11

Still Working On It

Posted by rubydooh on April 19, 2012 in Learning As We Go

Hello and wel­come to this update on hack­ing soft­ware, and the promised secu­rity of my bank account.

If you have been read­ing, you can see that I found some­one had hacked into my accounts and requested a refund for the ser­vice that was keep­ing the Tro­jan Horse from munch­ing away at my work.

No one is sur­prised at how all par­ties involved attempted to shift blame to each other, while my com­puter went with­out pro­tec­tion. It took me four days to sort it out on my end, now for Sup­port Mart to come up with their findings.

I started at my Credit Union and they imme­di­ately took offense and only heard accu­sa­tions. When I was able to clear that energy from the room, we started to brain storm a plan to back up what we did know, so Sup­port Mart would have a clear path to inves­ti­gate the sit­u­a­tion as it was for me.

Legally, my Credit Union has no power to change any­thing about my Travel Card. They only sell the option and ser­vice so I do not have to give all the per­sonal infor­ma­tion to com­pa­nies offer­ing this kind of ser­vice to people.

They can begin the rela­tion­ship but once I use the card, it is all in the hands of the com­pany main­tain­ing my, Travel Card, account.

I was able to obtain, “Hard Copy”, proof of every­thing that hap­pened with my account from my Credit Union.
Look­ing up the date, April 12, 2012, you will find no reflec­tion of any request for refund activity.

While I was still in the meet­ing with them, I requested that they be my,“Big Dog”.

To make a call and have a con­ver­sa­tion that would engage this com­pany main­tain­ing my Travel Card account, in this investigation.

To again, ver­ify that no activ­ity had hap­pened on April 12, 2012, other than what we had seen recorded in the list of activ­ity my Credit Union had avail­able for me by April 16, 2012.

They agreed that there was no other record and asked that I call them to secure the account with proper pin num­bers and pass­words for appro­pri­ate access and/or protections.

When I got home, I called them and made the nec­es­sary effort to do just that. Again, I was told that they did not find any record of activ­ity other than the few trans­ac­tions I had made that day.

I had taken the card out to use it at a gas sta­tion to see how it would work, before going on a trip. Just being care­ful to under­stand the thing before I was out on the road with it.

With the hard copy from my Credit Union and the assur­ances from the Travel Card Com­pany under my belt, I called Sup­port Mart back.

They are very kind but really, I was short tem­pered and had no respect for the almost, “lip ser­vice”, I felt I was get­ting. I had to catch this man up for a long time and he could tell I was los­ing patience.

Finally, I just said, “Lis­ten, you have allowed some­one to make a change to my account and have removed my access to the pro­tec­tion I payed you for. Your peo­ple accepted this change with­out even call­ing me to ver­ify that it was me and this is unac­cept­able. No apol­ogy will fix this. No apol­ogy will pro­tect me and noth­ing about this account could seem safe in any way. I have been under attack and you were hired and payed well for the ser­vice. I have hard copy proof, in my hands, that it is not even legal for my Credit Union to do what your com­pany says they did. I have hard copy proof that no refund was ever asked for, filed for, or given. I expect the four days you denied my account to be added on to the end of my con­tract and I expect to know who did this, what their name is, why they did it and what key­stroke actu­ally accom­plished this hor­ri­ble mis­take. I am a cus­tomer of your com­pany and at this point, I have proof that I have been harmed by your peo­ple while your peo­ple have forced me to obtain the proof. Now the bur­den of proof is on you and I expect to get the answer I was promised, in the mail, in hard copy form. Can you ver­ify if the inves­ti­ga­tion is even going in?”

Silence, then more apologies.

He said, “Maam, even I can under­stand your frus­tra­tion and I assure you, your money was never refunded and you are pro­tected and your account is active.”

Again, I told him I was aware that my money had not been refunded, I am ask­ing if he can ver­ify that some­one is look­ing into who and why and when his com­pany allowed some­one to can­cel my account with­out first ver­i­fy­ing that it was, in fact, me that was mak­ing the request.

Four times we danced this dance and I am not offended by the lan­guage bar­rier, just frus­trated at the sound of lip ser­vice when clearly the phone tech was stumped and hard pressed to make it right with­out under­stand­ing how their com­pany could make this hap­pen to me.

I asked him repeat­edly if he could see any­thing on his screen to ver­ify an inves­ti­ga­tion was going on. Very fran­tic click­ing keys in the back­ground told me he was, in fact, search­ing for the infor­ma­tion I was ask­ing for. Finally, he said that yes, he could see that my account had been esca­lated to an emer­gency level inves­ti­ga­tion and that it was going on at a higher level than he had autho­riza­tion to access.

Now this sounded like what I was look­ing for.

This sounded like proper busi­ness prac­tice for a world wide ser­vice adver­tis­ing to be Microsoft Certified.

The fact that I had names, times, dates, phone num­bers, made him work for it. He knew the men I was refer­ring to. He knew they were not due in for their shift till the evening and had no options left but to do as I ask and look at what was being done, so far.

Again, I am quite clear that this will be a mys­tery with no answer.

I under­stand that they do not wish to admit some­one harmed me. I know how this looks and it is unac­cept­able to allow this to hap­pen to some­one who comes to them, under attack, and sim­ply let the ball drop like this with no explanation.

Still unac­cept­able to me.

I have done my leg work and I have proven them to be wrong in their expla­na­tion so far.

Now, we wait.

We are all wait­ing to see who did this and why.

As soon as I receive any­thing from them, I will scan it and get it here for all of us to consider.

I will include the orig­i­nal invoice for you so we can com­pare what they sell and what they actu­ally provided.

I have been so pleased with the indi­vid­u­als who work with me online.

The tech sup­port has been a real com­fort and edu­ca­tion each time I have called in for another clean­ing of my sys­tem. The last time they worked on my sys­tem was April 9, 2012 and to find the Cus­tomer Ser­vice Dept. so happy to just can­cel me with­out ver­i­fy­ing it was me, tells me the tech sup­port is the strength while the records dept. sucks.

Harsh words?

Not when you con­sider I paid $350.00 to these peo­ple for anti-virus sup­port and they so casu­ally allowed this inter­rup­tion to take place.

I was not happy but could tell that his man was clearly mak­ing all the effort his level of cus­tomer ser­vice would allow him. I do believe that much.

I thanked him for his effort in my behalf but told him that it was clear to me I would have to review the find­ings of the inves­ti­ga­tion to deter­mine if I had hired the wrong com­pany for my tech sup­port and anti-virus protection.

Again, he was gen­er­ous with the apologies.

Again, I told him it was too late for apolo­gies as I had been com­pro­mised by his com­pany and it had not been made right yet.

He said, “Oh, no maam, it has been made right, your account is active again.”

I just sighed and reminded him that I was aware they had re-activated my access to this level of tech sup­port, what was wrong is that they had allowed some­one other than myself to can­cel my pro­tec­tion and account and they had not ver­i­fied with me before accept­ing the ques­tion­able request for refund. I had been asked to pay again, before being able to get tech sup­port and this is unac­cept­able busi­ness prac­tice in any Country.

Do you remem­ber what the Wicked Witch of the West said, as the water Dorothy spilled on her, melted her, before their eyes?

You remem­ber her from the Wiz­ard Of Oz?

In the end there was only a man behind a cur­tain mov­ing things around but mak­ing it look like magic to the munchkins.........

The Witch was melt­ing and she just kept saying,“What a world, what a world, what a world...........”

All I can say today is, “Ditto”.

I will be on the road till the 29th of this month. Ari­zona bound and ready to rest.

I will have declared my Chap­ter 7 bank­ruptcy, cleared the way and will be headed for brighter days.

If I find any infor­ma­tion wor­thy of your ears, I will get it down for you, from the road.

If you don’t hear any­thing, it just means this isn’t over yet.

Thank you to those of you who are reg­is­ter­ing for this blog.

Your inter­est and com­pany gives me more strength.

There is so much wait­ing to do with this blog.

Even­tu­ally, I will even attempt to sell some­thing to you.

Some­thing that I find is wor­thy of your hard earned money.

Some­thing I believe will be use­ful to you on your journey.

For now, we are all in this together and these reflec­tions are always here because I under­stand that lots of my read­ers are actu­ally in the same boat as I am.

I always hope that by telling these tales to you, you are under­stand­ing that you are never alone and that you are in very good company.

For now, be kind to your­selves and laugh often.

Watch the sky for beauty and strength and remem­ber to pace yourselves.

What you are work­ing for, is for you.

You mat­ter.

You are beautiful.

We are made stronger when we join together and talk about what we work at.

I always appre­ci­ate your reflec­tions and com­ments and I look for­ward to hear­ing from all of you.

Let’s make this day a really good day and be productive.

Joy­ful in the task.

Joy­ful.

 

Always.

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5

THIS IS CRAZY

Posted by rubydooh on April 15, 2012 in Learning As We Go

It’s me again.

I just have to share this with you.

Some­day, you may find your­self here, fight­ing for what is right to you.

Keep your head up.

Yes, I cried.

Yes, I kind of freaked out.

No, I am not done yet. I am so not done yet.

 

I was attempt­ing to bal­ance my records for the,“TRAVEL CARD”, that is the replace­ment for credit cards I kept for online pur­chases, gas pur­chases, and etc.

It is referred to in pre­vi­ous posts and is a com­pro­mise peo­ple use when declar­ing Bank­ruptcy. It is a tool that requires care, is all. I was in the process of keep­ing track, attempt­ing proper care with a good record.

The Credit Union that I am a mem­ber of, gave me a record to refer to as I cre­ate a reg­is­ter sim­i­lar to any reg­is­ter con­nected to your check­ing account.

Hav­ing hired a com­pany to pro­vide Inter­net sup­port and pro­tec­tion, I was look­ing on the record for the charges to record. Often Inter­na­tional charges come out dif­fer­ent than you first expect because of the addi­tional Inter­na­tional fees.

Not a big issue, just some­thing to record so the amounts are cor­rect when funds are needed again.

The record for the, “TRAVEL CARD”, activ­ity was quite detailed but hard to under­stand. Kind of like attempt­ing to read HTML with­out any idea what the sym­bols and let­ters mean.

The very first charge would have been from the, “Sup­port Mart”, peo­ple who are car­ing for my sys­tem and keep­ing the Tro­jan away. The charges were con­fus­ing but only that I could not find the actual total charge and wanted to get it right in my register.

I just went to the icon on my com­puter home screen and checked for a tele­phone num­ber to call, for infor­ma­tion. I never expected conflict.

Con­flict was wait­ing for me and it blind sided me, I can tell you.

The phone tech informed me that since I had put in a request to reverse the charges, I could not get sup­port today. I would have to pay again to find any­one will­ing to help me.

I did not put in this request and my Credit Union was unaware of any request for rever­sal of charges last Fri­day. Accord­ing to Dan­ish, (pro­nounced, Deneesh), the request was sub­mit­ted Thurs­day, April 12, 2012. He said his records show that I sub­mit­ted this request for a rever­sal of charges. I asked what infor­ma­tion was required to ver­ify it had been me mak­ing the request. He was unsure.

I went in to get my record of activ­ity, Fri­day, April 13, 2012 and there was no record of any request for this rever­sal of charges. They did not seem aware that any funds would be re-loading into my card bal­ance and ver­i­fied the amount left on my card as less than the reversed charges.

Hav­ing told Dan­ish this, he said that the funds would not appear till 10 days from now.

I’ll say it again.......THIS IS CRAZY!

When I asked who autho­rized this request he told me that the Credit Union would have had to file the request for me.

Since no one asked them to do this for me, I can’t wait to hear what they say about the trans­ac­tion rever­sal and the forms nec­es­sary to file such a request.

There will not be a form that I signed because I did not request this reversal.

There will not be autho­riza­tion num­bers or con­fir­ma­tion num­bers because I did not attempt to reverse the charges. I have counted on this com­pany to act as the back-up I need, since the first day that the Tro­jan Horse Virus shut down my computer.

So far, there is no way to find out who asked for this rever­sal of charges or why.

Tomor­row, Mon­day, I will go to my Credit Union and request a copy of the form they filed to get this rever­sal of charges.

Attempt­ing to sort this out, I keep remem­ber­ing the fear I felt as the iSpeed­way cat­a­stro­phe and theft, went down.

But because of the covert nature of this sit­u­a­tion, the only con­nec­tion I may fear I have to the con­flict and threats I received from Omar Sayed, are the mes­sages left on my home answer­ing  machine, telling me that “Casey” from “iSpeed­way wants me to call her back. Call­ing her at the num­ber she leaves me does not help. The phone just rings and rings but no one answers, any time of day.

 

Both times that this woman left the mes­sage, the Tro­jan shut my com­puter down the next time I attempted to access the Inter­net. The laugh­ter and the whis­pers, in the back­ground of the mes­sage, are dis­con­cert­ing, to say the least.

Just as the per­son leav­ing the mes­sage stops speak­ing, there is another per­son who laughs and whispers,“Do you know who...”. Then the calls ends.

I mean, leav­ing the same arro­gant mes­sage, com­plete with laugh­ter in the back­ground, really?

She says that she is a, “Mar­ket­ing Man­ager” for iSpeedway.

It’s just that back in 2011 we were informed that iSpeedway.com does not exist any­more. That they lost their license to do busi­ness, but then re-appeared as Internet-Speedway.com

 

Hmm­m­mmm.......

 

Today, I am telling you that I don’t know who is after me but they are here again.

A Tro­jan Horse does not wan­der and then find us, they are built and set on us, by some­one who intends harm to us.

I will be hav­ing my, “Paper­work”, meet­ing with my attor­ney for the bank­ruptcy, tomorrow.

I will be jump­ing through a few hoops as we set me up for the Judge.

After I have com­pleted this meet­ing, I will be call­ing India.

I will be ask­ing for the super­vi­sor, assigned to this conflict.

I will have been to my Credit Union and I will have any infor­ma­tion those good peo­ple will have for me, as record of what hap­pened in my name, on April 12, 2012.

If it was from a com­puter, I am think­ing there should be an IP address left behind.

If it was done by phone, there will be a phone num­ber, of call origination.

If there is any way to access my accounts, with­out my per­mis­sion, there will be a trail to follow.

I doubt it was an arbi­trary mis­take some com­puter made.

I doubt I will ever know the truth.

I just know I will be talk­ing about it.

We will all be watch­ing, as whomever it is, attempts to shut my mouth.

 

Be strong.

Be joy­ful.

Be well.

 

Always.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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4

I’M STILL HERE

Posted by rubydooh on April 12, 2012 in Learning As We Go

Thanks for asking.

Funny how this get­ting ready to accom­mo­date Bank Of Amer­ica has qui­eted this writer.

No, really, even this chatty bitch.......

But, not to worry.

Whomever it was that set the Tro­jan Horse on us only slowed us down with the non­sense and expense. They did not ruin any­thing, just caused us to learn.

The pos­si­bil­ity of cat­a­stro­phe, cre­ates education.

Gave us food for posts, too.

But me......I am busy tak­ing my home apart and piece by piece, sell­ing and giv­ing away those same things that gave me strength just to include in my visual life, here in my cot­tage. Yes, you are lis­ten­ing to the thoughts and mes­sages of some­one who has lived a trea­sured time in a 1934 cottage.

Pretty cool place to fall back into after a hard day at work.

I will find another pretty cool place but for now, I am watch­ing my things walk away at each yard sale and doing the best I can to keep the let down from tak­ing my energy.

That trans­lates into fight­ing depression.

One good thing about all this is the smile on the face of those grate­ful peo­ple who are also fight­ing so hard to keep qual­ity of life while they strug­gle to live in this Coun­try. A place where the com­ing Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion  con­stantly reminds us that the only peo­ple who are com­fort­able in this con­flict, are the “Wealthy”. The, “one per cent”. The polit­i­cal ads are the con­stant reminder that we are sup­posed to trust these peo­ple, but under­stand that we may never be as com­fort­able as they are. Never feel as safe and cared for as they do. Some of us real­ize that their pets have bet­ter health care than we do.

The con­ver­sa­tion about that doesn’t ever get anywhere.

They don’t get stuck on the couch with worry over where they will live, how they will feed their kids, how they will get the bills paid with so lit­tle income avail­able to work for.

Tough times for so many, I am made stronger when I am able to get my things to those who have so much less than I do.

Shall I tell you some of the sto­ries I have been get­ting when peo­ple show up at my yard sale?

Per­haps you are in this sit­u­a­tion and you have found your­self unable to open to your options.

I am one who under­stands and I say to you, fight the urge to isolate.

It only helps for a lit­tle while and then if you stay alone too long, peo­ple won’t under­stand your quiet, almost uncom­fort­able tones.

So is this where we only con­tem­plate courage or is this where we reach for strength in the sto­ries of others.

 

Deb­bie is a round faced, almost thirty some­thing, clearly strug­gling but still con­jur­ing joy, kind of woman.

She has relo­cated her­self and her two young girls to this town.

She some­times sounds like she is from the East but it is only impor­tant that she found this town to raise her girls.

A very good place to raise healthy, sane adults.

At an ear­lier yard sale she told me that  she lived around the cor­ner. It was a sale of items from the inside of the house so she was very inter­ested in linens and tow­els and such as that.

I never real­ized how she was struggling.

I never saw her fear, only her smile.

It was a chaotic day and her mem­ory faded with the sun as I cleaned up what was left and got it to the thrift store here in town. It is a char­ity that pro­vides day­care for the local kids who have par­ents unable to pay for the care. Cool, huh.

So when this last sale went down, it was the garage stuff. All my tools, equip­ment for keep­ing up repairs, clean­ing sup­plies for my com­mer­cial accounts that no longer use my ser­vices and of course, paint and paint­ing equipment.

Then there was the shelves and the table from the laun­dry, a desk and light, the big enter­tain­ment unit that was the yard work tools keeper, etc., etc., etc.

Only had a few hours to pull that sale off. The 80 mile an hour winds were pre­dicted to hit by noon, that day.

Yes, that is heavy wind but that is how win­ter ends here in our desert haven. We tie things down and count our bless­ings that it isn’t snow......

So it was around 9:00 that morn­ing when she and her mom came by. I was busy with other shop­pers so I didn’t rec­og­nize her at first.

She had been look­ing at the table with two match­ing  stools, for a very long time, but she never spoke to me. That is often the case with yard sale shop­pers. They are in another world as they attempt to visu­al­ize the item sit­ting in the spot they con­sider, for the piece.

We all do it. It isn’t nec­es­sary to speak, just to smile. She did.

When she finally spoke, she shared a mouth full.

She wanted to know how much I wanted for the lit­tle table set. I told her it would be nice to get twenty dol­lars but the idea was to get this stuff to the peo­ple who could really use it and not just to those who buy to re-sell for profit.

She smiled again, just before she broke my heart.

She said, “Well, I can’t afford that much but we don’t have a kitchen table and my girls don’t have a place to do their home­work”. Her girls are 9 and 7.

 

She had also looked hard at the sweet lit­tle black com­puter desk but had moved back to the table set for the dou­ble duty of it, I am sure.

I told her it needed to be twenty dol­lars but I could throw in the desk to sweeten the deal.

Such a good feel­ing to help some­one strug­gling so hard to be a good mom.

I know that one.

I do.

So with one very sweet smile she ran over to her mom and told her how won­der­ful this had turned out. Then she fret­ted and though I was with other cus­tomers, I could see she was com­ing back to me so I just went to her and asked if she had any­thing else she hoped for. It wasn’t that.

She said she didn’t have a car or truck to move this stuff. The car they were in was her mom’s and it had a hatch­back but the stools were the only part of this deal that she could get to her house.

I have a truck.

I have a son who is over six feet with the strong back of the won­der­ful young man that he is. I have the abil­ity to help.

So I told her it would all work out and just asked my son to be a deliv­ery ser­vice for her. He smiled.

You can guess the rest.

Thing is, her mom kept look­ing at the big shelves stand­ing closer to the house. They were attrac­tive though older than most pre­ferred. It seemed as though they weren’t going to sell. I knew who I could give them to. I didn’t mind giv­ing them to the young cou­ple up the street. They had even asked for them if they didn’t sell, because they really couldn’t afford them but also needed them. The cou­ple up the street were at work and Deb­bie was here with her mom. The twenty dol­lars was hard for her to part with, I could tell. I looked at her mom and I could see she was strug­gling, too.

Open­ing my heart to these two women pulled me away from the hurt of los­ing so many of my things to this effort.

I told her if she really could use them I would give them to her for five dol­lars and my son would also deliver them with the table set and desk.

Peo­ple danc­ing in your dri­ve­way can really lift your spirits......

By end of day, those same things were deliv­ered and Debbie’s two sweetie girls had a desk and a kitchen table and two very large, dark wood shelves that would stand almost floor to ceil­ing in one of these lit­tle cottages.

That mama was feel­ing a lit­tle stronger as the walls in her house started to warm with fur­ni­ture and com­forts cre­ated by her courage.

Both of us were made stronger that day.

Two days later she knocked on my door while I was get­ting dinner.

There was that grin and hope­ful sound as she asked for per­mis­sion to go through the boxes still sit­ting in the dri­ve­way, wait­ing to be dropped off at the char­ity. I sat on the front porch munch­ing my bowl of pasta while she chat­ted me up and searched through the shoes and purses and odd items at the bot­tom of the box. Then she went to the other box and gasped. She said, “Oh, there are dishes in here!”

Here is where she started to won­der if I would be ask­ing for money. Of course this box might have gen­er­ated twenty or thirty dol­lars just with the dishes and kitchen tools. Of course, I could have hoped for income on it.

I knew that I didn’t require her hard-earned cash. She told me that she didn’t have any dishes, just odd pieces her mother had shared with her, for the girls.

Have you ever tried that hard for anything?

I know where she used to work, they are strug­gling and cut­ting the staff to accom­mo­date the hard times.

I know what it feels like to stare at the walls of my home and feel des­per­ate to change the con­flict, only to under­stand the pow­er­less feel­ing of some kinds of compromise.

She needed me to deliver the heavy boxes and I did.

As I drove away, she was car­ry­ing the pieces into the house. I warmed to the feel­ing the smile she also car­ried, gave me.  It was the smile I had when I brought those same things into my home, for the qual­ity of life I had hoped to pro­vide, for my chil­dren.
The good stuff.

 

So, then we have Gretta.

Gretta is 91 years old and very happy to share that she has a Birth­day com­ing soon.

Her grin can bring the birds to sing.

She does not show a strug­gle when she comes to my sales, though walk­ing is clearly get­ting to be more of an effort for her.

She does not even buy any­thing, ever.

She only brings her grin and her story.

Yes, she has come by for years.

No, she has never bought any­thing but she always  leaves me with a warm reflec­tion of who she really is. Worth more than money, sometimes.

Per­haps you will agree.

The story begins when she was twenty two.

She reflects on what it was like for her to afford clothes for work.

Con­sid­er­ing her age, this means she was most likely work­ing in an office somewhere.

A recep­tion­ist, or per­haps, a secretary.

She said she used to shop in the “sec­onds” stores, so she could afford the qual­ity and not have to give up too much to pay for what she wanted. If you are unfa­mil­iar with the con­cept, it is when the big­ger stores leave behind cloth­ing that has an imper­fec­tion like crooked seams or zip­pers that won’t work or in this case, a miss­ing button.

Oh, Gretta loved this suit.

It was a beau­ti­ful cream color that made her then, blond hair look so good.

It fit her as if it had been made for her and she knew that she could make it work with other items in her closet, so it would cre­ate more than one outfit.

She asked me, “Do you know how hard it is to even find your own size in places like this?”

The price was more than she could afford but she wanted it so much and by keep­ing a tighter bud­get, she felt she could pay it’s already reduced price.

Gretta’s smile at the mem­ory always catches in my throat. She must have been such a beau­ti­ful young girl in the big city.

So far from her mom. So hope­ful to make a life for her­self, before falling in love and mak­ing a life with a hus­band and chil­dren. She told me once that she had had four children.

Any­way, here she was, spend­ing her money on this suit and car­ry­ing it home to try it on again so she could really admire it, in her own mirror.

Then, she noticed that one of the but­tons was missing.

The but­tons were cov­ered but­tons and were not going to be found in any fab­ric store. They were made with the mate­r­ial the suit was made with.

She was so disappointed.

She told me that she went right back to the, “sec­onds”, store to ask if they had a “but­ton box”, for all the strays, from all the clothes.

She was so cute as she said she searched and searched but could not find one to match the suit.

She said she went over to the rack to see if any­more suits were still there.

She found only one but it wasn’t her size so she couldn’t ask for a trade.

She said she couldn’t wear it with­out the but­ton and she didn’t want to return it so she took a but­ton from the one, still on the rack.

Yes, she stole it and secretly left with this stolen but­ton only to return home with guilt and dis­com­fort at the thought of her covert dishonesty.

Now, you may be think­ing, it was only a but­ton. It wasn’t going to make any dif­fer­ence to the shop owner. It wasn’t going to make the suit, still in the store, less beau­ti­ful or use­able for the woman who it would some­day fit.

“After all”, she said, ” I bought the suit with a miss­ing but­ton, some­one else could buy this one and think noth­ing of replac­ing all the but­tons, to make it look right again”.

But then she told me that it still just didn’t feel right.

She slept that night but not very well. It both­ered her that she had done what she had done. It made her feel like she was a thief and she just couldn’t make an excuse for her actions.

Here is where she touches my heart every time she tells me this story.

She said after her very trou­bled sleep, she got up the next morn­ing and took the but­ton back.

She waits here, to let me ask her what I ask her.

“Gretta, how do you re-attach a but­ton that you have stolen, in front of the staff and not get caught?”

I think that Gretta actu­ally loves to tell this part.

She smiles this imp­ish grin and says, “I couldn’t bring a nee­dle and thread but I took a lit­tle safety-pin and pinned it in from the inside. No one could see what I had done, and the woman who might buy the suit, wouldn’t lose the but­ton, on the way home.”

My answer is always the same. “Bril­liant, Gretta, just brilliant.”

She tells me that she always remem­bers this because it is wrong to take things with­out asking.

She says it wears on you even if you think you can for­give your­self.  She says it is just impor­tant to try to make things right.

I asked her if she lost any more sleep and she smiled and just said, “I sleep very well.”

I always enjoy her, even if she never actu­ally buys a thing.

Wouldn’t you?

 

One more, then I will close for today.

Thanks for stick­ing around while I reflect.

 

So, Alex and Anna are new to the game, but learn­ing as they go, just like us.

Times are com­pli­cated enough with­out the strug­gle of just being so young you sim­ply don’t under­stand what options you have.

Hav­ing been born in this town, Alex has more insight than most, when it comes to under­stand­ing the peo­ple who were also born here.

Being such a very small town just out­side of such an awe­some world des­ti­na­tion like Las Vegas, NV, we are often just mak­ing our way out here, while the money from Vegas does not make its way out here.

Alex builds an income, tak­ing peo­ple Kayak­ing, out on the lake.

Lake Mead, is only 6 miles from us. It is very smart to share what he knows with the tourists that are over­whelmed with the beauty and wild side of the this National Preserve.

Also, work­ing out on the water for a liv­ing is a beau­ti­ful and ful­fill­ing choice of employ­ment. They are a very sweet cou­ple full of hopes and wishes and all that energy.

Good energy.

When they moved into this neigh­bor­hood, they rented a house that had once been such a beau­ti­ful lit­tle place. It had all but been destroyed by the two pre­vi­ous cou­ples, that rented it.

We were all so hope­ful each time, only to watch as the beau­ti­ful lawn became noth­ing more than a park­ing lot. After those peo­ple left the next cou­ple used it to let the dog relieve her­self, but never cleaned up her drop­pings. The smell was almost worse than what it looked like, as we walked by.

Sad really.

Then we met Alex and Anna.

Alex’s mom runs the local gar­den cen­ter, behind the Auto-zone store.

Small town, very small town.

With only a month of work, Alex and Anna trans­formed that ruined front yard into a beau­ti­ful veg­etable gar­den, com­plete with the fun­ni­est, home-made scare­crow and an iris bed, along the side­walk. It has a pre­cious look when the corn is up and the toma­toes are lean­ing into the iris. Pur­ple and white, bearded iris.

Last year, the green beans were thick and deep green and very tasty.

So, when they came by, I was glad to let them shop before the sale really opened.

I only work a yard sale on a Sat­ur­day morning.

They work Sat­ur­day morn­ings on the lake.

You under­stand.

These two peo­ple are the ones who asked for the shelves, if they didn’t sell.

These two peo­ple came here with noth­ing in their house to work with and have strug­gled to fill it, even with chairs to sit in.

I have been proud for their moms because they are always ready with a grin and a chat, no mat­ter how hard it looks like it is get­ting for them.

Wind is deadly on the lake and being out in a kayak isn’t a lot to work with, should you find your­self rock­ing in the waves. I was con­cerned for them that day, since the wind was so strong, so fast. By 11:00 the first big gust had thrown a shelf unit into me that left a bruise the size of a small book on my arm. I could only imag­ine them attempt­ing to get the tourists back to land, if they were still out in the open water.

Alex told me he just got them all into a cove to wait it out.

In the past these two have found my gen­eros­ity and have shown me their grat­i­tude for the kind­nesses I have offered.

Because they were tak­ing a group out on the lake, they missed this sale. They missed the shelves.

It didn’t shake their joy. The day they came, before the sale, Anna found the white wire gar­den edge that she had hoped for. It is now a beau­ti­ful edge to the veg­etable gar­den. Alex is pleased to have a bar­rier against the side­walk traf­fic that some­how seems to care­lessly walk on the bulb garden.

I include these two because they are us.

They are qui­etly begin­ning a life together, just like some of us did.

They have hope and are so happy to have any­thing to work with, while they love each other and build their life together.

My finan­cial com­pli­ca­tions have pro­vided cast iron pots and pans for the kitchen that up until the day the cook­ware was avail­able to give to them, was empty.

An empty kitchen in an almost empty rental.

The cat tree that looks like a huge cac­tus tree, almost as tall as the ceil­ing, now gives their res­cued kitty a perch that is safety from the over-sized, sur­prise pack­age, res­cue puppy, that now chews any­thing left unat­tended, on the floor.

They paid me well for that one.

I only had to make them promise not to tell Moe.

She is one of my kit­ties and she felt it belonged to her.

It did.

Now it doesn’t.

We are all giv­ing up things we value.

We are all mak­ing the effort to value who we are, more than what we have.

What we have has a dif­fer­ent value now.

It’s a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive around here, while we pre­pare to get our sweet selves to new digs.

Life goes on.

Peo­ple change, life will change, time will erase emotion.

Stay strong my dear readers.

Remem­ber to be cre­ative and inspired as you make your way.

Lately, the chant is...

“Imag­i­na­tion is real­ity, cre­ate your own.”

Here we go, cre­at­ing and shar­ing and hop­ing this will work out for the good of all.

Head up....eyes bright.

Thanks stop­ping by.

 

Always.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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6

A TROJAN HORSE

Posted by rubydooh on March 20, 2012 in Learning As We Go

Yes.

That is what Man­ish felt it was.  (pro­nounced, “Maneesh”)

He said, “Oh!..no, ma’am!”

Strikes such fear into your heart, to hear some­thing like that.

Still, we have been fight­ing some­thing for months now. It is get­ting stronger while we are end­ing up just miss­ing, online.

Oh, the moment this kind of thing sinks in.

It can steal your inner strength if you let it.

The thought of a crash and what fol­lows. The chaos.......the time....the new expenses.

Our heart was pound­ing till we could hear it in our head, over the soft words of this very kind man.

You can refer to our pre­vi­ous post titled, “Insane Courage” to find us telling you about our recent Inter­net and com­puter con­flict, here, at rubydooh.com.

When some­thing becomes cor­rupted, you can’t con­tinue your favorite efforts till you do the proper repairs. It is too easy to for­get that this machine is so much like our body, our machine that we use to make our way each day, on this planet.

Just as Man­ish said, we should take care of it just like we take care of our brain and our body.

We intend to do a bet­ter job but we must com­mend all the good peo­ple who helped us yes­ter­day. Just won­der­ful to watch them work, as they chased the virus out of this system.

It was Feb­ru­ary that we chased this thing out, for the first time. At least, that is a good guess at all this and how very strong this virus was.

We chose to pay a one time fee for get­ting it to let go its grasp on our files and move out of the sys­tem, but we didn’t use com­mon sense and it cost us.

Con­sid­er­ing the level of sup­port the McAfee peo­ple pro­vide, they may have included a warn­ing that this would be a pos­si­bil­ity.  20/20 hindsight......

We did not con­sider a need for future sup­port and drop­ping this ball only required fur­ther invest­ment on our part, as well as, the down time we expe­ri­enced while the tech sup­port sorted out what was left to work with.

Man­ish told us, ” You are  in seri­ous trou­ble, Ma’am, and I will  have to get the help of all our senior techs for this one.” Thank you Man­ish for all the help you offered us as we attempted to remain good for some­thing, here, in our pages.

It would seem this virus has only hov­ered in the net­work, wait­ing for the oppor­tu­nity to re-enter our com­puter for a deeper munch of our files. It has become strong enough to blow through the anti-virus pro­tec­tion we have had up until now. McAfee is a strong com­pany with incred­i­ble peo­ple to help you if you stum­ble, but they did not have enough strength to keep this Tro­jan out of our computer.

When we attempted to get online, yes­ter­day, it was impos­si­ble and the blue screen forced us to make calls, search for and hire hon­or­able tech support.

We started with Dell. There was an error mes­sage say­ing that some of the com­po­nents could not be found and that soft­ware required re-installation. This is a Dell prod­uct and soft­ware would be easy to find with them. They said it was a tough error to find and that it would require a deeper investigation.

It was too costly to start at the begin­ning with them.

A phone chat with our ser­vice provider even­tu­ally told us the trou­ble wasn’t with them.

Next, we went to McAfee and checked on the Secu­rity Suite, pro­vided to us with our Inter­net Connection.

Usu­ally it is ample protection.

Hav­ing the right phone num­bers in our Feb­ru­ary notes, was a gift. We just hoped some­one would remem­ber us.

Hav­ing had this issue in Feb­ru­ary and in Jan­u­ary, the records spoke for them­selves and sud­denly, we had more to work with as we inves­ti­gated our blue screen trouble.

In Jan­u­ary, we pur­chased access to the tech sup­port level we were hon­ored to work with. We had paid $139.99 for the access to this group and the removal of the virus, as it was then. The access to this sup­port line was for one year.

Man­ish took the call and we found him imme­di­ately under­stand­ing the symp­toms and trou­bles reported.

Big sigh of relief....then hope.

After he gained remote access, he started to search behind the scenes, so to speak.

One long day, thanks again for the tenac­ity, Man­ish. You never gave up and your efforts were appre­ci­ated, more than you can know.

Some­thing we learned in this effort is how impor­tant it really is, mak­ing the best choices and find­ing the fund­ing for the “Best” protection.

Bren­dan Bur­chard tells us that if we are attempt­ing to cre­ate an income online, we must “be” online, as much as is possible.

Well, if we intend to cre­ate an Inter­net income, we must act respon­si­bly with our equip­ment. Noth­ing will pre­pare you for your momen­tary feel­ing of pow­er­less­ness, when a Tro­jan Horse Virus finds its way into your vir­tual brain.

The phys­i­cal brain shows you how lit­tle you can do, when it is ailing.

If you are one of our kind and loyal read­ers, you may under­stand that these past months, we have recov­ered from a stress related seizure we experienced.

Ironic, isn’t it.

Actu­ally, by under­stand­ing the cost we were pay­ing for let­ting the stress take us down, it pro­vided renewed inter­est in mak­ing our health stronger. Hope­fully, more use­ful to this blog and our read­ers, as well as, mak­ing our­selves bet­ter com­pany for our fam­ily and friends.

Good health is every­thing, you have heard this before, but respon­si­ble habits are required.

More sleep, calmer inner dia­logue, sup­ple­ments to heal on a cel­lu­lar level,( Gingko, Evening Prim­rose Oil, CoQ10, bet­ter multi-vitamin), less sugar and caf­feine, more exer­cise, more playtime..........yes, more time for laughter.

We have pre­pared for the impend­ing bank­ruptcy. No small effort for any­one in need of this kind of finan­cial relief.

We found, “Bank­ruptcy For Dum­mies”, to be help­ful, as we pre­pared for the first con­ver­sa­tion with our cho­sen Attorney.

Yes, we are still in a process, just calmer and more grounded about how this is going. Tak­ing bet­ter care of the machine helps.

The life we live is no dif­fer­ent than yours.

We com­mend you for the fights you win and the con­flicts you sort out, as you make your way. Shows that your brain is work­ing for you and you are car­ing for it.

The thing is, we feel we just dodged a very big bul­let and our vir­tual brain is grate­ful for the care and feed­ing and most of all the, the new protection.

We are here today about the Tro­jan Horse Virus.

About what it took to help us be able to keep chat­ting you up.

We learned from the fight yesterday.

It was a fight to finally resolve this obsta­cle, and it is impor­tant to share what we now know. If this is an issue that presents itself while you are build­ing what you hold dear, we hope you will find some strength here.

Some edu­cated choices to consider.

If you intend to be online for any rea­son, you really must make the effort to under­stand the risk. As we said in our pre­vi­ous posts, tak­ing care of this tool is such an impor­tant task.

So let’s iden­tify this virus the way Man­ish did.

He first called it, The Beast of the Beasts”. A hack­ing software.

He said that it is very, very strong and that it could have done last­ing damage.

Then he spoke the cor­rect title......csrss.exe......!

If you have encoun­tered this bad boy, we hope you will reflect here in a com­ment, so our read­ers can find an edu­ca­tion in your reflec­tions and encouragements.

We were for­tu­nate to find encour­age­ments all through the day and, wow, it was pretty scary for a while there.

It is a pro­duc­tive habit to take good notes.

It begins when the con­ver­sa­tion begins.

When your tech sup­port answers, they always speak their name. Jot it down so you can say their name back to them in your con­ver­sa­tion and also in your grate­ful farewell.

Get all phone num­bers and URLs, if you can.

Your effort to take good notes is sim­ply being proac­tive at a time when you have to give over your per­sonal power any­way. Why not remain use­ful to yourself?

Date and time is use­ful a year from now......

So when Man­ish was done inves­ti­gat­ing, or at least he had seen enough to know it was a big­ger issue than he alone could accom­plish, he explained the point of dif­fer­ent choices in Inter­net pro­tec­tion software.

Sim­ply put, when you have a Microsoft prod­uct, it is pre­ferred that the pro­tec­tion soft­ware come from Microsoft. The engi­neers at Microsoft cre­ate the soft­ware from real expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge of Microsoft needs.

Makes good sense but then how to choose what soft­ware is needed? And what about ongo­ing sup­port for the things too hard to under­stand as they are hap­pen­ing? What about monthly ser­vice con­tracts and then how does it fit into an estab­lished schedule?

Not to worry.

Because we work with a Microsoft sys­tem, we are com­fort­able with this choice. Microsoft tech sup­port was very kind and effi­cient to work with.

The choice Man­ish sug­gested for our par­tic­u­lar needs was prob­a­bly a choice he was most com­fort­able sug­gest­ing. We enjoyed the con­nec­tion he had to these peo­ple and how easy it was to move from his depart­ment to theirs, as the process moved along.

The soft­ware and ser­vice we chose is called, Microsoft Secu­rity Essentials.

The URL was, www.callingcard.supportmart.net and we sug­gest you make a visit to see this. Man­ish had the access but we bought the abil­ity when we hired them.

Now we have the access through the screen icon and our account.

Man­ish gen­er­ated an account and account num­ber for us. It is unclear if we would have gained access to this soft­ware and ser­vice on our own. The day and the process were not inter­rupted for very long. While we went to arrange for the pay­ment, Man­ish con­tin­ued to work at clear­ing and clean­ing and heal­ing the prob­lems. Like he was mak­ing the sys­tem ready to be worked on by the team at Microsoft Secu­rity Essen­tials. He called us back at the agreed upon time and our effort con­tin­ued almost uninterrupted.

Out­stand­ing tech support.

Side note here.....

If you are attempt­ing to live in this world with­out a credit card, try your local Credit Union. You will need a check­ing account, usu­ally they will require you to keep a sav­ings account, also. Sav­ings make bet­ter inter­est rates so this is cool.

Then you sim­ply ask if they can give you a, “Travel Card”, that is Inter­na­tion­ally accepted.

It is not a “Gift Card”. A “Gift Card” can sel­dom be reloaded. A “Travel Card” is meant to be reloaded so you don’t have to carry your usual credit cards while you  travel.

Stan­dard issue “Money Cards” that you will find in most stores, include hefty set-up and monthly fees and require too much per­sonal infor­ma­tion to even access the group pro­vid­ing the card.

The “Travel Card” had a $7.00 fee to cre­ate and the funds were just trans­ferred from an exist­ing account. Rea­son­able ver­i­fi­ca­tion with­out all the per­sonal infor­ma­tion required by  other cards. No monthly fee.

Just an FYI but it seemed important.

So, it was a “Travel Card” we loaded and then used to pay online.  Yes, it felt safer to just be giv­ing a “Travel Card” num­ber for processing.

Worked just fine.

 

The Microsoft Secu­rity Essen­tials agree­ment that we agreed to and paid for, is a life­time mem­ber­ship for sup­port, sup­port soft­ware that removes unwanted intrud­ers from the sys­tem each month, phone calls to check on my needs. Man­ish will be my phone tech. The fee was more than wished for but it was still only $349.99. Man­ish will be call­ing every two weeks to check on this sit­u­a­tion and offer sup­port. If we under­stand cor­rectly, he will work with the peo­ple at Microsoft Secu­rity Essen­tials, to main­tain this com­puter and its software.

The icon remains on our screen, to reach them in his absence, should we need them.

It was won­der­ful to watch the work as it pro­gressed and while the virus was being removed.

All along the way, it was required that we stay in front of the screen to give per­mis­sion to do each task. No infor­ma­tion was lost and noth­ing hap­pened with­out our company.

We are very impressed so far and look for­ward to feel­ing safer now.

It was a way to work with peo­ple who could under­stand how to clean out this sys­tem and bring the equip­ment back to a stronger, safer level of ability.

It was a way to cre­ate a rela­tion­ship with an hon­or­able group who enjoy doing what they do for a liv­ing. We are grate­ful and pre­fer the abil­ity to be present for work that is done.

They gave us a new, stronger brain/registry to work with and they will be here to help us care for it, for the next three years. At least we will be get­ting calls for the next three years. After that it will be a life­time mem­ber­ship that gives us options for the sup­port we need by then. Good to know when you con­sider the changes com­ing to the Inter­net in the next few years.

Just a click on the icon and we are taken to the page where sup­port can be found and records reflect what has been found so far.

Excel­lent.

In build­ing any­thing online, it is appro­pri­ate to build rela­tion­ships with oth­ers online. Just make good choices and afford the best you can afford. Pay just a lit­tle more than you can afford, if you are smart. You will find it worth the invest­ment when you con­sider the cost to replace what you may lose.

 

Another thing Man­ish shared yes­ter­day still kind of haunts us.

Because Face­book is so big, it stands to rea­son that we should act care­fully when work­ing with the force it has become in this world.

Also, hack­ers never take time off really.

This was just the first time hear­ing this and we think it is some­thing to share.

Evi­dently, when some­one tags you in a Face­book photo, viruses in the tag­gers com­puter are able to be shared with the one that opens the file of Face­book photos.

Mind bog­gling.........

So, sim­ply set your Face­book account to say you pre­fer not to be tagged in other people’s pho­tos. Is it really that impor­tant to find your­self in pho­tos other peo­ple have in their folders?

If you were there, you can ask for the photo to be sent to you....

Bet­ter than pos­si­ble viruses sneak­ing into your files.

 

...munch.....munch.....munch.

 

It would seem that we are done chew­ing on this one.

That was tak­ing it too far, wasn’t it.

Got car­ried away.

Hope this has been a good read for you.

Glad to still be here.....yeah.

 

Always.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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0

We Found This.

Posted by rubydooh on February 22, 2012 in Learning As We Go

Hello and welcome.

We have been work­ing Inter­net com­pli­ca­tions again.

This time it would seem one of our plu­g­ins decided not to get along with all the others.

Though we are con­fi­dent that unin­stalling the plu­gin will make a dif­fer­ence, we are notic­ing the amount of com­ments included in one of the threads that our spam folder caught for us.

Some are very kind, some are unnec­es­sar­ily harsh and we are con­fused about the choice of words. When we attempt to copy and paste, our com­puter will not give us the out­come here, only on our notepad. Tells us to delete these mes­sages as they appear to be the work of a pro­gram that sneezes com­ments out so the one URL that they all appear to come from, is reflected.

Inter­est­ing turn of events when we just pub­lished a post that con­sid­ers these programs.

Just good to get our dash­board back. Good to have access to this project again.

Hope you are well and we will return after a few minor adjust­ments are made.

Be well and keep the inspi­ra­tions alive.

 

Always.

 

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0

Time For Comments

Posted by rubydooh on February 16, 2012 in Learning As We Go

Because it has been so very con­stant here at Ruby­Dooh, we feel we have been remiss about answer­ing all of you who are gen­er­ous enough to leave com­ments for us to find.

Our apolo­gies if we offend or leave any­one feel­ing left out.

This ride is a wild one and con­tin­u­ing to respect each other for the unique qual­i­ties we all bring to this table, has always held value in our practices.

We wish to answer some of the Com­ments here, because we guess that you are pos­si­bly like us, when you search the web for good things to think about.

You prob­a­bly look at the posts and skip the Com­ments Sec­tion because lots of the time, peo­ple are talk­ing about things we are not look­ing for, at the sites we visit.

Today, before we jump into the 136 Com­ments wait­ing in the queue for response, we wish to answer just a few with more than a nod.

The first issue is that we often find a ques­tion about how we do not show spam on our site.

We do get a con­stant dose of spam. After all, com­put­ers run spam pro­grams that search for any site that is unat­tended. We have guessed that leav­ing that Com­ment will keep the URL up, for Search Engines to find and count.

The game is deeper than that but for now, that says it sim­ply enough.

Still, if you are attempt­ing to cre­ate an income online through a blog or a site to sell from, you really should look into your dashboard.

Assum­ing you are work­ing from a Word­Press plat­form, you will find a drop down menu titled, “Plugins”.

Hover over the title till you see the words, “Add New”.

Click on this and you will find a screen offer­ing you a search bar.

Go ahead, type in the word Akismet.

Let the search roll through and you will find many offer­ings to consider.

In our begin­nings, we spent an entire evening just read­ing every offer­ing we could find. Just the read­ing offers an edu­ca­tion and we were unsure how we wished to move for­ward when it comes to spam.

Like lice, unchecked and uncon­trolled, it can get under your Inter­net skin and won’t leave with­out extra effort........

The impor­tant thing when choos­ing is to value the choices other peo­ple have made. Some­times respect­ing the expe­ri­ences of strangers can save you the time of trial and error.

We spe­cially like the star rat­ing sys­tem and sug­gest you look first at all the five-star rated offer­ings. Then, just be brave and install what looks real, safe and trust­wor­thy to you.

We chose the plu­gin that we chose because we like the fact that all com­ments can be caught in the spam folder till we make time to process each one.

When you use a pro­gram to catch your incom­ing com­ments, you can devote your atten­tion in a more pro­duc­tive way and your read­ers and/or clients and cus­tomers are never dis­tracted by the dis­re­spect some vis­i­tors can practice.

Just say­ing.....

So now you have found the plu­gin page with all the Akismet offerings.

You have been brave and you have clicked on the details, read the info pro­vided, and even­tu­ally, made your choices.

Just click on the install and wait it out. Not long, we promise.

When you have the plu­gin installed, the next thing to do is acti­vate it.

Your “Installed Plu­g­ins” page is your next place to be.

Scroll down your list till you find what you are look­ing for and go to town...     ^_^

Next thing you know, you rock, and your spam folder will be catch­ing all Com­ments, till you can process them. Very cool.

When we first got on this train, we won­dered why so many use­ful plu­g­ins were avail­able with­out a fee. Just look at the info you will find in your plu­gin “Details” option. You will usu­ally find the name of the per­son who cre­ated this plu­gin and you will find them say­ing they wish to be allowed to show their name on your site, as the creator.

Very rea­son­able request, don’t you think?

[UPDATE.]

Recent events beg for reflec­tion. While we were busy sort­ing out the dreaded 505 error mes­sage that froze us out of our dash­board, we learned from the phone sup­port who con­tin­ued to search for the cause of our con­flict. Though the trou­ble orig­i­nated in our Hosts changes within their set­tings, changes that affected our site, we found many oppor­tu­ni­ties to ask ques­tions about installing plugins.

We learned that when we install, com­pat­i­bil­ity with our ear­lier plu­gin instal­la­tions can cause trou­ble for our site. Sim­ply, as site own­ers, we have to keep a site and sys­tem that allows all of our plu­g­ins and wid­gets to get along with each other. The fact that the 505 mes­sage referred directly to the plu­gin with the error, we could have sim­ply “unin­stalled” and it should have fixed the trou­ble. Because the trou­ble orig­i­nated in the changes our Host required, within their own sys­tem, the error mes­sage appeared to be the trou­ble when it was only an added com­pli­ca­tion that hap­pened, at the same time as the Hosts issues were affect­ing our abil­ity to work here.

Ulti­mately, the les­son we learned is no dif­fer­ent than any life les­son, we all have to get along. Inspi­ra­tion, though fun and edu­ca­tional, requires com­pat­i­bil­ity, within our sites.

Installing plu­g­ins requires that we check as we go, to see if the cho­sen plu­g­ins that we installed, have con­flict to cor­rect, after the install. Error mes­sages can be the infor­ma­tion that leads us to what is not get­ting along before it becomes a prob­lem for our read­ers. Tech sup­port says the act of “acti­vat­ing” the plu­gin, is after the fact. It is the instal­la­tion that gives an oppor­tu­nity to check for issues, before “acti­va­tion”. Acti­va­tion is sec­ondary to instal­la­tion so instal­la­tion is where we should pro­mote con­trol over our choices.

Thanks for the Com­ments that address this issue.

This brings us to another Com­ment, we often find.

Our read­ers appre­ci­ate our choice of tem­plate. Thank you.

Some­times we are asked where we found it or if we tweaked it somehow.

Again, we sug­gest you go to your dash­board for the,“Appearance”, title.

Hover dear ones, till you find the option to view, “Themes”.

Once you have found this, you will want to look at the top of your page.

Notice two tabs?

One says, “Man­age Themes”, while the other says, “Install Themes”.

Go ahead and click on, “Install Themes”, to find a page with all the choices your heart could desire.

We have learned that the more boxes you check to instruct the pro­gram about what you hope for, the less choices you will find. Try not to nar­row your search till you get your feet wet.

Don’t be over­whelmed, just go slow, read and read and read and then act.

Again, you will reflect the name of the cre­ator of the tem­plate you choose, on your site. You will find the name of our tem­plate cre­ator at the bot­tom of our pages.

Inspired indi­vid­u­als we enjoy pro­mot­ing with each day we use the template.

We use the Desk Mess Mir­rored theme.

Just like it looks at our key­board, so it was a per­fect fit.

When we chose our theme, we were hop­ing to bring human­ity back to RubyDooh.com. We were the prod­uct of the assault made on us, by the peo­ple Omar Sayed employed to steal from the good peo­ple of this world. If this state­ment seems  harsh, check under the tab at the top of this blog, titled, “Saved From ImElite/NancyMcEldowney”, and fol­low the path we reflect on there.

No mat­ter what we find in this Inter­net world, we feel we are mak­ing choices, right or wrong. It is us, in the end, who must con­tinue to live this life we choose. We have attempted to cor­rect errors in judge­ment. Find­ing a more pos­i­tive path for Ruby­Dooh heals more than Omar Sayed has ever guessed could be possible.

 

Another trick we wish to share is how to keep track of every­thing as you move from one tem­plate to another, till you choose.

Keep two tabs open at the same time.

Use one to keep a visual of the site you already have up.

Use the other to wan­der the tem­plates till you have a few installed that really please you.

Once they are installed, on this tab, click on them to see how you like the work you have already done, with a new look. We warn you, some­times it will show a generic site or ref­er­ences to tech­ni­cal terms that you are not required to understand.

Just remem­ber, installing does not acti­vate. Keep­ing two tabs open insures you do not lose any ground you have pre­vi­ously gained in your efforts to cre­ate here, on the web, in most cases.

Okay, we have gone over two items from our Com­ment Section.

Now to address one that can annoy but deserves respect.

In our begin­nings, we were try­ing to pur­chase mul­ti­ple teach­ing pro­grams being hyped to us, through our e-mail boxes.

Yes, it was costly but ITT Tech said it would begin around $40,000.00 and we were unable to gen­er­ate that kind of pay­ment so we chose small pay­ments and occa­sional refunds, asked for within the usual 30 day refund peri­ods most com­pa­nies honor.

Many times we found repet­i­tive pro­grams being sold to us from affil­i­ates of the sources who cre­ated these inspirations.

Refunds seemed the only recourse when mul­ti­ple offers came to us for the same pro­grams that had just been updated to look new again.

An under­ly­ing theme kept pre­sent­ing itself. So often we were find­ing teach­ing pro­grams that sold ideas to trick the search engines or take advan­tage of other people’s suc­cesses by get­ting our name out in the form of com­ments or small ads that hover or sneak up on the readers.

As you have seen, we do not like this con­cept or habit so lots of the pro­grams seemed use­less to us. What was of use was the offer of e-books that came with the pro­grams, to entice us to pur­chase. Many time these added free­bies had insights. Insights that we still use today.

Good, com­mon sense ideas that only peo­ple who do this for a liv­ing can come up with.

We urge you to open your minds to the freebies.

Some­times they rock.

The thing is, we are rec­og­niz­ing one of the tricks we returned for refund.

There are peo­ple who sell the Com­ment Sec­tion trick of copy­ing the same com­ment over and over but the IP will reflect a dif­fer­ent computer.

At first we guessed we were being hit by pos­si­ble auto-responder pro­grams that had been installed into office net­works so mul­ti­ple read­ers could com­mu­ni­cate. Pos­si­bly a trans­la­tor pro­gram that offers the same words for ease of use.

At first it was a small issue that did not war­rant conversation.

At this point, we are giv­ing this state­ment about all that:

If you wish to see your name on our site or get your­self into the world of self-promotion by way of a pro­gram repeat­ing the same mes­sage in hopes of sneak­ing through, well just, “Really”? “Really, that’s all you’ve got”?

We do hope for more integrity and we do hope to help all those who agree.

Pro­duc­tive and pos­i­tive self-promotion is not trick­ing the Search Engines or sim­ply spam­ming com­ments through the blog-o-sphere. It is grow­ing organ­i­cally with proven brand­ing and time in busi­ness, online.

SEO refers to com­put­ers com­mu­ni­cat­ing with each other in code.

Word­Press says code is poetry. This poet agrees, but the poetry of code is not words.

SEO is also about pro­vid­ing a mes­sage that humans can read because humans are your cus­tomers and followers.

Self-promoting with words left in com­ment sec­tions, is not a pro­duc­tive effort, because humans read the words and they even­tu­ally rec­og­nize you and remem­ber you for your poor habits.

Feels kind of disrespectful.

Cre­at­ing a bad or dis­re­spect­ful rep. online will cost you, at some point, so why not work from a higher place and reap a longer term of reward for your effort?

Michael Tor­bert of SemperPlugins.com pro­vided the SEO plu­gin for this site. Yes­ter­day we joined his fold of affil­i­ates and will be plac­ing ads for his group some­where on our site, in the near future. Yes, ads, because this group pro­vides integrity and we are hon­ored to pro­mote their efforts, here.

Michael sent us an e-book just for sign­ing up and we enjoyed the good read he provided.

In this e-book he said and we quote:

“High qual­ity SEO efforts aren’t about gam­ing the sys­tem, but rather are about con­sis­tently apply­ing proven tech­niques and strate­gies that have the great­est like­li­hood of with­stand­ing changes to the search engines’ algorithms.”

We are hope­ful when it comes to algo­rithms and the changes that are com­ing to the web we all think we recognize.

We are hard at work to grow organ­i­cally and you, our read­ers, are show­ing us that this was our best idea so far.

For those of you who are using the same mes­sage from dif­fer­ent IP addresses, take care. We feel you are con­fused in some way and though you do not harm us, you do not find our respect.

 

One last thought before we move on to process com­ments patiently waiting.

On a few occa­sions we have found ref­er­ences to read­ers say­ing they are using our work on their sites. Though it is true, we are here in a place where copy and paste is within anyone’s grasp, we appre­ci­ate being told if we are being used elsewhere.

This site is copy­righted and we charge noth­ing to teach and share.

Cour­tesy my good peo­ple, a gift to remember.

Be good to your­selves and good to oth­ers, always, and you will live fuller and richer lives.

By the way, thanks to all the read­ers who have sub­mit­ted quotes to us, along with their comments.

Just won­der­ful to find inspi­ra­tions wait­ing for us.

Thank you.

Our quote for you today:

“Your eco­nomic secu­rity does not lie in your job; it lies in your own power to produce–to think, to learn, to cre­ate, to adapt.

That’s true finan­cial inde­pen­dence.”                 Steven R. Covey

 

We wish you joy in the jour­ney and we look for­ward to hear­ing from you.

Per­haps you will tell us how you are doing on your path.....

Together, we are more.

Always.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Hello Valentine

Posted by rubydooh on February 14, 2012 in Learning As We Go

Dream Big.

That is the mes­sage that my Valen­tine gift says to me.

I was remem­bered this day of lov­ing ways.

Some­one took the time to keep me in the fold and I am grateful.

Our hope, here at Ruby­Dooh is that all of you are reminded to dream big.

Our hope here at Ruby­Dooh is that you all are reminded in some small way that all you do, and all you are, is the prod­uct of love.

Let’s make an effort to remem­ber our­selves with love this day.

 

In keep­ing with the best of our inten­tions, we hope to chat you up about some of the tech­ni­cal chal­lenges this dream can present to those of us dream­ing to cre­ate an income here on the Internet.

 

Yes­ter­day was a nor­mal beginning.

It was impor­tant to check in on the health of this web­site. Another effort to honor the care and feed­ing of this dream.

Per­haps you will remem­ber an ear­lier post, “Insane Courage”.

Per­haps you have found your­self in this main­te­nance mode but as you felt you were mak­ing progress, you found obsta­cles to your efforts.

Such is the story of yesterday.

Today we are here to share our path with you. We have all been here before.  It is true, some of us would be more com­fort­able to go along fine, let­ting some­one else sort out our challenge.

Ruby­Dooh found the chal­lenge to be an unusual education.

Per­haps you will agree.

 

It began with a day of clear­ing cook­ies and caches to keep all the infor­ma­tion like logins and pass­words from poten­tial idiots who troll the inter­net for infor­ma­tion that may find them access to per­sonal infor­ma­tion places, in our lives. Seemed like our usual daily begin­nings but with one fell swoop, all the pages dis­ap­peared that reside beneath our tabs.

Train wreck!

There was quite a post wait­ing to be worked on, but the snag of dis­ap­pear­ing tabs took the lead in the day.

The mes­sage we were find­ing when we clicked on the tabs just said the server could not find the pages. A 404 mes­sage can be such a stinker.

The first thing to do was call our server.

Go to the site, click on sup­port to get a, “pin num­ber” for phone sup­port, check our e-mail for the “pin num­ber”, call into Enom­Cen­tral, answer the com­puter prompts to get to the right depart­ment, remem­ber­ing to say, “Agent” for every answer the com­puter voice requires, get in line for a techie to pick up.

We are pleased to work with Enom­Cen­tral because the peo­ple on the phone for sup­port are always so kind and help­ful. Like talk­ing with the neigh­bors, we began with small chat and then we dove in, to sort out the mystery.

Daniel was the good man who picked up our call. He was sleepy and just begin­ning his day, just like us.

He was con­fused at the mes­sage because he could see the pages when he opened up our site, just like us. The prob­lem we had hoped to sort out was that if you weren’t logged in as admin, the pages didn’t show up. How was that happening?

Could be so many things.

Every­thing means every­thing when you find a dreaded 404.

The good man that he was, found him dig­ging and dig­ging through the pages of his man­u­als. We were both under the impres­sion it started with the fact that our site is built on Word­Press. The pro­gram is won­der­ful but there are no phone num­bers to call for sup­port. Then there is the thing about how the WordPress.com is dif­fer­ent from the WordPress.org and it was look­ing like our whole site had pos­si­bly been cre­ated from the .com, so our options were look­ing limited.

We did not remem­ber cre­at­ing Ruby­Dooh on the .com pro­gram but we are open to find­ing we make errors  and we still get con­fused as we grow, sometimes.

The .org is the one you can tweak, just requires an out­side server.

But then, the .com sup­port forum is won­der­ful to con­nect with.

Tons of client reflec­tions and peo­ple in the ether con­nected to the post­ing area so our requests for help can be worked from the com­put­ers of good hearted Word­Press experts. At least, WordPress.com fam­ily who are com­fort­able help­ing out when the pro­gram challenges.

So there we were, look­ing through any­thing we could find in our dash­board for the clue. Hov­er­ing over each sec­tion with Daniel at our side, guess­ing and check­ing and talk­ing about what we were find­ing in each drop down menu.

Search­ing for some­thing that had power over this change. Some­thing that would sim­ply be found to be dis­abled. Per­haps an add-on that  wasn’t com­pat­i­ble with some­thing else. Maybe a plug-in that our browser no longer cared for. Every­thing means every­thing when you find things dis­ap­pear­ing and we were going to sort this out. We had guessed that Enom­Cen­tral, our server, would be where the trou­ble orig­i­nated from. The mes­sage told the tale. “Server can not find page........”

Daniel was more inclined to believe it was an error in our text and that Word­Press would hold the key.

Daniel put us on hold politely and checked with his supe­ri­ors. He put us on hold to walk over to the desk of an office mate who might have the man­ual that pos­sessed the key to this com­pli­ca­tion. Daniel offered all the guesses he and his office mates could con­sider. We all agreed it would pos­si­bly be nec­es­sary to copy and paste what we could find and re-submit all that work by cre­at­ing a new URL to import to.

UGH!

Weeks of work, tons of infor­ma­tion, lots of time con­sum­ing effort to head into.

We still had a post to work on so we left Daniel and Enom­Cen­tral for WordPress.com.

Think­ing we had an error in our text in some way, it seemed the cor­rect place to research after our work with the tech sup­port at EnomCentral.

You can find an expla­na­tion of WordPress.com ver­sus the .org at, http://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/, a very good read.

An excerpt of this is:

The dis­tinc­tions between WordPress.com, Word­Press, and WordPress.org can cause some con­fu­sion. Let’s clear them up.

WordPress.com is brought to you by some of the same folks who work on Word­Press, the open source blog­ging soft­ware.  WordPress.com is a host­ing plat­form that uti­lizes the same Word­Press soft­ware that any­one can down­load from WordPress.org.  With WordPress.com, the host­ing and man­ag­ing of the soft­ware is taken care of by the team here at Automat­tic.  With the free­stand­ing Word­Press soft­ware, you need to install it on your own server or a 3rd party host­ing provider.

 

Ulti­mately, good peo­ple, we really should check every­thing but it is still com­pli­cated and just because we found this expla­na­tion, we did not find help in the FAQ section.

Daniel had told us it looked like the whole she­bang here at Ruby­Dooh had pos­si­bly been built on the .com so we were quite con­cerned at how much less you can do if you have your own server. Our server was guess­ing we had made the error when we built RubyDooh.com, oh no.

We got up and walked away to go out-of-doors for a look at our rainy desert skies. We hoped to regroup before we tore into the sup­port forum pages for anyone’s reflec­tions of sim­i­lar challenges.

When we were refreshed, we con­tin­ued our day of search­ing and read­ing and won­der­ing if our orig­i­nal post efforts would ever find our time and attentions.

First, get into the sup­port forum.

WordPress.com had changed in the tech­ni­cal ways that require all of us to keep up, so to begin with, our pass­words were not work­ing. Get into the request pass­word places and open new tabs to go to our web mail and retrieve codes to get to the  “option for pass­word cre­ation” pages. Small, time con­sum­ing task that proved worth the time. Just took so long as get­ting the mes­sage from the WordPress.com site required a refresh to get the mes­sages to come through. Log out, log in, log out, log in....you know how that goes, sometimes.

So now we have our new pass­words and we have found our way to the WordPress.com sup­port forum.  Cre­ate a request for help, com­plete the forms, keep it short in spite of frus­tra­tion build­ing. We weren’t sure we made it clear but we left mes­sages and as we typed, we found a mes­sage to the right, grow­ing on the screen, that the com­puter had gen­er­ated. Then we found another mes­sage from the com­puter, telling us we were in the wrong forum. That this site is not hosted by the WordPress.com site and that we should get our sweet selves to the WordPress.org sup­port forum.

Well, they didn’t actu­ally say we were sweet, that was us on this very sweet day.

Then, we found a mes­sage from some­one iden­ti­fied sim­ply as, Time bandit.

Imme­di­ately liked the han­dle and read what she had to say.

Again, we were told that we were not in the right forum but this time, we were asked to click on “unsub­scribe” at the top of the forum page, so this issue would be closed and we would no longer receive e-mails about this. You can imag­ine, the tabs that were open were pil­ing up and we were happy to close some of them but our con­flict was not resolved so first, we went to WordPress.org/support forum.

Just as we did at the .com sup­port forum, you type in your request for help. The com­puter pro­vides aid and the forum has reflec­tions but noth­ing was an actual answer, just sim­i­lar chal­lenges and guesses.

Back and forth we went from the .org to the .com forums. Read­ing and read­ing and read­ing. This sand box we are so quick to play in can really be com­pli­cated when your edu­ca­tion isn’t up to the year you are work­ing in. Inter­net is like that, excit­ing and fun but still so com­pli­cated. Even Daniel had been frus­trated by what he didn’t know and he is a mas­ter work­ing Tech sup­port, at a major server in this Country.

Our effort had become a chal­lenge that con­sumed hours of our day.

Our insight for this chal­lenge was that we should be record­ing our steps because this walk down Inter­net lane was tak­ing so many twists, we were unsure if we could remem­ber our path or even the lesson.

Yes, every­thing is a les­son if you want to keep up with our next gen­er­a­tion of techies, on this planet.

Jot­ting down notes, mak­ing more phone calls, stop­ping to check com­par­isons between the .com and .org forums.

A knock on the door broke the spell for a minute, I was grateful.

With fresh eyes, I retraced my Ruby­Dooh steps, in the dash­board sec­tion again.

For the third time, hov­er­ing over all sec­tions in our dash­board, we real­ized we had made some changes to our site but had not checked the site to see how it looked before we moved on to our “Com­ments”, queue.

We went back to the .org sup­port forum and searched one last time. Maybe we real­ized that we had changed some things but we did not know which changes could have cast our tabbed pages into the dreaded 404.

Then, as if by magic, we found an entry all by itself, from a man who had lost his pages but had found them again.

Lit­tle answers with very big results.

He had also been at the wrong forums, he had also thought per­haps he had lost all his work. His answer was at the .org forum but I shared it with the .com forum before I clicked the “unsub­scribe”, so the issue could be closed.

He had inspired my mes­sage by say­ing he hoped this helped any­one here search­ing for an answer. I felt the same and told the .com forum I was leav­ing this answer for any­one else who found them­selves in the wrong forum. We believe that Inter­net cour­tesy is always appre­ci­ated and keeps with the Col­lec­tive habit of for­ward motion.

We felt like one of the sim­i­lar­i­ties we had kept find­ing was that many of us spend time in the wrong sup­port forum and we imag­ined the techies at the .com repeat that mes­sage over and over to those of us still unsure about the differences.

So often, sim­ple answers, hard to find.

We went into our dash­board one last time for this challenge.

We went into “Links” and then to “Permalinks”.

One of the first steps we took that morn­ing was to check and see if our posts could be more attrac­tive in the way they iden­tify them­selves, for our readers.

Cos­metic con­sid­er­a­tions that com­pli­cated the day.

That gen­er­ous man at the .org sup­port forum had evi­dently done the same.

Here is the skinny.......

If you are tempted to take your perma­links out of “Default” set­ting, you bet­ter be pre­pared to see things dis­ap­pear. That’s right. It was that simple.

All we really had to do was go to the list of perma­links and click them back into, “Default setting.

Bril­liant!

Pages back, entire day con­sumed, rather incred­i­ble feel­ing to have cor­rected my misstep.

Along our path yes­ter­day one thing res­onated as we wan­dered the pages of WordPress.org, WordPress.com and RubyDooh.com.

The most impor­tant les­son we found in this exer­cise was to remem­ber to back up our work.

We do use back-ups but even back-ups can fail you. We know we caused this and we know we are bet­ter than that but we sorted out our com­pli­ca­tions and it will remain a stronger les­son because we made the steps our­selves, until we found our way.

 

We under­stand that you are aware we began this post men­tion­ing the post we had intended to share with you, yesterday.

Now that we have shared this les­son, we would like to share a lit­tle of yes­ter­days thoughts.

You are all so won­der­ful in your com­ments to us. Even though it is so impor­tant to answer all of you, we feel it sim­pler to res­onate a lit­tle in our pages so all new read­ers can find what we are learning.

One com­ment we are work­ing to answer and resolve is a ref­er­ence to the title you find when you attempt to book­mark our work. It would seem the title of “My Life In Other People’s Homes”, has become the title that reflects as our URL and we are con­cerned. All we can find so far is the pos­si­bil­ity that the last time we worked “My Life In Other People’s Homes”, beneath the tab, “My Other Blog”, left our account stuck in Blogspot mode. Still can’t find a solu­tion to this chal­lenge as we have yet to find that page again. The .org is our first guess but like many of the peo­ple in the .org forums will tell you, it has become near impos­si­ble to find our accounts. If any of our read­ers have advice to share, we will be grate­ful. We remem­ber what the page looked like and the infor­ma­tion was retained in a sec­tion at the top left of the page. More than that we are con­founded by how hard it has become to find this page again.

Still work­ing on it.

Next, we wish to share that we are cre­at­ing pages to mon­e­tize this site.

Kind requests for ad space have prompted this effort.

We have been study­ing this pos­si­ble source of income since the begin­ning of our Inter­net edu­ca­tion. You may remem­ber from read­ing posts beneath the tab titled, “Saved From ImElite/NancyMcEldowney”, that we orig­i­nally attempted a Superstore.

Per­haps it was a pet rock but we did acquire some edu­ca­tion and even if we found our­selves unin­ter­ested in work­ing an online store with drop­ship­pers and ware­houses and oh, my good­ness, headaches, we still learned something.

We learned there are some places on the Inter­net that we didn’t find we fit.

Ulti­mately, we believe this is the key to all this Inter­net hype and tease.

Just find the place you fit and work it. Work it for all you’re worth and make some­thing of your­self and your inspirations.

Along our early path, we pur­chased pro­grams, stud­ied free e-books, pur­chased books for our Resource Library, joined forums and cre­ated per­sonal opin­ions of the work we found as we surfed. (You can find our pref­er­ences, so far, behind the tab con­nected to, “Pals Pages”.)

The opin­ion we wish to share with you today is that we are con­flicted about the clut­ter of ads on many sites we frequent.

Yes, we hope for income.

We are finan­cially danc­ing as fast as we can and this effort would do well to cor­rect that and release us from fret.

The choices we see usu­ally include fees to find cus­tomers, oth­er­wise called, “Traffic”.

SEO, affil­i­ate work, AdSense which can end up leav­ing ads that do not reflect our inten­tions in a proper light and require a min­i­mum amount, before a check is cut, sell­ing ban­ner ads and pop-ups that annoy us to no end. These are just a few of the usual tech­niques but we are slow to join the masses. We are cre­at­ing some­thing that we would like to find when we surf. We are hon­or­ing how unique we are and we hope we will find this notion catchy, on other sites.

Still, how do we do this?

How do we mon­e­tize with­out los­ing what ground our work has gained with our readers.

This is the con­flict and all we can say for now is that we have believed that grow­ing this organ­i­cally is a bet­ter fit.

Sure, there are com­pa­nies out there who will charge us to take care of all of this for us.

Sure, there are col­leges who will charge us to train us in the arts of Mar­ket­ing Online, but again, we are slow to join as we find the les­son learned by doing, stays with us longer.

Ryan Deiss says we should be slow to bring in ad space after a blog has been up and run­ning with­out the ads for a time. In fact he has shared that one of his part­ners did just this and found it rocked the boat of his read­ers for a short time, before it took hold.  Yes, Ryan says if you will be keep­ing ads on your blogs, it is bet­ter to start pro­vid­ing ad space from the beginning.

Per­haps you have noticed our begin­nings behind the tab, “Pals Pages”?

Our inten­tion so far is to cre­ate more pages for you to adver­tize from. We do not have pric­ing put together but we feel our read­ers are most often peo­ple who are learn­ing as they go, just like us.

If you are look­ing to adver­tize on our pages, tell us what you have in mind and what you are able to pay for the space.

We have been find­ing requests in our Com­ment sec­tion but no real infor­ma­tion to work with, to help you.

George Brown, cre­ator of Google Sniper and co-founder of ImElite, among other inspi­ra­tions this man has mon­e­tized, says we should cre­ate let­ters to request space, com­posed in our own voice. He says we should appear to be real and human and approach­able, using our own name as often as pos­si­ble. At least that is how we trans­late what we have been read­ing, from his work.

He inspires even when he is sell­ing. ^_^

So this is what we hope to create.

It is our inten­tion to cre­ate a page of all our book­marked busi­nesses that have proven them­selves wor­thy of our respect.

The trick and time con­sump­tion will be in check­ing with each com­pany we intend to pro­mote, for what they will pay us to pro­vide this ad space. Yes, this means many of the com­pa­nies we wish to pro­mote may not be inter­ested in doing busi­ness with such a young site.

Doesn’t mat­ter.

The point to begin­ning with our own book­marks is that these com­pa­nies have proven them­selves to us that they prac­tice busi­ness with integrity.

The exer­cise will pro­vide the rep­e­ti­tion of cre­at­ing let­ters, respond­ing to answers and find­ing rela­tion­ships to care for, on our path to cre­at­ing an income for our work.

While we are doing this, our hope is that any of you look­ing for ad space will feel brave enough to sim­ply open the dia­logue with us. While room for ad space is at a pre­mium and the cost is prob­a­bly lower than other sites, you may find a good fit here.

Per­haps this too, will offer an edu­ca­tion for us and our read­ers, about how this works and how it can look once the ads are in place.

All in all, this whole game is still so excit­ing for us. The requests from our read­ers for ad space means we have grown.

We have grown good peo­ple and you were here to be a part of it.

Well done and thank you from our heart of hearts.

We do hope we have pro­vided a good read for you, today.

Feed­ing the dream and shar­ing the bounty of good work and kind­nesses that enable growth.

We like this feel­ing of com­mu­nity, that is grow­ing here.

We hope to honor all of you who take the time to inves­ti­gate the path we are shar­ing with you, in our words.

After all, you do honor us so, when you come back for more.

You inspire us and we are so grate­ful for your com­pany along our way.

Here’s to the dream­ers and the eccentrics.

We keep the color.

 

Leav­ing you with love.

Always.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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2

Insane Courage

Posted by rubydooh on February 3, 2012 in Learning As We Go

 

I know, what does that mean?

Insane Courage, the words just keep rolling around in my head.

I like say­ing it out loud.

I con­sider the words, as I chew on them, dur­ing tasks that require my silence.

Yes, those moments do come around.

I try not to let them slow me down.

In fact, today is mov­ing by pretty fast so I am here, briefly, to let you in on what we have resolved today.

If you are one of my won­der­ful read­ers, you are aware we expe­ri­enced a bit of down time to get our sys­tem ser­viced and refreshed.

They, McAfee, told us we had a virus.

This last two days, we have noticed more drama with the sys­tem so more dig­ging seemed appropriate.

We searched and chat­ted with tech sup­port and found ways to delete pro­grams that might be in con­flict with each other.

Turns out we are back with Firefox.

Hav­ing been built by pro­gram­mers, we find it more com­pat­i­ble and with more options to con­sider,  than that of Google Chrome. Miss the bells and whis­tles but Fire­fox keeps us online when Google Chrome seems to pre­fer conflict.

We felt that we had got­ten some­where. We were attempt­ing to return here, to put up todays post when all the drama reignited.

Hmm.....

Long story short, I went straight to the facts, as I under­stood them.

A mes­sage kept sweep­ing my screen about how my d-drive was too full.

Remov­ing files doesn’t change the warn­ing reports. I just won­dered why it was always a warn­ing from my d-drive and not the rest of the system.

Then there is the prob­lem with my real-time scan­ning con­tin­u­osly shut­ting itself off after I turn it on.

Two unre­lated things that keep happening.

Hmmm.....first, unin­stall and then re-install the McAfee Secu­rity Program.

Maybe some­thing is incom­pat­i­ble within itself.

Then, what if I was given a file with a virus or some crea­ture born of dis­hon­esty and too much time on some fools hands?

What if the new restore point we just set didn’t remove or change any­thing on my recov­ery drive/the d-drive?

I went into my com­puter and then to my drives.

I chose to look at the d-drive and checked the installed programs.

Sure enough, like a guilty puppy under the table, a com­plete instal­la­tion sim­ply marked, “ruby­dooh”, had an install date that matched up with the dates I started hav­ing all the trou­ble with Inter­net Speed­way, aka: Ispeedway.com.

The most recent restore point iden­ti­fied ruby­dooh in her cur­rent form.

I left those files intact.

But the file dated back in 2010, the file that had a shadow light­ing behind it in the files list, was just deleted. Out of Recy­cle Bin files, too.

Half my d-drive vol­ume was just now removed and here we are to cel­e­brate a pos­si­ble unin­stall of Omar Sayeds covert attempts to be King of the world.....

When you make a big dog brat like that mad, you can assume his under­handed attempts at mess­ing you up.

We are talk­ing about the risk we all take just play­ing in this sandbox.

Yes, we feel vulnerable.

Yes, we are in uncharted ter­ri­tory every day and we do it anyway.

No, we are not stupid.

We are tak­ing advan­tage of a con­nec­tion to our Coun­try and our Planet, in that we wish to con­nect in the ethernet.

I think it’s pretty cool, really. I like to play here every day and when some­thing pre­vents me from doing so, I am com­pelled to keep dig­ging in this machine that brings me to you, and fix what is ailing.

Yes, this thing can suck us in, can’t it?!

There’s that place where I tell myself, Ruby, fight the urge to live in your head..........

Hmmm...maybe I have had enough cof­fee for this morning.

+)+

Doesn’t mat­ter.

What is impor­tant is that we were brave today and we sorted out the con­test we observed between our Inter­net provider and our Secu­rity provider.

While each group of phone tech sup­port attempted to shift the abil­ity to solve the issue to the other, we kept lis­ten­ing and tak­ing notes to do the work we did.

The feel­ing of acom­plish­ment lingers.

Be brave today.

Be respon­si­ble for your equip­ment and check into get­ting ser­vice done to remove old, pos­si­bly incom­pat­i­ble pro­grams, that are run­ning in the backround.

Look into your restore points and find out how long ago you set them.

This means being aware of the machine you are work­ing on.

If you are in an office and you have sup­port pro­vided for you, doesn’t mean you should remain igno­rant of what gets you where you want to go.

I will stop here, and refer you back to the posts, saved from imelite. You will find a tab for this blog at the top of this page. This first post was an early obser­va­tion for me but it still resonates.

Those of us who know the back streets and short cuts on this Inter­net High­way, will have more fun down the road, when tech­nol­ogy changes and improves the inspi­ra­tion. Good for us, who have the insight and tenac­ity to keep train­ing our­selves to under­stand all this.

Today we are reflect­ing on the care our equip­ment requires.

We are respect­ing the good inten­tions all the tech sup­port offered, as we con­tin­ued to take advice and make changes along the way. The real­ity of the trou­ble also pro­vided the con­flict these good peo­ple sup­plied, as they couldn’t fig­ure out what was wrong. We are just grate­ful we were tak­ing notes because col­lec­tively, this group of peo­ple, Freddy, Tabitha, Joe (twice), and finally Matthew, helped this bumpy road smooth out.

We are very grateful.

So rule for today.....

Ser­vice your equip­ment the same as you would your vehicle.

Being unable to under­stand com­put­ers does not excuse using them with no regard to the care and feed­ing. If you abuse or neglect your tools, they will crash and cause you all sorts of grief that you really won’t have time for anyway.

Today, it would seem we have stepped up our game in the care and feed­ing places.

The low life, Inter­net Speed­way, aka :iSpeedway.com, group that is still maraud­ing through the eth­er­net, may have given us the virus and it still may be lurking.

We are hop­ing that remov­ing the old 2010 file, for a shadow ruby­dooh, from our recov­ery disk and recy­cle bin, will slow it’s process and increase our ability.

We hope that we have shown you a rea­son to look at your com­puter with a more pro­duc­tive respect.

Oh, and we were so proud to have sorted this out so far.

Here is where we remind you that the choice of browser that you use may be the com­pli­ca­tions you expe­ri­ence with this site. Money is moti­vat­ing the poloriza­tion of the browsers avail­able to us. Be wise in your choices and find the one most com­pat­i­ble to your needs.

Just get­ting that for­ward motion going again.

Stay strong and be brave.

Insane Courage.

Insane Courage.

Insane Courage.

Always.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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0

Welcome Back...Google

Posted by rubydooh on January 27, 2012 in Learning As We Go

Hello.

Thank you for your inter­est in our words and all the par­tic­i­pa­tion that we are find­ing in our com­ment sections.

Your inter­est and respect brought us to tears today and we are very grateful.

Just goes to show you, the good stuff is always hap­pen­ing right along side of what we are stay­ing busy with. Shows you how impor­tant it is to stay open for the pos­i­tive even when con­flict has you danc­ing as fast as you can.

This blog has always been about the growth we expe­ri­ence as we con­tinue our focus on learn­ing. It is a true joy to con­nect with so many other like minded peo­ple, all over the world, who are also in search of that some­thing, that makes every­thing else, make sense.

We believe in the kind­ness of strangers.

We believe in the for­ward motion shar­ing what we know can provide.

We believe strangers are only peo­ple who have yet to intro­duce them­selves and our com­ment sec­tion is a strong indi­ca­tion that we are not alone in our opinions.

Thank you for all your comments.

Thank you for the time you take to read our work.

We are hon­ored and we hope to con­tinue to be use­ful and enter­tain­ing in our efforts, here.

Today will be a com­pli­cated day that will lead me as I accom­plish all that is on the, “Fri­day List”.

Here’s to good days, full of activ­ity and com­pany and for­ward motion.

Steven R. Covey advises us to, “begin with the end in mind”.

We are aim­ing for the end of this day and will keep an eye on our list so we can feel the accom­plish­ments sink in as we check off each item that waits for attention.

With this day at hand, be well and main­tain your­selves with joy in the process.

Evening will be here soon enough.

Our windy sun­rise has just arrived.

Per­haps another cup of coffee.........

 

Always.

 

 

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0

STOP CENSORSHIP!

Posted by rubydooh on January 18, 2012 in Learning As We Go

We wish to encour­age inspi­ra­tion and growth. We believe the com­ing days will reflect what Con­gress believes. We urge you to join the black­out today and speak your heart about how the Inter­net will be used from this day for­ward. Will the Cor­po­ra­tions con­tinue to con­trol this Coun­try, our world, or will the peo­ple who live in this world con­tinue to cre­ate income and share our lives as we have. This is for you to decide and you choose even if you choose not to choose. Let some­one choose for you? Risky.

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