It has been in my plans for a few months now to buy a Nintendo Wii for the house. Dylan has always had fun while playing it at friends houses and I have to admit it is fun even as an adult. Yesterday I went out and bought the Wii which of course led to buying accessories and games for it as well. My fiance Claire wanted the Wii Fit which is a board you can use to play games but also as a fitness tool. I added that to the list along with a couple games and the Wii Fit Personal Trainer game. In the end everything came to a total close to $600 which added up really quick.
The first thing Dylan did when he got home was to play the Wii. He choose some kid games and while watching him play I thought they were ok but not great. I had bought the snowboarding game and wanted to give it a shot. I do have to admit that using the Wii Fit to snowboard was a new experience for me. I have not been snowboarding in years but used to go all the time when I lived in Vermont. Snowboarding on the Wii Fit takes some getting used to as when you put more weight on your heels or the balls of your feet by your toes it makes you turn. It does take a moment to get used to it but after a short period of time I was able to control the character.
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With any scam you are going to see failure however your job as a scammer is to at-least keep your website up and working. If you click on the image to the left it should show a larger version. This is a screenshot of the Vuulu.com homepage at the time of this writing. You can see that it is not showing any products listed. Where did they all go? Were they all won by the auto bidding bots? Did the owner just forget to add more products and everything ran out of time? The answer to this is REALLY simple.. WHO CARES? They are on a venture to scam anyone and everyone they can, stay far far away from these guys. Blog about this scam and get the word out. Let everyone you know in on this little secret fact.
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Yesterday I wrote a post about how vuulu.com was a scam site and how it is the spawn of a site that I had previously written about called Bid4That. Today I am writing to confirm that I verified the death threat comment in the email that I had received from an informant. I got the verification yesterday through Twitter from Christian Owens, you can see for yourself by checking this Twitter Page.
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Before I begin I have to say that I have not verified any of this. However I received an email yesterday from an informant who wanted to let me know that Bid4That.net is now Vuulu.com. She wrote to me because when she went to Google.com and searched for Bid4That my site came up first before any of the press releases etc.
I would hate to see this site back up and running because if you have been following anything I have covered in the past about Bid4That you will know that they were around for a few days just to scam people out of their hard earned money. As I mentioned before I have not done any domain whois or traceroutes or anything to validate this claim however it would not surprise me that they are under the same ownership. Continue reading to see the email in it’s entirety from the informant.
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I have been doing nothing more than interviewing the last few weeks. The interviews have all been set-up by technology recruiters for the most part. I am finding that I am being sent to interview for jobs that are not under my skill-set for the most part. For instance I interviewed with a company who told me the position was a front end developer position. I could have completed the tasks required for this position however when I was on the call I was asked only one question about front-end development.
Have you ever used the Blueprint CSS Framework?
I had never heard of this nor had I heard of a CSS Framework. Really all CSS is are definitions so a framework struck me as odd. I was also interviewed by a Java Developer who said our backgrounds have nothing in common so he was not sure what to ask me for questions. This is when I went over my background and what I had been working on.
My question for my readers is this. Since most interviews are not asking technical questions, how can I probe for them to show the Interviewer that I have the knowledge necessary for the position? What are your thoughts and what have your experiences been?
Over the last few weeks I have had potential employers ask to see a code sample. I have not had any recent code that I could share and out of all the code samples I have written the one that got the most inquiries was the YellowPages Content Grabber. This code does not work any longer however. The code is using curl to scrape the HTML and extract the content from the site. I created this a long time ago when I was creating a “local” list of businesses which I could contact to offer my services.
Starting today I am going to completely revamp the code and also fix the regular expressions so that they will actually grab content. I am going to add a front-end to the code so that you do not have to alter code and run this manually from the browser by altering the query string in the URL.
I have started on this today and will be working on it heavily over the next few days until it is completed. At this point I have finalized the fetching of categories and storing them in the database. Now because this code is just for sample code which I will probably turn into an article on this site I am not going to use any special database abstraction layer. I am going to keep it simple and just use the php mysql_* functions.
Stay tuned for more information if you are interested in a complete rewrite of the code I linked to above.
Last week I was contacted by First Financial USA, they said that they had found my resume on a website like Monster.com (this is very true as I am seeking work) and that they had a position for me. They wanted me to attend a conference call where everything would be explained however this is what they stated in the initial contact.
Your resume came to our attention recently and your background appears to match other highly successful members of our team who are motivated to build a career over the next 3-4 years.
FFUSA is an 12 year old financial services firm specializing in payment processing services for retail and medical merchants. Currently FFUSA serves thousands of merchants with over 100 sales professionals nationwide.
You owe it to yourself to take a few minutes exploring the FFUSA site to find out more about this unique career opportunity. We are looking for a limited number of sales professionals to add to our growing team.
Click here and you will be directed to a website that gives you more detail about the position and an opportunity to schedule a time to ask questions.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Melinda Hanson
FFUSA Human Resources Representative
805 Meander Ct
Medina, MN 55340
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Over the last few weeks I have been applying all over for Web Developer positions here in the Boston area. I have been telling everyone that I am a beginner with CSS / JavaScript however I think I have been selling myself short. I decided to take the W3Schools CSS Quiz just to see how much I know off the top of my head. I found the quiz to be easy but I never figured I would make it through 20 questions in 3 minutes 34 seconds and get them all correct. I know that the W3Schools quiz is just a simple one so that you can see how much you know and is not actually a test of skill. While I still have quite a bit to learn I think I have been stating that I know less than I do and well that is not a good thing when it comes to trying to find a job. I have been trying to be honest however I have been lying to myself. I know more about CSS than I thought. I also did a lot of reading today from a sitepoint book I have and most of the stuff I understoood.
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Over the last few days I have been digging deep into the concepts of REST. I have been reading through my copy of RESTful Web Services. Out of curiosity I searched Google for a “php REST library” and it turned up the Official MySpace PHP REST Library.
I started to look through the code and noticed something really weird about how the code is structured. It looks like they are trying to use an Object Oriented approach however I think they are going about things improperly. The code looks a lot like the following.
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As some of you might have noticed I have removed my resume page from my site. It started to become too much to keep altering the resume page on top of my word version. Instead what I am doing is offering a PDF version and a Word version.
