Author Archive

Is it time for bed yet?

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007

It’s about 2:15am and it’s been a pretty busy day and I’m pooped because of it. I’ve almost completed the templates for Dick, I’m just waiting on a response from him about a few things. I’ve been battling it out with my server master in regards to Ranee and I’m close to completing another template to throw up on AGN Designs because a few things need to be changed out.

Rent’s been paid, bills are all taken care of and I’m shopping for a new cellphone. T-mobile has free Razr’s for those signing up with a new 2-year contract, I’m considering getting a family plan with Sean but not sure when, at the moment. I think the only reason they’re free is because Motorola is releasing R2 soon, it’s nice and all but I like the original – not too keen on what the new one has to offer.

I’m also working on getting the information together for grants/loans and other crap for Westwood so I can get that started. I’m just too busy with shit to really be able to sit down and concentrate on that at the moment.

It’s great having a pretty heavy work-flow coming in. I’m under a new contract and have like three templates pending for just basic blog work that shouldn’t take me THAT long, I just need to schedule myself. It’s the 2nd and I still haven’t gotten around to changing calendars around.

It’s supposed to be pretty hot this week and I’m someone who absolutely hates hot weather so I may wind up spending more time inside than I’d really like. I like having the ability to go relax outside for a little while and get some fresh air. In Delaware, however, there’s something known as a “State Smell” and the running joke with residents is you can tell what county your in based on the smell in the air. So since I’m surrounded by farms it’s kind of hard to relax in the heat. And even though placement of the house is in my favor during the day, when the sun starts to set it drops down head-on with the porch and that’s an instant heat box. Just not fun at all.

In any event, I considered this my ‘break’ for the evening so I need to get back to work.

[edit] You people seriously need to spend less time coming up with bull-shit stories and more time looking into a real life. I have not been sued, threatened or even contacted by TGO in regards to anything going on with Ranee’s site being suspended. No lawyers are throwing paperwork in my face, no local police departments are telling me to shut anything down and I have not spoken to, or plan on speaking to TGO about this. The reports did not come from him and while private information has been listed on the site he hasn’t said BOO to me about it. The issue at this point is between Ranee, Me and my server master. Step away from the freaking computer and leave things alone and next time you start sending off stupid emails at least have your damn facts straight.

Listen Up!

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

I just want to clarify that my previous post about a client was not in relation to Ranee, it was someone completely different. Her account was not suspended by me, it was suspended by the server master due to TOS violations. So you can stop filling up her inbox now, ok?

[edit] I also posted this in comments on TGO’s website.

I don’t want to be involved with any of this but I will say that TGO did NOT report anything to me. Up until the report came in I had no knowledge of anything going on with Ranee or TGO.

The report was sent over my head to my server master who then forwarded it to his boss. They’re the ones who suspended the account and are the ones holding it from having the suspension reversed, something I’m working on fixing.

There were multiple reports in regards to this issue. The ticket with the most to say had an IP based in Canada and cross-checking Ranee’s stats with this IP, 15% of her monthly visitors are from Canada so I wouldn’t even know where to begin tracking it down. It was an anonymous email filled with links to comments and entries noting his full name, which according to those above me are a TOS violation based on the situation at hand.

Again, I’m working on getting her back up and running but at this point it’s out of my hands until further notice.

Working leads to vacations – right?

Monday, July 30th, 2007

I’ve been keeping myself busy on a new project with Dick, and I have to say it’s coming along pretty nicely on my end. I just need to stop second guessing myself in photo shop and start coding up everything for the base site and then converting it all for the WordPress end of it. It’s going to be an on-going project for me, then again anything with Dick seems to be an on going project. He’s just great – heh.

So, Sean and I are planning an upcoming vacation which is hard considering we’ve been watching Family Guy and we keep thinking of weird places TV shows have been based in or talk about. He’s already spoken about going to all of the Springfield’s in America, and we’re going to be looking for a Sven if St. Olaf Minnesota actually exists. I’d love to go to Seattle but I may use a couple of vouchers I’ve got and invest in a few Disney World Tickets because I’ve been itching to get down to Disney for many years now. I just don’t know where we should go in upcoming weeks. We were considering a few nights up in Atlantic City because each of us have free nights pending that we could cash in on. I figured we can do two nights at one hotel and two at another – it’s just a matter of money though. Who knows.

I’m sure we’ll figure things out.

What a freaking day.

Monday, July 30th, 2007

Last week all of the servers were upgraded to cPanel11 – There have been NOTHING but issues popping up ever since. My Inbox is full if people who lost email, can’t log in with user/pass issues, lost files and other crap that they probably don’t ever need anyway considering it’s not even site based files, it’s stat based ones. However – they’re still PAYING clients so it’s good to know where exactly everything is. He fucked something up on one of the servers so everyone was running off backups and now the main server that houses all of my personal/business websites is having email issues. I don’t even know if anyone is getting emails from @agn-solutions.net based addresses, this is only for the past week – nothing before then everything was 100%.

So instead of getting any real work done today I have to move address books around and get in touch with people. Thanks to him doing something I requested he WAITED on, I’m now at risk for losing many paying clients. Three for sure have emailed me (which I received) I just don’t know if they actually got anything in return.

On top of that I’m dealing with these bull shit “You Suck” emails from people who still don’t know how to read. How can someone have ‘shitty service‘ if it’s the non-payingresource-eating user who doesn’t know how to get in touch with someone? Get over yourselves, morons.

Since she can’t read email and I know her trusty side kick has nothing better to do. I’ll leave a personal message here. Her files will be backed up in an oh-so-nifty ZIP and then she’ll be completely removed from the server, this includes all of the domains that she does nothing with. And considering she isn’t a paying client, I don’t even have to save THOSE files, so consider this me being nice.

What this person claims is that she lost her password, I’m sure she’s failed to mention the fact that it’s been changed for her over six times during the course of hosting her. I’m sure if she thought long and hard she could figure it out since apparently she doesn’t know how to read emails (that according to me – were actually read thanks to a trusty thing named a ticket)¬† The password was listed in two of them.

: head desk :

More crap to do, another freaking 10 hours left in the day.

Spoiled, Spoiled, SPOILED!

Monday, July 30th, 2007

Dog food can be a completely evil thing. Many dogs, particularly smaller ones, have allergies so the owner is naturally going to look for the food that doesn’t contain any of these allergens. Typically this is more expensive food but I’ll agree that if you love your animal as much as you claim you do, you’ll feed them something that won’t make them sick in excess.

So lately Bella has been very picky about what she eats, or even IF she eats for that matter. Putting chicken down at 10am means nothing to her, she insists on eating about 3AM the following morning after you’ve coaxed her into numerous different plates, she’ll return back to that $2.00 can of CHICKEN, not dog food – I said Chicken.

Candy, Karen’s dog, has been on a high protein diet throughout her entire life. She maybe had dog food twice when she was a baby but since then it’s been home-cooked meals and to a degree, mixed with pure luck, after 16 years she’s still alive. A little senile – yes – but she’s still alive. I do believe this is based on the dog food. Knowing full well that I intend to have Bella for as long as possible I’ve also steered away from dog food but this is only after I’d tried every single available brand that she turned her nose up to.

For some reason, not sure if it’s the weather or just stubborn animals, Candy and Bella have both decided that they no longer want $2 canned chicken. They want home made meatballs. And not just any meatballs, MY meatballs. This means we’re now spending money on 5lbs of meat (per week) and all of the fixings for me to make the family sauce, nope – they don’t like bottled sauce either.

It’s now 3am and I’ve been up for over 16 hours and I’m exhausted, this – however – doesn’t mean anything when it comes to making sure all animals are covered for dinner tonight. I turned 5lbs of chop meat into about 8 pounds of meatballs (once you throw in all the fixings, of course). They’re now in the oven cooking off some of the fat before I throw them into the crock pot where they’ll sit for 10 hours and all dogs will be fed.

This morning, however, I’ll have to then begin making dinner for the humans and I volunteered to make a big turkey dinner. I’m stupid, I know – but my love for Thanksgiving side dishes can really get the best of me. Hrm…I just remembered there’s a few things I forgot to get for dinner. Damn! Guess I’ll have to send Sean out.

Been a few days…

Sunday, July 29th, 2007

With the amount of time I’ve spent online for the last few days I wanted to at least get around to posting something here instead of dealing with things every where else. I’m catching up on email, I completed a few things for other domains and clients and now I’m waiting patiently for Sean to get out of the shower so we can head out for the evening.

August 2007 Someone asked me about the color scheme for August, I figured I’d paste it up to share. Note that once the template is replaced for September’s, it’ll be setup under my the free wordpress templates, naturally there’s going to be a few alterations but I’m sure it’ll work out just fine as a free template anyway. Who doesn’t love Gray and Pink?

PS: Still working on returning comments, I have three domains worth to get through!

Almost done for the evening.

Friday, July 27th, 2007

For some reason my domain wasn’t set to auto-renew so I luckily got in just in time so I could keep AGn Designs up and running without any downtime. The server has been on the fritz for most of the evening, if you’ve noticed a 500 error – trust me I’m fully aware of it.

I just finished up work for the day, took me a few hours longer than anticipated but I think that was based on the fact that I’m having some trouble concentrating. I have quite a bit of email to go through as well. I’ve been slacking, but honestly I’ve just had more important things to do. I’m working on a new project, I’m getting clients taken care of, if random questions here and there go unanswered for a day or two that’s just how it is. I’ll have all of them cleared up tonight though, I should be sitting here for a little while longer before I take a shower and get myself ready for bed.

Bella’s being obnoxious lately, she refuses to eat anything half the time and she’s been right at my feet for what seems like the last 24 hours. I usually can’t leave the room without having her right behind me but today it’s just growing to be annoying. I can’t even move my chair without the risk of rolling over her paw or her tail. She has a bed in the office, she won’t really sleep in it though. She was in it for a while today but then Sean came back in the office and for some reason once he showed up she wound up right back underneath my chair. If she was just under the desk itself it wouldn’t be that bad but right under the wheel of the chair is just unsafe considering how often I move around. My back has been killing me, so sitting still for too long just doesn’t seem possible anymore.

Time to get some write-ups taken care of.

Where are all the jobs?

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

Karen is in the process of looking for a new job. The company she currently works with is absolutely horrible because it’s being run by someone who saw a price tag and not the actual business behind it. They’re lucky if bills are paid on time and it’s been noted on more than one occasion that they’re just sneaking by on getting the payroll taken care of. So naturally she’s tapped into every possible site on the internet looking for work. Monster, CareerBuilder and even CraigsList haven’t really brought up anything for her. I pushed her in the direction of looking for corporate finance jobs because that’s probably going to be the best thing for her. She’s digging through their site at the moment, I just hope she’s able to come up with something.

It’s FinancialConsultantRecruiters.com, they’re a executive search firm that has finance jobs and their professional recruiters/consultants have executive and entry level jobs in the corporate finance field available now. I just hope she’s able to come up with something because she’s had no luck looking anywhere else.

:: crosses fingers ::

Slow your roll

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

I’m having some trouble with WordPress today and I’m not quite sure why. I keep getting a 500 error every time I go to login and get some things done. It only shows up at random, I’ve got Tony working on it at the moment. Didn’t mean to interrupt his lunch but hey – I’m paying him so hmph! Yes, childish I know.

I’ve noticed a rise in people having a complaint about the new way of doing things with a paid blogging company I work with. Instead of 3 posts per day, per blog in the database, there’s now only 2 posts per day and those new to the system feel as though they’re being raped out of money. Thing is, the intent for this company was never for these people to fully switch their sites over to a money making machine and any true paid-blogger knows that putting all of your eggs in one basket is just plain dumb. Many bloggers earning the $2000 a month and up income aren’t only working with one paid to blog company, they’re working with about 10 of them – trust me, I’m one of them.

However, this doesn’t mean that the only reason I have a blog is for the sake of making money off of it. I work from home, yes, but more than 70% of my income is WORK based, I do run my own company you know? I’m not sitting at a website at 9am to midnight hoping to get an opportunity as it’s posted and then participate in the op orgy to post articles completely irrelevant to my website. Everyone wants to go for that $20 and up post, even if it has nothing to do with their daily lives. I’m sorry but a 18 year old blogger knows nothing about refinancing student loans for college graduates so why are they going to take it? They want a fat wallet.

Yes, everyone wants a fat wallet. This is why people work their asses off on a regular basis. The difference is, when you’re sitting on your ass just crossing your finger for one of these ops to show up, you’re really not doing much of anything. Many blogs around the internet are losing their readership because of sponsored blogging. I’ll be the first to admit that I use my site for monetary gain but I’m also still keeping up on my daily life here as well. Posting sponsored entry after sponsored entry is something being done all over the internet and many people have noticed that they’re no longer getting the hits that they once used to.

Some have smartened up, they’re no longer paid posting on 10 different blogs and found an actual income from outside sources. You’ll still see entries popping up here and there but for the most part they’ve gotten themselves on an actual payroll that isn’t based post-to-post.

I completely support anyone who writes sponsored posts. I just won’t be floating around those blogs as frequently because the bulk of them all have the same entry just written a different way and I’m sorry but if your site has absolutely NOTHING to do with the entries you’re posting, it’s really nothing more than a waste of time. A fat wallet is great but no readership won’t keep that wallet very fat for long. You can easily be taken from a PR6 to a PR4 with the loss of back links due to paid blogging, no more high paying ops for you, no more fat wallet, and no more actual visitors. Something to keep in mind the next time you log into your paid blogging system. Pace yourself with other companies outside of a fast-paced-blog-orgy and really think about what you’re writing about, if it doesn’t connect to your website, even if it’s a quick $30 – it’s really not worth the write up.

:: bangs head on desk ::

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

I’m done with the August theme. I’m thinking about launching early considering I can’t stand this blue thing. But I have all of that stuff on auto-move so I’ll just wait and go from there so I don’t mess anything up. Jenny saw it last night, thought it was cute – that’s good enough for me. I made her an icon to match my template and now she’s all smiles.

(more…)

Old friends doing really well!

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

My friend Pat is in a band that’s been traveling basically everywhere. They started off as local hotness and has now skyrocketed to a large success, especially among college campuses. They were once Hyjinx but now known as Stealing Jane. I asked him about coming down to Dewey because it’s a massive college town and he said that there’s some big band thing going on in September that they’re waiting to hear back on – YAY!.

Either way their music rules and based on the last I heard they were doing really well on merchandise sales too, shirts are flying off the rack it seems. Their EP is about to drop so they’ve been looking into expanding their merchandise to include baseball caps, mouse pads, pens, stickers, bags and other fun stuff. So this is where my actual point comes in.

When it comes to band based merchandise, owning a shirt just won’t cut it sometimes. What would you like to see with a band name on it? They want something unique, I’m sure. They used to do thongs but those went too quickly and strangely lonely boys were the only ones actually buying them – lol.

Disorganized as all hell

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

I’ve been saying it to myself for days but I really need to do some serious cleaning. My desk is turning into a dumping ground for random crap that I don’t need and the sooner I get rid of everything, the better. I have magazines kind of thrown around and papers that could probably be thrown out that I’m too lazy to look at. My iPod is dead but I’ve yet to throw it on the charger and wires are all over the place with my keyboard and mouse plus the head phones. My white board covered in my to-do list actually is just listing completed projects at this point and the board could basically be wiped clean, it’s kind of annoying. Soda cans and pens kind of fill in the holes everywhere else.

To my left is the dumping ground for both Sean and I. There’s a table separating our desks (makes it look like back-to-back L shaped desks) that’s covered in crap that doesn’t even need to be in here. His desk doesn’t look any better at the moment either. I think the two of us need to stop working (money’s great right now) and then spend an hour cleaning out the room. The coffee table that’s being used as a TV tray is caked in dust and that can’t be good for his XBox360. I know for a fact that my computer needs to be dusted out as well but the can of air we’ve got is close to dead and I don’t want to shoot any kind of liquid into my case, condensation on a can or air is HORRIBLE when the thing is about to die.

There’s crap in the fridge that can definitely be thrown out and even with all the shelving we have in here everything is unorganized. There’s got to be something we can do to solve this problem. This middle table is going to have to be changed out at some point because when I purchase the iMac it’s going in between us. That’s later down the road but you’d think knowing that we have some kind of time frame going on we’d be able to organize better. You know?

VoIP Phone Systems for Businesses

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

If you run a small business and have shown an interest in VoIP phone systems, than this entry is for you. Today I came across a website for Xpander Communications which is a company that specializes in hosted PBX small business VoIP phone systems. This system is for companies looking to improve and explore new technologies. With the rise in broadband for business, naturally working with your old phone setup is going to seem kind of pointless. VoIP is proving, time and time again, to be a pretty decent service to use. Xpander offers the most user friendly phone systems available thanks to it’s focus on simplicity, reduced costs and drastically reduced maintenance. Small businesses with office branches scattered across the country can share the same phone system on the same private list of extensions. So say you have an office in California and you’re looking to get in touch with someone in your Denver Colorado branch, you just dial their four digit extension and you’re instantly connected. I think it’s a pretty interesting route to take.

I know that my server master, Tony, works at two different datacenters. They have the same kind of VoIP setup so he’s able to contact his boss easily at the main branch while he’s at the sub branch a few towns over with just a few clicks of a button. Sure you can easily keep someone’s number in your phone book but going through this system stops you from having to pick up your cellphone and spend money where it doesn’t really need to be spent.

I think it’s worth checking out, honestly.

Budget Digital Cameras

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

I came across an article in one of my magazines that I thought was pretty interesting. It’s called “Budget Digital Cameras” and there’s a listing of 3 of the best digital cameras to purchase when you’re on a budget. I came across the Fujifilm Finepix S700 for under $250 and I have to say it’s pretty cool looking, a quick break down from the article:

For all the amateurs aiming to make the jump to enthusiast. Fujifilm’s Finepix S700 bridges the gap between a point-and-shoot and a full-fledged digital SLR nicely. With this versatile camera, you get a long 10x 7.1MP resolution. iFlash Intelligent Flash system (which determines the appropriate flash settings for a photo so that images don’t look washed out). 14 scene settings, and lots of manual controls. The S700 accepts both xD and SD cards, which is a nice improvement over most other Fujifilm models that accept only the less common xD format. $249; www.fujifilm.com

I figured I’d share knowing that many of you are into photography and I know for a fact that a few of you are looking for new cameras based on the blog entries I’ve seen.

Yep, we bought a Wii

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

Sean is currently jumping for joy over the fact that he found a vendor on eBay who’s currently got the cheapest listing for brand new Wii’s. They’re based in Canada, some video game store, and they added $30 to the price so the store could at least gain some kind of profit. It was only about $30 shipping or something like that as well so in total he spent about $310. I gave him $100 towards it, not realizing that this was going to happen today. We spoke about this in regards to Christmas, not five minutes later.

Either way we estimate that it will be here sometime with in the next 7-days, at most and once we know for sure that everything is working properly and we didn’t get screwed over, we’ll probably go out and make a few quick purchases for it. By default the Wii comes with one wii-mote so we’re going to pick up a couple more after it gets here. There’s no point in purchasing them before the product is even shipped because if it happens to not show up that’s going to be a waste of money that can be used elsewhere.

I can say, from the get-go, that I’m going to skin my wii-mote. I want a pink skin, I don’t know why but I tend to love anything skinned in pink or black. We’ve got a few games in mind as well. I think for now, however, we’ll stick to the default mini-games that it comes with (bowling, tennis, baseball, etc.) and purchase a points card so we can download some games also. I personally wanted the Wii for the original Mario so either way I’ll be a happy chick.

Keeping in touch.

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

With running as many sites as I do, I make it a point to have Mailing Lists setup so it’s easier for me to get in touch with a large number of people with out having to keep a huge address book on Thunderbird. I have quite a few contacts that I’ve built up over the years, I don’t use them for regular mailings, but when something big is going on with say AGn Listings, for example, it’s good to know that I have that database to get in touch with the members.

There are many resources out there for running your own mailing-list. It’s important to know what kind of resources you’re going to need in relation to them as well. Don’t figure that the moment you launch your site that you’re going to have over 30,000 members on your mailing list and then purchase some $600 script to manage them all. When you first start out I’ve found that self-hosted scripts are pretty reasonable, and 99% of the time they’re free OR can just be found through your cPanel installation.

Naturally someone running a large business wouldn’t take this route and they’d look into outside companies like ResponseCom‚Ñ¢ to handle these things for them. Marin Worldwide is one of the largest and most successful mailing list providers in the nation which offer you customized mailing lists, Telemarketing lists and fax lists to both small businesses and fortune 1000 clients. If you’re looking for something on this scale then checking out martainworldwide.net would be a good thing for you.