Today I received an email that appeared to come from the “online department” of Chase Manhattan Bank. The sender is listed as Chase Online Services and the subject is “Congratulations Valued Customer”. This particular phishing spam was a little more scary for me than most of them that I have seen because it almost fooled me into clicking the link, which is why I want to warn readers about it here.
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In the never-ending quest to optimize our sites for the search engines, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture because we get bogged down in many small details due to “information overload”. In an earlier article, I mentioned ten simple SEO strategies for newbies that could be used to improve a beginner’s chances of better rankings without having spend lots of money or time. Now I will cover the other side of the equation; that is, common mistakes that are often made by the clueless newbie who may not be aware of how search engine spiders or algorithms really work.
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Shane Cory, the Executive Director of the National Libertarian Committee, sent out a fundraising letter to the email subscriber lists today, pointing out some encouraging developments in our membership trends and hoping to bring in the donations required for us to overcome the outstanding ballot access barriers in preparation for the 2008 election season. So far, 26 states are definitely “in the bag” and will not require further attention, but a major petition drive is currently underway in North Carolina. Party members in several other states are waiting until the laws allow us to officially start collecting signatures. Ballot access status in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania is currently on hold pending decisions by the state courts.
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This is the third and last part in my series of essays regarding the system of federalism as it applies to the United States government. The first two parts of the series can be found by following their associated links at the bottom of the article.
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This is a continuation of my previous essay on the idea of federalism as it applies to the government of the USA. In this section, I deal with the doctrine of national supremacy and its implications for the United States Constitution. I also describe some of the effects that such ideas have had on our current political system.
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Eponyms are words that denote objects, events, or concepts that have been named after real people. The following three examples have come to us from the Napoleonic Era, the historical period between the French Revolution of 1789 and Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. As one may deduce from the eponyms that were derived during this relatively short time span, it was one of the most turbulent periods in European history.
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This week’s “Top Builder” award at Medieval Hits went to Bonnie Davis for her consistent surfing and promotional activity over the past few days. She is also known as Stormspotter for her work as a volunteer for Oklahoma County Emergency Management, which involves tracking potentially dangerous storms and warning the public about any tornadoes that may spawn from them. Like Richard DeHawkinz, she is also on our team at StartXchange, where she has also been very active in surfing and promoting her sites. This is her feature piece for Medieval Hits:
Approximately four months ago, I received an email about a food product recall that was beginning to affect the grocery stores and supermarkets in our local area. When I checked the bottom of the email for the source, I noticed that it was from our local NBC affiliate, KRIS-TV. Amazingly, I found that the report was full of errors even though it was coming from what is supposed to be a professional news station.
I replied to the email with a detailed list of the errors and my suggested corrections. Earlier today when I was trying to come up with some ideas for humorous blog posts, I remembered this report after I read another one from the same news source that also contained two word usage errors. After going back through my old email folder, I was able to track down the original report again. It turns out that even after four months, they have only managed to correct one of the errors that I had noticed (the “effected” vs. “affected” mistake is the one that is now fixed), but have left the other five completely untouched! Here is the original report from February 26, with my reply between the lines below:
This is simply a reminder for those of you who are emailing me with various stories and articles for me to consider covering on this blog. Recently I have been receiving many emails that have potentially usable content but no indication of its original source. For example, a few days ago I received the following bit of text under the title, “The New Vista”:
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While searching through Google results yesterday for a source link on an article that someone sent me, I discovered a potentially useful site for people who want to buy, sell, or trade gift cards. This site piqued my interest because gift cards are a common way to receive compensation from paid surveys and reward programs that do not always pay out in direct cash incentives. The name of the site is Star Gift Card Exchange and is apparently being operated from the Chicago, Illinois area in the USA.
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At the Medieval Hits traffic exchange, web designer Richard DeHawkinz has won this week’s “top builder” award by donating some new banners to the program for use as additional promotional materials. As part of the prize, he was allowed to post an introductory article about himself and have it displayed on the members login page of Medieval Hits. I have reposted his piece here between the lines; although I have edited it somewhat, the content is still substantially his. DeHawkinz seems to have an affinity for run-on sentences and the original text was poorly formatted (lots of unnatural line breaks and superfluous spacing between words), so I have taken the liberty of tidying it up a bit:
After looking at the category listings last night, I realized that I have not made a post for the humor topic since the article on April Fools Day jokes. So today as I was doing my usual surfing at the traffic exchanges I started paying attention to any humorous stories that might be contained in people’s pages and links. I eventually ran across two stories that were relevant enough to fit into the category but that most of you have probably not seen yet because these kinds of stories seldom make it into the front page headlines.
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Leo di Milo has launched a new blog called IdiotAffiliate.com that is quickly becoming a valuable resource of information for novice webmasters and affiliate marketers. I was an avid reader of his site DrunkOnLife.com back in the heyday of autosurfs and HYIP around 2-3 years ago, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn about his latest project. Here is an excerpt from an email newsletter that I received from him a few days ago:
The Royal Surf traffic exchange is temporarily increasing the regular credit bonuses beginning today and is also increasing the frequency of randomly occurring letter bonuses that appear on the surfbar. It is unclear exactly how long these increases will last, but I can confirm that they are still in effect right now, which is approximately 10 PM Central time on the date of this post. Here is the latest email from the current admin detailing the latest developments:
Another popular “spam & scam” method that is often used by phishing artists is the notification of fake lottery winnings. This tactic takes advantage of the fact that despite the incredibly small odds of winning, many people play in the various state and national lotteries around the world in the hopes of miraculously solving all of their money problems in one fell swoop. Since many such people are already fairly desperate, they are vulnerable to being more easily duped by scams such as this one. People in these situations sometimes get fooled even if their better judgment suggests that not only is it unlikely that they could ever win the lottery in the first place, but it is even less likely that they would somehow win a lottery for which they did not even purchase a ticket, not to mention the fact that they do not even reside in the same country in which the lottery took place.
This latest spam mail that I have received is a good example of the above method, but was very poorly targeted in this case. Not only do I generally not play in lotteries (the odds of winning in an HYIP “gold game” are actually much better than the odds of winning a state or national lottery), but I do not even live in Ireland and certainly do not remember purchasing a ticket for this particular program:
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