Download Windows XP Service Pack 3 (XP SP3) directly from Microsoft.

Chinese (Hong Kong)

Chinese (Simplified)

Chinese (Traditional)

Czech

English

French

German

Hebrew

Japanese

Polish

Russian

Spanish

FYI 10:37am April 30, 2008 - I've installed the English version of SP3 on two desktops. It installed quickly and everything worked post install. Seems zipper too. Nothing much else visually to note. the UI is more responsive it seems.

Forget about expensive inkjet cartridges, how about 50 million dollars for a HP Inkjet printer with Bluetooth? It must be good it has a 4 out of 5 rating..

See for yourself at Amazon.com (they've removed the price already)

Ken Hoagland (center) and Duane Parde, President of the National Taxypayers Union, delivering a combined 163,000 signatures to Rep. John Linder (right), lead sponsor of H.R. 25.

April 15th also saw Rep. Gresham Barrett of South Carolina become the newest Congressional co-sponsor of the FairTax bringing our total to 71! We are not there yet with a majority but this represents the greatest number of co-sponsors for the FairTax to date--and we're only getting stronger.

Thank you.

In Washington, we took the FairTax bus to Union Station where we saw even more enthusiasm for the FairTax. The bus was, of course, eye-popping and won waves and honks up throughout the city.

We then stopped off halfway to Capitol Hill where we found IRS headquarters surrounded on tax day with 30-40 police cars.

"Just a normal precaution," a Metro police captain told us. He was friendly and curious about the issue and after ten minutes of earnest talk he and five other officers asked if they could have FairTax caps. "Sounds really good to us and we wish you luck," he said. "No problem pausing the bus for a few photos," he said, "and good luck on your national campaign; we all need it."

The FairTax bus, flanked by DC Capital Metro police cars, at the IRS headquarters in Washington on Tax Day.

It was then on the Rayburn House Office Building where we proudly carried our blown up petition poster and 103,000 FairTax.org petition names bound in four handsome books. We met up the new leader of the National Taxpayers Union who brought 63,000 more petition names to the event. We think it very healthy that other organizations are coming on board as excitement for our worthy cause grows.

We presented the petitions, talked with many co-sponsors and snapped photos for hometown releases for the next hour. FairTax House sponsor Rep. John Linder was appreciative and complimentary and continues to push hard inside Congress. The voice of so many citizens strengthens his hand, of course.

The petition will now be broken down by Congressional district and sent along to Members of Congress who have not yet come aboard as co-sponsors of H.R. 25 and S. 1025 and will be sent to each of the leading Presidential candidates.

Thank you for your support and for your belief that "We, the People," can direct government policy. Together, we are moving the FairTax closer and closer to being enacted into law. This is a citizen campaign determined to make public policy actually serve the public.

What's next? We need to take our message to Town Hall meetings hosted by Congressional Members in hometowns across the country. Now that April 15th is past, we will be focusing on getting the word out and asking local leaders to take our case directly to elected officials in your hometowns.

Sincerely,

Ken Hoagland
Communications Director

Most perceptive web advertisers have seen dwindling click through raters (CTR) on both banners and contextual ads. The rate has been on the decline for several years.

So where are the clicks coming from? I would venture to guess that the bulk of clicks are coming from new Internet users that have not been inured (yet) by the millions of ads that most seasoned web surfing veterans have seen over the course of their daily Internet activities.

When the novelty of annoying ads (like audio and video ads) wears off on these new users, they no longer click.

What this means to the online advertising industry? It means you have lost the long-time dollar spending users. These users are the ones most likely to spend money online. The in-your-face advertising will not work on this demographic of Internet users, subtlety is the key to reaching the users.

Of course, it will take the advertising industry a couple more years to figure this out, which by the time they do, the current click rates are going to bottom out and hard. Much like the print media is finally figuring out that they must embrace the Internet if they are going to survive.

Congratulations advertisers, you have lost the most valuable demographic. What you are getting currently, are Internet newbie's and broke school kids clicking on ads. Ha!

I have been involved with online publishing for over 10 years and I have seen the poor CTR trend for the last five or six years now. I have been warning fellow site owners that the trend will worsen. Some listened and many did not.

The trend I think that will grow will be more about branding and less about click through rates. While everyone else is trying to makes ends meet with pitiful CPC and CPA dollars, I will continue to sell CPM (cost per thousands) advertising and push branding. After all branding is what it is all about, whether it is online, TV or radio. An unforgettable brand will make much more than the easily forgotten (or very annoying) brands.

From what I can gather faceroller is clone of twitter that adds photos and location to short messages. It appears to be geared toward mobile phone users and a beta version of the application (Java based) is available for download. The download link is at the bottom of the faceroller home page.

I am assuming you can also add items via the website as well. At this time faceroller will integrate with facebook and flickr.

click for larger image

click for larger image

The idea looks very interesting, when you hover over a posted item the associated image enlarges and a Google map of the location appear in a bloating window. It is a bit clunky, however I am sure they will refine this feature.

I will most likely sign up, associate it with my facebook account, and try the service. faceroller will be facing stiff competition with twitter which is fast and popular.

Mobile social networking is getting "hotter" and I image we will see quite a few mobile social networking services popping in the near future. As with any popular type of service faceroller may be a hit, it is hard to say at this point.

Whew, what a whirlwind the last 5 days have been.

I finally got *all* my business and personal taxes done as of yesterday. For once I in quite a while I actually got them all completed before the deadline. I will have to say this year I had less problems. Of course becoming addicted to Twitter didn't help.

Ah, Twitter. To me Twitter is a combination Instant Messenger (IM), Forums, IRC and Usenet all rolled into one extremely simple way of doing things. I have met and twitted (chat) with some of the greatest minds in the technology and social media industries. I read more than I tweet (post) however the ideas I have come away with will make for great future blog posts.

I wish had the time right now to pen some of the ideas into posts. I am keeping track of these ideas in Microsoft OneNote (a blogger and researchers wet dream). Rest assured they will be forthcoming shortly.

Using Twitter is akin to wading through a small stream and watching everything spin around your legs. Sometimes it is difficult to keep up with the many ongoing conversations. It's also fun. I find a lot of levity and humor among the serious and thoughtful posts on Twitter. Good stuff, feel free to follow me on Twitter and I will do my best to reciprocate.

If you are finding it difficult to find people to follow, there is an web application called Twubble that will help you boost your "Following" and "Followers". Twubble helps you find friends of friends and even fellow twitters in a geographic area. It is quite nice, so be sure to have a look.

I've been playing around with several Adobe Air based applications and finally installed Twhirl. Twhirl is a free desktop application for Twitter. Not a lot to write about it other than it works well and the UI reminds me a bit of IM clients. Good stuff.

Oh and FedEx Express of Statesboro Georgia SUCKS. More on this rant in the next day or so. I have a large client project to finish before I start in on FedEx. I did send a good many FedEx executives a EECB (Executive Email Carpet Bomb) about my  consistently poor service from the company. I guess I will give them a chance to fix it before I unload on them and stir up a lot of bad press. I just Googled FedEx Sucks, I am not surprised at all the complaints I found based on the crappy service I have received for the last 5 years.

April 17, 2008 - Update on the FedEx problem - I got a call from FedEx corporate on April 15th, they are "taking measures" to ensure this sort of poor service doesn't happen again and they are cutting me a check for two hours of my lost time and for a gallon of gas (i had to drive to the FedEx facility to get my Next Day package at 7pm).

The Care and Feeding of a Sucks.com is available on Amazon.com (Kindle format) for $6.39.

The author, Allen Harkleroad, has gone toe to toe with some of the largest multi-billion dollar companies on the planet over publicly criticizing their products and services on the Internet. Many times these companies used legal intimidation or threats in an effort to force him to shut down his sucks.com websites. Unfortunately for them the scare tactics didn't work as he understands copyright and trademark law intimately. You don't run a publishing company and magazines for ten plus years without understanding federal copyright and trademark laws. Allen uses that knowledge to his advantage and now so can you.

PDF Format ($7.99)

Amazon Kindle ($6.39)

MobiPocket ($7.99)

The Care and Feeding of a Sucks.com
56 pages
ISBN: 0-9789997-1-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-9789997-1-1
ASIN B0017L8MZ6
Published: 11/2007

Read more about the book (at AllenHarkleroad.com)

We now have over 96,000 signatures, and need just 4,000 more to hit our target of 100,000 names for our "Pass the FairTax" April 15th petition. Please take a second and help us surpass that goal today.

We thank you so much for signing your name and raising your voice for the FairTax during this critical election year. Even if you've already done so, we hope you'll take this one last opportunity to spread the FairTax word, and help collect a few more names in these crucial final hours. With your support, we've added an incredible 96,000 names in just a few weeks, and hope you'll help us reach our goal of 100,000!

Here's a quick reminder of what you can still do:

Send a "Pass the FairTax" eCard. Tell others why you've already signed the FairTax petition and why they should too.

Pick up the phone and make a pitch to a friend. Tell them to go to www.changedc.org  and sign the petition now.

Send an Instant Message to a friend and ask them to go www.changedc.org  and sign the petition now.

Remember, we have just a few days left to hit our 100,000-signature goal for our "Pass the FairTax" April 15th petition, so please do your part now.

As you know, we'll be delivering a copy of this petition and 100,000 names to Congress and the leading presidential candidates on April 15th. By signing now, you'll be there too and reminding our elected officials in Washington that demand for the FairTax is growing, and that real change is coming to Washington courtesy of engaged citizens just like you.

Again, thanks for your help during our April 15th "Pass the FairTax" petition. We, literally, could not do this without you!

Sincerely,

Ken Hoagland
Communications Director

It appears that there is not going to be much in the way of social media news this week.

One item to note is the launch of Facebook chat this week. Personally, I could care less about a chat application on Facebook. I barely have time to check Facebook a couple of times a week to start with. However, that is just me. I guess if you are into IM then this very cool.

Michael Arrington throws a fit on Twitter about his Comcast Internet problem over the weekend and gets results. I guess Twitter is good for something other than micro-blogging. Michael made a reference to Jeff Jarvis’ Dell problem in it, which I find quite funny as I myself got quite a long run-around by Dell and ended up erecting a suckstobedell.com website to get them to pay attention. Dell did address my problem as well. Public embarrassment frequently causes companies to do the right thing. Kudos to Michael.

Is a company giving you the run around or not fixing a problem that they should? Then you might want to read my book. I quite literally “wrote” the book on using a sucks.com website to protest and get results, click here to download it. It is a free download, no registration required – it will also be available on Amazon soon.

I should be glad that this last week was a slow social media news week as so much happened that I wasn't expecting, and most of it was "good" stuff.

Monday April 1, 2008 was a strange day indeed. Rather than be sucked into a April's Fool's prank I opted to not post news. It was a wise choice as more than half of the "news" was bogus.

So what did happen this week? Here goes.

Tuesday April 2, 2008

TechCrunch 50 scheduled to overlap with Demo - Geek Gestalt

The Money Problem with Facebook / MySpace / hi5 Apps - Noah Kagan's Okdork.com

MySpace Becoming a Portal to Artists' Own Networks - ReadWriteWeb

FriendFeed's goal: More than just a feed aggregator - Webware.com

Children flock to social networks - BBC

Wednesday April 3, 2008

MySpace Music to launch in days: sources - Reuters

Psst...secrets of Google News exposed! - Google News Blog

Record Labels and MySpace Cut a Deal - Business Week

Seesmic Acquires Popular Twitter AIR Client Twhirl - TechCrunch

Thursday April 4, 2008

Scalr: The Auto-Scaling Open-Source Amazon EC2 Effort - TechCrunch

That's it folks. Not much else happening around the Net and social media.

Have a great weekend.

I have the leaked documents that proves the Microsof Yahoo Deal is Real. To keep my blog from crashing I have embeded the PDF files in to a plain HTML page located here.

Enjoy!

Due to the overwhelming amount of "not" news items floating around the Internet today, I will not post any sort of news today. I have seen too much funny stuff today and would rather not post to err on the side of caution. That and I need a long nap...

Here are some humorous items for you to enjoy

Barack Obama - What's Wrong with this picture?

Politician Joke

How To Be Annoying While Riding In A Car

Allen

 April 1, 2008 

This is not an April Fool's joke - This is REAL

It’s been a couple of years since I have seen one of Domain Registry or America’s scam invoices. Mostly because I moved all of mine my own and clients domain registrations away from Network Solutions to a different registrar. I haven't seen or heard about Domain Registry of America for a while, till this weekend that is.

I hadn’t given much thought to them scamming any more of my hosting clients. Domain Registry of America had in the past scammed several of my clients and by the time I found out about it, it was too late for the clients to get their money back.

I am afraid it is too late for Safe Haven to get their $50.00 back from Domain Registry of America because they sent them a check and DROA most likely didn’t send the transfer email until after the non-profit’s check had cleared. Of course there will be no domain transfer so Safe Haven has been effectively taken for $50.00. There are many people that have been mislead with Domain Registry of America’s “invoices”, so you can image in that DORA is raking in cash without having to do anything but put a stamp on a misleading advertising that looks like a bill.

I wouldn’t even been aware of it had I not received a domain transfer request from Domain Registry of America over the weekend. It was sent via namejuice.com which appears to be owned and operated by the same folks that are scamming unsuspecting people via misleading Domain Registry of America invoices.

I did some investigating on Domain Registry of America (DROA) and Name Juice and found some interesting things out.

Domain Registry of America (DROA) and NameJuice operate out of Ontario Canada and their website droa.com and namejuice.com are hosted on Verizon Business Hosting (Shame on you Verizon).

Domain Name: NAMEJUICE.COM
Registrar: BRANDON GRAY INTERNET SERVICES, INC. DBA NAMEJUICE.COM
 Whois Server: whois.namejuice.com
Brandon Gray Internet Services Inc.
7100 Warden Ave
Unit 8
 Markham
 ON,   L3R 8B5    CA
 +1.9054152681
+1.9054152682
 registrar @ namejuice.com

Same registration for DROA.com

Email header (IP): Received: from mail02.namejuice.com (mail02.namejuice.com [209.167.25.68])

209.167.25.68
OrgName: MCI Communications Services, Inc. d/b/a Verizon Business
OrgID: MCICS
Address: 22001 Loudoun County Pkwy
City: Ashburn
StateProv: VA
PostalCode: 20147
Country: US

Verizon needs to pull the plug on these scammers…

What is even worse the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) got a court order barring Domain Registry of America for doing what they are still doing 5 years later.

Stipulated Order Requires Payment of Consumer Redress, Prohibits Future Deceptive Conduct
The Federal Trade Commission has requested that a federal district court enjoin Domain Registry of America, Inc., an Internet domain name re-seller, from making misrepresentations in the marketing of its domain name registration services and require it to pay redress to consumers.

If you search Google for “Domain Registry of America Complaints” or even “Domain Registry of America” you will find countless complaints about the Canadian company.