Lost!

In a similar story to eBay Is Dead, I feel that Amazon is starting to have a lot of its own problems that is causing it to go by the weigh side. There are just too many problems these days to warrant me playing with the website or company policies. You see, Amazon uses a network of roughly 1 Million “independent merchants” ranging from Target to Joe Schmo selling his large collection of books.

Over the last few months, I’ve been increasingly frustrated with Amazon and it’s merchant’s over shipping policies. If you’ve been following my blog at all, you’ll know that I live overseas. It seems that Amazon has gone the same route as eBay and made it a requirement for the overseas people to hunt through the pages of information in order to see if a product is shipped overseas. Continue reading…

It seems that the internet has pushed out the bad in people. Now it seems that some company wants Dean Hunt to remove himself from Google since there is a Search Engine Optimization battle going on.

What’s basically happening is that some business owner checked his Google Rankings and found out that Dean’s website ranks better than his own business for a specific search term. This guy had the gall to email Dean and tell him to remove the search term because Businesses should be ranked higher than Bloggers (seriously). Dean replied and basically told the guy to shove off, but the guy replied and said he’d contacted Google and his lawyer…

Where do people get off doing this type of stuff? This reminds me of the old Mafia movies - pay up or else…

This is one of the neatest things I’ve seen in awhile. It visually shows the complexity of the music and a whole bunch of other stuff. It’s actually very similar to what the Deaf use to see music played. Check it out over at Google Videos. Even my wife, a professional musician, thought it was pretty cool.

Its always been normal that someone that owns a website owns their own website and that, for the most part, you really can’t be fined or anything from the federal government. Well, it seems that Uncle Sam is looking over a bill introduced by Sen. John McCain that thinks differently.

It appears as though website owners that run Blogs, Photo Sharing websites, Forums, etc. can find themselves find up to $300,000 if specific images or videos. Now, that sounds completely terrible until you find out that the images and videos are illegal to own, have, etc (children - that says enough…) So, what happens if you find something like this and remove it as fast as you can - everything’s alright, right? Nope… Thats the bad part about this bill. You, as a website owner, are required to file a report with the government, step by step, or risk being fined. While I honestly didn’t read over the bill (its late, the bill is pretty long, etc…), I’m guessing that you have to dig through your server logs in order to fill out the required information when reporting the issue.

I’m all for protecting children and getting rid of filth, but risking being fined because I didn’t fill out some form correctly, that’s pretty upsetting… We’ll see what happens with it over the next couple of weeks.

Letters to Santa use to be one of those things that people knew about, but when they where mailed, they where gone. The post office wouldn’t talk about what happened to them - at all.

Those days are now gone. According to a recent CNN article, Santa resides in North Pole, Alaska. So, technically, letters to Santa really do go to the North Pole. Santa’s elves are volunteers that open and read letters trying to get return addresses. According to the Article, a writer named Ashley, wants only one thing, an iPod Nano. She also asks “What list am I on, the naughty or nice list? If I’m on the naughty, what could I do to get off?” She even goes on to ask “And how many cookies do you think you can eat on Christmas night?”

What happened to the secret of Santa of our past? Seriously speaking, there are 5 year olds that can get online and go to their favorite websites. Whats to stop them from getting on Google and figuring out that CNN and others have let the cat out of the bag - then again, I’m now one of those “others”? I remember being 9 and watching a special on how people have seen “elves” running around the North Pole and all that neat stuff - complete with footage of something weird going on and people disappearing in rays of light.

Now days, the most I’ve seen is Santa riding in on a fire truck here and there and NORAD tracking Santa. On a more interesting note, the history behind NORAD tracking Santa dates back to a misprint from Sears in 1955 that gave a number of a hot line for tracking Santa - it just happen to ring the Director of Operations at CONAD (now NORAD). More can be found here.

I may not have kids, but Santa is one of those things, in my mind, that you just don’t mess with until the kid finally figures it out later in life. It shouldn’t bug me, but it does… I can imagine that little Johnny in school has been told that there is no Santa by his parents, only to go to school and tell all his friends in Kindergarten. I’m sure that happens all the time these days - in my past, this didn’t happen until somewhere around 3rd or 4th grade (If memory serves correct). Oh well, it appears that nothing is sacred anymore.