Busby SEO Challenge by Benj

You still have time for your last minute holiday shopping. If you think that will just make you spend some more money, check some online discounts you can get with coupons. Me being an electronics/computer guy, I think I will use one of the Best Buy coupons myself at www.couponchief.com. It’s still not too late for your holiday shopping!

Just because you know how to use the computer, sometimes all your relatives and friends ask the same questions over and over again. How to remove or prevent viruses and spywares. Since I used to teach at a computer school, sames questions used to arise and that is also when I started blogging. I used to give out a page on my students blog about anti-virus and anti-spyware but it is no longer updated. But since I still have several friends asking about them, there is a tutorial site that has a page about this on Newbie.org. And it seems to have the proper links in there as well, so I suggest checking that site out as well.

Growing up kids is enjoyable, you do not really want to spy on them, and still give them enough freedom to breathe, but you still would want to monitor them in a way just to ensure they are going up in the right direction.

In the information age, the Internet has been a tool that has been used in both good ways and bad ways. And I guess one concern of many parents is what do their children do online? Chatting and emails have been tools also of the malicious people looking for targets of prey, from pedophiles to scammers, phishing attempts and plain robbers getting information about your home. With the high volume of pornography, illegal gambling, illegal selling of drugs online and adult dating websites, you would want to take some extra precautionary measures.

One way to be sure is by the user of keylogger programs. A good keystroke logger can make parents feel more secure without staying over the shoulder of your children. A leader in the keystroke logging software is Spectorsoft. and you might want to check them out. They have been mentioned in several TV programs and magazines. They can monitor emails, blogs, surfing activity, chatting and more. This may also have other applications in the business world as well as in private investigation purposes.

I found this cool site with a nice software for PDAs, Newsland. On my previous Palm’sthe m100, IIIxe, Zire 7.1 and Treo 600, I was a fan of AvantGo. But now that I got my new Treo 700 smartphone running on Windows Mobile. Newsland is the perfect replacement for AvantGo and I am happy using it synchronizing all the news I like, especially when I want to keep up to date with the latest in science and technology.Newsland is the perfect news application tool to keep up-to-date while on the go.

Yeah, the default email program on my Treo 600 doesn’t work. Good thing there is an alternative solution. And even runs better than the default email program. Very light weight, consumes less resources, runs faster. I like it. Read about the MsgAgent email software for the Palm Treo 600 and Palm Treo 650. I think this does not work on the Palm Treo 700 because that is running on Windows already and not on Palm OS.

If you are looking for this driver and is having a hard time looking for it on the Creative Labs Website. Here is the driver.

I had an old blog posting somewhere here about my Treo on what I liked and what I do not like.

The PalmOne Treo 600 has no Graffiti. Graffiti, aside from what it really means, this is also the name of the writing system software in most Palm PDAs. You learn how to write their way to digitally input real text that can be editable. It is somewhat like a character recognition software to converts what you write into real font letters but you have to follow their proper way of writing.

Being a Palm m100, Palm xeIII, Palm Zire 71 user… the graffiti system was into my way of writing already. For me, it was way faster than the on-screen keyboard or any type of keypad. When I got the PalmOne Treo 600, I was dissapointed they took out the Graffiti software from the whole system and it had a tiny qwerty keyboard instead. That sucked for me. I had my Treo for several months now and just adapted to the qwerty keyboard system.

But I decided to get MobileWrite 3.5, mobile handwriting recognition software. Finally I can run Graffiti again on a Treo! I found this in a promotial PalmGear mailing list I am a member of and decided to get Sudoku and Kakuro since I got addicted to playing Sudoku already.

Way back 1996, when I started shifting to my IT career… I used no software for Personal Information Management. For email, I used Qualcomm’s Eudoraâ„¢ but this was for email alone. And the old pen and small notebook did the rest for my everyday planning. After sometime, I started using Microsoft Outlook®, since it integrates email, contacts, notes, task and the calendar very well.

Being concerned with company expenditures, I was at first against the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) since I viewed it as another company expense and the pen and paper, whiteboard and corkboard in the office works fine. But as my former partner Terence Teves was persistent in getting PDAs, I was convinced to give it a shot.

So I started with a Palm m100. And I was happy it would synchronize well with Microsoft Outlook®.

After using Palm® m100, I have used a Palm® xeIII, Palm® Zire™ 71 and now I am using a Palm® Treo™ 600. During those times, I have been jumping from Microsoft Outlook® to Palm® Desktop for my calendar, task and notes. I liked the power Microsoft Outlook® offers but seems to have trouble when it gets really filled up. And it was the email that fills up Microsoft Outlook® so much. And I have used the scanpst tool to fix the outlook.pst file many times in the past and there were times I had unrecoverable data. So those were the reasons I would go back to Palm® Desktop and use something else for my emails.

Since the late 1990’s, I would jump back and forth from Microsoft Outlook® to Qualcomm Eudoraâ„¢ and since last year, I was a Mozilla Thunderbird user. For the past year I was happy with Palm® Desktop and Mozilla Thunderbird combination totally departing Microsoft Outlook®, but recently my Mozilla Thunderbird has been very slow. After opening it up, it takes some time before I can display the email messages and it always gives this dialog box that it is still processing the folders. I guess this happens once it gets filled up too.

The new Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2003 looks very attractive and promising as I have seen the new interface on someone else’s computer, but buying Outlook is just another problem to face too. And in the past, I always had the same problem with Microsoft Outlook® that when the outlook.pst file gets so big, that is when problems come out. But then again, I think it happens to all email softwares when they get so filled up.

I guess the best solution is simply go through your emails, and do not archive them all. Delete all those sales emails from all these subscriptions, delete the mailing list emails that are already out-of-topic, and look for some nice way to archive the emails. I wish there was an easy one-click way to export all the emails in a nice way to different database formats for better archiving.

It’s been a long time since my last post because I’ve been so busy lately. And bad things happen to make things even harder.

My PC Problems

As usual PC problems never go away. One time my PC kept rebooting and at first I thought it was Windows, but even before it enters Windows, it reboots just a few second after POST. So it can be a hardware problem. I check some CMOS settings and everything looked fine and the weird thing was even within the CMOS settings it was rebooting. And I checked the system health within the CMOS setup and noticed the fast climb of the temperature. Once it reaches 96^o centigrade, it reboots. Imagine that, just 4^o less than boiling point at STP. The processor fan was still running, but the problem was mainly it was just a bit loose and the heatsink was not sticking well to the processor.

After that was solved… there was a recent lightning storm in San Diego that woke up the whole neighborhood where I lived. There was one big strong one that lit up my room and my lights blinked even if they were off. And my PC was on during the night. What the lightning broke was one phone line splitter, one DSL line filter, one 56k intenal PCI modem and a bunch of bad sectors on my hard disk. The PC was totally unoperable. Although I had a Celeron Windows PC hanging around and a laptop, a lot of needed files were in separate places on my AMD PC that was struck by lightning and the hard disk had bad sectors everywhere.

I can use an external USB/Firewire hard disk casing but my data was in two different hard disk and I have only one external casing. Taking them in and out of the casing was a tedious task to do. Aside from that, two of the partitions on one of the drives were in NTFS and not in FAT32. And the other hard disk was all NTFS. I got a Mac Mini Recently and even if it can read the NTFS drives, it is read only. MacOS can only write to the FAT32 file system. My only hope is to do a Partition Magic, but the drive must have enough space to be able to do the non-destructive partition changes, or else, I need to copy everything to my other drives and reformat the NTFS partitions to FAT32 and put the files back. And I need to do that on my Celeron PC.

Opening and closing the PC, putting on and removing the hard disk, moving files from hard disk to hard disk all consumes time. But if not done right away, more work is going to catch up on me. So far chkdsk was already done on my 120GB hard disk and was able to retrieve most files. I can do partial work but thework files are on the NTFS partitions. My other 80GB hard disk is currently undergoing chkdsk and when that is done I need to copy my billing statements to my clients and other papers like invoices, proposals and contracts. It’s October and I need to send out October billings.

The Mac Mini

I got a Mac Mini. Only 512MB memory since I will upgrade the memory myself to 1GB. Also got a Hyundai 17″ TFT LCD Panel Monitor. Kensington Wireless RF keyboard and mouse. Mac runs fine, pretty fast and everything how a mac should be, so generally it is great. But what do I do not like?

I am a keyboard shortcut person on the Windows PC. I use the keyboard a lot in many ways that many people will use the mouse instead.

I bodies of text in anything, in word processors, spreadsheets, browser text boxes, anything with text, I use these shortcuts very often:

up
down
left
right
home
end
pgup
pgdown
ctrl-up
ctrl-down
ctrl-left
ctrl-right
ctrl-home
ctrl-end
ctrl-pgup
ctrl-pgdown
shift-up
shift-down
shift-left
shift-right
shift-home
shift-end
shift-pgup
shift-pgdown
ctrl-shift-up
ctrl-shift-down
ctrl-shift-left
ctrl-shift-right
ctrl-shift-home
ctrl-shift-end
ctrl-shift-pgup
ctrl-shift-pgdown

In the Mac, it can also be done. Like instead of Home, you use Alt-Left, and instead of End, you use Alt-Right. No problem, I can train myself with the changes, but the problem is in some applications it does not work. It works on MS Word for Mac, in the text in Adium, it wants the Home and End, and in Dreamweaver code view, it does not work at all. Yes I am trainable to new conventions, but each application in the Mac does not follow the same conventions. And I am forced to use the mouse.

Another thing… In Windows… many applications have keyboard shortcuts, but not everything has a keyboard shortcut. But everything that does not have a keyboard shortcut, I memorize the “Alt” key sequences using the menu bar underlined letters.

Common ones I use often are like

Photoshop:
Alt>I>I = Image Size
Alt>I>S = Canvass Size
Alt>I>P = Crop Selection
Alt>I>A>C = Adjust Contrast/Brightness

Excel:
Alt>O>C>A = Auto-fit column width
Alt>O>R>A = Auto-fit row height
Alt>O>C>H = Hide Column
Alt>O>R>H = Hide Row
Alt>O>C>U = Unhide Column
Alt>O>R>U = Unhide Row

Word:
Alt>F>U = Page Setup

These are just a few of them. And on the Mac, the only shortcuts I seem to be able to use are the shortcuts given and cannot activate menu items with the keyboard alone. Unless there is something I really do not know yet and I still need to figure out how to do them on the Mac. So right now, I am forced to use the mouse.

I still picture myself using the Windows PC as my main general all around computer to use. And I will use my Mac Mini for work specific things that is related to graphics, audio or video. For coding I will still use my Windows PC mainly because of the keyboard shortcut convenience and speed and for websites, the Mac will be used for view testing. And of course Linux still powers my server. Stable, economical, perfect for a server, but will not use it for general all around use.

Investor Workshop

One of my favorite books on my shelf is RIch Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. Although this is not a book only for business people, most business people like it. The book mainly talks about Robert Kiyosaki’s two dads. One rich, one poor, and how he learned from both, but followed the advice of his rich dad when it came to the topics about money.

Robert Kiyosaki recently had an Investor Workshop at the LA Convention Center last October 1. Being on his mailing list, I received an email about the event. It cost $150, in Philippine Pesos that is more than P8,000, but it was really worth it. It looked like there were 2,000 people there and he was really great. His knowledge shared will really charge a lot in the way you think. He also tells you about the common pitfalls people do why they never really succeed. He talked about taxes and other problems with the government laws that you have to watch out for. Knowing the rules to take advantage of the rules and not fall into the wrong paths. He talked about 3 top investments and he had excellent speakers on every type of investment. He talked about inflation and currency and investing off-shore. And although he talks all about money and how to gain more money and get rich, methods he used himself by using real estate, gold, silver and gas. He did not promote nor was trying to sell any real estate, gold, silver or gas shares. He was just sharing his knowledge. And it is very nice to know that he also has a foundation that is helping out schools integrate into some lessons as early as grade school just to get students better equiped with financial knowledge. It is his social responsibility to help lessen poverty. Since he does believe that war, divorce, illegal aliens, and other problems are really money problems. So his foundation is to help educate the people learn more about financial knowledge to make a change in the world.

And the things I learned and changed some of my thinking was… I like gas, I am not going for a sole proprietorship and will register a corporation, I am not getting my 401k or IRA. But I still need to save up and earn more so I can invest more and make money move and work for me so I do not work for money.

While working at home… I have two desktops and one laptop. All emails and PDA synchronization runs on the laptop. That way if I need to be on the go, all planning and client correspondence comes with me.

One PC is mainly for work, and the other PC runs all sorts of stuff like TV, radio, CDs, music, and other entertainment while I work.

But with the tables I got, and how they are arranges, sometimes even just opening the other PC makes me lazy since I have work to do on the work PC. So the PC that serves as my TV is just there doing nothing. My laptop… all my emails are there… I sometimes find it inconvenient twisting my body all the time since the laptop is on my left. And with my table… my legs go all the way in and my legs cannot move freely to turn to the left.

All these extra efforts I believe affects my productivity and health as well putting my body in various contortions just to reach stuff.

Now I have seen all these nice corner desk at various office furniture websites. But all of them will still require me to spend some money. So I decided why not still give it a try with whatever I have and try to make it work. So I started rearranging things and the two most time consuming parts in doing this is the bunch of wires which I often call spagetti.

I still don’t find it convenient facing my laptop at where it currently is. I rather slip out of the table to free my legs and face the left completely. But then I will need a new table. So I still spent some money… I bought a Tabletote. The Tabletote is a product of Instand, manufacturer or portable laptop tables.

This product could be taken apart and easily fit a good laptop bag. So aside from having a new table, if ever I will be on the go with my laptop, I will bring the table along as well.

Although my Tabletote has not arrived yet, and I chose the longest shipping period since that is the cheapest shipping rate, this is the result of my current setup.

No postings, too busy.

Start of the month again, new billings to send… And my billing data is saved in an external drive using a 120GB hard disk in a External USB Casing. Then last night, my whole invoice folder dissapeared. Actually it was still there but totally unreadable. It had client invoices going back to August 2003.

I am not running any automated system yet and all invoices are in Word Documents that are manually edited and saved, emailed, faxed and snail mailed to my clients in the Philippines that pay via bank deposits rather than online payments.

The whole invoice folder was totally corrupted and unreadable, even after doing chkdsk twice.

If you are a client of mine, nothing to worry about, I have backup files all the way from the beginning up to January 16, 2005. Then the rest of the months are in the sent items of my email software. I just dfelt bad about the trouble of going through my email, sorting and putting things together. Another time consuming thing. I guess if updates were done more often, it would be better.

I just decided to sleep last night and when I woke up today, ate lunch, I decided to go to the gym and just burn out my negative energies.

When I got home, I decided to do one more final chkdsk. And restarted, and like magic, all the files were there!

So I took out a blank DVD right away and burned about 3.5GBs of backed up data, documents, contracts, invoices, proposals and websites.