Scrabulous Is No More
Posted by Mitch on Jul 29, 2008
I think we all saw this one coming. Scrabulous, the highly popular yet copyright infringing game on Facebook, has been abruptly pulled without notice, freaking out over 500,000 people who had made it a daily, sometimes every single minute, fun waste of time. Yeah, I played, and enjoyed myself also, and I’m sad to see it go.
I thought the creators of the game, Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla from India, were greedy when, earlier this year, Hasbro, the owners of Scrabble, made them an offer that, in my mind, was generous, especially since it was a stolen idea. Instead, the countered, wanting more than $11 million; that wasn’t happening. So, Hasbro developed their own game for Facebook, then lowered the boom and demanded that Facebook pull Scrabulous, and they did.
So, now I’ll probably move over to the legitimate version of the game on the site, though I’m not sure if I’ll immediately head over there or wait a couple of days before switching. I have to think about it. I can waste a lot of time playing there, but these days, I’m sitting in a hotel room during the week with a terrible internet connection, and because of that it keeps making me sign in, even during my interactions on the site, and that’s irritating as sin. But we’ll see.
Goodbye, Scrabulous; it’s been a wonderful ride.
Weitman, Weinberg & Reis Is Abusive
Posted by Mitch on Jul 27, 2008
I’ve been battling a collection agency for a couple of months now. The name of the company is Weltman, Weinberg, & Reis; I’m not afraid to give their name. I’m not afraid to give their name because I don’t owe anyone anything, and their own processes need to be brought out into the open. It’s been a long time since I talked about anything financial; it’s now time.
Many years ago, when I was just getting my business off the ground, I ran into some financial difficulties. Hey, it happens to many people, and I wasn’t alone. I soon fell way behind a lot of people, and of course the phone calls start. I got a lucky break, things started to happen, and I made deals with, and paid off, pretty much everyone. Some companies I got letters from, some I didn’t, but most of them showed up on my credit report as being satisfied, and I didn’t think of it again.
Until last October, when I was contacted by a collection agency about a balance that I knew I’d paid. I told them so, and within a week they sent me a letter saying they weren’t going to bother me again. I thought I was done with it all; I was wrong.
Over the next few months, I was contacted by three other companies looking for this same balance; the last one was Weitman, and they were different because they told me they were going to sue me. I started going through all my papers, looking for something, and of course I couldn’t find it. I was at my wit’s end; I knew I had paid it. I checked my credit report, and sure enough, that balance was still showing as open. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, other than possibly having to start making payments.
Talk about being lucky. I finally came across something which was my agreement letter that I’d made with the company at the time to pay them back. Sure enough, I had paid the balance in 2004. I had a name and number; I had some proof, thank goodness. I called that company, and they told me that they usually only kept records of paid accounts for 18 months, but that they would check their fiche for my records. They also showed that I didn’t have an open balance with them, which was in my favor because it meant I hadn’t reneged on any agreements with them. I asked them if they could fax me a letter to this effect, and they said they’d see what they could do.
It took two weeks. In between that time, I got another call from Weitman, and I told them what was going on. They said they’d give me 10 days. I finally got my fax, looked up a fax number online for Weitman, since they didn’t give me a fax number on their letter, which they finally did send, sent the fax, and figured everything was fine.
Nope; life just doesn’t work like that. I got another call while I was out of town saying they never got the fax. I told them I’d send it again when I got home, and I did. Their office was closed, but they said they’d contact me the next morning telling me it was received. I never received that call, but I wasn’t worried about it since I’d sent it to the number they told me it was supposed to go to.
Then Friday, once again, I get another call, and now I’m livid. I’ve sent it twice, and they’re telling me they didn’t get it. I told the guy I was going to send it immediately to whichever number he gave me, then I’d call him and tell him I’d sent it, and he could go get it. This started the next round of things that really got me irritated, and tells us all some things about how life works.
I sent the fax, called back, and they couldn’t get me to the guy. Matter of fact, they wanted me to leave my number and said someone would call me back. I said I didn’t trust them now, because of everything that had been going, and I got the runaround. I got transferred twice to someone else; I hung up and called back. The last woman I got I just didn’t want to get off the phone. We went back and forth for about 5 minutes, then I decided I’d just keep calling back every 2 minutes until I got the guy I wanted. i did just that; they got irritated, but I didn’t care; after all, that’s how they treat us, right?
I finally got him, and he said he went to look for the fax and they hadn’t gotten it; what the hey? I got a confirmation back and they didn’t get it? It’s a good thing I’m me, otherwise I’d have started yelling and cursing. Instead, I asked for a second fax number, said I was going to fax it to both of them, and I was also going to fax it to myself just to prove that it would come through.
I did fax it to myself, then I sent the same fax to both letters. I got my copy; the original letter sent from the other company might come through a bit dark, but it came through. I called the office and now the guy I wanted was at lunch; ugh. I wanted someone to go look for the fax, but they wouldn’t budge. Figures, because I was taking money out of their pocket. The lady told me the reason was they had thousands of people making calls and that they didn’t have anyone who could go pull the fax; if they had thousands of people and no one could go pull a fax then this company isn’t worth anything to me because their processes are garbage. They don’t care about any of the people they call because none of us are their clients, and, truth be told, their clients don’t really care one way or the other because the open amounts have already been charged off; check out this previous post on outstanding debt. Of course, the reason I was home was because I had a dental appointment, and I had to leave, but I did wait 30 minutes for someone to call me. I got home later, had a phone call from the guy asking me to call back, but of course he’d gone home, but the woman I talked to said his notes showed he got a fax. I hope that’s it, and that it’s all finally over, but I have my doubts. I didn’t mention this one earlier; they have “thousands” of employees, but not a single one of them has an email address, not even the supervisors; yup, you read this one correctly, because I asked, and if they truly tape their conversations, they’ll hear their representative telling me that. Come on, does Weitman really think we’re all fools?
At this point, I’m going to give them a week to see what happens. I asked for a letter saying they got it, but I’d been told before that’s not their policy. Yup, I have to prove to them that I don’t owe any money, but they don’t owe me a thing for trying to ruin my life and threatening to sue me for a balance I don’t owe. Frankly, I think the whole thing stinks, and that none of us can trust any of these people, especially Weitman. It’s not slander; it’s truth.
I’ll be leaving town again this coming week, so I can only hope they’ll send me something, or contact me with the confirmation that they’ll be leaving me alone. I’ll be protecting myself some more by sending copies of the letter from the other agency to Experian and the other credit agencies, though I only know for sure that Experian will do something about it since I do subscribe to their service. And I’ve learned it really is important to have a credit checking service on some sort of basis; people, check your credit yearly, because it’s free.
Learn your rights; protect yourself.
Why Do You Write Your Blog?
Posted by Mitch on Jul 21, 2008
Why do I write this blog, or any other blog? Why do you write a blog? What are you hoping to achieve? Are you trying to inform? Are you trying to make money? Do you have something you need to get off your chest?
I ask this question after reading what can best be called a couple of rants by different guys. One guy, Merlin Mann, wrote a piece called Blog Pimping, and actually used a lot of the original rant, written by a guy named Jack Shedd, called Tacky. Both posts are pretty much against what they consider as the blatant marketing of blogs to make money by the professional bloggers, and what they perceive as what’s been created because of them, the professional commenters, whose only purpose is to try to hopefully drive traffic to their sites by commenting on these big time blogs.
Of course, one of these guys is marketing things in his own right off his blog, whereas the other guy, Jack, doesn’t seem to be marketing anything, so we can take each for what it’s worth. It still begs the question for most of us as to what our purposes are for writing our blogs, and whether we end up staying true to our souls more than our goals.
I don’t think I’ve hidden my goals for this blog; I want it to make money. So I write about topics that interest me, hoping they interest others enough to want to come back often to see what I might have to say. I like to think I’m not a one trick pony, though, as I slide from topic to topic and, occasionally, post something to entertain myself more than I’m probably entertaining someone else (remember the Yoda video?). This is a blog to make money, but it’s also a blog to have some fun with. I don’t see myself as one of those guys who’s ever going to make blogging a 24/7 job; could happen, but I doubt it. I have way too many interests for that sort of thing.
And of course there’s my other blog, the professional one whose purpose isn’t necessarily to make money (though I do have Adsense on it; I’m not a fool after all), but to inform and show people that I have some competence with my main career as a consultant. Maybe indirectly it’ll convince someone to request my services, and I may make money that way, but it’s intention isn’t to do it straight out.
Still, a good question to ask is why it seems to matter so much to someone else why a person is writing whatever it is they feel like writing, and why it’s disturbing them so much. Truthfully, I read a lot of blogs, but there’s many more that I’ve taken a look at and decided I don’t want to read for one reason or another. It’s just like television; if you don’t like the program, turn the channel and watch something else. Not that I don’t find a blog post every once in awhile that gets on my nerve, but to rant against someone because they happen to be successful sounds like the people who gripe against musicians who allow their music to be used in commercials; life was never that pure to begin with, and it’s certainly not going to be that pure now.
For the moment, I have another career, so I’m sorry if I can’t put together 1,500 word tomes on my blog just to pad the stats. But I’m near 600 words; that has to count for something. And people, if you want to comment on my blog to try to drive traffic to yours,… by all means!
I’m Going To Commission Junction University
Posted by Mitch on Jul 19, 2008
Back in May I talked about Commission Junction and how I wasn’t doing all that well in making money from it.
Well, I’ve decided to partake in what’s known as Commission Junction University. Actually, it’s not a full university at all, just some training and tips from the CJ folks themselves on ways to market what they have to offer. It’s the first time I’ve ever noticed it, which shows that I, and probably a lot of other people, haven’t really been paying as close attention to the site as we probably should.
In general, it has six initial sections that help to give you ideas. Then they have a few interactive tutorials to help you even further. And they also give you links to other topics to help you learn about each of those areas, along with case studies from others who have gone before us. And, it seems they actually have in person training a couple of times a year that you can go to; don’t see me doing that for a long time, if ever, I must admit.
So, at least they’re trying to help us make money, which of course helps them make money. This is a good thing, so I’ll be trying to learn a few things, and who knows in the long run, right?
Update Your Automatic Update Plugin First!
Posted by Mitch on Jul 19, 2008
A couple of days ago I wrote about updating my blog to Wordpress 2.6. It was, and still is great, but there’s something else that happened that I want to clue you in on.
If you use the automatic upgrade option, you’ll learn that there’s a new version of it that needs to be downloaded to be compatible with 2.6. You will probably have to download that first before trying to update any of your other plugins. It seems that, at least for me, you can’t use the automatic upgrade program to update itself. First it wouldn’t work, then any incoming links to my site were suddenly bad and corrupted, and it wouldn’t update any other programs either. So, I had to go to the site, download it, and install it the regular way. After that, it worked on the other plugin, which, in my case, was the All in One SEO pack, which also probably needs to be updated with 2.6.
Anyway, just so you know; happy blogging!
Why Are We Attracted To Twitter?
Posted by Mitch on Jul 18, 2008
As I write this, Twitter is down once again, and I’m irritated. I should have been wondering why I hadn’t been hearing the little sound I get every 5 minutes or so when another acknowledgement of a Twitter post from someone that I happen to be following, and now I know why. Actually, I wouldn’t have known then if I hadn’t tried to post something; I’m irked.
Actually, seems I said that same thing almost two months ago when I first wrote about Twitter getting on my nerves because of all the outages. And yet, here I am, still trying to get back on at some time, and it would seem I’m not alone.
There was a recent article which indicated that Twitter is actually growing in popularity, even as people are finding other micro blogging sites to visit such as Friendfeed. This even prompted Amazon creator and CEO Jeff Bezos to invest $15 million into the project.
So, what’s Twitter doing these days instead of taking care of its customers (which is kind of an interesting term, since they still haven’t figured out how to generate revenue)? Well, one thing they did was acquire a social search engine service known as Summize. It seems they’re also testing a new design, though, according to the story, not everyone has seen it yet.
So, Twitter isn’t just standing by doing nothing, but it still makes one wonder why they’re not taking better care of its present customer base, which happens to be us. As I said in the other article, I like the idea of the service; I only wish it was more stable. Of course, I bet if they started charging for the service it would work better, but I wonder how many people would stay? Do we want to pay to blog, let alone micro blog? Probably not, but my thought is that, until Twitter figures out how to capitalize on its membership, we’re going to be on the short end of the stick.
And I’m not happy about it one bit.
Wordpress 2.6 Update Now Available
Posted by Mitch on Jul 16, 2008
So there’s a new version of Wordpress, 2.6, but this time around it looks like they’ve added some pretty neat stuff. However, I read about it on my friend Sire’s site, so instead of totally rehashing it all here I think it’s better if I just post the link to his site to give him a little bit of love, as well as tell you that if you visit his site there’s a video that tells you all about the changes. This also means that if I need to read it again so I can hook up some of the newest stuff that I’ll know how to find it quickly. Yeah, sneaky, but why shouldn’t I benefit along with y’all, right?
In any case, it’s always recommended that you upgrade to the latest version of your blogging software if, for nothing else, to help prevent someone coming along and snagging it out from under you. And trust me, it happens all the time. By the way, I used the Wordpress automatic update plugin and I was done in just about two minutes. It’s the best plugin I’ve ever installed.
Having Vista Anxieties
Posted by Mitch on Jul 13, 2008
I need a new computer. That’s pretty easy to state. I want Microsoft XP; that’s not as easy at this time and place.
It seems that I missed the deadline. As of 6/30, all new PCs with a Microsoft operating system has to come with Vista, no questions asked. Some computers, if you order online, can come with both Vista and XP, but Vista is the big dog now, plain and simple. Suffice it to say, I’m not overly happy.
The Microsoft people have done a lousy job of convincing us why we want Vista loaded computers. They initially came out and said we wanted it because it had all these capabilities, and that it was prettier than XP. Then we heard the reality, that not only was the version most people were getting lacking the “pretty” part of Vista, but most of the computers being sold were deficient in power, so they couldn’t run the new operating system properly. And let’s not forget that it wasn’t compatible with an overwhelming number of hardware or software products that the masses already had. In other words, Microsoft had a massive customer service issue, which I wrote about on my other blog. It’s such a bad problem that, oddly enough, when most companies are advertising their computers these days, they don’t even mention the operating system until later in the descriptions; that’s a shame, and it’s somewhat disingenuous since the release of Windows 7 is pretty close to only being a year away.
So, what do I do? At least these days most computers are being loaded with Home Premium with the first service pack; that’s a step forward, but from the normal consumers position, is this much more improved than what we initially heard? I could buy the sucker, erase the operating system, and load my own XP professional version, which I purchased for another ungodly $300 a few years ago. I could go the route of trying to put together my own computer components and loading it myself, or better yet hope to put together a component package that still ran IDE drives so I could slip my own drive back into it; nope, that doesn’t make sense, since the reason I need a new computer could possibly be related to the drive (I don’t think so, but who really knows, right?). Or I could pay big money through a company that puts computers together independently such as Falcon Northwest, but at the moment their computers are a bit pricey for me. Or I could just take my present computer to the shop up the street to see if they can overcome a problem that Comp USA couldn’t for a year or so (before they skipped town, along with the $299 I paid for 3 years of maintenance) for under $500, which, as a friend of mine said, makes little sense when I could probably buy a budget machine for less than that that’s more powerful than what I have now; that’s a shame.
Decisions, decisions,… who to trust, how to trust, what to do,… I sometimes wonder if it’s better to not have any knowledge at all about computers, so I could walk in and just pick either the nicest looking one or the cheapest one and get on with life. Luckily, I don’t have to buy it today, so I have more time to think about it. Other than looking at RAM, what does anyone else think is the most important thing I should be looking for, and would you be balking at Vista right now, especially since it’s being forced on us?
Google 411 - Amazing
Posted by Mitch on Jul 11, 2008
What’s the 4-1-1 on Google? It’s Google 411, a new service where you can dial 1-800-GOOG-411 and get all sorts of information about businesses, maps, restaurants, and many other things. The link above will take you to the same video that’s below:
This is fantastic, but I have to admit it seems kind of unbelievably, well, helpful. As you see in the video, not only can you find out information, but you can then go ahead and make the call if you want to, or call up a map and go to the place. This is freaky; can these Google people really be this smart? Yeah, I guess so; wow!
This Is Now A “Do Follow” Blog
Posted by Mitch on Jul 9, 2008
Well, the things you learn. I was visiting one of my friend Sire’s blogs (no, I’m not writing the name, but if you click on the link you’ll see it), and he was talking about testing something called Comment Kahuna, which is link building software in general, but it gives you the option of deciding when you want to use “do follow” or “no follow” tags, which in essence means whether you want to give love to the people who comment on your blogs or link to your site or not.
Out of the blue, someone else commented that it was an ironic topic for him to be writing on, since his own blog automatically set comments up as “no follow”. I thought that was intriguing, and so did Sire, so we both asked this guy how he knew, with both of us assuming that CommentLuv was getting us around it. Nope; didn’t work quite that way. What he said to do was right click on a comment on our blog, go to properties, and if it said “external” then it was a “do follow”, but if it said “external no follow” then it wasn’t. I checked this blog, and of course it wasn’t heck! I guess it’s an automatic default in Wordpress, and I never knew it.
His suggestion was to go on Google and search for a plugin to eliminate the “no follow” if we were using spam blocking software, which I am with Askimet. So I did that and came upon a nice simple little plugin called Do Follow; can’t get any easier than that. I downloaded it, then uploaded it to the blog, and now this is a totally “do follow” blog; yay!!!
The things we can learn from strangers; thanks Dennis!
I'm Just Sharing is a blog about sharing my thoughts about internet marketing and other things. Read, enjoy, and buy! :-)
