Bert's Blog...

Windows Live Writer

2012-02-08T21:01:00.001-06:00

I never thought that I would get into all this ‘blogging’ but I keep getting sucked in with all of these great app’s and plugins for Blogger.

Windows Live Writer is currently one of these tools that has my attention. Normally Microsoft doesn’t have a lot of additional features or plugins to their software but WLW is definitely an exception.

For example, I just downloaded and installed 10 plugins ranging from an app that makes your images look like an old Polaroid pic to an app that lets you paste Visual Studio code (with formatting and highlights) straight into your blog.

So with that being said, here is a damn pic that is supposed to look like the aforementioned Polaroid…

There you go, beautiful isn’t it! Oh and if you are wondering why the pic is ‘tilted’ a lil’ bit - its because I like living life on the edge. (Or I just set the rotation setting in the plugin to .4 degrees)

Superbowl Commercials - Best & Worst...

2012-02-06T21:30:00.003-06:00

Seeing as how I didn't get to watch all of the Superbowl Commercials this year, I found a website that has reviewed and rated the best and worst commercials this year.

Click here to go to www.superbowl-commercials.org to check them out...

Cancelled - Superbowl Scramble

2012-02-04T11:09:00.000-06:00

The El Dorado Golf & Country Club has had to cancel the Superbowl Scramble due to the downpour El Dorado, AR is currently under. Check the post on the Country Club's website below...

Cancelled - Superbowl Scramble

El Dorado Country Club - New Manager's Blog...

2012-02-04T10:55:00.000-06:00

Click the link below to visit their site...
Manager's Blog

I'm not sure if I can jump on this bandwagon...

2012-02-01T00:01:00.000-06:00

Personally, I think that Facebook's upcoming IPO will be the biggest damn thing that the business world has and will see for some time...

BUT, according to Peter Cohan at Forbes, he can supply us with 4 valid reasons why Facebook's (rumored soon to be) IPO will be irrelevant Read below and let's see what you think...

by Peter Cohan

"Have you heard the latest rumor? Facebook could sell shares to the public in an IPO — valuing the social network from $75 billion to $100 billion — sometime between April and June. But there are four good reasons why this will be a non-event.

Even though I am not among its 800 million users, Facebook is profitable. It sells advertisements directed at those users and eMarketer estimates that between 2009 and 2011, Facebook’s revenues grew at a 127% annual rate to $3.8 billion in 2011 with operating profit of $1.5 billion, according to BusinessInsider.
So why is one of history’s biggest IPOs a non-event? Here are four reasons:

It’s grossly over-valued.
On a price/sales basis, Facebook would trade at 19.7 — that’s 497% higher than Apple (APPL) at 3.3 and 294% above Google’s (GOOG) P/S of 5. And assuming Facebook shares Google’s net margin of 26%, Facebook’s P/E of 80 is far higher than Google’s 19 or Apple’s 12.7. This means that Facebook’s stock might not hold up after the first-day IPO pop — the same fate that greeted most of 2011′s tech IPOs.

It won’t unleash corporate capital spending.
In 1995, Netscape’s IPO spurred a wave of corporate capital spending. That’s because the web browser made the Internet easier for people to use than it had been before. A wave of supporting industries ranging from web consultants to makers of Web infrastructure – that got their fingers into the corporate Internet investment pie, as I described in my 1998 book, Net Profit. Facebook is not doing that — its revenues represent a mere 1% of the world’s $507 billion in total ad spending and its IPO would not lead to a major change in the trajectory of corporate spend.

It doesn't change much for Facebook insiders.
Facebook’s investors and employees were able – until last week when trading there was halted – to sell their shares for cash on SharesPost, a secondary market. On January 26th, Facebook was valued at $73.4 billion there — a few billion below the estimated IPO range. Sure, an IPO required by topping 500 shareholders will add to Facebook the cost of running a public company — but beyond that, things there should not change much.

It won’t boost the overall venture financing market.
If a Facebook IPO created a fever to invest in tech start-ups, it might be good for the venture capital industry. But since the IPO does not change much for Facebook investors, does not spur the growth of a range of related industries, does not unleash corporate investment, and might not even help out the IPO market, the after-effect of Facebook’s IPO could be modest.
It is popular in the media to compare the Facebook IPO to that of Google whose price has risen nicely since its 2004 IPO from $84 to $580. That 30% compound annual growth is good – but Google trades 19% below its 2007 peak of $715.
To be fair, there is a bit of good news for those hoping that Facebook stock will climb after it goes public. A quick look at Google’s 2004 prospectus reveals that its IPO price of $84 valued Google at a P/E of 80 – the same as Facebook’s estimated P/E (Google had 271 million shares and estimated 2004 net income of $286 million at the time of its August 2004 IPO).
That’s the only glimmer of good news for why Facebook’s IPO might breathe some life into the business of VCs and tech entrepreneurs. But Facebook’s inability to transform the way companies operate their business means that it will remain a niche phenomenon in the grander economic scheme."

Murphy USA IPO and Move to Dallas Possibile...

2012-01-26T17:14:00.001-06:00

Jan. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Shares of Murphy Oil Corp., the U.S. integrated oil company based in El Dorado, Arkansas, recovered after Chief Executive Officer David Wood announced its retail business may be spun off, sold or placed in an initial public offering.

Murphy rose 2.1 percent to $61.91 at the close in New York after touching $64.50, its highest price since Nov. 28. Earlier, shares fell as low as $59.40 after the company announced that fourth-quarter output of oil and natural gas missed its forecast.

Murphy has about 1,128 fueling stations in the U.S., many of them located at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. outlets, Wood said on the call. Murphy has been trying to sell its fueling stations in the U.K., along with its refinery in Milford Haven, Wales, to focus on more profitable oil production.

Wood said a decision on separation of the retail business will be taken to Murphy’s board about mid-year.

Also on today’s call, Wood reported a successful well drilled in the oil-bearing Three Forks Formation in the Canadian provide of Alberta. Producers such as Continental Resources Inc. have been tapping the same formation in North Dakota.

--Editors: Susan Warren, Jasmina Kelemen
To contact the reporter on this story: Jim Polson in New York at jpolson@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Susan Warren at susanwarren@bloomberg.net

So I Got This Going for Me...

2012-01-23T16:30:00.001-06:00

So, it being Chinese New Year today (and me realizing that my Chinese sign is a monkey... (did you read that right, a damn monkey... why can't I be something cool like a dragon? Anyway, I digress...)) this particular article was of great interest to me, please read below...

Chen Shuaifu, 59, has been in the industry for years and is currently chairman of the Chinese Feng Shui Association, a trade group that has between 50,000-60,000 members.

Chen predicts that this will be a prosperous year for those born in the year of the Dragon (those born in 1940, ’64, ’88,’ ’12), Rat (’36, 60,’84,’08), Monkey (’32, ’56, ’80, ’04) and Rooster (’33, ’57, ’81, ’05). Of these zodiac animals, those born in the year of the Monkey are poised to have particularly good luck in 2012!!!

Suck on that El Dorado News Times daily horoscope...

SOPA Bill Shelved, Thank You Google, Wikipedia and others

2012-01-21T20:23:00.001-06:00

Well the good ole' folks over at the Washington Post posted a great article about how the SOPA bill was 'put on hold' by congress today (Thank God), so I figured why not let you read it straight from the horses mouth, click here...

But if you want my honest opinion I think it had a lot to do with a post from one of my favorite website author / designers at The Oatmeal. Check his hilarious but spot-on take about SOPA by clicking here...

MegaUpload now MegaOffline

2012-01-21T08:53:00.001-06:00

Yesterday a massive operation took down MegaUpload, one of the world's leading file-storage services and one of the world's biggest sites, period.

While the timing came as a huge post-SOPA protest surprise, the fact the site was targeted was not – for many months there have been rumblings behind the scenes that something might be "done" about MegaUpload. Nevertheless, the manner in which the action was taken and the language used by the authorities in doing so was utterly unprecedented.

So the key question this morning is this – What made MegaUpload a rogue site which deserved to be completely dismantled and its key staff arrested? The answers lie in the 72-page indictment and show just how the authorities (with the massive assistance of the MPAA, no doubt) framed Mega's activities in such a way as to strip it of any protection under the DMCA.

In the U.S., online service providers are eligible for safe harbor under the DMCA from copyright infringement suits by meeting certain criteria. However, the indictment states that member of the "Mega Conspiracy" (capital M, capital C no less) do not meet these criteria because…

…they are willfully infringing copyrights themselves on these systems; have actual knowledge that the materials on their systems are infringing (or alternatively know facts or circumstances that would make infringing material apparent); receive a financial benefit directly attributable to copyright-infringing activity where the provider can control that activity; and have not removed, or disabled access to, known copyright infringing material from servers they control.

Let's cover the last point first – the apparent non-removal of known copyright material from MegaUpload's servers. First, a little background on how MegaUpload's user uploading system worked because this is absolutely crucial to the case against the site.

Mega had developed a system whereby files set to be uploaded by users were hashed in order to discover if a copy of the file already exists on the Mega servers. If a file existed, the user did not have to upload his copy and was simply given a unique URL in order to access the content in future. What this meant in practice is that there could be countless URLs 'owned' by various users but which all pointed to the same file.

Megaupload's "Abuse Tool" to which major copyright holders were given access, enabled the removal of links to infringing works hosted on MegaUpload's servers. However, the indictment claims that it "did not actually function as a DMCA compliance tool as the copyright owners were led to believe." And here's why.

The indictment claims that when a copyright holder issued a takedown notice for content referenced by its URL, only the URL was taken down, not the content to which it pointed. So although the URL in question would report that it had been removed and would no longer resolve to infringing material, URLs issued to others would remain operational.
Furthermore, the indictment states that although MegaUpload staff (referred to as Members of the Conspiracy) discussed how they could automatically remove child pornography from their systems given a specific hash value, the same standards weren't applied to complained-about copyright works.

In June 2010, it appears that MegaUpload was subjected to a something of a test by the authorities. The company was informed, pursuant to a criminal search warrant from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, that thirty-nine infringing movies were being stored on their servers at Carpathia Hosting in the Eastern District of Virginia.
"A member of the Mega Conspiracy informed several of his co-conspirators at that time that he located the named files using internal searches of their systems. As of November 18, 2011, more than a year later, thirty-six of the thirty-nine infringing motion pictures were still being stored on the servers controlled by the Mega Conspiracy," the indictment reads.

The paperworks goes on to accuse MegaUpload of running a program between September 2005 and July 2011 which rewarded users for uploading infringing material.
A citation from an internal MegaUpload email from February 2007 entitled "reward payments" claims to show that at least two key staff members knew that cash payments were being paid to users who uploaded infringing material including "full popular DVD rips" and "software with keygenerators (Warez)".

Then the indictment starts to throw up some very interesting questions, specifically how the authorities managed to get hold of not just one but many of MegaUpload's internal company emails (dating back to 2006) to use in the case against them.

It's certainly possible that the authorities were monitoring MegaUpload's correspondence but there are also at least two mentions in the indictment of an unnamed person described as "an unindicted co-conspirator". While prosecutors sometimes use this term to describe people who have been excluded from an indictment on evidentiary concerns, they also use it to describe individuals who have been granted immunity from prosecution.
In any event, these emails are being heavily relied upon since many appear to indicate a knowledge among staff that copyright works were held on the company's servers. Here's a sample:

An email from 2006 claims to show how MegaUpload attempted to download large amounts of content from YouTube and appeared by April that year to have obtained 30% of the site's content. A follow up email in 2007 claimed that "Kim [MegaUpload's founder] really wants to copy Youtube one to one."

An email from August 2006 titled "lol" contained a screenshot of a MegaUpload download page showing a cracked copy of CD burning software Alcohol 120%.
Other correspondence quoted in the indictment appears to show key staff members sending each other links to copyright works hosted on MegaUpload.
One contained 100 MegaUpload links to content by recording artist Armin Van Buuren. Another, allegedly sent in December 2006 by Kim Dotcom to another staff member, carried a link to a music file hosted on a MegaUpload server entitled "05-50_cent_feat._mobb_deep-nah-c4.mp3". No context for the sending of these links is given in the indictment.

Other emails show staff asking each other to help locate copies of infringing content including TV series The Sopranos and Seinfeld, and music from a band called Grand Archives. Again, no context is offered in the indictment.
An email sent in July 2008 shows a key staff member reporting an earlier conversation with another entitled "funny chat-log."
"We have a funny business . . . modern days pirates," the exchange begins. "We're not
pirates," came the reply. "We're just providing shipping services to pirates."
But aside from exchanging links to copyright works, the indictment claims that key staff members also uploaded material themselves including a TV show from the BBC and a copy of the movie Taken.

The indictment lists several other examples which are supposed to demonstrate that the admins of MegaUpload knew that their service was being used for the storage and distribution of illegal material.

Emails from customers are cited where they complain that for various reasons they're unable to watch named copyrighted works. Others ask how to find pirate movies on Mega and are told to go to sites that index Mega-hosted material, such as the ThePirateCity.org, a site seized as part of Operation in Our Sites.

On at least two occasions the indictment reports key MegaUpload staff discussing TorrentFreak articles on seizure operations being carried out by the US authorities.
In one email, Kim Dotcom reportedly stated: "This is a serious threat to our business. Please look into this and see how we can protect ourselfs [sic]," adding, "Should we move our domain to another country, Canada or even HK?"

The indictment separately lists several movies being distributed from MegaUpload's servers in the United States, all of which were not yet commercially available. There is no indication, however, that MegaUpload's operators knew they were there.
On face value it would seem that in a handful of cited instances staff at the company did indeed link each other to copyright works, but when the massive scale of the MegaUpload operation is set beside them, their significance is put into a different perspective.
The issue of not taking down content is a fascinating one. MegaUpload is not on its own when it hashes content then allows users to access already-stored versions of the same files. Nevertheless, will taking down a specific URL and not the content itself be enough to appease the courts?

Finally, and despite the assertions of the MPAA, RIAA and the authorities, MegaUpload carried a huge amount of non-infringing content, giving the service itself "substantial non-infringing users". Nevertheless, all content has now been seized, leaving millions of people and companies without their personal data.
Cyberlocker services and potential startups all around the world will be watching this case like hawks...

Me and Jessica

2012-01-20T11:12:00.000-06:00

Me and Jessica @ Murphy X-Mas Party

Posted via Picassa

Biggest Online Blackout Ever

2012-01-17T17:59:00.001-06:00

Poetry in Motion! - Google "Blacks out" for SOPA

Tomorrow, January 18th, 2012, will be the largest internet protest in history. Thousands of sites across the internet, including some of the biggest in the world, will be blacking out and directing people to contact Congress to kill the web censorship bill, SOPA and PIPA. We want to get you involved.

Join us on the historic day by blacking out your site. Copy the code below and paste it into the header of your theme (Wordpress users: use the SOPA Strike plugin) to black your site out in protest of SOPA/PIPA. It will activate automatically on Jan. 18th, displaying this page and directing visitors to contact Congress, and will deactivate at the end of the day.

<script type="text/javascript">var a=new Date,b=a.getHours()+a.getTimezoneOffset()/60;if(18==a.getDate()&&0==a.getMonth()&&2012==a.getFullYear()&&13<=b&&24>=b)window.location="http://sopastrike.com/strike";</script>

In just 7 days, the Senate will vote on forever altering the free and open internet by instituting a new regime of extra-judicial, corporate-led website takedowns. This is a fundamental fight about who has power in society -- the people with the means to communicate freely or the governments and corporations that feel threatened.

For the full state of play on the censorship bills, take a look at this infographic we've put together. Click here. The clock is ticking, and we're still 35 senators short of the number we need to kill the bill.

Thank You!

-Donny, Tiffiniy, Holmes, CJ, Phil, Josh, Douglas

Fight for the Future is a non-profit organization fighting for people's freedoms in a new digital age

ELDOGCC - January Bulletin Available

2012-01-16T20:33:00.001-06:00

El Dorado Golf & Country's Club new January Bulletin is now available on their website!

Check it our here and let them know what you think...

Hello World...

2012-01-13T21:17:00.003-06:00

Welcome to the world Madison Anne Harrison!!!

Posting via SMS

2012-01-13T17:22:00.000-06:00

Being a developer I normally stray away from pre-built forms and applications like Blogger but I have to say that I'm really digging all of the features here!

The amount of design tweaks that you can apply along with the ability to post via email and SMS really sets Blogger out above the rest. So I guess you can score another one for Google.

SMS

2012-01-13T16:30:00.002-06:00

Test post from my phone...