Facebooks How To’s

10 Mar

There are often things I want to do on Facebook that FB tries to stop users from doing.  Fortunately there are people out there trying to best them, and I’ll be posting here some of the things I’ve tried to do, and what worked.  Note that FB changes its site frequently, so tricks stop working from time to time.

INVITING ALL FRIENDS TO ONE EVENT

Regularly, Facebook forces you to click next to the name of the friend you want to invite to an event.  You can force your browser to click on all the names by using the javascript below.  Note that it didn’t work for me using Firefox (it said something about FB disabling it to keep social engineering away), but it did work perfectly in Opera.

This is what you do:

- Go the page of the event you want to invite people to

- Click on “Invite Friends” on the top right-side of the window

- A pop up window opens up with the pictures/names of your friends. This window only displays a few friends at a time.  Scroll down to add more.  Continue scrolling until all your friends are shown.

- Copy this script:

javascript:elms=document.getElementsByName(“checkableitems[]“);for (i=0;i<elms.length;i++){if (elms[i].type=”checkbox” )elms[i].click()};

- Paste it in the url bar (replacing the url of the page you are in).

- Click “enter”

- Wait until the squares by the pictures of all your friends are clicked (it can take a few minutes, depending on how many friends you have) and then press “submit”.

 

You are done!

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Internet Puppy Scam

17 Jan

We’ve been talking about getting a dog for a while.  We figured we’d wait until the kids were a bit older and, all of sudden, we realized that they were already older (7 and 10) and that if we didn’t get a dog soon they’d go much of their childhood without one.  Camila, in particular, has been asking for a dog for a LONG time.  Last year I promised her I’d get her one if she didn’t whine until the summer.  She actually managed to do that (though I had to remind her each time).  The weekend before last, for some reason Mike told her that we could get a dog now – so I started looking.

The kids didn’t care too much about what type of dog we got, but I was pretty adamant that it had to be cute.  For me, that meant no mutts (let’s be honest, most of them are ugly), no hounds or other skinny dogs and no small dogs – they are just too precious.  Going through the breeds of dogs that I could actually find around here, I ended up deciding it had to be a Goldern or Labrador retriever, a German or Australian Shepherd, a Siberian Husky or a Border collie.  I had originally wanted a grown dog – so I wouldn’t have to house train it – but Mike wanted a puppy or a young dog, so that’s what I started to look for.

I first started looking on Petfinder, a wonderful website that lists adoptable pets from shelters and rescue groups throughout the country (and more important, the Bay Area).  But I quickly realized my chances of finding a dog with those characteristic were minimal.  Plus the rescue groups, in particular, have pretty onerous adoption processes that include “thorough” questionnaires and home visits, I definitely didn’t want to bother with that.  Plus adoption “donations” for these groups can be as high as $250!

My next place to look was Craigslist.  Some shelters advertise here, but there are also ads from people re-homing their dogs and selling puppies.  Now, Craigslist doesn’t allow people to actually sell dogs but they allow “small” re-homing fees, but what constitutes “small” seems open to interpretation.  Anyway, most of the puppies we called about seemed to be in the $150 to $400 range.  Unfortunately, Craigslist didn’t have any puppies I wanted when I looked, though they do add new ones daily.

By searching around the net, I then came across oodle marketplace, an online classified website.  Here I found lots of listings for puppies at very reasonable prices (about $200-300).  I hurried to e-mail the owners, asking for more information on the puppies as well as pictures.  Almost immediately the replies started coming.  I wrote to seven people, and got five replies back.  All of those were SCAMS.  I’m copying the responses below though they are pretty much the same:

  1. They are all written in bad English (typical of Nigerian scams)
  2. They all offer say their puppies are AKC registered, yet the puppies are free or too cheap
  3. The puppies all come with equipment, guarantees or other things that cost money
  4. They claim that what they most care about is a good home for the puppies and send a long questionnaire.

As I’m a big fan of reading scam baiter e-mail threads (and I have to recommend them to you, the baits are soo funny though sometimes really cruel), I could tell from the first e-mail that it was a scam.  A quick google search for the e-mail address led me to many ads offering all sorts of puppies for sale, in many cities.  But how did the scam work?

Another quick search leads to the answer:  the scammer tells you that she’s no longer in your city but she’ll be more than happy to mail you the puppy.  All you have to do is pay for the shipping (or a low price that includes shipping), directly to the shipping company.  The shipping company they’ll use is a fake and requires payment by Western Union or Moneygram (which will be untraceable to them once they receive it).

Personally, I don’t know why anyone would buy a puppy sight unseen (even from a reputable breeder) but these scams must work because they continue doing them.

Oh, well.  At least scam baiters are having fun with these scams, this one is hilarious.  And as for me, I went back to Craigslist and got a gorgeous German Shepherd puppy from a private party for a very reasonable price.

Continue reading →

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Easy Doggy Shampoo – Recipe

17 Jan

We have finally gotten a puppy!  A beautiful 8-week old (well, pretty much 9-week old by now) German Shepperd girl dog (it just doesn’t sound right to call her bitch) that we’re calling Smokey.  This pre-bath picture does not do her justice, but you’ll have to wait until I get more.

I’m sure I’ll blog a LOT about her, but this particular posting is about doggy shampoo!  Of course, we have a dog so the kids want to give her a bath.  A few months ago, when I suspected one day we’d get a dog but didn’t know when, I got a Scientific Explorer Pamper Your Dog Science Kit at the flea market for $2.  One of the activities in this kit is making doggy shampoo so you can give your doggy a bath.  Well, we made the shampoo and we could not believe just how soft and fluffy Smokey is.  I have *never* petted a softer dog or puppy in my life.  She smells great too!  I did a quick search and found out that glycerine soap, the main ingredient in this shampoo, is actually good for dogs’ coats.  It’s also cheap and easy to find.

This basic recipe is good enough as it is – but you can also add a couple of drops of the essential oil of your choice to make the puppy smell extra-nice (or get a perfumed glycerine soap).  Lavender essential oil smells nice and works against ticks, while white cedar, peppermint, eucalyptus and citronella essential oils may help with fleas.  Use any natural (non-mineral) oil you have at home.

Doggy Shampoo

  • 1 oz bar glycerin soap
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 1/2 Tbsp. vegetable oil

Chop/cut the soap into chunks.  Put it in a microwave-safe glass together with the water and the oil.  Microwave for 30 seconds, mix well, and, if the soap is not yet melted, microwave for 15 to 30 seconds more.  Let cool

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Looking into the sun (with glasses)

28 Dec

I remember the first – and perhaps only – eclipse I ever saw.  It happened in August 1979, when I was on fifth grade.  I remember getting out of the classroom to look at the sun – despite warnings that we shouldn’t.  Somehow I managed not to blind myself (though I developed myopia not too long after that, hmmm….).  Since then I have been more responsible and have not looked directly into the sun – until yesterday, that is.  You see, Mike mentioned a few weeks ago that the kids and him had gone to some science event in which they had glasses they could use to safely look at the sun.  I looked them up and found out that they are super cheap (though only sold in bulk) so I decided to get him a set for Christmas.

The glasses are quite simple, they are made of paper with black polymer lenses which filter all of the harmful ultraviolet and infrared light, as well as practically all the ambient light.  Put them on and look anywhere but at the sun, and you’ll see pitch black.  Then sun, however, looks like a perfect orange circle.  When I looked yesterday I couldn’t see any sun spots, but now that we have the glasses I can look often until I see them :-)

These glasses are going to be perfect for the annular solar eclipse that will take place on May 20th this year.  It won’t hit the Bay Area, but the 20th conveniently falls on a Sunday making a trip up north (Redding is near the center path for the eclipse) easy enough.  As if that wasn’t enough, on June 5th Venus will be transiting between the earth and the sun! It’ll be the last time that this happens while we are alive, so I’m sure it’ll be worth seeing it.

I got the glasses at the Rainbow Symphony Store.  They are usually 85-cents each, plus very reasonable shipping, with a minimum purchase of 25.  But if you don’t care what the frames say (which I didn’t), you can buy them for 40-cents each with a minimum purchase of 50.  With shipping, this came out to less than $25.  The store’s website is very simple – very 1990′s – but I liked the vibe of it, and the glasses came very quickly.

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Some Patchy Catholic Censorship

2 Dec

As my local friends from San Leandro (the town I live in) well know, I participate a lot in local politics and write and comment on my San Leandro blog and Facebook page about anything going on in this town.  I’m also a very active participant in the San Leandro Patch, an online hyper-local news portal owned by AOL (which wants to become a media company).   Here again, I comment about anything and everything.

One thing I commented about last night was a short frilly article on what some moms tell their kids about religion.  My comment(s) were left alone, but when a gay atheist man commented about his own experience raising a son and how he feels about the Church’s stands on gay marriage, his post was quickly deleted because the editor considered it an attack (won’t say how or on whom, however).  In any case, I am posting his comment here so that everyone can read it.

I am an atheist and I raised my son to find his own way with religion, he went to quite a number of local church youth-oriented faith events in his teens and I did not pressure him to believe or doub. He has become a wonderfully warm and caring kid, and we both have found our moral compass without any connection to the Judeo-Christian belief system. We are good people because that is the right thing to do, not because a book tells us to do it, or because we live in constant fear of an eternity in hellfire. As a gay man I find the ongoing religious demonization and intolerance toward LGBT families simply outrageous and so NOT what Jesus would do. The Catholic church leads the pack in this regard, Archbishop Dolan makes weekly statements about the horrors of allowing gay couples to get married, while at the same time his church seems to be maintaining the largest group of pedophiles the world has ever known. The hypocrisy that exists in the Catholic church is appalling, an organization that prides itself on ‘justice’ clearly does not mean if it you are a child or gay, and heaven help you if you are both. In closing I will paraphrase Caria: “At the end of the day what is most important to me is that my little boy grows up to be a man who is secure in his heart, his mind and his faith that we as humans should love one another.

Billy Bradford

And I’m posting this cartoon because it’s funny and oh so true :-)

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A song for Mike

18 Nov

This song just came on my playlist, putting a big smile on my face.  It really represents my feelings for Mike, at least when I’m not mad at him ;-)

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$40 for a link!

16 Nov

I just got an offer from someone I suppose works for a search engine optimization (SEO) company offering to pay me $40 to advertise on one of my web pages.  I get these offers from time to time, but this time I decided to inquire a little bit further and find out exactly what they wanted from me.  It turned out that they wanted me to place 3 links on my Cantabrian cheesecake recipe page.  That, in itself, was pretty weird, as I can’t imagine that page gets many visitors, but what was weirder was the actual links they wanted me to include.  They were to websites for building birdhouses!  Two of the websites, moreover, where government websites (I guess park departments must encourage birdhouses).   Now, this puzzled me as I was sure that government websites would not be paying for links, specially from irrelevant pages like mine, so I decided to do a bit of investigation.  This is what I found out:

- Nobody knows exactly what Google’s algorithm for listing websites is, but one factor is how many other sites link to that one site.

- The “quality” of the site where the link is matters, Google gives more weight to websites that it deems “legitimate” (i.e. not created for the sole purpose of linking to other sites).

- The word it links from matters too.  In this case, the SEO seller asked me to add the words “cottage cheese” to my description of queso fresco and link to the one commercial birdhouse site from the word “cottage”.

- Google, however, does not assess the relevancy of the link to the subject matter of the page.  In other words, Google won’t notice/care that the link to a page on building birdhouses came from a recipe page.

- If Google catches you buying or selling links, it will penalize you by not having your website show up at all or in the first few pages of search results.

I still don’t quite understand how this person actually found my Cantabrian cheesecake page (what word could she have been searching for that would have led her to that page?).  In any case, I thought this was interesting to share.

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Best-Loved Folktales of the World – Review

3 Oct

I just got Best-Loved Folktales of the World at the San Leandro public library sale.  I have only read three tales so far – two African-American and one Southern one – but I can already tell I’m going to love reading this book to my 9-year-old.  This 780-page book contains 200 tales from all over the world (though there are none from Argentina).   The tales are, of necessity, pretty short but they’re very nicely written.  The three tales I read were written in the style/language in which they would have originally been told.  It was a bit hard for me to read them outloud – no, I cannot do a southern country accent -, but it was pretty fun.  The stories in the book are not without controversy, however.  One of them comes from Uncle Remus (that one I couldn’t read outloud, I tried but my daughter couldn’t understand me) and another contains the word “nigger“  in it.  Still, that gave me the opportunity to talk to my daughter about the word, which thankfully she never had encountered before.

The three stories I read were very good, and my daughter enjoyed them.  “People who could fly” is a story about an African with doctor, captured and brought to America as a slave, who helps the other slaves in his plantation escape by giving them wings.  It’s a story of hope and very touching.  Beware that its description of slavery is pretty overt.

“Baby in the Crib” is merely half a page, and it’s perhaps a joke more than a story, but it is really funny and well told.

Finally, “The Two Old Women’s Bet” was just hilarious.  It’s about two women who bet about who has the most foolish husband.  One – in the style of “The Emperor has no Clothes”  – convinces her husband she’s made him a suit he cannot see.  The other, tricks her husband into thinking that he’s ill, and then that he’s dead.  Mika laughed and laughed and laughed.  You can see one version of the story online, but the one in the book is told much better.

I am looking forward to reading the rest of the stories to Mika.  The language in the stories is complicated enough that I don’t think my 6-year-old would grasp it, but I’m sure one day I’ll read them to her as well.

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Creative Communication: Scamming a child

21 Sep

“Mommy, I won, I won”.  Mika rushed out of her 4th grade classroom today, paper in hand, a huge smile on her face, happy and proud of herself.  She’d won a poetry contest, she told me, almost out of breath in her excitement.

I knew immediately what it was.  I had read about poetry scams years before, understood well how they work.  They ask you to submit a poem (many advertise in magazines) for a “prestigious contest”.  Some time later you’ll hear that your poem has been selected to be published – trouble is that if you inquire further, you’ll find out it will be published in a  volume only marketed to the authors of the poems and that there is almost no selectivity as to what poems are published.  Creative Communication admits publishing about half of all the poems it gets, and does not explain how the selection process works or who the “judges” are.  They sell the book for $26.40.

I was not aware that my daughter had entered this contest at school last year.  Creative Communication apparently uses teachers to get their students to submit their poems.  I am sure that my daughter’s teacher thought it was legit.

I was torn about telling Mika that her contest was a scam, but when she asked if I’d buy the book, I asked her whether she wanted me to tell her the truth about the contest.  Mika is very mature for her age and I try to be very honest with her, but she was so excited that I didn’t want to crush her.  But she wanted the truth and she got it.  She felt bad, disappointed, taken.  She even wrote about it on her new blog and e-mailed her friend to warn her.  I hate that that slimy company got to hurt my child.  It is just unconscionable to play with the feelings of such young children, exploit their emotions and profit from the naivete.  These are children, for God’s sake!  And parents, of course, many of whom probably cannot afford the overpriced volume but will feel they’re failing their children if they don’t.

If there was a hell, there would be a special place for the owners of Creative Communication and other companies of the sort.  I will, of course, inform our daughter’s teacher (principal and school district) of this scam.

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Bishop Village Motel – Review

13 Aug

California’s eastern Sierras are a vacationer’s paradise, with access to beautiful national parks, amazing lakes, lots of fishing an amazing old-West ghost town. The area is very popular with tourists and vacationers and hotel prices are quite steep – specially after just coming from Vegas. I had originally planned to stay in the Bridgeport, but we left Vegas late and we didn’t make it to Bishop until 7:30 PM. I didn’t see any reason to continue on that night, so I looked for a hotel to stay in Bishop. It was a Monday night, but most of the better reviewed hotels in Bishop were full.  The Bishop Village Motel had OK reviews and a room available with two queen-size beds and a kitchenette for $90, so we decided to take it.  It was an OK place to stay for a night, overpriced, but as I mentioned that’s true of all hotels in the eastern Sierras.

Our room had a small kitchenette, with all the needed appliances as well as plates and silverware (I didn’t look for cooking utensils).  There was a small, tall table with two chairs – too small and in too small a space for the four of us to be able to eat together (we got take out).  The room itself was in an L shape and featured a double bed and a Queen size bed, each with night tables.  There was a dresser with an old-style TV, a closet with extra pillows and not much else.  The small bathroom was small, but the towels were fine. They had soap and shampoo, but no conditioner.  The beds were comfortable enough.

Even though the room is definitely dated and tired, my girls really liked it.  Its major problem was that the wireless internet didn’t reach it, and the wired internet didn’t work.  Again, not a big deal for one night.

The motel itself is pretty humble, but it does have a swimming pool, which we didn’t use but looked quite clean.  The managers have a friendly dog and a cat, and my kids were super happy with them.  The only problem was that they weren’t there at 8:30 AM or so when we were ready to leave, so we couldn’t leave the keys with them (and the motel has real keys, not the key-card type).  We gave them to a woman waiting for them who said worked there and appeared to be the cleaning lady – I’m hoping she was :-)

All in all, it was a fine place to stay for a night.

Bishop Village Motel
286 West Elm Street
Bishop, CA
(760) 872-8155
http://www.bishopvillagemotel.com/

Marga’s Hotel Reviews

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