Martha's Blog

Lots of stuff among the flotsam and jetsam on the ‘Net. I see tons of sites, most of them are just so so.

Every now and then I find a site that I consider a true ‘treasure’. These sites just offer me an ‘escape’ from the humdrum of daily stuff.

A few of these treasures are listed here and maybe you will consider them treasures as well.

Dark Roasted Blend, Weird & wonderful things
You can spend hours and hours on this site. No matter what you like, you can surely find something to enjoy here. Fantastic collections of photos!

Playa Cofi Jukebox The top 100 songs from the golden years of music.
I guess it’s just me (or maybe you), but a lot of the stuff that passes for music these days is just not for me. The music on this site is Music! You can select a year and listen to real music while you work.

I love animal pictures, animal antics, and funny stuff.  Lolcats is just one section on this site. There are over 90 pages of these funny captioned kitties! Loldogs is just as big! A treasure for animal lovers!

I am addicted to little games that don’t require a ton of graphics and eat up my computer resources. Several years ago I found a marble game that just is a delight to me. I play it all the time when I need a ‘break’. There are some other games on the site, but this is the one I play.

Corn DancerThe author of this site is extremely talented. Even without the great photos he takes, the accompanying prose paints such a picture you could ‘see’ what he captures on film. A new adventure every week brightens my Monday morning!

I hope you enjoy my ‘treasures’!

Martha

I kid you not, there is such a product. There are websites that sell it. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would need it, but the explanation given is so beauty pageant contestants won’t have to use staples (Ouch!) to prevent a section of their swimsuits from disappearing into a body crevass.

I guess there are some folks who will do anything, but I absolutely cannot imagine why anyone would have used staples on their behinds.  So I guess butt glue is a real advancement for those folks.

Just in case you are wondering how I found out about this product, it wasn’t because I was looking for it.  I found it in Dave Barry’s column; ‘Why do we give gifts during the holiday season?‘

There are more wacky gifts in his column, all of which I can’t believe anyone would ever buy. (Except butt glue, I can see why a girl wearing one of those beauty pageant swimsuits might need that. However, I have a better solution.  She could wear a swimsuit that actually covers her fanny, then she won’t need any butt glue.)

Happy shopping!

Martha

Just about everyone with an email account gets spam, some more than others. Most ISPs, or email purveyors like Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. have an address that we are encouraged to use to report the spam perpetrators.

Don’t waste your time if it is for Yahoo.  I rather suspect the email address for spam reporting just goes into cyberspace somewhere, never again to be seen by human eyes or if it is actually answered, a canned reply will be delivered back and no other action is taken. The canned reply, if one is actually received, gives a solution that has nothing to do with the complaint. The last time I sent a complaint to Yahoo’s ‘abuse@ address the message ‘bounced’ with a mail daemon telling me the address was ‘not valid’.

The same thing seems to be true for the option to “Report Abuse” form that Yahoo so nicely offers. It is a waste of time.

There is a spammer with a Yahoo address that is repeatedly spamming Yahoo Groups owners/moderators. Frequent complaints to Yahoo have not stopped the spammer or disabled his Yahoo.com email account. A Yahoo moderator cannot send these spams to a spam filter as this would effectively remove the ability to handle legitimate requests for members.

Yahoo has been telling us they want to improve their service. A good way to start would be to remove spammers using a Yahoo.com email account.

And before you make a comment that the account may be ‘spoofed’, the headers indicate it is a real account.

Martha

Footnote:

Someone just told me “It’s the Yahoo way, get used to it”. Yep, they are right!

Could have fooled me!

According to my latest issue of Consumer Reports, “spam, spyware and virus have declined ‘significantly in the past few years”. They got this information on their new ‘State of the Net survey’.

Consumer Reports has in the past been considered by me to be a reliable source of information about just about everything. But this little tad of information has me totally bewildered. What kind of folks were taking this survey? This statement makes me wonder about all of the other reports they publish.

On the contrary, Consumer Reports! Spam, spyware and virus have NOT declined significantly in the past few yeas, but are more and more prolific all the time! Since 2006 the total amount of spam in email has increased from 56% to 80%! Anyone who has used the same email address for any length of time can vouch for that. (Unless they have a really industrial strength spam filter. Even then spam gets through.)
Source: Spam Report

Spyware has changed it’s face so maybe some folks think it’s down. The ‘change’ has involved more rootkits, key loggers, Trojans and worms, all designed to steal your money and identity. New virus are being intoduced every day. I suspect the folks who took that survey probably are mostly behind corporate firewalls with an IT department working feverishly to prevent all of the bad suff from ever reaching the work stations of clueless users.

They should have sent the survey to those techs working behind the scenes!

All of the above reinforces the old saying ‘Don’t believe everything you hear or read’. (And now with PhotoShop you can’t believe everything you see either)

Martha

As a general rule the assumption is that change is usually good. Notice I said ‘assumption’.

So far this year I have noticed a number of changes and most of them are not good.

I guess the biggest change is known by the local news pundits as ‘pain at the pump’. Since I am retired and pretty much a stay at home person, that change hasn’t affected me as much as the folks who have to drive to work in order to be able to pay the bills. Where I live public transportation is not generally an option as it is either very limited or not available. This is mostly due to urban sprawl and the fact most of the American people have long had a love affair with the automobile.

Another change is how much the interest rates have gone down. I guess that change is good for some folks, but I suspect it is good mostly for big business and not for the ‘little guys’. The people who carry a lot of credit card debt don’t seem to be benefiting any from the interest rates as not many credit card companies are lowering rates for those folks.

I don’t carry debt on credit cards so that doesn’t affect me. But what does affect me is how much less money I earn on my savings. Another change I could have done without.

A huge unwelcome change is how much more money it takes to buy groceries! Every time I shop for food something or several somethings have gone up in price and not by just a little bit either.

The big box retailers are trying to cut costs and most of them are doing that by cutting employees and as for customer service, that’s practically non-existant now. So the poor customers are left with no one to help them make purchases and sometimes it’s even hard to find someone to take their money. I wonder if those big box retailers realize that all of this ‘saving money’ is costing them more money in the long run?

Now the politicians are promising ‘change’. So far all I have heard just makes me wonder, ‘what kind of change?’ I have always laughed at the old joke about ‘how you can tell if a politician is lying, his lips are moving’. I am beginning to think ‘change’ is a bad joke, and the joke is on us.

Martha

Advertisers are constantly looking for ways to push unwanted ads into our faces while we surf the ‘net.

First came the banner ads. These are still being pushed into our faces. Some of them just sit there on the web pages, but more and more of them are using flash to blare out their presence. A few of them are extremely obnoxious. Those are usually the ads for dubious products.

Most of us tend to just ignore banner ads, so then the ad makers tried using pop-up ads. This tactic caused another webpage to jump into our faces, obscuring what we really wanted to see. Annoying! A few sites would cause more than one pop-up to populate. This caused a flurry of programmers making applications that would stop pop-ups. For awhile this solved that problem for folks who, like me, were and still are totally turned off by pop-up ads.

Then some clever jerk came up with pop-unders. Grrrrrrrrr! I hate those as well. The pop-up stoppers don’t seem to have as much effect on pop-unders, so now we have to disable JavaScript to surf without pop-unders.

The latest ads to get our attention on websites use a method of JavaScript called IntelliTXT. The script finds ‘keywords’ on the page, double underlines them and when a cursor passes over the keywords an ad pops up, obliterating the content beneath the ad. Since there are no apparent ads on the page when the site is first accessed, this appeals to a lot of advertisers and is being used more and more.

Personally I find this method of shoving ads into my face extremely annoying and furthermore, I’m not the only one that feels this way. While some of the folks on the web using these tactics are just trying to offset the costs of maintaining their sites; others are trying to make a living or at least a decent profit. I can understand that, but the stuff that gets in my face like most of the tactics annoys me enough to leave the sites and not go back. (Another thing that will cause me to leave is sound blasting at me and no way to turn it off, but that is irrelevant to this tale of woe.)

Google Ads do it right. There they are, sitting in plain site. They don’t annoy me by jumping in my face or causing an obnoxious pop-up, pop-under or obstruct the content I am trying to view. They explain what they are and if I am interested, I can click on one. I have in fact clicked on them on occasion. I have even ended up making a purchase using a Google Ad.

One thing all of these methods of advertising does, is make revenue for folks who provide the ways to stop these annoyances. Currently I am using a trial of Super Ad Blocker to see how it works. So far I like it. The price is perhaps a little high for what it does, but I may buy it anyway just to stop all those ads from jumping in my face. Super Ad Blocker also includes SuperAntiSpyware, an excellent spyware remover.

This site Sillysot (funny name!) has a little program (Intelli: An Intellitxt link remover)that will just stop the IntelliTXT stuff, but it works best in Firefox. It is supposed to work in Internet Explorer as well, but I couldn’t make it work. It doesn’t even require installing; you just drag the Intelli to your links bar.

I wonder what the next thing will be in the world of Internet advertising!

Martha