In less than an hour, the United States hockey team will take on Canada
for the gold medal, and yet I wanted to get a post out before then. So, this is one of those posts where I’m going to talk about a few things on my mind, without any consistent theme. Stay tuned.
Let’s talk about the hockey game first. I don’t normally watch hockey. If it’s the NHL professional league, I will watch it if I’m at someone’s house, or if it’s the finals and possibly the final game of the year. I don’t know almost any players anymore, especially since the New York Rangers started playing bad hockey after winning their last Stanley Cup. I used to be a Boston Bruins fan when I lived in Maine as a kid, but once you can’t watch your teams play anymore, you sometimes tend to move away from those teams. I’m glad I still get to see a lot of Boston Red Sox games; I hate the Yankees!
Anyway, whether you care about hockey or not, this is big. The United States versus Canada, the two best teams in the world, are vying for the gold medal. When the U.S. won last week, we had a mini Mardi Gras party in the states, and we’re hoping for more of that today, even though Canada is favored. Hockey is supposed to be their game, like curling, which Canada did finally win the gold medal for (men’s team at least; not sure how the women ended up). This is interesting in that it pits professional teammates against each other while they’re representing their countries. Should be a lot of fun as the Olympics is finally ending its two week run.
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Locally, our big story was last night for the Syracuse Orange vs. the Villanova Wildcats NCAA basketball game. Syracuse ended up with the largest on-campus home crowd ever in the nation, 34,616 people, and they crushed Villanova 95-77. They could be the number one team in the country come Monday; that would be something, especially since this team was barely picked to finish in the top half of the Big East conference at the beginning of the season.
I’m glad I wasn’t at the game, because I wouldn’t have been able to see replay after replay of some marvelous basketball. That, plus knowing what the roads had to have been like after all the snow we’ve had lately and many road closings; nope, I enjoyed it right where I was, camped in front of the big screen in the bedroom. That picture is showing what more than 30,000 people looks like in the Dome; wild!
On another front, I can’t believe I never heard from 101Phones regarding the commission they didn’t pay me. I did hear from Commission Junction finally, and wasn’t really happy with their response, but what can you do? I have dropped these people from any advertising, and I went to the site and delisted myself from them as well. Stay away, folks; if this is how they treat affiliates, your business is worthless to them. Even their Twitter account was canceled, if it was them to begin with. Man, I hate being taken advantage of.
That was something else I had to deal with last week. Imagine waking up and seeing a lot of trackbacks to your blog, and figuring out that they’re all your own posts on someone else’s blog.
That’s what happened to me, as this blog based in Egypt had come in and stolen 7 of my posts, verbatim and image wise, without attribution. That was the second time this month I’d had my content stolen, although the first time, supposedly, it was from a site in the British Territories (whatever that is) that was supposed to be something like StumbleUpon, only they took the entire post and didn’t tell anyone who wrote it. Even the ISP wouldn’t intervene on that one, telling me my only recourse was to write the company and ask them to remove the post, which they didn’t.
Man, I wish I knew how to report the ISP to someone for not doing their duty; that’s the problem in trying to overcome foreign companies sometimes. Anyway, the guy in Egypt finally did remove all my posts, so I commend him on that and won’t out him, although I did out him on Twitter when it looked like he wasn’t going to do the right thing.
Man, am I going to have to start adding a disclaimer at the end of every post so people who visit these guys will know they stole content? I haven’t seen a lot of people doing that, but maybe it’s the way to go.
And finally, let’s talk snow. Some of you, like Sire, have no real clue as to the kind of mess too much snow can cause. Here in the Syracuse area, we’re usually well prepared for snow
, but Thursday and Friday were something else. It was a heavy, wet snow, which adds a lot of weight to the effort of trying to remove it. This was one of those snows where small snowplows, those on trucks your neighbor might have, actually got stuck in some places; now that’s wild. Thursday I was able to get to the snow before it got too high. Friday, however, my back wasn’t having it, and even with my wife home, in 20 minutes we’d barely made a dent in the driveway, though I made it my mission to at least get a thin trail to the street, just in case there was some kind of emergency. Many people missed work because large plows couldn’t get into their neighborhoods, and even if they could there was no place to put the extra snow. The thing about snow is that people sometimes disregard it, saying it’s just snow, but when snow is heavy it takes out more people over a larger area than any other natural disaster can. This last storm took out the entire East Coast; not even a hurricane does that.
Finally, it’s the last day of February, and I said I wasn’t going to post financial numbers anymore until I made at least $500 in a month. Nope, nowhere close to that, but I still hate that I’m not getting credit for that one affiliate sale. I need some free time to do some extra stuff, but it’s fleeting. I’m expecting March to be a great financial month offline, as I landed a short contract that will pay a lot of money in a short time, so that might bode well for April; guess we’ll see.
I hope everyone else has a great Sunday and last day of February; go USA!
I really hate rats like you’re talking about up here. I wish there was some way to report them and get them banned period. Now THAT would make me happy. It’s not the same but ever since I’ve started adding content to my blog, people have been spamming it over and over again. I had to put on the moderator feature and check every post made. Which, really isn’t a big deal, it’s reminded me to go put more content 🙂 I still shouldn’t have had to do it, but it’s good we do have some remedies. Those types of people… stink. Period.
Actually, you can, if everyone else cooperates. You can look people up to see how they’re registered, and you can always contact the domain host once you have that information to try to get satisfaction. I did that, getting satisfaction on the one and none on the other. When they’re out of the country, and in a place you have no idea where they are, satisfaction might not be forthcoming unfortunately.
I’ve reported several URL’s and domain names etc., to banking institutions almost instantly because they lie to you and pretend that they are from your bank to try and get your banking information which I think is just as underhanded as it gets. Hopefully they got taken care of. Always check the URL when you get something like that. Mine was from Bank of America and the URL was far from that once you clicked it.
Ratts! 🙂
Sue T.
You know Sue, I have to admit that only once have I reported one of those bad bank links; most of the time now I just delete the emails while still on the server and move on. Those scams are different than these weasels who steal from us; people need to stay alert against that sort of thing.
You wrote a post and talked about hockey. That game must have been a big deal. It was a great game even if the US came up short but we through a big scare in the entire country of Canada.
BTW, want to use my photo of the SU game? 🙂 Never mind, if anyone is interested, people can click on the link.
Going to miss the Olympics. I enjoy the winter games much more.
.-= Scott Thomas´s last blog ..View 114: Sold Out =-.
I rarely watched the winter Olympics, but enjoyed the few things I did watch. To me, I wanted the U.S. to win hockey because the women didn’t medal in figure skating for the first time since 1968. Overall the U.S. team did well, but I wonder how it would have looked if they’d removed the X games events.
I’m glad Canada won the hockey. But then I’m Canadian and it is our game,ha,ha.
The U.S. team was the best I’ve ever seen though. Excellent game.Could of gone either way.
Our men won the curling gold and our women won the silver medal.
Surprisingly there isn’t any rush by anyone to steal my content,ha,ha.
It must be maddening..
Wet snow is the absolute worst kind. We won’t get any of that for a month of so though..
The Canadian women’s curling team is what makes those who don’t like it question whether it’s a true sport or not, as they had a visibly pregnant woman competing. I’m not sure if there’s another Olympic sport where that oculd have occurred.
Glen, just stay tuned; your stuff will be stolen at some point because your stuff is intriguing; just wait and see, because I said the same thing. lol
And I definitely seem to be theft worthy these days, as I found another site stealing from me: http://www.imspike.com/Marketing/an-seo-project-irsquom-undertaking/
I’m a Filipino, haven’t seen a snow in my life, yet I’m hooked to US vs. Canada hockey game, And yes, I was cheering for the USA…too bad they lost it.
but it will be a big blow to the Canadians, for being a hockey country, if they didn’t win.
so Kudos to both of them.
Eric, I know they’d have been crushed, but that wouldn’t have been my concern. lol
We’re going to have to get you someplace where you can play in the snow; maybe a quick trip to Russia during the 2014 Olympics.
Am I the only one completely uninterested in the Olympics?
What was CJ’s response?
.-= Dennis Edell´s last blog ..DEDC Updates – What the (Near) Future Holds for You and I! =-.
You’re probably not, but then you don’t like sports. I only cared about two things, but you know, I do care slightly because it’s the United States against the world, and any chance I get to cheer for my country, I’m going to take it.
Commission Junction’s response was weird. First they said if I couldn’t prove I got the link from them that there was nothing they could do. I proved that, so then they said that because I change the one thing in the code, which is only the price, that it could mess up the entire thing and therefore it could possibly be my fault. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, since I’m only changing text and no code whatsoever, and thus it looked like it was written by someone who has no clue in regards to what coding is. Then they added that they can’t force one of their advertisers to pay and that I’d have to take it up with them, which I’d already told them I had tried.
That’s bad customer service from where I sit, because it’s like they admitted that they bring on advertisers who might cheat you, but it’s not their concern.
I’d put that word for word in a final reply.
.-= Dennis Edell´s last blog ..DEDC Updates – What the (Near) Future Holds for You and I! =-.
Dennis, I actually said it in my first reply to them; seems they ignored that part.
I’d do it again, with a little side snippet of how many bloggers I know with 6 digit subscriber lists. 😉
.-= Dennis Edell´s last blog ..DEDC Updates – What the (Near) Future Holds for You and I! =-.
I thought about making that threat, then decided I’d hold off on that one lest they dropped me before I thought about whether or not to drop them. Actually, as it’s the only real problem I’ve had with them over the years, since the other one got resolved, I’m letting it go for now. But I’m still going to talk bad about 101Phones for awhile.