John has noticed a specific behavior in Adsense and the Googlebot. This could possibly be used to our advantage.
I have only installed Adsense and it hasn’t really taken off for me, yet. So far, in 4 days, I have made just under $2. I’m intrigued to see how long it will take for it to make $100. This is the magic number in which google will give a pay out. Looks like I have a few months to go at this rate. Come on people, get to clicking. 
Many people, in the recent past, posted comments to this site saying that they would like a GMail account. Although I have an account and I do get the opportunity to give a few accounts away, I don’t have enough to give to all that want one. Well, for those of you that have been waiting for an account, a couple thousand accounts will become available for those of you that are quick enough to grab them. All you have to do is visit Kevin Rose’s site and take one at the specified times.
Event #1:
Friday September 3rd – 5:00PM PST
1,000 GMail InvitesEvent #2:
Tuesday September 7th
Between 4:00-5:00PM PST (Live on The Screen Savers)
1,000+ GMail Invites
So set your alarms and good luck. Get there quickly for these accounts will go fast.
In early March, I reported a great deal on Hitachi 4GB microdrives, via Creative Labs. Well, Thirsday of last week, I finally received mined after waiting nearly 2 months. It was well worth the wait.
Sunday evening, I got down to business and started to extract the innards of the Muvo. Getting to the microdrive was a little challenge for I didn’t have the right size screwdriver to remove the casing. I nearly stripped a screw (any more monkeying around with it would have left it unremovable) before I decided to just run down to WalMart and buy the proper sized tool. Once I had the proper tool, the job was a tad easier. When I finally removed the microdrive I replaced it with a Sandisk 512MB compactflash that I had picked up on sale late last year (I think I paid $80 a piece for them).
Putting the unit back together wasn’t too easy either. The screws that hold the internal circuit boards were so small that I could barely see them. I’m used to working with magnetic screwdrivers and I didn’t have one this time. So, trying to work with big fingers, trying to place a small screw into a hole against the inner wall of the case, proved to be a lesson in patience. Needless to say, I managed to get the job done.
Next step was to install the firmware on the newly modified Muvo. This was the easiest part of the whole process. I loaded some music on the Muvo and tried it out. Guess what? It worked like a charm. That was all I was able to do for Sunday night.
Monday evening I tried out the microdrive in my camera. Popped it in, formatted it, and started snapping pictures. I wanted to see how fast the microdrive was. With the Digital Rebel, I can snap off about 6 shots before the buffer fills and the camera starts taking pictures at a delayed pace. So I snapped off several groups of 6 or more shots and then waited to see how long it would take to save the buffer off to memory. I haven’t physically timed the process but it felt like 25 to 30 seconds for it to finish. Compared to my Lexar 512MB CompactFlash Pro 40X the microdrive is a little slower but it is acceptable.
I have also started shooting at full resolution, since I now have an abundance of space. I have taken about 170 pictures whose file sizes average around 2.5MB and the camera continues to tell me that I have 999 pictures left. I estimate that I can take about 1600 pictures on this microdrive before I have to download them to make more room.
So far, I’m VERY PLEASED WITH THE DARK DEAL. If you are interested in getting a microdrive for yourself then you better order now. As far as I know, there is still a great demand for the Creative 4GB Muvo^2.
Yes, that’s right, today is my one year anniversary writing on this blog. I owe many thanks to my brother for introducing me to this pastime. A year ago, I didn’t even know what a blog was, yet I was technically savvy. When I finally understood the idea of blogging, I knew how I could use it for my own purposes. Thus, here we are today.
It has been a knowledge filled year. I have read much content, visited many blogs, found new technology daily, basically, many hours have been spent glued to the computer throughout the year. Although I still have the passion to continue to blog, I find it hard to find the time to do it to the level in which I would like. This is not a bad thing, it only means that my son is growing up and needs his father to entertain him. But when he goes to sleep for the evening, I sneak off to my computer room/office to find things to write about. No worries all, I’m hooked to this hobby and I see myself hanging in there for at least another year, maybe two.
I have learned much this past year, keeping me in my true form, “Jack of all trades”. I have always been one to know just as much as I feel I need to know about things and then the rest bores me. If you haven’t noticed, that is basically my style of blogging. My appeal should captivate all that suffer from ADS, even though I don’t have the affliction. I have learned about blogs, at least enough to generate a somewhat steady stream of traffic to my site. I have learned about the various browsers out there, finally settling on Mozilla….I highly recommend Mozilla Firefox. I have learned about news aggregators; I wouldn’t be able to blog without one. I have learned a little bit about CGI, PHP, CSS, MovableType, and Gallery. I have started many other blogs/websites for work and fun. I have built a Linux machine, that I am currently experimenting with, and I am planning on buying an Apple laptop sometime this year. Without this site, I wouldn’t have accomplished or strived for so much.
I think the best thing about my blogging is that I have made some great friends and acquaintances online and I actually meet one of them in person. So all-in-all, it has been a great year. Let’s see what I can get into this year.
Ok, as some of you already know, I have taken my brother’s advice and broke down and bought a Tivo, two of them, as a matter of fact. I was lucky enough to get a special DirecTV special in which I bought the TiVos for $150 a piece and just yesterday I received the $50 rebate on each. The monthly DirecTV service is just under $50 which is comparable (and cheaper than) to the price I was paying for regular cable through Charter Communications. So, I actually picked up two TiVos for about $200 and I’m receiving the “same” minimal service as I did with cable. The great part is that I am being exposed to TV shows that I didn’t normally watch, because of the time they aired or because I didn’t know about them.
Each TiVo unit holds 35 hours of recorded programming and I think roughly 20 hours of new recording is done each week. A great percentage of the shows it records are reruns of things that I like; any type of Star Trek show (TNG, Enterprise, DS9, Original series), Sienfeld, Friends, Stargate SG-1, Sliders, MacGyver, these types of things. I’m sure that my good friends are not surprised here. There are some shows that I have always wanted to watch but just didn’t have the time or the enthusiasm to set the VCR. These are shows like; Tech Live, anything related to pool (Billiards), anything related to poker (Texas Hold’em), Fear Factor, Fresh Gear, The Screen Savers, things of that sort. There are also new shows that I have come across, like; The Thirsty Traveler, Pimp my Ride, Call for Help, Angels in America, and there are shows that I have heard about but never really watched, like Sopranos, Sex in the City, Law & Order. As you can see I’m using the TiVos pretty well. Whenever I go to my brother’s place I always find a show that I haven’t heard of, so I have a little bit of growing to do with TiVo.
I like the way that TiVo does most of the work for me. This is a great tool for the extremely busy person. Creating a “Season Pass” for a show allows the machine to record a complete season, and more, of programming. Your must see shows should be setup with a “Season Pass”. Now if you have a special interest like poker or pool, you can set up a “Wish List” and all you have to do is put in some keywords and TiVo will record any show that was those words in its description. I get a lot of poker shows this way.
What I don’t like so much about TiVo is that if you like a cooking show and decide to record one, TiVo will find all the cooking type of shows and record them for you. Some shows it decides are candidates for your interest are way out in left field. This problem usually happens when you first start using the TiVo. It tries to determine your interest based ion the type of things you watch. when I first used Tivo, I was watching the evening news and the very next day I had 6 new programs saved for me. I also viewed a couple shows like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune and it went ahead and recorded other shows like it. But I must say that as you use the machine, it does show that it has the ability to learn, and it starts to do a better job of selecting shows that you may possibly like.
Over all, I’m very pleased with my purchase. In fact, I find myself making time for TV again because of TiVo and that amount of time is considerably less than it would be had I not bought a TiVo. I can watch an hour show in roughly 40 minutes, skipping through commercials. I am still confident that PC TV recording will catch up to the abilities of Tivo and SnapStream claims to be getting closer with every release. TiVo also needs to provide a way to allow the owner to archive the recordings to DVD, hopefully we will see this feature in the near future. But without a doubt, this is truly the way TV should be watched.
I have recently reached the 100,000 mark in site visitors. This is a mark I really thought to be unreachable, at the early beginnings of this site. The last couple of weeks the hits have been coming in fast and furious, so I didn’t actually catch the momentous event. I do know that the 100,000th visitor was sent to me by Google, something about Janet Jackson!!! This month already, this site has seen more traffic than any 2 past months combined. This is a record month.
Thanks for your visits.
I have been wanting to make a list of the gadgets that I have purchased or plan to purchase, and some of the technologies that I am playing with. Hopefully, at some time this will evolve into something bigger, but I don’t know what direction it will take as of now. The following list, are things that I have recently bought or I am about to buy. I will also be writing some quick reviews about the items as I use them. So stay tuned for that.
One of my special projects, which I have already started, is to build a webserver. If I am successful with this project, I hope to host a few of my personal websites from it. So far, I have built a new machine for this webserver. It is an AMD 2400+ based machine with an Abit NF7-S motherboard, Corsair 512MB DDR400 PC3200 memory, Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160GB SATA Hard drive, there is also a brand new Maxtor 40GB hard drive that I had lying around that I put in there. I have purchased the Plextor 708A DVD burner and installed it in my main computer. I had a Plextor 40x CD burner in there and now it is in the webserver. This machine would make a nice computer for everyday use with a few more additions but my goal is to make a webserver with plenty of space. So far there is 200GB of space which should hold me for a little while. On this box I have installed Linux Red Hat. It is my first time using a Linux OS, so there is a learning curve there. It appears to be pretty easy to use so far. That is the first stage of my webserver project. The next step will be to install the Apache Webserver and install PERL. I will keep you all updated on my progress.
Sorry!!! My brother has reminded me that I forgot the TiVos. They are now added to the list and I will definitely do a write up on it. I am thoroughy enjoying them so far.
Tivo (2 of them) - Direct TV setup
Canon Digital Rebel
Lexar 512MB CompactFlash Pro 40X
Sandisk 512MB CompactFlash
Garmin Gecko GPS
Sony SuperSlim CyberShot
Mini iPod
WebServer
Maxtor 160GB SATA Hard drive
Plextor 708A 8X DVD burner
Red Hat Linux 9.0
Apache webserver
PERL
Hello! I’m back! After three weeks of vacationing in Bolivia, I have seen only a small portion of the countries beauty. We have started our journey in Cochabamba and then travelled to La Paz. From La Paz, we went back to Cochabamba for Christmas. Then on for New Year’s we went to Chapare, the Coca capital of Bolivia. We made it back to Cochabamba on the evening of Jan. 1, leaving me time to get all my souvenirs and luggage together, so I can fly home on Jan. 3. I had a wonderful time and I truly hope to make more trips to Bolivia in the future. Muchas gracias a la Familia de Lara por su hospitalidad graciosa.
I have roughly 2500 pictures from the trip. It will take me some time to sort through them and narrow it down to a manageable amount to put online somewhere. I’ll make an announcement when I have it all sorted out.
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Hello all! I am blogging on location in Cochabomba, Bolivia. My family and I arrived here Saturday morning after a long three legged trip. It was my son’s first time flying and he did pretty good for a 17 month old. He only screamed out, at the top of his lungs, for five minutes straight, twice. Of course it was when everyone was sleeping, but what can you do?
We are visiting many places here, my wife is showing me and my son the beauty of her birth land. By time I get back to Atlanta I should have visited 3 cities. Now, we are in Cochabomba, later this week we will be going to La Paz, and the week after that we will travel to Santa Cruz. I’m taking many photos as we travel and hopefully I will find a place to post a few. Tomorrow we will visit Christo de la Concordia. It is the giant statue of Jesus that stands on top of a mountain overlooking the city of Cochabomba. I expect to take some excellent pictures from there. I will post a favorite on this post later.
I don’t expect to be blogging much, eventhough I brought everything I need to do so. There just isn’t enough time. So consider me on vacation for the next couple of weeks and I will resume my regular posting when I get back to Atlanta in the new year. Happy Holidays to all.
Chau…
…I will be emailing if anyone wants to keep up with me. Be patient for a response.
John of John’s Jottings is celebrating his first anniversary of blogging. This is a site that I keep track off on a regular basis because there are usually things on it that I find of use. For John’s anniversary post he gives some stats on the status of his site. It is good to see the growth that John has gone through over the year. Do pay him a visit and send him some link-love.
I just came across an annoying popup that caught my attention. The heading says, “Win This System”. Then there is a picture of a pretty sweet looking computer setup. The system is labeled as a MACH 3.8 Personal SuperComputer. Now two things caught my attention about this ad; first is the monitor, it is undeniably the monitor that Liebermann’s Inc, GO-L is/was trying to sell, and second is the computer, from the picture it looks like the computer enclosure has a small (4 IN. DIAGONAL) monitor display on it. Well, I had to know a little more so I clicked on the ofical rules link and found this within the rules.
HOW TO ENTER ONLINE.First, you can visit Peel’s Free Internet website (”the Website”) and complete the online registration form. Be sure to include your name and e-mail address. You must update this information as necessary to remain eligible to win. You must also opt in to become a registered member of Peel, agree to co-register with Peel’s joint marketing advertisers (”Advertisers”) and agree to accept e-mail messages from Peel and its Advertisers as a condition of such membership.
PRIZES:
Grand Prize (1 Winner)- NEC GO-L.COM COMPUTERTotal number of prizes=1 Total approximate value of $7799.99 for all pieces in total. The winner will be e-mailed they have won and can e-mail back to us at contactus@peel.com to redeem their prize.
According to the rules, there is nothing that you have to do except fill out their form and give them your email address. The sweepstakes began Sept 24, 2003 and a winner is suppose to be drawn on October 1, 2004. I don’t plan to enter their contest but this ad along with an email I received a few weeks ago from Liebermann Inc. is making me wonder what is going on with this “company”. The email stated that Liebermann Inc. was going to COMDEX or some type of show like COMDEX and was going to be exhibiting their products for all to see. The email was an invitation to witness their existence. I didn’t see any mention of complimentary air travel so I declined the offer. I haven’t seen any news about their presence at the show and I only halfheartedly looked for that news. That was the last I have heard of the company until now.
If anyone knows about this company and what they are up to, please let me know.
Here is the link to the popup ad.
If you don’t know anything about Liebermann Inc. check this out.
Okay, all! I have turned the commenting feature back on. Hopefully it won’t bring the site down but if it does, I will be working to get the situation resolved ASAP. Wish me luck and have at it!
Ok, I just got back control of my site. I don’t know what the problem was but we had to move my MT database to a MySQL setup. I have been wanting to do that, just never got around to it. Preliminary findings suggest that there was a problem with the MT database, perhaps corrupted, and it was affecting the hosting server, in such a way that it was creating an enormous load. In response to that load, the failsafes in place cut access to my site. Hopefully, the upgrade will fix the problem, but if it doesn’t, then rest assured that I will be back again, and again, and again.
Special thanks to Simon, over at BloggedUp, for working so diligently to get this slightly irate and impatient customer.
Update: Comments are offline for the time being, but I am taking email. Just send to Tony-no-spam-@TonyTalksTech.com (Take the ‘no spam’ and the ‘-’s out.)
I was just looking through my referrer logs, on SiteMeter, and I saw that someone found me by looking for “technically speaking”. Well I followed the link back to the Yahoo search page and found that I am #1 on that search. Curious, I thought, what number will I have on Google?
Okay, now on to bigger and better things.
Other Technically Speaking sites.
Technically Speaking
Technically Speaking
Technically Speaking
Technically Speaking ** Mental note — Keep an eye on this one. Another blog! Been around since 11/02
Technically Speaking I like this ones graphics!!!
Technically Speaking
Technically Speaking
Technically Speaking
Well!!!! I have something to think about. I rememeber when I first applied for one of these Adsense accounts. I was flat out denied. The reasoning was unclear. I didn’t really mind it until my brother showed me the amount of profit that could be generated from it.
Google wants me now. I’m considering. Why? you ask! This could pay for my blogging habit,…easily. I don’t need help for my blogging habit, but this validates that I’m not wasting my time with delusions of granduer. Here is the email I just received….
Congratulations!
As we grow, we are able to include a wider range of publishers and
content, so we’ve revisited your AdSense application. We’re happy to
inform you that your site, www.tonytalkstech.com, has been approved to
run in our AdSense program.We have activated your account and hope that you are still interested
in being a part of AdSense. You are under no obligation to join at this
time, but, we encourage you to try out AdSense and discover its earning
potential and editorial value.
I am finishing up a long weekend. I took some time off to get a little rest and to spend some time with the family. I actually had a good relaxing weekend. Friday, I was able to spend some much needed quality time with my son. Saturday, I attended a black tie affaire at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Buckhead Atlanta. My salsa crew and I did a performance for the Latin American Association’s annual Gala. Yesterday and today were truly two days of rest. I spent the extra hour I had changing all of the clocks in the house. You don’t really realize how many clocks you have until you have to change the time on each and every one of them. Well, I’m back to work tomorrow, I’m sure they will be happy to see me in the office. I am in the middle of programming tax returns for roughly 100,000 investors. Big time project thrown right in my lap. It is one of those hero or oat situations. If you see an increase in my blogging after February then you know that I was designated “Goat”. I’m not expecting this though. Now, off to find some quality topics to write about. That’s if Gizmodo hasn’t beaten me to them already.
I’ll tell ya, I was working my way around to a couple of juicy bits of news I found. My aggregator chimes in about a new post and I check it out. It’s Gizmodo, and they have just posted about the traffic signal changer I was just about to write about. Then I look at some more of their work and see that they also posted about memory glasses. Man, whoever is running things at Gizmodo must be cracking a serious whip. How is a small time blogger like me supposed to compete with such talent? I don’t know but I don’t give up so easily.
I’m taking a break for now, I need to whip together a new machine for a friend. See you in a few hours. Well, I have to do the dentist appointment, beer shopping, and of course, stop buy the computer store to see the latest gadgets. So I’ll see you later this evening.
Some have asked me, “What happened to your site today?” Well. some of you may have noticed that I was unable display my site. All is better now. My bandwidth quota was exceeded. I’m not really happy about this and it took 12 hours for the hosting company to correct the problem (upgrade me to the next package.) after I have sent email after email requesting it be fixed. I came across word that 1and1 hosting is offering a hosting package that can’t be passed up. I will try to keep my feet well planted for the year. Believe me, I’m looking to make a switch. I just don’t think that this a good time. Even if I blog for three years. I will spend less money for the first 6 months than I am spending now, on childern clothing. What was I trying to say? anyway… It will be less expensive for me to stay where I am. I think that when the payments for 1 and 1 kick in, they will have many people jump ship. My rates are pretty good where I am now and I haven’t seen prices like them anywhere else. So for the time being, I’m saying put.
Here are a few enthralling topics from LockerGnome today. Something here has to interest you. They all interest me!
Check out Kate. She is taking her Letter of the Day game to the next level. I want to play, so very much, but I have to get some sleep. I will try to acquire the necessary link and submit a post, tomorrow.