Blog Marco

Are we all addicts to the Internet? (link) Can Generation X, Y and Z survive without the internet? Generation X saw the dawn of the new computer age when they were kids and in their teens. Now most of their jobs are somehow connected to the internet. Generation Y saw the dawn on the internet age when dialup's came mainstream in the 1990's (remember Compuserve and those pesky AOL disc s and CDs?). They grew up on slow 14400 baud modems in their teens. Now with Generation Z, they know nothing else but computers and the internet. I watch my young cousins (aged below 3) jump on a browser, do a google search for their favourite games and start interacting. I was doing a survey the other day about my internet usage and I noticed that I seemed to tick all the boxes. I wondered if this was the case for most people? Are we all reliant on this massive electronic giant? What do you use the internet for?

• To spend time with friends or family
• To give me something to talk about
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Submitted by Marco on Fri, 21/08/2009 - 6:49pm.

Looking at some SEO jobs in Sydney on Seek.com.au. These people earn quite a high income for what they do. I find the whole SEO industry quite interesting. The industry was started because finding things on a search engine is so important. Businesses take advantage if this so they can influence the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and rank their business higher. But all SEO isn't good - there has been some high profile companies like BMW that was punished by Google because of bad practices. Also small businesses can find their business wiped out if their SERPs rankings fall. All this and more was written about in last weekend's Google Monster article.

Here is a comprehensive list of "You are an Internet Addict When..." There are many variations of this list all over the internet. Some of them are a little "old" like this one: "You've already visited all the links at Yahoo and you're halfway through Lycos. or [C]ontinue?" Lycos? What ever happened to that search engine? All jokes aside... here is a Public Service Announcement from me about Internet Addicts. It is a real disorder: "Internet addiction disorder (IAD), or more broadly Internet overuse, problematic computer use or pathological computer use is excessive computer use that interferes with daily life. These terms avoid the distracting and divisive term addiction and are not limited to any single cause. IAD was originally proposed as a disorder in a satirical hoax by Ivan Goldberg, M.D., in 1995. He took pathological gambling as diagnosed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM-IV) as his model for the description of IAD. However, IAD receives coverage in the press, and its classification as a psychological disorder is being debated and researched." Wikipedia Enjoy the list!

• You log off for four minutes to make yourself a cup of coffee and AT&T assumes there must have been a fault on the line and sends a repairman to fix it.
• You refuse to go on a vacation spot with no electricity and no phone lines.
• Your bookmark takes fifteen minutes to scroll from top to bottom.
• You begin to wonder how on earth your service provider is allowed to call 200 hours per month “unlimited.”
• Your phone bill comes to your door in a box.
• You move into a new house and decide to Netscape before you landscape.
• All of your friends have an @ in their names.

Internet addiction is a rising problem in today's technologically advanced society. You can laugh at these jokes about internet addictions, but IAD - Internet Addiction Disorder is a serious psychological disease. China has the world's largest number of internet users with 338 million -- more than the entire population of the United States. More than 10 million of the country's 100 million teenage web surfers are internet addicts, the China Daily said, citing a survey by the China Youth internet Association last year. There is controversy over the treatments for internet addiction and how it is diagnosed. The health ministry last month banned the use of electroshock therapy to treat internet addiction, the China Daily said. Internet addiction kills, there have been deaths linked with playing games on the internet continuously for many hours, and a more recent death of someone dying indirectly because of his internet addiction.

More American Workers Outsourcing Own Jobs Overseas

I keep getting this error popup box in the corner of my screen from AVG Free Antivirus. Error says: "Invalid Update Control CTF File". I've got Windows Vista and this isn't the first time this stupid error has appeared. And the consequence is that the virus definitions file isn't being updated.

In Vista, to fix this "" you'll need to go to" C:\ProgramData\avg8\update\download (open up explorer by pressing WinKey+E and pasting that address into the address bar). Then delete the two corrupted CTF files in that folder: "avginfoavi.ctf" and "avginfowin.ctf". Now open up AVG Virus (double click its tray icon) and click "Update Now" - this will now download a new CTF file and refresh your virus definitions.

In the past I've downloaded many flickr photos. However some are protected using some smart HTML/CSS coding which covers the real image with a stretched transparent gif image file called spaceball.gif. (Other websites which utilise the same protection methods use gif file names called space.gif or clear.gif). Why would I want to download the images? So I can compile a collection of reference photos on my hard drive from which I like to refer to when seeking inspiration or ideas for future photoshoots... So how do you remove the spaceball.gif? to download protected photos from flickr?

Well there are a few ways to do this. The first is a very easy way and handy if you are only going to do it once or twice but becomes irritating if you have more than 10 or so... simply do a complete web page save (File>Save Webpage As... and choose complete). The photo will be in the folder amongst the other images on the webpage.

There is a web-based option to download the protected flickr spaceballed image is to visit deFlickr.

An article from SMH reports about illegal downloads in two universities based in Sydney: UNSW and UTS - but no doubt every university in Australia or internationally faces the same problem... students logging on the free university wi-fi internet connections from their own laptop and downloading copyrighted movies and songs... But students have always found ways to beat the system. There are plenty of ways to avoid getting caught using torrents.

Why do students illegally download stuff at university? Because the internet connection is SUPER FAST. Universities have access to the fastest internet connections - at optimum speed downloads can reach 500mb to 1 gig in one second. And according to the report, incidents of copyright infringement are increasing.

I'm still on the lookout for jobs... from photography jobs to employment in the internet marketing industry. I was looking through seek.com.au and I sound a few jobs relating to employment with the Internet Marketing industry. Interesting to see a varied range of renumeration packages. One job offers $500-$600 per day?! for a three month contract. Another for an online marketing assistant offers only a $30,000 per annum salary. While another for a higher internet marketing job position called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Manager offering $50 - $70k per annum. Check them out:

Don't get caught by this scam PayPal email... it looks VERY convincing...

From: service@paypal-team.com

Reconfirm your bank account

Your bank account attached to your PayPal account has expired. You need to reconfirm your bank account in order for you to be able to use your PayPal account like before.

To reconfirm your bank account attached to your PayPal account you need to make 2 small deposits of 15.12 EUR and 21.25 EUR into the bank account of the PayPal agent in charge with your account security management. As soon as the deposits are confirmed into the bank account of the PayPal agent in charge with your account security management the funds will be returned into your bank account.
Confirmation of your bank account takes 3-5 days.

The details needed for the deposits are:

Amount to deposit: 15.12 EUR and 21.25 EUR
PayPal agent name: Liviu Rupa
Bank name: Caja Laboral
Bank address: Perez Galdos
IBAN: ES5930350250472500014927
SWIFT/BIO: CLPEES2MXXX

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Submitted by Marco on Tue, 17/06/2008 - 10:49am.

Here is another one of those Nigerian scam spam emails... If you want to have a laugh and perhaps help out stamping out this kind of scam go visit: http://www.419eater.com/. They have a great community of "anonymous" people scamming the scammers. Instead of simply pressing the spam email button, these internet citizens click reply and actually start a relationship with the spammers. Their goal? To get a trophy: which usually consists of a photo of the scammer holding up a bogus sign or product. I simply can't believe people are still being taken in on this type of spam crime...

One of Sydney's Western suburbs, Blacktown, is out of phone, internet and EFTPOS services this weekend after vandals cut a Telstra communications cable around 8am this morning (Vandals are awake so early these days?!?!). The vandals severed two fibre optic cables affecting these telecommunication services in Blacktown, Rooty Hill, Erskine Park, Arndell Park and Shalvey. Sort of similar to the very recent episode of SouthPark called "Over Logging" when the whole town lost their Internet. Of course it wasn't from vandals, but rather, the Internet was lost because of too many people using the Internet and the network simply gave up.

Google has been taking photos of streets as a part of their Google Maps project. (I know this is OLD news... this is just for those who aren't aware of it yet) What Google Maps does is drivve a car around and take snap shots which they then stitch together so that instead of viewing a street from above you can view the street from a horizontal viewpoint.

I found a list of the "Types of Websites On the Internet". This list may be useful for research.

• blog
• commercial presence
• forum
• articles / news
• directory
• e-commerce
• social networking
• games
• search engine

For those that follow this blog, know that I like to collect a very vast variety of information. I like to collect snippets of information which depict the Internet as the Wild West of today. Laws are simply trying to catch up to this wildly popular "thing" we call the World Wide Web (WWW). Here's another proof of that concept: Craigslist Crime.

I'm not talking about the coaxers and the get rich quickers, I'm talking about real Criminals, real robbers that are into Craigslist Crime. These bums post up bogus classified posts on Craigslist which advertise to the world that anyone is welcome to anything in the house (furniture, lawn mower and even the kitchen sink...) since they were moving out - a house which they don't own. The criminals are indeed creative in the way they conduct crime, but please, use that creativity in a positive manner.