Don’t know how things work in other parts of the world, but my dear Romanian friends are bugging me 24/7 with stupid Mass Messages over Yahoo! Messenger. It can be so annoying to see a window pop up from nowhere with a stupid message in it. I have a popup blocker for Firefox. Someone should invent one for Yahoo! Messenger too.
The messages I lately get can be categorized like this:
1. Advertising own blog! This one gets on my mind. Especially if the person advertises a blog at least 5-10 times a day using Mass Messaging, but the blog was not updated in days. At first I open the page on every ad. After doing this a few times and seeing no new content, I ignore the ad. Than, getting bored of the ad messages I instantly close the window and maybe even set the user to IGNORED!
2. Advertising an online radio! I have 2-3 contacts on my contact list that have an online radio and keep advertising it. One of the ads are a simple “playing now on my radio station URL” and the other one is “if you don’t listen to this station I’m gonna delete you from my contact list”. The first one is acceptable, but annoying. If you want to advertise you radio and show everyone that you play very cool tracks, just get yourself an application that changes your Yahoo! Messenger status to the track you play and set an URL that gets you to the radio station’s page. The second type is really stupid for a type of advertising. Especially that it comes from a girl that I think most of the people keeps in their contact list as a sexual fantasy resource while mast*** and if that is the kind of people that are listening to the radio station I’d better go watch CNN on TV.
3. Messages trying to promote humanitarian sites! “Go to this site and sign a petition for this and that”! Everything is ok with this accept the site is full of ads. I would say that is ok too as long as they are covering, let’s say domain name and hosting expenses. But when the site is hosted on a free host with a free subdomain provided by the hoster, I can’t see other reason for those ads than making money out of a good cause!
4. Yahoo! is closing down! Oh, this is my favorite! I’ve got at least 1000 messages like this in which more than 100 presidents of the Yahoo! company say that they will delete all unused accounts and the only way to keep your account alive is to send the message to all your contacts. I wonder if these people are really believing what they forward, or just do it for bugging others.
5. You will die! Now these are very interesting. There are hundreds of stories, hundreds of outcomes for you but in the end it always gets you dead or having at least 7 years without any luck if you don`t send the message to at least 10 if not all your contacts. Never have sent one and am still alive.
6. You are a coward! This one I hate the most! “To prove you are not a coward, forward this message to all your friends adding your ID at the end of the message!” At least it is a good way to see which IDs you need to set as IGNORED to shorten the list of stupid messages.
I guess that’s about all. Looking forward to hear your messages!
with all the respect, Greyheart
I know I am a little late for giving you my best wishes for Christmas, but hey, better later than never right? So, here is Christmas, the happiest few days of the year. Families united under the Christmas tree, giving and getting presents, smiling, talking, hugging, kissing. Love is all around. Kids awaiting Santa, parents forgetting about the usual problems, friends forgetting about yesterday’s fights. Wonderful isn’t it?
I hate Christmas! Why? Because the Christmas feeling described by me is pure theory. Christmas is nothing more than a reason for the people to spend their money on gifts, for the companies to spend money on campaigns, for the youth to get drunk. The whole “getting together under the tree” thing takes just a few seconds until the “giving and getting” session is over, than everybody goes in his room or gets out with some friends to have a few drinks because “it’s Christmas”.
I hate Christmas! Why? Because my company sells computers. So? Don’t know how it works in other countries, but here, in Romania, people spend about 10 times more money on tech than in other periods of the year. A new computer for the kiddo, a new laptop for me, a new printer for the office and a new LCD for my wife. Wonderful. This means more work for me leading to headaches and bad attitude when I get home.
Never mind my bad thoughts about Christmas, hope you all have a real nice one as close as described in the first few rows as possible.
All my love, Greyheart
I hate today. I felt like shit all day. My tong hurts badly, don’t exactly know why so I could hardly speak today on the phone (speaking all day long on the phone with customers being part of my job). Than, I had to help out my colleagues to unload the truck full of merchandise and of course I catched a terrible cold, now sitting in front of my laptop with at least 38 degrees fever. And this is not the worst part.
Yesterday my best friend came home from Bucharest. I haven’t seen him in months and we were planning to go out tonight. We said we would go to a Karaoke bar to have some beer and sing something but in this conditions I cannot go out, cannot drink and definitely can’t sing. Too bad. Not to mention I can’t even kiss my girlfriend as that hurts too!
But maybe tomorrow I’ll feel better and I’ll go out have some beers and dance. No singing tomorrow as there is no karaoke party anyway on Saturdays here. But maybe we will have a few beers more than we can take and we’ll sing anyway, karaoke or not!
Have a pleasant weekend everyone!
With love, Greyheart
I was looking at this template today and I realized I like it some much, I cannot ruin it’s design by putting ads all over it. So I decided to remove existing AdSense codes and leave just the partners banner for the Bloggers Oradea community. Still, I have to make some money out of ads and good money comes with lots of content. And how the hell was I gonna get me lots of content? Yesterday, while talking to an old friend of mine he showed me a little plugin for wordpress that allows you to automatically create posts from the headlines it reads through RSS. I have already noticed lots of sites like this, but they were a little bit boring, with no subject, just some random RSS feeds found around the web. If you want to make yourself a blog like that just to earn money you should select a keyword that is well quoted and than select feeds from the sites that have posts with that specific keyword. This way, your content will get higher in the search results on Google for that keyword, thus bringing you more visitors, thus making you more money from ads.
I decided to give it a try and install that plugin (feedwordpress 0.991) on an existing wordpress installation on one of my domains I don’t really use. I added 10 RSS feeds, all business related and when I hit update, I suddenly got more than 200 posts on my new business blog. All I had to do is install a clean template and put some ads on it. Now, I am waiting for Google to index my site and for people to start visiting it and clicking on my ads. I am probably going to install a sitemap plugin and a cache plugin for wordpress to make it easier for Google to index and to reduce the server load on the RSS updates.
I hope I can get a few dollars a day with this scheme. If it works, I promise I will tell you more about it in a later post, but until than, I wish you a good night!
Greyheart
I am really angry these days thinking about the stuff I’ve been through the last few weeks. As I mentioned in my first post, I am an area sales manager and I am working at least 9 hours a day communicating with the companies costumers, with people. I am not even close to be perfect, but it really bugs me when idiots hired for support or just for forwarding mail to the right person don’t do their job or are incompetent to do it. You don’t wanna do it, go away, let someone else do it. You can’t do it, find something you can.
There are a few basic rules to start and maintain a good relation with your customer. First, if he contacts you for anything, even if he wants to ask you when is your grandma’s birthday, you have to answer him. If your customer does not get an answer for his question you will probably lose that customer. Second, if your customer asks for any information you don’t treat him like the most dumb person in the world. Third, don’t waste your time on details. Tell your customers exactly what he wants to know and let him know he can contact you for further details. He might just need some basic information about your product, the rest being obvious. If you start telling him all the details he might get confused, lost and forget the thing he was actually supposed to remember. Forth, and last for today, be sure you give your costumer the right information. Customers are usually really unhappy to get as a reply information that they did not need without any relevance to their request.
I wrote these few lines because I can’t really understand how companies like Kodak can afford to ruin their image by paying idiots to answers peoples support requests. I, for example, asked a simple question about the Orientation Sensor option, which my Kodak camera has, but uses it wrong and the one answering my mail start explaining how it works, how can I turn it on and off. OK, so he called me a lamer and flooded me with information I already know, leaving me with the problem unsolved. Oh, he also mentioned that my camera works correctly. I really don’t wanna mention the outcome of my reply.
Stories about customer relations departments are still many to be told, but maybe another time!
Sweet dreams, Greyheart
I was just thinking about how jealous I was of the people that were spending their vacations outside the country borders. In the summer people were going to Egypt, Greece and Hawaii and in the winter they were going to ski in the Alps. Than, this summer I went to Bucharest, the great capital, to visit a friend of mine and the part of family I’ve not seen in ages. Spending my time there as a tourist I realized that I was so stupid for wanting to go visit other countries when I didn’t even see my own. Bucharest is a city of constant motion, day and night people running from place to place. I don’t think I could live there because of the stress that you can even smell in the air, but as a tourist, having time to check everything out I must say I was impressed. I’ve been to Bucharest before. Once as a child, and I don’t remember much of it, than almost a year now, but I was attending some software presentation of a partner company and did not have time to visit anything.
Than these thoughts came bothering my mind again while I was visiting Predeal, a fascinating place in the mountains. It is usually full of visitors in the winter, hope next year I’ll have the occasion to spend a few years in the snow there. Even though I was visiting it in full summer season, the place sticked itself into my head as a wonderful memory.
I should get myself a driver’s license and a car and next summer I should go visit the whole country. Who wants to join me? Than, first stop Egypt, the pyramids. That is one thing I want to see before I die.
Kiss you, Greyheart
Today, Romania parties because it has 18 years since Ceausescu, the last dictator of Romania was shot. All Romanian people celebrates its freedom. Freedom to do what? In these 18 years I’ve seen no improvement of the law, no improvement in economics, no improvement in anything. I’ve seen just corrupt people getting rich and hard working people getting more and more poor. I can see how Romania’s identity is falling apart with the UK newspapers and Italian media screaming at us, calling us thieves, killers and rapers just because we let them see only the worst of us. And now the question comes. Is it a better of us to show? I think it is. I believe it is. I know we, the Romanian people could show the world we are better than what they see on TV. We have the potential. We just have to find courage and will to stand up and work for it.
So, are we celebrating 18 years of freedom to become rapers, killers and thieves or are we celebrating 18 years of freedom to work, create and prosper, do everything for a brighter future?
Kisses and hugs, Greyheart
Hello everybody,
I am thinking for about half an hour what to start with, than I decided I should just start writing. So I did. First, a few words about me so you’ll know who’s writing this article. My name is Stefan, friends all over the web call me Greyheart or just Grey. I was born in 1983 in Romania and I am still living in Romania. Probably I will die in this country too. At the moment I am working as an area sales manager, earning a pretty decent amount of money to sustain my personal needs and hobbies. What hobbies? Well, I love to take pictures, even though I am not too good at photography. I love to mess around with websites, that’s how I got about 30 domains, almost all with some basic layout on it, than I got bored and left them behind. At the beginning of 2007 I discovered I like to write articles so I made myself a personal blog. Seeing that people liked what I write in Romanian, I thought I should try it in English too.
Now, let’s talk about the future of this blog. Well, honestly I don’t intend to be a popular guy all over the world just for having a blog. This site will do nothing more than tell you about my experiences in life. Don’t expect from me too much, maybe some sick humor and some helpful info from time to time.
Enough as a first post, hope you will enjoy the rest of what comes!
My unending respect, Greyheart
