Jim

Where have I been?

2009-11-22T19:01:00.002+11:00

Abducted by aliens! I've just been too lazy to keep this page updated with all the other sites i have to look after. I'll probably not post here in the future either, i have kazakhan.com for my ranting even though that hasn't been updated in months either...

The Best Web Host

2009-02-27T21:11:00.003+11:00

I've so far used three different hosting companies and found major differences between them. At first I signed up with Hytek and they still have the bulk of my domains. Their support is slow and so are the servers my site is hosted on, I just transferred my main site to Hostgator. So far Hostgator have been by far and away the easiest and fastest to use I've found. I also used to use Host4Profit whose support was quick and the servers were also quite responsive however the backend was arcane, they're expensive and the options are limited compared to Hostgator and Hytek.

RP50 Guitar Pedal

2009-02-20T20:06:00.002+11:00

I bought myself a 2nd hand Digitech RP50 today. I don't play my guitar much and one of the reasons is the crappy tone i get from my tubescreamer pedals. When i tried to test it out i noticed that my amp has developed a major fault on the clean channel and is unusable. I had to get out my daughters little 10 watter which i think sounds a lot better anyway. The pedal seems to have all i need to get a similar sound to my favourite pedal the ibanez fatcat although it's going to take some fiddling...

Twitter

2009-02-13T14:16:00.003+11:00

I've signed up to Twitter and also Tweeter Getter. Tweeter Getter shows you how to get 1000's of followers, i got 2 followers a few minutes after signing up. I don't know much about Twitter so i'm not sure how i'm supposed to use it to help me...

Back to School

2009-01-29T12:51:00.002+11:00

Yesterday my eldest daughter went back to school and this morning my youngest started kindergarten. Finally i have the daytime to myself again and i should be able to get some things done now. At least we'll be back to a routine in no time, i'm sick of taking things day by day.

I've just signed up with Newsvine and will use it to rant about things i read in the news. I'll add a permanent link to my Newsvine page once i've written something. I've been reading stories at Newsvine for the last week or so and have found it very refreshing compared to The Sydney Morning Herald which has usually been my first stop for news.

I went for a surf...

2009-01-16T01:54:00.002+11:00

Late yesterday afternoon a mate dropped in and asked me to grab my board and come for a surf. When i was young i was always at the beach but rarely go now i'm older even though its only a few minutes away. I've only been once in the last fifteen years and that was for about five minutes, so off i went. The surf was crap and i wanted to leave as soon as i seen it. It's one of the reasons i gave up i got sick of searching for a decent wave. Of course i got talked into giving it a go and when i got in the water it was freezing! After a few minutes i was right and paddled out the back it's amazing how quickly everything returns just like riding a bike. Although i only lasted about ten minutes i was stuffed just from paddling out pass the breakers. I had a crack at a couple of waves and fell off both times of course but i resolved to go again and at least get one good wave in before i quit.

Woohoo

2008-11-19T20:09:00.002+11:00

The major functions of the application i'm working on have been done. I really expected it to be another week or so before i got this far. I'm chuffed that i've managed to get it done it has been a long time since i coded and even longer that i used Delphi or Pascal. And i was never much of a programmer anyways. But so far so good all that needs to be done now is to optimise the code and test, test, test. At this rate i might have it released by xmas!

Vista Revisited

2008-11-18T11:45:00.003+11:00

Almost two years i bought a new laptop and it come with Vista pre-installed but after less than an hour i decided to put Gentoo on it instead. It's been running Gentoo up until last week when i put Vista back on. I did this as i was interested in trying the Speech Recognition that is built in, speech recognition on Linux is lacking. The speech recognition worked reasonably well although i only used it for a single day, i've since been working on a new application. Of course the biggest issue with Vista was the UAC dialog popping up every few minutes. Disabling it helps but i now have a big red X in my system tray that complains about UAC every boot. It's also quite resource intensive but disabling a few unnecessary services helps. So far i'm reasonably impressed at least more so than my first experience with it, especially when my laptop only has 512Mb of RAM (an extra 1Gb is on the way). Whilst i miss Gentoo being on the laptop i think i'll keep Vista for the time being, i can dual-boot with Gentoo later. Now i wonder if i should try the x64 version on my gaming machine, decisions decisions...

Bad Weekend

2008-11-02T14:44:00.003+11:00

I was supposed to make a cake yesterday for my daughters birthday party today. But i have been having trouble with a stiff and painful neck problem by the time i pulled the cake from the oven i just couldn't cope with the pain anymore. My wife had to decorate it and i think she can now appreciate how difficult and frustrating cake decorating can be at times. I've spent most of today in bed trying to get my neck to relax, the girls will be home from the pool party soon and i'll find out how well the cake was liked.

Good News Everybody!!

2008-10-31T20:18:00.003+11:00

My Adsense account is back up, not quite how i wanted it but i'm happy to leave it as it is now. I've also signed up with Adgridwork for free ads. Adgridwork is similar to Adwords\Adsense except it is totally free and the ads are context based too. I only sign up with Adgridwork this morning and already one of my ads has been displayed over 120 times with a single click-through. The format options for the ads could be improved however the similarity to Adsense should satisfy most users.

Update

2008-10-28T13:52:00.003+11:00

Well i'm still waiting on Adsense, why i thought i could sign up under my main account after umpteen previous attempts is beyond me. Anyways i haven't done much in last few days as my wife has been away and i've been looking after my two daughters on my own. Hopefully i can get a few more articles posted to my sites by the end of the week. I'm also waiting on my first Adwords campaign to kick in.

Adsense Woes

2008-10-23T20:02:00.004+11:00

I signed up for Google's Adsense however it would not let me use my current Google account. It gave me some garbage about the account already being in use which makes no sense as it was asking for my current account and a search around shows that this has been a problem for some months. Hopefully when\if i get approved i can migrate it to my main account.

Welcome...

2008-10-23T18:25:00.000+11:00

I'm going to use this blog to rant about current events and document my efforts at making an income from online ventures. I've spent ten years in partnership with my wife owning\operating a retail fashion business and have also worked a number of years in sales and IT. I'm hoping my experience will help me in my online efforts but it probably wont make much difference...