Write A Review!

A few years ago I wrote a blog post about my new lemonade stand policy - that henceforth I would stop at every lemonade stand I drove by....if for no reason other than to encourage young entrepreneurs. See - Encouraging Children.

(Although this past summer I once stopped, prepared to buy, at one and these "rich kids" were asking for $3 for a Dixie cup of powder-mix lemonade! I told them the price was too high and drove away - an economic lesson nonetheless.)

Last week I was standing outside a small Italian deli/eatery here in London trying to figure out whether or not to take a chance on eating there. Quite frankly, some of the food here in London really sucks. "Overpriced" is bad enough, but when it sucks too you really get indigestion.

Google Reviews were scant on this little Italian place.

I took my family in and was amazed at how good the meatballs and bolognese sauce were.

Of course it was pricey and the portions were small...

But I went home and wrote a glowing 5-star review for the place on Google.

And a couple months ago I did the same thing for my mechanic. I actually asked him what site he wanted the review on.

First of all, you should support these places that are good....because otherwise they will be gone. So a positive review, in the year 2014 AD, can really help.

Secondly, if you offer to write one, you may even wangle a free dessert or otherwise ingratiate yourself at the establishment.

Reviews are VERY IMPORTANT. You can have the best product/service in the world but if you suck at marketing you may be doomed.

A lot of people are good a making meatballs or whatever BUT they don't know $hit about how important reviews and marketing are.

YouTube - The Forgotten Giant

Today we were setting up a YouTube account for my 7.12 year old son...

As I was keying in the info my son inquired:

John - Hey Dad, what's 'other'?

Hah! I ignored him, twice, and haven't gotten around to answering it. Although *Michael Jackson* might do the trick.

YouTube is littered with cussing and girls in thongs....even on SpongeBob videos!

So generally I don't let the kids surf the website.

BUT there are still tons of terrific, age-appropriate content on YouTube.

I send my kids videos of (other) amazing kids all the time. Y'all should do this too!

Right now my daughter is watching a young lady singing beautifully.

And my son, now that he has an account, is already subscribed for awesome, FREE chess lessons.

Critics thought YouTube would die from copyright infringement lawsuits; they said that it was nothing more than *pirated content*; that no one would create quality video content for free; and that Google OVERPAID.

Of course they were, as critics so often are, dead-wrong.

Now that I have an internet-enabled color TV in the house I find myself more and more opting to watch YouTube clips late at night, in bed - be they chess tutorials or interviews with famous entrepreneurs and whatnot.

Google - Setting Its Sights On iTunes

I'm always rooting against Apple - much like I'm always rooting against the Red Sox.

While neutral on the products, I just don't care for the rabid fans!

And this reminds me...

One of these days I'm going to have to figure out a way to listen to music and whatnot in my car in a more modern way, i.e. NOT through the AM/FM car stereo.

I just can't bring myself to BUY an iPod and then BUY a thousand dollars worth of music.

Then I have to *manage* it: physically bring it with me, hide it in the car, sync devices, etc. Heck I'd probably get another $180 ticket from a cop for a *hands free violation* messing around with it.

I need a computer embedded in my car, with access to my stuff. Google obviously is positioning itself for such a future world.

For more info Google's latest salient - click here.

Picasa Photo Albums

Do any of y'all use Picasa - Google's photo and image management application?

I do try to concentrate as much as I can in my Google Account: email, YouTube, all my notes and half-written books are Google Docs, etc.

But a couple of years ago I downloaded Picasa (the desktop application) and it automatically went about synch-ing with the millions of photos I had on my hard drive. I couldn't control it at all and my computer was getting old so Picasa kept crashing during this synch process. Needless to say I never got started using it.

However I do have many of my photos uploaded to Picasa over the web. I think of it as a free online, in case of a flood or computer crash, storage. Of course I hit the memory limit long ago.

But yesterday I paid $5.00 - essentially nothing - to upgrade my online storage to 20 giga bytes per year. Right now I'm uploading 2011's photos to Picasa and I'm considering that since I have a new PC I may try out the desktop Picasa application again.

Do any of y'all use Picasa for managing and editing photos? I myself can't stand Shutterfly and the like. It seems to me to be so much more convenient to have my photos - along with everything else! - centralized in my Google account.

Unquestioning Morons

My wife recently spend a long afternoon with one of her old *friends*.

Afterwards she remarked that her pal, whom she hadn't seen in ages, didn't ask a single question about what was going on with my wife and her family - this was over a period of something like 6 hours.

As far as I'm concerned, that's not exactly a *friend* or someone worthy of spending any scarce personal time with. When one half of a relationship becomes acutely aware of this kind of imbalance....I say it's definitely time to short that friendship.

We all have acquaintances that, well, don't ever initiate getting together or even make any efforts in that regard. And there is certainly some real value in maintaining skeletal relationships with old friends.  (Of course, some of these clowns need to be severed too!)

But *not asking you any questions* is a clear warning sign and not just with friends; it also applies to strangers and random people that you meet. If you're sitting there at a party or something and some self-orbiting Moron doesn't express any interest in the basics (like where you're from!)....well, I quickly cross them off my list.

I submit that it's beyond merely a sign of vanity or social retardation.

People who aren't genuinely interested in the lives of others may very well be intellectually retarded to boot. Have any of y'all ever met an incurious, closed-minded genius?

I'd like to suggest a new metric for assessing IQ.

How often do you Google?

Seriously. It's sort of a corollary to that old maxim *there's no such thing as a stupid question* which casts the kid who's afraid to raise his hand in a government school classroom.

Think about it. The WWW holds the answers to almost every basic question imaginable. Only a certified Moron would not want to tap that resource, again and again.

Plus....I myself Google stuff all day long! Ergo I'm clearly very...

NY Times Readers, Complaining Of A Small World!

In the anti-spirit of Greg Mankiw....I'd like to *discuss* this:

While I think the subject is interesting in its own right, there was something nauseating about this particular buffoon, discussing the subject of closed-mindedness, amongst his boneheaded cronies at a TED convention.

It'd be like the Morons who've sequestered themselves away in say the Peoples Republic of Cambridge, Massachusetts wondering why their organic cocktail parties are dull - with everyone finishing each other's sentences in turn.

I mean the idea that in the pre-internet age newspaper editors were anchored by *gatekeeping integrity* is downright ludicrous. And anyone decrying an alleged dearth of web info TODAY ought to be branded a complete Moron.

While the speaker deprecates it, I do like and agree with this quote from the beginning:

Make no mistake, and don't ever forget that calls for *public mindedness* have never been anything but a Trojan Horse for those elitist, religious fanatics who are more accurately described as socialists.

How's this - if you're worried about suffering in Africa why don't YOU don't something about it - something that doesn't involve coercing others to help you?

And if YOU don't like the news feed from Yahoo or Headbook simply STOP using them. If YOU don't like the first couple Google search results....then YOU can scroll down or use another search engine.

Yeah Africa has problems, but here we have the burden of whiny *smart ignoramuses* and whiny *volunteer slaves*...

Thanks to jabroni LeagueIslander for sending me this one.

Blogger - Sexier Extreme Makeover

Shoot....check out these new *views* (of my blog) that Blogger just came out with:

Flipcard

Snapshot

Mosaic

Sidebar

Timeslide

I'm not sure what to do with them at the moment. Do I now have to alter the format of my output? Or are these just trendy preferences for tablet iMorons that I don't comprehend?

Anyways thanks to Paul Mitchell, my eyes and ears (and occasional brain!), for alerting me to this development.

And sorry for the pic of Arm Pitt. But that's what's comes up first when you search for *sexier*.

E-Delivered Nastiness

Several years ago, a friend was complaining about the *forwards* her 'old coot' FIL used to bombard her with from his AOL account. After all, he had her work email address and....she was too freakin' busy to be bothered with his political/joke spam and clippings directly from the snopes.com FALSE file.

This young lady was tech-savvy, I'm talking 10 years ago, and told me how she *created a rule* for the email he sent her.

Fast forward to today...

Now I'm having some email issues. Quite frankly way too many worthless ones pour into my inboxes.

Worthless I can deal with, but I've about had it with people who send me NASTY emails. I've gotten to the point where upon the first iota of nastiness I detect, I hit the delete button. And I don't care who it's from!

I mean I'm busy as (poop), I don't need to be distracted or riled up by some wimp who wants to hurl invective at me from the safety afforded by distance.

Some people I've successfully cut off by ignoring them. But today I finally started creating filters in my inbox that will either instantly archive or delete emails I receive from certain unspecified individuals. Unfortunately Gmail does not have *bounce back* functionality which is too bad - because I would like the people I bounce to get the message.

What's your nasty-email policy?

See also - Doing The Nasty, Email.

On Web Pollution

I only recently heard the term *content farm*. I mean I certainly was well-acquainted with eHow, ezinearticles, and friends, I knew they were fonts of garbage, but naively I didn't fully understand their sordid business/economics.

Read this very interesting *article* - Google Kills eHow Competitors, eHow Ranks Up.

Warning - that guy really, really loathes all things Google!

The web has certainly gotten very crowded the past few years. While my blog output has been increasing in volume and quality(!)....my web traffic has stagnated for the past 1.5 years.

I'm not sure exactly why but I sense that while I've been focusing on writing, my website competitors have instead been focused on gaming the search results and whatnot.

We're a *blame society*, right?

So whom could we blame for polluting our glorious internet with dating advice written in broken English by Third World Asians?

Blame Google? Blame Google because it's their AdSense network that's subsidized these so-called content farms/mills?

Nah....we rightfully have to blame the Morons who actually click on the ads!

Marginalize The Watermarkers, Too!

This week Google was in the news with a headline about them beginning to crack down on content farms.

I had thought they were already doing that?

Anyways, I have some advice for Google's search algorithm tweakers:

GET RID OF THE WATERMARKED, FOR-SALE IMAGES ATOP THE IMAGE SEARCH RESULTS.

iStockPhoto, Corbis, et al....these image-renters have no business showing up in generic search results.

Rightfully they ought to be placed in a separate category.

NO ONE, no individual, is going to pay $129 or $300 or $400 for that pic above. Perhaps some media company will, so let them transact with each other directly, no?

They definitely ought to boot these *content farms* from the top pages of Google search results.

Screed, over.

Calculator = Defunct

Y'all don't even have to find the calculator on your computer now to crunch some numbers.

Just google an expression and the answer will pop right up!

And how about those *instant* Google search results now?

CRAZY!

CaptiousNut Incognito!

Recall I just upgraded my 5.75 year old PC and boy is it nice to be out of the Dark Ages!

Everything is better: the speed at which it turns on and off, the Paint program, MS-Office that's NOT from 2002, etc.

My old PC, with the hard drive 83% filled, was on the fritz and hence didn't respond well to the barrage of updates that continually flew in: Windows, Java, virus software...so I couldn't really install the latest versions of everything, nor did I feel like I needed to.

But now that I'm back up to speed, there's one thing in particular that I'm enjoying - the Google Chrome Browser. It's a vast improvement from the version of Explorer I had been using, IMO. One aspect of it that I just discovered is the *Incognito* option.

When I first saw it, I partially inferred what it was. I could open an *Incognito* browser and it would be disjoint from my extant browser sessions. Right away I successfully opened my other Gmail account in it. You see before I could only be logged into one at a time and it was real annoying. If my wife wanted to come over and check her email I had to log out of not only my Gmail account but also Blogger, my Google Docs, and Google Reader. What a pain in the butt it was.

Then when I got the Droid phone, I'd do all my personal email on the tiny *smartphone* while I had my CaptiousNut account open on the PC. It was ridiculous how I used to forward personal stuff from my phone to my C-Nut account just so I could see it on the computer without logging out of everything!

But apparently the incognito browser does more than just permit simultaneous access to multiple Gmail accounts:

For times when you want to browse in stealth mode, for example, to plan surprises like gifts or birthdays, Google Chrome offers the incognito browsing mode. Here's how the incognito mode works:

Webpages that you open and files downloaded while you are incognito aren't recorded in your browsing and download histories.

All new cookies are deleted after you close all incognito windows that you've opened.

Hmmmm.....let me see.

ALL browsing history, download history, and cookies are expunged...

If you believe this were designed for hiding *surprise birthday parties*, then you my friend, are a Moron.

BTW, there are a whole bunch of other innovations that I am enjoying on updated PC like Sticky Notes, Chess Titans (for my son), the scribble pad, the improved Movie Maker, and no doubt plenty more things I've yet to discover.

It's kind of exciting to deny yourself all the latest and greatest in some areas because it makes the eventual upgrading all the more fun - like a time-warp into the present.

Now I'm going back to planning my wife's *surprise birthday party*. Her special day was actually last week, but it's going to take me a full year (of browsing) to plan next year's soirée...

Riding John Daly's Erraticism

Look at that ↑.

Apparently Marginalizing Morons is hosting the top image search result for "John Daly".

That explains all the hits my blog is getting today - given that he shot 6-under and led the British Open this morning.

Content Thugs

Recently, in - YouTube Overshooting - I expressed my frustration at Google/YouTube for their accelerating *copyright* enforcement.

But it's tough to really blame them given the diversified and unrelenting legal assault on them from interested lawyers and competitors. As Microsoft found out, bigness and wealth attract shakedown artists like honey does flies.

Google's won the first round of the enormous lawsuit Viacom brought against it. Viacom is suing Google for $1 billion for not having copyright lawyers inspect all the videos that get uploaded to YouTube before they're made live (they're also asking that Google eliminate private videos because these movies -- often of personal moments in YouTubers' lives -- can't be inspected by Viacom's copyright enforcers).

The lawsuit has been a circus. Filings in the case reveal that Viacom paid dozens of marketing companies to clandestinely upload its videos to YouTube (sometimes "roughing them up" to make them look like pirate-chic leaks). Viacom uploaded so much of its content to YouTube that it actually lost track of which videos were "really" pirated, and which ones it had put there, and sent legal threats to Google over videos it had placed itself.

Other filings reveal profanity-laced email exchanges between different Viacom execs debating who will get to run YouTube when Viacom destroys it with lawsuits, and execs who express their desire to sue YouTube because they can't afford to buy the company and can't replicate its success on their own.

Read the rest of it here.

Hmmmm....Sending legal threats over videos Viacom had uploaded itself?

Sounds like *entrapment* to me.

Here's hoping that Viacom's business gets decimated by the digital, internet revolution!

Creative Jobhunting - In The Age Of Google

I'm sure a lot of other people have tried this approach now that this story is out.

And why the bleep not?

Making Virtual Flashcards

Check out my 3.86 year old's new *pics*:















Those are from her *word pics* folder that we just created on my desktop.

At this point, she's learning phonics, learning to read. So I pick the word; we Google an image of it; she gets to choose which one she wants (it's quite the process); and I'll scratch the spelling on it with a photo editor if needed (but only in the color the Princess demands!).

Of course when we're perusing *her pics* she has to say the word, spell it, and say it again. All this may seem rather simple and mundane but I submit it most definitely is not.

This make-your-own approach gives the child a very active part in the educational process. It'll be a whole lot of fun for them and far more effective than a boring phonics book.

Both she and her older brother LOVE to sit at my computer and flip through their pics. The enthusiasm for this - and most other things *computer* - is simply off the chart.

For more on *pics* see - Another Great Activity For Kids.

Better Blogging Chronicles - 4 - Too Slow?

I have a question for some of you squeaky wheels:

Does my blog load too slowly for you?

The reason I ask is because all the *pro-bloggers* say to get your page load time down. They say to truncate posts with a *read more* link; they say not to show nearly as many posts as I do on my front page (25).

Google says that it uses *page loading speed* in its search rankings. Why? And who knew?

I have no idea how important this is, but it's a reality I must respect.

Check out this recent graph of my blog's loading speed:



Click graphic to enlarge if necessary.

Hmmmm....what happened in March to cause that spike in slowness?

I'm going to take a closer look when I get a chance - because my site traffic got crushed over that period as well. It went from over 1,000 hits a day to about 400 daily hits. My daily traffic is starting to uptick again into the 700s now. It was frustrating somewhat because I lost all those hits precisely when I started putting the effort into reading all those professional blogger sites and precisely when I started my Better Blogging Chronicles!

I only had mere hunches as to why my site got cut down so much. For example, I've noticed that when I don't blog on the stock market for a while (including Google Finance links), my traffic tails off. Also, I heard that Google implemented one of its notoriously disruptive search algorithm upgrades recently. Perhaps I was a short-term loser in that, so I wondered.

Of course there's a method to my madness and the format of my blog, and I'm defensive about it, but yet I am still interested in feedback on this issue.

It's funny because with some things I'm extraordinarily FAST (shopping, golf, talking, etc.), while with others I prefer deliberate S-L-O-W-N-E-S-S (driving, cleaning, blog-writing, etc.).

My Latin (100% Italian) wife....she has no *gears* at all. It's all-out, full-speed ahead from wake-up to bedtime - even on weekends.

I guess people that read my blog often (as opposed to Google search traffic) already have the recent pictures and whatnot from my blog stored in their temp files (?) so my pages load rather quickly. That seems to be the case for me anyway - as my slow computer loads Marginalizing Morons rather quickly.

See also - Better Blogging Chronicles 3 - Aesthetics

Social Networking Competition

Today my Gmail-checking was interrupted by a prompt to check out *Google Buzz*.

I have to assume that it's a foray into *social networking* - that it's an assault on HeadBook or whatever that thing is called.

I remember when Gmail started. They tried to manufacture an aura about it in the sense that one had to be *invited* to get an account. I think their gimmick was to no avail in the early going, but here we are some years later and everyone is using Google's email service. Alright, except maybe for the 'old coots' and 'old bags' are who are still on Aol and Compuserve.

I may not avail myself to the services of *Google Buzz* - and why would I? I have a blog! - but I do hope that it takes a bite out of Headbook. I've always considered it to be blogging for simpletons; it was for the masses what cavity-backed clubs were to golf hackers!

More Quotes

Y'all might have noticed....I added a new *gadget* to my blog.

In the course of my ongoing Bible study I have amassed numerous sagacious quotes - bits of wisdom even many of you heathens can profit from!

So check out my new random quote generator, in the margin on the right, atop the old one.



Is it, or is it not interesting to behold some of those search suggestions and compare contrast them with the group(s) most often vilified as *religious*?

Those results reflect nothing more than delusion and propaganda!

Jesus Christ was by no means a communist by today's definition. He believed in a purely voluntary sharing - which is in stark contradistinction to the coercion of today's *planners*.

I submit that, if anything, Jesus was actually a libertarian!

My quotes can be refreshed anytime by refreshing the page (hitting F5).

And the picture above is Poussin's rendering of The Judgement of Solomon. Cut that kid in half!

MS-Deflation

I don't know about you clowns, but that's what's running on my PC - the 6-7 year old version of MS-Office!

But what else would you expect from someone who drives clunkers?

Check out the Google search suggestions:



Piracy galore!

The whole slate of results aid and abet people in *not buying* the 2003 version of Excel, MS-Word, etc.

I think *torrent* is some Napster or Morpheus type of peer-to-peer file sharing network.

And *keygen*, "... generates cracks and serials online for your software to unlock it."

I'm about to buy myself a new PC - and probably one for my kids. I can't see any way that I end up springing for new Office products - not with Google Docs out there for free.



Shoot. Microsoft has been dead money for quite some time now - 11 long years!