October 5th, 2006
Firefox 2 is out now for downloading and I'm very happy with all the new features of the browser. The one thing that was driving me nuts is I didn't have my yahoo toolbar because it's not compatible with firefox 2. I changed that. Here you can download the latest yahoo toolbar that will install on firefox2.
http://www.litfuel.net/plush/files/yahootoolbar-1.3.0_us.xpi
enjoy.
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July 29th, 2006
So I just had a birthday recently and got some gift cards. One of the gift cards was to boaters world, which sell marine supplies. There isn't one all that close to me so I was hoping to be able to use this gift card online. After not finding any information on their website I decided to call....
"ring ring ring"
Hello? May I have your name and telephone number please?
me: actually I just had a quick question...
me: I got a gift card as a gift and I was wondering if I can use it online or over the phone?
You have gift card? (puzzled)
me: yes, a gift card to boaters world.
So you buy at store?
me: ummm no, I received it as a gift. I don't know where it came from
So you got the gift card at the store? (still puzzled)
me: ummm no, I just said I got it as a gift
hmmm so which store did you get it from?
me: (thinking WTF lady) did you hear when I said I got it as a gift and I don't know?
well you'll have to use it at the store you got it from
me: (click hang up)
seriously people wtf
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May 25th, 2006
Apparently my tech dogs either don't want me to work or they're trying to pick up a little laptop and ajax time.
Note the big dog seems to like AJAX books and the little beagle dog seems to go for the mac laptop and wifoo book.
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March 28th, 2006
I'm suprised I haven't seen any sites dedicated to "adsense bombing" yet. As I was looking at my adsense stats today I noticed it was particularly higher than most days as far as clicks. Which lead me to a thought about having a site called "Make Them Rich". On this site you would just have a link to a site-of-the-day where everyone is encouraged to click on that site's google ads. Through viral word of mouth if you had half a million people visiting per day each following the creedo of clicking on the site of the day's adsense ads you'd have one shocked person to find 500,000 clicks and a 100% click through rate the next morning :)
some thoughts...
1. would google actually pay them ?
2. if so, might be nice to do it for charity sites or helpful sites like tutorial sites, etc.
3. would google attempt to seek legal action?
4. If it were to become large enough you could actually skew statistics for the entire online advertising sector
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January 27th, 2006
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January 22nd, 2006
I was bored this weekend and wrote a little firefox extension called "popTart" that I plan on expanding upon. Its only 5K at the moment, very small. The first two features are:
1. When you enable poptarts's frame it will load an iframe at the bottom of your browser so when you click on a news item it loads in the frame below, not a new tab or a new window. Allowing you to stay on the same page and read the article while you decide if you want to digg it or not
2. Go NAKED! The naked digg option makes everything invisible except the main page of the news titles and summaries. Notice I left the google adsense bar. I felt it would be a dis-service to the developers who work hard on the site not to have people clicking on the banners. So I have no plans on making the google ads invisible.
I plan on adding support for Fark and Slashdot in the near future as well as being able to use your right/left arrow keys to page through Digg (thanks for the suggestion Emil!)
Here is where you can install:
Here are some screenshots:
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December 24th, 2005
Thank you allofmp3.com for doing things right.
What are your choices for "legal" online music these days? iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody to name a few top players. How do they like to deliver your music? Through proprietary encoding formats that cannot be played in the devices you want it played in. I figured by now these asshats would have gotten it right as allofmp3 does. Give me a choice of kbs and the format I want it in, mp3 for example, and leave me the hell alone. Don't tell me I can only burn your song 5 times, don't tell me I cannot transfer my song anywhere I want and don't charge me the same amount of money as a real CD.
A album in a store costs around $10.00 on average, an album online costs $10.00. Ummm seriously people WTF? How about passing the savings on to the consumer? No packaging, distribution costs, art design...all you have to do is push some cover art and a file. You still expect me to believe it still costs $10.00 an album? Online music will continue to suck until they come up with a realistic model of purchasing music. I don't mind buying music, but don't tell me how I can use it. I buy a cd in a store and I can play it wherever I want. I can burn it to mp3s and transfer them wherever I want. THATS WHAT WE WANT. Don't waste money on programmers to come up with clever DRM techniques to use. If you charged reasonable prices and gave me mp3s you wouldn't have the piracy problem you have today. You were late to the market and now you're still reactive, not proactive and you will continue to lose. Suing your customers is ludicrous, nice work on that. I guess when you have more lawyers than talent this is what we get(thanks harvard).
So far I've spent around $200 on allofmp3.com and love every minute of it. If you take it away from me, then I'll go back to file sharing.
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October 17th, 2005
I've spent the last two weeks probably reading 400+ blogs from local individuals and I've come up with a revelation. Wow, they suck. Considering how much weight google gives blog in search rankings you would think there would be more relevant sites out there. Around 350 of the sites were just people talking about what they ate for dinner or what they did on saturday night. I'm sure its a good outlet for some people, like an online diary of sorts that anyone can read however do we really need these clogging up search results?
I believe Goolge will be its own demise of sorts with the introduction of adsense and making links from blogs and blog content rank so highly. Why you ask? Right now there are millions of webmasters creating useless content just to kick up adsense revenue or try and get high SEO rankings with nothing more than a paragraph and a bunch of adsense ads. The internet is being flooded by directory sites, useless content, blog spam. When people create content targeted at getting high keyword ad placement does it really help out the end user? Does it really help out the advertiser? Probably not however I'm not sure I have a well thought out enough alternative. Adsense is by far the best program out there however if you've noticed the irrelavant results on google lately you'll know what I mean.
To me the keys to a good blog are:
1. Unique thoughts/content - The more unique your blog the more valuable it will be in the search game. Are you working on a special project? writing unique tutorials? reviewing unique devices? or are you just re-posting the same things 10,000 other bloggers just talked about?
2. Monitoring comments - are you active on your comment monitoring? All comments should be filtered if they contain a link or a link to a homepage. Random image (captcha) verification should be used for all posted comments. (I get around 1000 posts a day from poker sites but 0 make it through). Make sure comments are related to the topic being discussed.
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October 13th, 2005
Yesterday's Photoshop class was about photo retouching and I went home and tried to put my skills to use.. not bad for the first shot I think. I'll post a tutorial up this week on how I was able to do this in 15 minutes pretty easily. Photoshop tutorials are a pain so give me some time ;) Basically what I did was use the spot healing brush to remove several freckles and blemishes, then, whitening the teeth with a saturation layer after selecting the teeth only, then duplicate the layer, add a MEDIAN filter at 19pixels (filter->noise->median), set that opactity to 50%, then clicked on the layer mask and painted in black the areas I didn't want blurred such as the eyes, mouth, hair, etc. This is what I gots.
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October 12th, 2005
Soooooooooo we have a guy at my work doing photoshop lessons during lunch this week and yesterday was photo retouching. Photoshop CS just rocks. I learned a few new tips and tricks that will definatley help out with my photos. Here's the best one I learned.. working with levels. When you add a level adjustment layer, hold down the ALT key while moving the triagles left to right and you'll see things getting highlighted. Those are areas of detail you're going to lose. Just keep moving them until you cut out what you want and stop when your subject starts to get cut off.
Here is an AMAZING before/after photo retouch -> roll your mouse over it
http://www.graphic-design.com/Photoshop/beauty_retouching/rollover.html
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