Matt Silverman

In these tough economic times, even Craigslist scammers are not as creative as they once were.  Every time I post something on Craigslist, I get at least 1-2 scam replies offering to pay with a [fake] money order.  When trying to sell my bike, this most recent scammer sent me a pre-fabricated scam e-mail, and did not even bother to distiguish his craigslist scam from his eBay scam.

Come on!  You think I am going to send you a bicycle in the mail, trusting your paypal echeck or money order, when you cannot even confirm if this is an auction or a craigslist ad?  I’m not going to give up my “firm prize” that easily.

Today marks our official launch of DrudgeFeed.com, a very simple, yet accurate, Drudge Report RSS Feed.  DrudgeFeed crawls DrudgeReport.com every 3 minutes, scrapes the links and link text, and throws it into a database.  It only picks up new links, and we are able to assign a timestamp to each link in order to throw it into the feed.  We then generate an XML feed from the DB.  I have not publicized it too much, but in the last few days since launching, it already has around 50 subscribers.

I sent Matt Drudge to get feedback on DrudgeFeed, but no response as of yet.  There are a few other sites that claim to have a Drudge RSS feed, but so far, I have not seen one more accurate than DrudgeFeed.

If you have any ideas on how to improve it, let me know.  If you are new to RSS feeds, check out Google Reader.

Ping.fm is down.

Ping.fm, my favorite aggregation service for facebook/twitter/status updates, seems to be having domain name problems with GoDaddy.  Just helping to relay the message. Hopefully they get it up soon.  I would think that Godaddy could at least remove that hideous ad page from resolving on Ping.fm in the mean time.

Official Message from Ping.fm staff:

“Just to set everyone at ease, we are simply waiting on GoDaddy to update their end so that this mess becomes history. I’ve been in direct contact with them. Actually, the office of the President of GoDaddy called me personally ensuring that they are working on this with a high priority.

Everyone can do us a favor by just spreading the word that everything in power is being done to correct this. And be known that we aren’t going anywhere. This isn’t us leaving, nor shutting down. This is a problem that has come between service provider and client. It’s unfortunate, but it happens.

This should all go away any time now.

Thanks for your continued support through some wrenches in the system. Keep on pingin! (Bots still work.)”

Is this legal?

Just came across instructions on how to make bacon cups.  So many possibilities.

Golden Oolong Tea 12-Pack

Description of Oolong Tea:

“The raw leaves are sun-wilted and then bruised, which exposes their juices to the air, so the leaves oxidise and start to turn brown like a cut fruit. They are allowed to oxidise only partially, giving them a rich, floral flavour. The tea is then dried fully; locking in the rich flavors that oolong tea is known to offer. Oolong’s unique drying process creates a tea that has many metabolic stimulating attributes.” [Source]

Tea has now replaced coffee and espresso in my diet.  My favorite variety happens to be the Golden Oolong made by Teas’ Tea.  I order it from Amazon via Amazon Prime, and it ends up being roughly $2.00 per bottle delivered.  Equal to the cost of a cup of coffee, half the cost of an espresso drink.

Reasons I like Golden Oolong:

• Unsweetened
• Smooth taste, not bitter
• 1/3 the caffeine in coffee

Amazon ships boxes of Golden Oolong in packs of 12 bottles.  Shipping is free if you have Amazon Prime, and free if your order is $25 or over.  I’m not sure how long they can afford to keep shipping 15lb boxes of tea, but until they raise the price, I will keep ordering.