Entries Tagged 'Writing' ↓

I did the copywriting for the following two new search-optimized page additions on the website of Excel Dentistry, the office of Glen Rock and Passaic, New Jersey cosmetic dentist Mayra Modesto-Garrido:

http://www.exceldentistry.com/html/sedation-dentistry.html

http://www.exceldentistry.com/html/dental-implants.html

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The true test of any real metal album is not the ears, but the gut and the balls.  A good metal record makes you want to get in a fight, fuck stuff up, and damn the consequences. Now, as anyone who’s been paying an ounce of attention knows, Metallica has made a series of missteps in the past several years, perhaps most infamously the shit-tastic St. Anger album, the pits of which Death Magnetic has the unenviable task of attempting to rehabilitate the band’s artistic credibility, critical reputation, and status as chart-toppers.

On the latter issue, it seems an inevitability that Metallica will secure the #1 slot considering that third-raters Slipknot and The Game are presently squabbling over it, and if there’s any fanbase more loyal than Metallica’s I don’t know who it’d be.  Oddly, virtually every Metallica fan I know professes that everything since a certain point (pick either And Justice For All, the black album, or Load) is worthless crap and they really only go to the shows to hear the old stuff, which can still sound impressive when the band works up a head of steam.  Oh, they’ll buy this record in hopes some echo of the old fire resurfaces, and they’ll listen to it at least three or four times, but inevitably it’ll be back to the classics other than maybe a track or two here and there.

So is Death Magnetic the long-prayed for return to form?  No.  But neither is it a total waste like St. Anger.  Kirk Hammett’s guitar is back in force, and there are a number of good riffs sprinkled throughout the record.  The problem is that the majority of the tracks’ tunes and riffs are far, far too flimsy and overly familiar-sounding (”Unforgiven III” anyone?) to bear the weight of being stretched out to seven minutes apiece, as is done to pretty much every song.  It’s just tiresome, and I can’t see most people seeing repeated listening to this album as a desirable or pleasurable experience.  “All Nightmare Long” is probably the one new song people won’t head to the bathroom during, but mostly Death Magnetic is a hard slog that fails to hold the listener’s attention — it’s hard to imagine anyone getting worked up enough over any of this music to go out and fuck shit up.  In the end, it’s just another late-career two-star album by a band that has matured into a perennial live draw despite decreasingly rewarding output of new material, and that’s an old, boring story no matter how you spin it.

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Digitek Manufacturer Actavis Totowa Issues Recall For All Other Drugs

“Actavis Totowa has announced a voluntary recall on all drugs manufactured at their Little Falls, NJ facility due to unsatisfactory results on their 2008 FDA inspection…” Continue reading

Bay Area Water Regulators Announce Intention to Sue Federal Government over Pollution

“The San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board will file suit against the U.S. Maritime Administration over pollution caused by deteriorating vessels…”  Continue reading

Tracy, CA Man Receives 10 Month Prison Sentence for Asbestos Violations

“Wassim Mohammad Azizi was convicted by a federal jury on three counts of violating the Clean Air Act in conjunction with the demolition of a building containing asbestos…” Continue reading

16 Injured by Collapse of San Diego Construction Site Pedestrian Walkway

“A covered, wooden pedestrian walkway collapsed at a construction site in downtown San Diego Thursday and injured 16 people, three critically…”  Continue reading

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A new article written by me is up on Docshop.com now:

Lose Weight — or Lose Your Job? Your Employer May Be Watching Your Waistline

“Should Big Brother be watching your weight or personal habits? Your government or employer may think so. Even as many employers trim back the amount of healthcare coverage they provide in attempts to cut costs, some believe they should have more say in their employees’ lifestyle choices — including whether they smoke, drink, or exercise, and even how much they weigh…”

Continue reading at Docshop.com

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Maryland Labor Board Proposes Strict New Crane Safety Regulations

“Three months after the death of a worker in an Annapolis crane accident, an advisory board of Maryland’s Occupational Safety and Health program has recommended sweeping changes be made to state rules for crane operations…”  Continue reading

New Study Shows Correlation Between Higher Gas Prices and Fewer Roadway Deaths

“According to a new study by professors Michael Morrisey and David Grabowski, the rate of traffic fatalities in the U.S. falls as gas prices rise…”  Continue reading

Truck Accident Dumps Thousands of Chickens onto Buffalo Thruway

“A truck carrying nearly 10,000 chickens tipped over on the offramp from the Mainline Thruway today, spilling thousands of chickens and eggs onto the roadway…” Continue reading
Study Shows Popular Infertility Treatments To Have Little or No Effect

“A study in the British Medical Journal shows that women trying to become pregnant who were given either of two popular fertility treatments demonstrated no higher conception rate than patients given no treatment at all…” Continue reading

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So as anyone who was around back in the heady, halcyon days of the first internet gold rush can tell you, there used to be tons of nascent websites and services promising something for nothing.  While this is a perennial favorite advertising technique, the newness of the online environment lowered many people’s otherwise acute bullshit defenses and people signed up left and right for a plethora of “get paid for surfing the web,” “get paid to read ads,” and “get paid for nothing at all, really, we swear” schemes.  I was no exception — I distinctly recall running something like three adbar programs simultaneously at one time — but as we all found out, very few of these new ventures survived long enough to pay anyone for anything, assuming they’d ever intended to.

Yet somehow here we are well into the 21st century and somehow, MyPoints is still around.  I’m not sure why they survived while all the others I signed up for back in the day have long since been forgotten, but they are.  Better yet, they’ve stood the test of time and they’ve proven to me that unlike most online marketers they deliver on what they promise.  Each week I get a certain number of MyPoints emails in my inbox, each usually delivering between 5 and 50 points into my account.  Eventually, they pile up enough that I redeem them for something valuable or useful from the MyPoints selection of rewards — lately I’ve just been getting Wal-Mart gift cards, since I know I’ll inevitably have to go to Wal-Mart anyway (no matter how much I try to avoid it) it’s basically like getting money.  No, it’s not like getting a ton of money, but it’s something for nothing, and it’s enough to be helpful and appreciated when it’s time to get toiletries or a microwave oven or whatever.

In order to give some sort of ballpark figure what to expect, I logged into my MyPoints account, which tells me I have redeemed 33050 points during my time with them.  At current exchange rates (they used to be quite a bit lower, so this is a pretty conservative estimate) that would work out to 21 10$ Wal-Mart gift cards, or $210 bucks.  Like I say, it’s not tons of free cash, but hey — that’s $210 bucks for doing basically nothing that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

One of the things that I think has helped contribute to the company’s survival is that they don’t have the kind of referral link system that encourages people to just spam referrals everywhere in hopes of profiting off of what’s essentially just a digital pyramid scheme.  One can make referrals, but only on a one-on-one, personal direct email, and each member is limited to only five referrals per month in order to discourage spam.  If you’d like to sign up for MyPoints as one of my referrals, send an email to apoehler@hotmail.com including your name and I’ll try to sign you up.  (If I happen to have used up my referrals already for that month, I’ll put you in the next month’s queue.  I promise.)

Get something for free on the internet, part 1: MyCokeRewards points actually add up enough over time for me to get free Skullcandy earphones

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Despite the ubiquity of supposedly free offers online, it’s no secret that most are at best email address harvesters and at worst identity-theft scams.   Over time I have tried many of these programs, and a few have filtered out of the pack that have actually paid off for me, so I figured I might as well document these for posterity, since genuine reviews and recommendations of such services online are so few and far between as to be basically nonexistent.

Anyway, like many manufacturers whose business depends heavily on brand loyalty (like, say, cigarette manufactures) the Coca-Cola company places codes on many of their products which can be redeemed for points at mycokerewards.com.  Most people tend not to participate in such programs since entering the codes is remarkably tedious and to get anything decent usually requires purchasing said product in Costco-sized bulk quantities, any until recently I was among them as regards the mycokerewards program.  However, despite regular admonishments from my dentists, I regularly drink quite a bit of Diet Coke in cans, and I got in the habit of saving the cardboard can boxes because I found they make great shipping protection for the books, CDs, comics and such that I sell periodically on ebay (though far less often since their last nonsensical set of feedback rule changes).  As a result, my hall closet began to fill with the empty boxes.  Eventually, I began staring at the pile and wondering just how many mycokerewards points the stack constituted — hundreds?  Thousands?  Having never before bothered with the program, I had no frame of reference, but I figured it might be worth my time to find out.

Turns out they limit the number of codes one can enter in a day to ten, so it took awhile to whittle down the pile.   Still, this was far better than painstakingly doing it one at a time, and soon I found I had built up a grand total of 1400 points from my now-empty closet despite the fact that the mycokerewards site is absolutely awful, filled with pointless flash interstitials, illogical categorization of rewards, no basic ’show all rewards’ option, and unnecessary animation.

Like all such programs, mycokerewards offers a variety of rewards, but some are just ridiculously out of range.  Probably the most practical and useful reward offered by mycokerewards is actually a full 20-piece set of Rachael Ray-endorsed cookware, but to get said reward one would need to redeem 14400 points, or the equivalent of 1440 12-can packs of Coca-Cola products — 17280 cans.  So yeah, while I thought my year-plus pile of empty Coke cases was substantial, it wasn’t anywhere near Rachael Ray territory.

After browsing through the entire catalog of rewards, and realizing that the earbuds that came with my ipod were in fact impossibly shitty-sounding as well as ill-fitting, I settled on a pair of black Skullcandy “Smokin’ Earbuds” which “cost” me a mere 731 points.  And lo and behold, yesterday sitting at my door when I got home (thanks, DHL) was a package containing these:

Unfortunately, a quick perusal of the mycokerewards catalog shows that it looks like they’ve removed these earbuds from the possible rewards, so I may have gotten in just under the line on that one.  Still, depending on how many Coca-Cola products you drink on a weekly basis it may just end up being worth your while to tear off and save up the codes in a drawer somewhere and enter the codes in whenever you feel you’ve built up enough for it to be worthwhile and you have nothing better to do.  I myself have 749 points remaining in my account there and none of the rewards within that range really catch my eye at the moment.  Though if necessary I could burn off those points on movie tickets or promotional t-shirts, for now I’m content to let them sit until, perhaps in a year or so, I have built up enough to bother foraging through the mycokerewards site to pick out something else.

Get something for free on the internet, part 2: MyPoints is the last of the something-for-nothing digital economy deals, and one that has paid off for me

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In these doldrums of summer, one really notices how slim and shallow the network’s offerings are; in the blush of publicity they’re great at making it appear something’s happening when nothing really is, but eventually one realizes it’s just new iterations of the same old tired soaps, game shows, overwrought “dramas”, and hacky sitcoms.  Howard TV is something perhaps only Stern (or Oprah, his counterpart for the non-Y-chromosome segment of the population) could pull off, in that it’s essentially an entire channel devoted to the universe of Stern, his radio show, and the various characters that orbit within its gravity.  Between the four-day-a-week Howard Stern morning radio show itself, the followup Wrap-Up Show, the behind-the-scenes activities of the Stern staffers, the ongoing circus that follows the show’s Wack Pack of hangers-on, and material drawn from the vault of videotapes originally shot during the time Stern was on the E! channel, there’s a near-constant flow of new, high-quality programming on Howard TV — I’d estimate there’s at least an average of around five hours of new content added per week.

The real downfall of Howard TV lies in its limited distribution.   Thus far the material produced for On Demand remains solely available there, which is all well and good if you happen to be on one of the cable systems that carries In Demand Networks, but if not, well, you’re pretty much SOL.  Especially now that Howard TV is branching out into producing more original programming (such as its two bowling shows and the Miss Howard Stern reality show), the service is perfect for Itunes video sales: it’s easy to imagine Stern fans loading up their ipods with the latest Howard TV content each morning for the subway ride into work, and the fact that this or another similar revenue stream isn’t being capitalized upon is ludicrous.  It’s the problem Howard has (so far more-or-less successfully) been combating since leaving terrestrial radio for satellite: sure, the show is great, but do people know?  If a person has neither satellite radio nor In Demand-enabled cable television (nor the proclivity towards filesharing), then chances are they don’t.  But if they could get a taste of what’s going on at Sirius and Howard TV on Itunes, it could lead them into purchasing more, perhaps regularly, and maybe even signing up for a satellite radio subscription — you know, once all the Sirius/XM merger issues are settled.  Without this additional avenue for revenue or exposure, the Stern circus will likely stay out sight and out of mind of most who don’t already number themselves among the converted.

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So the San Diego Reader is reporting rumors that the House of Blues here is in trouble, and if they don’t start bringing in better numbers the venue may close within nine months or so; reportedly, the San Diego HOB has the worst attendance of any of the chain’s locations.  I can’t say I’m terribly shocked, based upon my own experiences there seeing maybe four or five shows.  It’s far from the worst place I’ve ever been, but I also wouldn’t really call the experience of being there enjoyable or pleasurable — it’s like seeing a band in an Applebee’s, and a very overpriced one at that.  Drinks there are a complete ripoff (though comparably priced to many downtown venues), the food is okay but not great for what you pay, and between the cost of parking downtown and gas as evening at the HOB can easily run double the cost of a night at, say, the Casbah or the Belly Up, where I generally actually have fun and don’t get half as douchey a vibe.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t actively dislike the SD HOB, but I definitely don’t consider it a great place to see a show.  Generally, when I see someone is playing there my reaction is similar to this: “Hey, Motorhead is coming to town…mmm, but it’s at the House of Blues…I don’t know, do I want to deal with that?  Maybe I’ll hold off and see if they drop the tickets to half-price (which they very frequently do — apparently their lack of consistent attendance figures is not a new thing) and then I’ll go, but…”  So while fewer performance venues in a city is never a positive thing in my book, I can’t say it seems likely I’ll really miss the San Diego House of Blues if and when it should happen to close.

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It’s been an embarrassment of riches lately for fans of the Replacements what with the spurt of expanded reissues packed with outtakes and rare tracks, but despite issuing a couple of decent newly-recorded tracks on their “hits” collection  the ‘Mats themselves haven’t made the obvious full-fledged reunion move since bassist Tommy Stinson seems firmly stuck in the solo band Axl Rose likes to call Guns ‘N’ Roses.  Fortunately, in his absence, Paul Westerberg hasn’t just been sitting and biding his time.  Here, Westerberg reinvents the album form as a single mp3 file the length of a single side of a cassette tape — despite the title, 49:00 comes in at 43:55 precisely — which is appealingly homebrewed and packed with tantalizing Guided By Voices-like snippets and fragments in between the more finished-sounding tunes, dropped on the listening public with little advance notice or fanfare suddenly last weekend.  Westerberg’s rudimentary drumming continues to be the main downfall of his recent solo work, but he’s succeeded in recapturing a significant amount of the ragged spirit of fun that once seemed so effortless within the context of the Replacements but which drained quickly out of Westerberg’s major-label work.  Even the Mats’ predilection for unrehearsed cover tunes is back in the form of brief clips of Westerized versions of tunes like “I Am A Rock”, “I’m Eighteen”, “Born To Be Wild”, “Rocket Man”, and “Hello Goodbye”. Word is Paul has been working on a mountain of new material, a rumor that seems far likelier to be true considering he’s selling this solid album-length chunk of new stuff for a mere 49 cents. No, this isn’t the world-shaking type of attention-grabbing gesture made by such as Radiohead and Trent Reznor, nor should it be expected to be, but this only makes 49:00 even easier to like.   I’m not gonna expect all of Paul’s future work to hit this price point, but as long as it all hits this level of quality I’ll be satisfied.

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