Awesome First Date!

Knock knock

Oh hi, how's it going? It's me! Every girl ever. I'm really looking forward to this date. I'm not nearly as attractive as you remember me being because when we met the bar was dark and you were drunk. Come on in. Let's start off with the unavoidable tour of my incredibly typical post-college-girl apartment. You'll notice that I went ahead and purchased everything that Ikea and Pier 1 have ever produced. There's my decorative birdcage over there even though I don't have a bird, and there's my gay wicker basket with bamboo poles in it. I don't know what the hell that's thing's all about, but I bought it.

Hey check it out, I have more candles in here than a Roman Catholic Church. Doesn't it smell like Hazelnut!? If I were to light all of my candles at once you could see my apartment from space! I fucking love candles! Come on into the living room. Oh, I see you met my cat there. That's "Freddy Paws Jr." Why don't you pet him and act like you like cats even though you hate cats? There you go. Oh, he took a little swing at your eye there huh? Yeah, he'll do that.

Hey, let's check out the kitchen. Hey look at my refrigerator. There are pictures all over it! Look at all these pictures of me and my equally vacuous friends from college! We were so crazy! You can tell we're really good friends because our faces are all pressed up against each other like that. And check it out, we're holding up alcoholic beverages to the camera in every single picture. That's to prove that we were partying. College was so fun! But of course I don't talk to any of these girls anymore because now they're all bitches.

Let's go back into the hallway! Hey, before we leave I'm going to go in the bathroom for ten minutes for some mysterious reason. Why don't you sit awkwardly in my big, stupid, round papizan chair over there while you wait for me. It's like you're sitting in a hug! Be right back... Sorry that took a half an hour, I don't know what the hell I was doing in there. Let's go! Wow! Thanks for opening my car door for me! I'm totally going to blow that meaningless gesture out of proportion and delude myself into thinking that you're a really good guy because that's what I want to believe.

Well, here we are at the restaurant. No thanks waiter, I don't need to see a menu, just bring me some expensive things. Hey I know, while we wait, I'll tell you all about my unspeakably boring job. I hate my boss. He's a jerk! I might get another job. Maybe something in pharmaceutical sales. Now let's talk about my family. I love my family. I want you to love my family. I want my family to love you. I want you to make love to my family! I want you to go golfing with my semi-retarded brother Travis. That would be so God damned cute!

Wow! I can't believe I ordered all this food! I have no intention of eating any of it. No thanks waiter, we don't need a box. Just throw it out. Hey, I've got an idea, let's go to a bar and have an after dinner drink! It'll be great, it will be just like how we're drinking here, only it will be louder and we'll have to stand up. Come on! See, isn't this better?

Oh hey, what a coincidence. Look over there! It's a group of my friends that I knew was going to be here. Let's go over there so that they can judge you! Hey, I have to go to the bathroom for a half an hour again for some reason. You can stay here and talk to my unbelievably hideous friend Christine! Christine's so ugly she scares kids! Talk to her! She has a job and a family that she wants to talk to you about too. Be right back.

I'm back! Sorry I was gone for three hours, there was a line. I want to go home now. Well here we are at my door again. This was really fun for me and not you. You should pretend like we're going to do it again sometime! Maybe I'll see you at Target a few months from now and we can avoid eye contact because you never called me. Here, have this awkward goodnight kiss that's as empty as my soul.

Good night!

Found this on Digg via Craigslist

Oglethorpe needs a good home!

This is Oglethorpe

(named Huey by the shelter)

He was turned in to animal control in Athens, Georgia by his owner after being a devoted pet for over 8 years. The reason that he was surrendered could have been because an anti-chaining ordinance went into effect in Athens recently or perhaps it was because he has a skin condition that requires medication but is easily controlled. He is a special guy, who is very gentle and well mannered.

Someone must have trained him at some point because he walks beautifully on a leash (doesn't pull at all) and sits on command. He absolutely loves being around people as well as other dogs and reportedly cats. At his foster home, he got along with the 4 other dogs there without incident and this could be due to the fact that he exudes just a gentle, non-threatening and loving nature.

He looks mostly shepherd with the exception of one of his eyes which is baby blue. He weighs around 80 lbs and loves attention. Although his name was Oglethorpe, he doesn't seem to be too familiar with this name which seems to indicate that he was probably chained for a good portion of his life and not given the attention and affection that he so craves.

He is neutered and vetted and will make a wonderful dog for the rest of his years.

If your interested and can get him from athens leave a comment and Ill send you an email address.

Freelance design business

FreelanceDesigners.biz relaunches as a freelance business blog: Freelance design business

Evolution of Mac Commercial Spoofs

In the beginning there was the "Im a PC, Im a Mac" commercial...


Then came some elaborate (and not so elaborate) YouTube spoofs..


More wackyness ensued: Someone through linux into the game - in his sweet TRON getup no less.




Of course Linux is just an OS no hardware involved. And now Macs run intel chips and you can actually run windows on Mac hardware if you really wanted to.. not sure why you would.

At some point I guess all 30 members of the Free BSD usergroup got miffed and whipped up this beauty:





You know an OS is in trouble when it has to resort to porn. I kid you BSD users (there are over 100 BSD mailing lists!)

ok hope you liked these four images...

adios

SEO Article Published

Got my article published in a few places:

GetAcoder
eZineArticles
Astro Market


and of course on my own blog

From the original article:

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Automated Link Exchanges: Easy PR or SEO Nightmare?

Automated Link Building SystemsIm sure many of you, as I have, receive lots of spam email saying "we have placed your link on our PR4 site! please place a link back on your site." For those of you new to SEO, PR refers to PageRank which is a value assigned by google from 0-10 with 10 being the highest and almost impossible to get ranking. Even ebay is only a PR9! OBL stands for Out Bound Links which are simply links on a page that link to another web site. Pagerank is calculated, in part by how many IBL (In bound links) with each site counting as a vote. IBLs are the same as OBLs depending on who you are talking about - if its your site and the link is on another page its an IBL for you, to the site owner its an OBL because it links away from there site to yours. Am I making this confusing? Sorry, anyway read on.Now there are a number of reasons why these things are worthless and probably detrimental to your site. Here are the main reasons these things bug me so much:

1) High PR? Not on the page your link is on!The emails refer to a high PR site which is "domain.com", and that domain may have a decent PR, maybe its a 4 or 6. However, thats NOT where your link is - your link is buried several folders down in their "links"section which usually has 10 to 20 pages with almost no PR and certainly no traffic.

An IM conversation about SEO

[16:30] Wesley: we could do a SEO deal with her for around $1000/month would be the cheapest
[16:30] Wesley: but
[16:30] Wesley: she could just post what she wants on designquote.net and get 8 free bids
[16:30] Paris Hilton: Gotcha
[16:30] Paris Hilton: One fear is that they're going to tear apart the site. Does that normally happen?
[16:31] Wesley: who?
[16:31] Paris Hilton: Then I'd be stuck trying to interface OSCommerce into their changes
[16:31] Wesley: tear it apart how?
[16:31] Paris Hilton: whomever did SEO
[16:31] Wesley: ohhhhhh
[16:31] Wesley: no most SEO is off site anyway
[16:31] Paris Hilton: I'm not sure.
[16:31] Wesley: there would be minimum on-site stuff
[16:31] Wesley: but you would have to put that in the project requirements
[16:31] Wesley: just say "must leave my os commerce code in place and unaffected"
[16:32] Wesley: http://www.quantcast.com/designquote.net
[16:32] Paris Hilton: wow!
[16:33] Paris Hilton: OK, I'll email them and let them know that I know of someone at about $1K/month.
[16:33] Wesley: she can find it cheaper
[16:33] Paris Hilton: I don't know what to tell her, heh
[16:33] Wesley: thats just us, but we deal with competative terms and do serious SEO stuff so its not cheap, its normally $2500 a month for us, but since her site is so specialized an niched it wouldnt be as difficult as a normal site
[16:33] Wesley: tell her if thats more than she wants to spend
[16:33] Wesley: (most seo firms charge 2-3k / month ith a one year minimum contract)
[16:34] Wesley: tell her you can post it on designquote and get 8 free bids
[16:34] Wesley: she can get a one-time seo tune-up
[16:34] Wesley: from a DQ provider
[16:34] Wesley: probably for like under $1000
[16:34] Paris Hilton: Is that a good investment in your opinion?
[16:34] Wesley: 500 - 1000 one time
[16:34] Wesley: its worth it
[16:34] Wesley: but honestly
[16:34] Wesley: seo is a process not an event
[16:34] Wesley: like
[16:34] Paris Hilton: Ya
[16:34] Wesley: not like building some code
[16:35] Wesley: its an ongoing thing
[16:35] Wesley: she should have someone do some more work at least every 3 months (bare minimum)
[16:35] Wesley: but a one-time shot will defienitly help
[16:35] Wesley: just make sure they are sticking to google webmaster guidelines
[16:35] Wesley: and not using blackhat techiques
[16:35] Wesley: minimum paid links
[16:36] Wesley: should be on-site text copy and code optimization
[16:36] Paris Hilton: OK - I'll relay all of this to her. What about purchasing mailing lists? Ever done any of that?
[16:36] Wesley: then off-site stuff like articles and link swapping etc
[16:36] Wesley: nope dont use them
[16:36] Wesley: sponsored a couple but not a great result
[16:36] Wesley: people dont like spam
[16:37] Paris Hilton: true
[16:37] (9 minutes edited and removed for the safety of the internet...)
[16:46] Wesley: LMAO
[16:46] Wesley: can i blog this too?
[16:48] Paris Hilton: You can blog: rail_skills(Paris Hilton) >> rail_skills(Warty)

Twittering

You see the bubble video?

i decided to try out twitter, now you can see my every little move...

DesignQuote

Stumble me DesignQuote

SEO from a journalists perspective

This is a great article I cam across in Advertising Age Optimize Me: A Reporter's Journey into the World of SEO and SEM. That's SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search engine Marketing)

"The search engines give you the blueprint," Mr. Hershberg said. He then rattled off the three main principles: Make sure you have keyword-rich text or, in other words, say what the page is about. Make your site navigable. Make your site popular by getting a lot of quality links coming in from outside the site.

Here are a few of the best tidbits:

Turns out that merely pumping hundreds of articles into the world isn't enough to hog Google results these days or crowd out all those "imposter" Matt Creamers, especially if many of those articles sit behind walls that require payment or registration. Good old-fashioned news stories to be bought for good old-fashioned money don't stand up well next to content that's free, open to links from others and created with tools that are essentially built to perform well with the bots the search engines use to survey the internet, giving Google and company the data they need to act as supreme arbiters of how we come to the information deposited in unimaginably large amounts on the internet. My failure to get this meant I'd ended up with a search profile that was not only crawling with "impostors" but also failed in every way to represent me.

And a little further down:

What's not in doubt is that the social has been at the heart of search since Google's main innovation took root in business and in culture. Its PageRank algorithm made off-site criteria a crucial determinant of search results for any website. In otherwords, the number and quality of links flowing into a site is hugely important in determining how high in the results it shows up. By extension, that makes the social-media ecosystem of blogs and other sites that are all about linking to other content important.

Annual PC Tune-Up - Make your computer speedy again.

Is your PC not running like it used to? Bogged down by too many startup items, slow to load, slow to restart? Use these time-honored Ninja Techniques for tweaking your PC back into tip-top Ninja shpe.

Its time for your annual end of the year PC tune up!

These tips can be done anytime, and even as often as every couple months if you like, but you should do them all at the bare minimum of once per year! So here are some essential tune-up tricks to speed up your PC. Best of all they are all free!

This tune up guide will walk you through the following steps to get your PC running speedy again. Most of these steps take only a few minutes to complete and make a big difference in your computers performance. I have used everyone of these and they all work great.

1. Registry Cleaner
   
2. Updated Virus Software
   
3. Spyware Checker
   
4. Disk Defragmenter (Defrag)
   
   

Your computer works hard for you all year, and just like a car it needs periodic maintenance. These four tips will help your computer keep running smooth and behaving like it should. The whole process can be done in under an hour, and most of it can be done while you are multi-tasking and even using under other applications or surfing the web. I do not count the HD defragment process here because that should be done when the computer is not in use as it takes hours.

Ok so without further ado, lets get started:

1. Slow Startups? - Clean that registry!

Your Windows PC loads a bunch of tiny programs everytime you start up the machine.
Some of these programs are actual applications and some are little programs used by the system.

Every time you install a new program or update your OS you create a new Registry entry.
The System Registry is a todo list for your computer. If your PC is a year or older, chances are you have installed (and uninstalled) lots of software,
sometimes (like when visiting a website requiring a plug-in or a spyware application)
without even realizing it!

The Registry list can get cluttered and filled with bogus, removed and out-of-date entries that
the computer has to check every time it starts up. I ran this cleaner on one PC and found over 1500 registry items that were no longer there. For everyone of these items the system has to look and see if the item is where it is supposed to be, then if it isn't it skips to the next one. A single item doesn't take very long but they can add up quick!

Fortunately the nice people at Eusing have created a free Registry Cleaner. This is from
their website:

Problems with the Windows Registry are a common cause of Windows crashes and error messages. Registry problems can occur for many reasons, including references left behind after uninstallation; incorrect removal of software; missing or corrupt hardware drivers; or orphaned start-up programs. This will significantly increase the Registry size and slow down your computer, because Windows will need more time to load, search, and read data from the Registry.

So go download and install Free Registry Cleaner 1.6 After installation the default is to have the program run. The first thing you see will be a prompt window to register and support Eusing software. To register click the registration button and its only $15 for a great handy piece of software. Or you can click the skip button and proceed with trying it out first.

First scan your registry and it wil show you how many broken entries are there.

This may take a while depending on how old your computer is and how many entries you have. After the scan, back up a copy of your current registry (under file menu). Next click Repair and viola, your registry is clean.

Want 3 more great tips? Thenread the rest of this article here.

Foux De Fa Fa

This show is awesome. And so is this video:




Flight of the Conchords

My kiwi buddy Leighton told me about this show last year and I love the New Zealand sense of humor - perhaps I am a reincarnated native