Archive for October, 2006

Pioneers in blog marketing and promotion, PayPerPost.com, provide unprecedented opportunities for bloggers to make their blogs pay off. I blog for fun, but fun doesn’t pay the bills. PayPerPost pays my bills. Check them out and find out just how much you could be making with only a few minutes worth of work. Find out about new products and services and be the first to know about them. You can have the latest news and get paid to talk about what you already would talk about anyway for free!

By the way, the picture at the right is part of the payperpostbluemonster contest worth $500 to the winner!

I hate the telephone. I hate answering the phone. I hate calling people on the phone. I don’t like the telephone because it is rude. If a person were as inconsiderate as the telephone is they would get a punch in the mouth. No matter what you are doing it just rings when someone enters the magic numerical incantation. When it was first invented it would just keep ringing until the person on the other end of the line gave up. That’s why answering machines were invented and why they are so popular. They make the phone shut up when you are in the middle of doing something. Most of the time when people call me they are requesting information or asking if I can do something in the distant future. When people call for these reasons it really aggravates me.

For the longest time I have been against putting any sort of personally identifying information on the answering machine. I worked for a short period of time in a call center where we called businesses and conducted surveys. I can’t believe I ever took the job because of how much I hate the phone. I actually used to call people for eight hours every day. When we got any sort of recording we were usually able to verify that we had the right telephone number and even, sometimes, the name of the person we needed to talk with (we only wanted people that could answer financial questions about the company, so they needed to be at least a head accountant). You ask the secretary (who we affectionately called the “gatekeeper”) if we could talk with the Accountant or the CFO at the company. Usually asking a vague nameless question like that gets you voice mail. Well, the Voice Mail usually had their first and sometimes their last name on the recording (“Hi, you’ve reached the office of Dale Higgins…”). So then you write that down and call back later and confidently ask for Dale Higgins.

Where am I going with all this, you might ask. Well, I really want to change my answering machine message to simply give my email address and then say something like: “If you have a request you would like to make of Shawn please email shawn dot dowler at gmail dot com. That is the fastest and most reliable way to get a timely response. We are not responsible for unreturned phone calls.” I have another address I could give out that would leave out my last name. I think that might be vague enough. I don’t know how people would take such a message, though. Maybe I could add: “If this is an informational call not requiring a response, please leave a message after the beep.” I figure that that’s probably the most cordial way to handle the situation. Then it’s goodbye phone, hello email!

PayPerPost has allowed some people to make the money they need for all kinds of things. I make enough in one month to pay the rent on the apartment Krissy and I live in! It’s like having the money from a part-time job but still having the time to focus on school!

If you are interested and want to make money, and you would like to help me out then please use my email address (shawn dot dowler at gmail dot com) in the referral field when you sign up. The sooner you sign up the sooner you can start making money!

Making web pages used to be fun. I started back in the old days around 1996 with my first attempts to learn HTML. It wasn’t complicated. There weren’t very many tags. There was no such thing as CSS. You just made invisible tables to position everything. Life was good. You didn’t have anything so complicated that it “looked wrong” in another browser. Then things started to change. People started using Microsoft Internet Explorer and making their web pages with it as their rendering tester. After their designs were finished they would start getting complaints about how their site was all messed up in Netscape Navigator (that’s what the web browser was called back then). So instead of trying to make their site work right in all browsers (which is still hard today) they just slapped a little image on their site that said “This page best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer Version X.”

There has been a push for web standards in the hope that pages might render the same on all browsers. No browser implements all of the standards correctly, unfortunately, but some didn’t even try. Internet Explorer has historically been the most popular among web users, but at the same time the worst when it came to standard compliance. The biggest problem with Microsoft Internet Explorer, though, has been that it had been years since it was updated with any new features. New technologies have emerged that were simply unsupported in the most widely used browser in the world. It appears that IE7 seeks to change that. I still don’t recommend that people use it over Firefox, but at least with the world shifting to a more feature-rich browser web designers can finally start using the advanced technologies that have been supported by Firefox, Opera, Safari, and others for years now.

Maybe Microsoft Internet Explorer’s best contribution to the Internet will be that it makes web design fun again. Let’s home it doesn’t end up like IE6 in a couple of years: ignored and outdated.

All I have to say is that this new mosaic puzzle must be huge to have this many pieces. This time PayPerPost.com, the company that pays bloggers for blog ads online, has got something really exciting planned. At least that’s what they’ve said. It’s still a secret, but it won’t be for long! Remember, the first person to assemble the entire payperpostbluemonster picture out of all the little puzzle pieces gets $500 for their trouble. Let me know what it’s like when you win!

On my way home from the Church Membership Records Audit I stopped by the dry cleaner’s to pick up Krissy’s clothes she had left there. We always go to the same place where there is a really nice woman that works there with her surly husband. I always hope she is manning the counter when I go to do anything. Today the husband was vacuuming behind the counter when I walked in, ticket in hand. I handed him the ticket and he went over to the clothes roller coaster. When he came back he said it was five dollars. I always pay with a credit card, it just makes things easier to keep track of finances that way. I took out my card and offered it to him. He didn’t move. He just stood there and snidely said, “It’s only five dollars.” So I stood for a second with my hand outstretched, not moving. Then I finally said something like. “Oh. Alright. Let’s see if I have any cash.” I knew I had a 50 dollar bill on me, that was a gift I had received, and it is part of the Wii fund. I honestly didn’t know if I had five dollars. I found one, though, and gave it to him.

I just couldn’t believe that he would scoff at my plastic money. I understand that each transaction with a credit card costs him money, but I would assume that that cost is already factored into the price for the dry cleaning service. I’m just proud of myself that I didn’t get mad.

Here is a rather interesting looking payperpostbluemonster puzzle piece this time. PayPerPost.com provides an easy meeting place for bloggers and advertisers to help each other through blog marketing. Whether you want to get your product or service out there or you want to pay your blog hosting costs, case PayPerPost is the way to accomplish your goals online.

Over the past few years of waiting and watching many sites slowly switching to a reliance on Flash 8, doctor Linux users have been left out in the cold. Adobe originally promised a version of Flash 8 for Linux, case but then they decided to jump over that release and just work on getting a Linux version of Flash 9 out the door. I can say that in my preliminary usage of the new plugin it is much more stable even though it is still in beta. It is more stable than Flash 7 for Linux (which kept crashing Firefox). So I say upgrade now to Flash 9 for Linux and enjoy a more stable, more compatible Flash experience online.

I admittedly don’t know much about Sytropin HGH or Human Growth Hormone or any other nutritional supplements. My Aunt, Dawn, knows tons about these kinds of things though. HGH is still a relatively new discovery. Sytropin triggers the body to produce more HGH than it normally would, so it’s all-natural. Accordion to some studies HGH can have results similar to what many would consider to be an age reversal in physical terms. I don’t know all of the information, but Sytropin appears to be one of the most popular ways to stimulate natural HGH production. There is a good article about HGH supplements you should also check out. I’m all for anything that makes you feel better. Give it a look-see.

Our neighbors across the way has a habit of leaving a bag of trash outside the door of their apartment. You’d think they would get it on their way out in the morning, but such is often not the case. Krissy and I thought it might be a nice gesture to take it out to the trash for them when we were already going that way anyway leaving the apartment. After a while it got to be kind of a running joke. The missionaries came over once when the trash was there and they took it down when they left. It looks like the fun might be over, however.

Today we got one of our apartment manager’s infamous letters telling us that we’re doing something wrong. They try not to target any individual for some reason, which only leads to inaction. This time the wording was in the passive voice: “We have received several complaints that there has been trash left outside apartment doors in the hallways of building 1726.” I doubt that it will really stop until someone actually knocks on their door ant tells them in person to quit it and hands them a written letter with their name and apartment number on it telling them to stop or else.

I wonder if they will ever know what happened to their trash when they left it outside their apartment.