I ended up going with a MacBook Pro w/ 15-inch screen along with a 16GB iPod touch, both of which arrived today. That, however, isn’t the point.

The point is that the online mechanism they use to handle rebates has to be the best thing ever. As long as I get my check quickly, this will be the best rebate experience any company has ever offered. All I had to do was submit my information and they didn’t hassle me for nonsense extras.

Glad to see someone actually cares about making it easy to get a deserved rebate!

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The only thing that’s going to change you from where you are now to where you’ll be five years from now are the people you meet, the books you read, and the dreams you dream.

I find this very applicable to me as I transition from my 9-5 job. Although I am pursuing a career in basketball, I feel this quote is applicable to any profession outside of sports.

Something Lou touches on in the video compilation is the aspect of maintaining, something he feels he should never have done at Notre Dame. In a way this is what I was doing at my 9-5, and I became increasingly turned off by it. I don’t really regret it, as I feel it’s played a key role in motivating me to change, and plays into another quote I found in the video:

embrace change when change is necessary for success

I could easily apply for and obtain a job similar to what I was doing before, but this would be counterproductive to me being successful. Although I’d be paid fairly well, I would not consider that a success as many others would, as my room for growth and being happy with what I do would be severely limited. Change is very necessary, so I’m going at it will open arms (even if my wife cringes at the thought of it).

Success is more than money, and I figure everyone should ask themselves from time to time: “What am I doing to be successful?”. I don’t have a problem if you define success as money, but I hope there is more to it than that for you.

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My first attempt at working from home will be freelance programming. This seems to be the best way for me to generate income in the immediate future, so I created profiles on eLance and Guru:

ryanjparker.elance.com
profile.guru.com/994494

So far I like eLance the best, but I haven’t even been doing this a week, so that is subject to change. I’ve had a small success so far, as I accepted my first eLance project on Friday.

To be honest I haven’t heard rave reviews about freelance coding services, as the feeling seems to be that most people want the world at a cheap price. Hopefully I can avoid those sorts of projects.

My plan is to develop one of my own websites during this process, WhichTeamWins.com and work on some open source software. Hopefully I can generate some meaningful income (either directly or indirectly) through those projects as well.

I’m interested in hearing from anyone that has made a similar transition (successfully or unsuccessfully). If anyone has any tips I’m all ears!

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First, the nonchalant attitude the guy gives with respect to the people calling him is classic. The “I didn’t read the e-mail you sent me so I deleted it from your sentbox to make you think you didn’t send it to me” is another goodie.

Top it off with the fact that he keeps going back to pwn n00bs on Halo and it is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in some time. It really hits home with me. I give it 5 stars!

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That changed, however, when my iGoogle feeds stopped updating properly.

Today I finally imported the RSS feeds into Google Reader, and I’m in love. The interface is great. I can quickly navigate to the content I’m looking for.

If you’re stuck in the stone age like I was with the iGoogle Homepage, it’s time to give Google Reader a shot!

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The trackback requests were prevalent before, but for some reason they weren’t slowing the server down until the upgrade.

After trying many solutions, I finally found a way to solve the problem. This will no longer allow you to have trackbacks on your blog, but if you have to decide between no blog or no trackbacks then I’m sure you’ll have no problem implementing this.

Basically you just update your index.php to the following:

if ( preg_match('/trackback/', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) ) {
die();
} else {
/* Short and sweet */
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
}
?>

You might need to modify the preg_match() so that you don’t cut off legit posts that have trackback in the name, but the blog I use this code on does not have such posts.

Hopefully some day soon these spammers will realize they’re doing no one any good.

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For example: I have 14 people subscribed to a feed using SendMeRSS, yet FeedBurner only counts 4. I know it’s 14 because SendMeRSS lists the number of subscribers in every e-mail that is sent out. Yes, I’m one of the 14 because I want to know if it’s ever broken.

Also, Google’s feed fetcher only reports 7 subscribers, yet FeedBurner counts this as 14. I know it’s 7 because the Googlebot comes to my site first before being re-directed to FeedBurner.

I figure this is just a parsing issue, but conspiracy theorists could suggest that Google wants to make it look like everyone is using their service.

Regardless, I just want to have an accurate subscriber count. Is that too much to ask for?

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Reading through the e-mail I had no idea why I was removed… I have quality content, it’s constantly updated, exactly the kind of things BlogRush is looking for. Well, at the very end, I see this last paragraph:

- The blog’s content (or advertising) should not contain any of the following types of content: hate, anti-racial, terrorism, drug-related, hacking, phishing, fraud, pornographic, nudity, warez, gambling, copyright infringement, obscene or disgusting material of any kind, or anything considered illegal.

Everything else in this list is either obscene or illegal except for gambling. Obviously you can make the argument that you typically have to be in a place like Vegas to take part in this type of activity, but BlogRush isn’t quite getting it right by barring this type of content.

Sports bettors like myself are a small crowd so I don’t expect much, but what about the poker playing community?

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Looks like it didn’t work.

A few hours ago I received the following e-mail from Google:

Hello Ryan Parker,

It has come to our attention that invalid clicks and/or impressions
have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s). We have
therefore disabled your Google AdSense account. Please understand that
this was a necessary step to protect the interests of AdWords
advertisers.

As you may know, a publisher’s site may not have invalid clicks or
impressions on any ad(s), including but not limited to clicks and/or
impressions generated by:

- a publisher on his own web pages
- a publisher encouraging others to click on his ads
- automated clicking or surfing programs, or any other deceptive
software
- a publisher altering any portion of the ad code or changing the
layout, behavior, targeting, or delivery of ads for any reason

…

I run AdWords campaigns and obviously hate click fraud, which is why it’s unfortunate that Google has disabled my account.

So, what are the odds of Google reinstating my account?

Tags: google, adsense, account disabled

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Hopefully by blacklisting .biz and .info I can keep Akismet happy.

While we’re on the topic: anyone actually own and/or use a .info TLD for a legit purpose?

Tags: .info, spam

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