Author Archive

Chugging Along…

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

I’ve gotten through about 100 emails, most of which were support emails that seemed to be backed up in the database, at least they’re taken care of though. I rested my eyes for a few minutes to go outside and take in the weather. It’s pouring right now but it’s got such a calming effect on me that it’s taking me out of my work mode and putting me into a “When is Bedtime?” state of mind. This is why I’m now inside instead of being out there. I know I have a lot to get done there just aren’t enough hours in the day it seems.

Baby and I have been very busy for the last week so I’m behind on everything from email to work. If I didn’t have the ability to type so quick I’d probably get absolutely no blogging done at all and that’s a lack of income so that certainly isn’t going to happen. Guess I should get back to work now.

CRM Software

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

Not too long ago I discussed a program called crm software which is a lead management software for businesses. The software can be found on aimpromote.com. I’d recommend it to anyone running a business with a lot of clients coming in on a regular basis. My previous boss used it to keep track of all of the potential clients, including the ones that he was already working with. Sometimes you can only use up so much notebook space to keep track of everything, it’s good to have a program on your computer that will take care of it for you.

If you have 15 or 500 users, this program will be easy for you to use. It doesn’t require you to download anything, everything is stored under your user name on aimpromote.com, it helps for those checking on leads when they aren’t at their regular computer. There’s no need for a thumb drive, just internet access. I’d say that’s a fairly nifty idea, wouldn’t you?

Slowly getting things done…

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

I’ve spent most of the morning working, and continuing to go through email. There are only 200 or so messages left to go through and I’m sure I can get them knocked out today. I don’t like taking so long to get things done but there were a few curves thrown at me this weekend that play a roll in everything. I’m getting close to having my enrollment money though, I figure 3 or 4 more days of work will do the trick, it shouldn’t be too hard to get the remaining $400 thrown into the college fund, especially considering I have half of that coming to me over the next few days on just post payments alone.

My day will basically be spent finishing up on emails, working on a few accounts after I’ve gotten back to some people and then maybe I’ll switch from my desktop to my laptop and play around in photoshop while I’m laying in bed watching TV. I really do need to throw some templates together for the other domains I’m working on. I also have to get quite a bit of content up on curvy-chick.net because that lacks everything I wanted to do with it.

Guess I should get my ass in gear.

Online Schooling – Capella University

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

I’ve spoken about Capella University in the past and quite a few people have asked me questions about them. I’ve dealt with quite a few internet based school and I fully understand how beneficial online courses can be. They’re a great resource for high school and college students, they’re also an excellent resource for people who are looking to further their career or even those just interested in learning a new certification program.

Capella University was founded in 1993 and is a fully accredited online university that offers graduate degree programs in business, information technology, education, human services and psychology. They also offer bachelor’s degree programs in business and information technology as well. With these areas of study, Capella currently offers 82 graduate and undergraduate specializations and 16 certificate programs. The university currently serves more than 17,900 students from all 50 states and 56 countries. Their goal is to provide high caliber academic excellence and pursuing balanced business growth. If you’re interested in learning more about this school, please visit capella.edu or call 1-888-227-3552 (1-888-CAPELLA).

This blog post was based on information provided by Blogitive. For more information, please visit Blogitive.com.

She’s going to be fine.

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

We got to the vet around midnight last night, sat in the waiting room for a little while and then Princess headed in to see the vet. She was in a lot of pain for the entire car ride and lord knows how long before we actually had gotten home considering she was home by herself all day. The vet said that it was just a urinary tract infection and that she just needed the antibiotics. Now she also had a fever so that was another source of her being clingy last night. Everytime Kay went to get up she insisted on being right there. Bella typically does the same thing when she’s not feeling very well either. In the end, she’s on medication and hopefully there will be some signs of improvement.

I woke up this morning to find out that she’s not even bothering to look for wee-wee pads, she’s just going right on the floor and I assume that since she’s not feeling well that’s the source behind it. She’s still got her apetite so I assume she isn’t in a great deal of pain at the moment. She had round one of her medication this morning, she’s taking two pills twice a day for the next 10 days and that should hopefully resolve everything. I’m going to make sure she actually completes her medication for the full 10 days.

Most people don’t realize that antibiotics have set dosages for a reason. Taking only half or just not finishing them doesn’t mean you’re saving medication for the next time something flares up. It means that whatever infection you have can now fight off the medication and mutate into something completely different. Considering how expensive pets can be when it comes to the vet, I’m going to make sure she doesn’t have to go back.

She needs to be on a diet, she also needs to be a bit more mobile than she actually is. She’s supposed to be a mini dachshund but she’s 26lbs and can barely walk because of back issues. She’s never really walked around outside and this is primarily based on the fact that she was wee-wee pad trained and now she’s paying the price for it. So when the rain goes away I’m going to start walking her around the house. She likes being in the grass. Kay thinks that it’s a bad idea because she doesn’t have any flea/tick medication for her, but considering it’s low grass and she’ll be out there for maybe 3 minutes at most, just to get some cardio in of course, then I think she’ll be fine. I’ll take full responsibility if something does come up though, at least she’ll be getting the exercise that she desperately needs. Feeding her low-carb food isn’t going to do the trick, she needs to do more than jump off the couch to eat…that’s all she ever does.

SEO Effect Software

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

If you’re looking to drive more customers to your business, seoeffect.com has created a Search engine optimization SEO software. SEO Effect draws enormous attention. You’ll attract more visitors, more interest, more conversion, more business, and more sales. If you can handle the attention than this is the script for you.

They offer a free trial, I signed up and created a free account. Their prices range from $69 to $269. In wanting to learn more about the program I signed up for, I went to load the free account section and found myself looking at a 404 page. The rest of their navigation seems to work but it would be nice to know what the free account looks like. I had a little bit of trouble navigating around their database. At this point I’m unsure if anything is actually being done with my site.

To get past all of that, however, I found myself looking at the SEO Glossary. They list a long page of commonly used words on the internet in regards to search engines and other programs that webmasters use on a regular basis. Another option that they want you to look into is handbook search engine optimization however, the site isn’t in English so I doubt it would be much help to anyone.

While the site is fairly easy on the eyes and the navigation is standard in one place, I’m not overly confident that this company could help me as far as marketing is concerned. I’m sure they have a great idea and maybe their clients have even had some success in the past but I don’t personally see the point in spending $269 a year promising me more ‘attention’ when they claim to be professionals at this and are only a PR5 themselves. I was already a PR5 before I changed my website title. Now I’m just waiting for things to push back up again. I don’t believe this company will do that for me but maybe someone else will have some luck.

Emergency

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

We were out for quite a bit of time today to come home and find out that one of the dogs is pissing blood. Kay is sure it’s a urinary tract infection because it’s spotty but the problem is that we didn’t know who it was, until Princess squatted. I was relieved to know it wasn’t Bella but at the same time it was bitter sweet because I adore Princess, it’s hard not to love a dog that’s too fat for her own good but so damn cute about everything she does. So now we’re on our way up to Dover to the 24 hour animal hospital in hopes to get a good response. Baby believes it’s internal bleeding because Princess isn’t acting like herself, Kay on the other hand knows that Princess has gotten these infections before and she just needs antibiotics. Either way I hope it’s nothing overly serious or this is really going to suck.

Review: Discount Safety Gear

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

When asked to review a site, typically the first thing I look towards is site design. Is the template setup in a way that’s easy to read. Is the site easy to navigate through. Do the colors blend well together and don’t come off as blinding. Then I begin to poke through the actual content of a site. Typically some will say that the content is more important than the layout. To some degree this is true but 90% of the time if you load a site and it’s close to impossible to read anything then naturally you’re not going to stay there for very long, no matter what the resource.

I was asked to write a review on discountsafetygear.com. They offer everything from Hard Hats to Safety Goggles. The bulk of their website is setup in .html format and as someone who uses PHP exclusively I don’t quite understand the reason behind it but I’m not here to look at how the webmaster coded it, but what the final outcome is.

Visually the site is rather appealing. With the size of the text and the initial format of the page I can tell that the owners took Web 2.0 into consideration. It’s very easy to navigate through the page as well. The information listed on the sidebar is easy to read and easy on the eyes as well. I like their New Product section, I’m a sucker for new and interesting gear. There are a few sections where there’s the black and white construction tape and while I can understand the reason behind it, on the sidebar behind the title text there really isn’t much need for it. It makes it a little it hard to read but that could also just be my monitor. By the looks of it the site is fairly CSS heavy but it’s also designed with tables and that honestly doesn’t make much sense to me. I say switch completely to divs, search engines seem to like that a little better.

Considering Baby is prone to some form of self-damage (walking, bending, whichever) I naturally found myself searching through the First Aid Kits. The Home and Personal kits seemed interesting but for some reason I was drawn to the construction section. This is probably because I grew up in a family full of construction workers and knowing the contents of these kits by heart, I kind of wanted to see what an un-used one looked like – if this makes any sense of course. The kit that interests me the most is naturally going to be the most expensive – but this is my taste. I know in regards to safety that it’s important to have everything you’d ever need, even if it’s things you don’t think you’d need. This, of course, is based on the fact that my mother was assistant chief of EMS and always had a bag filled with things.

All in all it’s a fairly decent site and a great resource for safety gear that I’d recommend to anyone, no matter what you happen to be looking for.

EEk! I’m late!

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

I’ve only been up for about an hour and already my entire day is basically fucked. My alarm never went off so a knock at the door an hour after I was supposed to wake up put me in a rushed-funk as I like to call it. I had my coffee to kick that just woke up feeling, smoked my cig because that has to be done within the first half hour or it throws off my whole routine, took a shower and now with a little bit of time to spare I’m going through all of my email. I don’t like waking up early on a Saturday but the flea market is only open until about 5:00 and it’s noon now, it’s going to take us about an hour to get there too.

It’s already 85¬?F (29¬?C) and it’s supposed to continue to rise throughout the day. It’s also a fairly high UV index AND it’s humid on top of that so within a half hour I’m not only going to be dehydrated, I’ll be burnt to a crisp. I can’t even wear shorts because I have a few large mosquito bites on my legs that’s stopping me from shaving them to the same closeness that I always do. On top of that I also haven’t gotten around to doing my toe nails either. I took the polish off two days ago before I showered and never quite got around to putting any back on. My toes feel naked without polish, I’m strange like that.

Baby just got in the shower a few moments ago. Once he’s done in the bathroom I should be able to get my hair done and hopefully we’ll all be out of here. I’m going to find something to eat before we go, I don’t need to get light headed at this thing too. We’re going to be walking for 4 straight hours so at least I’ll be able to get back on track with the exercise, considering it’ll be in 90¬?F (32¬?C) heat. Can’t forget my water bottles. I should probably bring the larger purse to hold all of this stuff – shouldn’t I? Time to down a couple 100 calorie packs to get my energy up. The coffee didn’t do such a hot job yet, then again – one cup typically doesn’t do anything for me.

Random Bellyaching

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

I’m not sure when they implemented it into their system but PPP has finally edited their code to show you when an offer has already been taken. I know a few people who have walked away from their program because they were unable to find any opportunities to post on. Now they’ve labeled things for you so you know before you click if it’ll even be worth your time. Green means it’s a featured post, pink means that you’re not eligible, white means that you can take the offer and grey means that the offer has yet to expire but there are no longer posts available. Naturally I wonder why they even bothered with the grey considering no one can post there so more than likely no one is even going to bother reading it. The advertiser has already gotten their money’s worth so it makes no sense to me but I didn’t code their database so in the end that’s just the way things are.

I’m not quite done with all of my email checks but that’s because I keep getting side-tracked with things. It’s also a little hard to do anything at the moment considering how hot it is in the office right now. Baby seriously needs to invest in LCD monitors because the CRT’s are giving off so much heat it’s unreal. The television also plays a roll. I know the computers do as well, I just wish there was a way to work around it. We’re going to be investing in some fans this week. I think we were going to put one or two in here and we’re definitely going to be putting one in the bedroom because that room is like a heat-box at night with the two of us so close together in such a small bed. There’s got to be a way to increase your tolerance to eat. It’s not like I can roll around in ice before I go to bed and I sure as hell can’t take my skin off either. Hopefully the fans will resolve this issue.

At the moment we just have a full sized mattress on the floor. We’ll eventually be upgrading to a king sized bed that will actually have a box-spring and frame so we’re going to need a fan that sucks the air up from the ground and spews it back at us. I found a fan that sucks the air in on one vent and blows it out from another. So we could have the ‘suck-in’ side right next to the air conditioning vent and then the blow-out side angled straight to the bed. It sounds more complicated than it really is but I’ve had to do something similar in New York. Living in a brick building for 20 years, you learn a few tricks of the trade about how to get things to work with you in the summer. Brick naturally holds heat so the house was typically 10¬? hotter at night than it is outside. In the winter this was OK because it cut down on heating costs (if it was a sunny day) but in the summer it’s borderline obnoxious and fixing it with proper fan placement is obviously the way to go.

In any event, I’m going to start wrapping things up for the night so I can get to bed. I need to be up around 10:30am so we can get out of here early tomorrow.

Flea Market Fun

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

Tomorrow we’re all heading up to Laurel because there’s some flea market and when I go to places like that I like to check out the jewelry, you can typically get some fairly decent deals on anything that you buy considering the vendors are either getting their items at cost or they gave up on having a yard sale and it’s just items that they’ve got sitting in their house that they’re looking to get rid of. Ebay is really considered to be the flea market of the internet, if you think about it. The one thing I always make a point of doing before going to a flea market or bidding on something online is the current gold price because it’s important to know what you’re getting yourself into when buying gold based pieces.

I don’t think I’m going to be bringing any money up with me though. I’m sure that I’ll come across something but knowing my spending habits around funky looking things and the fact that my father’s birthday is coming up, I’m going to make it a point to not go crazy and just keep the money in the bank. That’s going to be hard for me but even just spending the day looking around a 15 acre lot, I’m pretty sure that I’ll be too tired to even bother with whipping out some cash.

Search Marketing in Austin

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

Any webmaster would know the importance of using marketing to help their business. Sure, word of mouth is always a great deal but that only covers a limited number of people. By manipulating your website code you can get yourself indexed on Google, Yahoo, MSN and other major search engines to bring in some visitors to your site. This isn’t the only way to get your business out there though.

There’s a company named Apogee Search, Search Marketing in Austin, one of the 25 largest Search Engine Marketing firms in the world. It was founded by early Internet pioneers and McKinsey & Co. alumni. THei focus on a variety of proven online marketing methods that include paid search, natural search, affiliate marketing, and even pay-per-call. All of their solutions are designed to drive qualified, targeted visitors to B2B and B2C websites for more leads, customers, revenues and profits. Anyone with a business should consider looking into them.

My New Toys!

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

New Computer Desk - June 2007 I snapped a quick picture of the new desk, I’m not really one to randomly throw up images but I just wanted to share I guess. The desk itself cost me $54.99 from the salvation army, the chair was only $40 and is rather comfortable considering the price, I got it from Staples. Both of them were a fairly great deal. The desk is 5′ x 2′, or somewhere around there. Baby can’t find the tape measure at the moment so who knows. Either way it’s larger than anything I’ve ever worked on before and that’s good enough for me. I looked around for the retail value and even the cheapest price runs in the $150 range. I spent $60 less and got myself a chair in the process. I love good deals, I really do. : w00t :

To the left of the desk is my old desk, we’re using it as a divider for the printer and scanner. It’s also a place to keep the remote and Xbox360 controller considering Baby’s desk is typically overloaded with crap and important items can very easily get lost, lol. I would snap a shot of his side of the room but he’s yet to organize everything on his desk. He’s been busy working and I’m sure that won’t be done for a while anyway, he’ll get around to it eventually I hope.

Lapband Surgery

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

Before I started on my diet I considered many different techniques to effective weight loss. I even considered lap band surgery until I realized how much is involved with it. Surfing through the internet you come across many things that can be a valuable resource for anyone. Unfortunately sometimes the most valuable information is never really well known because people name files and sites wrong so a google search won’t pick it up. I got lucky with this one though.

I came across Lap Band Surgeon Mexico which is a website that has many resources for this surgery. The thing I like about it is they tell you everything you need to know about finding a surgeon. They teach you how to go through their doctoral background, reading through testimonials, asking around, talking to previous clients and many other resources that most people may not look into when they go to get the surgery themselves. There‚Äôs even an FAQ to cover all of your questions. There‚Äôs a body mass index calculator but it just gives you an estimated answer, I‚Äôd assume. I plugged my statistics into it and I think it’s saying that 40% of me is fat which makes no sense considering all of the muscle I have in my arms and legs. I admit that my tummy is round but seriously now, 40%?

They personally do surgeries themselves but since they have the understanding that not everyone reading their site is going to truck it to Mexico, they offer you the resources you need in order to get yourself to a surgeon ‚Äì safely. There’s even a quick checklist of questions that you need to ask your doctor.

Anyone looking for valuable information about this subject, head over to mylapbandsurgery.com. You can even call them for more information. Their numbers are 866.309.0036 toll free for US callers only. Direct phone is 386.206.9358. I assume direct phone is connected to those living in Mexico. While I doubt you’d travel all the way to Mexico, you can at least use their site for Q∓A.

Highly Addicting

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

I don’t consider myself a gamer by any means. Baby is a Halo addict and considering that Bungie liked him enough to choose him as one of their BETA testers for Halo 3, it’s had me itching to do something for a while now. Now that the rooms are rearranged I’ve been playing Hexic, which I have to say is an extremely addicting game.

I don’t quite know what I did but I managed to get him some kind of award for a million points and then now I”m working in the Marathon mode in order to get three black pearls in a cluster to officially beat the game. The problem with me is it’s hard to do that when all of the power-star things seem to float in the same area and I have no idea how to get them away from each other. In order to make a black pearl you need six power-stars, so I’d need to make 18 of them during the course of the game and when there are bombs dropping in telling me that I have X number of moves before my board blows up it just makes it difficult.

I’m sure I’ll figure it out eventually. :hopes:

Winding Down

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

I’ve been rather productive today. I didn’t actually get around to my laundry but I did manage to get the finishing touches on my desk, so I’m fully unpacked (took long enough…right?). Baby and I did some shopping this afternoon to get things settled for the weekend. A lot of vacationers are down here now, summer has basically started early, so it’s hard to do ANYTHING on the weekends, Route 1 is beyond packed from here to Ocean City. We loaded up on ground beef and chicken so I assume we’ll be barbecuing the entire weekend.

I’m slowly getting through all of my email, I do still have some to go through. A few of them are work related but I’ve been unable to read them yet. So if you’re coming here with the “Oh she can update but can’t read her email” attitude, chill out I’ll get to you soon. I think the only thing I haven’t done today is check myself in for drug treatment, lol.

I think I’m gonna get myself in gear on the rest of my email though. There are a few domain notifications that have to go out that need to be taken care of ASAP.