New Hampshire Real Estate & Consumer Resources

Archive for April, 2006

Advertising on the Internet is a fact of life. Just like with television, newspapers and magazines, advertising pays the bills or at least helps pay the bills.

Before I had my own web site and saw the view from this side of the fence, I had always hated ads on web sites. At one time I even used an old program called Proxomitron that added many useful features to the web browsing experience — not the least of which was blocking ads.

Now that I have a few web sites of my own, I see that ads on web sites do not have to be a bad thing. The advertising I have on my sites pays my web hosting fees and even leaves me a little extra cash every month. Having clicked on a few ads myself, I now think that advertising on the net is a good thing.

I will however qualify that statement with a very important condition: If it is done right. And by “right,” I mean ads that are done tastefully and aren’t jumping, flashing, vibrating or popping open new windows in my face. I’ve always hated pop-up ads and I still hate them to this day and I do not use them on any of my sites. Period.

There is one ad, however, that I loathe even more than the pop-up ad. And that ad is the ad that uses sound of any kind! There is no place in Internet advertising for ads with sounds that shatter a web surfers otherwise peaceful experience with some obnoxious music or sales pitch.

I was just reminded how much I hate ads with sound when I visited the Yahoo! site to check my local TV listings. Yahoo has excellent television listings and I normally check them each night to see what’s on the tube.

This evening my otherwise pleasurable visit to the Yahoo! television listings was decidedly more unpleasant than usual due to an obnoxious Flash ad that was accompanied by sound. At the bottom of the ad were buttons that allowed one to stop, pause or play, much like the controls on a DVD player. That little effort fell far short of easing my displeasure with having sound suddenly and unexpectedly usher forth from my speakers however.

It was then I decided it had to stop. As a recent Firefox convert, I decided to go in search of an extension that would put a stop to obnoxious ads on web sites that I visit. The greatest thing about the Firefox browser it its ability to accept user-written extension which can add wonderfully useful features to the program. If you have not tried Firefox, I strongly urge you to check it out. I was a dedicated Internet Explorer snob for a long time and once I tried Firefox I was hooked.

Sure enough, there is an extension for Firefox called FlashBlock and it does pretty much what is says. When it encounters a web site that has Flash content, it replaces the actual Flash content with a little “play” button that allows you to decide whether you want the Flash displayed or not. So far, it seems to work just as intended and I shall use it from now on.

It does not block any non-Flash ads so I still see all the normal text ads and any other ads that don’t use Flash. I know there are Flash ads that do not use sound, and I did not want to block all Flash ads, but that is what I will do in order to put a stop to those who misuse Flash ads. As usual, the idiots ruin it for everyone else.

The FlashBlock extension does allow whitelisting, which means you can exclude well-behaved sites from the blocking function and still see the Flash adson those sites play automatically.

I understand the need for many web sites to generate income, and as I previously pointed out, I do it myself! I also do not assault my visitors’ senses with obnoxious advertising, especially sound! Like almost anything else, it can be done tastefully and without letting greed exercise too much influence over it.

If you are interested in the FlashBlock extension for Firefox, you can find it here.

There seems to be an almost limitless supply of “investment advisors” sending me e-mail lately.

I am seeing these penny stock spam-scam messages seem to be arriving more frequently and the losers that are trying to pump up GAPJ stock must be getting worried since the stock is has just been floundering around and doing nothing.

I hope these GAPJ pumpers are stuck with a boatload of that stock and they lose their shirts.

Here’s the latest penny stock spam messages starting with the much-pumped GAPJ:

The stock spam-scam messages are continuing at a pace I have not seen for quite a while.

The losers sending out the GAPJ “alerts” must be getting quite desperate since I am receiving them almost daily and the stock continues to do nothing except hold or drop a little. I hope they lose their shirts!

Other “alerts” recently received here include EXTI and KDNG. All of this action sure must be keeping these “investment advisors” very busy lately:

Here are the latest two pump-and-dump stock scam e-mail mesages I have received.

The first is for a company called Phinder Technologies, Inc. (PHDTF). I happened to check the chart to see just how hard this stock ran Monday (yesterday), and was very surprised (NOT!) to see that the only direction it ran in was down. It opened around 35 cents, dropped for a while to 31 cents and then closed back where it started at 35 cents. Wow! What a run!

Looks like the losers who spammed out the above garbage should have picked this stock up back around March 7 just before it ran from 19 cents to almost 45 cents. What’s the matter spamming losers, did you miss the boat?

The next one is a company called Peopleline, Inc (PLLN). They don’t talk too specifically about when this one will go, but the fact that they issuing a “Strong Buy Recommendation” is enough for me (Ha!).

I get a kick out of all the little tricks these weasels use to get you to open up their spam. This one put the first half of my e-mail address in the “Subject”. Little do they know that I look forward to receiving their garbage so I can post it here.

Even though I did not see a great deal of action during my time spent as a real estate agent, the few customers I had dealt with were just a pain.

It seems like people were either cancelling their appointments, not showing up for appointments or changing their minds about that it was that they really wanted.

From what I observed, these things are all pretty normal in the real estate business. People buying or selling real estate can often be uncertain about what they really want and can change their minds frequently and that is probably quite normal when such big decisions are involved. A few examples from my brief time spent as a real estate agent:

All of the people I mention here didn’t really do anything wrong and I have no reason to think they are not perfectly nice, well-adjusted normal human beings. It isn’t difficult however, to feel somewhat put upon or perhaps even ‘used’ as a real estate agent since that is the nature of the business.

Alas, another area where I would not do so well.

I should also point out that never did I have a harsh word for any customer or potential customer or even any of the agents I worked with during my time as an agent. Sure, there were people I ran into that I did not care for much, and that’s a normal part of any job, or, life in general.

Overall, I was fortunate to have a very good group of agents in the office I worked in. Sure, as you would expect, there were some that I liked more than others and even two or three I really didn’t care for much at all, but I never had any bad experiences with anyone in the office.

My very first dealings with real customers was a bit of a turn-off. As luck would have it, they were interested in finding a rental unit. As you might suspect, an agent does not make much money with a rental deal, but they were my first customers and I was ready to do all I could for them.

The were a young couple ‘ married or engaged, I cannot recall which ‘ and I took them out on a cold winter morning. If I recall correctly, I had three properties to show them.

They were somewhat pressed for time since one of them had to head to work right after we viewed the properties. For whatever reason, they arrived in separate vehicles and insisted on each driving their own vehicle and following me. This wasn’t what I had envisioned but it all worked out reasonably well.

What bothered them about me right away was that they didn’t seem terrible friendly and even seemed a little disinterested in the whole process. They certainly did not strike me as being too enthusiastic about locating their new home. Maybe they had a fight that morning or something, who knows? Whatever the reason, it did not make me terribly comfortable.

I had initially talked to the woman on the phone after being given the lead from another one of the agents in the office after the woman had visited my website. Yeah, I know, go figure. Apparently, when she called the office initially, she did not ask for me by name and became ‘fair game’ for whoever was on duty at the time. Being a rental, the other agent probably did not have much interest and decided to offer the lead to me since the woman had called as a result of visiting my web page.

I had talked to her a few times on the telephone and she had seemed quite friendly and personable. I wondered what had happened to change her attitude between the time we talked on the phone and the time I met her in the office.

Despite my concerns about locating these properties in areas that were not terribly familiar to me, we pulled up in front of the first property without delay. That one turned out to be in pretty rough shape and not at all what they were looking for.

The second property was also easily located but that is where my luck ran out. The high-tech lock-box devices that are used these days usually work pretty well. Each agent has their own electronic keypad and code that is used to open the lock-boxes and obtain the key to the house.

On this particular cold winter day, the lock-box did not appear to be working as intended. After attaching the keypad and entering my code numerous times, the box refused to open. I could hear the little motor inside the unit and it sounded as if it were trying to do something but to no avail. It was either frozen shut from the cold, or not closed properly by the last person who has used it. If you are not careful, it was possible to jam the key in the little drawer as you were closing it and make it almost impossible to open again.

I called our office administrator on my cell phone to see if she, or someone else in the office, could offer any tips on opening the unruly device, but there really wasn’t anything else that I could do. I told the customers we would have to re-schedule since there was just no way to get into the place and being pressed for time, they could not hang around and wait to see if we could get someone from the listing office to come out with a key.

The customers has decided that they had seen enough that day and headed off to work. I was actually happy to see them go. It was good to be done with the stuck lock-box incident and since I was not all that fond of dealing with people who were so cheery, I rather hoped I did not see them again.

I heard from her a week or so later and she told me she had located a place and she thanked me for my help. Frankly, I was glad to be rid of her. Not a good sign.

Coming Next: Part 2??