I got a good laugh when they had this little segment about the internet.  Forgive me but I forget the guy’s name.  This channel 2 guy recommended that people check out Fixya.com the next time they needed help fixing something.  That made me chuckle.

If you check that site out, you will see that it is a total spam site.  The site is completely loaded with ads, mostly Google Adsense.  If you read the supposed solutions to the problems on there, you will see that for the most part these so called expert answers are super low quality pieces of crap.  In fact, it appears that the overall business model for this site is to flood the internet with highly optimized posts that provide zero value to the end user so that visitors just click on an ad to leave the page.

Has anyone ever got any good advice from this site?  I have looked at their posts numerous times to try and find solutions to various problems.  I can honestly say that there is not one time that I can recall ever finding a decent solid answer that helped me.  It is pretty much as useless as Ehow.com.  They have thousands of fluff posts about how to supposedly fix something.  But, when you visit and read the material, you realize that this so called expert is in fact a clueless bozo who knows nothing about what they speak of.

For the most part you will be let down by that site.  That is of course assuming you are a reasonably intelligent person.  I hate to bash other websites because it is not like I am providing huge value with my own.  However, this Fixya.com site is, in my opinion, a total Adsense spam site that should be pushed way down in the Google rankings because of its excessive advertising.  Notice I didn’t give them any link love from my site.

I bet they are making a killing with the Adsense though.  Good SEO + Low Value Content + Adsense = very high CTR as the visitors leave the site when they realize how useless it is.  How they ever convinced this channel 2 news guy that their site was worth publicizing as a useful tool is beyond me.  Crap, crap crap.  That site is even BBB accredited. (LOL)

The food was awesome. We had a couple of appetizers including some kind of egg roll & cheese dish (I forget what it was called) and some clams casino. Yummy. We had our normal cocktail before dinner that we usually do. We had a Red Zinfandel with dinner that was also very nice.

The salad was fresh and crisp. The garlic bread was outstanding. I had a haddock filet cooked in a white wine sauce with mushrooms. My wife had a dish that contained shrimp, scallops and pasta in a sherry sauce. Her sauce tasted a lot like a seafood bisque. Both dinners were excellent. I, of course, sampled my wife’s meal.

They even gave us a lemon sorbet for in between the appetizer and the main meal to cleanse the palate. I thought that was a very nice touch in traditional Italian style.

Really everything we ate there was surprisingly delicious. Between the service, the atmosphere and the quality of the food, I cannot believe this place wasn’t totally full. We will definitely be back for more.

Obviously this guy is connected to a number of people in the political arena. One of the big questions regarding this matter is how and why was this man released instead of prosecuted? Why was he taken to the mayor’s office to begin with? Did Mayor Brown pull strings to get this matter swept under the rug? If you or I had done this, we would have been in front of a judge. As anyone who has been to a Buffalo court in the last couple years knows, you are basically going to be found guilty of anything the Buffalo police accuse you of doing.

Now some people want an FBI investigation into the matter. When asked about the incident, Mayor Brown stated that he did nothing wrong. Yet, he refused to answer any questions about the incident other than to say he did nothing wrong. He would not say why Stokes was brought to him or what conversations were had regarding Stokes. Smells like guilt to me.

Brown says this whole thing is politically motivated. It probably is. But, that doesn’t change the fact that the law may have been broken at a high level here. There’s nothing like an upcoming election to bring out all the accusations of law breaking, corruption and scandals.

I was once told by a very wise old Polish woman from Buffalo, if you have a good reputation and are an honest man, never get involved with politics. Your enemies and even your own constituents will ruin you.

We never participated in the massive housing boom that so many other areas in the United States experienced. I think that our high property taxes around here prevent things like that from happening. I suppose they are still possible, just far less likely. If they did happen here, they would probably develop much more slowly than other areas of the country.

Now that the real estate market has taken a turn for the worse, I am kind of grateful that we never experienced that boom. No boom hopefully means no bust. I think the banks around here are far more responsible when it comes to making loans to people also. It seems like even though I have good credit, banks are still hesitant to fork over huge amounts of cash.

That should bode well for the local banks’ balance sheets. Maybe there is opportunity here to own stock in them?

So, I guess if you are looking for a silver lining in the way things are done around the Buffalo area, you can rest assured knowing that the lack of froth in the local real estate market has pervented the need for home prices to give back any of the last 5-10 years of capital gains.