Jason Poteet - Life In The Second Digital Decade

Add This to the Gotta Have File

We currently have a iRobot Roomba and love the thing. It does a wonderful job of helping keep the house dog hair free. You just press a button and it vacuums for a couple of hours then goes back to it cradle to recharge. Now that is my kind of house work.

The back of my house has gutters that are at least 30′ off the ground. So you can imagine my glee when I saw an ad for the iRobot Loojâ„¢ 120 Gutter Cleaning Robot. I’ll report back when I actually get one.

Computer Wallpaper

I came across an awesome website for computer wallpaper the other day. Mandolux.com has some really cool photographs for your wallpaper but they also offer them in the sizes us geeks need. They have sizes from the smallest at 1024×768 to the largest at 2560×1600. They also break each image up and offer them in right and left monitor configurations for those of us running dual monitors. Awesome site! Here is a pick of my left monitor.

Mac OS X Boot Keys

I just upgraded our macs at work to 8 new Intel based G5’s with 30 inch Apple Cinema Displays. The displays are fantastic by the way. I have also found myself needing to remember the Apple/Macintosh boot keys again so here are some for reference. I’ll update this list as I come across new ones.

1. Command S = boot into single user mode
2. command V = boot using verbose mode (all messages)
3. X = Reset startup selection and boot into OS X server
4. Shift = Boot into Safe Mode (press as soon as mac is on and hold down)
5. option = boot into open firmware target disk mode
6. Command + Option + Shift + Delete = bypass internal hard drive on boot
7. T = boot into firewire target disk mode
8. C = Boot from CD or DVD drive
9. N = boot from network
10. Command + Option + P + R = reset PRAM
11. Hold Down Mouse button = Ejects any removable media

Bonus Commands After Boot is complete

1. Command + Shift + 3 = Full Screen Shot
2. Command + Shift + 4 = Adjustable Area Screen Shot

Mobile Google Reader

I was very excited to log onto Google Mobile recently and see the Google Reader added! This adds a great level of productivity for me and my Motorola Q. I can now login and go through blogs anytime I have some downtime no matter where I am. The interface works very well and is fast just like you would expect from Google.

Viewing Mac Partition from Windows on Dual Boot Mac

I have an Intel Duo Core MacBook Pro that I use as my main laptop. I actually prefer Windows but I often get customer files that are mac based so I have to have access to a mac. The perfect solution came along with the Intel based macs. I configured my mac using Bootcamp to dual boot Windows XP or Mac OS X. This allows me to have all of my tools loaded on one laptop.

The problem I ran into was not allowing enough room on the Windows Partition when I created it. I thought I would not be adding much to it so I didn’t want to waste precious space. I made it 10 GB and went on with the install. In the back of my mind I knew that was a bad idea and would be a problem someday, but I did it anyway. Well sure enough the day came when I needed more room. I didn’t really want to delete the Windows partition and start over so I needed a better solution. The one I came up with was a piece of software named Macdrive7 from Mediafour.

MacDrive 7 installs as a Windows program and allows you to see the Mac volume while logged on Windows. This treats the Mac volume with it’s 100 GB of free space as a second hard drive. This allows me to install my Windows games on Windows but actually use the Mac Partition to store the 5GB worth of game files on. Perfect remedy.

Mac OS X, Windows Post a comment

New design coming soon

Posted by Jason on July 19th, 2007

You have probably seen me playing around with the design of this blog.  I am working on a new look so don’t be surprised when you see the mess.  The funny thing is I no longer need a designer or a coder, it just seems like I need a blogger.

General Post a comment

Wordpress 2.2

Posted by Jason on May 16th, 2007

Well, that was a pretty painless upgrade. I went from 2.0 - 2.2.

The site is looking pretty bare at the moment and I am working on some inspiration for a re-design.  Hopefully I will get some time to redo this place soon.  I am over the current look.

General Post a comment

Don’t bid on our Name

Posted by Jason on May 3rd, 2007

I got an email the other day from one of my favorite affiliate marketing products telling me they were changing their terms of service.  It is no longer permissible to bid on search engine traffic using their name, variations of their name or the names of their products.  I was pretty disappointed to read this and didn’t think it was a smart move on their part.  I did however comply with their instructions.

I changed the Adcenter, YAHOO, and Adwords campaigns I had running to send all that traffic to a landing page with their competitors ads on it.  I am in full terms compliance.  That was a smart move on their part.  Their PPC bills should drop next to nothing now that noone other than them will bid on their keywords.

Affiliate Marketing, PPC Post a comment

I am not the Zodiac

Posted by Jason on April 19th, 2007

Great movie. Not 100% factual, but it was very well done.

General Post a comment

Microsoft Adcenter Clicks Are Worth More

Posted by Jason on April 13th, 2007

I decided at the first of the year to get a better handle of my arbitrage by figuring out which traffic was converting best for me.  The easiest way for a non programmer like me to do this was to buy a new domain and put up the same landing page on it.  So I have Domain A and Domain B and they both have the same content.  Domain A traffic comes from Microsoft Adcenter and Domain B traffic comes from one of the two remaining big three.

The results are in and they are staggering.

Microsoft Domain A - Clicks = 564 Imps = 973 CTR = 57.97% CPM = 385 EPC = $66.49

Other      Domain B - Clicks = 690 Imps = 2426 CTR = 28.44% CPM = 61.83 EPC = $21.74

For  this specific page and product, Microsoft Adcenter owned the competition.

Adcenter, MSN Adcenter 2 Comments

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