip address in my browser and see the following message.
THIS IS NOT AOGSERVICE.COM AOGSERVICE.COM IS BEING ILLEGALY POINTED TO THIS HOST AND THIS HOST IS NOTHING TO DO WITH AOGSERVICE.COM IF THIS ABUSE DOES NOT CEASE THE OWNERS OF THIS HOST WILL CONTACT GODADDY WHO ARE THE REGISTRAR FOR AOGSERVICE.COM AND DEMAND THAT THE ABUSE BE DEALT WITH!!!!!
That host name however is something altogether different. The reason I am posting this is that first I have no idea who this user was.
The location of the ip is:
City: Columbus, OH -
Latitude: 39°99’68″ North
Longitude: 82°98’83″ West
That is in no way related to anyone I know. The websites logs have been scanned and this is not a visitor here that we have record of. We do not track all visitors ip addresses but when commenting or anything of the like they are logged. So nothing for answers there and now the next issue is that this user came to a totally unrelated and private network, joined a channel that is totally unrelated and verbally assaulted me instantly and then left. If you search just right you can find information related to me that ties this all together but this person would have had to invested a considerable amount of time into it for a purpose that is totally oblivious to myself or anyone else at this time outside of some of the things we have found ourselves stirred up in here about content but this does not seem to be anything of that nature. Just the same whomever “Stylezed” is it is all on record here.
Not sure how to take this really. Never received hate for anything before on the web and with no explanation even. What do you think? I don’t think it is random per se but it is obvious someone’s machine is compromised somewhere and they are listed on the site here and are now ticked. As of this time I have only searched the logs for full ip matches but I will next search for matches in the first three octets and go from there. We will see I guess. Interesting just the same.
Heh. How is that for some Internet junkie drama? Tune in next week as the saga continues
If you, a friend or relative have a drug addiction I have found an excellent treatment facility that I must tell you about. Everyone knows how much you can be held back by a drug addiction and it is not always easy to find a helping hand through difficult times.
I have known many people who have been to treatment centers and I must say that The Stone Hawk drug treatment center is amazing. They know where you are coming from because they have been there so being able to relate is not an issue.
The Stone Hawk has an astonishing success rate of 76% and counting. I highly recommend this treatment facility mostly due to their views on recovery. I do not want to knock the 12-step program but I have rarely if ever known it to have a high success rate. The fact that the Stone Hawk treatment facility has a strict no drug policy meaning you do not take drugs to get off drugs goes to show you that they really mean business. They do not want to substitute your one addiction for yet another and in their methods maintain that your body is being cleansed of not only drugs, but also the need to have drugs in your life.
This method allows for you to lead a normal productive life without feeling the need to go to meetings regularly/habitually. This is an absolutely wonderful facility and I personally hope that many people find the help they so rightfully deserve by stumbling onto this post.