Call me naive.
Never mind, I'll do it myself; it doesn't hurt quite so much if I castigate myself for being a little slow on the up-take, even though all the clues were there to follow.
It would be more appropriate to say half-naive, if there is such a thing, because for quite a while I've noticed that whenever I Google something I get spammed a lot.
Like most everyone's, my email server comes with spam protection and pop-up blockers, which work pretty well most of the time. Ninety-nine percent of the garbage emails by-pass me totally. Only occasionally is there a message telling me I might want to check out a suspicious email and declare it alive or dead on arrival.
I should have known, but I didn't realize that the rumors that Google scans my email [and yours] every time I hit them up for a "free" piece of vital info I need for something I'm writing just might be true.
Silly me. I thought the only thing my email had to fear was George Bush himself.
So, the price I have to pay for "free" Google is getting spammed. I'll get to the other money-making genius who figured out how to get us to "pay" him to bombard us with ads in a minute.
If I can't trust Google, who can I trust. No one but myself. It's been about three years since I Googled myself, so I took a time out to do it.
The last time, even after all the stories I wrote for a local paper and as an editor, I thought there might be something...one little thing about "moi" in there. Nothing. Gournished. Zilch. All I got was 14,417,008 links to rock quarries, gravel pits, every silicate imaginable, and every podunk town with the world with "sand" in its name.
Now that my curiosity got the better of me, I Goggled my name again. I suppose now that I've done that, I'll be sandbagged with dump trucks full of spam telling me which are the best beaches to visit, or the best maps to guide me to Fred Flintstone's rock quarry.
Omigawd! This time, thanks to OpedNews, I found myself on Pages 2 and 5 of the 14 million links, although it was a bit of an ego buster.
After all, I put in my own name; I'd have thought I'd be on Page 1!
After skimming through five pages of guides to Sandy Hook, New Jersey; Sandy City, Utah; Sandy Foot, Somewhere U.S.A; Sandy-Indie Rock the Hills, North of Philly; and my favorite...Sandy Shoals, islands off the coast of England, and every sandy beach in the world, I got bored and came back to this, and the bright entrepreneur who already has more money than god and wants more.
Being launched today is something called "Pudding" something-or-other.com -- you search for it -- I don't want this guy to know I exist. Vindictive me, I hope his bubble bursts and he goes bust before his new enterprise has a chance to get off the ground.
Here's his deal and how he wants us to "pay" for it. It's also rumored that he's doing this to cut into Google's share of the ad revenue pie. Free Internet telephone service in exchange for you having the privilege of being accosted with ads, because your phone calls are being scanned for key words that signal the computer that you just might be interested in buying condoms, just because you spoke the words: I really "tire" of this nonsense.
Computerese logic? Tires are made of rubber, ergo buy rubbers.
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