You got to go check out Caveman’s Crib.

I think these guys set the bar for the most amusing advertisement. While in their crib, jump onto one of the caveman’s laptop. You can read his blog, “Caveman Musings”.

Last week Los Angeles was hit by one of the largest earthquakes since that scary 1994 Northridge quake. Today we had another quake and by now you’ve probably heard the news about the massive quake that hit yesterday where hundreds of people are presumed dead in Peru.

We are a few weeks away from giving birth to a girl and while my wife is on autopilot “nesting” I can not help but want to protect my new family.

With the help of my wife, this past weekend we put together an Earthquake Emergency Kit with enough supplies that should allow us to survive a major catastrophe for a full week. It’s quite the kit.

Back in the Northridge quake, we had no water or power for a few days and the water that did run was highly contaminated. Also, because we live in such a big city all the supermarkets were sold out on almost everything a few hours following the quake. Because goods were flying off the shelves so fast, looting began and all hell broke lose real fast.

That being said, we have built an emergency supply kit so we are not dependent on finding food, water, first aid or sanitary supplies. Additionally we picked up radios, axes, propane stoves, batteries and pet food.

Putting such a kit together requires a real gut check. You’re throwing items into a large duffel bag and you have to ask yourself, is this something that we need and will save a life?

There are plenty of earthquake emergency supply lists to follow and believe me when I say you need a list when shopping otherwise shopping can get out of hand.

One thing people don’t think about after a major disaster is the fact we become almost a cash only society. Since power is out, people are not accepting your debit / credit card.

So it is extremely important to have cash on hand. As for how much cash one needs is dependent of their life style and what they have planned in case of an emergency. In our case we said we need enough cash to “buy” our way out of Los Angeles and survive for a month or so.

Its scary thinking about stuff like this but knowing we have that kit in our house provides us with a sense of reassurance that we can survive in case of an emergency.

Since our move across town we’ve picked up a new telephone number. With this new phone number came quite a bit of baggage from the previous owner.

I am getting on average 4 – 5 automated telemarketing calls a day. Everything from Mortgage Refinance to Carpet and Window Cleaning.

I for one should be one of the last people to complain about these automated sale messages considering I’ve made some excellent money selling these types of mailing lists and leads over the internet.

Here is a little tip when an automated machine calls your home or business. While the automated message is playing press the number 2 on your keypad. That should take you off their call list. It may not work in all cases but the majority of automated dialers respect this code.

Obviously you want to register your number with the National Do Not Call Registry and un-list your number with the phone company.

I am so disappointed in myself. Knowing very well I should have waited till Vista released a new service pack before upgrading to it from XP.

Quite frankly I was so psyched about my new heavy duty HP workstation I thought Vista would run smoothly on it.

At the beginning of this year I went out and purchased the beefiest HP workstation I could find on the market. For the amount of work I do on the Internet I was tired of waiting for applications to load. I was tired of slow processing and rebooting. So I figured the money spent on a fully loaded box will come back to me in more productivity.

The HP I purchased came with XP and I ran it in stock configuration for several months. When I received my Vista Upgrade disk I spent a week planning the upgrade. Doing the preplanning phase I made sure I upgraded every possible item I could to make sure all hardware and applications were compatible and I even spent two days doing a double backup incase of a an installation failure.

I was certain Vista would run smooth on my new workstation and for a few months it has been great. Then as time went on I started to see the tell-tail signs of problems. Booting up took a little longer every week, applications started to load a little slower and adding new fire-drives to the box paused the hour glass longer then normal.

Then this past week I got the dreaded BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.

After rooting my machine for the umpteenth time and doing a system restore to previous dates where I know it worked well, it appeared the workstation was heading for a massive crash.

I transferred close to 3GB of backup data to my Dell Laptop and then reinstalled Vista using the PC Recovery tools. I think that did more damage then good because my uptime was down to clicking on a few applications before I got that freaking BLUE SCREEN.

My HP comes with 1 click factory restore and I finally sucked it up and told it to FORMAT my hard drive and take me back to better place. I now plan stick with XP till Vista comes out with some new service packs and I hear from power users that they are working well with it.

Here are a few things about Vista that SUCK.

1. It is so god dam resource intensive. The graphics are awesome but I just felt my workstation was running slower then it did with XP.
2. Their friendly tool that pops up and offers assistance when an application fails is ridiculous. It asks us if we would like it if they found a solution on the web for why the application failed. I click yes every time and every time nothing happens. It’s like ordering food in a drive thru with no one taking the order.
3. Internet Explorer (which I try to never use) is dog ass slow on Vista. Go figure, considering the browser and Vista were created by the same company.

I am so pissed just thinking about the hours I’ve wasted this week. I am just thankful I had automated backups running every night and I own a kick ass laptop that held me over.

What a pisser of a weekend for my computer. Vista has crapped out with non stop blue screens of death. Microsoft’s support messages are not helpful at all. You click on their message thinking it will find a solution on the internet and its as if nothing happens.  

After removing all I could from my machine I finally sucked it up and tried for a reinstall of Vista. That took several hours but once I had the machine back up and running I kept getting error messages saying that my copy of Vista was not genuine.

Um, that’s news to me!

After messing with that for a while Microsoft finally validated my copy of Vista but then there were Update Error Messages 800FFFF.

Based on reading a few forums it appears one of the live updates that happen automatically is screwed up.

I was so loving Vista till this weekend…

When I was told about this via our mother-in-law I thought it was just another gimmicky pet product. Either way my wife wanted it so we went out of our way and picked one up.

It’s that time of year where everything around us has hair all over because our cats can’t stop shedding. Well we have put the Furminator to the test and this deShedding product is amazing. I have never seen so much hair come off our cats.

The Furminator is now a ShandyKing recommend product.

Well the first episode of the show was cool but since then I’ve been struggling to pay attention when it is on.

While on vacation this past weekend I was talking with my wife about the show and comparing it to Deadliest Catch. (Yup, we only talk about the important things while on vacation).

I think perhaps the producers of Ice Road Truckers got only part of the concept right with this show. Just watching truckers drive around and filming them steering their big rigs is not very exciting from the viewer’s perspective.

The only real sense of danger you get from watching the show is perhaps the ice might open up beneath the trucks. That was enough to keep me watching for 1 or 2 shows.

At least with Deadliest Catch there was a sense of excitement and unknown as we watched the crab fisherman fish. There was drama and excitement as we saw some boats hit payday while others worked through the cold night only to catch a few small crab.

I think Ice Road Truckers is an excellent show for Modern Marvels or some 1 hour special. But so far, watching truckers tie down their loads or watching them eat pieces of chicken while they drive their cabs is not so much fun.

I’ve been in hardcore research and development mode these past few months for several large projects.

While in this mode I’ve spent considerable time pounding away at Google and as there are two stages with R&D, research & development, there are two different ways I use Google.

During research mode I strictly only use Google organic search results. I could spend several days to several weeks jumping through Google’s organic search results trying to come-up to speed for a process or solution I am trying to solve. In my quest I could go through dozens of keyword combinations.

You don’t realize how far off Google’s Organic Search Results are and how much work needs to be done with Google’s algorithm until you need to seriously research a method and attempt to bring yourself up-to speed on a variety of areas.

During my research stage I am looking out for several things while clicking away at the organic listings. First of all, are the pages on topic for what I am looking for and secondly are there additional industry terms I am failing to type into Google to refine my research.

This part is key, “Industry Terms”.

Somewhere along the line, it could be a few hours to several weeks, where the information I have been researching suddenly clicks in my brain. Once I have educated myself on the specific topic I have no problem pounding in the industry jargons and pulling on high quality search results.

As it turns out, the majority of sites out on the web still have no clue and use their inside industry terms to describe their products and services. Perhaps this is more of a problem with Google and not those businesses. Reading these sites is as fun as ease dropping on a conversation where people are conversing using nothing but industry acronyms. But, thats where we are still at. The majority of website fail to use basic terms, but those websites offer solid services I might be interested in.

Once I have become a pseudo expert on my researched topic the only websites I want to visit now are those that have a service offering for me. This is where I find value with Google Sponsored Links.

I am currently doing some research on “Managed Email Autoresponders” (See previous post). And when I type in my keywords I see that there are 10 advertisers who have a managed services offering.

At this point, thanks to tabbed browsing I will click on every single one of these ads and open them in separate tabs. Then I will take some time to review each website and narrow down a potential service provider. I could care less that these business spent money advertising and my click cost them because I am now ready to buy and it is comparison shopping time.

I believe my Google search habits represent a lot of users and as someone who advertises products and services via PPC it is important to understand what is happening here.

Users who click on PPC advertisements are probably ready to buy or just need a little priming to click that Buy Now button. Being that as it is a smart PPC campaign should lead a visitor to a page that shows the user only the specific product or service they were looking for and the ability to buy it right then and there.

This may seem like common knowledge but do some searches for some “Managed Service Offerings” and notice how many PPC ads lead the user to the businesses home page.

Hey, I’ve already done my research and I am ready to buy. That’s why clicked on your ad. Take me directly to the product or service I am looking for and tell me how much and show me where I can buy it. Otherwise I will tab over to the 9 other businesses in my browser window and never return.

I thought I would take a quick moment and write about what life is like right now with a new baby on the way. We have just hit 20 weeks and our baby girl is now kicking strong.

I’ve been married a few years and it is really interesting how the woman I am married to and love with all my heart has changed with me. Looking back she was once this girl who I considered to only be my girlfriend. Then as a year passed and my girlfriend was no longer my girlfriend, we were just together. Another year passed and then she became my fiancée. Before I knew it, that year passed and I was able to call my beautiful best friend, my wife. (more…)

When I logged into my Blog’s admin console this morning I found a bit of humor when I saw my Akismet Spam Protection had caught another 1,000 comment spam. If you don’t know, the art of comment spamming is when someone posts a comment on a Blog for the sol purpose of embedding a link which leads back to one of their sites. For a variety of reasons they hope to attract more visitors to their blog, attract the Search Engines and hope to artificially inflate their rankings.

I am sure compared to more popular sites that the amount of comment spam I receive is negligible but still ShandyKing.com receives a healthy few hundred a day. If it was not for having Akismet installed in my WordPress I would have to spend much wasted time manually filtering out the select few authentic comments I receive amongst the Spam.

At the rate I see comment spamming arrive to my Blog you would think Blog Spamming is still popular. Then again, I can not get over the number of people who send fake referral traffic to my Blog so they could get their Blogs URL stamped in my log files. But that’s a whole other story all together.

I remember when I first launched my Blog I was sort of thrilled when I got my first Spam. It sort of told me my URL as making its way around the web.

But this post is not how to spam your way to get links. When I first started this Blog I put quite a bit of effort into getting it noticed. With the number of new Blogs created each day, you have to do something to stand out!

Here are few things you can try that are not so evil yet deliver results: (more…)