Today I found out that my Gmail account – paulbenetis@gmail.com – was disabled.  My buddy sent me an IM and said that he received a bounce back when trying to send me an email.  This account was mainly set up as an additional email address and was forwarding all my emails to my other Gmail account, and I give it out to people so it easy from them to remember.  Therefore, I don’t ever go to Gmail and login to this particular account.

Right away I went to mail.google.com and tried to log in and received “Sorry, your account has been disabled.” error.  No explanation, no anything!

There was a link provided to get some help and I was able to fill out a form to submit to Google.  I am not sure if Google will ever get back to me…

This really worries me however as my main Gmail account has a lot information that is valuable to me.  I use Google’ services with confidence that the services they provide will be there for a long time to come, but situations like these are really discouraging.  How can I trust the service on my other account will stay active?

I understand that if you use the account to send spam emails but this wasn’t the case at all.  This was my personal account!  I really hope the form I filled out gets me somewhere.

Another really weird thing that I noticed:  I tried to sign up for another Gmail account just now, trying to use paul.benetis@gmail.com, and instead of saying that this name is already taken, it gave me a message that this particular user name has been disabled!  Is my name becoming some blacklisted name with Google?   NOOOOOOO!

With DVRs gaining popularity, the companies are afraid that they are not reaching all of the viewers with their continuous bombardments of our TVs. New ways of reaching the consumer are required and video games are one of the channels that are not yet exploited.

So far companies have been able to place ads in video games, but there is a problem with placing an ad in an environment where the consumer is not forced to look at the ad. For example, you watch the commercials (if you don’t have a DVR) while waiting for the show to continue. You might not pay much attention to them, but there they are in your face and that is what companies care about. In a video game, however, the ads are placed in the environment around you but that doesn’t mean you have to stare at it – after all, you are busy playing the game. If you do, however, look at an in-game ad, these companies want to know that. They want to know if their ad is reaching the audience. There is really no way of knowing whether or not I looked at the Intel ad while blasting away some aliens. Without this information advertisers are unable to create any strategy for their ad campaigns.

So here is the point of this post. Marketing company Neue Digitale, based in Germany, says that they have found a way to help advertisers with their dilemma. Supposedly, they developed the technology that will record players’ in-game actions which will provide very detailed information about the ads that are placed in the game’s environment. Such actions include how many times the players looked at the ad, at what angle, and for how long. If these guys can actually execute what they are promising, I am sure they will be raking in some serious money in no time.

I am still thinking about the ending and haven’t decided if I liked it or not. It definitely did not end how I was expecting it to, but I really doubt anyone expected the final seconds to be what they were. Too many open question and too many IFs and BUTs is not sitting right with me as of now, but I will get over it.

After 8 years of following the show, I think we all deserved more answers than we got.

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I started out bidding .20 per click because thats what I needed to in order for the ad to show up. I thought that was a bit pricey considering I had no competition. Either way, I had no choice. After not even 20 minutes, clicks started coming in and my CTR was very decent. So I lowered my max bid to .10 which was a relief because paying .20 for as many clicks as I was getting, was becoming too expensive. My CTR kept steady and I still had no competition. I decided to drop my bid again to .05, which lasted for a good hour until Adwords raised my minimum bid back up to .10.

This is where I am at a loss. I don’t think that with good CTR and no competition I should pay more than .05 per click. Google is not making much money from this keyword so why not let me pay .05 so they can at least get something instead of nothing. I am not sure high my CTR has to be in order for minimum bid to be at .05 per click but when I am the only one that is displaying ads for a certain keyword, I think Google should give some leniency.

Am I wrong? If I am I would like to hear some feedback about this.

If this accusation is true, I hope that Best Buy gets what they deserve. I have had some bad experiences with that store and cannot say that I am their fan. Some people are not “internet savy” or just don’t like to shop online. I don’t believe its fair that they have to pay a higher price because of it. Best Buy taking advantage of them is simply unacceptable.

Source:Â washingtonpost.com

So I giggle as I found it pretty funny. Then, I decided to Google “death blow” just for the hell of it.

This page comes up as #1 result.

WTF!?

To investigate further I checked where these visits are coming from and it turns out to be blog.akismet.com. So I go there and sure enough they have an entry about my post. To make things even more crazy, I typed in “slow blog solution” in Google and my blog comes up as #1!!! The only other search string that shows my blog as number 1 is my name – Paul Benetis. My last name isn’t that common so I wasn’t that surprised.

So there it is…I posted something simply to express my appreciation for Akismet and in return I get a bunch of traffic.

There is also one more thing. I have to admit that I got a bit nervous wondering if the blog looks alright. Its like having guests come over to your house and you start to worry if everything looks nice and neat.

Its just too easy to do, so why not.