Cshel Chicago SEO, PR and Web Development

Blog Tagged!

Posted on 20. Dec, 2006 by Carolyn Shelby.

Brent Csutoras of WeirdAsiaNews.com blog-tagged me, so here goes my obligatory five things people might not know about me and then my five tags. 

1) I took the SATs the summer before I started 7th grade. Yes, it was the real SAT and no, they didn’t modify the grading scale. There was a program that found kids who scored in the 99th percentile on their state-mandated standardized tests throughout grade school, and then had us take the SAT with the high school kids. They were using the info for some kind of study, though I never did bother finding out what the study was exactly or what the findings were.  My scores were pretty good, so I went ahead and applied for admission to Purdue at the beginning of my freshman year of high school and was accepted. This, of course, made me feel a little too cool for school…. which leads us into item #2

2) I flunked English my junior year of high school, but not because I didn’t do my work or because I had a poor grasp of the concepts. Noooo….. I failed because I pointed out to my teacher that I thought he was an imbecile.

In my defense, he totally started it. I don’t know why he decided he didn’t like me, but he didn’t and it was clear. I maybe might have accidentally rolled my eyes at him once or twice, but that shouldn’t have started WWIII. I was a 16 year old punk kid, and he should have been able to write the snarkiness off as such. In his defense and though he DID start it, I most definitely took great pleasure in the escalation.

The final nail in my English Lit coffin was hammered in when he submitted a comment to the school newspaper regarding his displeasure with a commentary that ran the month previous. As the opinions editor, I was responsible for running the piece and his criticisms of the writers were unwarranted and simply not accurate.

The fun part about his pointless rant was the letter he submitted — to ME — was riddled with grammar mistakes and improper word usage. So here I am with a 500 word, poorly written letter from the person who is my most favorite person in the universe to mock… what to do, what to do? Why…. I corrected it! I got out my handy-dandy red editing pen and I corrected the crap out of that letter, and then I might have taped a copy of the corrected letter to his classroom door… and maybe taped one to his lectern… and I might have distributed copies to a few people.  :-)

3) I sold my first business at 20. During the three years I was involved with the ISP, we went through a bitter break-up of the original partnership which resulted in a year and a half of court mandated receivership. We survived receivership (something that normally doesn’t happen because receivership tends to be the predecessor of bankruptcy court) and then went on to have explosive growth, only to get word that the cable company was going to be launching broadband service that would make dial-ups obsolete. We got out at a good time, and the amount of business experience I gained during those three years could last me three lifetimes. The ulcers have since healed, and I still sometimes wish I could go back to 1995 and do some things differently (or at least hang onto all those 3 letter .coms I had). [...]

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All the cool kids are on TickMe.com

Posted on 15. Dec, 2006 by Carolyn Shelby.

I was checking out TickMe.com earlier today. It’s DaveN’s newly launched social networking site that is better looking than MySpace (though the green is a trifle on the bright side) and is supposed to be more private in terms of how other members can contact you (so no more random “I want to be your friend! My name is Bambi and…” emails). It seems like everyone in SEO is joining, and being the follower that I am, I went ahead and signed up, too.

As I’m filling out the profile, I noticed an odd thing. When you specify your straight/not-straight/whichever-I-just-love-lovin’ preference, the system announces it to the world at the top of your profile — regardless of your marital status. Um. Well…… hrm. So I opted for “Not saying”; not because I’m confused, because I’m not. I totally dig dudes. I just don’t want to put up a “Hey, hit on me, PLEASE!” sign.

Another item I found interesting were the options available to females for specifying body type. Generally, you expect to find some pc terms for plumpish, and then your standards like athletic, thin, average, etc. They’ve got some cute options and a couple I just am not sure what to make of… the options are:

• Round and Proud (doesn’t need further explanation)
• J-Lo Booty (How accurately applied this one will be is in doubt)
• Big Boned (okay I can figure that one out) 
• Lara Croft (I’ve seen the video game, nuff said)
• Average
• Legs 11

The “Average” and “Legs 11″ have me perplexed. After all the clever options, why throw average in there? What is average? Average for where? Average in LA != average in Green Bay != average in NYC. “Legs 11″ I suspect is a nod to Spinal Tap’s custom amp that is better than everyone else’s because the knob goes up to 11 instead of 10. So, we can infer then that girl who describes her body type as such has legs up to her chin (and I’m guess that to be roughly a 36 inch inseam).

Then, also, there is a noticable lack of options for ladies who are neither rubenesque, nor statuesque. Why are we leaving the very petite and the amazons out in the cold? Hrm?

By the way, I went with “Lara Croft” at the recommendation of Phil Maher. So if you disagree, blame him.

Finally, the last little feature that I like, but is driving me batty is the tally of how many “ticks” you’ve received. See, you can only see who’s ticked you if you’ve ticked them as well, and it doesn’t appear that you can see HOW they ticked you — only that you’ve mutally ticked each other. So for my tally it shows that I have 13 ticks today, and they’re not all “Hey”! People are ticking me as “Hot Stuff” and I can’t frakking see who it is (can you tell BSG was on earlier?). It’s making me crazy. I want to know who these people are, because I feel like I owe them at least a thank you note, if not a fruit basket or something.

So anyway, if you’re not on TickMe yet, hop to it. If you are, tick*me* dammit!

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Proposed law requires sex offenders to disclose email addresses

Posted on 08. Dec, 2006 by Carolyn Shelby.

Reuters ran a story today about how Senators Charles Schumer (NY-D) and John McCain (AZ-R) have proposed legislation intended to keep sexual predators off of social networking sites like MySpace.

…require registered sex offenders to submit their active email addresses to law enforcement.

The legislation would enable social networking sites like MySpace to cross-check new members against a database of registered sex offenders and ensure that predators are unable to sign up for the service.

Under the proposed legislation, any sex offender who submits a fraudulent email could face prison.

Okay, we all know this isn’t going to work. If the pervs really want accounts on MySpace to prey on children, they’re going to get them.

They’re only going to get in trouble IF they get caught and they usually only get caught AFTER they’ve done something criminal.

I suppose it’s nice that there will be more/new reasons to tack on additional years of incarceration, but that’s really all this is going to accomplish. There’s no way this plan is really going to keep registered sex offenders off of MySpace.

So why are they even bothering with this stupid proposal? Well, it’s the start of the 2008 election cycle… and we all know McCain has his eye on the White House. (I’ll have to check to see if Chucky is up for re-election in 08).

Beyond the obvious “I care about the children!” campaign reasons, this bill (if passed) would be a HUGE gift to MySpace and other social networking sites; not because it’s actually going to keep the pedos away from the sites, but because it gives them something with which they may cover their butts.

If this becomes a law, the suggestion that sex offenders are stalking children on MySpace will be met with, “Oh no they aren’t! We’re complying with this federal law so we’re doing everything we can to keep the predators off of our network. We’re doing EXACTLY what the law says we have to do. See?” Thus removing the “but you aren’t doing enough (or anything that actually works)” argument from the arsenal of critics and potential litigants.

I’m hoping the whole idea just sort of falls by the way side and never moves any further, but if there’s a lot of NewsCorp money pushing it, it might very well become one more useless law.

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