What prompted me to write this post, which as you might be able to gather from the title, is the latest health care proposal bill. Our great almighty president, or as SARAndipity refers to him, Barry, is trying to ram this health care proposal through the system just as he did with the stimulus bill. If you don’t remember, the stimulus money was supposed to solve our economic crisis, or at the very least, stop the unemployment rate from growing. Instead the money went to frivolous government programs that did everything but solve our problems. All this happened to the tune of one trillion USD.

Back to health care.

I don’t know how you feel, but our current level of health care is outstanding compared to the rest of the world. Why else do you think people from all over the globe come to see OUR doctors and receive OUR treatment? Because it’s the best. Is our current system perfect? No. But, it’s certainly better than anything else in existence. Why would we switch to something subpar?

Furthermore, This universal or socialized health care system would cause our economy to completely crumble. Who will pay for it? Wait, I thought it was going to be free.

Wrong. The government will be covering the bills through your tax dollars. Say goodbye to at least 60% of your paycheck. The government is going to start regulating health care costs and determining the number of patients doctors are required to see on a daily basis. Furthermore, the government will also be deciding who gets what treatment. Was one of your parents recently diagnosed with cancer? Want to get them help? Too bad. Under this proposed system, the government will say he or she lived a good life and  isn’t worth the cost of cancer treatment. Not only that, our doctors are going to be overworked and underpaid which in turn will reduce the overall quality of health care.

It’s a lose, lose situation. If this bill passes, we’re in for a world of hurt. Literally.

Photo cred: Eneas

Remember that crazy red headed guy from Mythbusters, Adam Savage? Yeah, the guy with the goatee and thick black frame glasses. Well, he made the news recently and not because of some crazy debunked myth. Adam racked up an $11,000 cell phone bill while in Canada.

Apparently the problem was with the USB modem plugged into his laptop. The wireless plan he had subscribed to was only suitable for the U.S. not Canada. AT&T claimed that he accumulated 9 million kilobytes in uploaded/downloaded data. For those of you who can’t do the computation, that’s 9 freaking GIGS!

Being fed up with charges, he did what any faithful Twitter user would. He complained to the masses. Within the day AT&T became a trending Twitter topic and soon the chatter was too great for AT&T to ignore. Needless to say, AT&T dealt with Adam’s charges to his satisfaction.

Cool huh?

Now you can add this to your book as another useful way to use Twitter. As for me, I’m just going to try to NOT rack up an $11,000 cell phone bill.

Photo cred: noelzialee

For those of you who don’t know, Squarespace is, as noted straight from their website, “A fully hosted, completely managed environment for creating and maintaining a website, blog or portfolio.” So then, what’s the problem?

They’ve generated quite the controversy lately as noted by the tweet below.

Why all the hate? Well, people are pissed because Squarespace found a way to game the Twitter system. They created a simple contest, found a product people lusted after, and the rest is history. Now everyone’s Tweeting the Squarespace hashtag. A relatively unknown company has made a huge splash to millions of people for just under $6000 or 30 $199 apple gift cards.

That’s just brilliant in my book.

I think people should be a little less pissed off and a little more open to learning from the success of others. Squarespace took what they knew about Twitter, followed the rules, and made an irresistible contest. Good for them.

I’m interested in their traffic numbers. Obviously the contest was to increase name recognition, but does that correlate to increased traffic or better yet increased sales?

What do you think about Squarespace? Are they in the right or the wrong? Comment below and let me know! Hey that rhymed…

Photo cred: piez

I was the first one at work to sign up and begin using Twitter. Back in the day, ahem, six months ago, I was a huge advocate touting Twitters innovative and simple features. I’d tell everyone I knew to sign up, but few listened.

Out of the handful that hopped on the Twitter bandwagon, many sent out one tweet “checking out this Twitter thing” and that was that. The rest did something completely different.

The others began following people, but never joined the conversation. They leave TweetDeck open religiously, but never say a word. Weird? Yes. Wrong? No.

Twitter, like most things, is whatever you make of it. I don’t think there’s a wrong way to use the microblogging tool – other than spamming the shit out of it.

What type of Twitterer are you?

Photo cred: 42dreams

So I’m kind of frustrated right now.

Correction, I’m super frustrated right now. I went on to register my Facebook username to only find the two names I wanted, jasonfleck and jason.fleck, were both taken by the same douche bag!

WHAT THE FUCK?!

Is it really possible to get multiple usernames and link them to the same profile? I mean this dude’s profile has the same friends and everything. So from what I can tell, it’s the same profile. Honestly, I’m just as pissed at the fact I forgot to log on to Facebook Friday night to claim my user name as I am at the douche bag that stole both my names, but still, that’s not the point.

What am I going to do about it? Absolutely nothing. I’m going to cry about it on my blog and that’ll be life. I’m too lazy to report him and I can’t really tell if he is exploiting the system or not. Probably the only thing I could do is complain of nudity and hope the Facebook powers that be check out his profile.

Whatever, I’m over it. I ended up snagging www.facebook.com/jaephlec so that’s satisfying. What username did you grab?

Photo cred: hamed

First impression: Holy shit this cool.

For starters, the Face.com application is a facial recognition program that scans through all your Facebook pictures and figures out who everyone is. Better yet, it will even tag your pictures automatically! Yup, no more clicking multiple times per picture tagging everyone manually.

How it works

After allowing the Face.com application to access your Facebook profile, it begins scrolling through your pictures asking you if it’s tagging everyone right. From the ten pictures or so I let it scan through, it nailed everyone. I then clicked on the ‘ME’ tab and quickly realized it was going to take a while to scan through all my pictures and all my friends pictures so I let it sit.

As of right now, the scanning process is still on task, but I’ll be sure to update you once it’s finished.

No I’m not talking about some Hindu belief  - I don’t believe in that stuff. Rather, I’m talking about an extremely useful, third party Twitter app.

Ultimately, Twitter Karma scans everyone linked to your Twitter account then displays everyone in an easy to view grid. From here, you can see everyone you’re following and if they’re following you back. Furthermore, Twitter Karma lets you batch follow or remove people.

Seeing who follows you back makes a lot of sense when putting that data against people who actually join your conversation. Plus it makes your Twitter spring cleaning so much easier.

Photo cred: vramak

After many visits to the Disqus forums and multiple installations, I finally have Disqus fully and more importantly, correctly integrated within my blog. Their support staff was friendly, but they did have lacking response times. Normally, I wouldn’t think a 24hr response time to answer a support ticket was all that bad, but in the times of Twitter and the need to get blog comments up and running, 24 hours is almost too long to wait.

However, despite the installation problems and rocky support, I’ve decided to use Disqus over Intense Debate because of a few key features.

The first of these features is the Facebook and Twitter integration. Do you have a Facebook and/or Twitter account? Good. You can now use them to log in and use them to post comments. Your picture will automatically show up and you wont have to enter your name, email and website information every time you want to leave a comment. Don’t have an account with either of those services? No prob. Just keep doing the same thing you’ve been doing.

I also enabled the Seesmic video response option for you to use if you so choose. It’s a cool feature and adds a personal feel to comments and seriously if you’re not in the mood to type, now you don’t have to. If you don’t have a Seesmic account you can click here to sign up.

Do you use Disqus on your blog? Like it? Hate it? Let me know by commenting below. If you feel a little daring, leave me a video response. I’d love to see all your pretty faces!

The best thing to gather from this information is driving traffic to your new site isn’t impossible. As of right now, Twitter is my highest referring source with Google lagging behind.  I’m excited to see what these numbers will look like by the end of next month.

These statistics are from May 2009.

Remember to find other sources of traffic other than search engines to grow your reader base. If something doesn’t work, don’t scrap the entire site. Do some testing and make some changes. Eventually, you’ll find the right formula.

Now down to the nitty gritty.

Last night she stopped for gas at a Citgo gas station, this one in particular.  She filled up fine and when she tried starting her car, the engine wouldn’t turn over. Sucks right?

She called me at work and I left to bail her out. By the way, my work is 45 minutes away from where she was, so it was going to take me some time to get there.

After getting off the phone with me, she went inside and explained the situation to the two or three guys behind the counter and told them that I was on my way to handle the situation. What’d they do? THEY THREATENED TO HAVE HER CAR TOWED!

Did they offer to push her car into a parking stall? Nope. Did they ask her if she’d like some coffee while she waited? Nope. Did they do anything that would constitute the littlest notion of good customer service? Nope.

Situations like this amaze me. I’ll never understand how people can be so cruel — espeically to a cute, little blonde. I know that each Citgo is independantly owned and opperated, but honestly, I’m never filling up at any Citgo ever again. Please go here and rate their friendliness and customer service a 1 in the bottom right.

P.S. Hey Citgo, by the way, I drive an hour to work everyday and that means an hour back too. In other words, I fill my gas tank on average AT LEAST two times per week.

Please Retweet this and help me get the word out. This type of behavior is unacceptable and we shouldn’t have to put up with it.

**UPDATE**The story unfolds even further. Apparently there was only one guy behind the counter, but the manager was in the building too — doing what ever managers do behind closed doors. Anyway the manager caught wind of the situation and definitely said he was getting the car towed. THE MANAGER OF ALL PEOPLE DIDN’T EVEN HELP HER OUT!