Wednesday, March 09, 2011

The Joys of Burglary


 The cops arrived about two hours after I phoned. In the meantime, I really had to use the bathroom because I'd been on the plane and subway all day, but the burglars had urinated in my toilet, and I wondered if I'd be destroying evidence. Could they get DNA from pee? I didn't know.
Sound irrational? Maybe. But I was sitting in an empty house and I had to pee really bad; that can make you crazy. I decided to hold out, and sat down with my legs crossed to piece together the holiday mail. The burglars had ripped all the cards in half searching for cash.
The cops showed up long after I'd given up and relieved myself. They were both rookies. One was a round, short woman so overweight she could hardly walk (which irritated me, I mean how can you respect any cop you can out walk?), and the other was a guy who spelled "also" as "all so" on the report. When the fingerprint detective arrived, the first thing he asked was, "Are you sure your roommate didn't do this?" He was suspicious because the burglars had taken everything, including the coffee table and rugs. Crackheads don't bother with home furnishings. So we got hit by pros. The cops said that pros wait for you to replace everything with your insurance money and then they come back after a few months. That didn't happen, but I watched for them for months.
Besides our stereos, computers, leather, compact discs, telephones, cash, televisions, VCRs and porch furniture, the burglars stole my nail file set, a nice one that I received as a present. I hope they like it. They loaded their bounty into my a 1986 Chevrolet Astro minivan according to neighbours and stole that too probably.
The fingerprint guy was the most interesting of the cops (Laurel and Hardy) who showed up:  a detective who questioned neighbors and the fingerprint guy. He poked around, covering everything with a metallic dust that stripped paint off metal. He also was the last one to leave.
"How long you been a fingerprint guy?"
"Twelve years."
"Any common elements among all the burglaries?"
"Crack addicts. Kids. Not very smart. Don't wear gloves, so we catch 'em. Always eat something."
I noticed a carton of orange juice and a cup of blueberry yogurt on the kitchen floor. I pointed them out. The fingerprint guy picked up the yogurt.
"Plastic doesn't work that well," he told me. He tried anyway. He dusted my yogurt.
"If burglars always eat something," I asked, "could we leave behind some poisoned beer?"
He didn't answer, and I thought he was concentrating on the yogurt. Then he turned in the chair and fixed me with a cold stare. "Ever hear of manslaughter?" he said.
I didn't ask about the legality of a shotgun booby trap.
After the fingerprint guy had gone, I fixed the door as best I could and tried to sleep. I had the heeby-jeebies for months, even after my housemate installed an alarm system. Every sound became the echo of steps, every creak was a crowbar. The radiators popped without warning, that breaking-of-glass sound when you're not expecting it. You only needed to believe it for a moment and your heart jumped and you have to talk yourself out of it and try to sleep.
As the weeks passed, I became angrier that I suffered this anguish, tiptoeing around the house, not playing the radio because of my (irrational, certainly) fear that I wouldn't hear the crooks returning to tie me to a chair and say, "What should we do with him?" It's a strange leap, it was just a burglary and happens all the time and I was insured and it's certainly not as traumatic as being shot or raped or beaten. But when you've been violated in whatever way and you read about some guy on death row who killed two teenagers in cold blood and now wants a stay of his execution and has Mother Teresa asking people to pray for him, you think why not a fucking prayer for me?

Sunday, March 06, 2011

7 Methods to Traffic


Getting repeated traffic is very crucial when it comes to an online business, whether it’s a monetized blog, an e-commerce site or anything that generates income for you. At some point, generating initial traffic can become an easier task compared to maintaining the tempo of the traffic and keeping them going back to your site the next time.

To help you, here are 7 methods to help bring repeat traffic:

be constant on your post and try to follow a schedule. This usually alarms visitors that liked your recent articles about the time for the post. Not only does this help your blog grow, it also shows how diligent you are in updating the blog.

Make things simple for your visitors by adding a link to your primary page with a “Book Mark” or “Add this site to your Favorites” script.

To attract customers and make them repeated ones, use the “Recommend this post or blog to a Friend” function to make that easier. Remember, this link does not only function to send mail to the new users but most of the times have option to send a copy to the send himself. But in doing so make sure to have your blog updated as well, a list would be very useful for organization purposes.

By properly branding your site or blog, you can easily make people remember your site with less effort. Each time a reader thinks about your blog, all they simply need to do is to remember a photo, a figure, logo or simply a color. This will create a presence and feel for your customers and visitors that they are at your site.

The sending of unsolicited emails to your mail subscribers if the list is maintained separately. This should be the least expected thing for your readers to think of. It’s advisable that you give them options to opt out from mailing list for every mail you send to each of them. Always make an assurance that you honor their request/s and take them off your mailing list/s. constan

flooding of your reader’s mails will only result to the damage of your site and reputation, avoid this as much as possible.

Try to optimize your blog post pages to the fullest, so that search engines in such a way that the subject or topic of your blog post/s, if searched on your blog should be appearing in the first two pages of search engine/s. always remember the contents quality and the keywords that match right into it, since these play a huge role in contributing to your site’s success.

Always observe proper logic, spelling and grammar when it comes to your content. The more your content is clear and understandable, the more it your readers would enjoy your content, as much as possible make it brief and straight to the point but also useful to the readers. Try to use spell check tools just make sure that your post is completely spelling mistake free.