slamboard

I have a somewhat complicated and relatively pricey connection to the internet. Broadband and DSL combined using a HOTBRICK Dual WAN Firewall Router. We haven’t been tweaking it that much because it was such a steep learning curve to get it operational.

My impression is that you can’t expect to get very good support from your ISP(s) for this kind of thing, because they don’t know how their competition works in detail. One guy basically told my wife that it was just NOT possible to set up a combined redundant service. That was all the motivation she needed to get it to work.

With all this going on, I expected Joost to work like a charm. I have had a few brief shining moments of good functionality, but by and large my Joosting has been a wash. I cannot be sure that it is my internet speed that is limiting my enjoyment, but I suspect that it is.

dual wan
joost

I have been remiss with my tagging of blog posts. I may look into tools that can save time and effort.

I used to just have a notepad file with all of my most commonly used tags. Technorati has changed the code for tags recently so that they display a small image.

technorati tags

The blogosphere may have a greater relevance on the internet in part because of all the back scratching that goes on among bloggers. Some of the exchanging of incoming links is a very organic. Just people talking about people.

I have probably given Perez Hilton a half dozen over the last few months and I don’t even like him. He probably will never link to me, unless I have an affair with Doogie Howser. I saw him on a trailer for Harold and Kumar go to White Castle and I have decided that he is not gay, it’s all just a publicity stunt.

Some linking that has relevant content is actually very organized. There are Blogging Carnivals. A host blog is linked to from a banner that particpants embed on their blogs. The participants make a blog post that is relevant to a chosen theme and the host links to everyone’s blog posts. This does in fact generate traffic. It improves Alexa rank.

I have Vonage Voip service, sort of. It’s pretty standard for users to be equipped with linksys adapters so they can use a standard phone with their VOIP service. A little over a year after we moved abroad, our adapter broke. They aren’t available in our local retail and the shipping is a bit prohibitive.

The choice we made was to stay with Vonage using the lowest priced package, our friends and Family back in North America can still call for free and leave a message. We can retrieve the messages over the internet. We have outgoing VOIP with a local provider that is reasonably priced as well.

This is all kind of boring, sorry about that. The reason that I was reminded of Vonage is because they are in the news. It seems they have been given a 1 in 3 chance of failing as a company.

I saw an unusual job opportunity posted on www-transcription.net the other day. It wasn’t the usual telecommuting transcription of soundfiles.

It was an unpaid internship that entailed transcribing video interviews of fashion models. There was an indication of paid work later on if an applicant excelled at the work.

Putting the Alexa widget in my sidebar may or may not have triggered the ranking of this site.

6,681,768 ???

I honestly didn’t know that there were that many websites on the Internet. Oh, well I guess a ranking that poor makes this site a great test subject for experiments. I recently saw an improvement of over 100,000 places for another site of mine. The widget may have helped with that as well. I did some social networking with that site as well.

Here is something really cool, a home business network that awards grants based on peer voting. The site’s users decide whose home businesses or startups are most deserving.

The first grant of $250 is set to be awarded on April 30th, 2007. Membership that includes voting privileges is free. If you have a home business or a plan to start one this is going to be a great place to network.

I sat down a moment ago and decided that I was going to find a cool gadget to talk about. To make a short story even shorter here it is:

Linux is a whole other world. It’s purists must, of course, have their own smart phone. The biggest difference from iPhone is that far from being proprietary, it is pretty much open sourced. You can enjoy the fruits of 150,000 untanned laborers.

I’m having serious ISP issues this morning. SLOW.

Anyway, since I am not alone in the room, I get to use an old fashioned form of information technology while I wait for pages to load. It is called talking. Today we are talking about an eBook idea. I can’t really get into the topic, because if it interested you, your next move would probably be to go find an eBook that is already published.

So I hit the top item on a Google search for Ebook sales trends. It had a lot of superlatives. Now that it is loaded I see that it was published in 2004. It looks like 2004 was a great year to come out with an eBook. In that year, you could get an electronic version of The Da Vinci Code for $4.50 less than you would have paid for a hard copy. I can rent the DVD for 50 cents now, that way I won’t even have to read it.

Most news items about eBooks are actually press releases by the book publishers. This one about an SEO eBook has intrigued me. The fact that it was at the top of the page is promising.

I should mention in this post that my boundless devotion to putting quality posts in this blog will have to be put on the back burner while I do the drudgery of actually writing an eBook.

No. In terms of content, a picture is generally not worth 1000 words.

I have experienced the occasional blip in traffic when a photo on a blog ranked on the first page of a Google Image search for a popular term, but this is rare and I think that it is hard to make it happen deliberately. One thing that you should keep in mind is naming your image files using relevant keywords.

As far as copyright law goes, you can find lots of free photos on the net, or you can take your own pictures. I would only consider buying an image if I was planning to make it an integral part of a page layout.