Don't listen to them!

I was perusing reviews of web hosts today trying to find a possible future home for Nidgin Idberry. Two of the first names I stumbled across, in addition to my old 1&1, were FastCow and JustHost (and I'm not linking either because they suck). I searched around for some reviews of them, and came across this website: www.hostingsthatsuck.com

HostingsThatSuck had a review of FatCow that said "Hold up. We researched this, and there are more positive reviews than negative. We recommend them!" Okay, cool.

Then I was checking out other hosts on the same website and I came to a startling realization.

The text was identical.

Compare:

You have seen the number analysis above. Numbers don’t lie. You should look no further. EasyASPHosting comes with 30-day money back guarantee so there is little risk to you to try host your blog, build company website or sell your products with them. Follow the EasyASPHosting discount link below and get their special limited time 15% discount via the coupon code (the coupon code may have expired so hurry).

You have seen the number analysis above. Numbers don’t lie. You should look no further. HostExpress comes with 30-day money back guarantee so there is little risk to you to try host your blog, build company website or sell your products with them. Follow the HostExpress discount link below and get their special limited time 15% discount via the coupon code (the coupon code may have expired so hurry).

You have seen the numbers. You should look no further. Follow the Dot5 discount link below and get Unlimited Everything (diskspace, bandwidth, email accounts) at only $4.95 $3.95 per month. Hesitate no more. They come with 30-day money back guarantee so you have no risk to try them. Dot5 Hosting can get you started today.

I found the Dot5 review, by the way, by researching the worst internet companies out there and plugging them in to HostingThatSucks to see if they got a good review. They did. There are a couple of variations, depending on whether the host is big enough to have negative experiences floating around on the easy-to-find portions of the net. So it's either "You've heard this bad stuff, but here's OUR verdict" or "we couldn't find any bad stuff about them, so here's OUR verdict."

Why?

Many bloggers make money by writing paid reviews on their blogs. Some seed them in, nonsensically, as nonsequiters to their normal writings. Some slip them in between legitimate reviews. And some blogs (okay, many blogs), like HostingThatSucks, set up an entire fraudulent website devoting to writing rave reviews for terrible services, making their bucks at the expense of those poor suckers who are trying to research products.

Oh, that site I linked to there? Paid Opportunities. It's a blog about making money online, much like one I tried to start and abandoned within a week. The irony is Paid Opportunties is basically devoted to taking money from companies to sell you on using their services to make money online. So it's half sincere, since the author is making money on it, but there is no reasonable expectation that you will too. It's essentially a pyramid scheme.

In the quest to make money online--or just to make money--we are finding that it is not the decentralized responsibility and groupthink of the corporation that is responsible for unethical practices in the market. It is the simple fact that greed--individual greed of individual people--trumps integrity.

nickkauffman.blogspot.com does NOT recommend HostingThatSucks OR Paid Opportunities.

Nico

Cherry? Plum? Cherry plum!!!!

Chris dropped a bike off today and asked if we would like to go pick cherries.  He had discovered a cherry tree with ripe fruit on the street.

We went and only managed to get a few cherries off the young tree.  It was too weak to climb well, and the cherries were too high to reach.  Between jumping, minor climbing, and Chris sitting on my shoulders, we managed to get a few, but our dreams of great spoils were unmet.

Then, on our way back, we found a much bigger tree.  Chris climbed up, with a boost from me, and threw down some very large cherries.  Looking around, I found another one just a bit down the street, which proved highly fruitious.  Now we had lots of cherries, enough for a pie or a cobbler.

These are things you never think about until someone mentions it.  Obviously, there aren't a lot of fruit-bearing trees on public land in, say, Indiana, but in California (and Mexico) you see a lot of trees--lemon, cherry, lowquat--just hanging out on the side of the road, with nobody to pick them.  All the fruit goes ripe, falls to the sidewalk, and gets smushed.  Nobody would think to harvest it!  In fact, we got a lot of strange looks from people passing by on the sidewalk, all of whom declined our invitation to take some of our bounty.

This is because of our attitude of scarcity.  We think value comes from the supply chain--something we pay for, that comes from an official source.  We need to move into a paradigm of abundance: urban gardens, food cooperatives, harvesting those feral fruits.  I had a great idea to create a website that used Google Maps to mark every fruit tree on public land, but this already exists.  However, it is scarcely used, so try and spread the word about neighborhoodfruit.com.

Oh, and it turns out they weren't cherries at all; they were cherry plums.  But whatever, we're still making pie.

It's worth some bad karma

I wish horrible fates upon people who want to have long conversations with me via text message.

Actually, I wish horrible fates upon people who want to have long conversations with anyone via text message, because it distracts them from actual social interaction.

Teaser is up

Rather than jump the gun and leap into a project I can't finish, I decided to put real preparation into Nidgin's second launch.  I'm doing some editing of my old episodes, writing new episodes, and planning some stuff out.

Meanwhile, I like prepping for things I can't have yet (I once bought a cell phone even though I didn't have--and didn't intend to buy--a plan), so I give you the website, with an exclusive prologue (I'll take it down when I launch the story):

The Adventures of Nidgin Idberry of Frockleton

I got my spiritualist terms wrong.

It's clairaudiant, not audiovoyant.  My Latin failed me.

California here we come

I've been in Berkeley, CA for a little over two days now, and I'm only now finding the time to blog.  Granted, I've found the time to write one journal entry, do some push-ups, and play some cheap addictive computer games, but very little.  I also skipped my planned blogging, e-mailing, journaling and story-writing this evening in favor of dinner with my fellow mentees.  Given my extraordinary budget constraints--the sort that will almost certainly leave me broke (at best) by the end of the summer--I opted for water only and waited, like a circling jackal, until at last two women found themselves unable to finish the gigantic salad they were sharing, at which point I swooped in and had myself a free supper.

I'm here to work on Pace e Bene's Nonviolent Stories project, about which I will blog at a later date--perhaps once I start work the week after next.

Tonight my Indian housemate did some high-end astrology for me (in India, astrology does not mean reading your weekly horoscope or figuring out which signs to avoid, but very complex readings that involve Jupiter looking towards Venus in the fifth house with his third eye and whatnot) and told me some potentially mildly profound things.  I do not place much faith in these things, though I'm open to being demonstrated wrong (all I'd been told previously was that Capricorns love spreadsheets, are bad news for Libras, and don't believe in astrology).  Ketan asked if I got angrily easily (yes), if my last two years were tumultuous (maybe), if I completed something major in 2008 (yes) and if I had a lot of luck (yes).  I tried to evaluate everything for those traps in which everybody thinks things describe them, and while some of the things he said were vague enough to qualify, others were familiar enough to raise an eyebrow.  He said women fall for me easily (hehe) and the next 17 years of my life would be good.  He also suggested I should wear yellow sapphire to improve Jupiter, swim in natural water to balance my mood (by fighting off the sun), that I need many blessings, and he warned that if I get married before I'm 28, especially to someone with a weak Mars, my partner will die.  He was very adamant about this and cited a time his father gave someone the same warning.  She disregarded it and five days after the wedding her husband was hit by a bus and killed.

As long as I'm having readings done, I've also met someone who is audiovoyant--she hears voices that tell her things that turn out to be true, and does readings for people by listening to what the voices tell her about them.  I'll have to get one of those done.

I have always very much dismissed this realm of spirituality, but both of these people seem quite rational and have found startling truth in their skills--Ketan did a reading that told him he would be abroad soon, perhaps in the United States, before he ever found out about Metta Mentors, and now he is abroad for the first time in his life... in the United States.

Actually, I think I dismiss this sphere because I don't want it to be valid.  If astrology and audiovoyancy are able to predict the future, that means I am not able to control the future, and I am not satisfied with that.

Even though, scientifically, I'm still an epiphenominalist.

Many guides to making a living writing suggest blogging to build examples of writing.  I think this post just screwed me out of a job, now that I'm crazy.

I wish fiction writers made money.

As soon as I have time I'm re-launching The Adventures of Nidgin Idberry of Frockleton.

I'm done.

Living Slowly

I think this place is superior to the places I've lived in the United States in pretty much every way.  Everybody is cool.  The food is good.  There's a beach.  What else is there to say?