Hannah Montana / Miley Cyrus - Who?!?!

Good grief! I cannot keep up with my kids - Yesterday was crazy in Austin, TX as Hannah Montana / Miley Cyrus showed up for her concert here, along with Aly & A.J.

All this fuss over a teenage singer… So many people including myself think it is madness the way some parents spoil their children spending hundreds of dollars on tickets for what amounts to a children’s show.

However, there is something to be said about “gladdening the heart of a child.”

Bottom line - I am proud of my daughter, she is a great, kind, polite, considerate girl at all times (well, most of the time…) She never came to us begging to go to this event, she realized that we did not have the money to spend on something like this especially with all of her girlfriends at school talking about how much scalped tickets were costing the people who were going. My wife had mentioned something to me about a week ago that it might be something that our daughter might want to go to, so I spoke with her about it and she told me that she thought it would be fun, but that she knew she would not be able to go. I really was very proud that she had come to that “realization” on her own - she has a great head on her shoulders.

So, yesterday was like any other day until I received a call from my wife that a friend of ours had an extra ticket, but it was separate from the family that was going. Of course, we were not going to let our ten year old daughter sit by herself in a concert, but, it started me thinking about how I would love to do this for her (be able to send her to something which she would remember for years…) so I started searching the internet for tickets.

I found tickets being sold by “internet scalpers” - companies which profit off of ticket shoppers by purchasing hundreds of tickets at a time, as soon as they go on sale. Two tickets behind the stage at the Frank Erwin Center were going for $350 last night from these sellers (the original price for the same tickets were about $105 - not each, but for two). We looked on Craigslist and it was full of offers for tickets if you paid hundreds of dollars per seat. Basically, I had given up and then thought of a totally crazy idea and tried one more thing - I did a search on Google for Hannah Montana Frank Erwin… (so crazy, it just might work…) - and found a site - Texas Box Office - they were selling plenty of tickets in good seats for face value - a friend of mine couldn’t believe his eyes - he had paid about $300 for two tickets earlier in the week from a “Craigslist benefactor” (I use the term very sarcastically).

We purchased our 2 tickets from Texas Box Office for $153 which included taxes and fees - that was the final price for seats which were in front of the stage in section 45. To my mind, still a lot of money - but, my daughter had a great time, she is a great girl and her heart was definitely “gladdened” *grins*

Inspired by Magic Dude from Tubelounge.com I thought I might get “in touch” with some of my past and begin publishing a weekly article having to do with the way I paid for college and the beer I drank there… MAGIC

Enjoy

Okay - flat out - I’m not getting paid for this review by Samsung, I have no affiliation that I know of with them, but I have got nothing but good things to say about this 20 inch widescreen 1680 x 1050 panel.

I bought my first one as soon as it came out - the same time I bought the Gateway GT5468 - I wrote about in Computers SUCK! Now, Let Me Tell You How I Really Feel…

The panel has been operating with no issues at all for the past 7 months. This thing kicks butt! Mine had a $249 pricepoint and depending on where you buy it (got mine at Fry’s), but I still don’t think there are any other panels out there offering the specs this one does.

About 2 months ago, I was in the market for another panel, so I went out shopping and again, for the money there was simply no other panel out there offering the specs that the Samsung SyncMaster 206BW has. The main specs I looked at, which seem to me to be the ones that make the most difference image quality wise were, Response Time - how quickly images are refreshed / redrawn on the screen; Image Contrast - a measure of the difference in pixel brightness from black to white; Type of input - Wanted to make sure I had both RGB & DVI available; Max Resolution - How much desktop “Real Estate” I could expect to get (in other words, it doesn’t matter if you have a 5000 inch display if the max resolution is 640 x 480…)

• Response Time: 2ms
• Image Contrast Ration: 800:1 / 3000:1 (dynamic)
• Max Resolution: 1680 x 1050 which was good enough, but, I have to admit, I wish this was 1920 x 1200 - but that is the only item I wish was improved on this panel.
• DVI & RGB

Compare this with another larger panel the Acer AL2216WBD, which while larger is the closest price range lcd monitor from CNETs Top Rated LCD Monitors is seriously lacking with:

• Response Time: 5ms
• Image Contrast: 700:1
• Max Resolution: 1680 x 1050
• Signal Input: DVI-D, VGA

And another on the CNET Editors’ Top Monitors, the HP W2007 ($260 - $284 current pricerange) with:

• Response Time: 5ms
• Image Contrast: 1000:1
• Max Resolution: 1680 x 1050
• Signal Input: VGA - but, according to CNET specs, this display does have a DVI-Digitaligital connection… so not sure what the full story is here.

Let me know what you think.

Update on Alexa rank.

Bloglyne.com Alexa rank was 1,219,158

Bloglyne.com Alexa rank today is 1,069,216

You can download the widget and their toolbar from their site here

Also, make sure to check out the “Increasing Alexa Rank - A Joint Experiment” at Connected Internet.

An Australian fellow calling himself Leighmac will talk about Chicken Ti#ies, recipes, and PHP. PHP is a widely used Hypertext Preprocessor language - an open source, server-side, HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages.

I have heard about this language (although, I am not a programmer), but have not had a chance to work with it very much in the past. While trying to customize some features for my new Directory site, I needed to learn a bit more about the extremely dynamic language.

Being more of a visual learner and not wanting to wade through a 4 inch thick reference manual - I performed a search in Google for PHP Video Tutorials not thinking that anything useful would come up. After visiting Leighmac’s site - I simply couldn’t believe my luck… I was surprised by his first video where he walked through the installation of an Apache, MySQL, PHP Server package for Windows called WAMP and a really neat PHP editor called PHP Designer 2006 (now, PHP Designer 2008), covering every little detail needed to get up and running and writing the practice code within about 5 minutes of the video’s ending. Note: Later in the series, he switches to a Programmer’s Text Editor called jEdit.

These videos are balanced with humor, and a level of detail that is rarely seen in videos which train folks about programming languages. Most people creating these sorts of videos, in my experience, make huge jumps in logic leaving out large amounts of information fully needed to understand the topic.

Leighmac walks you through all of the details needed to make a go at this language. Check his videos out and if you like them, make sure to give him a donation - yep that’s right… one of the best things about these videos is that they are absolutely free! All he asks is for a small $5, $10, or $25 donation if you feel like you benefited from the tutorials.

First it was Compaq by HP, then ATI by AMD, then Netscape by AOL, and now AOL is giving up on Netscape and it seems it will go the way of the dinosaurs…

 

I find myself curiously melancholy about the announcement on December 28^th 2007 by Tom Drapeau on the decision of AOL to end support for Netscape web browsers.  My career in technology started because of Netscape, and I am so sorry to see it go.  I spent two years at Stream International as Tech Support and later a Mentor for other tech support staff for Netscape 0.9 through 2.1x (or something like that…) - The oldest version of their site I could find on the WayBack Machine was for October 20, 1996 (I had left Stream by then - but was still a Netscape user… in fact, I had one of the old ix.netscape.com email addresses now that I think about it…)

 

I felt a similar “pang” of sorrow to see ATI Technologies get eaten up by AMD last year – I spent the majority of the past 10 years working for ATI handling the Compaq and Dell accounts as a Field Applications Engineer and then a Global Quality Account Manager.

I think it is a testimonial to change and innovation.  I noticed one of the commentators (albeit with a few spelling mistakes) make this comment to Tom’s article.

Netscape’s rise and fall symbolizes why it is important for all companies to constantly innovate and litigate when others use unethical tactics to hasten their demise. Both Internet Explorer and Firefox can after Netscape. Why are they still around?How did they manage to get popular debuting after one of the most important additions to the beginnings of the World Wide Web? We all know about Microsoft’s controversial tactics - but how does one explain FireFox?!

Why did Netscape not compete successfully? Was there internal politics?

We should all learn from this!

I guess this type of thing shows the continued need for new companies to face the staggering cost barriers of market entry and make their presence viable, because the boys who have been there seem to be dying out.

I think it is great that FireFox will continue to be out there, but I am saddened that I will never see a newer version of the Netscape comet storm again.

Au Revoir, Sayonara, Vaya Con Dios & finally, Thanks for all the fishes!

In about two short weeks of posting, I have seen a little less than 210,000 increase in the ol’ Alexa rank.

Bloglyne.com Alexa rank was 1,428,583

Bloglyne.com Alexa rank today is 1,219,158

It is interesting how a bit of effort is seemingly rewarded.

I cannot seem to get anything done, everything is always in some sort of state of incompleteness – a few minutes ago, I remembered “out of the blue” that I started signing up for the new Google YouTube AdSense stuff the other day and never completed it, because of the other projects which took my attention.

Do you ever feel like you are riding the tail of a twister?

I feel that way most days… right at this moment, I have no fewer than 26 windows open across two computers and three flat panels that I am currently switching back and forth between, working on projects in varying stages of chaos and completeness…

In the midst of all those windows open, at 2:33a.m. (with no end in sight, I might add) - I have to find time for my family, the business I own which actually pays the bills, change one of my hosting plans, find time to do all of those “honey-do” chores my wife has been pleading with me to get done… Oh! And we are planning on selling out house soon, so I will need to etch out time for that – here is the amazing thing, as busy as I am, I know the majority of folks out there in the world, are just as busy if not more so.

As annoying as it is to seemingly NEVER get things done, I have to think that this state of incompleteness is one of those things to be “thankful” for – I am blessed to live in the United States and although our family is not rich, we have enough work and things to keep us busy, as we strive to reach our potential to break through that “glass ceiling” and “make it.”  So, in spite of the seemingly never ending work – I am thankful that it is there as there are those who do not have the potential that we do to keep going!

I would love to hear from you if you are facing similar issues – oh, by the way, I actually did find time to finish something today – you will notice the Google YouTube Ad above – *yee-haw*! (not sure what I think about this thing - it is HUGE - and this is their smallest one! But that is blog fodder for another day )

As a follow-up to an article I wrote last year, I thought I would check to see what www.bloglyne.com is worth today. After not publishing any articles for just under 6 months, we realized a drop in Alexa rank of about 1.2 million *grins* So, I was curious if this change might impact the “value” of the blog according to the sites which I quoted back in March - Sootle, dnScoop, and the Business Opportunities Weblog.

According to these three sources Bloglyne.com is worth somewhere between $515 to $4,990.

Sootle values Bloglyne the highest at $4,990 - Their FAQ can be found here. They seem to use a method of disclosed purchase deals for other websites and then break down a per back link cost and use that to estimate the value of the site.

This seems a very poor way to measure the value of a site after the advent of DoFollow. For example, by commenting on 6 to 9 posts in a blog that publishes the top commentators to each page an individual can create thousands of back links in about 5 minutes.

dnScoop values Bloglyne the lowest at $515 - They seem to take a “big picture” approach measuring the following items as of the writing of this article:

• Domain Age using the WayBack Machine
• Page rank Check (not sure how valuable this is with the new Google algorithms)
• Inbound Links (back links) using the Yahoo Site Explorer
• Traffic Rank by AlexaRank
• Domain Name IP Report by myIPneighbors.com
• Link Value Report by Text-Link-Ads

I think that the combination of each of these items gives a better view of to potential value a site may generate at any given time. And although I would like to believe my site is worth almost $5,000 after not doing anything with it for the past 6 months, I tend to believe that is hogwash!

Well - Busy day today, spent a lot of it getting back into the swing of things at the main biz. But, I am about to wrap up my day at 2:48a.m. as I have an appointment with a client at 8:00a.m. in about 5 hours and need my beauty sleep… man do I EVER need my beauty sleep!

Currently, I am using the LemonShadow2 phpLD Template by OS Designer. This thing is nifty and OS Designer has also made a companion WordPress template to go along with the directory template called LemonPress. I have not used LemonPress, but for those using the free version of PHP Link Directory they can directly link the LemonPress blog to their directory and keep visual continuity across both sites.

LemonShadow2 is a really great, and “simple to customize” template. It comes with some of the following features:

• Really nice 3 column format
• Pre-configured space for banner and text link ads
• Google AdSense Ready
• Easily editable Google Template file which allows for customization of links and your publisher ID
• The 3.2 version comes with Articles and Contact Me pages already installed
• Very few images to load in the template makes its load times extremely fast
• What I really like is that this is a free template and OS Designer does not require you to “pimp out” the directory by listing 3 sponsors in addition to phpLD and himself. All you need to do is leave his link in the footer alone, the rest of the template you can “go to town” with…

So, today I spent a few hours customizing the image files and CSS into a color scheme which I preferred to the LemonShadow colors, but still need to work on a logo… well - there is always tomorrow.