Another quote that won’t fit in Twitter. Here goes:

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
~ Helen Keller

Related posts:

1. QOTD – Dave Barry

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1. HDR in Fashion Island, Newport Beach

Another one that wouldn’t fit on Twitter. Thanks for checking it out from my blog.

Your modern teenager is not about to listen to advice from an old person, defined as a person who remembers when there was no Velcro. – Dave Barry

photo credit: AlphaTangoBravo / Adam Baker

Related posts:

1. QOTD – Helen Keller on Character

These photos are from Balboa Island, Newport Beach. They’re part of my HDR practice and experiments. Enjoy.
Click to enlarge, and use your arrow keys to navigate through left or right.

 

Related posts:

1. HDR in Fashion Island, Newport Beach
2. New Photos in HDR

I’ve been on SU for a long time, it is one of my favorite internet services. It started a long time ago, and quickly harnessed the power of social media… before the term was even coined. I highly recommend it to anyone that’s looking to find better and more interesting stuff. I’ll give you a quick rundown on how it works.

Basics

You sign up, and you select your topics. Topics are areas of interest that you care about, there are a few hundred but you’re allowed to pick 127 (last time I checked). Make sure you have installed their toolbar (don’t worry it is safe). Then when you’re ready to start using it, you click on the “Stumble!” button. StumbleUpon will then, begin to give you websites each time you click on the button. After you get to a website, you can use the “thumb up” or “thumb down” buttons to rate the site. You have to select topics you’re actually interested in and it will in turn give you the best of the web. Its like surfing the best channels on your TV, but for the internet, but you can also use it with a purpose.

Practically speaking, I get maybe 8 out of 10 websites that are good, and maybe 2 – 5 are excellent. I take the time to thumb up and down the websites as I see the content.

Why I like it

I also love SU because from time to time, when one of my pages gets thumbed up, I get hundreds and sometimes even thousands of visitors. Engaged and targeted visitors. Naturally it attracts marketers and webmasters trying to get some of the traffic that SU can give you. If you approach SU with the goal of getting traffic, you will be disappointed in two fronts. Your experience with using it will be boring and tasteless, and your traffic results will not be worth your time. It’s hard to cheat at SU, especially when you have some really active user base.

Here are some tips to help you have a good SU experience:

1. Don’t discovery your own pages. Let people in your network do it for you. If its good, it will happen naturally, if you need a boost ask for one politely and don’t over do it.
2. Your profile tells all about how you stumble, read it, check it out and adjust. People look at it, especially your discoveries.
3. Discoveries are the gold of our profiles, don’t saturate them with frivolous sites. If you have pages and pages of discoveries with only 1 – 3 views, you should re-evaluate.
4. Let your network discover one of your pages and they’ll be more inclined to stumble your pages later on.
5. Its easy to be marked as an adult stumbler and your profile will no longer be visible to non-adult stumblers.
6. Don’t abuse your ability to send messages via the stumble bar.
7. Do stumble up. It makes good websites surface.
8. Do stumble down when its really bad. Classify it if it needs it.
9. Do allow toolbar sends from people you really like.
10. Follow people that are in the 40-60% compatibility range once in a while, they’ll often surprise you with great discoveries.
11. When you explore another person’s profile, check out these sections:
    Discoveries, Tags & We Both Like
12. Try the stumblethru options instead of the regular Stumble! button.
13. Try a search in a topic you’re interested about.
14. When you discovery a page, do give it a description and maybe a sentence on why you found it interesting.

Happy Stumbling.

You can find me on StumbleUpon and add me to your network if you’d like. You can see my discoveries here.

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I have some interesting sites to share with you from last week. I call this a random link-o-rama, or share-content-fest.

Interesting stuff:

Read a great article on management and whether it is good or reasonable or even advisable to expect your employees to put in 60 hour workweeks, just because you (as the owner) do. The article asks: Ask yourself what actually matters in the long run. Is it that a certain butt is in a certain chair at a certain hour or would you prefer version 1.0 gets released on time? Would you rather an employee punches a card or he writes code with minimal bugs? Do you want someone who has no life or someone who brings fresh ideas to the office?

My vote? focus on productivity, it is already been researched and suggested that we’re only productive for a few hours a day anyway despite the forceful 8 hour days. From the same publishing powerhouse, VentureBeat, I read about Aaron Patzer. Aaron cashed out by selling his awesome application last year for 170 million, this is just an interview. Aaron founded Mint.com which is a great finances tracking application online, Mint.com was acquired by Intuit, makers of Turbotax and other finance products last year.

I also learned about Charles River Ventures, a firm that started a VC program called Quickstart. Out of 22 “quick” quarter million dollar investments, 6 of the companies invested in have made over $37 million in revenue. That’s crazy. I wonder how many of his investments have failed? I wish I had the money to do “quick” investments of a quarter million dollars!

As it relates to Google:

The Google adwords blog announced their bid ideas program, these are being rolled out in stages. Last week Google acquired Aadvark which by the way I’m already using, and loving it. This week, they bought reMail

On WordPress:

Matt Mullenweg explains a little more about the WordPress.com outage that affected millions of people. Quick to respond and react, this is why I love WordPress. I discovered a great post for in regards to SEO plugins for WordPress, I was familiar with a lot of them, but I’m glad to see a couple new ones listed and will be testing them out soon. Amongst the new ones for me are: WP to Twitter and I Love Social Bookmarking.

Other interests:

Wireless Power, real life application and working device- I read about PowerKiss, a wireless power supply for cell phones. Seems promising, and oh so awesome.
Engineering week at UCI
It is engineering week at UCI, and I think this egg dropping contest is part of it. I enjoyed watching some of the pictures about this event. Dropping an egg from a 9 story height to see if you can protect it enough to survive the fall.

SlideRocket promises to boost your presentations by adding plugins and widgets that incorporate real-time data to your presentations, feeds like twitter, polls etcetera may be added to your presentations to avoid “stale” time.
While reading more VentureBeat, I found that there’s a thing called ShotSpotter which is a mechanism that detects gunfire.

TV Everywhere. HBO will now have content available on the web, first to FiOS subscribers (Verizon). But this is one of the first premiere networks to offer their content online, expect many more to follow suit soon. I noticed some of the larger public broadcast networks already offer their content online, most of them do it for free. HBO today, the rest will follow and eventually you’ll be able to watch any show online.

About this site:

I got a couple changes done around here finally. WP-Super Cache was broken for some reason, fixed that. I also installed and activated a do-follow plugin so now commenters get a do-follow link back after they leave comments around the site, they need to leave a few though before it turns on. So comment on! And lastly, I discovered that my feed is broken. I need to fix that so people can actually subscribe to the site if they’d like, that seems to be broken at the moment. Peace out for now.

Yup I’m on Twitter and you can follow me. @notagrouch and I’m also on a million other networks, lately I’ve been on Google Buzz quite a bit. Follow me there if you’d like as well

Related posts:

1. What defines a Blog today?

I just got around to finishing a few photos in HDR. I hope you like them. These are from the past couple of years, some are in Seattle WA. Some are in Irvine, one from Kennedy Meadows, and one in Sonoma.

 

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1. My first HDR shot
2. HDR in Fashion Island, Newport Beach
3. Photos at Balboa Island

One more that’s too long for twitter. Part of my Quote a day regiment, here’s one from John Wayne:

I’ve always followed my father’s advice: he told me, first to always keep my word and, second, to never insult anybody unintentionally. If I insult you, you can be goddamn sure I intend to. And, third, he told me not to go around looking for trouble.

photo credit: Foxtongue

Related posts:

1. QOTD – Dave Barry

photo credit: smoorenburg
One of my favorites, it would not fit all in twitter so I’m posting it here:

In matters of intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard for any other consideration.
~ Thomas Henry Huxley.

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter to get other daily quotes to start your day.

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If you haven’t heard of Quix, and you’re a webmaster, or a webdmin, or work on SEO a lot, you definitely want to check it out. I’ve been using it since the day it was announced and I love it, it hasn’t replaced some of my major tools, but it is very helpful and extremely useful when I want to do quick analysis and check for “stuff”. You can actually dig pretty deep into different types of information about a website or specific URL.

What kind of stuff? Well head over to its page to read more about it, you can also read Yoast’s original announcement and read more there. There is a video on the right that shows you what it can do.

I put together a cheatsheet for myself a while ago, and I just cleaned it up a bit, so I thought I’d share it with you. I know, I know, other people have already made them before. I like mine because its compact, landscape oriented and easy to edit. You can easily copy it into your own Google Docs or your computer and make changes as you see fit, take sections out, make comments or notes, or whatever.

You can get to Quix Cheatsheet here hosted on Google Docs, or download a PDF version of it: Quix Cheatsheet (PDF) You can also download it in different formats, making it easy for you to edit on your own computer, from Google docs as shown below:

Many thanks to Yoast for making this available for us.

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1. Take care of your incoming links

During my early spring cleaning project at home, I came across some old photos. These are pre 2000, and they bring memories of what I consider some of the best times. I’m glad I held onto these photos. I posted some in FaceBook and maybe I’ll post some in Flickr, but then I realized that some people might want the full size images rather than the crappy version that FaceBook gives you. My buddy JR confirmed this when he asked me to send him one of them at full size.

Enjoy, zips are avail after the gallery.

CCF Camp Group Photo 1999 zip 5.2 mb.
All photos zip 20 mb.

I have a few more photos I’ll try to post soon. If you want to be notified when I put them up, leave a note on the comments section on this post (the form is below), and check the box that says “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” and it will let you know when I put new photos up in this gallery, or send me an e-mail

Thanks for stopping by!

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If you’re a blogger, and participate on websites with comments you want to know about this.

As you strut around the web, leaving your comments here and there and making an impression on people with your oh so clever wit, you should make sure you have configured your avatar. More specifically go on and configure it in Gravatar. Gravatar is the most popular service for this sort of thing, and for a good reason. Its so easy to setup.

After you’ve setup your e-mail address in your Gravatar account, your comments on most websites will begin showing your picture next to them. Take a look at the image below:

So now when you leave comments your picture will show up next to it, instead of the G from gravatar, or the mystery man, or any of the other default icons available in most blog platforms. For example, here are the options available to WordPress users:

You don’t want to be known as the Identicon, or MonsterID or Wavatar do you?

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1. The easiest way to blog

Happy Supperbowl day everyone. After the rain yesterday, I went out and took some photos to play around with HDR. Here are the results:
1


2

3

4

5

6

Did you like them? let me know in a comment. And if you want to vote for a favorite, you can do it below:
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Related posts:

1. Two more from Seattle
2. Photos at Balboa Island
3. New Photos in HDR

If you’ve followed me on Twitter, and sometimes here, you might know that I’ve been working with several Bloggers that happen to be Moms. I don’t know how it all started, but these mommybloggers are dominating the blogsphere. They are a force to be reckoned with when it comes to buzz, opinion, market trends and stuff like that.

Blogging isn’t new, but “mommybloggers” are and thus a lot of the little niches that could be developed aren’t quite there yet. For example, in the fitness category, I could not find a lot of bloggers that dedicate their writing to running. I decided to put a little list together with some fitness related Blogs written by Moms. Check them out:

http://workoutmommy.com/
Lisa runs workoutmommy.com, and says about workoutmommy.com:

is a blog about health and fitness for moms. Being a mom requires that you work 24/7 for someone other than yourself, so finding time to exercise and stay healthy is a challenge. I’m here to help you with that challenge and to keep you motivated and on task. It CAN be done!

http://www.momontherun.net/
Janice is the author and she writes about various topics. She has been blogging since 2004 so she knows her way around the interwebs. It seems that she doesn’t run as much as she’d like.

at the time this blog began back in 2004 I was a running mother-to-be, training for a 1/2 marathon. Part way through the pregnancy running became too uncomfortable for me leading me to slowly back off on my running. Now a days “Mom On The Run” is a reflection of how busy life has become caring for 2 completely adorable, yet “spirited” little girls while my hubby travels A LOT for business, though I do still run on occasion.

http://www.mymommyrun.com/
I personally know this author and after a long time of thinking about it, she finally decided to start a blog, and went live with her site earlier this year. She’s written about running, swimming and a few things about the gear she uses. She’s ran a few marathons and at couple of Ironman races. She’s tough and she’s here to share her endurance and long distance running experiences with other Moms and anyone that is interested in this. She writes:

full time working mom of 2 boys and 1 step-son. I used to do marathons and Ironman Triathlons, but that was when i was in my 20’s (and no kids ). I am now trying to get back into shape and add training into my already hectic life….. and it is a challenge.

http://fitnessformommies.net/
Rachel (Fit Mom) writes: Do what you can, when you can to stay fit, healthy and sane. That is exactly what her blog is about. A local to Southern California she writes about her fitness journey, involving yoga, running and general well being, she even has a store selling some of the products she recommends.

Passions include yoga, trail running, cycling, cooking and reading…
Together with some of my truly amazing fit mom friends, I focus on getting a workout in with kids or without!

I wanted to give you like 10 new sites all by Mommybloggrs that are into fitness, but truth be told I couldn’t find a whole lot. If you know any that I didn’t list or would like to add yours, just leave it in the comments. I’ll be happy to add it to the list.

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1. Getting started with Blogging.
2. What defines a Blog today?

Hey there, check this out. There are 4 screenshots at different sizes for you. The viewable area is the size specified in the file name. Hope this helps.

screenshots of your project

screenshots of your project

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I know people use their smartphones in very different ways, How do you use yours? Here’s a list of stuff people said to have done or do regularly while using their smart phones. Have you done any of this?

Cast your vote.

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What program, if any do you use to send your tweets out? Cast your vote on the top 3 favorite apps you use from the list below. If your favorite isn’t in there, just add it on the comments.

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Following on the theme of the last survey, I am also adamant about utensils we use to stir stuff up. Most of the time poeple use a spoon, but if you think about it, it isn’t very efficient at stirring. It turns out to just be a fat paddle wading around your coffee, or tea. The best tool to stir a liquid isn’t a spatula right, its more like a whisk. So I think that the best tool to stir in sugar, creamer, etc is a fork. It has the “paddle” section in the middle, like a spoon, but then the pointy parts (called tines) act more like a whisk. So I think its more efficient to use a fork when stirring in a soluble into a solvent. Cast your vote.

Related posts:

1. Twitter Survey.

Call me strange if you’d like, but ever since I was a kid I have a thing where I think that spreads, as in mayo, butter, etc, should be spread out with a spoon. The reason is that a spoon allows you to scoop up the material, whatever it might be, safely without dropping any. Ever try to use a knife to get jelly from a distance? it doesn’t work… especially if it has fruit pieces, it usually drops half way back to your toast. A spoon prevents this. Plus, after you plop down your favorite spread on the bread, you do a half turn on the spoon and you now have a spreader tool that works much better than any butter knife out there. Trust me, give it a try next time.

That’s the reason for this survey. so what do you think?

Related posts:

1. Twitter Survey.

• Do you support (fill in the blank) theme?

It depends, if its a popular theme, chances are I can install it for you. The ones that are supported for sure are: Thesis, Athahualpa, Revolution, Flexx, beyond that, almost any highly rated plugin from the official repository will do too, but just to be sure please check with me.

• Do you support (fill in the blank) plugin?

The same applies as the first question above, for themes. Please see it.

• WordPress says its really easy to install already, they have a 5 minute installation guide, why don’t I just do it myself?

Please, by all means if you want to roll up your sleeves and give this a try yourself, then go for it. Millions of people have done it and new people do it everyday. It isn’t that hard, there are so many free resources online already that can help you get started too. The services I offer give you peace of mind and worry free maintenance, but if you have time to do it yourself I encourage you to do so. If you run into any issues, please let me know if I can answer any questions for you.

• But, the hosts you recommend already offer automatic WordPress Installations, why is yours any better?

The automatic installation they offer is just a basic installation. You still need to go through at least 6 pages of configurations and settings before your website is ready to go. Not to mention, you have to make sure you have a backup, e-mail works, your urls are well formed, and that you know how to use the site.

• Do I need to give you my username and password?

It is up to you, there are two ways to do this, you can create your account as a master account, then go into the control panel and create me an account. Or you can give me your username and password, let me do all the work I need to do, then you can change your password when I’m finished. It is all up to you, I recommend that you create me a separate account so you can easily turn it on and off when you need my help.

• How can you say its Free?

In order to have a website of your own, you need to pay somebody for hosting. This hosting fee is going to be there no matter where you go. The reason I’m offering you this service for free is that when you buy hosting from my recommended host, they pay me a commission fee. This commision fee ends up paying for your installation, maintenance and support. So, technically it isn’t free as in a free lunch, but at least it doesn’t come out of your pocket. In this case the host pays me a percentage of your fee.

• But I still have to pay?

Your only costs are those you pay directly to Dreamhost, and your registrar where you bought your domain, I recommend Godaddy, I have over 60 domains registered with them. But I would not recommend their Windows hosting. (World’s Largest Registrar – GoDaddy.com). Remember, you need a domain of your own. If you need help with this, please let me know and I’ll be happy to walk you through it.

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