The saddest thing in the world is to say goodbye forever to someone you love. I experienced that yesterday as we had to put down our family dog Riley. He was a great friend, a loyal companion, a hiking buddy, a family protector, a surrogate nanny, a preditor to squirels/small chickens/etc. and a happy soul. Goodbye big dog, I miss you already.

I just received a request from someone for a link through one of our affiliate sites - this is not uncommon - but the interesting thing is that his approach was to build a triangle link. One of his sites links to one of my sites and I link back to a different site he owns in the same genre. This is smart as search engines are devaluing straight link exchanges as they are too easy to acquire and not “natural”. Here are some advantages and disadvantages as I see it on the triangle links:

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I’ve been using SpamArrest to limit the amount of spam I get (which is a lot - especially to a specific inbox) for the last year. SpamArrest is a challenge and response system (Hi, you just sent an email to scott. Please respond to this email to get on his white list) that usually works ok. However, there have been a lot of instances - particularly over the weekends - in which the filter fails and the spam comes flooding through. In addition I was using the free version and the interface wasn’t that great. I just switched to CloudMark (http://www.cloudmark.com) and couldn’t be happier. It plugs into Outlook for a free trial ($39.95 per year) and filters in Outlook instead of going to a browser. Once I tuned the spam filter a little (white listing some newsletters I get, etc.) it is piece of cake. It does take longer to synch my email and I do have to delete all the spam in the spam box - but I am much happier.

Rhapsody.com re-launched yesterday. It basically takes the features of Rhapsody Music Service and makes them accessible from a web browser using an activeX skinny client. You don’t get all the features of the full Rhapsod Player like burning CDs and some sharing, but it is a good start. On testing, I’ve found that the songs don’t play as quickly and I’ve gotten some skipping on some of the songs. I’m sure these will get worked out, but an interesting model. Check it out at www.rhapsody.com.