This is not an online marketing blog, or anything of the sort, however my experience with promotion over the past few months has taught me a few things and given me the motive to try some new things. I thought I would share some experiences and get any advice that anyone might want to share. There are several things I have tried:
Entrecard
Adwords
Adbrite
ProjectWonderful
Traffic Exchange
Amazon Mechanical Turk
This is just a very informal and non-scientific review of what I’ve done and my perceived benefit to the blog. Read the rest of this entry »
Walmart is now selling LED Christmas lights. For a string of 60 lights at 4.5 watts and pretty much zero heat generation this is a great idea. As someone who moved to CFL bulbs many years ago, this is just the next step in progression. Amazon has some lights available online, but Walmart’s 60 light string is about $6. This is a great deal! Read the rest of this entry »
Dr. Pepper made good on a promise to give everyone a free Dr. Pepper when/if Guns N’ Roses finished Chinese Democracy, started in 1994. They opted to use their website to hand out free coupons for Dr. Pepper. Well, the website crashed. They extended the free Dr. Pepper through 6pm today, but even today I wasn’t patient enough to keep trying the website, so no free Dr. Pepper for me.
By crashing their website they probably saved thousands of dollars in free Dr. Pepper, but at what cost to advertising? Actually probably very little. I’m sure their website is still getting many more hits than are normal.
It’s an interesting thought though. While many businesses rely on their websites to make money, others only spend money on their website, so the more time down, the more money saved. The question was, was this an intentional oversight? I’m sure they could have hired a 3rd party to handle the registrations had they been sincerely interested in giving everyone a free Dr. Pepper.
It wasn’t too long ago that we had this little thing called the dot com bust. What if the government had bailed out the tech firms as they plan to do to the auto industry? Here’s a little glimpse into what our lives would look like. Read the rest of this entry »
That is what I heard from a Microsoft trainer recently. Does anyone have any direct knowledge of whether this is true or not? The problem with any metric like this is that there are so many more variables than just Windows Vista and Windows XP. For example, take a 3-year old Windows XP machine and refresh it with a brand new PC and a fresh operating system and I guarantee help desk calls will go down, at least temporarily.
This is some good stuff. I downloaded the DirecTV2PC beta recently and have been using it to watch recorded shows in other rooms of the house. Read on for a full review with screen shots. Read the rest of this entry »
Ok, this is the last post for a while on Magic Jack. I have been using it for several days now and here is what I learned and why I will not be replacing my home phone system with it.
I can’t port my number. That’s right, I have found several places on the Internet that will let me port my number to them and for a small per-minute or a per month charge forward all my calls from my old number to my new number. My outgoing calls will still show as originating from Magic Jack, not my original number. This in and of itself is a dealbreaker for me. Sorry, but my phone number is plastered everywhere and it would take too long to change it, and yes people do need to get in touch with me.
Incoming caller-ID does not work for me. I guess this is supposed to work, but if it shows anything it is just the phone number, not a name. Call me spoiled, but I prefer to see the name and the number.
Voice quality is actually pretty good. I have noticed a little clicking on the line sometimes, however otherwise the sound quality is crystal clear in and out. The only issues I have had can be attributed to my cell phone when I’m calling home to talk to my wife.
Computer has to be on all the time. Not a problem for me. I have a few computers I leave on all the time, but in additional to being on it has to run an application that lets me interface with the Magic Jack. That program popped up in the middle of doing something a few times. In order to make it as nice as my Packet 8 system I would have to purchase and dedicate a computer to it. I could do that with an Atom PC and parts I have around for probably $100, and it would still be worth the cost considering how much money Magic Jack saves me.
It passes the WAF, but barely. She is willing to put up with it only because it is so inexpensive.
Magic Jack will not be staying on as our primary phone. It does a good job as a backup phone or portable one, but I can’t see a reason to replace my regualr phone service with this.
December 2008 UPDATE: If television commercials are any indication, MagicJack has officially launched into the real commercial realm. For their sake they should have gotten number porting working before launching. I think they also should have found a partner of cheap Atom PCs to bundle this with as an option.
I recently bought a Magic Jack to evaluate, and I finally got around to moving the house phones over to it. Unfortunately it is not yet possible to port your number to Magic Jack, so for the time being I have forwarded my Packet 8 number to the Magic Jack number. We will see how it goes. In the mean time I am looking at ViaTalk again since I can port my number to them and it will end up being about 1/3 of the price I am paying for Packet 8. They also have many more features that Packet 8 has not even dreamed about yet. Just worried about the stability, but I will get around to that.
In the USA we just went though a time change. The majority of the world does not do daylight savings time, however some of us are still stuck on legacy systems.
The most common answer to why daylight savings time was used is that it was good for the farmers, however this answer is largly mythological in nature. Farmers will get up and work regardless of what time the clock on the wall says it is. Another answer is to save electricity. Factories used to use daylight to augment or replace lighting during the day, so if the factory works during daylight hours, it is then saving money.
These reasons are not valid reasons anymore, if they ever were.
Since Halloween just went by I thought I would talk about vampires. You know, things that turn into bats and suck your blood! No, I’m just kidding. Well, I am talking about Vampires, but of a different sort.
Vampires, Wall Warts, Power Brick, these are all descriptive names for those transformers that plug into your wall socket and sap power out of the wall night and day regardless of whether or not anything is connected to them. Standby power is a minimal problem, but I did a little experiment recently to find out just how minimal.
PC
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