For our speaker, we had Steve Zehngut from Zeek Interactive in Huntington Beach. His talk pretty much explained why WordPress should be your first and only choice when it comes to getting a website for your business up and running. It's inexpensive, you can do a lot of it yourself and you'll learn quite a bit of stuff about your own business in the process of getting your website online.

I'm waiting for a few more pictures from people and also the video is not being processed. Both will be available on the website and on my blog in the next couple days.

Update 2021-07-13 - The video was removed by the Free Lunch Friday channel owner. My apologies.

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We also cover mass email systems. If you need to send email to your customers or potential customers, how do you do it? You can't just sit there and send hundreds of emails from gmail or yahoo! That would be crazy! But you also can't just spam people because you want to get your message out. You need to use one of the systems I mention in the video.

SEO news. There's a new and exciting plugin for WordPress that is going to change how you approach local SEO. Check out the video for more info.

Also, I'm taking questions and requests now. If you'd like to have your question answered or your product reviewed, contact me to be included in an upcoming episode.

Thanks for watching. Comments & feedback is welcome and greatly appreciated.

links:

Build your own Tagger Messenger bags and other bags.

Aweber

Disclosure: The Tagger bag was given to me for review.

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Here's a recap of my activity in January and a summary of the posts in case you missed anything. Just visit the January archive. To my surprise, there are actually 28 posts. 2 shy of 30 posts for the 30Day Blogging Challenge. Now that I got that part down. I need to share the posts with my Facebook group more regularly. To be honest, the reason I didn't do a lot of sharing this time around was because I couldn't ask people to read my blog if I wasn't going to read theirs and I didn't really have a lot of time to read or comment this past month. Being a dad is taking its toll in terms of time and availability.

To see all the posts from January, visit the archive here: January posts Summary. -- I missed a few posts that will be published in february. All in all, I've got a full plate for blogging in February. I've got a full review and commentary about Affiliate Summit West. Several WordPress Plugin reviews. 2 new website reviews and just general updates. Not to mention updating @WaterClaire's website.

I'm pretty happy about the traffic growth per week. That's one post I'd like to highlight to you so you can check it out and help me keep that goal going. I'm going for growth this week as well!

I was pretty active on Instagram and Foursquare, I'm playing around with them in preparation for our social media training course. Gotta push the boundaries in each network in order to know exactly what the boundaries are.

Another post I'd like to highlight is the one about Mailchimp. Mailchimp does not allow certain types of links or content in their systems so be careful and make sure you have your database backed up and you read their Terms of Service. They seem to be pretty strict about this. I also suggest an alternative in the post.

Update ( 2021-07-18) : Mailchimp has also been deleting accounts right and left due to "innactivity" I've just had this happen to a client of mine and when I went to check on it, 3 of my side-project accounts had been deleted. Add that to the list of reasons why I don't recommend, like or care for Mailchimp.

Get a real email marketing service like Aweber.

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First my comments on it:
This is the coolest way to photobomb! With this little gadget, you just point and wait until it detects a flash. Instantly then it projects an image that will show up on the unsuspecting victim's photos.

Pretty clever if you ask me. It's called the Image Fulgurator and from the article:

"As soon as the built-in sensor registers a flash somewhere nearby, the flash projection is triggered. Hence the projection can be synchronized to the exact moment of exposure of all other cameras in its immediate vicinity. Via a screen (ground glass), it is possible to focus the projection and to position it on the targeted object."

You can read the whole story here: Projector Disguised as Camera Flashes Images Into Others’ Photos

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My task: to establish a full backup system, without spending a dime. Spending my time on this is okay since they have a budget for labor, just not software. I had to turn to the friendly OpenSource community. A bunch of names came up, and most of them are well known in the FOSS realm and some even have a foot or two in the door at the enterprise.

I have to decide whether to use Amanda or Bacula. Both seem very promising and challenging at the same time, each one with its own quirks. I tend to lean towards Amanda because it seems more robust and easier to manage --not that it will actually be easy.

I have a mixed environment of Networking devices, Windows Servers, VM Hypervisors and Linux servers. This should be fun.

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Well, besides the cheese I made by leaving the cream out for 3 or 4 days, I have a few things to complain about the big coffee guys. As you might know, I visit Starbucks quite frequently. I stop at whichever location is closest to me at the time when I leave a client's site or when I want to get out of the house and get some work done.

Recently they closed down one of the shops I visit the most. The store was closed for approximately 14 days for renovation. About five days after they reopened, I went back to check it out. What a disappointment, they renovated the store alright; it looks nice, new, clean, brighter and more appealing.

The problem is that they removed 20-30% of the area where you could sit down and enjoy your beverage! There used to be 6 round tables, and a handicapped table, with enough chairs for each table corresponding to its size. Now there are only 3 small tables and the handicapped table.

Wouldn't Starbucks as the store owner want people to hang out in the shop? When I went in the last time, I decided to get my drink and go home since all the tables were occupied. Had I stayed in the store, I would have spent 10 - 15 dollars over 2-3 hours. Instead, I bought my drink and left. It seems that they don't want customers to hang around.

This is not cool, I hope they evaluate these decisions more thoroughly in the future. Besides keeping their bottom line, they should also consider the customers that bring them repeated business!

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To close out the year, I wanted to share some of my pictures from our trip to Paso Robles and a few other random shots.

My girlfriend and I took a little trip to Paso Robles, and we had a lot of fun. Tasted a lot of wine and enjoyed the area quite a bit. Here are some of the highlights.

This is the lobby at El Paso Robles Inn, a very cool hotel. The service was great and even their restaurant was excellent. It's in an old town so it's close to pretty much everything and centrally located if you want to go wine tasting.

I highly recommend it if you are going to visit the area. They also have free wine tasting deals if you ask.

There is a cool guided tour at Eberle, and we definitely liked J.Lohr a lot.

I left early one morning to get some sunrise pictures and I found an elephant seal, check out some of the shots by clicking on that picture.

Happy New Year!

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check it out...

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This time I got to experience more of the city, with my girlfriend and family. One of the days we were there, we showed up to Kuleto's. We had a reservation because according to my girlfriend, this place is the shit! So I was all excited. The place turned out to be one of the worse experiences I've had in fine dining. Here's my experience and review of Kuleto's. In short, don't ever go there.

We were seated promptly, however our table was absolutely unaccommodating. We had reserved a table for 10 a couple weeks in advance, I would think this would allow the restaurant to plan accordingly and provide us with a decent table. I can't say that the table was bad, but it was probably the most inconvenient table in the whole place. They essentially put a table near a corner area with a "bench" kind of like a booth and so we had , 4 people on chairs, 4 people on the bench, 1 person at the head of the table and one person on the bench on the other side of the table. Needless to say, the 4 people on the bench were locked in place. It was a hassle for them to leave the table and use the restroom for example. This is kind of normal I guess, but it made for an unpleasant experience.

Our table was poorly setup when we sat down. We ordered wine, and one of us placed their wine down on the table and it simply fell over and spilled everywhere. We found the reason for this wasn't sloppiness or drunkenness as you might have guessed, it was simply that the lazy and rude waiter didn't put the table together correctly. The tables had a few inches gap in between, and this gap was covered by the table cloth. So when the wine was placed there, it tipped over because there wasn't an actual table there... just a gap and table cloth covering this. When we brought this to the attention of the waiter, he brushed it off as if asking "so what"? And tossed a bunch of napkins on the table for us to clean it up. We simply ended up covering the spilled wine with 3 or 4 napkins.

We proceeded to look over our menus, never was offered water or anything like that. We had some questions about the menu so we called the waiter over. My sister asked something like "is the X dish" good? To which the asshole waiter replied, "yes, it wouldn't be in the menu if it wasn't good." There was something in the menu that my mom didn't know how to pronounce, but when the waiter came, she attempted and promptly asked the waiter "is that how you say it?" to which he said "how should I know? I don't know how to say it and walked away."

I know that if you are treated poorly, especially at a fine dining place you should raise up these issues with your waiter or manager right away. But we were celebrating and enjoying each other's company and stuff so we didn't want to make a big deal out of the issues, they seemed petty at the time. Oh geez, was I wrong. When little things like the ones I've described above happen, speak up right away, they are probably an indication of bigger things to come. I'm a pretty picky consumer and I should have paid attention to my gut when I felt some of the mistreatment was a clear indication of trouble. But I ignored it.

Our food was eventually brought out, Another waiter was bringing the plates to our table and he would just stand up at one of the end of the table and yell... "lasagna"? "who's got the lasagna"? After a couple of times he yelled across and actually passed one of the dishes down to one of us to be passed down 3 seats over I told him, take this back and bring our waiter, why would you be yelling, you should know where these go. Take it back and bring our waiter, he knows where they go. To this, he responded, "I know but you guys moved a lot" I said "we haven't moved, take this back and bring the waiter" He corrected this by talking to the waiter before each plate was brought to the table.

So we thought ok, all the issues are now cleared up lets forget about it and enjoy our dinner. We were celebrating my sister's graduation from college, not something you get to do very often right?

We ate our food, which was alright. It wasn't anything to write home about and frankly way over priced. A place like Bistango, or French75, or Bayside in Orange County simply blow this place out of the water. But this is not all, As we are all finishing our dinner, I hear my cousin ask my uncle "what is that Dad"? pointing at her plate of half-eaten vegetarian lasagna. There was some commotion on her end of the table so I focused my attention over there. She was pointing to her plate and near the remainder of the pasta there was something. Upon closer examination, we found that it was a worm. That's right, a freaking worm, like a grub like the ones you would buy at the tackle shop to go fishing. I am not kidding you. We even snapped a couple of pictures for posterity.

I asked for the plate to be passed down to me and I took some pictures, and when the waiter realized what was there, he attempted to take the plate from me... He actually tried tugging it away from my hand before I said NO!. He obviously noticed the worm and assuming I had finished with my own dinner, tried to take it away to cover the issue up. But it was too late, my cousin took video, my sister, her friend, my uncle, my mom and I had already taken a few photos so there was no way this would go unnoticed. I demanded that the manager come over to our table.

After a long time, five to ten minutes, (when you find a worm in your food, I think anything more than a minute is too long). The manager showed up and looked at the plate and said "Oh my god, that is disgusting" he said. And walked way as he said "I'm going back to investigate this" also in a very strange tone. After 10 minutes, and after we had all lost our appetite and one of us had to run to the restroom to vomit, the manger came back. He then proceeded to explain that the vegetables in the vegetarian lasagna have some sort of hollow corkscrew cavity where the worm might have been hidden. And that was it, then I said ok... so what now?

He mumbled something about comping the two vegetarian meals and left. After a really long time, we had most of our table picked up and the waiter brought our bill. The moment I looked at it, I handed it back to him and said "this is not acceptable, please take it back to Troy (the manager)." He reluctantly did. All they did was remove the 2 vegetarian lasagna from the bill and tried to charge us for all the rest, as if it had been a great experience.

(click on the picture to view a better image)

Now, lets stop for a second and let me tell you what I would have done if I were the manager of that place. First of all, the first thing I would have done is let the owner know. Then I would have come back and apologize as much as it was humanly possible. This wasn't a hair, or kitchen debris, this is a fuc*ing worm! I would have also brought the bill back with a balance of 0 and invite the customer back for a complimentary dinner. And I would thank the customers all the way to their cab for coming by and accepting our apology.

I don't think this ever happened. On a Friday night, in a restaurant of this "caliber" on Powell street, you would think the owner should be somewhere in sight, or at least in an office or something nearby. Mr Troy tried to handle the situation himself, he eventually came back with the bill which had a balance and I began talking to him about it.

Here's exactly what I said to him, "Troy, stop --he was rambling on about something-- listen to me, look at me in the eyes and tell me if this is acceptable." After a bunch of excuses and useless commentary, I had to ask it again to which he responded yes. His response triggered the anger of my sister and girlfriend and they jumped into the conversation. Thanks to them, Troy decided it was better if they just took care of our bill. Frankly I expected nothing less, but I feel bad that we had to request this and fight for it.

So don't bother visiting Kuleto's next time you're in town. You will pay fine dining but based on my experience, you will get piss-poor service, not fine dining service. You will also pay for common food. If you're looking to have a nice dinner in the City, I'm sure there are tons of other places that would make a better experience than Kuleto's. I've gotten better service, food and price at IHOP, Denny's and Ruby's than I did here. What a shame.

As harsh as I may seem in this post, this is all true and verifiable with the photo, and 8 witnesses I had with me. Skip Kuleto's and find somewhere else to enjoy a nice dinner in company of loved ones and friends.

Just so there's no confusion, or ambiguity. This happened at Kuleto's on Powell Street in downtown SF. I would still like the restaurant to apologize, they never did. The half-assed apology from the manager and the waiter, was similar to someone apologizing as they bump to you at the mall. One of those "sorry 'bout that" kind of apologies. Unbecoming of a place like this.

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I have so much to write about but I also have a lot of stuff to catch up on. Both my work and personal hiveminder list is growing every few minutes so I'll tell you more in detail about my trip to the City by the Bay.

The Muni made one of us sick. The night before, we went to a fancy restaurant and we found a grub in our food. We hit an Irish pub with a piano bar and got tanked. We walked until my feet were sore, we were harassed by the crazies on Market street and got to ride on BART. I walked into Chinatown, I had a clam chowder bread bowl at Pier 39. I saw my sister Graduate with her BA.

I had fun, hopefully, tonight I can show you some pictures and tell you a little more about the little adventures we had.

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This post talks about Keepass. While Keepass is still a good choice and continues to be updated, I have been using Lastpass and recommend it over any other choice. You can read other posts I've made regarding Lastpass here.

I am leaving this post here for archival purposes.

When I got hacked, I realized that I had 3 or 4 main passwords that I used on a daily basis, and these 3 or 4 passwords if lost, gave you access to over 30 systems I use regularly. From banking to blogging, computers, and voicemail systems, if you got a hold of these few passwords you could have an insider's view into my personal, financial, and mostly private life. Kind of scary if you think about it. Of course, as soon as I found out, I began changing the passwords and making sure no malicious activity had happened.

I've worked in corporate IT shops pretty much my whole life. The corporate policies on passwords are usually pretty good. You need to keep a password, that is at least eight characters long and that contains capital letters, lower case letters, and symbols or numbers. That's pretty good, the problem with that is that most people end up using one or two passwords for all their stuff. If you care about your sensitive information, you'll think twice about doing this in the future. In fact, start now and begin changing your passwords for different systems so that they are unique. I took this as a basis for my new passwords and began working on it. Took me about a day to change all my passwords and a few more minutes later on when I found the occasional

When I was all finished changing passwords so they are all unique and locking my stuff down, I had over 100 usernames and passwords. You may be wondering how I have so many. I have a lot of web accounts, I do most of my banking online and I also have a lot of accounts I use for my consulting business. If you really think about it, you probably have a sizable number of usernames and passwords. Even 10 or 20 passwords can be difficult to manage. So my task was to find a way to manage all the passwords easily and quickly.

I found several little programs on the internet that helped with this. Norton has a password manager application, there is my ex-favorite PINs by Mirek, but I found the best one so far. It's called KeePass Password Safe.

I love KeePass and I live by it now. I have a huge password that unlocks the whole file so I have access to my username and passwords. I think this is a great solution that everybody can use. One of the greatest things about KeePass is that it works on almost anything you can think of. It runs on Windows, it runs on Macs, Linux and other Unix variants. You can even run it on some mobile devices. It is really secure because it is encrypted. Make sure you use a long master password, like a passphrase and then you're pretty safe.

Some of the other key features of KeePass highlight on its maturity as an OpenSource application. You can import and export from and to a variety of formats, you can export certain groups of passwords, this comes in handy when you want to share a group of passwords with colleagues or spouses or for some other reason but you don't want to share your whole database. Another really handy feature of KeePass is its password maker utility, you can specify your password criteria and then have it automatically generate random passwords for you, this is a huge help when trying to come up with unique secure passwords.

This cool little app could even be used in a corporate environment where multiple people need access to the same systems. Like networking equipment, web servers, management consoles, etcetera etcetera. Given that this is OpenSource, cross-platform and easy to use I'm not sure why more companies don't use it. You can even team it up with a version control system so multiple people have access to it and changes are documented as time goes by.

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The short answer, to my relief is yes. Here's the official answer from the SSA website:

A: Yes they do. By law, the assets of the Social Security program must be invested in securities guaranteed as to both principal and interest. The Trust Funds hold a mix of short-term and long-term government bonds. The Trust Funds can hold both regular Treasury securities and "special obligation" securities issued only to federal trust funds. In practice, most of the securities in the Social Security Trust Funds are of the "special obligation" type. (See additional explanation from SSA's Office of the Actuary.)

The Trust Funds earn interest which is set at the average market yield on long-term Treasury securities. Interest earnings on the invested assets of the combined OASI and DI Trust Funds were $55.5 billion in calendar year 1999. This represented an effective annual interest rate of 6.9 percent.

The Trust Funds have earned interest in every year since the program began. More detailed information on the Trust Fund investments can be found in the Annual Report of the Social Security Trustees and on the Actuary's webpages concerning the Investment Transactions and Investment Holdings of the Trust Funds.

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This would be so much fun. I really wonder how it is programmed so that the guy's head can come so close to the ground. I'm sure it's safe but wow, that's still crazy!

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Of course we already knew this, its just a matter of time. 3+ Billion years from now.

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I personally have a love-hate relationship with them, this morning is purely hate.  I'm referring to the systems companies use to cut costs and not have to give you a live person to talk to. Sometimes they're great, you can call your bank punch in your information and do some major transactions, quickly and efficiently. For example Bank of America is awesome at this, I can check my balance, transfer funds, make payments in a matter of a minute or two.

Most times I don't ever have to talk to a customer service representative that wants to know how the weather is in California, or what I think of our Governor... but we all know they are just going through standard small-talk questions just to fill in the awkward silence while they look up your account.

The problem comes in when you NEED to talk to a person, and you can't. Going back to Bank of America as an example, they are great at this, at any time you can choose to be transfered to a live representative thats ready and willing to dish out all the small talk you can handle and hopefully help you solve the issue.

However there are certain systems that just don't allow you to ever get in touch with someone. I suppose if I had a multi million dollar company and was trying to cut costs, I would implement something like this... but as a consumer it sucks big time.

Take for example Columbia House. Yeah you know them... the DVD club mailings you get every other week in the mail, offering you a gazillion movies for 3 cents plus $12.00 in shipping. each. They also offer you another bunch if you get all your sucker friends to sign up.

Well Columbia House sucks ass at customer service. The first problem I had today when trying to get a hold of them was exactly that... getting a hold of them.  Their numbers are not publicized on their website. I guess they probably have them printed in their contract papers you get, but since I wasn't at home when I needed them, looking for this information in those papers was was not an option.

So I went on to look for them online. I eventually succeeded at finding their toll-free number (I have links at the bottom), but it wasn't as easy as it should have been. To my disappointment, the number was useless. I called and ended up in one of those loops that ask you for the same thing over and over.

Then eventually the phone system gives you, in a condescending smug tone a little statement to the like of "I'm sorry you're having problems with the easy-to-use phone automated system, please call back later to try again" and it hangs up. This is so frustrating... Geez! why would I want to try again later if I know its not I that has a problem. The problem is that the phone system is poorly designed, or they simply don't care to talk to you. After all, if you are calling this number they usually already have your money anyway.

In this case I had to put my hands down and fall back to the only way of communicating my issue to them. I went to their website, filled out a stupid form and hit send, hoping that someone will actually read it and understand my problem and try to help. One can only hope.

Thanks for reading my rant, and I hope that my time was at least well spent if I can provide you with the links to find other hard to find toll free numbers. There are sites all over the web with this information, here are a few that I think are pretty good.

tollfreenumber.org (airlines, government, health, irs, hotels, education, forum style)

hardtofind800numbers.com - dead -  (listed alphabetically by company, tons of them)

internet 800 directory (searchable by state and company)

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The way they match you up to sites is pretty nifty I think because most of the time I'm finding out really cool stuff. You can even "tune in" to a specific channel and get nothing but websites related to that topic. Every time you get a website from SU you have the chance of saying "I like it!" or "no more like this". Using one of these two options gives the system a better idea of what you like and continues to narrow down topics that are more likely to appeal to you. You also get to see pages that your friends have voted as "I like it" or "thumbs up." SU also offers a bunch of other social networking tools. Blogs, messaging, groups are all part of the SU offerings, but its core is serving you new pages, fresh and original content is its forte. A great combination of your preferences, your voting for "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" and a good mix of your friends' own preferences continues to serve really cool pages time after time.

This is another extension or add-on that I must have in almost every installation of Firefox I use.

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An episode of Seinfeld and Superman hanging out. The spirit of Seinfeld is present throughout the whole thing, "everyday life" type of stuff. What it would be like to hang out with Superman if Seinfeld ever hung out with him.

Of course, they'd go on a road trip. Pretty funny if you're into that kind of humor. "No super powers!"

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World's oldest newspaper goes digital

You can find it here.

The newspaper, founded in 1645 by Sweden's Queen Kristina, became a web-only publication on Jan. 1. It's a fate, many ink-stained writers and readers fear, that may await many of the world's most venerable journals.

"We think it's a cultural disaster," said Hans Holm, who served as the chief editor of Post-och Inrikes Tidningar for 20 years. "It is sad when you have worked with it for so long and it has been around for so long."

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If more women run for the presidency and actually win, would "he" be refered to as the First Man? Just one of those things I ponder. In this case, Bill Clinton will just always be refered to as former President Bill Clinton, or simply President Bill Clinton. But this is an unusual case.

First man? First husband? First Man-bitch? Who knows.

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