It was just my birthday and this year I am psyched with the gift my wife got me. It’s called a Readingpen and I hope it will assist me while reading books.

I love reading books but quite frankly I stumble quite a bit when I come across uncommonly used words and a lot of the books I’ve been reading lately seem to be filled with them. Basically, I never excelled with the English vocabulary.

For years I’ve been telling myself I should read with a dictionary but when it comes down to it I can’t really be bothered. For the number of words I have trouble with I would probably be spending more time reading the dictionary then I would the book.

Anyhow, I’ve sort of overcome this by typically skipping over the words I don’t understand and assume what the words mean based on the context of what the writers are trying to say.

I’ve basically been doing this my whole life and I am sort of getting tired of doing it. I feel I have been shortchanging myself. Also, I have come to learn that one word could change the whole context of a sentence and I’ve probably been completely missing the concepts for many points in many books that I have read over the years.

For a while now I have had my eye on the Readingpen. It’s a cool little gizmo that will allow me to scan a word and it will immediately show me the definition of it. I know that there are other electronic pocket dictionaries but for some reason this product appeals to my techno-geek nature.

This is the first I heard about them. Spokeo is a way for you to track all your friends online “social” activity by using their news reader.

Profy reviews the site by writing

Here’s what’s slightly (okay, a bit more than slightly) creepy about Spokeo, however; you don’t have to invite anyone, approve anyone, or really do much of anything. Getting all your contacts set up is as simple as providing your email address and password, and Spokeo will import your contacts and start crawling the sites to find updates.

Here’s the kicker: you don’t necessarily have to be friends with the people in your contact list in order to see what they are doing on many of the sites. From Twitter tweets to Picasa photo albums (which, quite honestly, I had no idea anyone I knew even USED), whatever people in your address book are doing on the 33 sites, you will have it dumped into your feed.

Check out these social sites you can monitor (many of which I never heard of).

Interesting stunt by Improv Everywhere

Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station.

You’re given the option to verify your site in Webmaster Tools by either creating a meta tag or by uploading a file. I’ve now seen on a few wordpress sites that the meta tag is not being read by Google. Even though the tag does show in the html code and is placed in the right area, Google won’t validate the site.

Easiest thing to do is upload the file but put the validation file in your domain root, NOT your Themes folder. Its quite common to put it in your themes folder but that will not work.

I am addicted to this show and watch it religiously. Sometimes while watching I would have to pause to check out his guests websites. That’s how cool the show is.

I am pleased to see Donny Deutsch offers on his blog a guest lineup which appears while the show is playing. Now I can kick back and relax while watching the episodes each night knowing I can check out his guest’s websites the following morning while drinking my coffee.

Los Angeles City Special Municipal Election

Proposition S offers to reduce City’s tax on communications users from 10% to 9%; modernize the ordinance to treat taxpayers equally regardless of technology used; exempt low-income senior-citizen and disabled households; to fund general municipal servers, such as 911, police, fire protection, street maintenance, parks and libraries.

Let me tell you why I am voting no on Proposition S. It’s a sham!

The city of Los Angeles has been illegally collecting a 10% tax on cellular phone services but the courts declared it as an invalid tax and a violation of Prop 218 due to the fact the city voters never voted for it.

If people vote yes on this Proposition our tax will be lowered to 9% but then there will be an additional tax placed on many of our other electronic communications. So basically we would be paying less in tax on the current service but we would then be paying a new tax on many additional electronic communication services. So in essence it will end up costing us much more.

But that’s not all!

The real pisser about this is the trickery taking place. They are trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Currently the City is appealing the courts and if they lose then there will be no tax on any electronic communications. If they lose, we will not have to pay a tax on any of these services. They are throwing in Proposition S as a way to get us to really vote yes to secure their tax knowing full well that they are playing dirty pool.

Their logic is if they tell us it’s a reduction in taxes we will vote it in, not knowingly voting in a tax which we should have never had to pay in the first place.

I almost want to become a politician to come in and clean up scams like these but then at the end of the day I would be a politician.

Vote No and we should ask for our money back.

Four of the largest southern California Indian tribes along with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger are pushing to amend an existing gaming compact with the state that would allow the expansion of their casinos. This expansion would make them some of the largest casinos in the world.

Out of all the propositions I have read, these required a bit of time to gather my thoughts and figure out which way to vote. As an avid poker junkie and a frequent visitor to these Indian Casinos it would seem obvious to vote yes to let them expand their operations. The trouble is, I am torn between my selfish desire to enjoy Vegas style casinos here in California and what I morally feel is the right thing to do.

In the simplest terms the Casinos are asking to expand their Nevada-style slot machines from 2,000 to 7,500. In exchange more payments would be made to the California General Fund. Governor Schwarzenegger is pushing for this as a way to pay down some of the 11 billion dollar fiscal deficit.

Schwarzenegger stipulates that by voting yes, 9 billion dollars in additional revenues would be collected over the next 20 years that can be used for public safety, local and State Law Enforcement, Senior Citizens, and Education.

Before we get too excited about all these billions of dollars in additional revenue, the state is only really looking at an additional $450 million per year. This equates to 0.3% of the state’s annual budget.

In an attempt to bring myself up to speed on all the issues surrounding this Indian Gaming act I have come across some extremely high emotions.

• There are those who feel Indians deserve to expand their Casino Empire and be allowed to make as much money as they can. It is about time Native Americans have a piece of the pie considering what the white man has done to them. When it comes to what the Native Americans have, no one has a right to complain.
• Then there are some Native Americans who themselves report that the wealth brought in from the Casinos are unfairly distributed to the smaller tribes. It has been reported by some tribe members that they have been expelled from their homes as a way for those with higher percentages of Native American blood can keep more of the distribution for themselves. The words “organized mafia” appears to get mentioned.

I have absolutely no idea if the claims made from Native Americans who have been expelled from their tribes for the sake of monetary gain are accurate, but I personally have been known to say we should give Native Americans anything within reason considering our brutal history with them. (Update: Video 1: Pechanga Membership Battle - Video 2: Tribe-Pechanga Casino Tribal Member Issues)

Anything in reason is how I’ve come to my decision to vote NO on this proposition. Casinos are basically money printing presses. The gambling odds are stacked in their favor over the long term and I see no reason for them to have a monopoly on all casino business here in California.

I’ve read somewhere each slot machine can bring in $130,000 a year after payouts. For purely selfish purposes I want a piece of that action.

Since Indian Gaming is a monopoly, their taxes should be much higher than what we are currently asking. The only competition for real Vegas style gambling in California are the Indian casinos themselves. The least they can do is pay two to three times what normal businesses would have to pay in state taxes.

Another thing that really has bugged me is the way this proposition is being presented to us Californians. Since our state is in fiscal trouble we must vote to allow the casinos to save us. The way I see it, if Indian Gaming can lower the states deficit problems then why don’t we just legalize gambling as a whole and impose a hefty tax which guarantees more money to the General Fund?

There are too many special interests to allow that to happen.

The California lottery was setup as a means to help pay down our deficit and as a way to contribute directly to education. From looking at the current state of our educational system I question how much that has helped.

Lastly, at the end of the day I just do not like slot machines (and the lottery for that matter) since they are nothing more than a senseless activity requiring zero skill. My grandmother used to call them “one arm bandits” as they stood there taking people’s money all day long.

When I was last at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas there was a line to the cashier dedicated to only cashing employment checks. Sadly it was filled with people all the way around the corner. I fear all those new slot machines which the Indian Casinos want to add will attract the same type of low economic people.

If this is the road we must travel then the least we can do is see to it that a large percentage of our resident’s losses in these expanding casinos will come back to the state in the form of a high gaming tax.

Before I dive into this I want to give a public thanks to Cash Volume for pointing out the fact my site had been hacked.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed the traffic coming to this site phased out. I know I have not been the most active blogger but I did not think that was an excuse for the organic traffic to just die out.

A few months ago I had upgraded Wordpress to its most recent version. When I recently noticed the volume drop in traffic I thought that perhaps there were some coding errors with an incompatible plug-in as result from the upgrade.

When upgrading the site I did not really spend much time doing any quality control. I’ve been so busy working on other websites that actually pay the bills.

After quickly running down the list of plug-ins, I found the Cloud Tagging plug-in had failed. This failure had thus set into motion 1,000’s of unique urls that all pulled the content from my index page. Thus I now had 1,000’s of duplicate pages.

The 1,000’s of pages were a result of the keywords that were tagged in my blog posts that had their own unique URL. When this was working, the number of pages Google indexed was in the 1,000’s not 100’s which represent the true number of blog posts.

Because this site is just something to pass the time I did not want to spend hours upon hour’s hand editing all my blog posts with new tags. So I wrote a disallow function in the robots.txt file to prohibit the spiders from crawling any subdirectory that started with /tag/.

I then went into the Google Webmaster Console and asked them to remove all pages from their index that had /tag/. This seemed like the easiest thing for me to do.

Then something interesting occurred last week that completely took me by surprise.

I got an email via MyBlogLog user, Cash Volume. He had pointed out the fact many of my Adsense ads were displaying content that was not even relevant to this blog. They were displaying pharmaceutical ads.

He was kind enough to show me the ads in an image and then he went on to tell me that he peeked at my source code and there were dozens of hidden pharmaceutical links on all my pages.

After getting his emails I jumped into my WordPress theme and searched through all the code for this blogs theme. For the life of me I could not find anything.

I then found my way to the Wordpress core files and upon review I noticed that there were two files whose modified dates stood out from the rest. The files had been encrypted with some hash or something and I could only guess if those were the culprits. I had no idea.

At that point I just got fed up with the whole thing and quickly made a back up of some core files and directories and then deleted the entire site off of the server.

Once I had a clean directory I did a fresh install of WordPress and uploaded the files need to get this blog looking the same. I doubled check to see if that removed the spam links and it appears to have worked.

I hardly review live source code on my sites unless I am debugging a change made. I suppose this is something we should do on a regular basis.

As for why the traffic died I do not know for sure if it was hidden spam links or the mass duplicate content. Whatever it was, the new entries I had posted this past week have ranked very well in the SERPs for their respective keywords in quick time. This leads me to believe whatever penalty was placed on this domain has now been removed.

Could it be we have the next big leader of the internet revolution?