To all you sexy programmers out there…

I got a tip from my contact form the other day about a “Super Sexy Mortgage Calculator Contest” going on at the Virginia Mortgage Research Center.  They’re holding a contest for the sexiest mortgage calculator, and shoveling out $10,000 to the winner.  You can get complete details here:

http://www.mortgageloanplace.com/mortgage-calculator.php

I’m too busy nowadays so I’m not going to be participating in this one, but the referring party does get $1000…that for me would buy a lot of alcohol and porn school books.  So if you feel like participating and want to win an additional $1k for me so that you can own me for the rest of my life, make sure you mention v-nessa.net as your referrer.

To check this out to make sure it’s not a scam, you can check them out at the BBB site:

http://www.bbb.org/stlouis/business-reviews/mortgages/va-mortgage-centercom-in-columbia-mo-310024839

I was looking around for some web data scraping software and came across Mozenda.com, which is a [paid] Web Scraper and web data mining software that parses web data in a variety of formats, like CSV, RSS, and XML.  I signed up for the trial and the software really did do what it claimed to, and was really easy to use.  The guy that heads the service offers a cool demo here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKrdFiilqXM

Only real downside is the pricing…most code gurus can probably come up with a more basic yet less costly way of doing the same thing.  Pricing starts at $49.95/mo and goes up to $1995/mo, but also has an option to pay as you go.  For  a business this would probably be petty cash and worth the expense, but for the average blogger like me, it’s a little out of the price range.  However, I probably could never code an application or service as feature-rich as the product that Mozenda provides which is why I was considering them.

For those of you wondering WTF I’m talking about, data mining is simply the process of collecting and organizing data, in my case, from other websites.  When you have a handful of 100+ sites, it’s more efficient to have a bot do it for you, kind of like what search engines use to index millions of sites on the Internet.

So I now know what happens when you don’t upgrade WordPress for half a year.  Yes, I admit that my site’s theme was hacked with some nasty Javascript inserts that ended up getting me tagged by Google for the second time now.  Luckily nothing was that much out of place,but a couple of my posts were altered to become permanent stickies, and the dates were changed. No worries, everything is should be back to normal now.

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…But…my Twitter account was suspended for “strange activity” and has yet to be reinstated by the Twitter staff.  I also found out that my roommate hates me because I party with his ex-girlfriend who happens to have been a friend of mine since high school.   To top off the week, I finally get to the beach today only to find out that there are no wave. This week has just been full of fun.

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In case anyone out there was wondering what we at InMotion Hosting do here in the east coast office when the sun goes down:

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