Woohoo! Adsense, gimme free monies. A whopping $113 is mine!

*dances a jig*

You know I listed my XBox 360 Premium console on eBay about seven days ago… last night, it sold on eBay for around $320. I was pretty excited, since that’s way more than I was expecting to get for it. So I went to bed, hoping the payment would come in that night or this morning.

I awoke to find an e-mail in my mailbox from eBay, explaining that the auction had been cancelled:

Uhm, what? If I’m reading that right, the entire auction is now deleted because someone let their account get comprimised, and illegal bids were placed via that account? Why not just BLOCK THE ACCOUNT, then? Why did you have to remove my entire auction? It literally doesn’t show up on the site anymore. I have no way of knowing who else might have bid on it, to do a “second chance” offer. Now I have to re-list it and wait yet another seven days to see the results.

To top it off, I got e-mails from the scammer(s) themselves, the first one faking a Paypal receipt:

Yeah, that looks legit, buddy. And look, it’s our friends from NIGERIA. I like how it says that it must be on it’s way to Nigeria “under 24 hrs”. Looking at the message header, it’s coming from belider1@gmail.com. And here’s the other e-mail they sent me, apparently from a Yahoo account this time, belider_w1@yahoo.com:

*sigh* Whoever you are, scammer, you need to get a life. Or maybe first, get a job. No, no, wait. First, find Christ. Then a job. Then the life will follow it. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

I noticed this morning that some of my older posts were getting crazy out of hand with their referrer lists. Some of them, even compressed with GZIP, were spitting out over 300k of content. That’s stupid!

So, in order to speed things up for regular browsers of my blog, I hacked a bit of the just-released version of DasBlog, specifically in the newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core project, the Macros.cs file… adding this code around line 3130:

   1:  if (requestPage.Request.UserAgent != null)

   2:  {

   3:      if ((trk.PermaLink.IndexOf("q=") > -1 | trk.PermaLink.IndexOf("p=") > -1) &

   4:          (requestPage.Request.UserAgent.Contains("Googlebot") |

   5:          requestPage.Request.UserAgent.Contains("Yahoo! Slurp") |

   6:          requestPage.Request.UserAgent.Contains("Yahoo-Blogs") |

   7:          requestPage.Request.UserAgent.Contains("Ask Jeeves") |

   8:          requestPage.Request.UserAgent.Contains("BecomeBot") |

   9:          requestPage.Request.UserAgent.Contains("msnbot")))

  10:      {

  11:          // Let it happen.

  12:      }

  13:      else

  14:      {

  15:          continue;

  16:      }

  17:  }

This will see if the user-agent matches a common bot’s, and if it does, allows the code to continue building up the referrals list. Otherwise, it skips through them all and is completely empty.

But at the end of the loop, you need to check for the item count to be 0. If it’s zero, we know that we have no referrers to show, so we need to clear out the placeholder’s content (since it will contain an empty “Referred By:“ literal control:

   1:  if (count == 0)

   2:  {

   3:      placeHolder.Controls.Clear();

   4:  }

And there you have it, you’ve hacked DasBlog.

Update: Don’t listen to me. This is what Google calls “cloaking” and it’s a sure fire way to kill your pages (and get them thrown into Google’s “supplemental index”.) This is really lame. Yet Google themselves does “cloaking”. Seems a bit hipocritical.

As it stands right now, a majority of my blog’s search results are in the supplemental index now, probably because of my hack. And there’s no way I’m turning referrers back on (the pirates of the caribbean 3 blog entry I wrote is almost 600K gzip’d to the client because of all the referrers) — so I’ve turned referrers off completely. My loss, I guess.

I can't get to sleep
I think about the implications
Of diving in too deep
And possibly the complications
Especially at night
I worry over situations
I know will be alright
Perhaps it's just imagination

Day after day it reappears
Night after night my heartbeat shows the fear
Ghosts appear and fade away

I can't get get to sleep
It only beings exasperation
It's time to walk the streets
Smell the desperation
At least there's pretty lights
And though there's little variation
It nullifies the night
From overkill

I can't get to sleep
I think about the implications
Of diving in too deep
And possibly the complications
Especially at night
I worry over situations
That I know will be alright
It's just overkill

Been feeling a lot like this lately. Overwhelmed, worried about the future and finances. But today I’m strangely at peace with it all. Just thought I’d share.

Maybe I’m just in a weird mood, but the above comment I found on The Consumerist blog is hilarious. The article is about how Comcast/DirectTV/etc. installers are usually hackjobs who really cause damage to your home.

NinjaCast indeed!

I’m selling my XBox 360 Premium kit. Here’s the Craigslist post, or if you’re too lazy to look there, here’s the specs:

I have an XBox360 premium console, won from the Mountain Dew contest (came out before people could officially buy the XBox360!) Works great, hardly played, and in excellent condition. I've added onto the system over the years. Here is a complete breakdown:

1 XBox360 Premium Console
1 Wireless Controller
2 Play & Charge Kits (lets you recharge your controllers)
1 Wireless Network Adapter
1 HD-DVD Player/Drive
1 XBox 360 VGA Cable
1 Game, Halo
1 Game, Halo 2
1 Game, Gears of War
1 Game, Kameo
1 Game, Perfect Dark Zero
1 Game, Need for Speed: Most Wanted
1 Game, Fable
1 HDDVD, Phantom of the Opera
1 HDDVD, King Kong
1 HDDVD, Serenity
1 HDDVD, The Last Samurai

If you bought all of these things brand new, you'd easily be spending around $1100. I'm selling it for $800, or best offer.

If you purchase the system, you are buying it as-is. I don't believe that Microsoft's warranty covers it now, since it's a launch unit. I haven't had any problems, though. Make sure you have adequate cooling!

If you need photos, I can provide. I will only accept cash, no checks.

I'm asking for $800, or whatever the best offer is. If you know anyone interested, please have them send me an e-mail at iransofaraway AT gmail DOT com. Thanks!

Update: I actually decided to put it all up on eBay. Click here to check out the listings.

I was dumb many moons ago and purchased my laptop and a desktop computer from Dell. My main monitor at the time also died, so I decided to purchase another one. Long story short, I spent around $4k on equipment, and like a dummy, signed up for Dell’s Preferred Account. It’s Dell’s line of credit, like a credit card, except you can’t put anything but Dell stuff on it. Insanely high interest rate, but since I had a good credit score, they offered 18 months no interest. I took it.

Fast forward to June 7^th of this year. I finally have the money to pay off my Dell bill in full, so I call the automated phone system. No operators available, so I use the phone system to pay my bill. There’s a $9.95 convienience fee to do this. Why, I have no idea. Just another way to stiff you of money. Whatever, I want it done, so I pay it off completely.

I get an invoice today, saying I still owe $592.19. Looking at it, I see my promotion (interest-free) ended on 06/01/07. A whole six days before I paid my account in full (and paid what the automated phone system was saying as the payoff amount.) So since the promotion ended, they charged me all the back-interest.

I wasn’t very happy. True, I was late, but not THAT late, and the fact that I going from near-minimum payments to finally paying off the bill should’ve been good enough for them, right? I called up Dell, got an Indian* with a clearly fake American-sounding name. He explained that he couldn’t do anything, it was late, etc… I told him I wasn’t sastisfied, and wanted him to check further. He put me on hold and came back about a minute later, saying his supervisor would allow him to take $30 off of the total bill. Whoopie.

Lessons learned:

1. Don’t fall for interest-free enticements unless you’re going to for-sure be able to fufill the requirements before the due date.
2. Don’t sign up for credit lines with insane interest rates to begin with.
3. Save up money to pay for computers. They depreciate so fast, it’s not worth placing them on a credit account/card.

* I am not racist. I just hate hate hate speaking to someone who can’t clearly speak the English language. That goes for any race, color, nationality. If you’re in the business of speaking with someone on the phone all day, you should have a good and clear voice.

Found this over on TVSquad— all of the LOST “plane crash” events spliced together to run semi-cohesively. Pretty sweet, and gets me all excited for next season. If you’ve never watched LOST, this will either be a really interesting clip to you, or really boring. Whatever!

This is hilarious. But the Bobba Fett / Han Solo scene is a little disturbing

Worth Watching - June 16: First 3:10 to Yuma Trailer « FirstShowing.net.

Worth Watching has a great trailer up for “3:10 to Yuma” (a remake of the 1957 film.) Looks like a pretty interesting Western, and with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale as leading actors, how can it go wrong?