Brusimm » consumer

Silk Has a Hit with Their “Fruit & Protein” Drink! [Consumer]

Bruce Simmons — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:29:06 +0000

This is a consumer product review of Silk‘s newest product, their Fruit & Protein drink. If you can call massive ingestion of a yummy product a product review.

My wife is a vegetarian and I’m a part-time vegetarian, if you count that 60% of my plate is usually fruits and veggies. OK, all joking aside, there’s no such thing as a part-time vegetarian. But since my wife is a vegetarian, she uses different vegetarian products, she has taken strongly to the Silk Brand Soy Dark Chocolate Milk.

I’ve tried it but there’s something about it that doesn’t like me and I have an odd allergy-like reaction to it. But the other day, I descried on the refrigerated shelf in Safeway, a product from Silk that I’ve never seen before. “Silk Fruit & Protein.”

And yes, it’s a product derived from Soy.

I have quite the sweet tooth and absolutely love fruit smoothies like what comes from Jamba Juice… or if you have the gear, time and money, you can make your own fruit smoothies.

But when I got the Silk Fruit & Protein drink home, my wife and I had real problems. The problem being I tested this fruit drink before finishing our unpacking our groceries. She had to take the Silk product away from me before I drank the entire thing and then I had to finish unpacking groceries.

The groceries got unpacked in record time somehow, but I had found my new-found yummy drink had been hidden and I was banished to the living room to watch the most-watched sporting event on TV ever, the Super Bowl. Gads, I have a mean wife! (LOL)

But I just had to write this up.

I snagged the Mixed Berry version of the Silk Fruit & Protein and it was just as good as anything I’ve ever bought from Jamba Juice. (Remember, I have a sweet tooth!)

But here’s the deal: At Jamba Juice, you might buy a single order for a few, like $5, but this was only around $3. And you have several servings. (If you, um, don’t go hog-wild about it.)

There are 4 servings per container in the Mixed Berry product, with 150 calories each, 15 of those calories coming from fat. You get 10% (29g) of your daily recommended carbs and 100% of your recommended vitamin C. You get 5g (10%) of your recommended daily protein intake, all based off of a 2,000 calorie daily diet.

If you have a sweet tooth, love smoothies and love quickie breakfast drinks that aren’t junk, this IS the new consumable for you! Seriously. I intend to testing the other two flavors soon. (Probably before the end of the day, but my wife might knock some sense into me. Plus it does not good to be waddling around work after lunch!)

If you’ve tried this, chime in and let us know what you thought, because I was so vague about my opinion on the product!

http://silksoymilk.com/products/fruit-protein

Beware The Email Onslaught When Signing Up For GoFobo [Consumer]

Bruce Simmons — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:05:51 +0000

A Consumer Awareness piece….

I received an unwanted email the other day about the movie, The Grey, starring Liam Neeson. It’s not that I am not interested in either the movie or the actor, but rather, it was the persistent source where I received the email from that aggravated the living (your favorite expletive goes here.) out of me.

The other day I was given an opportunity to attend a free movie screening… I’m not quite sure how I got this offer, but to be able to have a chance to get these tickets I had to sign up at ‘http://www.gofobo.com‘

Sure, great, no problem…

If you value the sanity of your email inbox, DON’T ****ING DO IT!

I signed up and then found out there were no more tickets available for what got me to the site. OK, whatever.

But before the day was up, I lost count at how many emails I received from the website regarding various “conversations.”

Mind you… all I did was sign up. I didn’t go clicking on any conversation, no BB “discussion” or anything. They just started piling updates into my inbox.

So thinking, like almost any other service one signs up for, I logged back in and looked for my communications options. I found the options and and unchecked all email options, and checked the box that said remove from all discussions.

There… I was done and now I can move forward .

NOT!

Some new threads (I’m guessing) popped up on the site and I was happily apprised of these threads.

Now, I’m getting aggravated.

Not only is the interface to customize your account a bit convoluted, I could not find anywhere on the site where I can cancel my account.

Wow… seriously?

It turns out, with enough digging… no wait, scratch that. I had to go outside the website and do a Google search to find out that there’s no ‘cancel account’ option anywhere on the site. You have to contact them through their “contact us” page and request the option to cancel your account.

So a few days and 24 emails later, (regardless of what communications option I have chosen), I’m going to try this new avenue because to be honest, I already get enough emails and to add to my collection of emails with more, about subjects I’m not even interested in just rubs me the wrong way.

Suggestions for Dealing With GoFobo

If you must try this curious service that says they provide free movie screenings, here are my thoughts:

One: don’t.

Two: If you only have one email account, I’d set up a rule that stuffs the emails in some protected or out of the way folder. (Like the trash!)

Three: Set up an alternate email account that you can use to sign up for contests and crap like this… Then it won’t matter how much email you get… maybe. Then again, your alternate email account will get overwhelmed with GoFobo updates and it might be a moot point if it crowds out your other email content, taking us back to suggestion Two!

Thus ends another consumer alert!

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The Ukraine is Poisoning & Incinerating Thousands of Stray Dogs

Bruce Simmons — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 07:22:38 +0000

The 2013 UEFA European Football (Soccer) Championships will be co-hosted by Ukraine. In anticipation of hosting the event, they’re trying to clean up the streets of the stray animals. But the approach they’re using is riling animal rights activists.

What the Ukraine is doing to clear out the thousands of stray dogs and cats on their streets is poisoning the animals, but they’re enlisting the citizens of the country in the process.

Country officials are not only leaving out poisoned food, they’re paying citizens for every dog corpse turned in. Portable crematoriums are being used in the process and in some cases, allegedly some dogs are getting incinerated while they’re still alive.

At $55 a body, I’m guessing some morals go out the window… but that’s a guess on my part. I can’t begin to imagine this situation.

Sure, I get they need to clean up the streets. I’m not sure there’s a very good answer, no matter how you look at it. If they literally have thousands of animals roaming their streets, maybe they should have done something sooner to keep the buildup of strays at a minimum.

I’m rather shocked at this particular development. And all in the name of sports.

Hit up the source link for more info and a petition that can be signed. Please, pass this on via sharing, liking, ‘FB share’, retweet or what not… get the word out gang!

[Image is that of my puppy and her two new friends during one Halloween week.]

[CesarsWay: Ukraine Killing Dogs for Soccer Game]

Craigslist Car Sale Scam Warning For Oakland

Bruce Simmons — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 05:47:47 +0000

NBC Bay Area news is reporting that there’s a scam going on via Craigslist that involves armed robbery and a car for sale.

There are ads being run on Craigslist that list a car for sale outside of Oakland. You make the arrangements to meet and then you find yourself being robbed at gunpoint by 2 to 5 gunmen!

The meet up location has been around the upper area of Lake Merrit near the 580. This dasterdly deed had started up in December, so beware… and check the source link for more info.

(There’s a $20k reward associated with info leading to the arrest and conviction of these folks.)

[nbcbayarea.com]

Bay Area Spare The Air Days Are Human Distributed & Not Always Right

Bruce Simmons — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:49:12 +0000

Back in the end of 2011, the residents of the Bay Area were subjected to “Spare the Air” days a number of inopportune times… Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, etc.. All times when visiting family from out of town would have absolutely loved having a fire going in the fireplace.

When I saw the Spare the Air alerts for the Bay Area, I thought to myself how unfortunate that this soulless, automated system is sending out alerts on THE absolute worse days of the year to do it… family holidays.

I mean, I don’t know about you, but after my family drove nearly 500 miles to see me and mine, well, it would have been nice.

I had presumed that the system that sends out the alerts was automated. I mean, in this day and age, I guess there’s a system that can read specific quantifiers in specific weather feeds and have it click off an alert.

Plus, who would be so inhumane as to sent out alerts on the biggest family get-together holidays of the year, right?

It would turn out that NBC Bay Area news reported that a human is behind the distribution of alerts. A human being destroyed my holidays! (OK, destroyed is a strong word, but each day, my entire family was rather disappointed that we had Spare the Air days on the few days we would see each other all year long.)

So I’m a bit miffed, that’s for sure.

It turns out that the Air Quality District folks seem to get some days wrong and completely miss other days. Wow… but how do they guess when a bad day will be?

By picking the days most susceptible to fireplace use….

“The Air District says its meteorologists look at a lot of factors, including historical data, weather conditions and if they think people will be burning. Air Quality is then rated on a scale. Anything over 100 triggers a “Spare the Air” alert.”

They say it’s extremely challenging to predict 24-hours out when a day will be bad, but to be honest, family holidays should be exempt days.

The Grinch IS running The Bay Area Air Quality Management District. That’s all I have to say, because if you can’t tell, someone here at this keyboard is a wee bit miffed!

If you’re curious about their hit and miss record, check out the following news article on the Bay Area Spare the Air days.

Thanks for hearing my vent…

TITLE NINE Gives The Customer an Awesome Consumer Experience

Bruce Simmons — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:43:39 +0000

Title Nine, per their website, is a “Sporting Goods Store, Women’s Clothing Store, Sportswear Store.” But don’t be fooled, they have cool trinkets too that might catch the guy’s eye too.

But what’s most important, is this is a husband’s point of view after having accompanied my wife to Title Nine in downtown Palo Alto, CA, and I have to say, this store, or company as a whole, gives you a fantastic consumer experience.

When my wife arrived at the store, she was looking for something specific, and walking into the store, you can pretty much see all that they have to offer the consumer. The layout is clean and easy to define where the products you are l00king for is located. And if you don’t see it right away, asking the staff that’s on hand seems to always be a win-win for everyone.

The staff is incredibly friendly, patient and knowledgeable, no matter what questions we laid out there for them.

The prices are about on par with what you’ll find in other venues. They may not underbid other competitors, but they do have a subtle edge that I’ll explain in a moment.

So after visiting Title Nine, I thought we had a good consumer experience.

But later, it turns out, that Title Nine not only delivers a satisfying consumer experience, they back it up with an incredible warranty policy of their products.

We’ve ordered merchandise from the store before but then my wife had ordered a coat with them online. We first went there looking at what they had, and they did not have the online coat there, but directed us to a close, satisfying comparable model. After a bit of conjecture, my wife decided to order the online coat.

The nice part is that the store can order the online products for you and you can pay there at the store and they ask you where you would like your desired product to be delivered. They give you the option of having it sent to the store or to your address. Nice!

Once we got the coat, it was pretty nice… and then I noticed the return policy for the item.

Within one year of purchase, if, for whatever reason, the consumer has some reason for returning the product, they will happily accept your return, no questions asked. One year!

And then we had an additional good experience with Title Nine.

After my wife ordered her coat, we saw it go on sale two weeks later. The sale price was reduced by $40. My wife called to inquire about the idea of returning her coat and repurchasing it at the discounted price. But without blinking an eye, they willingly worked with her and refunded the difference of the sale price.

All in all, you come away feeling pretty good about dealing with Title Nine, whether it be online or in-person. Want to know more? Check out their link:: [http://www.titlenine.com/]

A Winter Spare the Air Day Alert Around The Corner, But Who Cares?

Bruce Simmons — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 04:01:32 +0000

Over the 2011 holidays, we had several Winter Spare the Air alerts. All of them on critical days when friends and family would have loved to have had a fireplace going… Christmas eve, Christmas day, etc., etc..

The timing was poorly executed by mother nature. But none-the-less, the advisory board that runs the show distributed the warnings, regardless of the day.

It felt like the Grinch was running the show.

But it can be pricey to ignore the official warnings… first offense is a warning for any Bay Area resident found burning anything during the Spare the Air warnings. Subsequent fines could land in the $400 range.

That would be one expensive fireplace. The only exemptions are those who depend solely on fireplaces or wood stoves for their heat.

Back in 2008 when the Spare the Air program went into effect, they had seventy inspectors roaming neighborhoods.

But…

According to an NBC Bay Area news report, many people are using the system, but few are getting fined.

Just over this last Christmas season, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District fielded 400 calls from neighbors reporting their neighbors.

But since 2008, the org has received over 5,000 complaints, but despite the 600+ issued warnings, they’ve only distributed 12 tickets for burning on a Spare the Air day.

And the program costs over $1M to operate.

This doesn’t seem to add up for anyone.

Yet the program is focused more on educating than fining. As is evident, considering they’ve received 2,600 complaints this winter season, with 0, that’s zero, citations.

But still, I wouldn’t want to be that “lucky” thirteenth fine!

nbcbayarea

–

Beware of SOPA, Despite Its Intent

Bruce Simmons — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:07:35 +0000

It seems that of all the “social” circles I travel, I seem to be seeing nothing but bad news or poor opinions of this SOPA act.

SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act. Its intent is to protect copyrights and defeat copyright infringements. IE: Those internet movie pirates that believe they’re entitled to steal content without paying for it.

So the premise is to protect the major players of the entertainment industry.

But it would seem that the way it was written, there are catches that seem, per so many perspectives being made on the web, to threaten even the smallest web entrepeneur… you.

The concerns are that websites can be shut down, even if you’ve done nothing wrong yourself. IE: A site visitor leaves a comment with a link out to something… BAM, your site is done!

(Suggestion: I have this site set up to not allow links in comments. They all have to be approved.)

Another concern is that, like gun control, there’s no real power against the real content pirates out there. This is because sites are going to be blocked by entire domain names, not the real IP addresses that commit the crime.

The good guy will be getting the short end of the stick and those who say, post a video of yourself singing someone else’s song, can become the victim of this act because you singing a Lady Gaga song in your video, could be deemed copyright infringement.

SOPA will also be having domain names are handled, and this could open up security loopholes.

The largest online tech companies are against it… Amongst those are sites like Google, Facebook, PayPal, Wikipedia, Twitter, & Amazon.

They’re even considering an Internet Blackout day, and the suggested date, if they do this, could be on January 23rd. The day before congress votes on this SOPA act. (That’s conjecture right now.)

In fact the other companies support the OPEN act (Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act).

Now be it as it may, it’s because of online pirates and their pirating ways that the movie and music industries are all agog about this act. They want those extra estimated millions and billions. The movie industry is seeing more monies than ever in certain categories and certain home entertainment markets are starting to set their own records.

But we still have torrent sites and the users that use them illicetly, to blame, if this SOPA act comes into being.

This was food for thought, and I’m reflecting what I’m seeing out there on the ‘net. My personally, I get where the SOPA plan is coming from, but I think some folks concerns have some merit. Though they do seem extreme, the issues are possible if this beast comes into being.

Sites and Resources:

All via

copyblogger.com

Some of the New Aspects of Google… Are Different

Bruce Simmons — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 06:49:06 +0000

The new Google is … different. I subtle ways, but there are some interesting differences starting to show up, or just disappear on the user.

Things I’ve noticed:

In Google Bookmarks, the links no longer open into a new page, but in the same page that the Bookmarks page itself is in, so beware, if that’s important to you.

Google Bookmarks labels no longer sort like they used to.

You used to be able to use an underscore in front of a name to have it sort to the top of the labels list. The web interface has gotten “smarter” and no longer does that. Now it is only sorting numbers to the front of the listing, so you need to use a number in front of the label name to get it to sort to the top again, if that’s what you want.

(I have about 30 labels, but only two or three I use regularly. So I have them sort to the top so I don’t have to keep scroll-searching for them.)

In the control bar across the top of the screen when you’re logged in to one of Google’s many services, “web” has gone away for some reason. I used to like that link… because it took me directly to a Google search page. Now I have to get there via some other mechanism.

True, there are many mechanisms for getting there, but

Update: I just noticed today (1/11/12) that in place of ‘web’ is now ‘search.’

So there are a few things that are different and to be aware of.

That’s that. Later.

The Pursuit of Good SEO While Building Your Internet Presence

Bruce Simmons — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 08:59:17 +0000

I Love this DIYThemes Call Out of TMZ and Pointing Out Bad SEO

For the aspiring webmaster who wants to create a blog and make it big, they have to generate website traffic hits. Web surfers don’t come on their own, that’s for sure. And it’s an interesting learning curve on what a website owner can learn about the all-important world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and other related issues.

As you delve into this seemingly easy world of the web, you’ll start noticing that there are good ways and bad ways to try and trick Google and other search engines into liking your website.

There are the basics that ProBlogger and DIY Themes can teach you. And as you grow, you’ll notice that different sites do different things to capture traffic. Some nice, some tricky. Some sites use open-ended questions in their titles to bait the curious. Some will use titles making you think they have certain content in the article, but all you get is a “to be posted soon” notice in the article. Then there’s something like what DIY Themes made note of in how TMZ had reported one event many months back.

DIY makes mention of ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ SEO practices in their article. That is, doing article creation like a human might do or say it, using all the right key words, but using catch phrases when appropriate. Then there’s ‘black hat’ techniques… that would be like stuffing your titles or web paths or images with keywords, trying to capture traffic.

In this case, here’s the example URL that DIY pointed out from TMZ:

http……randy-savage-car-accident-macho-man-dead-dies-died-killed-wwe-wrestler-florida/

As you see, the title isn’t a simple sentence or phrase, but rather, it’s jammed packed with catch words related to the event. This slippery little trick is in hopes of catching web traffic for key-word searches. For sites as large as TMZ and such, they seem immune to being dinged by search engine rankings.

But the little guy needs to be careful.

For example, early in 2010, I had hit upon a practice of internal linking that seemed to work. I hid the links so that competitors wouldn’t catch on to what I was doing. But Google see’s link hiding as a bad practice and the site took an interesting dive in traffic. Once I figured out that Google didn’t like this practice, I stopped it. But dang.

Another facet you may have noticed is how some sites don’t have dates in, on or around their articles or links. That’s so Google doesn’t ding them for being out-dated in the search realm. For me… I thought about it, but it’s not fair to you my readership. If you’re researching something but don’t know when it was written/created, then one of two things happen. If you trust the website as a source and report old news as new news, you’re screwed. Or, lack of dates makes a website useless as a resource.

So as DIY Themes points out, some practices are not cool and if you’re a small website trying to grow, some of these black-hat practices are a bad thing to do. Just because bigger sites do things like this doesn’t always make it right.

So beware in your struggle to grow your small start-up site and if you follow by example, beware the examples. They’re not all good. Be patient and use some basic, common-sense in approaching this industry.

http://diythemes.com/thesis/tmz-sucks/

Brusimm » consumer

Silk Has a Hit with Their “Fruit & Protein” Drink! [Consumer]

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