Archive for May, 2007

A few weeks ago, i got a date for my driving test.

It’s 10 days away now.. when i thought about it and looked through all the forum questions and sites packed with information on it, i began to get a little hot under the collar. I haven’t taken a lesson in about 9 months Although i’ve lessons booked for next week.

But then i came to my senses and said, ‘hang on a second, i CAN drive, and i’ve been driving safely for almost a year with no problems’ All of this information just hypes the test up and puts you inder false pressure imo.. have a look at the marking sheet – what a load of rubbish.

looking at that, you’d think, oh flip, there’s about 100 different areas i can be marked down on. In reality there’s about 5 big areas and the rest is all common sense or common driving sense.

If i was mentally weak, i’d crack up looking at these websites and the amount of questions and answers on them.. i’d be a bag of nerves for the test and probably fail. It’s no wonder we have a 50% failure rate here..

But being as laid back as i am, nerves won’t come into it. I’ll just treat it as another trip around town with a tonne of semtex in the passengers seat I’m not going to sit here and tell you i’m all nervous and don’t expect to pass and bla bla – i don’t play that sly card where secretly i expect to pass but i’ll tell everyone i think i’ll fail just to lower expectations. That’s a cowardly way of doing things and certainly not my style.
I’m telling you now, i expect to pass as the test is too easy. If i fail, big deal, i won’t be the last. I’ll continue driving either way

I noticed on tylercruz’s blog, he’s made a major mistake, and one that has cost him dearly in terms of PR.

Go to http://www.tylercruz.com and notice a healthy PR5

Now go to http://tylercruz.com and notice a PR4

So google is viewing his blog as at least two different sites and the pagerank proves this. This can be solved with a few lines of code.

I blogged about this a few weeks ago. I knew about it, but never implemented it as i thought it was just a myth. Once my PR didn’t increase, i said i was taking no chances from now on and i’d add re-directs pointing to www.

I assume Tyler doesn’t know about this, but then again maybe he has some reasoning behind it.. but from what i’ve gathered studying SEO and building blogs, this is a simple, but crucial change that needs to be made to maximise SEO and PR.

Well, at long last, my n95 will be arriving, hopefully tomorrow. It was posted today via express post.

So tomorrow i won’t be online much in fact, i might make a post from my new phone.. that would be pretty cool.

i’m looking forward to the GPS system, along with the 5mp camera & video quality.. it means i can now take quality snaps no matter where i go.. the wi-fi will also be handy when i go away to hotels. Most (decent) hotels offer free wi-fi to guests so i’ll be taking full advantage of that with the n95.

When i go abroad, the n95 will not only guide me to my hotel, but i can use VOIP calls via wi-fi from my hotel, effectively getting ‘free calls home’. That sort of technology is mind boggling. I could even upload pictures/video taken via the n95 and send them via email anywhere..

yes, i’m already loving my n95 and for €650, you’d bloody well want to love it!

On sunday, i launched a contest for 2 free €50 adwords vouchers

Well, i’ve been over whelmed by the response A grand total of zero entries

So it’s not looking good, but it means that if you enter now, you’ll stand a very good chance of winning a free €50 voucher, as the competition is at this stage, non-existant

You’ve got until this Sunday (20th) 6pm to enter.

In case you haven’t noticed, wordpress launched version 2.2 yesterday.

I’ve switched immediately and have to say it’s much better. It seems more responsive and the sidebar drop n drag widgets are really easy to use. As you’ll notice i’ve added ‘recent posts’ to my sidebar and jiggled things about a bit.

Here’s a screenshot of how the widgets look..

WordPress really is getting easier to use.. it won’t be long until everyone can set up a blog.. When i first set up a blog in october/november, (back in the day), things plugins such as ‘recent comments’ had to be uploaded via ftp, enabled in the dashboard, then hand coded to display in the sidebar..

To a noOB, that can be very intimidating and they’d end up messing up the code and layout. I had a few problems trying to place my ‘feedburner stats’ in the sidebar, but in the end i discovered you could place the code in the ‘text 1′ widget and it would display it for you, so problem solved.

Overall, it’s a big improvement