Somehow, I don’t think the toy is as happy as it would have you believe.

Have you yourself ever felt stupid because you cannot believe that other people you deal with can’t seem to understand what you’re trying to communicate to them?

Pete, being that you’re also in the graphic arts, maybe you’ve experienced this sort of thing.

Here is the eMail exchange, paraphrased to avoid copyright and identification issues.

Me: I get “Access Denied” when I try to upload to your website, so I am attaching the file to this message. I have attached it in both PDF and EPS versions.

Other Person: You need to go to www… to upload your file. Which of the two files do you want to use?

Me: I went there, and got “Access Denied” when I tried to upload. Both files are the same, but in two different file formats. The EPS file may be the easier one to use.

OP: Which file do you want to use? You sent me two.

At this point, I decided I would just put an end to my headache and pick one myself.

Me: Use the EPS.

OP: You said both were the same so I picked the PDF.

Me: That’s okay. They are both the same.

That was yesterday. I thought everything was resolved. Until today.

OP: I was told both files were the same, so I used the FTP one. If you don’t want a different file, you will have to go to www… and redo the file. But deadline was 4pm. What do you want to do?

That message was sent after 4:00 p.m.

Me: PLEASE TELL ME THE FILE MADE IT IN! THEY ARE BOTH EXACTLY THE SAME! JUST DIFFERENT FILE FORMATS!!!

Okay, I heavily paraphrased my last response. I actually wrote a longer and more detailed response, but such was the underlying theme.

Was I unclear somewhere in my original messages? Please tell me I’m not stupid.

The title has little to do with the content. Nothing, actually. I just thought it sounded good.

At any rate, instead of eMailing you individually (you know who you are!), I figured I would just post this openly, and save the electronic stamps to eMail this out. Plus, this way, no one will mark my message as spam!

Hello, this is Dan from [insert blog name here]. I will be setting up one day per week as a guest blogging day, and need guest bloggers to fill in the slots.

I found your blog through [insert website or blog name here] and I think you have great content that would be of interest to my readers. I would appreciate it if you would be willing to do a guest post to fill one of the available slots.

My blog has been active since [insert date here] and has amassed quite a respectable following in that time. By guest posting on [insert blog name here], you will have the unique opportunity to expose your expertise and blog to nearly a dozen people, a handful of whom you may not even know!

I am sure that you don’t want to miss out on this exciting opportunity. Please leave a comment to let me know that you’re interested so that I can pencil you in.

Hurry! The available slots will no doubt fill up fast, and you don’t want to have to wait months for your guest post to show up, by which time the audience may have fallen to half a dozen people, all of which you already know. So, respond now!

Thanks!

I’ve previously mentioned that spammers try to sneak in their links by posting comments under another user’s name. Such a sneaky way of trying to get their links in. But, it didn’t fool me!

Unfortunately, there may be more to the story. It appears as though there may be an exploit in the Show Top Commentators plugin.

In my top commentators, David of MarketingDeviant.com is number 5. I noticed today that a spammer tried to post a comment using the name of “David.” It didn’t get approved, as it was busted by Akismet. But, even though it was unapproved, it appeared to usurp the real David’s spot in my sidebar. Thus, if you clicked on David’s name, you were taken to this spammer’s site and not MarketingDeviant.com.

I suspect is that Show Top Commentators grabs the most recent URL posted by a commentator. As the real David hasn’t been around in a while, the fake David grabbed his spot, even though the fake David’s comment was unapproved!

I can’t be sure if that’s the case until, and if, it happens again.

In order to get the real David’s link back in the spot, I had to delete the spam comment.

So, if you’re using the Show Top Commentators plugin, you might want to check your list of commentators to make sure some spammers haven’t snuck in using this possible exploit. And, if you do catch any, let me know so that maybe we can figure out if this is an actual exploit or just a fluke.

I tend to think it may be an exploit known to spammers, and that may be the real ulterior motive behind their using known commentators names to try to sneak in.

It’s time for another edition of “Weird Stuff You Can Win on eBay.” Let’s jump right in…

MUMMIES
There was a “rare” mummified cat and a dog that were available, but both listings are no longer available. Bummer. Guess you’ll have to settle for this Goth Rubber Duck which comes complete with a death certificate.

IT’S JUST A FLESH WOUND
Buy yourself some flesh from an accidental gunshot wound. The guy needs money to start an art studio. Better send him some money. Perhaps he got wounded when someone else with too much money was shooting coins.

Flesh not your thing? How about a nice human hairball? [Oops! Too late. Bidding has ended!]

Human miscellanea still not your thing? You’d just rather have the money? Well, you can get started by buying this big empty bag of money.

PRINTING MEMORABILIA
I just include this printing memorabilia because I figured Pete might like it.

ANTHROPOMORPHIC FOODS
A Cheeto that looks like a Cheeto! Wow!

The Cross in my Pocket Potato.

Frito with a Verse Inscribed on It. Some sort of hallucinogenic drug apparently required to see it.

Outties aren’t just for hot babes anymore. They’re on apples too. Must be those enhancement drugs seeping into the water supply…

A flippin’ potato chip and one with a pontiff’s hat. And a coupon for a potato chip shaped like the continental U.S. Why don’t they just sell the chip itself? Too obscene or too religious for you? How about a potato chip bunny? Or the Great Maryland Potato Chip with a Bunny. Obviously a matter of great state pride. Or, maybe you’ll prefer the Official Ohio Chicken Nugget.

A dirty hard-boiled egg. R-rated, or not, depending upon your imagination.

Frosted Flake King Tut or a Great Corn Flake Hummingbird. Tough choice. Maybe you’ll want both and have a more complete collection?

An Apple with a Heart. Great for the Mac Fanatic in your life!

An onion ring peace sign and another not quite as good.

How about a Presidential Potato Profile of George Washington? Or try to solve the mystery of who killed the Peanut Kenny from South Park? Or maybe just settle for a peanut shaped like a duck or a Popcorn Dog.

How about a smiley face chocolate chip cookie? Or a chocolate chip cookie depicting the solar system before Pluto was kicked out of the planetary system.

Spicy pork rind depicting Jesus holding a lamb. Question: How much beer (or wine) must you consume to see it?

Finally, a living Mr. Potato Head.

ANTHROPOMORPHIC NON-FOODS
An Oyster Shell that Looks like a Human Ear! Freaky.

Not human, but we’ll shoehorn it into this category anyway… A driftwood dinosaur! Your kid will have hours of fun!

Stone Duck Rock Head. Okay, so that’s not human either.

And neither is this one… Quartz Crystal Shaped like a Bunny Head. Must be weird, wild wabbit week or something.

DESPERATION
Some people aren’t lucky enough to find George Washington in their bag of potatoes. Those poor, unfortunate souls have to resort to tactics like these…

A black fine point Sharpie! Pay more than retail! Wow!

But, if you like overpriced office supplies, how about this ordinary rubber band?

A defective saltine cracker. Okay. But, that’s just slightly less desperate than this Ritz Cracker shaped like the Sun. You know. Round. And, it’s almost indistinguishable from this last Ritz Cracker in the Box!

Down, down the pits of desperation we go, as we find this Skim Milk Carton that Looks Like a 2% Milk Carton, with a different color lid and a different label. Don’t let this one pass you by!

This one is both desperate and sad… A woman trying to save her house from foreclosure by selling tiny pieces of it.

Finally, you never know what you’ll get with this Yard Sale starter kit. Mind you, this might be quite an innovative way to unload junk you have around the house.

MODERN DAY SLAVERY
Fight for the rights of the unseen! This 19-year-old is auctioning off his 17-year-old friend. Child slavery! Maybe you ought to buy him and set him free. Be an abolitionist!

LUCK & SUPERSTITION
13 Lucky Cat Whiskers. But, is it from a black cat?

Genuine 4-Leaf Clover. If this one sells, I might just get into the 4-leaf clover business!

BIZARRE
Bring about the end of the human race by building your own humanoid Cylon army! Here’s the head you can start with.

You know the economy is in bad shape when people start selling their friends.

Here’s a pair of standing legs (not quite anatomically correct, except for Barbie’s ex-boyfriend Ken) for your Cylon army.

A giant 8″ poison centipede. Presumably, it’s dead. One hopes.

I think this sponge has an outtie. It’ll be a nice match for that apple you just bid on.

Nothing says “family fun” like this wrestling jelly. Because family picnics are always where you see this stuff. Not at seedy bars. Nope. Family fun.

Finally, if you buy any of these items, you’ll definitely want to buy this hand-painted sign to proclaim to the world how you came into possession of such oddities. Heck, just buy the sign. It’s self-explanatory.

Actually, you can, but I’ve added one more plugin in my anti-spam arsenal: Close Old Posts. (Found by way of Shoemoney.com.)

You see, those pesky spammers find old posts through the search engines, or wherever, and hammer them with spam. Akismet blocks most of them, but it also has the effect (I think) of making some of my more obscure posts more popular, due to the spammers hitting them all the time.

And, lots of spam messages are on older messages, much more so than on recent messages.

Thus, the new plugin. It closes older posts from comments. My only concern is that it will also block linkbacks from real bloggers who may have just discovered an older post and blogged about it. But, I’ll give this plugin a try and see how it goes.

No Mundane Monday post today (probably). I’m pretty tired out from working on my taxes this weekend, primarily Sunday. Just one bit left to finish. And, after that, I need to get things ready for a photo shoot for a client on Tuesday. I received a new piece of equipment on Saturday, so I need to set that up for Tuesday’s appointment.

As I mentioned yesterday, though, I did find the time to get the new blog setup. Mostly. Just need to finish fiddling with the stylesheet so the colors all match up! Here it is: Find the Best Credit Card dot Com. It’s a site I’ve had for a number of years, with the only content basically being what you see in “The Basics” message. I’ve never gotten anything out of it–even tried to sell it once, but no takers. So, we’ll see how it goes with a blog and some regular updates.

In setting it up, with WordPress 2.5, I’ve discovered that some plugins don’t seem to work with it. The two I noticed are Brian’s Threaded Comments and Popularity Contest, which is a bummer since I use both of those as my basic plugins on all my blogs. Anyone know of replacements for these two? Or, maybe I’ll hold out for upgrades before updating all my blogs to WordPress 2.5.

Okay, so just a couple days after I tell you my new blog plans (again!), I change my mind (again!).

Well, most of what I wrote there will remain the same, but I don’t think I’ll shut down dcrWrites dot Com. Everything else can fit within the general theme of this blog, but the fiction just doesn’t fit. So, I think it will probably be best to keep my fiction separate. I may mention it here, just to let you know when something new goes up (for those that are interested), but I think it’s probably for the best to keep the fiction there and not here. Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind (again!).

And, I think I may start a new blog soon. I have a domain name with a simple one-page website that I have had for about three years, and I haven’t made a dime off of it. It gets some traffic, though there is no content to speak of, but no income. All I have on it is a couple affiliate ads. If I turn it into a blog, I can post fresh content from time to time and also add a wider range of ads on it. I can probably promote it better as a blog too.

But, my goal for the day is to finish my taxes. After that, if any time is left, I may then set up the new blog.

Ever scroll quickly through your eMail and see subject headers that aren’t really there? Instead, as you scroll quickly, you’ll see the first part of one and the second part of another, which can give you some interesting headers! Thus, the title of this post. The actual word was probably p0rn to get past the spam filters, but you get the general idea.

And, despite spam filters (which occasionally block legitimate messages too), I still get a lot of spam. I’ve had the same eMail address for over 10 years and, after that amount of time, it seems just about every spammer has it.

I haven’t checked eMail since Monday night, so when I checked this afternoon, I had over 1500 messages waiting for me. Of those, a little over 120 were not spam.

One has to wonder why there is so much spam. I’ve never purchased anything advertised in a spam message. I’d bet that you probably haven’t either.

But, spammers wouldn’t keep spamming if it didn’t work. Remember, for most of them, sending spam to millions of eMail addresses doesn’t cost them much, if anything. It’s not like direct mail where each mail piece costs the sender a small amount of change. With direct mail, there is incentive for mailers to target their mailings to likely buyers. But, spammers, they just blanket everyone. All they need is a very, very small percentage of people to buy, and they’ve made money.

The curious thing is that people do buy from spam. So many messages have misleading headlines, nonsensical wording and so forth, usually in an effort to get past spam filters. Right away, you would think that such deception would set off a red alert in terms of trust. Why would you buy medicines over the Internet from someone whose eMail header was “acorns”?

I think that must be how those spammy looking websites and blogs out there make money. Most of us are turned off by trickery or dodgy looking sites. When we get stuck on one, we leave right away. We delete comments left by people representing those sites. Yet, for the majority of us that run like the wind from those sites, there must be people out there thinking, hey, this looks interesting…

And, spammers are an enterprising lot. Just today, I received a comment (to be moderated) on a blog I haven’t even linked, advertised or finished yet! Already, the spammers have found it. Never mind that there aren’t any posts besides the generic “welcome” message. Never mind that it has no page rank or content or anything meaningful on it. Nope, they’ll try to get their link up anywhere.

Also, in this week’s eMail, was someone who wanted to exchange links with my web site, as they found my content interesting and thought it would be a good match for their site. So, the guy was asking for a reciprocal link. I marked that as spam. For one, he didn’t mention my name, so there’s no evidence he actually visited any of my sites. For two, he didn’t mention which of my websites he thought would be a good match. I have more than one website! So, with both of those pieces of information missing, what it appears to be is a generic form letter sent to anyone with an eMail. Even the “little blue pill” spammers do a better job of personalization! But, a lack of personalization just hints at spam.

On top of that, the letter even mentions that they have several websites. One would think they would know better, if it weren’t a generic mass-sent form letter, and actually identify the site they claim they found and that they want a link on. Instead, they are probably just hoping for any link they can get, and probably never even visited any of my websites at all.

I occasionally get similar letters that actually do indicate a website, but they’ll say how great my website is, even though I have nothing more than an “under construction” page or some such page.

So, no link for them! And, I am not even going to even visit their website to check it out. So, massive FAIL all around.

Mind you, I don’t mind legitimate people with legitimate websites or blogs asking to share links, but I want to see some indication that they actually visited my website or blog. I don’t mind an overall generic form letter either, but that still needs to contain some amount of personalization of information that clearly demonstrates they actually visited the site they want to exchange links with.

Anyway, it just goes to show that you can spend a lot of time maintaining your site and making it look professional, and still make less money than some spammer that just slaps together a site and puts it out there.

You know what else is somewhat discouraging? I have a blog that I haven’t updated in quite a while. Months actually. Meanwhile, except for this past March, this blog gets updated on a daily basis.

Guess which one makes more money?

Not this one…

Not quite the same as this Filtered Foto Friday, wherein I used a Photoshop filter. Nope, today’s filter is an actual on-lens filter for my digital camera.

But, I did combine the filtered and unfiltered photos in Photoshop to display them side by side, as shown.

The upper left side of the image is the unfiltered version. The bottom right side of the image is the filtered version.

I used a fluorescent light filter, which is supposed to correct for the greenish hue that fluorescent lights can sometimes cause.

But, I think the unfiltered version looks better, and is more true to the actual color of the wall and sign (which is white, not cream).

I think that the difference may be that, at the office, most of the fluorescent lights are full-spectrum, which is pretty much a necessity in the printing business, where you want to be able to see and show accurate colors.

At least I will have the filter on hand should I ever need it. As part of the three-filter set, I also received a UV filter and a polarizing lens filter. Haven’t been able to see a big difference when using either of those outdoors, but we haven’t had a really good sunny day. The last sunny day was still overcast, and my camera does pretty good outdoor shots on overcast or cloudy days. It’s on good sunny days when I can have difficulties taking photos of the sky. Also, haven’t had a clear night either, where I can try the polarizing lens on a moon shot. I can’t wait to try the polarizing lens in both of those examples and see how the photos turn out.