Mr. Genius Man from “Windows Technical Support” gets nasty

I got another “Windows Technical Support” call on Friday evening. My caller ID said Minneapolis, and since I have coworkers in Minneapolis, I answered. But the guy on the other end was a long way from Minneapolis and probably doesn’t know diddly about ice hockey.

I’m pretty sure it was the same criminal as last time, but over a better VOIP connection. I remember the voice pretty well, because his parting lines from last time, “Enjoy your broken computer, Mr. Genius Man!” struck me as funny. And he started the conversation with, “I’m calling you again about your Windows 7 computer.”

My conversation with him revealed a few things about why this scam is likely to be profitable.

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Why I set work aside for a while before calling it done

A former supervisor called me the other day. He’s having quality control issues at his new gig, and quality control was one of the things I did when I was working for him. He wanted my insight. And he was very direct with one question he asked me.

“You would always set work aside and then come back to it,” he said. “Why?”

He knew my tactic worked, but wanted to know why it worked. Read more

Three months with Viglink

Last fall, Amazon abruptly ended its affiliate program in Missouri, and they didn’t pay any of their pending affiliate fees either, which was a nice touch. I wasn’t getting rich off affiliate links by any stretch of the imagination, but it at least covered the expenses of running the blog. I looked for replacements, and settled on Viglink. Viglink is nice because it honors all of your existing Amazon affiliate links. It pays at a lower rate, but at least the old links still work. And if Viglink finds the same product at a different affiliate that pays a better rate, it will convert the link for you.

Another advantage in my case is that Viglink will monetize links to a lot of brick and mortar retailers. So if I mention something that one of the big-box home improvement stores sell, I can link it. People can click on it, see what it is, go buy it that day, support their local economy, and I make a penny or two. It’s not much, but when you’re the lone page on the web explaining how to do a handful of things–which I am in a few cases–those pennies can stack up. And I was making $0 off them up until October.

A final nicety over a lot of other affiliate programs is that the payout amount is pretty low. Amazon didn’t pay anything until you made $10, and Google doesn’t pay anything until you make $100. Disclosing earnings is probably against Viglink’s terms of service, but my first payment wouldn’t have made Amazon’s minimum.

It’s a slow start, but once Viglink has seen your most popular pages with links that it can monetize, it picks up. Three months in, Viglink is probably accumulating 50-67% of what Amazon would have made.

The amounts are lower because Viglink signs up for the affiliate programs, I provide the content, and we split the revenue. But the upside to that is that Viglink lets me participate in affiliate programs I never was eligible for before because I didn’t meet the minimum requirements for traffic volume, or that I simply didn’t know about. So that gap could theoretically close.

What your health insurance company doesn’t want you to know

My wife is a Type 1 diabetic. She’s the type of person insurance companies go out of their way to deny coverage for, and while I suppose I can say I’m used to them not covering her without a fight, I’m not exactly good at fighting the system. What I’ve learned the hard way is that you need to make sure, every time you change health insurance, that you have at least 12 months’ worth of certificates of creditable coverage. And don’t expect them to tell you this.

You see, the more you don’t know, the more they can deny coverage and rake in profits. Health insurance isn’t about health, you see. It’s all about profits. Read more

What I’m doing to protect myself after the Target data breach

As you’ve probably heard, Target had a bad month. Between the days of 27 November and 15 December, about 40 million credit card numbers were stolen, making it one of the biggest breaches of its kind in history. As far as we know, the card number and security code were stolen, but debit-card PINs and addresses were not.

Target says they have contained the breach and are cooperating with credit card companies and authorities. Cringely has some analysis, but it has more for people like me to think about how we do things at work than it does for consumers.

And, well, as luck would have it, I shopped a lot at Target between the days in question. And I used both my credit and debit card during that time. Here’s what I’m doing, some of which may be counter-intuitive.

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The New York Times’ dialect map can’t figure me out

My first semester of college, one of the copy editors for the student newspaper either minored in linguistics or just enjoyed the subject. He could peg where all of us were from–except me.

The New York Timesinteractive dialect map struggled with me too. I’ve taken the test five times, and it managed to give me a map just once. Read more

What to do when the layoff comes

An IT pro I went to high school with–he was a year or two ahead of me, so we weren’t quite classmates–got a layoff letter this past week, along with the rest of his department. It was a large, successful company making purely a financial decision to offshore a bunch of jobs, and unfortunately he got caught in the crossfire. It reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, so now’s as good of a time as any.

The details about his layoff and my layoffs are unimportant. What’s more important is what to do next. There are definitely things I know now that I wish I’d known years ago, so I’ll share them now.

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Goodbye Amazon Affiliates, hello Viglink

I’ve been an Amazon affiliate for more than a decade, which meant that if I mentioned a product, posted a link to Amazon and someone clicked the link and bought it, I got a little bit of money. It didn’t make me rich, but in a good year, I made a couple hundred dollars, which paid for the upkeep of the site.

Well, Amazon and the state of Missouri are fighting, so Amazon is discontinuing the affiliate program for Missouri residents. The loss won’t break me, but by the same token, it’s nice to have that money coming in to pay for things like equipment upgrades. I found Viglink, and I’m going to give that a try.

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Go to college, but don’t go broke doing it

I saw in this morning’s Post-Dispatch that 25% of student borrowers can’t repay their debts.

I understand why, but it’s preventable. Jim Gallagher’s column has some good advice. I’ll add some more, having recently spent a little time on my old stomping grounds at Mizzou. Read more

“Why do we have a server named ‘Vicious?'”

My first non-food service, non-retail job was working desktop support for my college, the University of Missouri-Columbia. They were doing a massive computer upgrade and needed some part-time help. When they realized they’d found a journalism student who knew PC hardware and already knew OS/2, they cut the interview short and showed me around. I started work the next day.

My job was, initially, to unbox a few hundred IBM PC 330s and 350s, install network cards and memory, then install OS/2 on them. We had room for me to set up about 10 of them at a time, on long folding tables on opposite sides of a long room. It was lonely work at times, but I got to work with computers, and they were paying me $8 an hour. I liked it better than retail.

After a few days I had enough time to watch the boot process. OS/2 had a facility called Configuruation, Installation and Distribution (CID), similar to Microsoft’s unattended installation that appeared in later versions of Windows NT, that automated much of the process. An administrator configured machines in advance, and then when build time came, I booted off a floppy, entered a computer name, and the process pulled down what it needed from the network. After 30 minutes or so, we had a functional machine. CID probably saved a couple of hours of repetitive work. On this particular day, after I got nine machines going, I watched the 10th go through its the CID process. I noticed the machine kept addressing a server named \\VICIOUS.

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