This is the first of what will probably be many miscellaneous item posts. It's a collection of thoughts, rants, and what have you that I don't want to dedicate to individual articles or posts. Take what follows in the context in which it's meant. When in doubt, look at the image. I think it's appropriate sometimes.

A Little Whine (or Whinge)

Okay, so I can't get online every day. It's not my fault! I didn't ask to get sick and I didn't ask Subictel to give me poor DSL service. In fact, after the fiasco yesterday of only having 2 hours of uptime in 24 hours, I complained rather loudly to the technical support representative (hereafter to be known as "Doofus"). I will be complaining to Doofus every day until Sunday (I can't complain on Sunday because it's never down on Sunday) and if that doesn't work, I'll be complaining to his supervisor (hereafter to be known as "Bonehead") next week. Then, if that still doesn't work, I'll move up the chain of command and let them deal with Bonehead and Doofus.

Yes, even outside of the military, there's always a chain of command in place.

UHT Milk

UHT stands for "ultra-high temperature" or "ultra-heat treatment", depending on where you see it. The local Filipinos seem to think it's something fairly new (as in the last 10 years). Well, they're wrong! We had UHT milk on our ship when I was deployed in 1983. The brand was "Magnolia" which is still sold today. The brand I prefer to stock up on (and it has a non-refrigerated shelf life of at least 6 months) is "Cowhead". Cowhead, among other brands, is imported from Australia. It doesn't sell well in America, but it would have saved me from throwing out milk that soured within days of purchase.

Is it healthy? Who knows? Who cares? I'll probably get run over by a reckless Filipino jeepney driver long before I'll ever have to worry about something like this.

Don't Ever Call Me A Liar (Unless You Can Prove It)

I may neglect to tell the truth at some time, but I will never intentionally lie about anything. I swear I can't remember where it was, but my blog reviews were pointed out as paid reviews. The commenter obviously had never read my blog with any kind of objectivity and was so far up Google's butt, I didn't know where Google started and this guy ended.

The point is that I have never required anything in return for a blog review and I never will. Now, if you offer me money to do one, I won't turn it down — that would just be foolish.

Reconsideration

I did it. I received payment for the last PayPerPost sponsored post that I wrote and then put the nofollow attribute on all the links. I immediately went to Google's webmaster tools and requested reconsideration. I no longer have even one post in the "Sponsored Posts" category.

Just to make something clear: This is a preemptive measure. If Google is capable of lowering pageranks, what's to stop them from lowering my posts in the index? I don't, and I never will, care about my Google PageRank. I'm attempting to protect the integrity of the search results for my blog.

The Passing of Postum

Robert Campbell gets around and he must really like the taste of Postum. I saw the comment but didn't think anything of it because I never was a Postum fan, having only tasted it once more than 23 years ago.

I was trying to figure out why I was seeing so many searches for "postum" and "postum coffee" in my stats log. So I did a search of my own. It seems that Postum was a favorite of Utah state residents and they're lamenting the fact that Kraft Foods pulled the plug on production after quite a long time. Color me stupid, but wouldn't it make sense to maintain production but market it in one of the few places where it might be considered a staple?

Nobody ever said that American food companies had the best and the brightest people on board. I think Google claims that fact.

Internet Piracy

My outlandish (or so it would seem) article titled "Downloading Pirated Anything Is NOT Illegal" still continues to draw a lot of search engine traffic. There's a good reason for that. Peer-to-peer file sharing is changing the way the entertainment industries are doing business, although they're very sluggish about it and fighting it all the way.

The same thing happened when books started being printed on printing presses a few centuries ago. "Steal This Film II" is a movie worth downloading with a bittorrent client, even if you don't use a bittorrent client on a regular basis. It's an eye-opener.

Favorable Responses

Yes, I noticed! Many of you enjoyed my article on how to make money online and the article in which I asked "am I boring you?".

Well, I plan to do many more articles like those because I really enjoy seeing some of the reactions. Also, look for more link frenzy-style posts (including the backlink bonanza thing) and even some new blog drive-bys (when I get a long, steady and stable connection for more than 24 hours in one stretch).

Posting Frequency

The underlying theme here seems to be my not so high speed Internet service. Nonetheless, I'm planning to post three times per day until the situation is resolved in one way or another. It never fails that either the ISP, the electric company, or inclement weather will trip me up on any kind of schedule — so trying to maintain one for the foreseeable future is out of the question.