l-dopa

I’ve been seeing a lot of ‘Google Money Master’ ads on various sites. You click through and you get a page explaining how you can ‘work at home’ (the American Dream, apparently) and a pitch:

Step 1: Get Google Money Master, only pay the $1.95 for shipping.

Step 2: Follow the directions on Google Money Master that basically shows you how to and set up a Google account. Then they will give you the website links to post. Start posting those links. Google tracks everything.

You heard right. It basically shows you how to and set up a Google account. There there are some fake comments at the bottom, which you can’t add to because of ‘problems with spam’ (kudos for that).

What you should do is check Google before attempting to become a Google Money Master:

• complaintsboard.com says: “This is based out of Phillipines. It posts FAKE blogs on how people made money posting stuff on google. They initally took out $2.87 from my account and I just found out they will take out $70 something monthly. Oh and of course the 800 number stays busy so there is no way to contact them.” (and the comments agree)
• ripoffreport.com says: “A couple of weeks later I received a phone call from a Fredricka Mills from the grant center telling me I would receive 7 free days of google money profit, and 7 free days of advance benefits plus 7/24 medical to try. In return I would receive a gas card and $1,000.00 in grocery vouchers. I told her no thank you I only wanted the grant cd and had not signed up for anything else. She then informed me that I would be charged $39.95 per month to be a member. Well it sure did not say anything about that either when I ordered the grant cd … I thought it was all over until I got this package of membership cards etc. for this advance benefits plus 7/24 medical emergency stuff. I called the grant place back and they told me they were a third party (which is bull) and gave me a phone number to call. In the meantime my credit card was charged $29.95 …”

Long story short, don’t fall for it.

Also of interest the same leaderboard ad shills for a fake Rachael Ray blog at rachelrayblogs.com:

We know we spelt her name wrong, but it’s too late! Did you know most people who search Google actually type the wrong spelling in?

…you don’t say.

NOTE: “Google Money Master” is now “Google Home Income” but it still continues to be a HUGE SCAM.

~Jeff

If you haven’t signed up for the free (free!) and amazing file synchronization service Dropbox, here’s a free invite that will help me out too.

Enjoy!

So a CEO, a web programmer and an SEO expert are on a desert island.

And the SEO expert says, “You guys, I’m so thirsty. Is there anything to drink?”

And the CEO says, “I just drank the last of my water 30 minutes ago.”

And the web programmer says, “I have plenty of water, a true abundance, but I won’t give any to you. Because, you are the worst. I hate you with every fiber of my being. Your very existence is an inherent refutation of the basic concept of quality workmanship and craft. Every additional second you remain on this planet is a deep, personal offense to me.”

Then the SEO expert died slowly and painfully of thirst, and over the next several days his body slumped, shriveled and shrank as his organs collapsed upon themselves with a hissing sound while the CEO and web programmer sat and stared. And the sun set, and rose, and set again.

THE END

Step 1: Drag the v0rtex bookmarklet to your bookmark bar.

Step 2: When you are reading about a cool album or movie that oh maybe you might be interested in, highlight the name and click the v0rtex bookmarklet.

Step 3: Prophet

~Jeff

So if I have this right, my Airport Express/iTunes combo:

• Takes a compressed music file from iTunes and converts whatever music file format that is into Apple Lossless.
• iTunes then discovers and connects via Bonjour mDNS autodiscovery to the IP address of the wireless router.
• iTunes streams that Apple Lossless file from the client machine to the wireless router over 802.11n via some proprietary protocol (but presumably some form of UDP traffic).
• The Airport Express takes those 1s and 0s and turns the Apple Lossless file back into music.
• That music is sent as bursts of light via fiber optic cable to my stereo.
• Those bursts of light are reassembled by the stereo and sent to the amplifier, which fluctuates between a positive charge and a negative charge on the red wire and vibrates the speaker cone.
• The speaker cone vibrations move the air and those vibrations are recieved by the cochlea in my inner ear.
• Those signals received by the cochlea then are translated into bio-electric signals which are transmitted to my brain and interpreted as music.

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

~Jeff

So, a dude at AIG refuses to give back is $700,000 bonus and says that he’s going to give it all to “charity” (read: Heritage Foundation, Project for a New American Century, and the Republican Party).

Please note these perfectly preserved leavings of a specimen of Homo Perapluo Internetica:

I wish that all you execuative haters would get what you want. Maybe it would be a real lesson if all the top execuatives quit. This country would stop cold and they could buy up all your assets for a loaf of bread because you couldn’e even feed yourself without these 1% or less running things the rest of the country would fail quickly. Stop the class warefare and go do someting to improve you lot in life. If you’r not happy keep it to yourself. Right now we don’t need negative small minded people wipped into a frenzy by crooked lazy politicians. We need real leaders of industry to solve our problems!!!!

Evoloopr (iTMS link) is a new iPhone/iPod Touch app by ldopa’s own Jon Klein. It’s a generative music app that creates eight loops and allows the listener to ‘mate’ two of the loops to create eight new offspring loops. Also, it’s got a single muted electric guitar note by yours truly that people are already calling ‘perhaps the greatest single-note guitar sample ever,’ or at least I think that people will be saying that in the iTunes Music Store comments soon, wink, wink.

Anyhow, check it out. Just to sweeten the deal, Jon Klein informs me that if you buy the Evoloopr application, and if you then meet him in a bar and show him the application running on your phone or iPod Touch, he will reimburse your purchase price by buying you the chilled beverage of your choice*.

* Offer only good for one (1) copy of Evoloopr per customer. Void where prohibited. Offer not good in Tennessee because Jon Klein refuses to visit Tennessee.

I got bored of waiting for the official Boxee iPhone remote, so I wrote my own. Enjoy!

Google Code project.

I couldn’t have figured this out without the excellent HTTP API documentation from the XBMC project and the source code for the keycodes as well.

I could watch this all day:

I don’t have any more info on it, though the original Flash file is hosted on http://www.wreck.devisland.net/ga/, which provides us little in the way of clues.

µTorrent.

I tested the current Mac clients of µTorrent versus Transmission using the .iso file for the latest version of Ubuntu. Both clients were fast, reaching the maximum of the 1.2 MB/sec connection, but while Transmission’s download speed varied wildly between 300k and the 1.2 MB/sec cap (and Activity Monitor bore the variance out), µTorrent hit the 1.2 MB/sec mark early and maintained it all thoroughout the transfer. A second test narrowed the gap, but the edge still went to µTorrent.

This has been my experience using uTorrent on Windows also; µTorrent has always been a faster client than any other GUI torrent client out there. Transmission might have the edge with the elegant, tiny UI and the lovely web interface, but if you want the data fast, use µTorrent.

But this was just my highly unscientific test. What’s been your experience?

From the New York Times article about Obama having to surrender his Blackberry¹:

Three days before his first inauguration, George W. Bush sent a message to 42 friends and relatives that explained his predicament.

“Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace,” Mr. Bush wrote from his old address, G94B@aol.com. “This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing with each of you.”

LOLOLOL He’s got mail LOLOLOL

¹ This is idiotic, by the way. Concerns about security? All devices like that have remote wipe. Presidential Records Act? How hard is it to back up email — sure, the current administration couldn’t do it, but apparently they had enough trouble with the internet that they had to go with AOL. But whatever, the dude in chief should have an iPhone anyhow.

So I played with it for a while. Cracked jokes. Followed famous people. Followed not-so-famous people. Geolocated myself. Posted pictures via twitpic or douchetweet or fuckchirp or whatever lamprey-like fly-by-night jackass service reared up to add the moronic and superfluous features that the folks at Twitter were smart enough to originally eschew.

And my verdict is: It’s retarded. It’s AOL keywords.

It’s the CB radio of the 2000’s.

For all the connectivity Twitter supposedly offers, it offers no genuine connections at all. Everything is passive. You send out a “tweet”¹ into the universe with no idea or clue that anyone will answer. You have no idea if anyone heard you. You have no indication that anyone cares. It’s just a firehose of the pointless flotsam and jetsam of cultural minutia and lifestyle effluvium, delivered in a lightly distracting, OM NOM NOM-style all-you-can-eat infotainment/ego-casting stream to whatever millennial-enabled wireless device you’re willing to hook into it².

It’s like talking to yourself, out loud, on the bus. And it offers just about the same amount of useful feedback.

If Twitter is the future of online communication, or the future of blogging and/or journalism: I’m out. I want the communication I spend my ever-decreasing amount of free time on to be richer, clearer; not constrained by arbitrary limitations based on the maximum length of SMS text messages.

¹ I never thought I’d hate a single word more than the word ‘blog,’ but here we are.

² Also see: Facebook.

Dear Incase,

I know for a fact a couple months ago I reviewed this case on your site:

http://goincase.com/products/detail/protective-cover-cl59038

I reviewed the case fairly and accurately, and yet, you don’t have my review up there. Admittedly: My review was negative, because the case I purchased initally was made of stretchy, faulty rubber and distorted itself. It would slip off but in the meantime it allowed all this crunk to slip around back and stain and discolor my iPhone. Awesome!

Granted, the initially defective case was replaced (after complaint) free of charge, but now, the replacement has ripped at the top on the ‘tread seam’ near the headphone jack (as others’ have as well). So while I like the look of it — it looks like a mountain bike tire, in a good way — I haven’t been blown away by the quality of the case.

I’m a pretty loyal Incase customer — your MacBook Pro bag is quite nice — and I like the look and feel of this case enough that I visited your site with the intention of buying yet another case, faulty or not. But given that you nixed my previous review, I have to ask, why even bother having reviews at all? My advice is: If you’re not going to play fair and put up critical reviews, just take down that feature altogether. As it stands, it’s more than a little deceptive to only keep the positive reviews up.

~Jeff

Edit staff,

This weekend’s editorial strategy planning and retreat session was tremendously productive. This year’s topic of focus was Election 2008; as you know, America is counting on us to have the punniest, most outrageous headlines of all national newspapers, so it’s in our best interest as an organization to really pull together and work this all out ahead of time.

Senior Editor Cathy Cembura suggests, and I agree, that if Obama takes an early electoral lead we should probably go with “Can You Smell What Barack is Cooking?” — someone please check with Dwayne Johnson’s people to make sure he’s not a Libertarian or something. On the other hand, if Obama takes an early hit it’s been suggested we go with “Baracknophobia!”. Maybe someone from the Art Dept. could Photoshop Barack and Michelle’s heads onto a big scary spider or something. Get back to me.

Inside the package, Dennis Kuptner from Marketing suggests that we need to capture more of the ‘Defamer snark culture’ audience, and to that end he suggests a sidebar factbox with bullet-points in the top story that references 80’s rap icons Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock:

I WANT BARACK RIGHT NOW
* Obama came to town to get down
* He’s internationally known
* ALSO: Known to rock a microphone

On the flip side of this election, we’re thinking by far the most noteworthy aspect of John McCain’s candidacy is that he’s very, very old. Could someone talk with Murdoch’s people to see if we can get temporary rights to some clip art of Grandpa Simpson? If so, we should put that clip art next to every story we run. If McCain takes an early lead, we’re hoping to go with “America Depends on McCain” with a photo collage of McCain wearing a baby bonnet and holding a rattle — and if he takes an early hit we’ve decided to go with “Fallen, and He McCan’t Get Up” with a photo of McCain tumbling off the exit ramp of the Straight Talk Express. Again, Art. Dept. should start work on this A.S.A.P.

Very excited to be out in front of this! Also, huge layoffs to come, but we’ll discuss that further next week.

Steve