Amy’s parents moved to Chicago. Well, the moved to Virginia, then Maryland and now Chicago. Its a good reason to travel, but its not a good thing when the little one’s want to talk to grammy sue and taco breezy. We’d been doing it on the phone, but that only goes for so long. This past Christmas, we decided to invest in a QuickCam for both families and we set up some Skype accounts so that we could talk to each other via the phone for free!
Skype has been around for a while and is definately the leader in VoIP services for computer to computer and their free Skype to Skype chat is really good. In fact, its so good that when the girls are on the line with their grandparents, Cookie (grammy’s dog) starts running around looking for G & E. I’ve been pretty impressed with the ease of use of skype too. We installed the web cam, and were up and running with the software in no time.
Its been a nice thing as whenever the girls want to see their grandparents we just call them up on the phone (to make sure they’re available) and then log in to Skype. The girls love it and so do the grandparents. If you travel a lot and need a way to keep in touch with your family, or you need a good way to see loved ones separated by distance (or hell, even local) this is definitely the easiest solution (and its cheaper than a plane ticket!).
I can’t wait to tell you about The AdSpace Contest I found!
The idea is simple and easy: Get as many entries as you can (very easy to do) over the next 30 days. The more entries you get, the better chance you have of winning! At the end of the 30 days, they announce the winner.
The prize?
A 125×125 pixel ad spot (above the fold) on at least TEN DIFFERENT BLOGS that will run for one month. That’s at least a $100 value!
How do you enter to win?
1 Entry - Subscribe to any one of the blogs above via email.
10 Entries - Write a post about the contest (must include links to all 10 hosts OR use the suggested text)
25 Entries - Offer up an ad spot on your own blog for one month as part of the prize package
Simply put, you could subscribe to all 10 blogs, write a post and offer up your own ad spot for a grand total of 45 entries!
I’ve had a song for Grace ever since Ben Fold’s wrote Gracie for his little girl. Whats been my struggle is coming up with a song for Emma. I’ve tried using Little Miss Magic by Jimmy Buffett, which is a good song, but I was out flipping though the pages of Amie Street and I came across a guy by the name of Jonathan Edwards.
Its hard to describe his genre, other than folksie, but it has a nice feel to it and its a fun listen to. I picked My Little Girl because it accurately describes how a father feels about his daughters. Anyways, check out Jonathan for more folksie feel good songs!
Why Amie St. Wednesday? Music is in everyones lives. It surrounds us even when we don.t it. This is a way to discover new artist, and share the artist that you enjoy listening to on AmieStreet.com. If you enjoy the music please support the artist. Amie St. Music Wednesday has no affiliation with AmieStreet.com and the opinion about the music and/or artist is the that of the postie.
Posted by mcangeli (Who am I?) on August 19th, 2008 | No Comments » | Aside
I’m generally always looking for a way to help keep the lights on here at Delusions and at Linuxtracker.org as well. Whether its doing paid posts/reviews, selling ads or my plasma, whatever it takes to pay the bills is usually what I do. I came across a better way to sell ad spots on my sites. I found a way to Make Money With PerformancingAds.
I’m not alone in this moving to PA to sell spots, a ton of other main stream blogs are using PA to sell the space on their sites. I had been trying to do it myself, however, this seems to work better. Fifty cents for the week is a good deal! Setup was easy too. There’s either a nifty Java script you can put on your page where you want it or a super cool plugin for wordpress, drupal and other platforms. So far it seems to be a good thing, we’ll see how it pans out.
I do want to let you know about a special that I think is outstanding!! You can get Great Tasting Jelly Beans at 25% off!! Of course this deal is only good for the next 25 hours (so until noon tomorrow 8/20) if you use the word CELEBRATE for the coupon code when you check out!! HOW FREAKING AWESOME IS THAT??
Posted by mcangeli (Who am I?) on August 18th, 2008 | No Comments » | Aside
I’ve been looking for a good way to view this site on my blackberry for a while now (the images in the theme play hell with a mobile browser) and I finally came across a kick ass plugin that does just that. Wordpress Mobile (imagine that right??) is a really nice plugin that reformats your site in to a mobile browser lovin site in no time.
Download the file, unzip it in your plugins directory and activate it. You can leave the default settings alone or go to the setting page for it and plugin your adsense and admob codes and make some money yourself. Ad revenue is split between you and the developer (or you can one out 25 pounds to the dev). The site renders fairly quickly (stupid edge network) and shows photos as well.
As more and more phones come out with better browsers on it (iPhone anyone?) plugins like this will become more prevalent in the blogosphere. One of the nice things is that ANYTHING with a mobile browser will be able to view it.
Now if I can find a good wp-admin interface for mobile I’ll be set!!
Last week, I was left home alone as Amy drove to Louisville, KY to drop the girls off with her parents (her parents drove down from ChiTown). This week I wasn’t so lucky. After a night of pyro at the Ted, I had to pile in the car with the loved one and head north. The drive north wasn’t too bad. You can see the route we took at GPSed. We made good time heading north through Tennessee and Kentucky, we even had a chance to stop a K-Mart just north of Nashville and pick up diapers for the ‘M’ as they had very few left… We toyed with the idea of stopping at a winery or two along the way or at the Jack Daniels Distillery, but kept going on.
Instead we made a side trip to Mammoth Cave. The “longest” cave system in the world (which, from where I sit, could be a hard thing to determine…). We got there and drove through the very scenic park and made our way to the visitor’s center to see about a tour or two. All the “guided” tours were pretty much sold out and all they had left were tickets for the self guided one. That tour is about an hour and a half, and as we were in shorts, t-shirts and sandals and not really packed to go caving at all, we decided to take a rain check and come back one day for a week or so when we can do all the fun tours. Plus, the girls would miss out! Can’t have that!
We decided on our drive back to the interstate that on EVERY road trip no matter what it was for, we’d make an effort to stop somewhere zainy. We pasted an odd assortment of “fun” parks on our way back to the highway and decided that we’d stop at Dinosaur World on our way back home on Sunday. We hit the interstate and continued our trek north.
Even with the stop we made pretty good time and managed to hit a traffic jam just south of Louisville that slowed us down for about half an hour. Finally we pulled in to the hotel just about 6pm. It wasn’t too bad. We hit a restaurant called KingFish for dinner, went back to the hotel and crashed.
It was good to see the munchkins again after a week. Its hard being away from them (despite the fact that it was nice to have a “little” bit of quite around the house). It seems that they grew up a lot over the week (Emma is talking more and Grace is just Grace). If I could bottle them and keep them this way forever I think I would….
We woke up Sunday morning, packed the cars, said our tearfull goodbyes and headed our separate ways. Grammy and Breezy headed north, we headed south with two girls crying in the back. The tears were quickly quieted though as we pulled in to a McD’s for some browns and milk. We also told them we decided to stop at Dinosaur World on our way home, so there was something fun to look forward to!
Dinosaur World is in Cave city, right off the interstate. You can see the big dino and the mammoth’s from the highway. It was actually cooler than you’d think (they have huge statues of dinosaurs everywhere) although I’m not too sure it was worth the $13 per adult we had to pay. The girls had fun though (Grace has already asked to go back) and they got to do a fossil dig. I’ve got some cool photos from DW that I’ll be uploading shortly.
The rest of the drive south was almost as unevenful as the drive north. Gas in TN was as low as $3.25 a gallon, almost a full dollar down from two months ago. That was really nice to see. I don’t think I’d do the drive like that again though, I’d spend a day in Louisville or the Mammoth Cave area…. all in all its good to be home.
Can go a long way, unfortunately, these days too many people are focusing on general IT degrees or MCSE certs that don’t amount to much when it comes to actual hands on ability. I’ve grown up in the IT field. Pops worked for IBM for something like 28 years before he took early retirement and moved on to Hitachi Data Systems and a couple of other IT jobs. Its always come natural to me (as I’ve grown up around it) and if I run in to a problem I need help with the big G is usually there to lend a hand.
One area I’ve always looked at though are the benefits of getting a Cisco certification. Cisco is the uncontested leader in networking and one of their certifications would come in no end of handy when battling the network gremlins. Who knows, if I had one of the certs, I probably wouldn’t go glassy eyed when someone starts talking about the benefits of IPv6 over IPv4. Luckily, there’s a good resource for those of us in the field who are looking to expand our horizons.
The Cicso Learning Center offers a huge array of Cisco certification programs and training that will help get you ready for the real world applications of networking as opposed to the “book” knowledge most programs provide. Another plus is that there is a nice size userbase to lean on when you need a little help.
Take a look at their CCENT program, geared for those interested in getting in to Network management. There are some pretty cool tools on there (such as the binary game) and its a terrific place to start learning the biz for network management. *mental note, must strengthen network management skills*. Check it out and let me know what you think!
Ever wonder what your blog or website is really worth? I was sailing the interweb today and I came across an excellent link at OrangeInks which helps put a dollar figure on your hard work.
CubeStat does just that. Plugin your URL (or any for that matter) and wait a moment or two as it scours the web for information pertaining to your site. Once its done, you’ll be treated to visual feast of information including dollar value, income, page views, alexa/quantacast rating, dmoz listing information, page rank and more. Its a pretty detailed listing of information, including a somewhat out of date thumbnail of the site (DoG has the *OLD* blue theme, so you know its been a while!).
I was pretty pleased to see that Linuxtracker was worth more then 20k and Delusions was worth more than 5k. Those are pretty respectible numbers considering the amount of work thats gone in to them.
Anyone want to make me an offer??
Don’t forget about the ENTRECARD CONTESTS I’m running right now, you have the chance to win 3k in credits!! Also, if you haven’t Joined the Pepperjam Network and Received your $10 Sign On Bonus You’re missing out on a great opportunity to take your blogging to the next level!!
Solid. Strong. Nuts. Funny shaped leafs. All things you think of when you think of a mighty Oak. Standing tall, shading you on a hot summer day while you sip lemonade and play your guitar in hopes of wooing women. Right? Well, when thinking about these OaKs its more like good tunes, wonderful lyrics that really sing to you and a sound thats clean.
The OaKs have been around since about 2005 and have released a number of albums. Their latest, Songs for the Waiting, is the culmination of several years work and is perhaps one of the best new releases in the acoustic field today.
Why Amie St. Wednesday? Music is in everyones lives. It surrounds us even when we don.t it. This is a way to discover new artist, and share the artist that you enjoy listening to on AmieStreet.com. If you enjoy the music please support the artist. Amie St. Music Wednesday has no affiliation with AmieStreet.com and the opinion about the music and/or artist is the that of the postie.
Posted by mcangeli (Who am I?) on August 12th, 2008 | No Comments » | Aside
I was out cruising the intertubes today and I came across a post at Cromely’s World where he was talking about recycling an AC unit. Not one of the big ones thats tied in to a thermostat in your house, but a window unit, and how he had to PAY $50 to have it recycled. Somethings you get paid for (like copper) others you have to pay to recycle and I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be great if you could make money from your stuff? Thats when it hit me. Gazelle!!
I had come across a site that claimed to Buy Your Used Cell Electronics! Phones, Ipods, Cameras, Laptops & More! I thought it was a little good to be true until I checked it out. I could send them some old phones (Nokia e62’s) that had been replaced with blackberries or iPhones and I’d actually get about $30 per working unit. Granted, it doesn’t pay for the iPhone, but it covers one month of data service.
I was FLOORED!! I wanted to know what else I could push on them. Old Laptops. They’d give me $147 for my laptop. Granted, thats roughly 10% of what I paid for it originally, but its going on two years old and by todays standards is WAAAAAAAYYYYY out of date! Besides, with $147, I’m almost half way to the cost of a new eeePC or one of the smaller notebooks from HP.
It appears they take almost any kind of electronic you could throw at them as well. Cell Phones, MP3 Players, Digital cameras, GPS Units, Game Consoles (sell your PS3 for $200 and put that towards a wii!), camcorders, portable hard drives and satellite radios (just in time to pick up a dual xm/sirius radio). They’ll pay you for it! And if they won’t give you cash, you can still ship it to them free of charge for them to recycle (who knows, maybe they’re building a huge Transformer out of used GameCubes or something).
Its worth a look if you have old phones or computer stuff laying around. Who knows, maybe you can Cash In Your Old Gadgets and get that new model you’ve been eying at Best Buy…
When Michael Phelps trains for a competition like the Olympics, he really trains. Most days he swims four miles in preparation. Others he works outside of the pool on building muscle mass and endurance. The man is a machine and its no wonder that he’s on pace to set an Olympic record of 10 Olympic Golds in his career. Everyone could learn from Michael Phelps. He sets his goals and he works to accomplish them, much in the same way a blogger should.
Perhaps you started blogging for any number of reasons (I started because it sounded like fun). After awhile though, your original goals become outdated and often forgotten. It doesn’t hurt to reevaluate your goals every couple of months. Perhaps you reached that goal of 100 subscribers on feedburner. Maybe you average $100 a month from adsense for the past three months. Nows the time to step it up. Instead of posting once a week about your cat, post twice. Find new things to post about. Venture in to an area where you might be considered knowledgeable.
Much like Phelps and his Olympic team mates, we need to always be working harder on our blogs/sites. There’s always going to be someone with better grammar, a cooler layout or better plugins. If you keep the same site you’ve had since you started in 2001 because you’re used to it, things will over time become stale. Instead, push yourself to the limit.
It doesn’t hurt to reinvent yourself, as long as you’re not doing it weekly. The important thing is that you work hard. After all, PR and Alexa ranking don’t just fall from the sky. You have to earn them.
Don’t forget about the ENTRECARD CONTESTS I’m running right now, you have the chance to win 3k in credits!! Also, if you haven’t Joined the Pepperjam Network and Received your $10 Sign On Bonus You’re missing out on a great opportunity to take your blogging to the next level!!
mcangeli
I can’t wait to tell you about The AdSpace Contest I found!
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