I arrived last night. After not sleeping the night before, my youngest came down with chicken pox, I took the train to Atlanta's Hartsfield and flew to San Francisco and then to Ontario, California (slightly west and north of LA).

All the trains and planes that I encountered were running behind.

I had all day to get to the event, so did not sweat things much. However, once I got to the Ontario airport and started to make arrangements to get to my hotel, I quickly realized that I had Expedia'd myself. I had booked my hotel through Expedia after getting a recommendation for the hotel from the conference itself.

The problem was that in Expedia, I must have slipped up and picked the right hotel chain but the wrong hotel. I had picked the Ayres in Ontario in my Expedia search. Despite the fact that Ontario has two Ayres hotels including one Ayres hotel that was next door to the convention center, Expedia with my blissfully blind oversite, managed to book me in an Ayres hotel 40 miles away in a different town.

Fortunately, Stephanie, at the Ayres hotel near the convention center where I thought I was staying, was able to get me booked in to a terrific room, and I was later able to cancel my reservation for the incorrect Ayres with Expedia. Expedia was very helpful and so was Ayres. I did an excellent job myself of not getting to stressed out by the entire situation.

Maybe with my recent birthday I'm getting a little grace then year to compliment the tiniest portions of wisdom that I try to cultivate.

Technorati Tags: Podcast and Portable Media Expo, Podcast Expo, Ayres Hotel, Expedia, Stephanie was Terrific

So the PayPerPost Pair stormed the Today Show and got some airtime, which is fantastic. They just wrapped up a spin through the OMMA trade show, and some of the new customers they signed just started to hit. Hopefully this great air time will help fuel the fire!

I've been on a tear writing on several different blogs and the renewed enthusiasm and energy is mostly coming from PayPerPost.

Sometimes you just need a few dollars to help you focus, and that is exactly what PayPerPost does for blogging.

Check them out as they launch theirGuerilla Marketing tactics.


Technorati Tags: PayPerPost, guerilla marketing, PPP, Today Show

I'm not complaining, just remarking every time I travel out of town, one of the kids comes down with something.

This time, it appears the baby is coming down with chickenpox. A neighbor girl had chickenpox last week, and she had been vaccinated 2 years earlier. My youngest was probably exposed just 2 days before she had a doctor's appointment and you guessed it received a vaccination for the chickenpox.

So I'm flying out tomorrow and spots are starting to pop up on the baby.


Technorati Tags: Chickenpox, chickenpox vaccinations, kids get sick when parents travel, ugghhhh!

You might file this in the what will they think of next, but I was reading a Washingtonpost article about the updated TSA travel rules, since I'm flying to California tomorrow.

One of the last items on the list caught my attention and made me smirk (in an immature kind of way.)

Apparently the TSA has not allowed passengers to bring gel filled bras onto flights since the most recent almost terrorist incident.  Now, my first thought was that I really felt bad for all those poor souls (men and women both) that could no longer wear a padded push up bra.  The TSA didn't feel that bad, but they did relax their rule so that people that wear a padded gel bra as a prosthetic can continue to wear them on board the plane.


Technorati Tags: TSA bans gel bras, Victoria's Secret Exposed at Airport

Its shaping up to be a pretty crazy week, flying around the country and back again. I'm leaving for the convention in Ontario and I'm excited about the trip. Today in the middle of my article writing efforts, I'm taking time out to pack and get organized and make some preparations.

Getting organized is good.

Making organized plans out of chaos is a little stressful. As I was doing some research I came across this Self Empowerment Book. I eat up these books looking for that one tidbit of unique thought or applications that I can add to my tool belt. So I'm going to try this one out and see if it will help!

Technorati Tags: Self Help, Empowerment, Meditation, Relaxation, Organization

Last thing I remember was shot glasses falling everywhere, and now this morning I don't know where I parked my blimp!



Technorati Tags: Blimp, blimp parked in trees, blimp stuck in trees, 101 reasons to avoid shot glasses

I woke up this morning and had a great idea.  I should setup a website and devote it to all things comedy.  I could even host reviews of comedy shows, tapes, dvds and even do some interviews with comics.

I was thinking this would be great, I haven't seen anyone do that before.

So I started tooling (too - ling v. -As in to Tool see also Latin. Maximums Tooliuttumus) around the internet
and found a comedy site that does all of those things already.  - MENTAL HEAD SLAP!

I think my favorite section was their MP3 Review pages. I listened to several of the reviews and they were not only on the money but they were entertaining as well.

Ah well, that would have been a lot of work anyway and since its already been done, might as well enjoy the fruit of someone else's labor!

I guess I'll keep plugging away at ComedySoapBox and maybe someday end up doing something with Comedy Central.

Technorati Tags: Comedy Site, Comedy Review, MP3 Comedy Review

That's what I could have said but I held back. When I was at that fantastic age when I lost my virginity, I didn't tell my partner(I was a closet Virgin).

I didn't tell her until at least a year after the fact, long after we had gone our separate ways. I had had a great experience, there was no awkwardness or problems. No horror stories or anything else. My partner was experienced, which was fine with me. However, I was not and I didn't want to screw things up by coming clean as a virgin.

Should a man tell his female partner about his virginity?
	yes
	no
Create Free Polls

On the opposite side of the spectrum, I've known several men and women both to openly confess to their virginity, when I knew they were definitely not virgins. It would seem that a virginal status has almost a quadra-polar popularity, amongs people that

• Don't want to tell that they are when they are,
• Don't want to tell that they are not when they are not,
• Do want to tell that they are when they are, and
• Do want to tell that they are when they are not

Its been a long time since I initially entered into and moved beyond amateur status(I've been married for almost 13 years and have 3 kids. For those of you that only consider pro's to be prostitutes and porn stars . . . well there are still some things I don't want to tell). I don't think about my past virginal status all that much, but I'm curious what other people do or have done in this situation.

Should a woman tell her male partner about her virginity?
	YES
	NO
Create Free Polls

"When you were a virgin, did you tell your future partner that having sex would be a new experience for you?"

Or maybe more to the point, none of us can go back, however knowing what you know now, should you have told your partner, "I am a Virgin, do with me what you will!" or maybe something a little less dramatic.

I'm sure the answer to this question is going to be different for different people. Men and women will probably approach the topic differently. I'm sure that sexuality will play a part as well.

"Would a confessional virgin have a better experience if they tell the truth up front? Would they lose their chance all together?"

Should a woman tell her female partner about her virginity?
	yes
	no
Create Free Polls

If you were preparing to make love with a person(sometimes referred to as foreplay), and they told you that they were a virgin would that be a good thing or a bad thing?

I grew up in the seventies and eighties at a time shortly before the Surgeon General was fired for recommending educational masturbation instruction(She didn't want any school left behind).

STD's have been a societal issues for thousands of years, and there is a perception that making love with a virgin may be safer. The truth is that it is safer but not a sure fire way to avoid a disease, as we all now know that diseases can be spread from a mother to a baby.

I've never been a great teacher or mentor or anything and maybe as a result I've always preferred my partners to be rather . . . experienced and maybe a little creative.

Should a man tell his male partner about his virginity?
	yes
	no
Create Free Polls

Yet many older men and a few grade school teachers are interested in younger less experienced partners. Is this because these people are more interested in youthful looks or do they enjoy a little youthful eagerness and ignorance?

I'm sure a part of the issue is that some people just want to start over, take Demi Moore. She opted for a younger man, some might even say a boy toy. Does she just like them young or was she looking to start with a partner that she might be able to mold an influence into the more perfect partner? Say what you will about Bruce Willis, but I doubt that he's much of a push over.

So what do you think?

• Should Virgin's confess up front?
• Do they have an obligation to forwarn their partner?
• What would you do if you were walking around in the shoes of a virgin again?

Technorati Tags: Virgin confessions, honest relationships, sexual candor

NASA planetologist team has come back with results that show that we are less than a degree from having the hottest year on record since 12,000 years ago.

What's more severe is that we are 1 degree away from having the hottest year in 3 million years.

Big deal, you might say. I can handle another degree.

Well, 3 million years ago when the earth was a little less than 1 degree warmer, it heated up the planet enough such that the oceans were 25 meters higher than they are today.

Are you ready for that kind of heat?

I've been reading more and more about Bollywood. Bollywood is a reference to the film industry in India, I believe a play on the city Bali.

Hong Kong has done some great things for film over the years. Brining not only kung fu, but the special effects that has recreated the action film genre.

Recently, we're also experiencing much more cinematic landscapes and locales that are truly unique and seem to bring the big screen back to life.

So as I read about Bollywood and its ever increasing number of films, I keep thinking that this industry is going to have a significant impact on the overall film industry. Already, Bollywood produces more films than Hollywood. In fact India has more English speaking people than the population of the United States.

The potential is huge. I've been exchanging several discussions with a new friend that tracks the Bollywood scene at Bollywood Movies.

Please stop by and check out Dream's blog sometime, and in the meantime we can wait for some new ideas to reinvigorate a great medium.

Technorati Tags: Bollywood Movie, Bollywood movies, India Movies

I just got off the phone with my brother-in-law, who recently moved from San Diego to Melbourn, Australia. Shortly after I got off the phone with him, I started wondering to myself, "Is John Stewart Funny Down Under?"

The Daily Show is one of my favorite comedy shows, and I watch it 2-3 times a week. The cathartic laughs that it brings with an irreverent style of humor might almost only work if you are in the United States, where things continue to develop in such a negative out of control way.

Are things bad enough in Australia or even in the United Kingdom for John Stewart to be considered funny?



Technorati Tags: Down Under Daily Show

I keep finding myself caught up in some of these Free Online Games. Last week it was evil Mcdonalds empire. This week its extreme dodge ball. There's something about the rough basic interface that makes the game fun.

Of course having body parts fly apart like a south park episode is always good for a laugh or two.

Technorati Tags: Extreme Dodgeball online, free video games

To Me! I'm another year older.


Picture from my buddy Wendy at CakeSpace.

She makes some great cakes!

Technorati Tags: My Birthday, Thanks Technorati

I've been on the affilliate bandwagon for sometime now. I've made a little over a thousand dollars in affilliate related transactions, but I've never found a great fit.

I write on many different topics on several blogs and design several different websites. I do need to pay the bills and I accomplish this in part through affilliate marketing programs.

Today, I signed up with a new affilliate program called ModernClick. They belong to a CPA Network (Cost Per Action).

A CPA campaign is basically one where a website earns money when a visitor clicks on a link and completes a form or signs up for a service on the other side. This is sometimes referred to as Cost Per Lead, however in traditional cost per lead campaigns the sign up process may be very simple.

ModernClick also offers Cost Per Click, which pays a website owner when someone clicks on a link or Cost per sale that pays someone when someone clicks a link and buys something on the other end. This is a very popular aproach for Amazon as an example.

ModernClick pays by PayPal every month on the 15th of the month and they have a minimum payout of $25.

If you have a blog or website and are looking for ways to monetize that site (make money)then I'd recommend trying them. You can use this invitation to get signed up and started.

ModernClick.com - Make Money!



Technorati Tags: ModernClick, CPA, Cost Per Action, Affilliate Advertising

Those extra nice People at the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals group are handpickin their battles to help the cock roaches.

They are upset with Six Flags. Six Flags parks are offering their visitors a chance unlimited line jumping privileges.

Why is PETA upset about cutting in line at Six Flags?

The visitors have to eat a live Madagascar hissing (as opposed to screaming) cockroach.

Now PETA could have chosen a many other companies to protest. Just today a report came out of Vietnam about Beer Drinkers that pony up to the bar to drink beer and eat deep fried crickets. Its not just an occassional cricket like the single hissing roach at Six Flags. Vietnam farmers are growing thousands of crickets and selling them to bar owners, where the crickets are dropped into boiling oil by the hundreds.

Does PETA have a soft spot for hissing Madagascar Roaches or a bias against Vietnamese Crickets?

Technorati Tags: PETA, Six Flags, PETA saves Roaches, PETA against line cutters

I've been writing occassionally for PayPerPost. Its been a very good and extremely motivating experience. My revenues for this experience are increasing every month, almost every week.
If you'd like more information about PayPerPost and their Consumer Generated Advertising Program, feel free to drop me a comment or email. If you have a great blog that's more than 90 days old and has been maintained with regular posts, you can diversify your advertising revenue with PayPerPost. I can vouch for their regular and timely payments and the growing PPP community includes a great bunch of people. If you want to sign up just give them my email address brettbum at yahoo dot com. (Disclaimer: I get $5 for referrals, which isn't going to make me rich or anything.)

My birthday is coming up on the 25th. This means a few different things. First it means that I'm getting older, but I don't really think worry or care much about my age. I never really have.
However, more importantly it means that summer is winding down, September is almost over and the holiday season is going to start rushing in soon.

Each year I fight a war against a type of flu bug with my family. Its not the type of flu bug that keeps you trapped in bed with a fever or running for the bathroom every 20 minutes or even something worse. Its the type of flu bug that runs up your credit card bills, fills up your attic, your storage areas, your closets, your garage, and forces you to by a new home twice as big as your last home every 2 years.

Its the type of flu bug that is rapidly making manufacturer's in China wealthy and creating a new middle class in China. This same flu bug has created some of the largest land fills in the world full of garbage and debrit that will not degrade for thousands of years if ever.

I'm talking about Afluenza, the juxtaposition of affluence and influenza, the bug that makes us not only buy stuff, but buy stuff we don't really need or want. St Nicholas may have been reinvented for good wholesome reasons to spark a service back to the church or he may have been the creation of some Madison Avenue retailers around the turn of the century, but the holiday we know of as Christmas has been hijacked by consumerism infecting people with afluenza.

Each year I try to convince the family to drop the gifts and spend the funds on those things that will bring us together for more quality time and less quantity of presents, and the wrapping paper and all the things that make us nuts for a flash in the pan few seconds of gift opening, only to rush to throw away all the garbage and move on down the road to the next celebration.

Since I can't convince anyone to get away from the gift idea, I think I will attempt a slightly new direction. Offering up reusable packaging and providing gifts that can be used and will be used immediately.

I'm thinking of Gift Baskets & Christmas Gifts packed with food, or grilling stuffs, or cookies or plane tickets to come visit or something. Something has to break the cycle that seems to be rubbing out the pleasantries of Christmas and replacing it with a mad rush to haul stuff from the local Wal-Mart back to home where the package goods can be double packaged in gift wrap, then shuttled down the road to Grandma's house, where both sets of packaging will be wripped to shreds and sent to the landfill leaving something in the middle that might look remotely useful or interesting, but only gets packed up, hauled home and stored in a pile of similar things collected in previous years.

Technorati Tags: consumerism, affluenza, gift baskets, christmas

I live in the Atlanta area and we have a widely known monstrosity called, Spaghetti Junction.This old image doesn't really do the mess of roads justice as it shows the roadway as an engineering marvel as opposed to the site that drivers see every day, the same picture of roadways packed bumper to bumper with cars, SUVS, Semi's and more stuck not moving anywhere. People in the Atlanta area are warned not to venture onto the interstate without three quarters of a tank of gass, pleanty of water, a little food and maybe a blanket as the interstate routinely gets shut down for several hours on end with accidents and worse.

Its a series of over passes that loop around criss crossing 2 interstates, one highway and 2-3 other streets as well.

It combines the worst traffic of Interstate 85 and Interstate 285 all in one nice big mess of a traffic jam first thing in the morning and from about 3:30 until 7 pm at night.

Part of the problem with the interstate system around the Atlanta area is that everyone drives a separate car to work. Now even if you are not a member of Greenpeace or something, too many people with too many cars some of which are oversized as well, fills up the roadways such that the interstate becomes a parking lot.

We've got to find some better ways to travel because the gridlock is going to bring our society to a hall whether or not the earth heats up or cools down and sends the human race the way of the dinosaur.

About a year ago, I chose to start driving a small motorcycle, when I need to haul my lonesome self around somewhere. Many tweens and teenagers and even a few college students have taken to getting around on electric scooters.

I think the idea of an electric scooter has some potential. These things can go up to 20 MPH up big hills and can go for almost 12 miles before they need a charge. They can carry a 400 lb person (or maybe two adults riding tandem, which would be really funny to see in the middle of a traffic jam on Spaghetti Junction.)

Maybe someday as the train system expands out around the Atlanta area, people will be able to trek to the train station on an electric scooter and ride the train into the city, and ride the scooter the rest of the way to the office where they can charge it up for a return trip that night.

Something has got to give, maybe a generation that has grown up with electric scooters will pave the way.

Technorati Tags: electric scooters, Atlanta commuting, spaghetti junction

Completing an Online degree program is a major challenge. I have a Master's in Laws myself that I earned from St Thomas University School of Law's LLM program in International Taxation. My wife earned her Master's in Education from University of Phoenix.

Below are some myths about online education and distance learning programs.

1. Online programs are not easy. You work from home and do not get the benefits of sitting in a classroom and speaking or talking with Professors or classmates. This is counter balanced by your opportunity to post questions in discussion forums 24 hours a day, but its not the same. If you need physical interaction with people think about how this will impact you.
2. Online eduation requires individual motivation in the extreme. You have to absolutely be self motivated, you will not get a bi-weekly reminder to get your work, research or projects completed by a physical person. You won't get it at all, if you do not turn your computer on during the week.
3. Online programs can be done in my spare time. Online programs take many hours of study. Just because you can study in the middle of the night, doesn't mean that you can get the studying done in 40 minutes. Expect to spend multiple hours per day 5-6 days per week.

These are just the myths. I have some online education survival tips as well which I'll post separately, but let me offer my primary tip.

If you try an online program and its not working whether its the entire program or just a single class, get out of that class or program immediately.

Online programs move very quickly, and if you are lost on a Tuesday and do not get up to speed by the end of the week you may get so far behind that you won't be able to recover. Get things straight quickly.

Last hint of a tip, if an instructor or professor cannot provide a very solid syllabus at the beginning of a course, you should seriously consider dropping the course, unless grades are not important to you. Online programs require very organized teachers, if they do not have a syllabus that is tight, odds are they will jump all over and this will make it exceptionally difficult for you to keep up with the fits and starts and adjustments they make throughout the quarter or semester.

Finally, let me leave you with 10 'No sympathy' lines that a professor of any school might give to a student. These apply double almost to an online program where you are responsible for driving your own program.


Technorati Tags: online education, distance learning, Top 10 No Sympathy from your Professor Lines, Myths of Online Education

Someday soon, I'm going to travel to India. I have many friends that live in India or that are originally from India and I've always wanted to see parts of the country.

That said, my international travel experience is paltry at best. So I turn to my trusty internet skills to start investigating the potential destinations and where I might stay when I get there.

Inasra, which is the combination of two words Indian + Asra, which loosely translates to Indian Shelter, offers hotel and lodging information on hotels in cities all over India.

The City of Alleppey located in Kerala offers six very interesting looking hotels. The River Side Retreat is a family guest house operated by the owner's family, which looks great in the picture above.

Or if you want European luxury in a Kashmir setting there is the Hotel Broadway in Srinagar.

Or maybe if you are looking to try an interesting setting in Goa but you are looking for an American branded hotel (for some reason ;) There is The Holiday Inn Resort Goa. Quick jibe about The Holiday Inn aside, this is a five star resort located on Mobor beach.

They all look fascinating to me, however, I've always held the desire to travel to the Kahsmir so for a vacation that will probably win the day. For business, I'll probably end up in Bangalore first!


Technorati Tags: Indian Travel, inasra, Kashmir hotel, Goa Resort

This morning I woke up to the sounds of war. I have been out of the military for over 10 years. This morning when I awoke I was somewhat disorientated thinking that I had gone back in time.

I heard the sounds of war. Explosions, gunshots, blood curdling yells and screams, alarms and more.

After a couple minutes I realized that it wasn't the real thing. The smell wasn't there. No diesel fumes, no radios or static, no sulfur or smells of recent gunfire.

As I cleared the smoke in my brain, I became aware that the fighting was less war and more border squirmish between my three year old daughter and my eight year old son.

I had no idea what the fight was about, but as tensions escalated I heard my daughter yell out that she was going for reinforcements. "I'm going to tell Mommy!" she barked as if she were General MacArthur reincarnated with the veiled threat of I will return and you'll be sorry this time.

She then opened the door, while my son screamed, "Noooooo!"

Too late, he didn't really fear mommy, he feared the house alarm.

As my daughter opened the door, the house alarm went off and that's when yours truly finally got out of bed.

Top Gear a British TV show has two presenters, Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond. Richard Hammond was attempting to break the British land-speed record in a jet powered car near York, when he crashed at almost 300 mph.

He woke up 30 hours later and asked Jeremy Clarkson, who was originally schedule to drive the car but had other committments, Was I driving like an idiot?

Regardless of the answer to that question, anyone that drives in a jet powered car should first ask themselves, Am I an idiot!

Technorati Tags: Top Gear, 300mph crash, Darwin Award 1995

I took a break tonight to try and run my own evil McDonald's empire. I started by raising cattle and soy and then moved on to genetically modified soy and hormones for the cattle to make them fatter.

Once I had some cattle ready to slaughter, I hired my crew to make and sell the hamburgers. Of course, I didn't hire a lot of crew at the beginning so the customer lines were kind of long.

Then the cattle started to pile up so I launched an advertising campaigns targeted at kids. This brought people in by the droves, so I had to hire more crew, but keeping the balance!

I had to bull doze some rain forest, plant more soy, increase the number of cattle and feed the cattle industrial waste when the soy didn't grow fast enough.

I bribed some officials but ultimately went bankrupt. I think I'll stick to blogging!

If you want to run your own evil McDonald's empire check out the flash games at Zwok.

The graphics are kind of simple, but the complexity is in the ecosystem of levels. :)

Technorati Tags: Evil McDonalds Game, Flash Games, Zwok

A man in Helsinki suffering from dimensia sued a woman and her boyfriend for bilking him out of $32,000, the total of fees she charged him for fondling her breasts on ten occassions.

That's $3,200.00 per touch, or $1,600 per hand per occasion.

There was nothing special about the woman's breasts per Yahoo, but I have my suspicions. I suspect that either there was something strange or maybe this guy was just cheap and changed his mind later. Obviously, this ruling could if it ever migrated to the US could pose a problem for strip clubs, where men change their minds about the value of this type of thing the next morning after their hang over wears off and they start adding up the ATM and credit card receipts.


The courts ruled that the amount was too high based on normal life experiences, but would not rule on an appropriate fee.

So now I have to wonder if he will get all of his money back, or what ?

Technorati Tags: cheap fondling, Helsinki breast fondling fee reduced

If your SUV loan is squeezing your wallet, you should consider refinancing your vehicle. Sometimes when you buy a car or SUV from the dealership, you think you are getting one deal and before you know it you are out the door and the first couple of payments roll in and the monthly amount looks OK.

But then you look into the details of the loan and realize that the dealership set you up with a variable rate loan or a large balloon payment at the end of the loan or a number of other schemes that dealerships use to get you out the door.

All of a sudden the financing part of the deal doesn't look so hot. When you find yourself in a bad financing deal, you should take steps to fix it immediately. Refinancing, selling or trading in the vehicle are all ways to start to get things fixed. Rate Genius offers Auto Refinanceoptions and will help you shop for a better rate or financing deal. They also offer other options like extended warranty plans and more.

Technorati Tags: auto refinance, SUV loan, Dealership screwed me over and I need to fix it fast!

Less than a week after Toby Keith appeared on the Colbert Report and talked about how terrific Willie Nelson's dope was. Willie "the dope man" Nelson's bus was pulled over. Willie and several passengers including relatives were cited for possession of drugs (marijuana).

Police found the smell of dope 'unavoidable' after the early morning pullover. They noticed the stench as soon as the bus driver opened the door.

Police only found 1.5 pounds of pot and two-tenths of a pound of magic mushrooms.

Seventy-three year old Willie must have been getting off to a slow start since he didn't have very much dope or as much as many celebrities have recently claimed.

Several celebrities from Johnny Knoxville to Toby Keith have recently publicly commented about how strong Willie's dope is.

Technorati Tags: Willie Nelson, marijuana, drug possession, Toby Keith, Johnny Knoxville

I've been working with PayPerPost for almost 3 months now and the experience has been excellent.

Basically, they pay you to advertise on blogs. They recently setup a blog of their own to compliment their primary website. You can check out their blog and get insights from many of they other people working with PayPerPost. If you've got a blog that is at least 90 days old and has posted regular content at least every week during that time period then you might make a good candidate for their program. If you have more than one blog that meets these criteria even better.. You can only take on up to 3 assignments (called 'opportunities') each day for each of your blogs. Plus, you will need to write non-PPP blogs articles in between their assignments.

This has motivated me more and more to do what I really want to do, write!

Let's say you are walking along, and you decide to count the cash in your pocket.

You keep walking, you're counting. You happen to walk across a bridge as you are walking and counting.

A breeze starts to blow as they often do on bridges and suddenly the blowing turns to a billowing gust and one of the twenty dollar bills you are counting is blown out of your hand and over the side of the bridge.

What do you do?
(note. the Bridge is on a US highway and its 50 feet over a river)

If you are Mark Giorgio, you jump over the side and go after the twenty bucks, and that's just what he did. He didn't catch it on the way down like a hero out of the Matrix or something. He hit the water and had to swim about a hundred yards down river before he got his hands back on his money again.

Technorati Tags: bridge jumping for twenty dollars

I spoke with a representative from Apogee yesterday. I'm in the midst of preparing for several future campaigns with 2 of the websites that I have designed and manage for my clients.

More and more I am liking the idea of turning some of the Search Engine Marketing over to an outsourced firm that can manage the program for me as I focus on other aspects of improving my clients business. All in all I was impressed with their response and offering .

I think I might even consider them for some Search Enginge Optimization Blog makeover's at some point down the road too.

Technorati Tags: SEO Blog, Search Engine Optimization

What's better than sitting back analyzing your profits? Maybe sitting back analyzing your dream home, or yacht or your Scrooge McDuck like money vault?

All kidding aside Acorn Systems posted an article about their profit analytics software. They offer a suite of products that work together and can be linked to a companies legacy systems and databases through a combination of SQL Server 2005 and an OLAP.

What's and OLAP? It's an acronym for on Line Analytical Processing. Think of it as a server pre-programmed to ask your database or datacube to be more precise 90% of the questions and queries that you could ever think to ask it, before you ever ask it. So that when you do ask a question its already got the answer fast and ready to spit out for you almost instantly.

Its kind of like keeping an entire floor of accountants working in the backroom in a synchronous way to generate the answer on spreadsheets for every thing that happened in the last quarter last year, or forecast what is happening now or going to happen next.

To put it another way this is the type of tool that will flaten society and put small and medium sized companies on par with fortune 500 companies running million dollar hyperion systems.

Technorati Tags: Profit Analytics, OLAP, SQL Server 2005

Dr. Loretta (whose full name is Dr. Loretta Ciraldo) has written a new book 'Six Weeks to Sensational skin: Dr. Loretta's Beauty Camp Handbook for your Freshest Face' is available for about $20 Link.

As much of my work is consulting and requires face-to-face first impressions, I think I might actually give this a spin. Every little thing can help!

Next up I think I'm going to have my teeth whitened too.


Technorati Tags: sensational skin, Dr Loretta

There's an interesting release about the work of a law firm named simmons jannace & stagg they took on the odd task of defending a 9/11 widow from her previous attorney.

Her orginal attorney was hired to fight for compensation from the death of her husband on 9/11. However the federal government setup the Victims Compensation Fund and did not provide any funding for attornies of the bereaved. So the original attorney sued the widow for $2,000,000 in a contingency fee.

Simmons, Jannace & Stagg fought against the size of the fee and against the jurisdiction of the filing. They convinced a federal judge that the federal government did not have jurisdiction over the matter it was deemed a state afair and the case was won.

Technorati Tags: 9/11 widow sued by attorney, victims compensation fund, simmons jannace & stagg

If your looking for something to put on a great wedding, there are many things you will need to consider. Whether you are looking ot put on a casual wedding or something more formal a store named Wedding Needs can help.

Everything from invitations to direction cards and more. A wedding is much like production or project and requires a number of components to be completed successfully. When people decied to get married they rarely wake up one day and think to themselves, "we want to have a bad wedding." Usually its almost always the opposite even if the affair is simple.

Technorati Tags: wedding needs, casual wedding, no bad weddings

Paramount may be opening the first salvo towards Tom Cruise in their recent public debacle.

They're going to make Tom real sorry that he didn't do their bidding.  After not agreeing to Tom's contract because of a $10m group of various fees and expenses for Cruise's production company, Paramount is going to turn around and offer Brad Pitt a $40 million dollar deal, a deal he can't refuse and one that would make him the highest paid actor (I think that's for a single film) ever.

Seems like a very business like thing today on Paramounts part.  Take a movie franchise that is grossing less and less money sequel after sequel and offer a single actor more money than any actor has ever received for a film sequel or not.

Cruise may have been a little flaky in public but Paramount seems to be acting twice as flaky like a crazy girlfriend or boyfriend that just wants revenge.  I'm sure Brad Pitt will probably make a great movie, but this doesn't seem like a rational business decision on Paramount's behalf.


Technorati Tags: Paramount focuses on revenge to hell with the bottom line and business, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Mission Impossible IV

I'm originally from Illinois. My family has been in the real estate business for more than 50 years there. I've studied finance, taxes and even real estate.

I've moved all around the country and lived in 8 different states in the last 16 years, so I've had a bit of personal experience in real estate. For people considering the Chicago area in particular if you are looking at Bolingbrook Real Estate you should review options with NewCastle Realty Group. They cover seven counties, 211 towns and specialize in many individual neighborhoods surrounding the City of Chicago.

Many areas of Chicago itself are being reclaimed and many areas of the suburbs are still growing at a very steady pace. The Chicago area is not going through a bubble. It's just growing.

Many predictions estimate that within the next 20 years a highly technical and populated corridor stretching from Chicago down through the burbs all the way to Peoria and up from St Louis will connect to create a large inter connected mass of communities similar to many areas of California. Similar projections show corridors like this growing from Atlanta through Greenville to Charlotte North Carolina and the Phoenix to Tucson corridor is rapidly filling in with a recent addition of a 35 square mile sub division(just one sub division).

It's more important than ever to get good advice and support from your realtor when you are making a move or relocation. Its been my experience that if you suspect your getting less than stellar service from your realtor, you need to switch realtors immediately, preferably changing realty companies. Your future home is too important to risk with a firm that's not doing a great job.

Technorati Tags: real estate, bolingbrook real estate

If you are considering looking for Baltimore Real Estate in the Cockeysville Maryland area, make sure that the apartment complexes you are looking at offers valet trash service. There are many amenities that come with apartments these days. The previous link has a release that offers everything from an olympic sized pool to 'valet trash service'. You really don't want to miss that!

As interest rates go up some lesser complexes don't feel the need to offer some of the better amenities because demand for apartments is increasing a bit as zero interest and adjustable rate mortgages catch up with people, but don't forget the valet trash service. There's nothing worse than living in an apartment and having to save your trash in a closet to load up in a truck and haul off to the dump once a week. Not only does it start to smell, but it can stain your carpet and that doesn't help you get your security deposit back.

Technorati Tags: baltimore real estate, valet trash service

Every now and then someone invents something that seems so obvious when you see it but absolutely defies logic before you see it.

There's this new thing called the Hercules Hooks.

Its this metal almost wire looking thing, but it goes into dry wall and can hold up to 150 pounds of weight. The hook like design allows the weight to be displaced over a wide area in a wall. You don't need tools to install it or remove it which makes it easy to take with you if you move from apartment to apartment. Not having to drill out holes tap in plastic sleeves and then screw in screws really decreases the amount of time and effort it takes to setup and decorate a room.

Technorati Tags: hercules hooks, wall hanger

Its one of the hardest lesson to learn as an investory. Buy Low and Sell high.

It seems like such a simple thing, but it means that you have to buy when something is dropping in price. Prices don't just stay at one level, they fluctuate up and down. If you want to buy low and sell high, you've got to be prepared to buy when the price is dropping.

Oil and Gold prices have been dropping reasons so by that logic, the time to buy would be now. These markets both peaked earlier this year on concerns about political turmoil. Now they are dropping based on the idea that the turmoil is dissipating. However as much as I'd like to believe that, the world's level of turmoil hasn't really changed much over the last 6 months.

Monex has put out a release recently detailing their ability to deliver gold to your location or to your designated depository. Any investment should be diversified, precious metals should be as well, balanced with platinum and silver even investments in copper have recently proved to be profitable. Metals are only one area of investments, stocks, bond or mutual funds in all of these are additional ways that you can balance your investments such that you never have all of your eggs or ingots in one basket or vault.

Technorati Tags: gold, investments, metals

My kids have a Chinchilla named 'Ready'. Every few weeks we get Ready out of his cage and let him run around the downstairs on the tiled floor. (the picture on the Right is Pete from Miami, I don't have a readily available pic of Ready, but promise to provide one real soon.)

My office is downstairs and Ready must have gotten in to the office.

He proceeded to run along the wall and found a fun wire to play with. He wasn't there long, but he took the amount of time he had to gnaw through the wire for my electric stapler in about 20 different places, shorting it out.

Ready has been very lathargic since his escapade. That was about 2 weeks back. My stapler has been broke for about a week, but I didn't use it the week before that. I only tonight saw the chewed up wire and made the Ready-connection.

Even more we now think that Ready may have been zapped one or more times and gotten a little shock therapy. Poor dumb Chinchilla, he's kind of cute, but I'm rather possesive about my electric stapler.

I'm an electronics and gadget fiend.

I use techonlogy throughout my life to help me do more, have more fun, relax more, get more done, get things done faster, more efficiently, more effictively and many more things.

I'm always cycling through old gadgets and bringing in new gadgets.

Whether its on my person, in my office or when its an in car audio systems, I've got gadgets that will get things done.

I don't like to frequent online stores or even physical stores that have a limited selection. I want to have access to almost everything that's available. That's why I like Fry's in the states and Dixon's in the UK. They carry just about everything in almost every product category. I don't want some corporate buyer limiting my decision to his or her top 3 products. I like to make my own choice for my own reasons and find my own price. After all isn't that waht the internet is for, getting any gadget, any day any where at anytime?


Technorati Tags: gadgets, every gadget should be available always

When you'd rather not send flowers, but instead pick them yourself (assuming you have a garden or a neighbor away on vacation that has a garden ;) you might want to consider picking flowers and arranging a bouqet in the European hand tied style.

Now its not a big thing to make the arrangement yourself and you can always plunk them down in a vase or something in the house. There was a time in my life when I didn't care much about flowers, but I worked for a company that used to hold a weekly lottery for the flower arrangements that we had on display. So every few weeks someone would walk home with a huge vase load of flowers.

After having great looking flowers around the house for a while, you start to develop a taste or eye or sense of smell for a little more color and beauty in your life.

Technorati Tags: flowers, european hand-tied bouquet

I'm impressed with the concept of a bank touting its goal of being up front, honest and ethical. Smile is an internet bank owned by The Co-operative Bank of the United Kingdom.

Too many banks flip their rates around or make changes on a too regular basis such that customers cannot keep up with the latest rates and fees. They attempt to offer lower rates by retaining the ownership of their bank privately as opposed to listing on an exchange where fluctuations in stock prices might subject them to more frequent price changes. So if you are in the United Kindom, the Channell Islands or the Isle of Man, this could be a good option to consider, online banking with Smile.

Technorati Tags: Smile, Online Banking, Co-operative Bank

Someday I'll think up something as silly and strange as International talk like a Pirate Day, until then I'll remain in relative obscurity.

Maybe Galactic Duck, Duck Goose Day

or

Pan - American dig like a miner week

or Norther Hemispheric walk like a duck month

or the Leisurerly Stroll for Greener Parks or something.

I was reading an interesting release about wedding favors and they mentioned in the release that a lot of times when people are planning for weddings they attempt to doll up the kids or even bring them into particpate suited up in mini tuxedos and gowns, but the kids only go along for the ride so far.

They often get disenchanted with the ceremonial scene and sometimes even the dinners and party and everything else. Now for me, when I go to a wedding I like to go for the dinner and party afterwards, and I do everything I can to try and talk my wife out of bringing the kids. However, if its family especially close family, I'm going to lose that fight nine times out of ten.

So I was reading the article and they poited out a couple great ideas like one setting the kids up at their own kid friendly table. Tykes get crayons and macaroni and cheese plus chicken fingers, and offer up a kids movie for them to watch. I've even seen some weddings where someone rents or uses a hotel room just to hold the kids and they bring in a baby sitter and get everyone to RSVP for their kids need for a sitter.

Even teens will probably be more comfortable with a table not with the tykes but with kids, pre-teens or teens their own age. Now when they get to those later teen years its anybodies guess so you better ask them. And just in case your a teen after my own heart, forewarn the bartender about who the teens in the room are. No point in getting anyone hurt or in legal trouble when everyone is supposed to be having a good time.

My Friend Colleen from PPP is working hard to raise $2200 for the Susan G Kowen Breast Cancer Foundation. Colleen's going to walk 60 miles in 3 days.

She's asked for support from fellow PPPoster's and I offered the challenge that for every PPPoster that provides a link to Colleen's site 3 Day Mom and to my Site Maven Mapper's Information that I will offer not only a link back myself, but will pledge $2 per pair of links to our sites up to $20.

I have a feeling this is going to go very well and it is a charity and I'm feeling more charitable by the minute, so I think I may increase my pledge as things progress. . .

I didn't mention it in the original offer, but I'm providing links back myself from both my Maven Mapper's Information site and from There's Something About Harry in my sidebars and from this article/webpage also.


Here's a list of the great people that have already acted and linke to us!

1. Cass Knits - Thanks Cass!


2. Phantascene.com Journal - Thanks Sandra!


3. Whatever I feel like Thanks Amy I had you linked before, but added you in this post and at Maven Mapper's!


4. Ankit's Life And Technology Reviews @ NSIT Good luck on Exams Ankit


5. Clover's Blog


6. Whisper's from the Past
7. Lady Nova
8. Stuck in Elmo's World
9. Mae Synchronicity
10. Tor's Rants
11. Julie's Journal
12. Marcus Williford
13. Starring Jo
14. 
    
15. Who's up next???
    

If I missed you or your blog, please leave me a comment and I'll get right on it!

Thanks,
Brett

Every few months the pores on my nose drive me nuts. So I go out and buy a pack of those Biore nose strips. Basically, you get this nose pad strip (not the type that help you breathe when your playing football) but the type that stick to your nose and peel away black heads and things lifting them right out of your clogged pores.

Now some people realize that you are supposed to clean your nose after you do this, otherwise you have just opened up a pore so that it can fill back in again and possibly get infected or launch a pimple platoon or something.

So after I do this I then proceed to wash my face with cold water several times a day for about a week ago, and then repeat the process at the end of the week. I then take a break for a month or two from it as doing this too much seems to have a negative side effect on my nose.

My skin is a little on the oily side, always has been probably always will. I'm in my thirties and don't like to walk around looking like a pre-pubescent teen having trouble with acne. Over the years I've learned a few things that help a great deal.

1. Clean your face regularly throughout the day with water and dry with a clean paper towel
2. Try to get a good nights sleep.
3. Get a good heart pounding bit of exercise. It helps to get good and sweaty too to open up the pores. Then take a good hot shower to wash away the dirt and oil.
4. Don't get over stressed.
5. The two toughest things that I try to do is to keep my face out of the sun and keep my hands from rubbing, itching scratching etc. I've got a slightly dark complexion possibly resulting from a slight Cherokee background. The sun and my skin work well together for healthy color, but not exactly for healthy and clean poors.

So those are some of the things that I do, everyone has different skin and requires different acne solutions. Each unto their own, but some of these things are universal, especially the stress free part!

Technorati Tags: acne solutions, personal regime, biore nose strips

RipOffReport.com is one of those websites that specializes in taking in lots of consumer complaints, rants and raves about everything under the sun. Some company does you wrong or gives you a hard time or accuses you of shoplifting powertools off the sidewalk, send in a complaint.

Here’s the rub, companies and people are complaining that the complaints at ripoffreport.com are sometimes either bogus or they have not been verified. These people and companies are accusing ripoffreport of something similar to extortion or slander or something.

So it makes perfect sense that if you have a company that is setup to take complaints about you or your company, and that company is itself either not on their game or not on the up and up, you are going to have to fight fire with fire. So now there is a group that has just issued a release that is working with these people and companies to bury Rip-Off Report ‘s search engine listings further down the results line with top search engines.


Technorati Tags: rippoffreport.com, fighting ripoffreport.com, shoplifting power tools off the sidewalk

Many people suffer from hearing loss.  Some people are born with the inability to hear or hear well.  Others suffer hearing loss from ear infections or other illnesses, and many go through their years and suffer hearing damage form too much exposure to loud noises including loud music, heavy equipment, gunfire and mortar shells even jet planes flying over head.

Just like vision impairments, hearing impairments can be reduced or minimized by hearing aids.  These devices range from simple noise amplification devices to Cochlear Implants with many different levels of sophistication in between.

Several members of my family suffer from hearing loss. Some have wised up and now use devices to help them hear, but some still rely on techniques like lip reading and other devices to communicate. I myself experienced a slight loss of midrange sounds, and found this loss to make it very difficult to study and learn enunciations of foreign languages.

For students or people learning a new language especially those immersed in a new culture resulting from a move, its even more important to try and make use of devices that can help them hear better such that they can not only hear better, but hear and turn that noise they heard into the correct words and speach they need to communicate themselves.



Technorati Tags: hearing aids, hearing impairments, betterhearing.org

So I've chronicled some local problems with home invasions, and I've been very active with the neighborhood watch and even had the electric company out to install a street lamp today.

Well I'm not in this alone.  The fine people of Rajasthan India have problems with stolen rice and wheat.

Unable to figure out who the thieves were, the village elders passed a diktat that required 150 men to dip their hands into a pot of boiling oil to retrieve a copper ring.

The logic behind this was that if they refused they must be guilty (and smart enough not to dip their hands in boiling oil).

Apparently, either one third of the group was either smart, guilty or guilty and smart as they refused to put their hands in the oil.

The other 100 men complained to police, who arrested the village elders!  It makes me wonder if those village elders might be interested in moving to the US, I suspect that they might be able to find some city council work in New Orleans.


Technorati Tags: dip your hands in oil or your guilty, dip your hands in oil if your not smart

If you do a Google Search on "Home Improvement Shows" you'll probably get a result of about 75,000 listings for shows.  That's a lot of websites about shows. 

Back in the hey day of double digit interest, shows like This Old House started up but never really gained a massive following. 

Then Interest Rates dropped down to virtually nothing for a while and along came Trading Space, Ty (Tyger Burton) Pennington and Paige Davis.

Before you know it everyone is trying to figure out how to transfor each room in their house for less than a grand and not succeeding.  In the real world things cost a bit more than one grand per room, but hey it made for great TV.  Almost as great as giving away free homes to people that are so far down on their luck that it would even make President Bush shed a tear.

I'll admit I was sucked into these shows just like the rest of the country.  I'm in the middle of a bunch of projects and probably will continue to be in the middle of a bunch of projects until I sell my home.  :)

I keep harping on my need to finish my kitchen, but I've got some old windows in the house.  The thermal pains are losing their seal and I need to get somereplacement windows. There are somethings I'll tackle myself, but most of my windows are on the 2nd and 3rd floor, and I don't like working high up with glass. Mostly because if I drop it then I'll be mad at myself. So for windows I'll try and find someone that is good at installing replacement windows.

If they drop a window, I'll make sure they are bonded, insured and that I don't pay for it until its installed. :)

Technorati Tags: 75000 home improvement shows, replacement windows, ty pennington's name is Tybert

Some new reports are out that the silling is mullying over a compromise in legislation to resovle conflicts amongst Republican leaders.

Last week Ex- Secretary of State and four star General Collin Powell made headlines by writing a letter to John McCain complaining about the Bush Administration's goal to alter the Geneva Convention.  Many ex war veterans in Congress quickly joined ranks to fight against the President, who served in the guard but had no war experience in the early 1970's.

So now it appears that a compromise modeled after a Clinton era legacy may bring these two groups together.

Its Don't Ask Don't Tell 2.0 now aimed at not asking and not telling about everything from Secret Prison's, torture, prisoner's of war, detainees and any one that generally pisses off the White House administration for anything. 

Administration officials are reportedly trying to win the hearts and minds of 'people who have committed their own lives to our destruction."

Technorati Tags: A little bit of Rock n Roll, and a lot more sarcasm, or was it satisfaction, Elvis

There's Something about a Wiki when you are trying to get feedback about travelling. Wiki's are excellent places to store knowledge on the internet compiling impressions from many different people and condensing it into an edited refined objective perspective with a significant amount of detail and often times personal experience.

So it makes sense that if you like to travel like I do, you want to be able to find a place that gives you good information about where you are going or where you might go. What better way to figure this out than through essentially an objective customer review edited and refined by tens, of hundreds of thousands of people.

It makes sense from a busines perspective as well. A travel company could spend a fortune on ads and copy to convince someone to travel somewhere, but a good objective review of a destination by many people that have been there can give a person the insiders view and the personal connection necessary to make the buying decision emotional and immediate. Today, travel and tourism wiki's are becoming more and more relevant and definitely a resource that should be considered. I wouldn't drive across the country without a map and usually one that's been printed. I wouldn't travel either without doing at least some research on my destination and a wiki is a great place to start

Plus, the person that travels today, can come back and refine the wiki a little bit more thus making it a living document that grows and improves over time, aging with the destination in some ways even.

Technorati Tags: wiki, travel, travel wiki, destination wiki

Over the years, I've found some creative ways to use junk mail.

For a bunch of years, I used to take junk mail, say from Publisher's clearing house as an example.

I'd fold it up and stuff it in a Postage Prepaid envelope from the credit card of the day, and mail them that stuff so that they'd have to pay for the postage of my publisher's clearing house junk as it came back to them, not to mention the person that would have to open the email determine that they the Publisher's Clearing House processing center had in fact received junk mail.

Then they would have to throw it in their trash, not mine and put it in their land fill not mine.

This seemed to work pretty well, but I started to get a little lazy with my junk mailing process. Truthfully, there was just too much, and I usually stripped out anything that had my name or identify on it so that some employee from Publisher's wouldn't use my name and apply for a credit card or something. I just sent the non-personal fluff to them.

These days when energy prices are outragious, I've taken to creating Junk Mail Brickets.

First let me say that I drink too much Diet Coke (Coke Zero to be precise as I was poisoned by the regular variety of Diet Coke about a year ago.)

So I get lots of these refrigerator friendly empty boxes of Diet Coke.

I take these boxes and stuff them full of junk mail.

Stay with me now this serves two useful and practical purposes.

I take the boxes once stuffed very very full and dense, and I burn them like a log in my fireplace during the winter time. When they are stuffed tight they actually burn hot and slow just like a log would and they help heat my home. I don't cut down trees to burn or anything, I use the dead limbs and trees that fall down naturally in the fireplace. I have a nice energy efficient heater, but the fireplace burning junk mail and dead trees serves to take the edge off in the cold Georgia winters.

It also serves to destroy any trace of my identity that came in the junk mail and might be used by an identity thief.

Plus, it saves my local landfill the large amount of bio mass that would take centuries to decompose. (Note many landfills are conteplating building clean burning incinerators on site that could produce energy themselves to sell to the grid, but most don't have these yet.)

Technorati Tags: how to get rid of junk mail, protect your identity, alternative heating fuels, publishers clearing house

Every year if not every day someone is coming up with a website for another aspect of life. Sometimes these things turn into fads and sometimes they even receive 15 minutes of fame. I remember about 6-8 years ago internet panhandling was a big new thing. Many of those people that offered up PayPal donation buttons, did make some money.

Example: You can donate a $1.00 through PayPal by hitting the button below

But I suspect that they made a lot more in experience and learned how to successfully market websites on the internet.

An offshoot of that fad was the trend for people to publicly use the internet to achieve financial goals from getting out of debt to getting rich.

That trend seems to have some longevity and I've toyed with the notion myself. It seems that among other things its very important to have a very tangible goal to write about but that you also need to be able to provide tangible updates and content about your efforts.

There's a pretty good example of this with a blog by Kim. Kim self admittedly wants to take people through her journey to find a man and a house. She writes about her efforts of the latter maybe a little more than the former. That's not to uncommon these days as keeping shelter over your head is probably more important than 'keeping' a man and many polls and demographics back this up.

You can see an example of how Kim's goal translates into content as whe writes about her efforts to paint the family room.

The point is that she constant gives her readers a view into her world so that they can make a connection. She's not panhandling like the trends of old, but she is providing a story that many people can relate to and this makes her contribution to the internet worthy. It also provides a good example of how the internet can promote connections and people to work towards goals and benchmark a little bit. Its not perfect but it is progress. We're moving from a distant strangers on the street internet to one where we are becoming closer neighbors. Some day the internet may break down barriers even further . . .


Technorati Tags: Kim's House, epanhandling, web trends

A lady in Pennsylvania that is apparently an animal rights do gooder, got a call from a few people talking about a dog, Doogie, that had been abandoned (left at home chained to the ground) for several days.

The dog was not moving and appeared  to be suffering from several problems.

The lady went to check it out for herself and found the dog suffering and unable to move.  She took lots of pictures and some videos and then took the dog to the vet to get some care.

The same people that called her had called the local humane society upon the ladies advice but the humane society didn't act.

She was arrested and had to post $50,000 bound to get out of jail.  She states that she over heard the chief of police threatening to shoot her in the ass if she ever helped his own dog.



So if you think that Doogie deserves better, add something to your blog and forward this on so that this Doogie doo goooder can get some community and morale support!

Technorati Tags: Doogie deserves better, pennsylvania, animal cruelty, animal rights vigilantes

Most bloggers these days absorb the concept of social bookmarking like a second skin.  However, if you are relatively new to writing or reading blogs or if you haven't added social book marking sites to your batman belt of information gathering tricks on the web then you definitely will want to read this article on social bookmarking.

This article is important for many different areas of business and hospitality, however the usage of social bookmarking has a universal appeal. Essentially the concept and application of social bookmarking allows all the people on the internet to serve as raters of good and bad content, voting for or clicking for the content and descriptions that they feel most aptly describe a concept. You can still use the algorithms of a Google search, but if you aren't finding what you were looking for because the robots couldn't grasp something, you should check out sites like De.licio.us or Digg or Trailfire or even BlinkList.

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking, public relations, PR, website ranking, better internet searches

I wanted to take just a quick second for a little self promotion. I've been blogging my A$$ off and enjoying every minute it of it. Hopefully you are enjoying it some too.

If you haven't had a chance, you might be interested in my Best of Viral Video Site or my technology and trends site called Maven Mapper's Information.

Stop on in and check out a funny video or catch up on some technology.

And feel free to pick up one of my 'Blogging My A$$ off! T-shirts through my store at Cafe press. prices range from $14-$16 and there are a bunch of styles and pick your size.







I've even got a Blogging my A$$ off magnet!



Technorati Tags: blogging my ass off, tshirts, magnets, best of viral video, maven mapper's information

There are a couple things that can make or break the value of your new home. Kitchens and Bathrooms. Both areas can be very expensive to perform a complete overhaul. I know from first hand experience having refinished too many kitchens and bathrooms.

However, you can get a lot of bang for your buck, by replacing the kitchen sink itself. An old kitchen sink is sure to tip off a potential buyer that your kitchen is a bit outdate, while a new kitchen sink and hardware can frame up your kitchen as possibly a little retro with all the modern conveniences ( I can just hear my realtor talking now!)

Sure you could go down the street to the local home center and pick up the basic sink from their selection of 6 or 7 basins, but this is the age of the internet. You can have almost any sink available. Why not pick the sink that's perfect for you.

Now if you aren't certain about styles or matching to other items in the kitchen, you can never fail by opting for a stainless steel sink. They will go with anything and can last a lifetime.

If you are looking for something a little trendier, you can add an entirely new dimension to the look and feel of your kitchen with a copper sink.

Take some time too to make sure you know what size of a sink you need, where it will fit and install correctly and then think practically about the depth of the sink, how it will fit with your disposal unit, make sure you have the right depth on the sink that will allow your disposal to fit underneath and still make all the connections for the dishwasher and anything else work.

Two last points. When you let up your faucet put the hand held spray nozel for rinsing dishes on the right of the actual sink and the nob to turn on the water on the left. Most people are right handed and will want to reach for the spray with the right hand (lefties I'm sorry but when you are selling your house go with the averages.)

If you get things mixed up during the installation, take your time undo it and fix it!

Technorati Tags: kitchen sinks, stainless steel sinks, copper sinks

We were on our way to soccer tonight, with the kids in the van. [note I put an extra comma after tonight and before with] :)

We were going around a blind curve on our road (Arnold) where it turns into Hutchins Rd. This blind curve actually has two roads in the shape of a 'V' and these 2 roads that form a V sit or ajoin the blind curve like a dunce hat sitting on a round head. The round headed blind curve is one continous road with no stop signs, but the V shaped roads intersect the curve in two spots and the V shaped traffic must stop at the stop sign and wait for all traffic to clear before they proceed. (If they only would . . .)

Anyway, we were driving on the inner part of the curve in the right lane (I'm in the US.) My wife was driving and I was yapping away in the passenger seat looking out the window not watching the road.

A white neon or something was coming the other direction. It was just getting ready to follow the curve around from Hutchins as it turned onto Arnold.

A mini van coming from Five Forks Trikum(this was one of the roads that forms the Dunce hat V) decided that the stop sign there on the curve was not really all that necessary to actually 'stop' at and kind of gradually rolled on through at about 10-20 miles per hour.

Basically there were the three cars trying to drive in the same spot at the same time and in Gwinnett County that means traffic accident.

And there was. We took the ditch to our right hand side in our Dodge grand caravan. The white dodge neon thing tried to dodge the dodge minivan rolling through the stop sign and came over in what should have been our lane of traffic.

But the dodge minivan was trying to turn left in order to travel in the same direction and in the lane that we would have been in had we not moved ourselves and our vehicle into this new thorough fair, formerly a ditch.

By driving into this lane the dodge van had to push the dodge neon out of its way. This is as the dodge neon is trying to drive by in the wrong lane (now) as it attempts to avoid being hit by the van that had rolled through the stop sign and avoid hitting our van head on in the ditch bypass.

Of course, this isn't the Dukes of Hazard and cars don't really push other cars around in Gwinnett county that much. They just smoosh each other and bang each other and generally stop functioning properly.

That's exactly what happened in this situation.

The white car got creamed on one side and parked down the road about 50 feet. We moved forward and stopped to make sure everyone was OK. We didn't get hit and we were fine.

The van that didn't like stop signs had a crumpled front passenger side corner panel and the front passenger side tire looked like a chocolate iced donut from Dunkin Donuts that had been dunked in coffee for a couple minutes and thrown at a wall for good measure. They decided to sit in the middle of the road there where everyone normally drives like complete angels.(Please read that last phrase with an exagerated amount of sarcasm!)

We walked back and convinced the mini van to pull off the road so that they would not get rear ended and they pulled halfway into the ditch just before a white suburban came barrelling around the blind corner at about 60 miles per hour.

We made sure the van people, now behind us, were ok. I then jogged down to the neon people and made sure they were ok.

The van people included at least three hispanic ladies and maybe as many small children. The neon people included two high school aged kids, I think a guy and a girl.

I called the police and they were already on their way. The neon kid driver called his mom as he'd been in an accident before and was paranoid. The hispanic lady borrowed my wife's cell phone and called her husband. It took 3 attempts as she didn't know the number.

About 5 minutes later, a Gwinnett County Police officer showed up. He looked like he was about 21 years old and you always feel old when you talk with a police officer that's a lot younger than you are(I'm 33 soon to be 34 before the months out).

He talked to the neon people first and had them stay away from the van people. He then talked to the van people.

Then he came and talked to us. My wife saw the accident, I was in the passenger seat and had been looking the other way when the whole thing happened hence my inability to describe the accident with very much clarity or descriptive phrases now.

My wife told the old enough to drink alcohol Officer that the van lady had seemed to roll through the stop sign and that we and the neon people were already on the road in the position that the van lady tried to drive into and so there wasn't much that could be done. In fact neon boy had done very very well by not hitting us in a head on collision.

Old enough to drink alcohol Officer pulled out a two of spades from his pocket, which is apparently not only a trump card in spades but also in traffic accidents.

Apparently van lady didn't have a driver's license so he took the two of spades, now in the form of hand cuffs and 'slapped them' on her wrists. He then checked with all the other van ladies and learned that they did not have a license either and besides the van with or without the van ladies was not going to be driving with the soggy dunken donut tire that had been slammed up against the wall.

Eventually, old enough to drink alcohol Officer got my wife's phone number and license number and we went to soccer about 15 minutes late. Neon kids mother showed up just before we left and old enough to drink alchool Officer made her stay a long distance from van lady in cuffs for some reason.

I forgot to mention that the white suburban that almost rear ended the smooshed van in the middle of the road, came back through the scene of the accident no less than three times. Each time she was still driving about 50-60 miles per hour. Each time she drove in and out of all the cars like crazy and was driving over big chunks of glass and van and neon parts on the road. She even honked at someone for driving too slow. I think she thought she was in the Dukes of Hazard and was late getting Boss Hogg his fried chicken or something. I bet her name is Lula.

I'm getting hooked on the Esetelle tv travel channel. You've got Estelle who's quickly growing one of the largest grass roots campaigns for a travel channel on the internet. She's got something like 1 million people visiting her site every 10 days, plus her television show on 800 channels around the world.

Well this week she's covering Panama and her favorite areas in Panama are the Playa Bonita and the Gamboa Rainforest Resort. Even an interview with Ruben Blades the Minister of Tourism and a former movie star, but I didn't recognize him at first.

Panama is starting to get more and more international attention again both for its tourism but also for its business capabilities. Panama offers a number of economic free trade zones and the Intercontinental Playa Bonita resort and spa is only 15 minutes from the city.

Basically Panama offers the luxuries of some of the finest hotels and spas, the allure of the rain forest and mountains, plus the touch of history and culture from temples and ruins and local artists all close at hand to a very modern thriving economic center that caters to business from all around the world.

The Panama Canal may have been built in the 1930's, but it still serves today to bring centralized trade and industry offering a not only a gateway from the Pacific to the Atlantic but an international port serving both Central and Southern America.

You can travel there on business and still make time for a significant amount of peronsal experience and enjoyment.

The Gamboa Rainforest Resort is itself right at the Panama Canal. This is a 5 star resort located in the middle of a jungle. One of the things that looks pretty cool to me is the aerial tram through the rain forest. I've seen a number of resorts that offer zip lines and a bit of repelling, but how much can you really see when your zipping across a gorge or over the tops of trees at crazy speeds. If you want to absorb the landscape and look around, I can just picture taking a bottle of wine and some bred on one of these aerial tours.

Look at this resort, can you imagine staying on the lake there?


Now look at this view!



Technorati Tags: Panama, Panama canal, Gamboa Rainforest Resort, Estell TV, Estelle, Playa Bonita

So yours truly wakes up that day around noon. My wife and kids had gotten up about the time this was happening and had seen the police and tow trucks a bit. My wife mentioned it to me, but I was asleep and not stirring.

I've slept through louder situations.


So when I get up, I check my email and see a note from my neighbor telling me about all the 'doings' which is a Georgia phrase for shit that's going on except they don't use the word shit with doings as doings is more in the Victorian style from a pomp and circumstance perspective even though the English is not as precise, correct or enunciated in a fashion that would be acceptable to most people that speak English with out a thick brogue or accent. In other words its slang.

So I catch up on the 'doings' and think to myself well, I wonder what the hell that's all about? Was it something serious? Did some axe murder wonder off into the neighborhood? Were they our burglars of recent days? Was it some poor slob whose car had broken down?

Well we are in the middle of a subdivision and at the end of a dead end street with a circle at the end commonly referred to in greater suburbia as a cul de sac and the point is, it would be pointless for a vehicle in distress to come this far into the subdivision only to park the car by the curb and then go seek help.

The police of course tell no one anything. We don't know if Charlie Manson is free amongst us or possibly Osama Bin Laden or Osama Been Thievin for that matter. We don't know if we're being paranoid due to the recent burglaries or if this is some strange but innocent thing.

The day wears on and around 5:30 PM I hear this loud truck outside. I know the sounds of most of the neighbors vehicles, they all sound quiet.

This was loud and it was going anywhere because we live on a dead end with a circle.


I race upstairs from the basement where I'd been dilligently working on my computer in my home office all afternoon since I woke up. I grabbed my cell phone and my digital camera and ran out onto the deck.

I could see a big red jacked up 4x4 truck not a pick up truck, but a truck - no fooling around type of truck if you know what I mean. Its kind of slowly navigating the circle a couple times and kind of pausing in front of my neighbors house (the one who had called the police earlier.) She's home alone with her daughter so I do the brave thing and walk down into the cul de sac (see above for definition) and say, "Hey can I help you guys?"

There are three big guys in this truck, which means they are all from the South, and generally menas that they are likely to be red necks. I'm not from the south and I'm not a red neck. Plus each of these boys had about 50-100 pounds on me and probably 5-6 inches too.

I'm six foot and these days, I'm down to about 163 lbs. I've lost about 20lbs in Dunkin donuts over the last year and I run a lot. I wasn't going to confront these guys, but needed to find out what was going on here.

So one of the guys informs me that he's the owner of the SUV that had been here earlier. I don't quite get it and I tell him the SUV was towed away. He says yeah I know, I just saw it at the impound lot (kind of like a jail or holding cell for derelict vehicles.)

We gradually work our away around to the conversation where he explains that the SUV was his and that it had been stolen 3-4 days ago and apparently whomever stole it, beat the shit out of it and took everything of value from inside and ultimately left it on my doorstep where it was towed away follwing the spotlight search by the local police.

By then my neighbors had come out to see what was going on too. We all shared notes about the situation and commiserated with the guys whose truck had been stolen and died a slow death.

The thing of it is, we now new that it had been a stolen car and the guys that had abandoned it and walked away and disappeared are some bad dudes.

So we weren't paranoid enough I guess was the bottom line! I've got a new street light on order from the electric company, I cleaned out our garage and now my wife is parking our van in the garage, where she can get in lock the doors, hit the auto door opener buttons and run the hell over anyone that might be lurking outside before she speeds away to teach first graders at the local grade school after she drops our little ones off at day care.

Crazy day!


Technorati Tags: stolen SUV, dumped cars, abandoned vehicles

I wrote an article a day or two ago about an ebook that predicted, well named the date when Adsense started to die.

This article has prompted a lot of discussion about the future or past of Adsense. Some people are claiming that Adsense doesn't earn publishers what it used to earn them and in my article I mentioned that this should be hurting Google's bottom line as well if true.

I've also been talking a lot about the programs to make money through PayPerPost.

The PayPerPost model seems to offer in some cases a deeper stikier product than adsense. It gives a deep link from one website to another loaded with context about that site. It does this for what used to be considered rather cheap Adsense rates, and the potential for fraud is a lot lower.

From my own perspective my earnings from PPP's program have been far superior to those of Adsense. However, I am looking at things holistically.

My Holistic Blogging Results
The more articles that I write, the more readers I attract on various topics and this in turn is good for all the way around. My Adsense impressions are up as a result of writing more articles. My page rank is up a full point in the last 30 days.

I'm getting paid on the front end from PPP and I'm getting paid in a style similar to an annuity on the backend from Google and other advertisers. I think Adsense's glory days may be ending and PPP's just beginning, however it would seem that both work to help each other very significantly.

They both provide a valuable service to the internet in their own way. Google delivers contextual advertising in a wide and shallow way and PPP provides it in a very direct and deeply targeted manner.

I've been super busy with lots of things lately, but one of the hard things is a lot of strange shit has been happening too.

Two morning ago, I went to bed at 2am. At 5am my neighbor woke up when a loud car entered the neighborhood on the street behind her. The loud car came up our street and parked in front of our house.

It was dark but she wask looking out the window watching (we've had some break ins in the neighborhood so we all watch a lot now.)

She saw two men get out of the SUV and walk off down the street. She phoned the police as the truck was in front of my house and she could tell it wasn't yours truly.

The police show up 15 minutes later and start shining search lights through the yards and streets. At 6:15am they tow the SUV away and we don't hear any more on the subject from the police.

To finish the story see Part 2

If this is at all interesting, please note that Part 2 is better, but Stolen Van Lady Goes to jail is even further out there.

Technorati Tags: stolen SUV, dumped cars, abandoned vehicles

Among other things I'm addicted to online Poker.  I don't let myself play when I've got work to do or when I'm taking a course.  But on the holidays and during free time, I'm playing no limit hold em.

There are a lot of great poker sites, but its not always as easy to find great Mac support.  Anyway, PokerOnAMac just published an article about Anywhere.  Anywhere is Party Poker's Made for Mac or at least compatible version of the software.



Technorati Tags: Party Poker, Anywhere

Every now and then I have an important day that comes up, one that I'm eager to tackle.  Sometimes this day prompts me to plan in advance what I'm going to wear, what I'm going to say and do, how I'm going to set things up.

My planning of wardrobe, usually involves a quick review through my closet and dresser of 'What's available?'

Sometimes it a concious decision not to wear this shirt or those slacks or these jeans planning for wearing them in a couple days.  Today was one of those days that I'd been planning on.  I was expecting to wear a particular shirt for a meeting I had scheduled for lunch.  This was a casual meeting and I was planning on wearing my PC Magazine "Last Gadget Standing" t-shirt underneath one of my nicer dress shirts with some jeans or something.

Shooting for that casual yuppie/techie suave look.  Don't get me wrong, I don't care that much, but can execute well when I'm trying.

So I get up this morning, Early around 9:30 am.  I get cleaned up showered and groomed.  I reach for my t-shirt and put it on and BAM like an astonished Emiril I'm hit with the sour odor of a shirt gone wrong!

Every now and then I'll wash a load of clothes.  I'll get distracted and forget to put the clean wet clothes into the dryer fast enough.  The clothes might sit ther for a few hours even over night sometimes.  When I go to get them out of the washer, they sometimes smell a little musty, so I put an extra fabric softener in the dryer and hope for the best (If they smell really musty, I just add soap and wash again.)

This shirt must have been one of those hope for the best episodes that didn't get nicked fast enough.  I wash all the clothes and dry them, my wife folds them.  That's kind of the deal we have.

I can't fold clothes to her satisfaction and she can't keep up with the laundry in a timely way so it works for us.

The quality control function sometimes misses a few things as was the case here.  She didn't receive the heads up memo that there might be a problem with some of the clothing in dryer load xyz_2006_09_02 and just folded away without putting her nose to the close.

So the shirt sat in my dresser for an extra week or so and probably got worse.  I had to run with a different shirt, and when I get through with my meeting will probably have to empty that drawer of contents and wash the entire batch.


Technorati Tags: sour shirts

I read an interesting ebook mentioned on Chris Sandberg's blog. He blogged about the ebook The Death of Adsense.

The eBook describes the decline of Google's Adsense program over the last approximate 10 months. As a blogger and publisher I try and keep in tune with this area, and as is obvious do run Adsense on my own sight. While I'm not at liberty to give details about my own earnings, I can say that lately they are not covering the cost of my site here (and its hosted for free!).

I suspect that there is something to the argument being made, and intend to dig a little further into the issue.

If you're a blogger or publisher, I'd be curious to hear about your experiences over the last year or so. Are revenues up or down???

From a stock holders perspective, it would seem that if revenues are down, then revenues for Google would be down as well. They are putting together a number of high profile deals, so it might be possible that this grass roots decline hasn't impacted the bottom line or that the merger growth is obscuring the grass roots decline if it exists.

Are we looking at The Death of Adsense? I guess we'll know for sure when all the ads disappear. Poof!

Technorati Tags: Death of Adsense

This is a shout out for any fellow PPP friends. If you are on PPP, drop me a comment here and I'll make sure I add you to my blogroll.

I'd definitely appreciate a linkback. You can see the list I've started below in my sidebar "My Triple P Friends"

Drop me a comment and do please include your blog url and I'll get you setup.

I've been trying to build the blog roll for a couple weeks, but noticed that Colleen of recent fame and fortune put out the call in an article on Simple Kind of Life and I wanted to reach out with a similar great practice!

I'm on a bit of a bullet proof kick today.  I was talking about ballistic glasses uses by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then I came across Pacific Bulletproof that makes bulletproof glass.

A year ago I didn't need a home alarm, but one thing led to another and before you know it a Chinese manufacturer is throwing out threats against my life.  So now I have an alarm.

I don't think I need bullet proof glass yet, but if I listen to enough Presidential speeches on Fox News, I'm sure I can convince myself that I do before the years over.  Or I could validate the need by going back to work for my old employer (not gonna happen !)



Technorati Tags: bulletproof glass

I will be attending the Podcast and Portable media Expo.  If you would like to meet up with me at the event, arrangements can be made

I'm really looking forward to the expo and will be attending as many of the events as possible.

Technorati Tags: Podcast Portable Media Expo

I had lasic surgery on my eyes in 2001. For years I couldn't see worth a damn unless I wore contacts or glasses, and even then I couldn't quite see 20/20.

After I sat up out of the lasic chair I could see 20/40, I went home slept the night, woke up went back to the doctor's office, I could see 20/25. A month later after I was mostly healed, I could see 20/15 and 20/20 out of my left and right eyese respectively.

When I was growing up with bad eye site, I took my eyes for granted. Now that I have perfect site, I take special care of my eyes, because I don't want to go back!

When I buy sunglasses, I make sure they are the best. Rugged, polarized, well built and built to protect my eyes.

I spent about $3k getting my eyes perfect and I'm not opposed to spending a few hundred dollars every few years to give them the best protection money can buy.

I was digging around the net and found what may be one of the most comprehensive offerings of very good sunglasses and goggles on the net.

They caught my attention when I read some graphic reviews from some of their satisfied customers. GI's that that were able to keep their eyes intact while wearing their ballistic goggles. I'm no longer in the military (been out for almost a decade), however I firmly believe in going into battle with the best tools and equipment possible. After all your life is on the line.

There's been a lot of discussion about body armor, but not much about armor for the eyes. My great Uncle Eddie lost one of his eyes as a Marine during the Battle of Okinawa. My point is that some people overlook their eyes, no pun intended.

I don't make that mistake myself and hope that everyone else will consider their own eyes as well!

Technorati Tags: sunglassess, tactical goggles, ballistic glasses, lasic, eyes

I just renewed my license plates for my Motorcycle.  For the first time that I can remember the online renewal process was easy.

Within just 2 clicks I was starting the renewal process!

I didn't get lost in the website, or terribly distracted or mis-directed.  All in all the experience was fast and painless as it should be.  It was almost convenient!

Maybe in a couple more years, they'll even automate this process or offer up a 2 or 5 year option, refundable if you sell the vehicle, trade it, move, or its squished like a grape in an accident.

If you happen to be living in Georgia in the US and you are looking to renew.

Just go to www.dor.ga.gov and look for the little image of the person driving above the .Tag and Title' caption.


Technorati Tags: license renewal, Georgia, license plate

Your the first American Idol, Kelly Clarkson, and arguably the most commercially successful. You have a long standing advertising relationship with Ford Motor Company. So its a no brainer that your going to get a Ford Mustang. Ford and Clarkson were working together to promote the 2007 Shelby GT500 and Kelly's new music video "Go."

That's just what Kelly Clarkson apparently did. She picked up this hot pink Mustang.

Someone in the publicity department didn't do their due dilligence however.

This Car was Made for Porn! or to be more precise made for Adult Film Star Alana Evans(wiki Bio). Kelly Clarkson's car was a duplicate of the original.

Clarkson dumped her car reportedly when she found out and Alana Evans was none to happy about the situation either.

Alana remarked about some of her friends comments, "It’s funny because when Kelly had the car, some of my friends saw her and asked me, ‘Who was that fat brunette driving your car?’ "


Technorati Tags: American Idol, Porn Star, Alana Evans, Mustang, made for porn

This is very sad and a little bizarre. Anna Nicole Smith's twenty year old son, born in 1986-7, passed away.

Daniel Wayne Smith died on Sunday in Anna Nicole Smith's room at Doctor's Hospital in Nassau. He had flown to be with Anna Nicole Smith as she gave birth to a healthy baby girl.

Reportedly he stayed by his mother's bedside. Anna Nicole woke up and noticed him sleeping in a chair. Unable to wake him up, she rang the hospital staff due to an emergency.

Regardless of what a person may think of Anna Nicole Smith, she has definitely had her share of tragedy and misfortune.

When I was a young man growing up in Missouri, we used to hunt Gin-seng root. Once dried it can be sold by the pound and will often fetch several hundred dollars a pound. It takes a lot of effort to take care of wild gin-seng.

You can't just pick the plant, cut the root and go about your day.

You need to pick it during the right season, and replant the seeds that grow on the plant in areas around the area where you picked the wild plant. This will keep the wild plant regrowing year after year, and will grow enough that plants can mature to a ripe enough age. Ginseng is an endangered species, and due to its value some hunters will pull it without replanting the red seeds. Worse they sometimes try to take the seeds and plant them in a different location where they can control the harvest. This often times leeds to the plants not coming up at all or coming up stunted in growth due to not growing in ideal conditions where the family of plants has grown for generations.

These days gin-seng pops up everywhere from teas to vitamins and more(seeChinese Herbs and Alternative Remedies). Today, I get a dose of it when I tank Ginko Biloba, a combination of Ginseng and biloba. The ginseng will definitely give you energy, its a stimulant like cafeine, the biloba combined with it is thought to help with memory and I need more help with every day that goes by!

Technorati Tags: ginseng

Its fall, the air conditioner is off and I'm working from the front deck.
Now I don't know if I've mentioned it lately, but I LOVE my job, my work, my business and my writing.

For those of you that only visit me here at Something About Harry, let me offer a few details.

I work from home. I am a business developer, web designer and freelance writer.

I write for almost a dozen or so blogs now, and this compliments my web design and business development consulting business.

For years, I worked in the corporate world, I have two bachelors degrees in Accounting and Finance and a Master's in Laws focussed on International Taxation.

I took a vocation vacation last fall when my former employer started making threats against my life and that of my family.
My former company was a company held by multinational corporation held by a multinational trust and more corporate shells than can be held in the ocean.

I became a whistle blower and they fired my ass. That was one of the best gifts I've ever received. Not because they 'gave' it to me, but because I had a wake up call when it happened.

I stopped working for other corporations and started working for myself.

I had always worked long crazy hours - 12-20 hours a days sometimes. Instead of channelling that energy into a corporate monster that didn't care and underutilized my abilities, I now channell every waking hour into improving myself, my business, and my customers business.

And last but not least, I keep my motivation high by writing freelance for myself and for others and this allows me to express my creative side and keep my imagination running at full tilt, which is essential to my youthful look, energy and down right sexiness. ;)

PS If you happen to be a law enforcement official or a hungry prosecuting attorney looking for an easy target, give me a ring.

Oh Yeah!
Its that time, Fantasy Football Time.

Are you ready to get your game on and get into Fantasy Football for another Season?

Check out the American Fantasy Football League. They have a great draft board and offer some huge prize payouts. You can enter for free or throw money into a pool essentially.


Technorati Tags: football, fantasy-football, fantasy_football

I received news today that I've been accepted to expand my product reviews. On my Maven Mapper's Information Blog I've been reviewing and commenting on consumer electronic and knowledge management tools for some time. I often will beta test products and write up reviews.

I'm now going to be moving into several additional product review areas. The timing of this is excellent.

I've got a number of trade shows to attend in the next few months covering consumer electronics, blogging, podcasting, videocastings and putting all four technologies together.

So its time to pack my travel bag (with nothing so that I can get on the plane) and hit the road. Time to crank up the charm a notch or two and make a little money for Christmas!

HO Ho HO!


Technorati Tags: Product Reviews

I'm adding Red Rock Canyon to the list of places I want to visit. I think I'm going to try and hit it this January maybe. It looks beautiful and looks like a great place for hiking and rock climbing.

I haven't been on a horse in a dozen years, but I might even try some horse back riding there. I've been fascinated with the desert and mountains since I spent a lot of time just outside of Death Valley in the early 90's when I was in the Army.

I love the climate, the air, and the overall feeling of the place.

Estelle's Travel Videos offers up a great view of this area on their destinations page dedicated to Red Rock Canyon.

They also offer some great information on Baja California.

I was scrolling through and noticed that they even have made it to Tombstone Arizona. I've driven through Tombstone, but didn't have time to mind meld with the place. I have spent a couple days in Dodge City, Kansas, but need to connect some dots with Tombstone maybe.

I remember Dodge City with their staged gunfight re-enactments, which also takes place in Tombstone at the OK Corral.

It is definitely something worth the experience. It is staged, but there's definitely something about seeing it in person. TV and movies don't do it justice from the perspective of size and layout and reality.

Now, I'm not saying that a travel site hosted by a super model will help convince me to get out and travel more, but then again I guess maybe it does.   . .  Maybe the Brooke Burke model of travel advertising has trained a generation of people to get hooked on new locals.  So Estelle Reyna(featured above) is just the latest generation to push people to get out somemore.

Before you know it there will be guided toors with super models.  Go diving in Belize with a super model, hang gliding with a super model, shopping with a super model, super model busses and cruise ships . . .

Of course if people around the world continue to fix themselves up with plastic surgery, exercise, diet and more, we might all be super models in 50 years!

Well I did something today that I've been meaning to do for almost 2 years.

I set up a Skype account! Last Christmas we gave my brother-in-law and his wife a skype phone for Christmas and he set it up and has been using it. They are moving to Australia from San Diego this week and so they bought Skype phones for the rest of the family so that we can talk with them internationally on the cheap.

Skype lets user call regular phones for free, which is pretty cool. So now I have my wife's family setup on skype to skype lines and my family setup to call their home phones from my skype account and its all free!

So I'm pretty stoked to have one more thing ticked off the good intentions list! ( I also mowed the grass, bought a new grill, and ordered a dedicated server for my new political website "No More Incumbents!" which is currently under construction.



Technorati Tags: skype, no-more-incumbents

I collect way too many books. I never sell any of my text books and I buy books from the book store and thrift store all the time.

CheapBooks.com is handy for this as they aggregate book deals from several other book stores like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Half.com and eCampus so you can compare prices through several sources.


So I have books coming out of my ears and off my shelves. They are double stacked and rapping around my loft. I've never counted my books, but I'd guesstimate that I have about 500 or more. I try my best never to pay full price for them. I don't resell them and I typically don't worry much about the condition as long as its legible.

For me reading its the important thing, I don't collect them to make lots of money off of them some day nor do I display them for artsy fartsy reasons - even though I do like the look of books on shelves everywhere..

I just finished a book by James Lee Burke called Pegasus Rising. Its a book in his Dave Robicheaux detectives series. These are all set just north of New Orleans and this was the first book since Hurricane Katrina hit.

The series is well developed and he's probably written over a dozen books for it now, but this was one of his better books in the series. The books are always tragic and something about the storm seems to have reignited his passion and increased the feeling in this book.

Technorati Tags: books, cheap

Well another year is going buy and I didn't make it to Burning Man again. That might not be surprising since I've never made it to Burning Man.

I've been meaning to go for sometime, but just haven't gotten around to it. Maybe next year, I'll pack up my motorcycle, a camper with a shower and lots of cooler space and a digital camcorder and I'll finally make the trek to the desert.

If you are wondering what the Burning Man Project is then click through and wonder no more.

Here are the 10 principles of Burning Man

1. Radical Inclusion
2. Gifting
3. Decommodification
4. Radical Self-reliance
5. Radical Self-expression
6. Communal Effort
7. Civic Responsibility
8. Leaving No Trace
9. Participation
10. Immediacy

Next Year . . .

Check out these great looking bean bags. I stumbled upon this funny ad campaign about them

Where Sumo Lounge asks the question "What's your favorite position?" :)

Then they show this series of pictures with a model in several classic bean bag positions.
Bet you never thought you'd read the phrase 'classic bean bag positions' now did you? Well you just did twice!

here's some of the pictures.




Its kind of funny, this company is getting a lot of good attention.

Check out the photo gallery from the 2006 Playboy Superbowl party, I'll admit its hard to tell if the bags or the bunnies have more nylon showing . . .




Technorati Tags: bean_bag, sumo, lounge, positions

A few weeks back my wife went out and cleaned the inside of our grill out. I had been avoiding this myself, but not because I'm lazy. I was avoiding it, because I had realized that the inside of the grill was so rusted that if the balance of rust, greasy glue, lava rocks and remnants of grill shards were upset or altered the ecostructure of gas shafts would be clogged and the grill would not cook evenly.

My wife hadn't picked up on this and I made the stupid mistake of not discussing my theory out loud - go figure.

So when she cleaned it out, the burner flaked apart and when we attempted to light it post cleaning, we only got a big yellow flame sticking up about 7 inches above the grill on the right hand side. Quick turn it off before it Blows UP!

We were not really ready to buy a new grill. This one came with our house when we bought, as did the last grill we had before this one (with our previous house). We actually hadn't bought a grill ourselves since 1997 and it had been rebuilt twice and painted 3 times before it rusted away to nothingness.

So I started browsing for grills and almost bought a nice stainless steel number at Sam's, but I was too slow and a bargain slipped away from me. But I was getting desperate the last few weeks. We live off of our grill and microwaving stuff was getting old.

So today, I took the old one apart and tried to figure out if it could be repaired. No Such Luck. :(

So I went to Home Depot, saw some decent ones. Drove across the street to Lowe's saw some OK ones. I kept noticing that the grills with iron cast burners seemed to be a lot more expensive. I didn't want my burners rusting away so I figured this was my best bet.

The thing is most of the iron cast burner types cost $700 or more and I didn't want to spend that much on a grill. I was thinking like $100. Hey I'm cheap sometimes.

I went back to Home Depot and found one that had the right burners for $269. The lady there told me if I found one with a dent she'd give me a bigger discount so I 'found' a dent. I was getting ready to pull it to the counter and realized that even though it looked the same on the outside, it actually had the cheaper stainless steel burners that rust inside.

So I then grabbed one that looked the same but had the better burners and got it for $239.

This monstrosity barely fit in the mini van. I had taken my son's dog Cheddar, and bought her some beef jerkey on the way out of the store. We snacked on jerkey and headed home.

So I finally have a grill again, and it cooked up some steaks just fine tonight.

Technorati Tags: grill, charbroil, rust

This last summer I watched the first couple of episodes of Do you want to be a Superhero or something like that. It had some potential, but in all honesty it was really really bad.

My son kind of liked it but it was just to cheesy. It kind of illustrated the lack of any quality comic book hero concepts. Now I was born in the early 1970's so most of the Justice League variety of comic book hero's had been around for a long time. My generation saw the creation of some trendy cartoons like He-Man and The Smurfs and Transformers. They received a lot of viewers from little kids, but never really took on the life and charisma associated with the likes of Superman , Batman, Spiderman or even Wonder Woman.

The X-Men series has come kind of close to achieving that type of status and for a while Blade had a lot of potential, but not quite the same.

Last spring I got caught up in a Smallville marathon and became a reluctant convert to the show. It was actually a great show, but I dismissed it originally because it was on the WB network.

It now makes me wonder if the original superhero's can ever really be topped? They were given special powers and special flaws and its hard to find a better mix to top them. I think back to the Greek tragedies and parables and consider that some of those stories survived a millenia before they were finally toppled in the twentieth century by slightly more updated versions of heroes and heroines.

Can you imagine the concept of Superman lasting another millenia or two thousand years even?

Societies dug up by archaelogists are constantly put back together with the artifacts that happen to survive. Sometimes garbage dumps are literally the sources of the most historical treasure.

So the next time you pick up a collectible action figure or give a present to your kids or nieces and nephews consider that this may be something that survives and ends up as the Rosetta stone detailing the ideals and shortcomings of our own cultures.

In the meantime, if you are looking for a little nostalgia or even a super hero lunchbox for your sel - (kids) check out the SuperHeroStore.com.


Technorati Tags: superman, batman, spiderman, wonder_woman

For those of you that have been following my neighborhood's little crime saga, I had an update over the last couple days.

Yesterday, I was sitting out on my front deck, programming, writing, blogging, and working my butt off on the phone. I noticed a guy ride up our street on a bicycle and proceed to ride around in circles in the cul de sac, looking at each of the houses as he went around over and over again.

A couple weeks back we had two break ins in the neighborhood within 4 days, and evidence suggested that more than one burglar was involved and that one or more people were keeping a look out while the home invaders burglarized.

So I saw this guy, who appeared to be a teenager or twenty something. I hadn't seen him before and I tend to pick up on things since my kids play in the same area. Finally, I decided that I was better safe than sorry so I called the non-emergency number for the police and gave them the information and a description. Just then the rider went down the street and out of site.

Five minutes later he was back, circled the cul de sac several times and now I was really curious. I was just getting ready to phone again, when he got off his bike and walked down the drive way to my neighbors house across the street, and walked right in the house.

I suddenly knew who the guy was. He was my neighbor! He'd been wearing a helmet, which made him look about 20 years younger. I couldn't see his face clearly because of the helmet nor the slight balding areas above his temples. I called the police back and told them it was a false alarm.

Today, however, I had a much different experience. I was walking my dog back from a circuit around the subdivision and noticed two guys in a maroon Ford Ranger parked across the street from a house that I knew they did not live at. It was a four seater type of truck and one guy was in the drivers seat and the other guy was in the back seet(small little area) crammed in behind the driver.

Something seemed weird about them so I detoured walked past them and got the license number. I went up the street one block, circle back and walked by them again. As I walked past them this time, the driver gave me a strange knowing smile and the guy in back made a weird gesture and then they tore off out of the neighborhood at a abnormally high speed.

I phoned 911 and gave them the license and descriptions. They had a cruiser patrolling the neighborhood in 7 minutes. I walked up the street, called one of my neighbors to make sure they were home and stopped by my bicyclist neighbor. I mentioned to him what I'd seen as he had driven by shortly after they left. I als mentioned that I'd called the police on him the day before and we had a good laugh together.

I'm glad we had the luxury of laughing off the situation today and not being concerned because inaction had made it easy for a couple criminals to invade someone else's home. It goes against human nature to speak up and point out something is wrong when we are together in a large group of people. This is part of the reason why atrocities were able to proceed unchecked during WWII and even more recently in Abu Grahib in Iraq. Its important for people to not ignore life but take it on and deal with it directly. I didn't confront the guys myself or anything like that, just showed them that our neighborhood was watching and paying attention and that if they wanted to nab something it wasn't going to be easy.

I'm sure you are wondering how the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland travelled about with his Hookah?

The hookah is half as big as the caterpillar and Wonderland was kind of a semi-brutal place.

Well the answer to this age old question can probably be answered with the travelling hookah kit.

Hookah's don't always just sit on a table in a cafe or bar somewhere. Sometimes they like to get out and see the world a bit, hence the travelling hookah kit.

If you don't believe me check out this fine example of a travelling Hookah kit from hookahtown.com. Yeah that's right Hookahs at Hookahtown!

Sorry, I just like mentally saying the word hookah.

Not only is school back in session, but all the extra curricular items are back in full swing. My infant daughter is still taking physical therapy two days a week. My middle daughter is taking ballet lessons for her second year and just started gymnastics three weeks ago.

My son's first night of soccer practice started tonight. This is his fifth season, and his second fall season.

This season he's on a new team with a new coach and a new bunch of kids. He seemed to do pretty well tonight, but the first 40 minutes or slow he was kind of slow and was starting to revert back to his younger days when he used to skip around and break dance in the middle of the field.

Once he snapped out of it, he was hustling all over the place and did pretty well.

The mania of too many things going on is starting to creep into our lives again though! Its not bad, just makes for fast times.

I sit and sit and sit and type and type and type and I end up slumping.  I work out and eat well, but all the sitting and slumping is getting to me I think.

I've tried a number of different chairs.  I try and stand up and type at a counter on my laptop.  I use pillows and more.

I legs, feet and rear end fall asleep and none of this is good for my circulation or heart.

I've been looking for a better posture chair but couldn't find one on wheels that is until today.

Now in addition to helping with posture it also helps relieve pressure from your coccyx or tailbone. Its got a little recessed area in the padding where your rump rests that allows for your tail bone to have a little more waggle room.

The chair itself won't help you type better, however it will allign your body such that when you naturally lift your forearms and hands, your arms and wrists will automatically be in a natural position that will reduce the risk of typing injuries.

For anyone that writes, types, or does data entry, its very important to get out of bad ergonomic habits that might harm your body permanently over time.


Technorati Tags: posture, chair, ergonomics

Engineers are still struggling to invent a more convenient cell phone. With concerns over the potential for electromagnetic waves and possible linkages to brain cancer, some efforts to reduce the risk of brain cancer have been deemed a little extreme. This picture shows just the types of extremes that researchers are prepared to explore and it shows there complete and utter ignorance of consumer concerns and needs. I'm sure this cell phone won't show up in the celebrity gift bag for the Oscars!


Technorati Tags: cellphones, engineers, ignorance

I took some time out today for a brain teasing hunt through riddles. If you've seen the movie National Treasure with Nicolas Cage or read the book by Dan Brown called the Davinci Code or if you've even been around long enough to read The Illuminatus Trilogy, you might have some fun tracing the trail of Riddles and answers with Trumalia's online search engine.

These are not necessarily easy riddles, but they many are very old so a practiced riddler may get a good work out. Upon solving a series of riddles, the surfer/player is presented with a coded image. Zoom in on the image and pick out the portion of the codes you can find, then go back to the next series of riddles and repeat until you have compiled the code for the entire message.

The codes are set weekly, so you have seven days to put the code together. There are forums to discuss the problems with others and more. All in all a very entertaining way to utilize the internet and search engines.

I followed the riddles through one chain to be presented with a painting by Philip Hermogenes Calderon. I would show you the painting, but that would give away the code, so you'll have to find it yourself if you are curious . . .

There are many symptoms that manifest in those people that work from home too much.

Some people stay up to late at night and sleep late in the morning. Almost everyone dresses more casually, unless they have a business meeting to attend. Many people lose weight and start exercising more regularly.

Some workers get more done and some slack off. Its been my experience that this symptom manifests in a 50/50 sort of way and can not be guessed at based on any previous displays of hard work, efficiency or even laziness and ineptitude. People working from home go through phases just like everyone else.

Regardless, there is one symptom that manifests in people that work from home in one form or another after enough time has passed. Eventually, they will start looking outside and sometimes even they will watch the plants and animals outside.

Some people living in a city may watch the dogs at the park or the pigeons on the sidewalk. People living on a lake may watch the fish or the ducks or other birds. Birds are also popular with anyone that has a bird feeder well positioned outside their window or deck.

For me, its squirrels. I'm not fascinated by squirrels. I don't harbor any affection nor disaffection towards squirrels. My yard just has a lot of squirrels. I never realized I had developed a squirrel watching symptom manifesting until I had a squirrelly incident occur last week.

Before I describe the incident let me offer up the disclaimer I have watched out for squirrels to protect my home. They have tunnelled into my chimney following wood pecker and holes through the cypress siding. They have chewed their way through my plastic gutter guards, installed to keep my gutters clear of pine needles, which I harvest for mulch in my back yard.

They gnaw on my siding occassionally and make a lot of squirrely barking racket chasing each other around my roof. A month ago, they even chewed a hole through my plastic garbage can lid. They didn't eat any trash or break a trash bag, just wanted to chew up my can.

Last week, I saw the stranges squirrel behavior that I've witnessed to date and its also the point at which I became aware that I am watching the squirrels. I was sitting on my front deck typing away on my computer. I heard some animal panting and some skurrying in a large 60 foot tall pine tree located in front of my house.

It sounded like a squirrel, but not like a normal squirrel. I looked up and saw something strange. I saw a squirrel with a squirrel tail coming out of both ends.

The squirrel had a normal squirrel tail, and it had a full squirrel tail coming out of its mouth. Now I've never heard of squirrel canabalism and I've never heard of a half breed squirrel snake, swallowing other squirrels whole like a Boa Constrictor swallowing a pig or something.

I quick ran and grabbed my camera and watched this squirrel, panting and crawling down the side of the tree.

My deck is about 10 feet off the ground and as the squirrel got to my eye level I realized that the tail wasn't coming out of the squirrels mouth, but was wrapped over the squirrels mouth just a bit and that the squirrel did have a squirrel leg in its mouth.

To be more precise it was probably a squirrel thigh. Now I've eaten squirrely thighs myself, deep fried with batter and they aren't very large, but I'm not a squirrel and I've got a bigger mouth than a squirrel. This squirrel could barely fit the thigh in its mouth.

I started taking pictures as it continued down the tree. I soon realized that the squirrel thigh was attached to a squirrel but complete with the tail that had previously made for a strange vision. This squirrel but was in fact attached to a complete squirrel.

The original squirrel I was looking at was carrying another squirrel with its mouth by the thigh down the tree. Both squirrel's appeared to be full grown. I watched the squirrel get to the base of the tree, jump to the ground, and then still carrying the second squirrel, proceed to climb up a maple tree in my front yard, back up 30 feet in the air panting louder and heavier the whole way. In fact I could now see that the laboring squirrel's chest was heaving visably.

At that point the squirrel with the second squirrel in its mouth, jumped from the tree and landed on the chimney of my roof carrying the other squirrel.

I haven't seen any squirrel carryings since then, but that was definitely bizarre and now I know my symptoms have manifested.

Step 1.
Hello, my nane is Brett Harold (Harry) Bumeter and I work from a home office.
Step 2.
I sometimes watch squirrels.
Step 3.
Hell if I know I haven't really found a 12 step program for squirrel watchers anonymous . . .

Many of my friends and relatives are having babies these days. I have three children and my wife and I are not having any more kids. However, the birth anouncements keep rolling in from my friends, most of whom are playing catch-up.

Sometimes I receive very formal Birth Announcements and sometimes I get a phone call or email several weeks after the fact.

Everyone that has a baby gets caught up in the moment and that is the important thing to savor the time and create lasting memories.

I received a request over the weekend, over the US labor day weekend, to provide an article describing my purposes in writing a blog and blog articles.

For those of you looking for something funny from the Harry site, this would be a good time to scroll or click on to a new article. I'll have more writing coming, but for now I need to take a quick break and collect my thoughts.

I write for several blogs, some of them belong to myself, some belong to other groups or organizations and a few belong to my clients. I write professionally for some of these groups, for some of these groups I write for creative purposes, and for many of these blogs I write to have knowledge and information published.

This last concept is key. I primarily write to publish information on the internet where it might prove useful for someone, somewhere someday.

I have written volumes of articles, emails, papers, reports, thesis, hypothesis, proofs, case studies and more over the years. Many of these items have been for select or limited audiences and many if not most of them are removed from circulation within a very short time. Much of my writing has been lost forever in the recesses of decommissioned hard drives and servers in various corporate vaults, storage closets, dumpsters and land fills across the country. In publishing my articles on the internet and in a blog, I receive the benefit of sharing my knowledge and small kernels of wisdom to others that might find it useful in the future.

I have been mining the internet and other sources for information for years, and I am now starting to give back to the world a bit. Some of my writing is frivolous and without meaning. Some of it as a limited shelf life and will not age well. Some of it is highly contextual and will not make sense to audiences. Some of the words and writing will probably come back to haunt me.

I have no fear of the internet nor of my writing nor of my thoughts. I understand many of my strengths and far too many of my weaknesses. I strive to continually improve and over time my writing will continue to benefit.

Since I started blogging or writing for blogs, I've experimented in many different writing mediums. Many of these experiments were complete and utter failures and disasters. Some have been great successes. Some of my failures continue to this day as I find new ways to experiment and learn about new boundaries and areas where failure in blogging can occur.

I have had several successes in my writing as well. I have continued some of my efforts that have succeeded and despite the success, I have halted a few of them. I have the ability to succeed in some areas or topics, however I do not always choose to proceed in that direction. In some cases they represent a step backward and do not offer as much personal satisfaction or growth as I might achieve moving forwards in areas where my immediate success is in question.

My blogging is not 100% about writing. Much of my work has many many related purposes. My blogging efforts have worked to compliment my consulting business. I have established new clients and new friends through my blogging activities and relationships. I have used my blogging as an incentive for myself to continue developing my web design and programming skills. I find that blogging provides a very useful outlet for me to learn how to program and design sites, activities even marketing campaigns on the internet.

These are projects that can not be spoon fed in a class room. Like an artist I sometimes find that I have to follow these projects to their natural conclusion. I mine my projects and topics and blogs for the vein of gold or silver or copper that yields a raw ore. I then labor to refine the material and the context in which I received the material into something useful.

I have also experimented in blogging for financial gain. I see nothing wrong with this activity and in fact find it as an aspect that validates my projects and efforts. If I want to continue with my projects and my education I must fund my expenses and my efforts and my time and my new project concepts.

Blogging is an evolving online form. It has been around in multiple forms for several years. I see it evolving in an iterative fashion. Many of the attributes that led to financial success in blogging 2-3 years ago work today and many do not work as well. New metrics of success and new avenues for financial reward are being created on a weekly or monthly basis.

I suspect that as the form continues to evolve it will ebb and flow in trends into and away from some good and some bad aspects. I find the current flow of wiki related writing and group editing to be a very valuable contribution. I suspect that this form will serve to catalogue a substantial amount of content over the next few years.

Blogging has the ability to capture the essence of thoughts and emotions as compared to a wiki that attempts to remove and objectify a concept. Both are tools that are invaluable but can be over and under developed and utilized.

I am positive that video and audio related productions will continue to grow and will likely over take the current two dimensional version of the internet and blogosphere. This is the area that I am focused on today and will likely be focused on for several years to come. At the end of the day blogging offers up a means of communicating with groups or individuals from around the world.

Audio and video will create the potential to streamline the communications process and allow people to come together, share and learn ideas and do so in both an objective wiki like environment and then to debate out those objectives with our own personal subjective attitudes, foundations, perspectives and individualized styles. This represents the frontier for me today, and I am charging forward towards this frontier both from a production, and programming perspective but also from a hardware enabling perspective. Our physical tools need to improve if we are to make optimal use of the audio and video mediums that are breaking out of their toddler stage.

So as I wrap up, I blog for many reasons, but the overall premise is that I blog for personal development and growth and to enjoy the path that I'm traveling. I do not blog towards a destination but to savor the path.

Watching viral videos on the internet is a great stress reliever. Need to put the smile back on your face? Just jump over to a viral video site and find something to make you laugh.

YouTube and MetaCafe are great sources for these videos but they also get lots and lots and lots of average to dull videos uploaded every day.

If you just want to see something funny and don't want to wade through the video fights between preteens trying to one up each other.

check out one of these great sites:

1. Wuzup! Viral Entertainment


2. Best of viral video
   

Technorati Tags: viral video

Despite petrol discounts and breaks offered down under in Australia brothels, there is no relief in sight for weary American drivers.

Brothels in Australia have offered their customers a discount of 20 cents a liter. Which in today's prices translates to a free two minute session with a 'service provider.'

The price breaks have also given Australian brothels lots of good international media exposure as their story was recently picked up by Reuters.

Brothels are legal though there are strict laws as to where they can be located. No soliciting near a church, school or residential area has a vastly different meaning down under than it does in the states, where your more inclined to hear a pitch from a vacuum cleaner sales person or a college kid selling text books as opposed to a Madame come calling with a line up of girls in tow waiting for inspection on the front steps.

Technorati Tags: australian brothels, fuel prices, mustang ranch

I've got a perfectly good laptop with a brand new battery, but its driving me nuts. Its about 3 years old and has a slightly loose power connector. The thing will be plugged in but it won't receive any juice. I prop up a rubber dice just so under the power cord and it will sometimes charge and stay powered up.

I found a description of this type of problem at Dell Inspiron 5150 repair. This company AbsoluteRaleigh specializes in fixing this problem.

Technorati Tags: loose power connector, laptop repair

Technorati Tags: loose power connector, laptop repair

I'm starting to finally get that home improvement itch back, and hopefully this condition will escalate to a full on set in of home improvement energy!

I need to tile my kitchen, paint a bathroom and tile it, and replace the blinds throughout the house. The house currently has vertical blinds in most of the rooms. They are about ten years old and made out of plastic and made during a time when vertical blinds were made with the kind of quality that exists today.

We have a lot of wood in the house and lots of trees, so I think I want to make the investment and install wood paneled veritical blinds.


I'm still debating on whether or not to put horizontal wood blinds in some of our smaller windows. I prefer the horizontal blinds because I can keep them cleaner, but if I do go with horizontal blinds I'll definitely go with wood.

I've purchased blinds from Lowe's before, but it never fails that when I get the blinds home the instructions are inadequate. I'm sure Lowe's would love to sell me some $30 book or something, but as I was browsing through Guaranteed Blinds.com I did find some additional installation directions for several styles of blinds.

Technorati Tags: vertical blinds

Around four in the afternoon yesterday, I was working on my computer at the island in our kitchen. The laptop was running on the battery and the power cord was unplugged as an Ernesto lightening storm was going through the area.
My front yard out the window across my living room about 20 feet form my work place, a lightening bolt struck one of my trees. The bold must have arked (sp?) a bit because I saw a static strand of electricity come through my window and strike a Winnie the Pooh toy in the toy basket on the floor of the living room. The toy got a little smudge mark on it, but immediately lit up and starte playing the recorded message, "Why hello there, How are you? Let's start counting . . ."

The charge also took out the phone line through the TiVo that was there. :(

So my phone is down and the phone company wants $90 for a service call to fix it, so I'm going to take the plunge and switch over to VOIP through my cable provider. I mostly use my cell phone for all calls anyway so VOIP is just extra for when the cell phone gets dropped in the toilet, a story for another day.

So I'm shopping around and looking for information on VOIP and came across a useful Vonage forum. They have over 30,000 members and lots of information on services, offers, how-to and more.


Technorati Tags: voip, vonage, forum, lightening