It took 1.49 days to get spam this time from my tagged email address I released on Wednesday. Wow, that’s the quickest yet. This one was advertising a web directory service. By the way, the process I’m going through I’m calling a blogtrap. 815a2aa2e435a70246cf153fbedb9891@planetmike.com

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It took 11.08 days to get spam this time from my tagged email address I released earlier last week. I guess the spammers are slipping; although they did send three of the messages at once. This spam was a pharmacy scam. 09137f629215aa18491f15c61529a282@planetmike.com

Remember a couple weeks ago when I shared my glorious experiences with Verizon? And I was assured my billing would be ok? I just got my September Verizon bill in the mail. Any one want to take the bet that the billing was ok?

My old billing is still in place. I called Verizon, yelled at their phone system that insists you talk to a computer instead of pushing buttons on my phone, and eventually got a real person. She said my order would go through on September 15th, because of my DirecTV order. I kindly explained I never ordered DirecTV, and I didn’t want to hear about the Triple Play. All I wanted was the Double Play. She looked up my records, I placed my order on September 4th. My September bill was processed on September 7th, and my new billing (for the DoublePlay) would go through in October’s bill.

I asked why it didn’t go through on the September bill, after all the 4th is before the 7th. She said the DirecTV order caused it to start after the billing period, and that Verizon is unable to bill in partial months. WTF? I know that I’ve had partial bills for months in the past. And it’s not like Verizon has a roomful of monks with abacuses (abaci?) figuring out the billing. It’s all computerized. I should only have to pay my old rate through September 5th or so; and then the new (lower) amounts should kick in for the rest of the month. So I end up paying around $20 extra for the month of September.

I asked if it was possible for me to get DSL without a phone line (aka “naked DSL”). She looked it up and amazingly yes! I can get the same DSL I have right now, for $41.99/month (and no taxes or fees), with a one-year commitment, vs. the DoublePlay package for $64.99 (but it’s ~$83/month with taxes and fees). So I can save $41 a month by getting just DSL. Then I could either get a VOIP number; or even better a prepaid cell phone for my main phone line.

Verizon, I’ve been with you as my phone service my entire life. Through seven different addresses spanning 20 years, I’ve been faithful. My parents retired from Bell Atlantic. I have memories of visiting C&P Phones and seeing the entire state phone book on one microfiche card. I remember being in the room when my mom would record the weather forecast for the C&P weather phone line. But I’m sorry, I think it’s time we parted ways.

The hottest new widget on the web is BlogRush.com (yes, that’s an affiliate link). You put their widget on your site, then they syndicate your headlines out to other blogs in your same category. On your blog you’ll see five headlines from other blogs. You’ll get one of your headlines displayed on some other blog for every time the widget is loaded. Plus you get credit for people you refer to the service. Their Terms of Service says not to spam people, or to otherwise harm the Internet, but I’d be willing to bet we start seeing BlogRush.com spam fairly soon.

The system is still gearing up. I think they may have been better off to have a limited beta system (take a tip from Google - invite only is good for gearing up) so they can iron out the bugs. After one weekend, they already are having trouble with generating the reports for user’s Dashboard. Once you’re logged into the site, you can’t get to the site homepage. You also can’t get to the Terms of Service or Privacy Policy. Actually, it might be a simple HTML error, the footer of the page doesn’t show up once you are logged in.

I also wonder if the system will scale well. Getting credit for up to 10 generations of referrals is nice, but eventually the numbers will overwhelm and you won’t be able to actually use all your credit. This is very similar to the model that Banner Exchange used back in the mid 1990’s. For every two ads you showed for other web sites, you’d get one of your ads shown elsewhere.

How do they make any money? It appears that 10% of the blogs showing up in the widget are actually ads. I think that might bother me, since there’s no disclosure of ad vs. blog in the widget.

So be aware that BlogRush is coming, it has potential to increase your site’s traffic. But I’m concerned by the advertising embedded within the widget.

One of the discussions I found about monitoring my web server’s usage mentioned in passing mod_cband. So I got it installed on my CentOS box, and it looks like it is working. I’ll hammer on it this week to see how well it works. I found this article very useful: Manage Apache Download Speed And Traffic Limits With mod_cband.

I need to install mod_throttle on my apache, and the author of the software has closed down his archive of it, and is refusing to respond to questions about it. That’s a very unfriendly thing to do, although I’m sure he has his reasons. Any other ideas for how to manage my apache system’s bandwidth and idiots that leech my photo galleries?

I just upgraded all of my blogs to the latest and greatest WordPress, version 2.2.3. Whew! I’m glad that’s done. I won’t have to do it again until the next upgrade. Which is scheduled for Monday, September 24th.

It took 4.07 days to get spam this time from my tagged email address I released earlier this week. This spam was a Paypal phishing attempt, from Korea. fea41c9b40a38060a8769e8d2ed4719e@planetmike.com

Many moons ago I had a subscription to MacWorld through Zinio. Zinio is a service that gives you an electronic version of a magazine, and the subscription I got was free with some Mac purchase I made in August 2004. It actually wasn’t that bad a product, but the funky player was a hassle. I stopped the subscription in August 2005. Since then I’ve gotten two messages about the Zinio player and conflicts with various Apple QuickTime updates, which were fine.

Tonight I got an offer from Zinio for several magazines, two of which I’ve never heard of before. The email message was notCAN-SPAM compliant, they did not include their postal mailing address in the message. It also said this at the bottom of the message:

You are receiving this email at (my address), because you have opted in to receive promotions and updates from Zinio. Update your email preferences.

The “Update your email preferences” was a link to the Zinio web site. I logged into my account, and discovered I already had opted out of Zinio’s marketing drivel (click to enlarge):

I’ve emailed Zinio at their customer support address, pointing them to this page. I doubt they’ll respond. But the helpful hint would be if you have any investments in Zinio, you should get out now; they’re getting desperate for customers; so desperate that they are breaking the law to sell product. I won’t be surprised if they get sold or go bankrupt sometime soon. And if you are a current Zinio customer, you may want to cancel your subscription now so you can get a refund for issues you haven’t received yet.

I’m wondering if anyone out there has any experience with advertising in their podcasts. My podcast over at ShowBizRadio.net had 2,785 downloads in July. I’m wondering if it is worth it to try to sell advertising around that size podcast. I’m thinking of embedded audio inside the podcast. I’m experimenting with scripting SoX - Sound eXchange so I can easily (and automatically) add a commercial inside our podcast.