Saying No to the Culture of Death

The Excitement of Receiving Referrals at the Traffic Exchange

2007-11-30T20:39:19+11:00

I have been a little remiss with my blogging because I have been occupied with surfing sites on the TEs. What has changed in the past week is the number of referrals that I have received. The fun part has been that several of these referrals are direct, that is the people have clicked on the advertisements that I have circulated, and suddenly I have a downline!! On one exchange I have 6 referrals to date, and if I get 4 more then I will get a free upgrade so that I will be able to use more URL's on that exchange. Yes, I really do feel that surge of excitement. On another exchange I have 9 referrals, 8 of them are first level referrals, and the other is a second level referral. Another one has provided 2 direct referrals, and there are at least 3 other exchanges where I have referrals. Suddenly, I find that I really want to get out there and promote, and see if I can earn my way to upgrading my memberships without spending money.

This is not the only form of excitement because I feel the urge to compete in the competitions and to at least win some credits with my activity. There are some fun ways of competing, such as playing Dodgem Cars, Horse Races, Lotto, and yes even card games such as Craps. I have just been surfing on Web Biz Solutions where I can play Craps, and i had this real desire to get ahead of someone called Muriel. I see her name on another exchange and I never seem to be able to catch up, but this time, I am ahead (until she gets up in the morning I suppose).

What I have noticed is that there are a few different types of exchanges, and it all depends upon the owners as to whether or not they provide a good surfing experience. The really annoying thing about some of the exchanges is the pop ups and the frame breakers. There are also some submissions that almost break the variety of rules about pornography (I guess the singles are allowed to advertise for partners but I do find it tasteless). Some of these exchanges provide an overall good experience, but if one person has gotten by with a site that provides a frame breaker, or attempts to download what could be malicious software, then I am going to help the owners get these people banned from their sites so that everyone can enjoy the experience.

Since advertising my sites I have had a lot more in the way of interaction with other people, and it is a real surprise to see myself being mentioned as an "activist." The TE's are one way that I can let people know about what the MSM is refusing to acknowledge, and at the same time advocate to see a change in attitudes towards women in underdeveloped countries where there is Sharia rule. This means having a go at the feminists who continue to stand back and do nothing to help women in these countries, especially in the latest outrage of the teacher who had the 7 year old children in her class name a teddy bear Mohammed. The woman is to spend time in jail and then be deported from the Sudan. The case against her was trumped up because the bear was being named after a child in the class.
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Been busy with the traffic exchanges and other matters

2007-11-22T14:45:47+11:00

I have been very busy with the traffic exchanges and I hope to be able to write up something quite substantial about my experience. I am still not convinced over the methods of Internet marketing to have confidence in the variety of schemes that are offered. It is amusing that people new to the business of Internet marketing are told to use their photographs because it is seen to give the persona a face or presence, when I find some of the photos to be quite a turnoff as far as those people are concerned. Some of the people make me feel uneasy.

I have become a member of more than 20 exchanges, but I do intend dropping most of them. I have had the most fun with Royal Surf and Medieval Hits. I have had fun with Dodgem Cars, but I find it is a real drag trying to earn traffic tokens via a dodgem race where it can yield between 2 and 10 tokens. After surfing 15 sites, a yield of 2-4 tokens is a very poor return. It is extremely difficult to win the extra dodgem points to end up in the top 25 finishers for the week in order to earn more tokens so the effort seems to be a little too much.

There are other exchanges that have been bringing better rewards, and I found one today that brings rewards in a different way because the beneficiaries of the exchange are children in Burundia. The exchange is being run by a Catholic priest!! However, Fr. Dave is making every effort to ensure that what he recommends is ethical. Perhaps following his lead is not such a bad thing.

Whilst I have been occupying myself in this way, things are finally happening with the sale of our house. At last the buyer has given the go ahead to come off the cooling off period, and settlement will be next week. After all of the carry on about getting an approval from Sydney Water for the construction of a Florida room, it turned out that the sewer is encased in concrete. The concrete platform that we have is more than adequate to have gain the necessary approval from Sydney Water. The next step is documentation being processed by the bank. It is extremely difficult having to deal with these problems. I will be glad when settlement has taken place and the responsibility for the house shifts to another party. I have had quite enough of the tensions that it has generated within our household.

Traffic Exchanges and the blogger

2007-11-04T15:25:27+11:00

I am a blogger, and I am not one of these people who will respond to appeals to my greedy self. In the past few weeks I have joined a number of traffic exchanges and I have enjoyed the games that I have found, plus I like the idea of getting bonus points. Since I am no longer in the workforce I need some forms of distraction in order to help me not to descend into the depths of depression out of the loneliness of knowing no one in my new location.

The problem with traffic exchanges is the fact that you have to surf to get your pages seen. I started with Blog Explosion, Blog Soldiers and Blog Mad. I have dropped Blog Mad because of the lack of satisfaction over an issue relating to one of my blogs. In the past I had managed to verify the particular blog through Blog Mad, but in July I was notified that my blog was deactivated because of lack of activity. That, however, was not true, and I had posted to that blog within a week of the deactivation. Since I was moving I could little about the situation. I attempted to reactivate my blog but nothing worked and I kept getting a message that the code I had placed on the blog was not detected. I requested support and after 2 months I had not had the problem resolved. This particular blog is operated through Blog Spirit. I like Blog Spirit as a provider but I am only using the free features since I cannot afford the upgrades. After so little in the way of satisfaction from the support area at Blog Mad, I decided to call it quits and I deleted my account.

I prefer Blog Explosion because I find that the games are more useful than the ones I found at Blog Mad, and I did win extra credits. As far as Battle of the Blogs is concerned, I think that winning or losing boils down to the politics of the viewer as much as anything else. If I go against a blog that I find is really lousy, thinking that I will win the battle, I can still lose, because a lot depends on who votes during the contest. However, it is still fun, and I like the scratch cards as well as the Blog Rocket. All of these things create both diversion and exposure to my writing.

There are other forms of traffic exchanges where the majority are people who have their own multi-level marketing systems. Do they work? I do not know. Some offer what is known as click to pay. The payout is very small per click but it is cumulative, but one cannot expect to make a fortune from this type of activity. I do not like some of these exchanges, but I have found others that are fun. It is hard work, but I do like Royal Surf, because there is that competitive team spirit. Traffic Dodgems, Majestic Hits and Medieval hits have also been fun. The purpose of Royal Surf is to earn enough points to finish in the top teams in order to win credits. The top team is Cavelot. One needs to surf at least 600 pages per day to keep up with the Cavelot team. However, this is my first week for Royal surf and I must admit to a personal best surfing record for myself. I have made it to the top team but I suspect that I will drop back again. One of the bonuses whilst surfing is to find the next letter for the quest, so that it can be completed before the week ends. To be successful one has to surf at least 100 sites per day. This should be achievable by most people who are into surfing the sites.

There are down sides to these traffic exchanges, and I nearly fell into a trap on one of the sites. I dropped the site immediately that this happened. These traps include the pop-ups, frame breakers, and downloaders. Some of the sites have been primed with a virus. I hit a site where they wanted to download a piece of software. My system is not slow and it does not need software that comes from an undisclosed source. I had to stop the download before it could begin, because this is one sure way of ending up with a virus on one's machine. Another down side are the sites that have audio, but no means to shut them up. A good example is the bird hawking the "apple patch diet". Now if ever there was a con, then telling people that they only have to wear an apple patch is definitely "it". Yes I really am that skeptical about some of these selling techniques.

I am using the exchanges to promote my blogs. I am not interested in marketing any wares, especially get people to part with money when there are no products that are actually being sold. A lot of the sites on these traffic exchanges are aimed at people who want to be rich. I guess there are thousands who continue to be fooled by the marketing hype.

Accused Mother walks free from court

2007-10-25T14:49:50+10:00

Has Justice been served for this mother, who had 4 children and lost all of them for an unknown reason?

CAROL Matthey entered the Supreme Court yesterday charged with murdering her four small children, one by one, over five years.

Police said she deliberately suffocated them, partly in order to sustain her troubled relationship with her husband, Stephen Matthey, the children’s father.

But yesterday, the criminal case against Mrs Matthey, who has always denied she harmed her children, collapsed.

Fifteen minutes after she arrived, Mrs Matthey left the court free, cheerfully accepting congratulations. In an extraordinary end to one of the most dramatic cases in Victorian legal history, prosecutors dropped the charges because much of the evidence gathered against her was ruled inadmissible.

A case that involved a three-year police investigation, thousands of pages of statements and 160 witnesses — and a case that dominated four years of Carol Matthey’s life — was suddenly over before it reached trial.

After she left the court, Mrs Matthey walked along William Street smiling, declining to answer reporters’ questions until this one: “Are you not guilty, Carol?”

“No,” she said firmly.

The reporter pointed out the double negative and asked for clarification. Did she mean she was innocent? “Yes,” she said, chuckling, amused at the misunderstanding. Then she walked off the public stage and into the rest of her life.

The Supreme Court case against Mrs Matthey ended as a result of pre-trial hearings before Justice John Coldrey. In a complex 94-page judgement on October 12, he found most of the proposed evidence inadmissible under the law.

In legal terms, this is not an acquittal. A defendant against whom charges are withdrawn is not protected by double jeopardy and, theoretically, faces the prospect of another trial if new evidence emerges.

Mrs Matthey, 27, of Geelong, lost four children between 1998 and 2003. Jacob was seven months old, Chloe nine weeks old, Joshua three months and Shania three years and four months. At her committal hearing in March 2006, Mrs Matthey’s defence argued there was no physical evidence of harm done to any of the children. Her lawyers said it was possible the children shared an as-yet-undiscovered gene that caused a medical condition, such as a fatal cardiac arrhythmia, that led to their deaths.

Police yesterday declined to comment. The acting director of public prosecutions, Jeremy Rapke, QC, said the case was irreparably damaged when the judge deemed inadmissible much of the medical evidence.

Initially, Jacob and Chloe Matthey were found to have died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and Joshua of klebsiella septicaemia. A police investigation began after the death of Shania, who was too old to have died of SIDS, and for whom no cause of death could be found. At the committal hearing, experts acknowledged SIDS was a “diagnosis of exclusion” — the cause of death used for babies when no other cause can be found. They said there were often no forensic clues that would differentiate natural SIDS from deliberate suffocation.

This left much of the expert medical evidence at the committal heated and contradictory. Four local forensic pathologists strongly argued the autopsies revealed no scientific evidence of harm to any of the children.

But a pediatrician from South Australia who specialized in SIDS, Dr Susan Beal, and a forensic pediatric pathologist from the US, Dr Janice Ophoven, were equally vehement homicide was the most likely explanation.

They argued that “scientific” evidence included the lack of risk factors for SIDS in some of the children; the rarity of four such deaths in one family; the troubled marriage; and the fact that the children had experienced “ALTEs” — apparent life-threatening episodes in which they stopped breathing or were found unconscious.

Dr Beal said: “ALTEs are not a predictor for SIDS; they’re a predictor for (homicide).”

Justice Coldrey ruled out most of the evidence of these two witnesses.

The conflict between the experts meant the Crown case relied on other evidence, such as Mrs Matthey’s relationship with her husband and children.

Justice Coldrey said the Crown had submitted that, particularly at times of ALTEs or deaths among the children, the marriage was under severe strain.

“Moreover, it is asserted that the relationship of Mrs Matthey to her children, evinced by unwanted and unplanned pregnancies, mediocre parenting and indifference to their deaths, would enable a jury to infer they were the unfortunate pawns in this strategy to bolster her marital situation,” he wrote.

Justice Coldrey found there was no discernible link between the timing of marital crises and the ALTEs or the deaths: “There is no foundation for the contention that the killings were designed to win back Stephen Matthey’s love and affection.”

While there was evidence of poor mothering, the judge wrote, other reports painted a picture of a woman “who was a concerned, caring and loving mother during the children’s lives, and a distressed and grieving one when they died”.

Mrs Matthey’s lawyer, Paul Lacava, SC, said there were no winners in the case. “Mrs Matthey and her husband have lost their children and their sadness is profound and ongoing.

I find it very strange that it used to be accepted if one baby died from SIDS then there was a chance that further babies could die from SIDS, yet these two women “experts” on a mission claim that it is impossible and that the deaths must be homicide. If this mother did in fact kill her children, then both of these “experts” have done a lot of harm to the prosecution case. The local pathologists, who had more than likely examined the bodies of the babies indicated that there was no scientific evidence of harm being done to the children. Why then should the Prosecution be allowed to build a case based upon the evidence of “experts” who had not performed any forensic pathology on the children. The Judge did the right thing striking down the charges. Carol Matthey does not walk away from the court as a totally free woman, because she could be charged again, but at least justice is seen to be done when a case that is not based upon fact, but upon “experts with a mission” has been struck down because of the lack of real evidence that would lead to a conviction.

I found the earrings but over 100 boxes to go

2007-10-22T14:56:19+10:00

We have just reached the one month anniversary of moving to Canberra. Oh how very exciting!! Besides the fact that I hardly know anybody in this hick town, I am already showing signs of being bored out of my mind. Yes, I still have over 100 boxes to be unpacked, but I just do not feel enthusiastic about doing the task. I am taking it one day at a time because there have been a few days when I have been too sore to bother with any unpacking. There has been a slight increase in the headaches caused no doubt from the arthritis in my neck and shoulders.

Anyway, I did continue unpacking boxes until I was successful in finding my pearl earrings - and then it was time to slump. Then I decided that I had to find the knitting needles that I had not wanted the packers to pack in the first place (that is what happens when hubby is left in charge and he tells them to go for it), and now that I found one lot of the knitting needles, it is back to the slump, and goofing off.

I have managed to choose to throw out more clothing. Most of it is very outdated, and for whatever reason some of the clothes were never a good fit in the first place. I find that I need a good selection of clothing because my weight goes up and down like a yo-yo. In summer I tend to retain fluid and when that happens my body tends to blossom outwards. I gained some weight over the winter because of the stress relating to this move (I did not want to move in the first place).

There have been so many hassles with this particular move. First of all, there was the gazumping of the first house that we started to negotiate to buy. Then we had to return to Canberra from Sydney to find another property. I came down with a chill and that sparked off an arthritis flare due to the fact that I have an autoimmune disorder. The flare then caused me to be in pain a lot of the time as I was trying to sort things out and start packing boxes. Then when we moved, there was the hassle of the packers being Irish!!! Within a week of our Sydney house going on the market we had a buyer. We decided to take the offer and the contracts were exchanged. All too easy we thought, but not so straightforward.

My husband had decided to build a room where he could play with his model trains. The room cost quite a bit of money to build, and council made us reinforce the concrete floor because of a known water easement. What we did not know, and it appears that council did not know, is that there was also a sewerage easement on the property. We did not find this out until the eleventh hour of the cooling off period. Great!! At first we could hardly believe that the information was true. So, my husband had to find out how he could verify the information and then seek approval after the fact from Sydney Water. EEK!!! He was mucked around because nobody seemed to know what was required to get the approval from Sydney water.

What is really annoying is the way in which the NSW government had legislated that Sydney Water was no longer under an obligation to inform householders about the whereabouts of the sewerage easements. In our case the easement was not on any of the plans that we possessed, such that when we purchased the place we were not aware of the easement's existence. We are left with this mess and out of pocket to the tune of $1000 and rising because Sydney water did not want the responsibility of providing vital information to householders or land owners. This is one of the real and existing problems that point to the corruption of the Carr-Iemma government. They were all too willing to introduce legislation that abrogated responsibility.

Plan to exploit frozen IVF embryos

2007-10-16T20:13:33+10:00

The California based company StemLifeLine has announced a plan to store stem cells from spare IVF embryos. However, this plan has angered UK scientists. The theory is that cells banked from one embryo could provide treatment for a sibling threatened by serious disease in the future.

Lord Robert Winston has hit out at the scheme stating that it is preying on parent's fears about the future of their children.

Stem cells are the master cells that are capable of growing into a wide variety of different tissues, and scientists believe that one day these stem cells can be harnessed to fight such diseases as Parkinson's Disease and Alzheimer's Disease. To date, there has not been any successful treatment developed from embryonic stems cells.

Whilst the Californian company claims that one day these cells "might be useful", Lord Winston has hit back stating that:

"There is no scientific evidence to sustain the notion that this will be a useful procedure. I would be horrified if anyone tried to do this in Britain."

Professor Stephen Minger, from Kings College, London, also spoke against the purpose of this company with the following comment:

"My worry is that this is a commercial service that is being promoted to companies when the sceince is not really there to justify it.

It is like trying to run before you can walk, and the fact it is being done for commercial purposes makes it worse."

Settling down in the new location

2007-10-10T20:56:23+10:00

It is almost a month since we moved from Sydney to Canberra. I still have over 100 boxes to unpack and I am taking my time. I am still feeling so very lonely and isolated. The isolation is made worse because I established such good friendships in Sydney, and the original friends that I had in Canberra in the past, well they were rather shallow friendships and I have not managed to re-connect with anyone.

Skittles and Ruby are settling into their new environment. It seems so strange, but Skittles is spending most of her time underneath my desk. She has done some outside exploration, but there have been days when she has point blank refused to go outside. However, what really gets me laughing has to be the way in which she will spend all day outside, and as soon as she comes in, she heads for her litter box !!

This week has been a small turning point because I managed to move outside of my confinement in the house. I have returned to daily Mass. It was such a relief to know that Mass is being offered in my new parish. I hit a snag when I made the first attempt to start going to the Mass. I did not know the precise location for this Mass and out of shyness I could not even ask anyone when I did attempt to turn up for the very first time. However, someone told me about the exact location and finally, I made the effort. I feel more at peace now.

There was one item of furniture that was damaged in the move - our wall unit that was over 20 years old. We went out to Fyshwick and found something as a replacement. We went to a few shops, and at the one that was probably the most expensive, the assistant had no idea what we meant by a wall unit!!. The new unit arrived last week, and to our dismay the mirror in the centre module has been cracked. With its arrival, though, we have begun to move a lot more of our good dishes and cutlery into this new unit. The entertainment unit that was used for the stereo and to hold our LP collection is to be dumped, for it is closer to 30 years old and it is looking very tatty these days. At the same time we purchased some new bar stool and this is where I came up with a new expression: The Goldilocks Test.

I have a very sore low back because of inflammation in my sacroiliac joint. If I sit on wooden seats for too long the pain can get out of control. Last November, when I fractured my coccyx for the second time in 30 years, I seemed to have sparked off a new round of inflammation, accompanied by pain. I did feel a lot better between March and June, and then I suffered a chill, followed by a secondary chest infection that needed to be treated with antibiotics, and it was hard to shake. As a result of this infection I have had a renewal of the pain. This also coincided with the amount of packing that I was doing on my own. Perhaps packing almost 10 boxes in a day was going a little too far, and yes I was rating more than 5 on the ouch factor scale. The pain was so bad at night, and once again, if I sat too long on any surface, I felt very stiff. There were other symtoms that were bothering me, and then I had a series of falls. The worst of these falls caused me to have a nasty scrape on my left knee, plus I had bruising on both knees at the same time. It was a real nightmare to have this happen just before the move. It meant that I was stiff and sore. Anyway, because of that sensitivity, I need to test the seats for comfort before purchase. Suddenly, it hit me, that testingout the furniture in this way is just like Goldilocks and the three bears. Some of the stool seats were too hard, none were too soft, and the ones that we purchased, were just right.

Alas, though, the new seats for the new church building in my new parish failed the Goldilocks test. The seat back is too low and it caused strain on my low back. I think that I can correct the problem with the use of an extra cushion that will support my back.