June 2007 Archives

John Chow, the dude that knows how to make money online, is hosting another contest in conjunction with BlueFur.com who is trying to get the word out that they are hosting Canada by giving away a 24" LG LCD Monitor. Sweet. All you have to do is head on over to johnchow.com, read the rules, and enter the damn contest. How much more simple could it be?

This is sponsored by PhotoFiddle, the company that lets you turn your photos into some seriously kick-butt canvas artwork. Just pick out your photos, upload them and review, crop the stuff that you don't want, check out your artwork and order the stuff. How much more simple can it get?

Here's the latest press release from PhotoFiddle:

Photographers, from pros to point & shoot alike, can now artistically enhance their digital pics and traditional photos into stylized photo art masterpieces on professionally stretched canvas using dozens of easy-to-create artistic designs, finishes and collage templates, online at www.PhotoFiddle.com.

From table size to wall size, PhotoFiddle.com can transform a simple digital photo in seconds into a dazzling array of art styles, from watercolor and pop art to a black and white line drawing or oil painting. PhotoFiddle.com is a fun way to become an instant artiste and add a creative flair to individual photos or collages. And, it's a compelling alternative to custom designers and professional framers who are far more costly and take weeks to deliver.

PhotoFiddle.com is easy to use, takes only a few minutes for a design, and doesn't require any creative expertise, software purchase or program knowledge. Unlike some of the well known photo and art programs, 'PhotoFiddlers' simply register and follow four easy steps 1, Uploading a picture to the site from a digital camera or scanned image, 2. Cropping and reviewing the art, 3. Choosing a design for PhotoFiddle to apply the photo, which can be previewed before 4. Ordering. Final artwork is available on professionally stretched canvas, framed or rolled canvas or museum quality, archival photo paper.

Among the most popular of the more than 50 PhotoFiddle designs and templates are:
- Pop Art
- Stained Glass
- Pencil Sketches
- Tinted
- Painting
- Collage designs
- Comic Book
- Filmstrip

PhotoFiddle allows users to experiment with different template designs without paying any setup fees in the convenience in their own home. Users can even email copies of the custom artwork for preview by family, friends, and associates before ordering.

Gallery art canvas and archival photo paper sizes are available from a simple 8" x 10" to as large as 6 ft. x 24 ft. The company offers live customer support during normal business hours, and an online tutorial for standard questions or creative input on projects.

Whether it's a memento from a recent vacation, an old picture that's been stuck in a draw for decades, or a bunch of 4x6 album photos that can be brought to life in a striking photo collage, PhotoFiddle canvas artwork is an ideal gift for anniversaries, weddings, or as an elegant accoutrement to home décor. Gift certificates are also available.

About PhotoFiddle
PhotoFiddle, headquartered in Melville, New York, offers 3-4 day turnaround on customized photo art that users design online, at far less cost than custom framers or home design professionals. For more information visit: www.PhotoFiddle.com.

Examples of Photofiddle.com work:
http://www.emediawire.com/prfiles/2005/05/18/242325/paintingstyles2.pdf

...and here are a couple of examples...

That's pretty cool. But how do people or animals look?

I was pretty impressed checking out the website. You can order something as simple as an 8" by 10" or a behemoth as large as 6ft by 24ft. Holy cow! The also have live tech support during normal business hours, so go check it out and give them a chance.

It appears as if my damn site is down again. It's 6:54PM right now, let's see how long it will take before I am back online. Damnitall. I hate when things don't go just the way they are supposed to in my world. It's my frigging Internet and needs to behave properly.

That was weird. I can get to it now, so it was only down for a few minutes. Maybe they had to reboot the server. Weird time to be doing that crap though. It's extremely laggy though.

If you got an error posting a comment, it looks like I couldn't get to the SQL server either for a couple of minutes there.

I just upgraded the site to the latest beta version, so if everything is hosed up that's why :)

Crossposted to all the sites.

This is sponsored by AimPromote On-Demand Lead Management, a leading provider of marketing integration tools.

Anyone familiar with CRM and customer relationship management knows that it can be tricky to get the right package for their business. CRM software is generally top heavy, complex and confusing to the very people that have to use it. The great majority of customer relationship management software packages that are available today for enterprise solutions don't have as much benefit for the people using it as they don't understand it or even use most of the features.

AIMpromote gets rid of the hard parts for sales teams and allows them to learn the features quickly and easily so that they can actually USE the software. AIMpromote also offers a 14-Day full featured trial which should be more than enough time to fully appreciate the power in this software package.

One of the things that is really nice for supervisors is that they can set it up so that only the team leaders have access to all features and members of the sales team will only be able to access the parts that are pertinent to what they are doing. This leads to much less confusion as they will only see the parts that are actually going to be used in day-to-day operations.

Check out AIMpromote and sign up for their 14-Day free trial to see why AIMpromote is a technology leader in sales lead management.

It's been about an hour and a half since I first called Charter so I figured that I would call back. Their computers answer in fucking Spanish now apparently. I don't even get the press one for Spanish press two for english any more. Just some fucking Spanish and then about three minutes of cheesy porn music, then the loop starts again. I swear I am about ready to put my head through the wall before I have to listen to any more of it.

What's with this bullshit anyway. Did Charter get bought out by the Mexicans when I wasn't looking and they just forgot to tell me about it? I'm half tempted to get a land line again just so that I can go back to DSL. The only reason I got rid of it in the first place was because I didn't need the phone any more but they won't let you have DSL without it. If it means I get to speak to someone that actually grew up speaking English and actually lives here I may just do it.

I finally just hung up and called information back to get a different city listing. Yeah, this time I get the English computer. Thank goodness.

I ended up taking the laptop down and after a few resets was able to connect. About fucking time...

I have mentioned a couple of times recently that I am starting to look for a new web host for several different reasons, the first being bandwidth and CPU usage. I still don't know if I am going to switch or not but I have found a couple of different providers that I am looking into one of which is Host Arcadia, who is also sponsoring this review.

Host Arcadia has a couple of really good plans that I am looking at. One of the things that really interests me is that their biggest plan, Zion, has 2.5 times the bandwidth that I currently get from my provider for less than half the price. The also let you pay a yearly rate. At $130 a year for the biggest plan, that's what I pay for five months at my current provider.

The starter plan that they offer which is good for most folks is only $3 a month but you have to pay for that one a year at a time, so it's $36. Not bad at all. In addition to the extra space and bandwidth you get from their hosting plans, Host Arcadia also throws in webmail, unlimited email accounts, unlimited MySQL databases,cpanel, and Fantastico.

They also have a pretty nice affiliate program that I am going to be looking into as well. If you are interested in web hosting or reselling you can get in touch with them at 1-845-784-1614. They are running a pretty nice Grand Opening Reseller Promotion as well at $9.95 a month for 3GB space, 80GB bandwidth, cpanel and Fantastico along with unlimited hosted domains.

I also like the fact that their servers are hosted in Atlanta. Being a southern boy myself I prefer to use things that are "local" although that pretty much doesn't matter now except for the fact that my current provider is either somewhere out west or in the northeast and occasionally I have DNS issues with them.

This post is sponsored by IDrive-E. IDrive-E is a supplier of online backup services. I have been getting interested in online backup suppliers over the last couple of months and have reviewed a couple of them as well. IDrive is one of the leading suppliers and offers free backup space up to 2GB without any kind of bandwidth or file restrictions. This could be pictures, documents, or even music. They also offer the option to upgrade to the paid plan, IDrive-E Pro as well. The pro plan is only $4.95 a month or $49.50 a year and offers unlimited storage space.

I went ahead and signed up for the free plan for the time being so that I could check it out. Sign-up is easy, Name, user name, password, email address, and a captcha gets you started at which point you download the application, which is about 7 megs. The install ran pretty much flawlessly under Windows Vista. During the install you pick an encryption password with which your files will be encrypted, so don't forget it as you won't be able to recover your files without it.

After you have picked the password it will prompt you to restart your computer. It's not required to use the IDrive-E interface but if you want to use mapped drives and Windows Explorer it is. Using the IDrive interface is fairly easy. You just pick the files that you want to backup, and either schedule a backup, or tell it to backup right now. I went ahead and did a manual backup and decided to store some pictures. I am sure that I have more than two gigs of photos on this computer but will store as many as I can. Here's a shot of the main interface.

Once I picked Backup Now it scans the files...

...and then starts the Online Backup. Apparently I did have less than two gigs. I had forgotten that I have not put all of my pictures back on here since I rebuilt my PC earlier in the year...

Overall it is a pretty cool service and a nifty companion app. I am considering signing up for the pro service. I am interested in seeing how well I can access my media files online as I may install this on my media center. I have close to 800Gb of videos and movies and it would be nice to be able to free up some of that space here. If it's fast enough I may just use them via a mapped drive.

I'm not a real huge multi-player game fan although I've played my share of death matches, but my son is. As a matter of fact he really enjoys World of Warcraft. One link I sent him recently was to Joana's Horde Leveling Guide. It's pretty cool and there's even a video with commentary that explains the whole deal. I have played in a couple of different MMORPGS and I can tell you that it's hard work to level quickly, but it can be done. The hardest part for me, particularly since I don't play a lot of online RPGs is that I never know who to talk to to find quests, or spend half my time just asking questions about how to do stuff. This guide takes care of those issues.

Technorati : Warcraft

One of the things I am really lousy about doing is sending greeting cards. I've got a box or two of Christmas cards tucked away in the closet that I bought several years ago that just seem to not get sent year after year. The same thing goes for birthdays, anniversaries, etc...What I have taken to doing the last couple of years is just sending online cards. With PictureSandbox Greeting Cards you can send your own "phreeting" (photo + greeting) that you have personalized like these.

With it being my day off I probably would have gotten started much earlier with my posting and some of the yard work I wanted to do, but when I got up this morning my connection was down. Once I got home from the doctor I fooled with it for a couple of hours, got frustrated and took a nap.

I finally got my connection going about three this afternoon and have been fairly busy ever since. Oh well. Hopefully tomorrow will be a fairly short day. I have a ton of stuff to do around the house to prepare for the party this weekend, and I also need to get my site fixed.

...breathing a sigh of relief. Good deal. I would have hated to lose my keyboard to a shitty replacement.

...after having spilled coffee on it yesterday morning. I thought I had snatched it off my desk fast enough and gotten everything wiped up but when i got home last night most of the keys on the right side were sticking. A little cleanup later..

The keys are drying right now. Hopefully everything will be slick once I get it back together. I hate the keyboard I am using right now. The keys feel mushy and everything is just slightly different which makes for a ton of freaking typing errors.

According to this article using black Google rather than white Google saves energy. Why's it always got to be about black and white any way? Damn racists... Anyway, that means my web site is saving you money every time you come here. You can send all extra proceeds to my Paypal account.

Even though I post quite often about skinning and Windows customization over at my tech site as well as here, one thing I don't talk about much and is one of the oldest ways to customize your desktop, is wallpaper. Just by changing your wallpaper you can change the entire feel of your working environment on the computer.

This review sponsored by vcars.co.uk is a web site where you can find all sorts of wallpapers and screensavers for download. Check out some of the Ford wallpapers and screensavers. This one is a pretty low res picture of the Ford GT40, but the full wallpaper is much better.

They also have plenty of other cars to choose from as well, such as the Mustang and the Iosis. I had never even seen an Iosis before I saw the wallpaper and it looks really sharp. I am hopefully getting a new car this fall, and that or the 'stang with the pony kit would just be too sharp.

As I mentioned before they also have screensavers. Check out this Ford Screensaver that is posted at Youtube.

That's pretty cool. I generally just stick with whatever generic screensaver is installed on my PC at the time, but those are pretty nice.

I have never used cars for my wallpaper before but some of these are pretty sharp. They also have a ton of other sweet makes and models aside from Ford to choose from, including Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Lamborghini, Hummers, Porsche, and quite a few more. If you are an auto enthusiast this is the place for you.

This is the Ford Iosis that I mentioned. It looks pretty sharp.

VCars sells Used Cars, and even though I am not currently looking for a used car, I do love the wallpapers. They are a network of 50 manufacturing specific websites that helps you find used cars in your area. They update the car listings daily, so there is always something new to look at.

Anyway, back to the wallpapers. Check out this Mustang wallpaper.

I have loved the Mustang ever since I was a little kid. My mom had one from the late sixties when I was small, and then had a Mustang II back in the seventies. A true muscle car. When I lived with some friends about twenty years ago, one of them had a very old baby blue Mustang convertible that I fell in love with.

My site must have been down today. 26 hits. Very strange..

I figured out why I was getting deleted files when I downloaded them through bulletproof ftp. There's a box in the advanced settings that I swear I have never seen before. "Delete files after successful download". Maybe it's just that the config location was moved. I've been using bpftp since win95 and have NEVER seen it before.

Now that I have figured that one out I am currently uploading all the files it has deleted :)

I have also upgraded to MT 4.0 Beta, so be prepared for the entire site to be hosed for awhile.

Asheville, North Carolina has become one of the nicer places to invest in property over the last few years for several different reasons. Set to the backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains it is beautiful all of the time. The weather is mild compared to other areas in the south, yet the winters are without the freezing cold that you would expect in a mountainous area. Here's a view of downtown Asheville.

Asheville is the largest city in western North Carolina with a population that hovers around 70,000. Big enough to be considered a city, yet small enough to know your neighbors and actually meet friendly people.

One of the more popular attractions in the area is Biltmore Estates, which attracts hundreds of thousands of people each year. Partly because of this, Asheville has quite a few of the conveniences of larger cities and a very high quality of living, without all of the mess and crime of bigger metropolitan areas. The Blue Ridge Parkway also runs through the area. I've ridden the parkway and it is particularly beautiful in the fall.

Webfooted.net offers the thoroughness of MLS property search integrated with Google Maps to make your search for property in the Asheville area a breeze. Here is an example of one of the locations on the map.

Pretty cool, wouldn't you say. One of the things that I think is so cool about all of the technologies in use on the Internet is how they are being mashed together to create useful tools such as this one in use by Webfooted.net. It makes it easier to locate available properties and if you are looking for luxury homes Asheville is the place.

Don't know if my site is down or not but I damn sure can't get to it right now. My connection went out completely but after a couple of refreshes and a reboot of my router I seem to be able to get back on, but can't access my site. What a pisser.

Still having some issues with it, but I seem to be able to get to my site now. It may be a problem with my DNS server.

...seems to be seriously dragging tonight. I know it certainly is taking my sidebar forever to load because Twitter is hanging. It's a cool little app but like blogcatalog also hangs sometimes I may end up dumping both if they don't increase their bandwidth.

Yeah, I know. Booorrrinnggg.

One thing I did install in the kitchen a couple of years ago was some temporary lighting on the top of my kitchen cabinets and hooked them to an X10 appliance module that would turn them on whenever it was dark and motion was detected in the kitchen. I know...pretty geeky stuff.

I do want to install some decent quality under cabinet lighting now though. I normally get up at 4:30 in the morning, and even with the accent lighting on top of my cabinets, that isn't enough and I generally have to turn on all of the lights in the kitchen just to make coffee. Some decent lighting underneath the cabinet (where the coffee maker is) should solve that.

I haven't had much of an opportunity lately to work on any of my home automation projects, but the next thing I want to do is start looking at Chandeliers for the dining room. I already have a bit of the kitchen/dining are wired up and right now I have a ceiling fan in there, but I am seriously considering replacing it with something I can control with my HA software. It may just have to wait until we get a new house, since the kitchen area and dining room are one big room and it gets pretty hot in there occasionally when we cook so I really need the fan some evenings.