One of the most important aspects of being a geek at large (actually, I’m a smallish geek, but I like to pretend I’m allegedly well over 400 pounds) is the ability to read, disseminate, and digest the vast wealth of information and advice that is available online.  From newsgroups to discussion boards to chat rooms to blogs like this one, there is an almost infinite amount of information and advice which can be accessed with relative ease.

Unfortunately, a large portion of the information and advice is flawed or can create future problems which can quite often be prevented simply by ignoring the flawed advice in the first place.  A bad SEO tip can result in a site getting banned. A faulty Windows registry hack can result in a forced reinstall or formatting of a hard drive. A bad piece of code can result in a website being hacked.

If you’re an online newcomer, you may be asking yourself, “how do I tell which advice is good and which advice isn’t?  How do I know if the provider of the advice has my best interests at heart?”  The following lists some of the ways you can determine a piece of quality advice as opposed to a piece of poor advice:

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I received a phone call from a client of mine asking me if he can close an old email address he was using to get rid of the spam.  I asked him if there was anything important that would necessitate him keeping the email address first, as any good web geek would.  He answered me with “yes, my penis is apparently way too small.  I get told that 20 times a day.”

 Now, since I’m the type of person whose mind tends to wander well off the beaten path, I came up with the following set of questions I’d like to ask people who send out unsolicited commercial emails:

1. If my Johnson is as small and non-functional as the Viagralistermine spam seems to imply, why do all of these Russian women want to date me, marry me, and as Borat would put it, “let me make romance explosion inside of them”?
2. How many dead Nigerian dictators with $12,500,000 (twelve million five hundred thousand) in unclaimed funds to be “inherited” are there?
3. Why does the caps lock key appear to be stuck on every Nigerian keyboard?
4. How much money am I supposed to have left over for those wonderful inside stock tips?
5. How come I keep winning lotteries from countries I’ve never even been to, and wouldn’t my lack of citizenship make me ineligible to claim the prizes?
6. How do you guys always know I’m looking for a wonderful commission job offer that will provide me with a “really favorably chance to earn”? 
7. How did you know my real name is “PayPal User”, or “TD Bank Customer”, or “eBay Member”? 
8. What do auto insurance, Swiss watches and porn star Peter North have in common, and why do you insist on filling out my clients’ spam forms with links to all three?
9. How do you guys come up with such original, yet coherent email subject lines from totally random words, such as “Doc Brittney Mother Horrified” or “them Products Remove”?
10. How do you offer such high-quality software from major brand names such as Microsoft and Adobe at such low, low prices?  No, really, how do you do it? 

I feel much better now.   This was strangely therapeutic.

Go on, everyone, give it a try.  Let’s all do it together.

What would you like to ask spammers?

RAPTORS PLAYOFF TICKET HUNTERS: I’ve posted a series of links to places to purchase 2007 playoff tickets here. This is probably what you want.

For those of you who haven’t heard of this yet, check out ESPN’s Fan Satisfaction Rankings for 2007. ESPN polled all 122 major North American sports franchises (MLB, NBA, NHL, and NFL) and ranked them under 8 different categories:

• Bang for the Buck: revenues from fans (concessions, tickets, merchandise, etc.) divided by number of wins over the past 3 years.
• Fan Relations: ease of fan access to players, owners, management, etc.
• Ownership Quality: judged on honesty, loyalty to players and loyalty to city.
• Stadium Experience: friendliness of the stadium environment and quality of the promotions within the game.
• Players: player quality on the field and likability/personality off of it.
• Coaching and Management: quality of player leadership and coaching.
• Title Track: titles won or expected to be won soon…is the team a winner?

Finally, and most importantly…

• Affordability: cost of tickets, concessions, and parking.

The rapidly surging Toronto Raptors finished 45th overall and 69th in affordability, and the Toronto institution known as the Toronto Maple Leafs finished 99th overall, and dead last (that’s right, 122nd) in affordability.

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That’s right, boys and girls…after much anticipation (mostly my own because I’m incredibly egocentric), I’ve decided to start my own blog. It is my intention throughout this blog to entertain, discuss, educate and raise Hell, but before I get into all that good stuff, I owe a great big “thank you” to a whole bunch of people for making this possible.

First off, thanks to Aaron Pratt over at SEO Buzzbox and Steven Bradley at The Van Blog for helping me get this set up and giving me advice. I’m sure I’ll be picking your brains a lot more over the next little while…but you guys are responsible for your noses.

Second, I’d like to say thank you to those people who have put out some quality blogs that have helped inspire me to create my own. The two most notable ones are Matt Cutts and John Alexander.

I’d like to thank all of my clients for allowing me the opportunity to work on their websites and acquire the knowledge, experience and confidence required for me to open up this blog.

I’d like to thank my friends, both online and offline. You guys are some of the most loyal people on the planet, and you rock.

I’d like to thank you, whoever you are, for reading this and hopefully all the other good stuff I plan to put into this blog.

Finally, I’d like to thank the female for her unbelievable levels of patience. Having a manwhore like me can’t be easy, since I am one crazy sonofabitch.

Anyway, thank you all. Here’s hoping I can give you a lot of quality content and crazy stuff in order to repay that debt.