May 2007 Archives

Although I use Sitemeter and Z-Extreme counters on my site, every once in awhile I check awstats to see how people are getting to my site as well as what the searches are. I have almost as many image search hits from google as I do keyword. That is amazing.

Here are the biggest keyword phrases that lead people here.

I suppose I need to find the entries that have those phrases in them and put google ads right smack in the middle of them or something. Perhaps I will have time this afternoon. It certainly wouldn't hurt...

Here is the list of biggest referrers to my site (for the month of May) not including the search engines.

With the Boy leaving for boot camp in a few weeks, the wife has laid claim on his laptop while he is away. That was quick. I guess I shouldn't complain as I am going to temporarily snag his 19" LCD. I say temporarily because he worked very hard for it a couple of years ago and bought it with the proceeds of a summer's work.

Anyway, I will have to get to the laptop at least once or twice. I have some software to install, including a tracking package, and I also want to pop some extra Dell Memory in as well.

I found directions over at Lifehacker about how to make your own airhorn in about five minutes. Cool. I could have used one of those last night at the graduation. I was the one hooting and hollering when my son's name was called. The don't call me a dumbass redneck for nothing.

There is apparently a new variant of a Skype worm that is targeting just about anyone on an infected user's contact list in AIM,ICQ,Messenger,Miranda,MSN,Trillian (which uses all of the above) and Yahoo.

Be very careful when clicking on links that anyone has sent you via IM. I use Trillian as well as Skype, but not very often.

I have used a few color picker programs over the years, and downloaded Ades Design Color Picker 2.0 the other day to try it out. There are a few different reasons that I have used color pickers before. One is for web pages. When I designed my template for this site, I purchased a banner and a basic template for a web page, but then I had to convert it to a movabletype template and create a few pages that of course never existed in the original template. I used my banner header to set the basic color screen and had to use a color picker to get just the right shades so that it would all piece together well.

I have also used color pickers when making new skins for Windowblinds and DesktopX. I always want to make sure that the various elements fit together properly just like I do when working on my web site.

Color Picker 2.0 is pretty cool. It is small and lightweight. It runs in the system tray, and while just sitting there it was only using 2560k of memory. Pretty minuscule with the amounts of memory in today's computers. There are several options that you can set in color picker as shown in the shot below.

While in Demo mode only RGB is available, but the program is available for purchase for $9.90 and get the rest of the features unlocked, such as getting HTML color codes.

Here is a shot of the actual program at work.

To activate the program you can right-click the icon, or use the ctrl-shift-a hotkey at which point the little viewfinder with color codes pops up. To get it to go away you just have to right-click the desktop.

Overall the program does exactly what it is supposed to and does it well. Although there are plenty of free color-pickers out there this one offers a few more options than most and is well worth the $9.90 that it costs. You can find out more information about Color Picker as well as some other cool programs at AdesBlog.com

You know, I just don't see chasing after my dog and shoving this thing under his butt. I would rather use the inside out bad around the hand if I am someplace that needs to be kept clean. That way it gets dumped in the trash and no need to clean up the equipment before getting back in the car or returning home...

I ran across this link at Paul Spoerry's site the other day and wanted to post it. Apparently as scientifically advanced as we are, evolution is less accepted in the United States as it is in other western countries.

Over the last 20 years we have moved to a much more fundamentalist Christian attitude and a large percentage of people say that they don't know whether to believe evolution or not. What's not to believe and who says that God and evolution can't coexist? It's not as if it's not a proven theory and for those among us that think that the word "theory" equates with "guess", get a clue.

Not literally. I have actually started to like it now that I can configure it to not look so out of place on my sidebar.

The part that is a drag is when it goes to load, sometimes it will take a few seconds and the rest of the sidebar has to wait until it finally loads. What a PITA.

Technorati : Twitter.

Sponsored by Zofunk.

These iPod cases from Zofunk are pretty nice from what I can tell. They are specially for the iPod Video and are very slim, only 1mm thick. They also allow you to put your iPod on the universal dock without removing it from the case, which is an issue I have with my iPaq as well as my wife and daughter's current iPod cases. Check out these screenshots.

This is Sponsored by MOCOspace Mobile Communities.

I used to hang out in Chatrooms a lot on AOL back when it was the cool thing to do, and on IRC quite a bit. I have pretty much moved away from that because I am usually so busy that when I am at home I try to stay productive on my sites. If I could take a decent app with me then I might use it more often.

In steps Moco, a mobile chatroom which you can use on your phone. You can access MocoSpace on your mobile phone's web browser by going to www.mocospace.com Here is a screenshot.

It's a pretty cool little app which requires no installations and can be used wherever you go. My browser is somewhat limited since Verizon lags behind the rest of the world in web access, but I did connect to it on my iPaq. I can use it here or in the yard on my wifi connection, or away from the house using bluetooth to dial up through my phone. I enjoyed using it and the response time was also pretty quick for me, which was nice because occasionally my iPaq-Phone combination can be quite laggy..

This review has been sponsored by Quibblo.

Before I sat down to review Quibblo I decided to take the site for a little test drive to see what they were all about. Quibblo is a fairly new site that lets you set up polls, surveys and quizzes and publish them to your MySpace or Facebook page (or any other web page for that matter). I've used a couple of survey sites here before so I figured I would check it out and see how it does.

Sign up is certainly a snap. You enter your info as well as some captcha text, which I got on the second try. I hate captchas but sometimes they are necessary. I may even be re-implementing them here again pretty soon as I am getting tired of the comment spam. Anyway, after that they send you a confirmation email where you click the link. Pretty standard stuff. After that you have to enter your real name, birth date, and where you live.

Before creating a quiz I figured I would take a look around. You can find existing quizzes by searching, getting a random pick, browsing all of them, or by tag. They have a little tag cloud with the popular keywords on the main page. They also list the most popular quizzes there as well. Here's a pic of the main page.

OK, time to create a quiz. Actually after looking through the popular quizzes I decided to snag one of the existing ones. There are options to publish these to your site as well. They have code that includes Javascript, plain old html (for non-myspace), HTML for MySpace sites, and just the link. And since it fits in quite well with my site and the posts I have been putting up over at Eric's site while he is overseas, I decided to use "Am I going to Hell?"

The site also lets you customize the style, so if that is working it should fit right into the theme of my site. I didn't bother looking up the exact color codes from my style sheet, so they may be off slightly. Over all I like the site so far. The quizzes are certainly much more customizable than previous ones that I have used where I hoped that the widgets would fit into my site design. Most likely I will be using Quibblo.com again.

Not like Lawyers and Money.

I had to visit the doctor on Wednesday. Over the last twelve months or so I have started to notice some changes at my doctor's offices. They are no longer carrying around the bulky charts and file folders anymore. Now everyone is carrying laptops connected wirelessly. Nurses, doctors, heck probably even the janitor. You can tell it's a new system because usually it takes them longer to get information entered or find the patient than it did using paper, but that is just something they will get used to with repetition.

It's not infallible though, or at least it could be better integrated, as I posted in that last entry. My lymph nodes are swollen and I have a sore throat so my doctor wanted to prescribe an antibiotic to clear it up. At first she was going to prescribe a Z-Pack. That's that five day pack of kick ass antibiotics that kills anything. Problem is that you can't take it while taking Vytorin, my cholesterol medicine. I found that out the hard way last year. When I said something about it you could tell she was getting all flustered because the computer didn't tell her that. She found the information, but all it says is that you can't take them together but gives no side-effects. I told her about those. It was like doing a bunch of cheap speed. I felt like I was having a heart attack, got weak and fuzzy headed. A six hour head rush. It was not good, particularly since I was at work the first day.

Any way, I suppose it depends on what software you are using in your EMR (Electronic Medical Records) system but something designed to make it easier ought to make it easier for them and spit out information like that. They have my meds in the system, but not the dosages (I switched doctors a couple of months ago). I have to take that information to them on the next visit. It's about time for my bi-yearly blood work anyway so I will take that information in when I go for my return visit.

Being a technogeek I like the idea behind using EMRs but the implementation seems to be difficult for some of the guys to get used to particularly in a paper environment. We have the same issue moving to a paperless environment with my company. The COO has a laptop that he has never used. His secretary prints his emails out for him daily so he can take them with him when he goes out in the restaurants. Pretty funny actually.

* Cross Posted at www.theapp.net

...since I have been over to CouponChief, but I always find something cool when I am there. This post IS sponsored by CouponChief.com

The reason I like going over there is that whenever I am shopping for something on the Internet, I want to find the best deal that I can. CouponChief always has great coupons and coupon codes for me to use. For instance with Mother's Day coming up I know that I need to get my something. I don't know what yet but they have some pretty good deals for ProFlowers at the site like a free vase and six free roses with the purchase of a dozen Mother's Day Roses.

One place that I like to look for stuff is at Overstock. We found a 19" flat screen for my son about three years ago for less than $400. At the time that was great. With coupons from CouponChief you can get free shipping on orders over $50, up to 75% off on watches, and great deals on jewelry. The wife doesn't wear a lot of jewelry, so that option is out but if it weren't that's where I would go.

Dammitall. My site was down when I tried to post that last one. It was about 1:15 this morning, so I am just going to bed and will look at it when I wake up if I have time before I go see my doctor.

Looks like it's back up. That's cool. I'll post these and hit the sack.

I figured I would try something a little new here. I signed up for the free Zookoda service which lets me offer a digest of my site postings daily, weekly, and maybe even monthly. Of course RSS is available, and I am even subscribed to several different RSS feeds, but I never seem to read them even though they are right there in Outlook, which is always open.

I do however, get daily digests from a few different groups I am a member of, and I at least skim over them and sometimes actually pay enough attention to read them. The link to the daily digest subscription is to the right, along with different RSS feeds.

I think the biggest reason that I DON'T read feeds is the interaction. I enjoy going to the different sites. That is part of the blogging experience for me.

Whatever. If you are interested sign up. It will give you once per day (if it works correctly) basically what is in my RSS feed for the day in a nicely formatted email and you can click the links if you want to read the entire post.