So as some of you may know, I decided to go back to school to get another degree. So, I look check out what everyone’s offering, and how much classes are, etc. I decide on Everest Institute. Small classes, hands on – great. I originally planned on starting in early May, but was forced to postpone as we had multiple sites that needed to be built. So now it’s July, and classes start next week, but as I’m going through everything, I notice that there’s nothing to do with back-end website development.

Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I think of developing a website, the first thing that pops into my head is “How many SQL tables will it need, and what needs to go in them”. I work in *nix environments, so the whole “does it need to be ASP or PHP compatible” thing doesn’t really cross my mind. Pretty much, I’d be paying to learn a bunch of front-end bullshit that I don’t even do anyways.. Just friggin’ stupendous…

Seriously though.. $30,000 for a fucking degree, and you can’t even bother to teach the students back-end? Do they expect them to simply go get hired to do front-end bullshit? You would be jobless until you had atleast 10 outragiously styled websites under your belt (And not your own personal shit either. You better plan on doing some serious freelance work in just html, css and javascript – Because that’s all you’re going to fucking learn here). You won’t be able to realize that arraying with php is better than filling an html doc with 1,000 lines of code because you need a dozen of the same dividers on a page.

Oh no, you won’t be able to enjoy PHP, SQL or Perl. And why you ask? Who the fuck knows. They only offer two “Programmer” type courses. But I guess, you get what you pay for, eh? $30,000 may sound like a lot to you and I, but when you put it next to say – $100,000, not so big anymore, right? But then again, you learn everything for that $100,000.

I don’t think I’ll be attending this institution for a degree. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll create a sort of degree myself. Maybe name it the ‘I got this piece of paper for free’ degree. E-Book’s don’t cost a penny, and I have thousands on disc. I’ll update via this blog, or maybe just create an entirely new site devoted to free higher education. Come to think of it, guy we sponsor for the newsletter (Brandon) is starting something like that. Maybe I’ll ask him if he wants to partner up on it.. Stay tuned!

I’m supposed to go to Everest to pick up my books this Saturday, not sure if I’ll be there, but I’ll definitely be in there eventually to cancel my enrollment (If they won’t do it over the phone).

Until next time.

-Nito

There’s not many non-profit’s out there that catch our eye, but when we saw this one, we had to jump onboard. Brandon over at Soap Box Included is starting a free weekly newsletter that will run 12 weeks starting next week.

The newsletter will give advice on how to manage and pay off your student debt, as well as links to a weekly spotlight scholarship that you may be eligable for and available jobs. This is ofcourse, one of the biggest economical issues facing us right now. Millions of students and graduates, stuck under thousands of dollars in school loans.

We’re proud to sponsor this newsletter, and hope that all of our subscribers along with anyone else who reads our blog(s) will support it. You can check out the website here.

-Nito

A couple of my friends asked me if there’s anything they can do to deal with all the bullshit soliciters they get via phone calls. As a matter of fact, there is, and it’s not even that hard to do. As long as you’re legitimatelly pissed over the call, or are good at acting, there’s a way to deal with them.

Now, I’m not sure about all the phone scams, but I know about the biggest one out right now. It has to do with an extended warranty expiring on your car. I got this a couple times, most of the time I was sleeping when my phone rang (I’m a night owl), so I wasn’t coherent when I picked it up. But then they decided to call me around 9pm one night, and boy did I have fun with them =D.

So what I did was just wait until the message got to the end, and it tell you that you can press 1 to speak with a live rep (Most of them will allow you to go to a live rep) and some guy comes on the phone. He says a few words, and I listen, making sure to read into his tone, accent and what-not. So now I know, the guy’s either black or a mutt (Yeah, yeah.. I’m not one for the whole politically correct crap), he has an attitude (He talks with that ‘slang’ in his words) and he’s tired (low cracky voice).

As soon as he stops talking I start going off – this is essential. If you call up, and you politely talk to them, they will continue to call you. Now from here, I obviously want to get transferred to someone in a higher position, so while going off I slip in the words your supervisor, and after about two minutes I’m now on the phone with someone who says they’re the supervisor. Now that I’m here, I go off again, and then… I drop the bomb that rattles all companies – The Better Business Bureu. I learned that trick while I was in the Army. If something’s legally fucked up, and they won’t fix it and you drop the words “Lawyer” and “Better Business Bureu”, they start to listen.

Again, I’m not sure how every phone scam works, but this is what works for me when I get them, and after I do what I wrote in here… I’m forever off their list.

Until next time…

-Nito

I ran across this post from one of my followers on Twitter about how Facebook is scamming advertisers out of thousands of dollars with fraudulent clicks.. Advertisers are reporting 10:1 ratios, which pretty much means, for every 10 clicks, 1 is legit or actually recorded outside of Facebook. What a fucking piece of shit company.

See, there’s some times you need to keep some of your shit to yourself. If Facebook hadn’t opened their network to so many fucking developers, but instead charged them propietary fees to post their app’s and shit they wouldn’t need to pull stupid ass stunts like this. But then again, we’re talking about yet another online media community, which means that they’re nothing more than some money hungry suit wearing corporate douches.

In my honest opinion, advertising on Facebook to begin with is a fail. Sure, maybe you get a few legit clicks, but that fucking site is riddled with thousands of bot’s, which means that most of the clicks you get won’t be worth shit anyways. The advertising worth on that site is less than the towel I use to blow my nose with.

So for all you little investors, put your cash into other sites. You wanna get some cheap ass advertising, that’s going to get you a nice amount of clicks? You can go to Today.com or look for personally owned blogs with a couple hundred posts and a decent amount of subscribers. Send the owner an email, and make an offer.. I’m sure it wouldn’t have to be too big, since they probably don’t make cash outside of Google’s AdSense or some other low level advertising.

That’s it for now..

-Nito

I look at my email, and see an email from a company I don’t do business with. So I open it up and read it, and see what i already know to be a scam. Below is the contents of the email…

Dear [email address],

Your account is locked for outgoing transfers and credit/debit card payments therefore we cannot complete this transaction.

To unlock your account, you must restore your account. Please visit unlock.moneybookers.com and submin your information..

Thank you for choosing Moneybookers!

*******************************

Moneybookers Ltd., London, Registered in England and Wales no 4260907.
Registered office: Welken House, 10-11 Charterhouse Square, London, EC1M 6EH, United Kingdom.
Authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority of the United Kingdom (FSA).

So I go over the hyperlink (unlock.moneybookers), which says something completely different. So, I copy the link, and throw it into a safe-mode browser, and go there. As soon as I hit enter it redirects me to another site (agsoftware.ca) where they (I guess) attempted to clone the MoneyBookers site, except for the fact that all the links were set for that site. So, I go to the direct agsoftware website, and find it’s just a blank page (Obviously by now, if someone hasn’t caught on, they’re complete idiots).

So I document everything (links, email content, headers, etc.) and start writing an email to the actual MoneyBookers company, which can be found below…

Hello,

I’m sending this email to give your company a heads up, in case you hadn’t already been
aware. If this is actually sent from your company, I sincerely apologize, but you could
see the cause for concern with the URI redirects, and misuse of non-localized websites.

I recently received an email stating that my account was locked, and a transaction could
not be completed until I followed the enclosed link and unlocked it.

I have attached the email in .txt format, with the corresponding URI’s from each step in
their scam.

Have a great day.

Regards,

Nito

So, hopefully they can get that taken care of, before anyone actually starts handing out their information to the scam site, which could potentially ruin that company. Can’t trust a company that can’t keep its customers safe.

Anyways, if you get an email from MoneyBookers.Com, saying anything close to what’s in this blog, do NOT follow the link and put your login information in.

[EDIT]

I just got an email back from the actual MoneyBookers company:

Dear [Name],

Thank you for notifying us. This is a phishing attack against our website and we are already investigating the issue.

Best regards,
Moneybookers Security

Until next time,

Nito

So, I ordered a Cricket Broadband modem from these guys about a month back. It gets here a about a week later, and I’m happy, because now I have a wireless modem to use when we get the stupid freak power outages around here. So I toss it into one of my USB drives to give it a go, install the software and connect.

Ok, so this is where this becomes a rant, and I go off on this company..

Well, the wireless modem itself is nice, I suppose. Black and green, and it’s got the neon blue bars to indicate wifi strength. So mine stays in the one bar (For the most part), which obviously means I have a shitty ass connection (Now remember, I live in the heart of the city – about a 10 minute walk from downtown). So I open FireFox to see how fast it work. Oh man.. I sat there for about 10 minutes waiting for Google to load. Now, if anyone reg’s Google, they’ll know that all it is is a blank white page with a couple of images and a text box, so wtf?! Yeah, so I disconnect and take it out.

A few days go by and the power goes out on our block again and I load it up on my laptop because I had work to do. Again, one to no bar. What a piece of shit… All in all I used the thing 3 times, racking up around 45MB of use (I wrote a little program to convert bytes into megabytes and so on, as the log only shows you in bytes, and who the fuck would want to convert that themselves?!).

Now, I hate their software with a passion. They activate the internet gateway option in your network panel (for those of you who have this, and may have been like how the fuck do I get back on the net I already have?!), which now restricts you from using any other connection method other than Cricket. Yeah, shitty software to go with their shitty service and shitty hardware – who’d of thunk it… So I unistall their software, and then have to go in and deactivate the internet gateway, reset the wireless connection I had prior to purchasing their piece of shit hardware.. It’s just a fucking hassle.

So, the month goes on, and now it’s today. I do my daily bank account check and find that $46 has been deducted to pay Cricket for a service I haven’t used. So, I call them. Now, I pressed 3 in the Cricket Broadband menu, signifying that I required help, but of course – an automated service asking me for the number I no longer have because I removed the shitty ass software from my pc. So after the third time of the service asking me for my number, you’d think MAYBE they’d send you to a help desk? WRONG! “Sorry, maybe you should try again later when you’re ready.” *click* You get disconnected. Oh grand, so now I’m not only pissed that I got charged for something I didn’t use, I got hungup on by a fucking robot…

So I call them back, and this time I press 2, signifying that I want to activate a new modem (of course their call service would be as shitty as the rest of it, right?) and I get a customer rep (about fucking time). So I give them my info and start asking them about a refund and cancellation. Blah blah blah. She says you get billed $1.36 per day no matter what, and that the deduction was a prepay? Where in the fine print was all this?! And when did I sign up for automatic payments? So now I’m going back to my pissed off German roots, and I start going off on her about the legalities of the ordering system and what-not. I continually ask to be refunded and cancelled, she continues to dodge it all. Finally I get pissed off and just start going off on her, and she says “I’m trying to keep this professional, but if you continue I’ll have to…” *click* I hang up on her ass. Yeah, because that’s what I want to fucking hear, right? Just give me the fucking refund and cancellation like I originally asked and there wouldn’t be a fucking problem. Honestly, how fucking hard is that to comprehend? I didn’t click the spanish button, right? We’re both speaking English? Refund and cancel, not hard to understand.

Bah, anyways.. I wouldn’t recommend this company to anyone I know. It’s complete bullshit from start to end. I think the only thing they have that actually works decent, is the payment process, although I don’t remember ever signing up for those automatic payments, nor was there any contract stating that I would be charged that fee per day. In fact, their main selling point is that there’s no contract, and you pay as you go. I actually plan on calling them back in a few minutes again, after I check my bank account just to make sure they’re refunding me. We’ll see how that one goes. =)

I called them back, but it seems my number got blacklisted (Can get customer rep on my girlfriends phone though), and goes straight to automated services no matter which selection I choose. So I google cricket communications and get another number to call, which I do. Guy tells me that Cricket doesn’t refund period, and in order to cancel your account, you just don’t pay? Yeah, because that’s not a credit conflict or anything…

So I end up calling my bank, having to cancel my current card so that I can’t be billed anymore (I don’t have access to the cricket account on the website unless I reinstall their software and get the phone number ***igned to me by connecting, which would then say I used the account in this billing month – nice right…). Anyways, I transfer to the payment dispute dept. of my bank, and we go through all the legalities of this and what-not. So I have to wait until the payment is completed to dispute it. Another three days at the most to file the claim, and hopefully I can get the money back.

This company’s a waste of money and time. How on earth can a multi-billion dollar corporation not do refunds? Maybe it’s due to the fact that they receive thousands of complaints a year about their services and the hardware that they supply.