March 27, 2012 pricing of gasoline at the Ebensburg, PA Uni-Mart.

Gas prices are falling in Ebensburg!

A few weeks ago a friend of mine sent me an email about his experience over the Memorial Day weekend. With his permission I’ve copied it here. This is from Arnold Cummings in Brookville, PA.

Over the Memorial Day weekend I went to my camp near Tidioute Pa. . As usual on Saturday I went yard sailing. The last sale I went to on that venture was up Church Hill Road. This road is located off Route 62 between the the Hickory Nut Bar and the small plaza next to it in the town of East Hickory in Forest Co. in North Western Pa.

As I went up the road to the sale there was an old small cemetery on the left side that sits on a knol at the edge of a large field. I noticed that there was a single small American flag at one of the stones. As I left the sale and came back down the road I was compelled to stop at the cemetery and “Thank the Veteran ” ( with the flag I assumed it was a Veteran and figured it maybe from the Civil War ).

I had stopped at this cemetery along time ago but did not remember much about it. As I looked at the few stones there were before the one with the flag many thoughts went through my mind about what it must have
been like in the early 1800’s. When I saw the grave with the Flag it only had the name and date of death. As I looked at the bronze marker I was taken back that this soldier was in the War of 1812 —– I thought my God this soldier fought 200 years ago for the freedoms that we have today —200 years later !!

We have had a lot of hype about the Civil War and its 150th celebrations but hardly anything about the War of 1812. I went to camp and was so wound up about this that I mistakenly told fellow campers about the Soldiers grave I was at from the “Revolutionary War ” I was really wrong it was 1812 !! Later I was compelled to go back and take a couple pictures which I have attached. I felt very dumb founded that I knew nothing about this war.

I have since done research and was amazed at what it was all about and how it has really affected our lives today. Just to mention a few things, the Battle of New Orleans, the burning of Washington DC (The
US Capital in particular ), setting some of our northern borders with Canada and something we hear all the time “The Star Spangled Banner ” .

Take a little time and see how important this war was in our History and Freedom. I have made a promise to myself that I will be back to the grave and put a flower on it to show my thanks —every Memorial Day that I have my health and can go there.

Arny

Placing an ad on the internet involves balancing exposing your contact information with protecting your privacy. I understand that, and I try to avoid making those decisions for you. I do filter out email addresses from ads. I catch too much heat for scammers and spammers lifting those addresses and abusing them.

Phone numbers are a little different. I rarely get grief for an abused phone number, so I let it up to you as to whether to put that out there or not. When I do get grief over a phone number, it is usually because someone typo-ed a phone number and accidentally (rarely deliberately) put someone else’s phone number in their ad. Typically when this happens I have to remove the ads and lock down the account until I get it sorted out as to what happened.

Something else to think about is how people are going to contact you. I see ads that specify “no emails, no calls, text messages only”. That’s fine. That’s your business. However I know more people that don’t have text messaging than those who do. Admittedly I’m a little older. My younger brother goes into text-withdrawal if he is unable to text for 10 minutes. But think about the audience you are advertising to, if you tell people not to call you, it shouldn’t be too surprising if they don’t contact you at all.

Best wishes, and happy buying, selling, and trading!
Chris

Some of you may have noticed that I had two separate outages on Sunday. In the morning one of my front end webservers flaked out, resulting in about 30% of our visitors being unable to view ads. After I resolved this, the authentication server flaked out in the late evening, resulting in most visitors not being able to be signed in, or not being able to see web pages.

My apologies for the inconvenience. Thank you for bearing with me while I repaired these, and thanks to those of you sent me error messages.

Chris

I’ve been meaning to add a category for child care for some time. It is a service that is frequently sought out on the PWC and there seemed to be enough demand for the category to make it worth adding. Both those seeking child care and those providing are welcome to advertise.

Please check out those to whom you would entrust your children. I don’t review ads before they go live, and the presence of an ad in the PWC Child Care section does not imply an endorsement or a vetting process.

Best wishes,
Chris

I’m frequently accused of deleting ads.  Frankly, I have better things to do, and I avoid removing ads in so much as I am able to do so.  I thought it might be interesting for folks to see how ads really do exist the Pennswoods.net Classifieds, so I did a couple of counts.  Here are some numbers for ads posted within the last 14 days.

Ads deleted by the owner. => 6085
Ads deleted for being in the wrong category, or for some other guideline violation. => 969
Ads the expired naturally. => 926
Ads removed because it was a scam. => 71
Ads the I really did remove. => 64

The vast majority of the ads were removed because people sold their item and removed their own listing, or because they removed this listing to post a different ad.

The next biggest cause of an ad to be removed is because it was reported as out of category, or a guide violation. More about how / why this happens can be seen in FAQ #10.

The third largest cause of an ad to be removed is because it expired. Ads run for 14 days, thus guaranteeing that visitors don’t waste their time looking through stuff that has long since been sold.

Ads that I removed include things such as scams and having the wrong phone numbers in the ads.

Best wishes,
Chris

The local scout groups gathered together today with the high school band, couple of VFW posts and lots of neighbors gathered today at the local cemetery to honor our armed forces.

As you go about your holiday activities, remember that we live as free as we do only because of the men and women who put their skills and their lives between us and our enemies.

Chris

Just a friendly reminder, the ‘Now Hiring’ category is just that, a category for employers with job openings.  I find it fascinating that the local paper advertised X number of jobs in every issue, nearly all of which are actually headhunter ads culled from monster.com.  Pennswoods.net consistently has more job openings listed, and they are _real_ jobs.

The many varieties of pay-us-to-start-a-work-from-home-job are not welcome in the ‘Now Hiring’ section.  The few that survive people reporting them as inappropriate I will remove myself.

Chris

Thanks to upgrades in the capacity of the classifieds, I’m pleased to be able to offer the repost feature on ads up to 2 months old.  This has been a popular request, and I am thrilled to be able to offer it, effective immediately.

Chris