Bramblog

First they throw up the “technical difficulties” page, and now they’re showing a 404.  With how much money/minute those guys make, somebody’s getting fired!

So this is really goofy and immature, but I like it. Check out the URL, and you’ll figure out how to make it say whatever you want to.

StumbleUpon Does What I Tell Them

I crashed another server on my cheesy Realtor business cards digg. Needless to say, I was pretty pissed at Inmotion. The sales team was very knowledgeable about the digg effect, and they assured me that my new plan would be able to handle it with no problem – no matter if I had a WP blog querying DB’s or not. And….it crashed.

To their credit, Inmotion’s support team was awesome. I had been meaning to install super cache for a while, but didn’t think to do it before the last campaign. They shut down the server, installed super cache on the blog, and fired it back up. By this time, the post had made it down towards the bottom of the page, so I wasn’t actually sure if it was the plug-in, or the decreased traffic.

But then, yesterday I pushed another piece. I did it kind of spur of the moment, and put it on a blog that I put up specifically for diggbait. It’s at 1000+ diggs right now, and the server stayed strong throughout the whole ordeal. So…I think we finally have the final piece to the digg proof puzzle – super cache!

Everyone knows that gmail rocks. However, the branding opportunity from using a “me@mysite.com” email address outweighs the functionality (and lack of spam) that gmail provides. I don’t know how long this has been around, but Braxton Beyer turned me onto it the other day, and I’m forever grateful.

Google apps allows you to dial your MX settings to Google’s servers, and manage your email using their servers & tools. They provide free POP & IMAP support, so you can use whatever email client you would like, and easily set up your smart phone. The free service provides almost 7gb of storage, and up to 100 user accounts. More than enough for personal or small business. Here’s the breakdown on the different levels of service.

The coolest (weirdest) part? There’s no advertising anywhere! It seems that they’re offering this purely to create brand loyalty…Well, that, and data mining.

The process is fairly simple:

1. Go to Google Apps & sign up
2. Change your MX records at your domain registrar or host
3. Verify your site
4. Set up POP or IMAP, if necessary

That’s it…really easy. It brought my daily spam count down from 15-20 per day to 1-2.

If you’re like me, you hate clunky software – which means that you’re really annoyed by anything that Adobe puts out.  I don’t know what it is about their software, but it’s ridiculously clunky, and takes up tons of resources.  Even simple programs like Acrobat Reader take a few seconds to load – and you can’t do anything to the document.

So….I did some searching & found Sumatra.  It loads REALLY fast, and allows you to rotate the document, and save (which is really the only document modification I ever need for pdf’s.)  Check it out – I think you’ll like it enough to replace Reader.

So…I bought a new Sony Vaio laptop over the weekend.  I know, I know…should’ve gotten a Mac.  The problem is, the comparable Mac costs twice as much.  I’d rather buy a new PC every 2 years than a new Mac every four.  Oh…and I’m seriously going to learn Ubuntu soon.
The original game plan was to buy the machine and immediately wipe it clean and install XP.  Then I started reading about what a bitch it was going to be to install all of the drivers.  So…I decided to live with Vista.  And I hate it.  Then I found some cool hacks that make it much more bearable (I found them at computerworld.com.)

1) Disabling the User Account Control:

The user account control sucks.  Bad.  Every time you run anything that might, possibly, minutely jack up your system, it asks you if you really want to do it.  If Microsoft ran the world, it would be rubber coated, and everyone would wear helmets when walking.  So…to disable it:

•  Run msconfig
• Click tools
• Scroll down to “disable UAC”
• Click “Launch”
• Reboot

2) Access the Double-Secret Adminstrator Account

Microsoft decided to coat the administrator account in styrofoam, as well.  Even when logged in as an adminstrator, you’re not really an administrator.  In order to unlock the double-secret administrator account, use the following steps:

• Type cmd into the search box in the start menu.
• Right click the command icon that shows up at the top of the start menu.
• Select “run as administrator”
• Enter this command: Net user administrator /active:yes

So…that’s what I have right now.  I’ll add more as I learn them.