I know this has been on slashdot, digg, and a million other websites, but I am going to post it here too. An interview of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs together. It is interested and you can watch it in pieces at All Things Digital.
They start out with them describing the other's contributions to the industry and then go on from there. Was interesting to say the least.
Well, another month has come and gone and it is time for the recap.
Unfortunately, this was the month were Google decided to love me and leave me. One night, they decided to completely stop sending me any web traffic and I do mean completely.
But fortunately, I had established multiple streams of revenue that were of a more fixed basis than Adsense or Kontera.
May's numbers and April numbers are in brackets.
The stats don't show the drop off of Google that I really had. Most of that 30% can from the first week where I still had good traffic and then the rest was made of some very specific keyword searches on Google. Below is a graph of my May traffic. Notice the big drop off at the beginning of the month. This entirely Google related. I was in the top 10 results for searches regarding Aeroplan and Airmiles, Nintendo DS homebrew, some photography searches, and a just a few other searches regarding blogging. This drove my Adsense and Kontera results.
May Traffic
Here is another graph. This is my traffic for March, April, and May. It will give you an indication of the traffic reduction.
March, April, and May Traffic
Overall, my earnings for May were $84.03.
This goes to prove the point that you need to diversify your income. In my case, I was dropped by Google search results and so my passive income dropped to around $17 where it was almost $50 last month. The PayU2Blog and PayPerPost definitely helps to smooth things out and pay the hosting bills.
I still have not figured out why Google did what the did and how to get back, but I'll just keep writing.
I do not have a clue what happened. Yesterday, Google started to send me search results again. My traffic is picking up. I was over sixty on Sunday and over one hundred on Monday.
You have probably heard me complaining the last little while in more than a few postings. It all began with Where Did All the Traffic Go?. Regardless, it helped me to look back at the basics again and submit to a few article directories and such.
It was kind of funny. John Chow had an article on his blog titled Google Updating Alogorithm. He was just knocked out of the top search results as well and posted an article on it. He was on it within a few days and he was back to the top. He won't disclose what he did however. You can read about his search results comeback in his article Taking back the Number 1 For Make Money Online. The only thing he said was Google webmaster tools is your friend!
After that, I logged into my Google webmasters account and sure enough there was some interesting things. I had two link errors for pages that could not be found. This was just my own fault for not checking. I didn't think this would affect anything however. The second piece of evidence was that Google said they have no indexed my site since April 28th. That is a very long time ago and coincidentally, a few days before they stopped all my search result traffic.
Why they started to send traffic again I don't know though. I fixed my broken links yesterday, but the traffic picked up two days ago. Hopefully it is here to stay, but the next time I might just fire off an email to Chow and see what he has to say.
Okay, I have analyzed a few credit cards and a number of people have posted comments about the American Express, so I am going to write about it now too.
I have a whole line of credit card posts trying to figure out which travel rewards program gives the best value. In my last articles, I came to the conclusion that the CIBC Aeroplan Visa cards probably work the best for most people, but it still depends. You can read my Air Miles Versus Aeroplan article to see more about it.
I was surprised that I didn't know about this card yet. Basically, it is a no fees credit card that pays one airmile for every $20 spent or for a $50 annual fee you can get 1 airmile for every $15 spent.
Compared to Mosaik MastercardThere is no comparison. The American Express Air Miles card is better. Mosaik's is no fees for 1 airmile for $40, $35 for 1/$20, and $75 for 1/$15. In my calculations for how much you would have to spend to make the feeds worth it, I figured out it was at least $4,000/year and upwards of $12,000/year. With the AMEX, you get 1 for $20 right off the bat.
First you have to ask how much you value an airmile. I personally value them at around $0.20 each. You can read about how in my Collecting Air Miles and their Value article.
If you pay the $50 fee every year, you need to spend enough to at least recover that value in extra airmiles you would get from being upgraded.
At $0.20 per airmile, this means you need to earn at least 250 more airmiles over the course of the year. The magic number for this is $15,000/year. So if you spend over $15,000 a year on your AMEX card, then it is worth the upgrade, because you will get that amount back in Airmiles. This isn't exact, it depends on what you use your airmiles for. Entertainment rewards have higher return than travel and gift cards, but you need to figure this out on your own.
The raw formula where V is the value of an airmiles is:
MoneySpent = 3000 / VSo 3000 divided by what you value an airmiles to be will be the amount of money you need to spend to justify the annual fee of $50. If you want the proof of this formula, post a comment or send me a message through the contact page.
This is a percentage I calculate as to how much money you are getting back. Since I value an Airmile at $0.20 and you get 1 for every $20 you spend on the basic card, this comes out to exactly a 1% return rate. The same as a lot of the 1% cash back cards. Compared to Aeroplan and the Airmiles cards though, this is the best rate for a "no fee" card. Pretty hard to beat.
Dell Days of Deals are here again. My favorite sale by far. It runs for 10 days and they have featured specials every day. It actually started earlier this week, but I don't feel like writing about anything else to day.
There is a neat little PC for sale today. Athlon 62 X2 (dual core) with 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive for $399 (Canadian). Of course there is free shipping with Dell as well. My computer is ancient and this would be a cheap upgrade even though it is a couple years old itself.
Seriously check it out though. There is an accessories section as well that contains a lot of deals that might last the whole sale or they might not. The daily feature changes though, so if you want it, you better buy it. Sale runs until the end of next week.
I just saw a posting today for Descent for the Nintendo DS. Some guy is porting it and released the source code as well. Definitely worth checking out. It will be interesting to see how far this project goes and if he can have as good a results as the two Quake ports.
I will load it up and post a review with instructions on getting it going in a few days.
In the mean time, check it out at kayvenm's blog. He talks about it here.
UPDATE (August 12, 2007): There is a newer version out now that you can download on the Alpha 4 page.
Treking has become a large tourist attraction in South East Asia. One place that is particularly popular that I have been to is Sapa, Vietnam. Situated in the mountains of northern Vietnam, it is only a short distance from the Chinese border.
I was there in April of 2004. I booked the excursion through a tour shop in the Old Quarter district of Hanoi a few days before I wanted to go. It included the train ride, bus ride, tour, and accomodation.
I caught a night train from Hanoi to NAMEOFTOWN. The air conditioning was ridiculously cold and all I had was thin bed sheet to cover me, but the trip was smooth nonetheless. We arrived in the early morning. There were two bunk beds in the berth so we shared travel stories with our berth mates.
When I arrived, we boarded a bus to take us the rest of the way in Sapa. It has a variety of guest houses and hotels brought on by the tourist industry. Since our tour was for a couple days, the hotel offered us laundry service while we were away. We could also leave or full size backpacks in a locked room and just use day packs for the trek.
We met our guide, Cham, later in the morning at the hotel we were storing our luggage at. She was a young native girl around 16 years old. Most of the trek guides appeared to be this age or younger. They speak amazing English and are fun to hang out with because of their young nature. Our group was the guide, myself, and two other people. A perfectly sized group.
We started to walk down from Sapa. The scenery is amazing. They are situated in lush mountains. There is terrace farming all along the vallies and they grow rice and corn primarily. Water buffalo cool themselves in the flooded terraces in the heat of the day.
The locals are all part of the native population and wear unique looking clothes and styles. We swam in the river just below a little waterfall with some of the young boys in the afternoon. They are all very friendly.
We stayed the night at her family's house farther down the valley. They served a nice meal and some of the other treking groups stayed at the same house. Everyone visited and ate late into the evening. The next morning the hike was on again as we went farther down the valley. I was worred about getting back, but we worked our way to the other side of the valley where a minibus picked us up to take us back to Sapa.
If you are in Vietnam and have the opportunity to visit and trek in Sapa I would definitely recommend it. The scenery and experience was amazing.
I started to use this site the other day and I quite like it. It is a page that contains map of the news where each block is sized proportionally to how many articles are being found for it on the web. Each block is also in a section of blocks that are in its subject category.
The site is Marumushi's newsmap page.
Here is a screenshot below. Notice that each block is proportional in size to its group of blocks. For example, all the red items are the world news so they are all clumped together. For this show, the fighting in Gaza story is the largest so their web crawler has found the most articles regarding that story on the web sites it checks.
If you see a story you like, you can click on it to take you to one of the articles. The picture below is only a screenshot and does not function that way, but you can go to the Marumushi's newsmap page for the real thing.
NewsMap
You will also see that there are tabs for different countries so you can make your news a little more country specific if you want. They index 4 times a day and archives 7 days back so you can see what was the top items on the weekend or a day you missed if you want to.
Very impressive and a new graphical interface to represent the news in a quick easy to understand what is going on manner. You just have to trust how they are representing it.
The other news organizations would be good to do this with their own sites, but technically their RSS feeds show their latest stories already. I just find they are not always that important.
I found a cool site the other day called SclipO. Basically, people post all kinds of videos on how to do stuff. Step by step tutorials on random things.
There is playing music, drawing, card tricks, exercises, science experiments, and other goofy stuff.
Here is one on how to do a matchstick rocket. I thought it was pretty cool.
This guy create a potato lighter.
This one is the best. The guy pulls a stock over his head and goes into stores to try and buy stuff.
I learned a big lesson the other day. You should shop around for your contact lense prescriptions. I know. You probably knew this in the first place, but I took it for granted.
I purchased my contacts from my optomotrist's office and paid around $125/box, which I thought was reasonable at the time, because they were a higher quality contact lense.
Anyhow, I was in Superstore the other day and they offer the exact same lenses for $75/box. That is ridiculous really.
The thing with glasses is that you shop around by default, because you are looking for different styles and you always see different promotions in he flyers. I have always looked around for them, but contacts I didn't even think about. Superstore will definitely be getting my business for now.
Anyhow, moral of the story is: Shop around for contact lenses.
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