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NextScript’s Social Network Auto Poster: A Flawed Tool With Miserable Support

By on Jan 14, 2014 in Blog Posts, Internet | 0 comments

SNAP: Sorry, No Auto Posting So let’s say you have a WordPress site with content that you’d like to automatically post to all of your social networks. There are plenty of plugins that will auto post to one or another of the networks, but few that will post to several at once. So far I’ve only found one that posts to Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Google+ and that is NextScript’s Social Network Auto Poster (SNAP) Pro. The free version doesn’t include Google+ or a few other important features, which I’ll get to later. Right off the top: SNAP is not a “snap” to setup. It takes quite a bit of effort to connect all of your social media accounts and some testing to get them posting just as you’d like, but after a few hours of hard work you should be able to get your newly created content to auto-post as desired. I didn’t have...

eBay Permanently Suspends My Account, Won’t Discuss It

By on Dec 4, 2013 in Blog Posts, Internet | 3 comments

When I created my account with eBay back in the halcyon days of 2004 I had no idea that almost a decade later the company would shut it down and refuse to discuss it. My “membership” started out as many do, with a casual interest in the site and learning how the online auction system worked. I won my first auction in 2005 and since then I’ve used the site to purchase and sell a dozen or more items, accumulating a flawless record of ratings for items sold to other members. I would consider myself a lightweight in the eBay world, but I’d be willing to bet there are a lot more people like me in their database than not. In June I received an Email from eBay notifying me that my account had been suspended. It was titled “MC999 Your eBay account has been suspended”, which I have since learned is a death notice. I didn’t even see the Email at the...

Stellar Phoenix Refuses to Honor Money Back Guarantee

By on Jan 25, 2013 in Blog Posts, Internet | 1 comment

Recently a customer was having a problem with Outlook; their PST file had become corrupted. This happens from time to time, especially with larger Outlook files, and the first thing to try is Microsoft’s own scanpst repair utility. When that doesn’t work or causes other issues, one goes Googling for specialty applications. That’s how I found Stellar Phoenix and their Outlook PST Recovery utility. I ran the PST file through a scan with the trial version and it found quite a bit of data to recover – over 45,000 Emails – so I decided to purchase it. After the scan was complete I noticed that Emails were corrupted, with foreign characters and bizarre time stamps and headers. The real problem wasn’t the corrupted Emails, but the massive amount of missing data. The original 4.5GB file was reduced to under 4GB by the Stellar Phoenix recovery utility, as see...

Why Internet dating is stupid and I hate it

By on Nov 16, 2012 in Blog Posts, Internet | 1 comment

For almost ten years I’ve maintained an on-again, off-again relationship with online dating websites. As I’m still single it should be obvious that it’s not working for me. I’ve been trying to determine the first time I ever opened an online dating account and as far as I can tell it was in 2003 when I created a profile on Yahoo Personals. I vaguely remember browsing for free and coming across a profile that intrigued me, which of course meant I had to put down some cash to send a message to whatever vexing minx shared my lack of social skills. Over the years I’ve had a number of wonderful relationships with people I’ve met online, but none of them have lasted any significant amount of time. Somehow the magic hasn’t been there for me. Maybe it’s a coincidence or perhaps meeting someone online just doesn’t have the romantic...

How to redirect images in WordPress

By on Feb 20, 2012 in Blog Posts, Internet | 0 comments

Today I had the pleasure of having one of my websites slammed with traffic. Normally this would be a wonderful thing, filling me with the joy of a thousand nerds meeting Jeri Ryan in person. I quickly determined that I wasn’t getting the kind of traffic I wanted. Some wanker had directly linked to an animated GIF on my website EnjoyTheRandom.com from Reddit rather than linking to the post it was on. This is generally considered awesome by Redditors and heinous by webmasters. We spend a ton of time combing the interwebs for content, so the least you can do is ignore the rest of the site while you get a chuckle out of the free content we’re providing.Normally I’d just let it slide, but this was a nearly 2MB animated GIF and the site was burning through over 5GB of bandwidth per hour. Since a moderately popular post on Reddit can generate that kind of traffic for a day...

Netflix vs. Blockbuster Total Access

By on Apr 10, 2009 in Blog Posts, Internet | 0 comments

I’ve been a long time Blockbuster member and have rented at least a thousand movies from them. Yes you read that correctly, and I agree it is sad. Back in February I wrote about how frustrated I was with Blockbuster’s lack of titles in stock. Sadly, things haven’t improved. In fact if you compare the list of movies I had queued in November 2008 with the current list (below), you’ll notice that exactly half over them are still in my queue six months later and don’t appear to be coming any time soon.How can it be possible to have over a dozen movies listed as “Long Wait”, seven as “Very Long Wait” and two as “Unavailable”? Why even list the movies if they stand no chance of ever being sent out? All good questions that Blockbuster has never answered for me, despite my asking.Recently I added a number of titles to my queue...