Faster, better…

Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

I am shaking my head in complete disbelief every time I see the TV commercial Americans United for Change play on Fox. They actually want people to believe that Republicans (and moderates and independents and even some Democrats) are BAD because not a single Republican voted for the socialist spending agenda in the nation’s 2009 budget. No Republicans voted because the budget was irresponsible and just plain stupid.

Oh you poor babies! Why don’t you just gather all of your marbles and leave the play ground. You got your way. Using this foolish commercial you are simply trying to throw sand in the faces of those that disagree with your child-like behavior. Our children and their grandchildren will be paying off the budget you clueless fools are so very proud of. (That includes YOUR children and grandchildren by the way.) All you do with this commercial is call to everyone’s attention how dopey you really are and how much you do not understand about economics. People don’t buy the premise behind your commercial. I certainly don’t.

The Republicans did the right thing in my view. You folks just keep calling attention to your own cluelessness and oddly enough you even pay Fox to do it.

(Editorial Opinion-  032809) xxxxxxBounty.com claims to be a site that permits graffiti victims to upload a bounty for taggers or graffiti vandals. A bounty is supposed to encourage people that know who the tagger is to act and turn in the tagger to xxxxxxBounty. This is odd, very unusual, and in my view not a very good idea. These were the things that crossed my mind when I looked over this website.

The likelihood that someone knows a tagger listed on this site then leaves their name to turn the tagger in for pennies is very remote. There’s no more incentive than one or two twenty dollar bills. I’m inclined to call it wishful thinking at best. In the meantime of course xxxxxxBounty is earning interest on the bounty funds.  Victims that are angry and fed up with vandalism might be tempted out of frustration to fund a bounty but they may never yield a result.

There is no process information anywhere on the site that offers any details or gives anyone what the probability might be that a vandal will ever be identified and prosecuted. There is no promise of anonymity either. Who in their right mind is going to act on a twenty-dollar bounty to identify a gang member’s graffiti?

Where is the profit in this business model? I have serious concerns about sending this company money. There is no company mailing address and there are no real names of corporate officers provided. All you can see are carefully crafted email contact addresses. I don’t get a warm and fuzzy feeling about sending money into an Internet black hole.

Most communities with a graffiti problem have well established methods for citizens to report vandalism. The most common place to start is with the local police! What good is it going to do to send an anonymous company a $20 bounty?

I’m not at all impressed with their FAQ’s. Question number two asks, “Are you against graffiti artists?” There is no such thing. By definition graffiti is a crime. This site also considers art (produced in collaboration with a property owner) graffiti. Talk about confused.

The site says the two most important things you can do if you see vandalism in progress is to call the police and then contribute to a bounty. Wrong.  First you call the police and next find out how and when the vandalism is going to be abated. The community may have an abatement volunteer group that a citizen can join. Cleaning the vandalism or working to insist that local officials and businesses abate the vandalism is far more important than enriching a private company inserting itself into the law enforcement process.

These people and their so-called bounty could significantly hamper or interfere with law enforcement efforts. Witnesses to crimes should be working with their local police and not through a third party. When police are not cooperative graffiti victims should be going to their city or county elected officials with complaints.  In most places, police will work to capture vandals. This is  especially true in the State of California where some of the site’s current pictures originate.  My experience in abatement issues has been with some of the more superior agencies like San Jose and Santa Rosa Police in California. There are many more enlightened agencies out there with dedicated graffiti cops. Police have informants, sophisticated computer systems and even the assistance of other police agencies on difficult cases. Police will find the bad guys in time as long as citizens trust them to. Citizens might even be able to put a bounty of their own at a local bank and establish a local committee to work with the police when deciding to award the bounty – if such a tactic is even necessary.

Most bounty’s are rewards for information GIVEN TO LAW ENFORCEMENT that result in the arrest and conviction of a criminal. There is a formal process for evaluating information and establishing whether or not it was significant. I don’t see any mention of how this website’s owners establish bounty eligibility or make payments. Do a little what-if analysis of your own and I’ll bet you decide not to send them a dime.

This company is apparently in favor of legal graffiti areas. Legal graffiti zones have never worked, and will never work. This company has no understanding of the vandalism subculture and is encouraging actions that will only serve their interests. They might succeed in perpetuating an income if people do send them money by encouraging free walls because free walls have always contributed to additional vandalism and tagging in the vicinity of the free walls regardless of the rules. After reading the site it is clear to me these folks are probably opportunists not fully aware of the anti-graffiti strategies that have worked for years.

Anyone seriously involved in graffiti enforcement and abatement will tell you that publishing the picture of a tag on the Internet is not a good idea. Vandals love to see their work up where people can see it and that includes the Internet. This site features tags. It’s probably the first [place a tagger would go to determine his/her own popularity. A bounty for their tag would actually contribute to more vandalism.

This approach is wrong on many levels and it does not appear that the owners, whomever they are, really understand the problem. It seems to me they see a money-making opportunity at the obvious expense of the angry graffiti victim. I believe the best course of action is to remain well away from xxxxxxBounty.com. I regret not providing the complete URL. It is my way of warning you away from a site that appears to a poor abatement option while also not providing the site with any additional advertising than they already receive in various banner ads. When you run across the site just remember – caveat emptor.

My time is as valuable as his so after one hour in the waiting room chair I got up and left. Yesterday I had a routine office appointment. A few days earlier this doctor’s office called me to remind me. Great. I was about fifteen minutes early. More times than I can remember arriving early has been a benefit to me and the doctor so to respect his time I always arrive a bit early. I signed in. The receptionist never looked up.

Over the next hour, those of us in the waiting room were subjected to an obnoxious day-time television program. Ignoring the TV as best I could, I scanned every magazine I could find but started to feel like some appreciable time had already passed. Lots of folks had gone in ahead of me. A nice lady sitting nearby looked at me and said, “What time was your appointment?” I said, “Two-thirty.” She said mine was at Two.” When I asked what time it was she said just after three o’clock.

I got up after sitting there for an hour and told the receptionist I was leaving and to reschedule me. My daily errands, being home in time to greet my spouse when she got home from work were all timed and based on the agreed upon appointment time. Already I had wasted one hour of my day in the waiting room. A new appointment was scheduled twenty days out. There was no apology and no regret expressed.

I believe that patients have a right to know when the doctor is way behind schedule. This office made no attempt whatsoever to set my expectations. When I rescheduled I didn’t appreciate the stares or the attitude. I could tell they felt my time couldn’t be nearly as important as the doctor’s. Well I’m done being treated like a faceless name when I PAY for a professional service. I’m sick of being treated like I should be privileged that I’m allowed to be their customer. Keep me waiting I’ll either reschedule or find a new doctor.

I’m curious. Did anyone else get an unexpected delivery of heating oil at the end of March? Oddly enough I did even though there was over 100 gallons in the tank. The bill came to $252. This has never happened before. This last year the oil delivery company insisted upon a payment or cash to guarantee the lowest price and there was a big per-gallon price reduction when the price of oil plummeted. Why would an oil company deliver oil when our use of the heater has been reduced to a few mornings in the entire month?

Very puzzling. I hadn’t planned on this in my monthly budget so they will be getting an ear full from me today on the telephone.

We keep hearing that financial people on Wall Street earn HUGE bonuses in the millions because they work with complex derivatives.

We pay police, fire fighters, soldiers, teachers, and nuclear power plant operators a pittance in comparison. Wealthy sales and marketing folks are a lofty privileged class supported and promoted by their own kind at the great expense of the business and the economy. These derivative folks and these mortgage folks as well as an incompetent Congress created the current economic downturn so in my view they are not all entitled to the bonuses really smart people are entitled to.

What I understand from having worked in business over the years is that the people close to the money work very hard to pay themselves more and equally as hard to pay those that maneuver for them a lot less. The notion that hard work reaps great benefit is true to a point but there is probably a law of diminishing returns.

The bonus money these so-called experts receive are obscene. This problem cannot be fixed by Congress. It must be fixed by the corporations. There must be a corporate conscience. Can you imagine the success a company might have if they had the funds to pay everyone a living wage that were also hard at work everyday?

Every company I ever worked for based bonuses on my performance and in the off chance our sales were low bonuses were not paid or dramatically reduced in amount. The bonus was reasonable based on my management contributions and not excessive.

Corporate America has some soul searching to do.

Neeld Estate at Plum Point was without AC power this Sunday. I’m told the power went out around 2:00 PM. We know it came on just after midnight on Monday. What we don’t know is why? There was no weather to speak of and no apparent reason for ten hours without power. Events like this are are less chronic than they used to be but still, in the 21st century and after paying OUTRAGEOUS power bills to Barely Gas and Electric this Winter I don’t expect this kind of inconvenience. What do you think?

A spam bot identifying as being at svservers.com has been harassing this blog for days now. The bot continues to try and hit the same post from many different IP addresses. AKISMET kills every attempt and I go through periodically and block the IPs. I see that many other blogs have been hit by the same bot.

Where is it and who owns it and how can the world get these creeps shut down?

I was not pleased to suddenly find my Twitter account being followed by yet another SEO expert, a free laptop scheme, a mortgage company masquerading as a happy teenager. Then there was the happiness guru, the sales advice guru. Blecch. The social media marketer is the brown colored goo in pond scum. The only way to get rid of it is to clean the pond and in the case of Twitter maintaining my account so that sleaze is blocked the moment it floats in.

Twitter has real-time usefulness. There are people that I respect, admire, and enjoy reading about or listening to. Following them on Twitter keeps me up to date. TweetDeck lives on one monitor while I work in another. I’m up to date with Drudge and FoxNews, getting the latest WordPress tip from Lorelle, getting updates from my sisters, and monitoring emergency providers, and news of the Coast guard through various feeds. What I do not and never expected to do with Twitter was accept it as a method of being introduced to mortgage rates, free laptop deals, MLM, consultants of various types fishing for business, or an SEO service from a company I would never recognize.

Twitter fulfills a need for specific information and a need to stay in touch real-time with family, people, companies, writers, political champions, news companies, and emergency service providers. Sales and marketing social media spammers are intruding in that space.

Before I have an unmanageable account I look at my list of followers. I block people whose personal URL turns out to be a sleazy marketing or sales website. The tweets of these folks are almost all universally contrived. So many of these tweets are in very poor English suggesting to me that the source is an off-shore company specializing in social-media spam. We may never know the real source.

Twitter allows you to report spammers via direct message to user SPAM. When I block a spammer I also report them. Other Twitter users should do the same. Doing this sooner rather than later will help Twitter and other Twitter users. I’m also reading a search on the word SPAM just to see what people are talking about and /or how they are dealing with spam.

Don’t let a spammer follow you on Twitter. Block them.

I received yet another call from the Account Services credit card scammer today. (Unknown name unknown number) I have started to press one each time they call. The woman at the other end of the call usually has to listen to at least one sentence before she hangs up on me. I’m able to get the following message to her, ” Put me on your do-not-call list you have called four times this week.” CLICK.

The operator there hates to hear this message. It truly annoys them. They obviously have instructions to hang up on people that want to complain. What if every person that received the call pressed one to talk with the scammer and expressed a one sentence opinion? It may have the effect of slowing down calls because the victims would tie up the lines. For all we know they may also have to pay a telephone company for every connect.

I say let’s waste the scammers time and see if we have an impact. I for one am sick of the calls. Today in the last two hours I have received the auto warranty scam and the credit card scam calls. The credit card call has come in every single day. Last night at 9:00 PM. Use up the scammer’s time. Press one to continue and share your anger. The scammer deserves it.

The Maryland legislature is currently looking at making laws to deal with bullying on the Internet. Given this interest I thought it timely to write about trolls.

There are small minded people in this world whose personal prowess is improved (in their heads) by harassing others. These people are called trolls. In truth trolls are the Internet’s bottom dwellers. These folks deliver opinions and points of view in cynical, nasty, and rude ways that are intended to belittle and demean. They think they are smarter than everyone else.

New laws are not needed to deal with bottom dwellers. All that is needed is genuine awareness and a willingness to hold them responsible if they are ever identified.

My belief is that before a parent allows a child to use a computer on the Internet they take the time to warn the child about trolls. Trolls have always existed. Even before the Internet there have always been pond scum or bottom dwellers that thought they were better than everyone else. The Internet is only unique in that trolls have a bit more anonymity because they can spew their hate in the privacy of their own surroundings. Other than that nothing is new, nothing has changed except the medium. A troll is a troll.

Our sister blog at popularwireless.com has been hacked, apparently by Muslim extremists with messages of hate directed at the USA and Israel. The blog was replaced by terrorist messages in English and a middle eastern language.

This is the second time in six months a Network Solutions account I own has been hacked. Despite changing passwords the last time on all of my accounts someone keeps finding a way in. Network Solutions said they might be able to escalate the problem in one or two days. Like the last time, all they would do is suggest I change passwords. Network Solutions was completely disinterested then as they are now. I did also mention I was a Gold VIP customer but the off-shore call taker was not impressed. So like the last time, I am on my own. They have no interest in determining where the hack came from.

Now I wanted to do the right thing so I called the Baltimore FBI office. The agent there connected me to the FBI’s terrorism task force. They don’t investigate these hijackings unless asked to by the local Sheriff but did request that I send a synopsis of the page content to them by email. I’m still mystified why they just couldn’t go look at the site.

Next I called the business number for the Calvert County Sheriff and explained the FBI doesn’t investigate these things until my local law enforcement has taken a report. Hmmm, local to me or the Network Solutions server? I would think such incidents are not local to me in scope. There’s no bad guys lurking in our forests and I have no clue whether or not the Sheriff has a cyber-crimes unit.

The sheriff’s call taker wouldn’t have a deputy call me to take a report. “We don’t have deputies to use the telephone.” I explained it was late and we wanted to go to bed. So unless I would have a deputy come out now there isn’t anything that is going to happen. I just thought that if there was anything important in this hijacked page law enforcement might want to look at it now. They didn’t need me to get on a computer and enter the blog URL! Yawn.

It doesn’t appear that anyone is even going to look at except maybe the FBI, but even with them I have to write a synopsis and email it. They’ll sit on the information though until the Sheriff gives them a buzz. Why am I starting to feel like this is an all-too common problem and that nobody really cares what the page says? Cyber terrorism is alive and well wherever the report might be taken. I’ll call the Sheriff tomorrow and see what they say. Maybe in a few days I’ll hear back from Network Solutions. Gold VIP! Woo hoo!

Independent Financial Fraud Investigator and Analyst exposed his many attempts to alert the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Bernie Madoff fraud today in Congress. I am expecting Congress to take this man seriously and to do something about the SEC as well as the bank regulators in this country. Our government has let us down big time and Mr. Markopolos understands that big time.

In the last year my home telephones have received numerous calls from this telephone number. A recorded female voice claims to be my credit card company – while not providing the of the name of the credit card. The voice CLAIMS the company has tried repeatedly to contact me to lower my interest rates.

Clues this is a VISHING scam:

None of my credit card companies have contacted me or have authorized anyone else to contact me.

The calls come on telephone numbers NOT registered with my credit card company.

They don’t know my name.

This call is yet another telemarketing scam, one that I have repeatedly filed as a complaint with donotcall.gov. The FTC warns that they do not respond to individual complaints but that a database of calls from reported numbers is maintained and made available to law enforcement. Based on a Google of this telephone number it sure appears that a number of people are being harassed by this telemarketer. So after over a year what has been done to shut this telemarketer down?

A blogger at Bohemian Revolution wrote about calls from this telephone number back in February of 2008. This blog, Communication’s from Elsewhere wrote about the scam in 2007! Another blogger was so incensed that the blogger created a website dedicated to exposing the scam titled, “Stopping Heather.” Yet another anti-scam website has an actual recorded call from the scammer. The call is hysterical since the scammer was spoofed! This scam has apparently been around for years and the FCC, and FTC and several states attorneys general already are familiar with the calls. Nothing has been done to put these thieves out of their misery.

No company name is provided by the caller. The Caller ID says, “FLORIDA.” Interestingly that’s where the car insurance scams seem to be coming from. Do you suppose these calls are all coming from the same call center?

Has anyone ever determined who is making these annoying calls and masking the intent so that calls seem to be coming from a company with who you have done business and thus exempting the caller from the donotcall.gov registry rules?

What does it take to have telemarketers prosecuted under the law? It is time the FTC takes action against scammers especially during an economic down turn. There is a mountain of information on the company’s behavior on the Internet. It’s time something was done by law enforcement to shut the scam down.

On December 17, January 15, and January 16 my home phone(s) (two lines) received telemarketing calls from an unknown company selling car warranty policies. The call always starts with the loud recorded voice of an older female claiming this is our last chance to update our car warranty. They also say they have been trying to reach us without success. I’ve always thought this odd because we don’t have a car warranty. What we do have however are two registered telephone numbers with http://www.donotcall.gov. The calls always come from telephone number (407) 251-6572. The caller ID always says just, “FLORIDA.” We have twice now told these telephone trolls to crawl back under the rock from which they came.

This company has called my home multiple times throughout the year and multiple times I have logged each call as a complaint on the government’s DO NOT CALL website. The calls keep coming. Twice now I have pushed one on the touch tone pad to speak to the representative that answers. Each time the representative slams the telephone down in my ear.

A legitimate company selling a product would certainly not behave as this company does so I ask myself the question is this a scam? If it isn’t a scam is this just a fringe corporation owned and operated by persons of low moral character? What is it, who is it and why does the government allow these scofflaws to remain in business? What is it going to take to turn these telemarketing calls off? I never give personal information to any unsolicited caller – not even the make and model of my car. This company must stay in business because some persons are falling for the sales technique.

I’m fed up with these people and I am equally fed up with the apparent inability of the government to follow up on multiple complaints. Using a Google search with this company’s telephone number produces many Internet sites with notes from folks equally perturbed.

(See this article at CTV British Columbia regarding vehicle warranty scams.)

Other similar posts:

Lisa of Loungbourne

CBC News

Baltimore Sun

PrivacyCouncil.org

TelemarketingLawsuit.com

ConsumerAffairs.com

WOAI.com

TheTruthAboutCars.com

Please read this article on the Inside Charm City Blog entitled, “Hopkins won’t rent space to Sons of Confederate Veterans anymore.”

When I was in my early thirties I asked my father who his grandfather Smith was. I didn’t know and dad never spoke of him. He had heard his name before but his own father didn’t go into great detail. We discovered on a trip we both took together to Waco, Texas that Ephraim Calvin Smith was a Confederate. A Confederate foot stone was placed at his grave. At Christmas time in 1863 when he was age 16 in Pickens County, Georgia, E.C. married my Great Grandmother M. Bertha Pendley and then joined the Pickens Raid Repellers, Cherokee Legion, Company I, Georgia State Guard. At that time, E.C. and his brothers felt compelled to take sides. Two of his brothers perished during the war as I recall from my family history. E.C. received his parole at War’s end in 1865 and went South to Texas in 1871 with other members of his family settling near Austin.

Other than having copies of my Great Grandmother’s Texas Confederate Widow’s Pension and E.C.s war papers from the National Archives I don’t know much about why he decided to go to the war. His county was the last county in Georgia to take up arms. Jefferson Davis had to send Confederate troops to remove the stars and stripes from the Pickens County courthouse flag pole because Pickens did not want to secede with the rest of the state. I studied US history as kid just like everyone else but never appreciated what that history and my heritage actually meant to me until I was in my mid-thirties.

Interestingly enough, on my mother’s side of the family my great grandfather on her line was one Ulysses Grant Ogan, named after the famous Union General and President of the United States. In my family there is heritage from both the North and the South.

After having discovered my own heritage I became concerned when year after year I heard of government agencies, private organizations, and now a famous hospital, taking up moral objections to my personal interest in my family history. I’m neither a member of the Son’s of Confederate Veterans, a racist, a supporter of slavery, a right-wing nut, or anyone out to intentionally yank another’s chain because he or she is a different color than I am; however, there do seem to be people out there that think if I consider membership in a heritage organization they don’t like I have to be all of those things. I’m just sick of the whole debate. The American Civil War ended in 1865. Not a soul is left living from that time period. Calling out the Son’s of Confederate Veterans as racists is just not right.

There are in my view, folks bent on making sure we are only allowed to study their version of American history and celebrate only those lines of heritage of which they approve. The Civil War is not over for these folks. They are still fighting the war, still getting even, still enraged at history.

I’m not without some sensitivity to John’s Hopkins. One of their most famous employees Vivienne Thomas, L.L.D reportedly met with terrible discrimination at John’s Hopkins his entire professional life simply because of his skin color. Well now the tables have turned. The shoe is on the other foot. A new elite is in charge at the hospital. An elite that ought to know better. The tolerance desired by minorities in those previous years however is apparently not about to be shared with anyone else because after all these, these are Confederates that want to use our meeting room! We have to spite them for their heritage. We are in charge now!

In St. Mary’s County Maryland the descendants of Confederate Soldiers that perished in the North’s version of Andersonville prison at Pt. Lookout purchased land for their own memorial next to a federal Confederate Memorial because our own multicultural, diverse, and enlightened federal government refused to allow the Confederate flag to be flown at that the “official” memorial to Confederate prisoner of War Dead.

At Harper’s Ferry I heard that Confederate re-enactors are not allowed to wear Confederate Uniforms on National Park property.

I think John’s Hopkin’s actions fly in the face of the tolerance and love Vivienne Thomas and Dr. Alfred Blalock had for each other, their work, and the thousands of children they saved then and have been saved since through their courageous friendship. These men looked past the color of their hands and their heritage to set an example for the racists around them then. But what about now? Who is here for us now?

There have been many Internet searches associated with yesterday’s Network Solutions database problem. At about 1730 yesterday 11/18/08 users of the UBB bulletin board at PopularWireless.com were greeted with an SQL error. A database cache table was read only. Yikes! Here at dougweb I could see that some functions in WordPress were not working properly including posting.

I put a call in to Network Solutions and luckily for me the contractors in the Philippines were not answering the help desk telephone. Now I’m a Gold VIP customer. All that has meant so far is that I am offered more and more ways to spend my money EVEN when reporting down time. None of the promises like periodic updates of help desk requests ever came true. It was interesting that they were prepping customers to receive calls from a company surveying customers on service issues. A recording said I might get a call.

In four to five hours the service came back but remains a little sluggish today. How is your blog? How did the down time affect your website?

Email spam is still around despite some states prosecuting the spammers they can actually catch. But spammers are not the brightest bulbs in the lamp as it were.

I live in Maryland. The two-letter abbreviation for Maryland is MD. Some dim bulb email harvester made the MD association and assumed it meant I was an MD or medical doctor. As a result I’m now getting email newsletters and email sales pitches obviously intended for doctors and no, I’m not a doctor.

The incompetence is simply staggering. Dim and dimmer I’d say.

It still makes me wonder why John McCain can’t or won’t stand up to Obama’s claims that 95% of the country won’t be touched by tax increases.

The middle class in America is already struggling because of huge unrestrained property tax increases in places like Calvert County, Maryland. Democrats raised the Maryland sales tax in January of this year, school spending is unrestrained. All of this is financed by Obama’s so-called struggling middle class. Obama’s tax hype is just an obfuscation. He knows the middle class is already taxed to death.

McCain needs to expose the obfuscations and the politicians on both sides need to start thinking about the welfare of the majority of citizens in this country. The ones that really feed the local tax systems. The ones that have to budget to stay alive. The ones that have to decide between groceries and health care, rent and feeding a child, child care or leaving a child home alone.

There is no energy policy so we are all paying more than we should for energy. There is no financial plan for our country so we are all at the mercy of greedy politicians and Wall Street speculators.

The obfuscations are the distractions. McCain start pointing out the obfuscations. Communicate with strength of purpose. All you need do is tell the truth.

The financial world around us is collapsing and the Calvert County School Board is telling the Recorder that they are oh so happy about the 57 million they plan on spending to rebuild Calvert High School. Everybody’s property tax check in Calvert County Maryland sends better than 50% of that money to this spend thrift organization. They build and and build and build. There’s no telling them no! Who is watching the Calvert County School District? Who is reigning in spending during hard times? Is there a conservative voice on the school board maybe saying this really isn’t the time? It just completely amazes me that this Board knows no bounds! They PLAN on tax increases before they happen. That’s how sure they are of themselves. They can fleece the citizens here with apparently no oversight. It is high time people started complaining and the Board starts to justify why they can’t do without during hard times for everyone else. What do you think?

I’m fed up listening to Democrats and Republicans arguing over the Federal Income Tax. The Democrats have ALREADY SIGNIFICANTLY RAISED taxes in Maryland. Other states on the East coast, like Maryland, are raising property taxes through the roof. The middle class and the quickly disappearing and struggling lower-middle class are taxed to death. We are the ones losing our homes, deferring one bill to pay for gas to get to work, struggling to pay health care deductibles while watching the government SQUANDER our money. The federal presidential tax debate is an obscene obfuscation.

In my Maryland county, Commissioners hype the so-called tax credit offered to persons earning less than $50,000 a year. Another obfuscation. You cannot own property in this county if you earn less than $50,000 a year living under this Democrat administration. It only applies to county related taxes and not the over-fed school system. Tax credit my foot.

The debate SHOULD BE regarding socialism and the redistribution of wealth.

More of the same at 1030AM EDT, July 5, from network Solutions. Philippine call center is intractable. They refuse to just deal with a complaint. I have to have the entire event repeated back to me while a script is read. This is the worst customer service I think I have ever experienced.

This was the response received yesterday. I believe all NetworkSolutions did was  wait for the server load to go down on this account without even considering my complaint that service to all of my domains using a database has suffered all week and on and off for MONTHS:

Dear Douglas Smith,

We apologize for the inconvenience you experienced yesterday regarding slow response times of your hosting account 00478A8.NETSOLHOST.COM and reported through 1-348827615.

Our engineering staff addressed the issue yesterday afternoon and we have verified that the loading times of your website have returned to normal. Thank you for your patience while we worked to address your issue.

We hope this update has been helpful. However, if you have any additional questions, or feel that the issue has not been completely addressed, please do not hesitate to email our Technical Support Department at [email protected] or call us at 1-866-391-HELP (1-866-391-4357). If calling from outside the U.S. or Canada, please call 570.708.8788. Please refer to Service Request 1-348827615 when contacting us about this matter.

Sincerely,

MOHAMMED005

Network Solutions Technical Support

—————————————————————————-

I am supposedly a gold something-or-other customer that is supposed to get better service. All that really means is that they are poised to sell me more services. I wouldn’t consider purchasing additional services until they get their act together. These folks just do not seem to get it. So I log another case 1-349092928. Everyone in the USA is on vacation this weekend of course.

I truly believe that my advertising income on all of my sites is down at least 60% because of the loading times casued by Network Solutions engineering of theior SQL server mysqlv1 but even talking business or money doesn’t seem to matter to these people. I cannot for the life of me understand how a company like this stays in business while it claims to be a number one provider of web hosting services!? How have they reached that conclusion?

We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but there has been an internal server error. Please click on the back button to return to the former page.

These are caused by the database failing to respond. I have a call in to Network Solutions to find out why. Call number 1-348827615.

This has been an issue for months, especially this week. Your patience is appreciated.

Tailgating in Maryland seems to be a state sanctioned sport. Citizens and police both do it. When was the last time you saw a driver with FP or FOP plates obey our traffic laws and how many times have you seen an MSP officer tailgating the driver in front of him without activating emergency lights? It’s perhaps why we only see radar traps and heavily choreographed sobriety check points instead of a real effort to deal with adult aggressive driving. We obfuscate traffic enforcement with the elements of it that make us feel good without putting the real culprits behind bars. We do what’s easiest in Maryland.

Driving to the Eastern Shore today was not a pleasure. It was dangerous. The ONLY police we saw were two Calvert County Deputies holding a radar gun in the median outside Chesapeake Beach. On the Bay Bridge we watched clueless idiots honking and speeding through a confusing UNMARKED bridge approach and toll exit. On every highway we were harassed by aggressive drivers. The ONLY exception was the community of Tighlman Island where everyone seemed to drive in a very respectable fashion.

Maryland is doing a lousy job dealing with aggressive driving. Tailgating is indeed a state sport! It might even be an Olympic event someday the way things seem to be proceeding.

This may seem strange but as I see it a couple of the advantages of moving to the east coast were Old Bay seasoning and UTZ potato chips (the Crab Chip.)  It’s just my take on things.

What do you use Old Bay on besides crabs?

Microwave popcorn, chicken, fish, meat, even quesadilla’s.  I just can’t help myself.

Keep in mind O’Malley raised sales taxes in Maryland in January, was at the helm in an election year when Maryland property taxes went SKY HIGH, and we have school spending out of control in many Maryland counties. (Calvert included.) These clueless politicians are obfuscating. In my humble opinion. Could they have helped cause this recession? Of course not

“Napolitano and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley penned an opinion piece for the Politico.com web site Thursday The governors criticized Bush administration policies and said Obama would expand government-run children’s health programs, “restore sense to our foreign policy” and cut middle class taxes if elected president.”

read more | digg story