I spend quite a bit of time searching weather.com and even accuweather.com just to get the info on what’s heading my way. Unfortunately the sites are annoying to navigate and you never really can get any kind of up-to-date weather related statistics so today I came across a site named FastWx Weather Forecasts. It’s the newest way of checking the weather without having to go through excess pages in order to get to what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for something quick and painless than head on over to fastwx.com
Archive for the ‘The Web’ Category
Resource: Newest Weather Site
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007Review: Canadian Web Hosting
Monday, July 9th, 2007Important Note: When being asked to review a website, paid or not, I treat it as though I’ve just come across the site on Google and then give my opinion from there. Price tags do not, by any means, sway my opinion on a sponsored entry. This is something I would like for the sponsor to keep in mind. Through me, you will receive my 100% honest opinion on your product and I remind you that this is what you’ve asked for.
This review is for Canadian Web Hosting Services.
I know it seems a bit strange that I’m writing a review for a web hosting company but this is only because I don’t have a bias opinion when it comes to the web hosting world. When, these days, it seems that everyone and their mother has a website, you’re going to need numerous companies out there housing all of these websites and there’s no possible way of getting around that.
When I first loaded the site I did notice a little bit of a lag but I want to assume this was Firefox and not them considering the main header on the site is flash based. I think that’s pretty typical for any hosting company so as of right now they don’t stand out very much for me at all. I do feel that for the services they’re offering, they’re a bit under priced to the point of what I’d believe to be overselling. For less than CAD$9.00 a month they’re offering a terabyte of transfer with 125gb of storage. All this triggers for me is a massive amount of overselling their servers. For CAD$16.00 a month you get 3 terabytes of bandwidth and a 300gb hard drive, that’s a dedicated server – basically – and there’s no possible way they can afford to run multiple servers with those kind of resources when they’re only earning $16 per month on that particular account! Doing further information you find out that it is only in the $16 per month range if you happen to purchase a yearly based account, the monthly price for this account is more in the $20 range if you choose to pay on a month-to-month basis. I personally would choose to pay CAD$20 for the first month and then decide from there if I’d like to stay with their services. You would have to pay them approximately $200 in order to go with the $16 per month plan. I think the $20 is the better route to take, honestly.
When it comes to standard web hosting, you’re rarely going to find companies that can do it 100% correctly. There is absolutely no need for someone to search around and get the most bang for their buck when it comes to web hosting. Do not put yourself on a server where you’re given 3 terabytes of bandwidth and an 80 gig hard drive to over load with stuff that you don’t need. I’ve noticed a trend in many people looking for high-bandwidth accounts in the $5-$7 a month range. Unless you average over 10,000 hits per day on your personal blog that your friends from school visit on a regular basis, you do not need anything more than 8 to 10 gigs at most of bandwidth. Yes, having some extra is nice depending on how many sites you happen to be direct linking off of but there’s no way that you will ever blow through 3+ terabytes of bandwidth in one month unless you’re doing something illegal or just running some kind of an adult site, if that’s the case you aren’t on a shared server that’s for sure.
Another thing that doesn’t quite sit right with me is how oddly priced their services are. They’ll give you over 3 terabytes of transfer for an account that can only host up to 10 add-on domains but a reseller account with 10 cPanel domains only has the option of 500GB of transfer even on a plan that costs $300 per month to run. For $150 you can rent a dedicated server and load it with as many clients as disk-space will allow and also giving you about 2-4 terabytes of transfer in the process. Half the price and four times the resources, that’s more than likely the company anyone who properly shops around would choose. If you’re someone spending $300 a month on literally no resources, please email me so I can point you in the right direction.
I’m not too sure if I would recommend this company to someone looking for web hosting. I will say that I would greatly appreciate anyone who is currently hosted with this company, and not an owner/support member, to give me their opinion on their services. What do you think of their company? How is their support staff? How much of the resources that you’re paying for do you actually USE during the month? I’d love to hear it.
This was a sponsored post.
Bowtrol
Sunday, July 8th, 2007There’s a new product out called Bowtrol out on the market. It can be found on basically any health forum but there is a lot of hype about it as being one of the best natural colon cleansing products out there. It’s important for someone to clear their system from time to time. It helps with weight loss, it gets rid of all of the bad toxins in your body and I’m sure there are many other benefits of colon cleansing that can be found by looking around publichealthforums.com as well. You should consider checking them out if you’re always looking for new and interesting products to better your daily life.
Relaunch of AGn Designs, went well…
Friday, July 6th, 2007I’ve relaunched acidgloss.net as a blog to go with my portfolio. I’ve been doing technology and business based product reviews for so long that I kind of wanted to place them somewhere else for a change. I’d been posting on acidgloss.net since January but I never quite got around to working the blog into the rest of the site until recently.
I was up at 10am this morning, not sure why but I felt something kind of pulling me out of bed and maybe it will benefit me. If I can get myself to sleep at midnight, instead of 4 or 5am then I’ll be able to get back on the schedule that I desire to work on. I don’t like working at night anymore, it’s summer – I’m supposed to be outside enjoying life when the sun goes down, not spending countless hours on designing for clients. So my schedule, as of right now, is back to 10am-6pm. I just wonder how long I’ll be able to stick to it!
WordPress Plugin for Paid Blogging
Thursday, July 5th, 2007Sean created a new plug-in that will more than likely help out many people looking to make the most out of paid posting, or just blogging in general. Most paid posting requires you to meet a minimum number of words before you can submit your post. Up until recently, however, the only Word Count hack available with WP 2.0+ only showed you the post count in the administration panel after you hit ‘submit’ or saved the draft and then went back to edit it later. This doesn’t help paid bloggers who have to work quickly, especially on PayPerPost, where offers are taken as quickly as they’re uploaded.
So he created a plug-in that’s WP 2.2 compliant called Leprakhauns Word Count which adds this real-time word count to your Write Post page in WordPress. It counts the true words in the entry, not the a href link attributes that can confuse most programs. You type your entry and hit “Calculate Words” and it doesn’t reload the page, it just shows up in the designated text area next to the button. I was using his original JavaScript one up until a few moments ago, now I’ve got the official plug-in itself tapped into there. I altered it a little bit for my own personal usage but that’s because I use a different administration panel theme for WordPress than the default that many people use.
Either way, if you’re an active paid poster and always having some trouble getting your numbers correct when submitting your post, this plug-in would more than likely be good for you.
Note: This hack will only work with WordPress 2.2. I’ve noticed when going back to edit a post that the calculate option doesn’t work but that could just be based on my own installation. Please report any problems with the script to Sean about that one.
Note #2: UPDATE! The hack has been fixed and should now work properly with all 2.2 installations. Entries may be a few words off depending on the fact if you’ve got hyphenated words in your entry. So right now figure I’m typing-up about ten words. Since the hyphen is between two words, it’s only listing it as 9. The script, at this moment, counts spaces between words. After that, however, it’s extremely accurate.
Are you that desperate?
Wednesday, July 4th, 2007I’m not quite sure as to why but I keep getting the absolute dumbest comments being left by people who just float through. I previously posted about my issues with finding a school. Every aspect of the entry was pointing towards ripoffreport.com (no, it was NOT a sponsored post, contrary to popular belief) explaining that there are 70+ strikes against a supposed-to-be top notch accredited university. I also noted that every single school I’ve come across also has the exact same statistics and the only option for me at this point is a campus based school that more than likely will not fit into my schedule, this is why I’m choosing to go to an online school so I can work at my own pace – not someone else’s.
So I open my inbox today and notice a comment from someone without a real name, a phony email address, and a link to the site matching the name as though I was actually writing up a sponsored post, but in this case it was just someone looking for a back link because they saw that I plug commenter’s.
Now, the comment literally said “they are all great schools, but the most important thing is to have fun“. I only listed one school, I listed how horrible the school actually was and I then went on to explain that it’s very stressful to even FIND a school. How exactly am I going to have fun? How exactly is a school that literally rips you off going to be a great one?
Why the fuck are you stupid ‘spammers’ so fucking stupid!
Where’d this person come from? Well, IP’s show me that it was a referral from someone elses site that houses the do-follow blogroll. Why are people not only spamming those who follow the rules, but abusing the system so disgustingly? I just don’t get it.
I give up…
Sunday, July 1st, 2007Nothing happened between my last post and now to give me any kind of inspiration for a July theme, as far as I’m concerned (at this point in time) there won’t be a change. Maybe something will trigger me in upcoming days, I know there’s a holiday around the corner, but I’m heavily doubting it at this point.
I have emails up the wazoo with bitchy people asking stupid questions. I’m not sure how but WordPress was bombed with spam that took me about a half hour of going through PHPmyADMIN just to delete and I’m craving coffee right now to keep me awake even though it’s after 3am and I should just go curl up with Sean and crash for the night, he’s been knocked out since 11:30 this evening!
I was going to barbecue tonight because I had a craving for smoked sausage and rice with basil but since I’m the only one in the house who eats rice, I was going to make baked potatoes for everyone else. The potatoes we have are not only too small to make a REAL baked potato,¬† but they’d also been on the counter for almost two weeks and were starting to root themselves to the bag. Needless to say, I needed to go to the store to pick up some more potatoes. After I’d told Sean about this he offered to just go pick up something for dinner and we wound up at Bona Pizza, he loves them – I hate them. So instead of eating nasty pizza, I had a calzone. Now, in NY calzones don’t come in two freaking sizes so I should have known right then and there that this was going to be interesting. I figured okay, the large so I’ll have something to eat tomorrow night. Little did I know they make their calzones almost the same way one would make a stromboli. Fold a pizza in half and throw some extra cheese in. So now I’m sitting there with my LARGE pie folded in half that’s overstuffed with cheese and sausage. This is not a calzone. Calzones have mozzarella cheese, ricotta cheese, ham, salami, pepperoni and sausage – unless you ask for straight cheese naturally. So I was a bit disappointed with dinner considering it had little chunks of sausage and about 10lbs of HORRIBLE cheese thrown in. It didn’t SUCK but even eating about a 1/4 of the thing – I can tell my stomach is going to be screaming at me for the rest of the week while I finish the fucker off. Any true Italian will know, food does NOT go to waste.
I have a taste for things, I grew up in New York so someone telling me that Grotto’s is the absolute best place in the world – I’ll naturally like to beat them senseless with a large trout. A good place in town is Louis, their pizza tastes the most like New York pizza minus the fact that yes, the crust is kind of thin. Sean likes more of a sweet sauce – he grew up in Jersey I wouldn’t expect any less – but he considers himself to be the master of Pizza…when you’re going to marry a New Yorker, your state of mind WILL change. He likes Bona because he basis the good stuff on the crust and theirs, yes, is thicker. It also tastes like straight flower – and not even semolina – what you’re SUPPOSED to cook with. The only place that I can say I enjoy the most, in this entire freaking state, is up in Georgetown they have a place called Bella Capri and when they say Calzone – you get a freaking calzone. Filled with the right stuff, the right AMOUNT of stuff and while their sauce is very bland (straight out of the can kind of bland) they include seasoning on the table so I can adjust it.
Either way, back to my original point; my mind sucks for not having any inspirational thoughts, my computer sucks for not finding me anything good, Google should die, no one in Delaware knows anything about good Italian food, tourists need to be shot considering Karen’s boy-toy was almost run over tonight, Bella and I almost got skunked on her walk tonight, spammers need to get off my back, and I’m freaking exhausted.
END RANT
I must learn to pace myself!
Sunday, June 24th, 2007For the past couple of weeks I’ve been looking heavily into Graphics Cards. The one I’m working off of at the moment is the standard integrated card that’s shared, I’d like to have a separate card so that I can regain some of my ram. I’ve settled on the card that I’d like but a feeling in the pit of my stomach is telling me that I’m making the wrong choice. Whenever I go to purchase anything for my computer I set myself in an estimated price range this way I can make it a point to stick with a budget. Naturally when I find something that’s way below budget, I not only get giddy but I also get greedy.
See, when I say I’m willing to spend maybe $250 on a Graphics card and I happen to come across the exact card I’m in the market for which is in the price range of only $100. I instantly think “Ooh, I’ve got $150 for something else!” this state of mind absolutely has to stop but I have an addiction to shiny computer parts and that’s just too bad for my bank account. So now that I’ve found the picture perfect graphics card for myself I’ve switched my gears and am now looking around for a second monitor and the little $15 adapters so I can run dual monitors with my dual DVI slots. I’m not quite sure if I’m saying that properly, I’m sure Sean will let me know if I’m wrong here. (Just asked, I’m right…women typically are.)
Anyway, so now that I feel as though I have the ‘extra funds’ for something new, I’ve been abusing my database full of coupon codes (thanks to KeepCash.com) and I’m poking around hundreds of sites in search for a second monitor. My issue here is that I’d like to get the exact same one. I have this thing about everything matching but I believe that my model of monitor is no longer being made. So if you’re interested in helping me on my quest, please let me know if you happen to come across an X2Gen 17″ LCD Black/Silver monitor. I’ll gladly give you a cookie.
I’m sure you’re saying “Uhm, Google gave me X amount of links with that search!”. I’m fully aware of what Google spews out with it’s search queries. However, the monitor I own has X2gen written on the bottom silver bar right above the power button. The ones I’ve come across all have them in the upper left hand corner. This doesn’t match and again, I’m picky! So if you happen to see one that has the x2gen written on the bottom then send that link over as soon as possible! I’ll bake and ship a few dozen cookies – I swear!
MmMm Coffee!
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007I just jolted myself up with a fresh brewed cup of coffee. I feel a little bit more awake now than I did a little while ago. I may still wind up just going to sleep for a few hours. While I do feel awake, my eyes are still randomly crossing while I’m coding things. I’ve gotten a few templates done for blog-ideas.net, they’re mainly basic templates I hope to get into more complex ones later on down the road. I figure I’ll see how the site actually does first and then I’ll put a lot more work into it. For now I’ll have the basic sections and then I’ll move on from there.
Bella is really matted down and won’t let me get near her with a scissor, sometime over the course of the next few weeks I’m going to have her shaved down but I need to get birthday gifts taken care of first. I set myself on a $300 limit but who knows what I’m going to find for my father. I’m getting him a new monitor, more than likely I’m getting it from Microcenter, but I was also considering getting him a new computer as well. I just don’t want to sit around and teach him how to use Vista, helping him figure out how to use a computer PERIOD was no easy task and I’m only going to be in New York for a couple of days. There’s also the factor that my sister doesn’t have a printer on her computer and people are finding it close to impossible to network Vista to XP, if you happen to have been able to figure it out, let Microsoft know that it wasn’t as easy as they claim.
Considering my father only really uses his computer to check email, I’m more than likely just going with a 15″ monitor. I was thinking something along the lines of this one because I have the 17″ model and I’ve seen the 15″ in the store and the picture quality is equally gorgeous. My sister has the same model in her room and it’s working out rather nicely for her. I was considering getting him the 17″ but it’s no longer available through Microcenter. I found it online but it’s about $40 more than I paid for mine and for the same price I can get the 19″ Widescreen from Microcenter. That would just confuse the hell out of him, too much desktop so little time…heh. So he should be fine with the 15″.
Baby is looking to get new monitors, his have been blacking out on him and he’s not overly sure if it’s the monitor themselves or if it’s the adapters for his dual DVI slots, either way he needs new ones because it’s close to impossible to read anything on those monitors, no wonder his eyes are getting pretty bad. He just got notification of a $200 credit card payment as his new “minimum balance” on the $2500 card. That’s going to fuck up his plans but I’m sure with a little work he’ll be able to handle it.
Bella finally decided to eat something, I managed to get her to eat a little bit of the meatloaf I put down, I had to put some cheese on it to even get her interested in it. This is probably the downside to animals living in an Italian household. She won’t touch anything unless it’s got some kind of marinara sauce and mozzarella cheese on it..heh.
Drug Rehab
Tuesday, June 12th, 2007I’m to a point now that any chance for talking about drug rehab, I kind of jump on so I can get it’s importance out there. I’ve lost too many people to addiction to not have some sort of a passion for it. I came across a new site for addiction treatment this morning. I found it kind of interesting because it’s not the typical center. Most centers have people doing things based on what they learned out of a text book.
At Stone Hawk they know quite a bit about addiction because they were once addicted themselves. They program they work with, Narconon, worked for them when other programs failed.¬† It’s probably one of the most successful programs in the country because of their 76%+ success rate. It breaks down to basically 3 out of every 4 people who graduates from their program leaves clean and stays clean. It’s an alternative to the 12-step program, one that seems rather interesting.¬† You should consider checking it out if you or someone you know needs treatment.
Spend a little … get a lot!
Sunday, June 10th, 2007Baby and I were on a mission today, to cool down the office. In my head I knew the more affordable method would be to get some fans and place them in the room at the proper angles. He had a completely different idea in his head and $90 later, there’s now a shiny new air conditioner in our window. It’s working rather nicely at the moment, neither of us is dying of heat exhaustion anymore – there’s always an upside to that. Not even Bella is panting because she’s nice and cool in here, it works out very well for everyone.
The bedroom has a few new fans. We do have central air conditioning, but even with the central air, computers do need some source of a heat break. The bedroom is a completely different story. It doesn’t get that hot in there at night because even the television is LCD so that doesn’t give off any kind of heat. Our resident space-heater is Bella so there’s no real control there. When the air conditioner is on with the fan above us, it’s still a little bit warmer than I’d like so we got a big 16″ oscillating fan to put at the foot of the bed and for those nights when the air conditioning isn’t on and the window is open, we have a small box fan so that Bella can still have her window seat and we can still get our much needed air.
The bitch is gone for the moment, her and Karen headed down to Ocean City to hang out for the evening. There’s the chance that Karen picked someone up last night and they’re more than likely going to see him tonight. I hope she’s safe and enjoys herself, but in the end I’m just happy the bitch is gone. She stinks to holy heaven, I don’t think she showers regularly she kind of bathes in perfume, the house reeks of that on top of the smoke. Poor princess is in the living room barely able to breath at this point, even Candy doesn’t look too pleased. It’s freaking bull shit.
I’m gonna get back to work. I’m finally throwing some free templates together for blog-ideas.net so I can get that up and running soon, I also have some things to do for curvy-chick.net as well. Should be a busy day. I’m waiting on emails back from clients so once those come in I’ll wind up switching my attention over to income, not personal stuff.
Technorati: Air Conditioning, Unwanted House Guest, Animal Health, AGn Designs, Blog Ideas, curvy-chick.net
WhoGets.com
Friday, June 8th, 2007If you’re poking around the internet looking for new and interesting resources (they’re rare these days, trust me) there’s a site named whogets.com that may be right up your alley. It’s a completely free website (that’s also spam free) that’s offering you the chance to win a huge array of prizes in their online contests. The contest prize values range from $10 to $600 and will be displayed in each contest. The contests are open exclusively to members of whogets.com, it’s free to join just sign up! Once you’re a member you can enter each contest for free via the website. There’s nothing to buy, no offers to complete and you’ll never receive any spam emails. Hundreds of contents, many different rounds to participate in, it just keeps building from there. If you’re interested in joining a new fast pace and fun site that will give you CASH for absolutely no money down then whogets.com is the way to go. Sign up now!
It’ll be a GREAT day for someone…
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007PPP is still running their Tuesday prizes. I never got my hands on anything in April, nor have I in May so I’m not even going to bother looking for todays opportunity. They’re giving away a Sony 50″ Grand WEGA LCD HDTV and while that seems like a great prize, I don’t have anywhere to put the thing unless I get rid of the boyfriend heh. I’m not lucky enough to get my hands on gifts like these anyway, even if I did happen to find the opportunity – I’d be too slow about it and wouldn’t get it anyway.
I heard that last weeks op was up for an hour before someone took it. I’m having a small issue with PPP at the moment though. I understand it’s very popular but there are opportunities listed that aren’t accepting any more blogs. And while it’s great that the advertiser got his moneys worth – it’s hard for posties to actually find a listing that they’re eligible for. I don’t mind doing the $5 listings, I do mind that there aren’t even any of those available. I seriously think that PPP should consider altering their database so that if all posts are already taken – the opportunity is removed from the public listing. But hey, that’s just the programmer in me talking. It’s not like it would be hard to code, I just don’t understand the point in teasing people with ops that they can’t even do.
I don’t know, I’m sure eventually they’ll do something about it – who knows.
Everyone POUNCES on the $10+ ops and while those are great to get, most of the time it’s based on topics that NO ONE would naturally speak about without getting paid. While I admit to enjoying paid blogging, I also make it a point to only have an opinion about topics of interest to me. Someone asked me recently if I would have had the same opinion on something if I wasn’t being paid about it and I can honestly say that yes I would. Before I was involved in paid blogging, I was writing up product reviews for everything that I personally found interesting/helpful, there’s nothing wrong with getting something out of it, but that doesn’t mean the payment is altering my views on things either.
Nothing to do … and I hate it!
Monday, May 28th, 2007I slept rather late today but that’s based on the fact that I’m not feeling very well. I don’t know if it was the food or the booze from last night but my head and my stomach are both screaming at me right now. I’m having trouble concentrating because Bella insists on being right on top of me so that’s just another thing adding to my list of annoyances.
I don’t have any design work to do today, that’ll give me enough time to get some work done on the June template, do some posting on curvy-chick and maybe get my ass in gear on blog-ideas.com, I should really get some templates together for it but I think the actual site content would be more important than the give-aways anyway.
I find it hard to get myself in gear on free templates, with all of the templates I create and don’t bother to use you’d think it would be easier to change the PDF and .zip it up with a small screen shot on the site but I guess I’ll get that all taken care of sooner or later.
I have some email and shit to go through, guess I should get that done.
ThePiggyBanker.com
Saturday, May 26th, 2007There’s a site called thepiggybanker.com where they offer you the Highest CD Rates, the Best money market rates, savings, credit cards and bank promotions. One of their featured savings accounts is FNBO Direct because they offer a 6.00% APY Savings rate on all balances until September 28, 2007. It’s one of the highest rates available for both CD and savings accounts.
ThePiggyBanker.com is currently running a $50 blog giveaway. To enter, all you have to do is write a post about it. It’s really quite simple. Just visit their site for the best CD rates, savings accounts, money market, credit card deals and bank promotions. They’ve a pretty valuable resource – I spent quite some time surfing around the site to learn more about some credit cards and accounts they’ve featured in their articles – you should check them out.
Chat Rooms
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007I know people who for years have remained active in chat rooms. Everything from your basic AOL rooms to your world-based Yahoo chat rooms. There’s a newer site on the ‘net that offers free chat rooms. It’s called wireclub.com.
I did some surfing around the site and found a few rooms of interest. The cool thing about this site is it’s kind of an ‘all-in-one’. You can also host a blog here, it’s also known for being a free dating site. It’s, to some degree, a newer twist on a myspace kind of a site. You can talk with other members, browse profiles, create friends lists, view picture galleries and blog. It’s completely free so if you’re looking to get involved with a new up and coming site, check out wireclub.com.
There are many social networking sites popping up around the internet, some of them look really interesting while a few of them are most likely going to be belly up sometime in the next year. Based on how popular and active wireclub.com seems to be at the moment, it’s safe to say this site may be around for a while. Sign up today, get yourself into something good from the get go, it’s kind of cool when you can be considered one of the senior members on a site, depending on how popular it gets of course.
