APCUG Annual Sponsor User Group Programs

APCUG's annual sponsor's, Adobe, CompUSA, Intel and Microsoft, have provided direct benefits to members of our group.

I wanted to take a moment to highlight some of these and sent a great big thank-you out to these fine companies.

Adobe (www.adobe.com/support/usergroup) has an outstanding lineup of home and business software that is all about paperless communication and the dissemination of information using standard formats. In addition to a software review program that allows us to obtain new packages in exchange for a published review, they offer two discounts, one is a web publishing discount for their GoLive! package and the other a two-fer deal on Adobe 6.0, which allows one to publish any format on any platform to the standard PDF.

Members of BGAMUG interested in reviewing software should contact James Gegner.

CompUSA (www.compusa.com) will almost certainly figure into our presentation plans this year, as the group in Las Vegas indicated that not only are speakers available, but their training center in Nashville is also available for our use. Granted, 65 miles maybe a bit far for us to travel, but if the speaker was big enough, maybe we could charter a bus or van or something, like we did last year for the group that went to Louisville.
CompUSA also provided two 5% discount coupons which we'll be giving away this coming Tuesday January 25th.

Intel (www.intel.com) provided a couple of really nice build-it-yourself PCs in Vegas, but unfortunately I didn't win anything! I got the distinct impression that the folks from Intel really wanted to say something about their 64-bit CPUs and chipsets, but were constrained from doing so by the marketing guys. These companies have learned a thing or two about empty promises, so that's probably a good thing.
Perhaps when the "latest and greatest" come out in the spring, Intel will provide us with a working prototype!

Microsoft's Mindshare Program has recommitted to active support for User Groups. We are entering into a registration sweepstakes with some great prizes! Also Mindshare, as with many of our supporters, has recognized our challenges in obtaining high quality newsletter and program content, and has allowed us to syndicate their professionally written content in exchange for signing a publishing agreement. Mindshare has several Presentations In A Box that we'll be going after this year!

So long until I get the bug again!

Mike

Google Wannabees and Highway Trickery

Like any good curmudgeon, I'm ranting here for the sound of my clacking keyboard. There's no complaint department for the internet and blah blah blah. Maybe just a "Yeah that bugs me too" on reply would help me spread the pain around.

But don't meta search pages just really boil you to the bone? These are the pages that come up when you spell a URL slightly wrong - where evil webmasters have machinated on-the-fly websites that sort of look like a search page, but really aren't. Because a lot of folks type in URLs wrong - we're only human - the target page even kindof looks like it might be the page you were after. Example: I typed in what I thought was http://yourkrogerbenefits.com, but it arrived at http://yourkrogerbenfits.com, dropping the middle 'e' in benefits. Even just now when I was typing that, it came out wrong. Visiting the latter brings you to this metapage filled with links that apparently people went searching for, thinking they were at the correct site.

I'm pretty sure there's some spyware out there that actually encourages the misspelling of URLs - file this under "paranoid delusions." If it's not out there, some bad boy is thinking about it.

Folks, there are no companies that care behind these sites - they are totally automated with no employees, and they have no product to sell and no value to offer. They don't even want to be Google, the perps throwing up these sites just want you to click, click and click some more. Actually they really don't want you to find what you are looking for, because then maybe you will come back to this faux page and try again. A sponsored link is money in someone's pocket just for the click of a mouse, and there are hundreds of ways to camo a link to make you think it's what you wanted. The guys that code these sites should be consigned to the basement of Big Lots and be forced to sleep on mouse pads. They are a class of active spammers that are reducing the Internet to a worldwide carnival midway. It doesn't help that anyone with $10 can buy a domain name.

So maybe someone will read this and come up with a spellchecker that will automatically correct URLs that were mistyped. Version 2.0 will auto-update itself with a "no-go" list maintained by anti-spam organizations.

Thanks for tolerating this. Sometimes I just need to get it out there.

Mike