If you read my earlier post I gave PayPerPost.com a try. I found the whole idea interesting, but slightly unethical. But I was game. I signed up and posted my first blog, which was to promote payperpost. They offered me $20.00 for a 30 day post. I posted and it was approved. The 30 days ended today and I receieved the email below. They refuse to pay me. Figures! I guess it was all unethical anyway and I deserve getting screwed by these idiots. I look forward to seeing them go out of business.
“This is a notification to let you know that we were unable to approve your post, I just signed up for PPP!, due to the following reason(s):
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Hello Robert,
Thank you for submitting this post.
Unfortunately, this URL leads to an error.
Please resubmit the post once it loads correctly.
Thanks!
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Because of this infraction, you will not be paid. If you wish to contest this, please contact our support team at please contact us by logging in to <a href=”http://payperpost.com”>http://payperpost.com</a> and clicking Contact Support at the bottom of the page.
Thank you,
If you have any questions or comments regarding this message, please send us a note by clicking on ‘Contact Support’ at the bottom of any page within your PPP account. Thank you!!
After the stunning, jaw dropping experience of opening my MacBook for the first time I am settling down to reality. I am still truly amazed that I lived with Windows for so long. A week into the Apple experience and I haven’t rebooted yet and I’m still enjoying the simplicity of the OSX interface.
But as I’ve tried to get some real world tasks done I’ve found that several pieces of software are need to perform common tasks such as bittorrent downloads, rar unpacking, word processing and instant messaging. Here are a few of the software packages I’ve downloaded so far.
Open Office - The open source replacement for Microsoft Offic.
FileZilla - A great ftp client that I used on Windows and works just as well on the Mac.
Adium - This is an Instant Messenger client that support multiple im services including AOL instant messagin.
Miro - A very nice open source media player. Support subscriptions. Great for train riders who need to numb the train commute. I suggest subscribing to the TED channel.
UnRarX - An unpacking utility for rar compressed files.
MAMP - The Mac version of LAMP. Mac, Apache, MySql and PHP. Get a web server up and running in a minute with this package.
Tomato Torrent - This is a very Mac looking bittorrent client.
I hope this list helps the first time Mac owners to get started a little faster on their journey.
I did it. I bought a macbook. So far so good. Working on transferring my songs to iTunes now. The first video that appears when starting the machine is a welcome message in many languages.
I was thinking about picking up a macbook today. Need something lighter for the train. That’s where I get most of my work done when I’m working on side jobs. My Dell laptop is great, but it’s 17 inches and heavy. The macbook is so light and I’m sure just as powerful as the duo core 2 I’m on now. Besides, I think I would like the osx os so much better than vista. Vista is such a pain in the ass. Feels like I’m working on yesterday’s operating system. Its has so many problems with file transfers. I love linux, but you can’t get dreamweaver or itunes on linux. It’s funny, those are the only 2 applications I can’t live without. There are absolutely no other applications on Windows that matter to me.
I think Microsoft is really screwed. Tech blogs say the sp1 patch they just put out didn’t fix any of the problems and people felt it did absolutely nothing at all. Most machines can’t even upgrade to it because it won’t install if it detects any devices that it doesn’t have drivers for. None of my machines received the patch.
Apple has 20% market share now, from something like 3% a few years ago. In 5 years everyone will have a mac and I bet businesses will start accepting mac as their OS. Microsoft will be the Office suite company because Excel is still the best. People will still use Word because its packaged with Excel.
A friend asked me to have a look at her 500gb Western Digital My Book drive today. The drive was not recognized on her desktop through a firewire connection. I first tried a few basic steps before trying to dismantle the drive.
I Pluged it into another PC.
Tried USB. She was using the drive through Firewire. This eliminates a cable problem.
I started up SpinRite and tried to recover the drive. Spinrite could see the drive but the tests ran through much too fast and it could not determine the correct size of the drive.
To see if the problem was the drive or the enclosure I removed the drive from the enclosure and placed it in a desktop. This was not an easy task. I should have taken some pictures, but I overlooked it at the time. I was dealing with a model that has a silver case with a rubber seal around the edges. There were not screws to be found. I tried peeling back the one label I could find on the back to see if screws were hidden underneath. No luck. I noticed some tables in slots on the top and bottom near the front of the case. I could push the tabs, but could not separate the case.
After fiddling the the case for a while I realized that I was able to use a small flat head screwdriver to pry up the rubber seal. I then pulled the rubber off around the whole drive. With the rubber gone I was able to pry apart the case easily. This was the most difficult part. I could find no instructions on the web for this model. I believe it was a model 5000.
After opening the case, I removed the 9 screws holding the drive in. Four on the top, four on the bottom and one on a circuit board on the side. I placed the drive in a desktop computer that supported SATA drives. Still no luck. The drive was unreadable. The bios could not even see the size of the drive. Well, at least I gave it my best shot and she can replace the drive with another SATA drive in the same enclosure.
I’m not going to attempt to write a review of the Kindle here, I’m sure there are enough of those, but I wanted to write brief word on the my wife’s experience so far. A bunch of her friends put their money in a pot and bought one for her 40th birthday. I had bought her a RCA REB1100 a few years ago and she loved it. Unfortunately, they couldn’t keep the business model going and folded the online store.
She started using the device in February. I didn’t want to skew her opinion at all, so I kept quiet and let her figure it out on her own. I didn’t even mention all the complaints about how easy it is to hit the page forward and back buttons by accident. The only advice I gave her was to leave the wifi off when not in use, just in case that ate more battery life. Over a month later and I haven’t had to help her at all. She’s downloaded several book and loves it. I hope this device becomes the standard.
Sony BMG is no stranger to piracy. As one of the most vocal supporters of the RIAA and IFPI antipiracy efforts, the company has some experience hunting down and punishing consumers who don’t pay for its products. The company is getting some experience on the other side of the table, however, now that it’s being sued for software piracy.full story…
I’m was able to get my xbox 360 for free. It’s simple. Get a Chase rewards card and use your points to get $100 gift cards from Best Buy. You’ll have to spend 30K to do this. I just put everything I possibly can on this card from groceries to plane tickets. It adds up fast. If you pay your balance off every month, you will have an xbox in no time. Maybe I’m crazy, but I get more out of my xbox than a free plane ticket.
My friend Jeff runs a site by the name of Fabrics and Home. He sells fabrics online. Brands such as Kravet Fabric, Ado Fabric, Duralee Fabric and much more. He actually had a store front in Manhattan at one time, but had more success online and realized it was time to close the brick and mortar store and go Internet only. Jeff is always looking for a way to spread the word. He actually spends quite a lot on Google adsense each month.
He had found a service through a friend that promised to get his ranking up on Google and provide his site another avenue for spreading the buzz about his store. He was paying these guys a chunk of money each month as well. After hearing about blog ads from Jeff I remembered an article that I had read in a magazine about pay per post. After researching a little I passed the word on and he decided he could handle this without a middle man by going direct to the source. Jeff is very happy and has really upped his traffic. I decide to get into the game. I already had this blog, so I’m giving it a try. I’ll let you know how it goes!