GoDaddy failing with .ME registrations
Not sure what is going on with GoDaddy but they are going to be issuing quite a few refunds over the next few days. I went to register some .ME domain names today only to find out later by email that these names were already registered and I will be issued a refund. Here is an example. I looked up Google.me about 5 minutes a go. That would be 3 hours after the public registration began. GoDaddy is showing Google.me as still available. Yeah, right. I doubt that. Leave a note if you had the same troubles and leave some names that you were successful in registering
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Word Origin - The Floppy Disk
admin | Jun 25, 2008Floppy Disk - The data-storage device called the “floppy disk” was invented in 1971 by a research team at IBM headed by engineer Alan Shugart. It was 8 inches wide, only a few mils thick, and flexible, so that it wobbled in its user’s hand - thus “floppy.” Later iterations enclosed the material in a plastic casing, which occasioned a change of name to “diskette.”
All they are good for now.
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Plastic Bag Problem
admin | Jun 24, 2008
Recently I have converted to using the reusable Stop & Bags that you can buy for a dollar at the store. The plastic bags I were previously using were just piling up in my closet and it was starting to get annoying. I could not take the clutter anymore so I rounded up all the plastic bags in my apartment and with my Fiance we took them to the local Stop & Shop to put in the recycle bin. With today’s ever growing concern with going green we felt we were doing our civic duty. Then I went online and researched “recycling plastic bags”. Here is what I found.
The advantages:
The durability, strength, low cost, water and chemicals resistance, welding properties, lesser energy and heavy chemicals requirements in manufacture, fewer atmosphere emissions and light weight are advantages of plastic bags. It is said that using plastic bags in more environmentally safe than using the traditional paper bags. The reasoning being that plastic bags require less energy to produce, transport and recycle; however these studies also note that recycling rates for plastic are significantly lower than for paper.
I thought to myself, why would the plastic bag be less recycled? I reuse the bags for when I clean out the cat’s litter boxes and I bring any extras to the recycle bin at the grocery market. Come to find out only 1% off all plastic bags are recycled. Only 1%!!. What is the point. I guess it is to expensive. Thought I was doing something good. If you want to read what a company thought of as far as recycling plastic bags you should read an article written by the Eco-Capitalist.
5 Business You Can Start To Make Money Online
The importance of Logo Creation
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The extinction of the gas pump
Four Dollar Gasoline sounds crazy enough in 2008 but it has become a reality. When the first gas pumps appeared in the 1930s no one envisioned gas rises to the record levels it is at today. So the architects of the early pumps designed them to only calculate up to $3.99 and the $99.99 for the total sales. This has made the old time spinning dial pumps obsolete today. Here are some interesting facts to take a look at:
17,000 mechanical pumps are in need of updating or replacing. It costs $10,000 to $12,000 to replace each one with a new electronic pump. Station owners can also pay $650 or more to have their old pumps retrofitted. Unfortunately for these gas station owners there is a significant backlog to get updated.
10.9 Cents is the average margin gas stations have been earning on a gallon of regular-grade gas in 2008, according to the Lundberg Survey. That would be nearly half of what it was last year at this time.
2 Percent of U.S. gas-and-convenience stations are owned by oil companies, down from 4% in 2004. This includes Exxon Mobil and Shell which closed or sold a third of their company owned stations. They still license their name to third party operators. With crude passing $130, the point of sale is not their best use of resources. The real money is in finding more oil.
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Five Businesses You Can Start to Make Money Online
admin | May 21, 2008
Written by Erik R. Wyche
Are you looking to make money online? Well the bottom line is regardless of how you make money online, you need to understand that everything you do on the internet is a business. As with any business you have a product or service that you are promoting and you earn money when you have satisfied customers use your products or services. The more successful you are at finding and getting customers to patronize your business the more money you are going to make online.
With that understanding, here are five businesses you can start to make money online.
#1 – Information Product Business – Why do people go on the internet to begin with? While people do play games, chat with other people and do many things online, the number one reason why people go on the internet is to obtain information. Want proof? At the time of the writing of this article, the top 5 most visited web sites on the internet are Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Windows Live and MSN. Each and every one of these web sites are information web sites. Therefore if the majority of internet users are looking for information, doesn’t it make sense to start a business selling information?
#2 – EBay Business – An EBay business is one of the easiest businesses to start online. All you need to do is find a product to sell, create a listing for that product on the Ebay web site and then once you have a buyer, ship the product out to the customer. There are even companies known as “dropship” companies in which you can sell their products on EBay. Once you make a sale, you place the order on their web site and they ship the product to the customer for you!
#3 – Freelance Services Business – There are a lot of people online that will pay you to perform a service for them. In fact there are entire web sites, such as Elance and Guru that have built an entire business simply by facilitating the communication between people that provide a service and people that are looking to buy a service. Some examples of great services to build a business behind include programming work, writing and content creation and administration work.
#4 – Internet Services Business – There are many services that are necessary for people who use the internet that you can start a business to provide. Some examples include internet connection, web site hosting, auto responder services, domain registration services and more. In many cases you can actually partner with a company that already offers these services and sell their services under your company brand name.
#5 – Lead Generation Business – Every business owner on the internet is interested in generating leads for his or her business. You can start a lead generation business where you generate leads for these businesses. You can either charge per lead or participate in an affiliate program where you get paid a percentage of the sales you generated.
These five businesses are the most common types of businesses that you can start to make money online. They are proven every day there are new success stories of people who have started businesses in these industries and have made a lot of money. All it takes is for you to pick one of these business types, learn the ins and outs and go out there and get to work!
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The importance of logo creation
In a business, logo creation is as crucial as setting up a business plan. It is not as easy as going to a designer and having him create a cool, modern symbol with a ripped off tagline. Unfortunately, it goes beyond “cool”. It goes beyond what you think is the hype. Instead, it requires a deeper understanding of your business, how it can be best represented, the overall impression it leaves on its viewers and if it is sticky enough to be retained in the minds of your market.
Your logo’s every curve and color must exist for a reason. All elements should come together to contribute to an overall powerful and clear message easily conveyed to anyone who sees it.
Color Selection
Let us start with color. Colors mean something. Some colors make you mad, some make you calm and some make you agitated and so on. Every color has a psychological impact on people and a good mastery of such knowledge will prove to be very useful in creating your logo.
Composition of Elements
Selecting the right image shapes for your logo and arranging them also requires a good amount of thought. Overdone logos with a lot of curves and circles might leave you confused and overwhelmed. At the same time, some are too simple that it leaves you unimpressed with no clear idea what the business behind that logo wants to say. Investing time and effort on trial-and-error tests on your logo might seem a tedious task, but once overcome, you will reap the rewards with more response and more results from your viewers.
Getting It All Together
Before we think of what color or shape, at the base of our minds is what your logo should symbolize. The “what” comes first before the “how”. From the base sketch, to the colors, to the shapes, always check if every addition gives more value to your logo in association with your brand. In addition to the value of the parts of your logo, another thing you should keep a keen eye out for is the overall balance of your design. You must think about how to balance your logo design well enough that each stroke is where it should be and everything taken in its totality equates to a clear message so that people can understand:
- What your business does and what it believes in
- The products and services you provide
- The advantage of choosing your products and services over others
Going over some popular logos very familiar to us, we notice the use of small fonts, use of the color red and arches. Let us dissect these elements for a minute.
Big companies use small fonts to convey that despite the enormous size and spread of their organization, people from all walks of life, even the less prestigious, can still make business with them. A small type makes people less daunted and rather more at ease in approaching the company.
The color red, not only grabs our attention, but it also communicates a sense of professionalism, passion and stability. That’s why it’s no surprise that several financial or banking companies make use of this shade like Mastercard, WellsFargo, and HSBC.
Now let us go to the use of arches. Arches can be used in a variety of ways and in conjunction other elements or letters in your logo. When used overhead, the arch can represent an umbrella to convey protection. Alternatively, in the same sense, when used under the text, an arch can convey reliability like a net catches circus acrobats when they fall. With lines arched in different directions, it is very possible that you can communicate a sense of protection, confidence and trust.
It goes to show that there is no need for too much incorporation of lines and shapes to convey a message to the people. Going overboard with symbols and colors in a logo can create too many elements that people will only add fuss instead of value.
Double check your designs and before you have your professional color printing company work on your logo, make sure that you have created it properly and have thought it out well. You must achieved the proper balance of using symbols that mean something akin to your company and keep them as simple and neat enough as possible. Balanced and uncluttered, remember that.
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The Power of Stumble
admin | May 16, 2008If done right and with a little luck social networking can be a very powerful tool. I own another blog, Zamoraa, which I just post random thoughts, news stories and pictures. On Wednesday I posted this illusion of Albert Einstein. It was stumbled and the hits to my site went through the roof. 25,000 hits for Wednesday & Thursday. This is 25,000 uniques for each day, not combined. Just check out for yourself.
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Is Urine the new Fresh Water Source?
The title says it all. Looks like in the distant future we could be drinking fresh water made of our urine. NASA has developed a water purification system that collects astronaut’s sweat, moisture from respiration, drain water, and urine - and turns it all into drinking water.
NASA has been working on this technology due to the heavy expense it incurs with transporting fresh water to the space station. Over the past five years, the agency has spent $60 million delivering potable water to the International Space Station on the space shuttle (6 tons at a cost of about $40,000 per gallon). Deploying the Water Recovery System on the ISS will cut the volume of water hauled into space by two-thirds and free up enough room on the shuttle for four more astronauts.
Water Security has added a special filter to the NASA unit, creating a system that can remove 99.9 percent (what about the other .01 percent) of all waterborne viruses, which could prove particularly useful in the developing world. The United Nations estimates that more than 1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water and that 10 million die each year as a result of contaminated water supplies and inadequate sanitation.
Water Security has already begun putting the technology to work in areas where freshwater is in short supply. This summer, global relief agency Concern for Kids deployed a foot-powered purification unit in northern Iraq. Robert and Roni Anderson, Concern’s founders, loaded it onto the back of a Toyota pickup and drove to dozens of villages to purify their groundwater. The unit pumps out 5 gallons per minute, and a single day of purification can sustain a village of 5,000 people for a month. The cost is about 3 cents a gallon. Iraqi water companies, by comparison, charge $4 a gallon.
I will not even try to explain how this system works for it is far to complicated for my simple mind. However, I am curious to see how many of you would adopt this method for drinking water. I know for myself, it might taste fine but in the back of my head it will always be there that I am drinking urine. Yuck!!
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Getting out of Debt
admin | May 15, 2008
Over the course of the next few weeks, I am going to take a look at debt and the solutions to get out of debt. This has become a major problem here in the United States. Lack of debt education and the economic pitfalls have lead to where we are today in regards to personal debt.
Unfortunately, the bottom fell out of the market and houses started to fall in value. Before long investors owed more on their homes than they were worth. To make matters worse, low ARMs started to reset and balloon mortgages started to come due. Many were unable to make ends meet and foreclosures started spreading across the nation.
America is facing a financial crisis. Millions of people are carrying to much debt. The average family owes upwards of $9,900 just on credit cards. That’s not even counting mortgages, car loans and student loans. Not since the great depression, as a nation we have spent more that we earned for two consecutive years. As a country, our household debt is at a whopping 19 percent.
The first step is figuring out if you have a debt problem. You most likely do, if you are reading this.
Stay tuned for part two, which will focus on acknowledging the problem.
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Albert Einstein Illusion
Occasionally I will come across something not related to the content of this blog but just have to share. This is one of the best illusions that I have come across on the internet. If you are able, just get up and walk away from your computer about 15 ft. and look at the picture again. Let me know what you see.
Pretty cool, right?
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