Crazy Busy Update #6

I finally completed my ethics course and have a little bit of free time before jumping into my final class. If I didn’t finish my story about my work computer, I will sum it up now… After a bunch of searching and tinkering, I discovered that it was Windows Explorer that was having issues. I installed IE7 and that corrected everything – what a sweet simple fix.

I am happy to report that my DVD LCD overhead projector is working as planned and it is awesome. Since I have young children, I have done a lot of testing with their videos. It is pretty neat to watch Blues Clues on an 83″ screen in the basement. What is even better is that the projector is capable of going bigger – I am hoping to get it to the 100″ mark. I will have to hook the Wii up to it and rock out with Guitar Hero!

Techie Lunch Suggestion

If you are like me and are busy as hell, then you don’t always have a lot of time to eat. I have a select menu of items I take to work that can be cooked and eaten rather quickly. I just found a new snack line from Oscar Mayer that is easy and quick to prepare.

The line is called Deli Creations and these flatbread sandwiches are nuked in the microwave for 60 seconds. Pretty darn sweet! While this isn’t tech related, I wanted to give a shout out for these new sandwiches because they are delicious and are perfect for those on the go.

Optimus Prime – Evolution of Dance

Just because I was a Transformers follower in my youth and I couldn’t pass it up…

Crazy Busy Update #4

I can’t believe it is February already! This year seems to be flying right along. A lot has happened in the last few weeks. I started my home IT consulting business, but then I also had to return to college. I have had to kick my time management skills back into high gear to handle everything. I also stopped hosting my website at home. The time it took to maintain the system and drives is something I didn’t have. Now I am hosted as a WordPress blog masked behind my MojoTechBlog.com domain name.

On the tech front, I moved my main dual core system upstairs so I could work on my school and business stuff more efficiently… and to do some gaming every once in a while. My toddler loves the blue LED power light on the case and thinks it is great fun to push it on and off when the system is running. Luckily I remembered to configure the power button in XP to not shut down my system automatically when she does this. Now she can click to her heart’s content.

Crazy Busy Update #3

It has been a hectic couple of weeks and I haven’t had time to post. I have continued my IT adventures though. I have been doing some Linux distro hopping and like the PCLinuxOS versions (both the main and the mini). They are very polished just like the Ubuntu series of offerings. I have run into trouble getting my laptop’s wifi card to work in PCLinuxOS, but I think I found a work-a-around from the PCLinuxOS magazine website.

I am also going through a pretty neat life transition. I have decided to start a home IT consulting/repair business and have some customers lined up already. I just need to take care of the business end of things first. So, if you are in Wisconsin and live near Janesville/Madison – I will be offering my services soon. To help with marketing I have decided to keep my TekAdventures website and will convert it to my business home page.

Moving to MojoTechBlog.com

I have everything ready for the move to the new domain at www.mojotechblog.com

From this point forward my new posts will appear at the new blog site. TekAdventures.com will continue functioning until the end of January. At that point it will be discontinued.

New URL Coming – MojoTechBlog.com

I have decided to change my blog name from TekAdventures.com to MojoTechBlog.com. Why the change? Good question! I really wanted a site name that had “tech blog” in the title to help with search engine recognition and ranking.

While TekAdventures is a good title for the content of my blog, I don’t think the “Tek” part is highly searched. This doesn’t help with site traffic. So, by the end of the year I plan on moving this blog over to the new URL. As of right now I have the MojoTechBlog.com site mirroring off the TekAdventures.com URL. Feel free to visit either place!

More AdSense Modification

I have been playing around with my AdSense setup some more. After adding some Google ads to my site I didn’t realize I could only have three of the same type on one page at the same time. After a little more research I found that you could have three Google ads and then three more of the referral ads.

That is cool as I really like having six posts on my main blog page. It looked funny to have three postings with Google ads and then three without. I dropped down to three posts on the main page to solve this, but now I am back to six with the extra referral ads solution. I also read something about adding a Google search bar as well. Capitalism – isn’t it great!

Crazy Busy Update #1

The end of last week and the weekend were very busy – both in my personal life and in my tech adventures. I received my bent pin CPUs in and look forward to that project, I received a 700 watt power supply in for a rebate I am doing, and I ordered some super OCZ memory via a great rebate deal as well.

Beyond that I found some cool new programs as I was trying to set up SSH on my webserver so I can work off-site and I also downloaded and installed the Bioshock demo. Can’t wait to try that out! It will be interesting to see how my current gaming system handles the graphics. It is a decent system, but it is definitely aging.

Google AdSense & AdWords

Now that I have my webserver set up, my blog running, and a few months of posts in the bag, I have decided to look into promoting my site more and maybe making up some of the operational costs associated with running it. One of my college instructors gave a quick overview of Google’s AdSense and AdWord programs in class last night so I decided to check it out.

Both are super simple to set up and if you don’t have a website yet they will assist in helping you get one started. I didn’t have to use this option, but I thought it was pretty cool. AdWords is Google’s advertising program for those who want to get their name out there or sell a product. This is the program that sets up the ads you see on the right side of Google searches that are related by typed keywords. The AdSense program produces the ads you see on web pages all over the internet. When visitors click on these ad links the website gets a small cut for routing a potential customer. Very cool indeed! I just signed up, so I will have an update later on how things are going.