Cleaner Life

For those who haven’t heard, my Vista laptop died and I replaced it with one that runs on Windows 7.

It has been a few weeks, and even though I’ve had Seesmic Desktop installed, I didn’t have my custom Twitter Lists loaded. They are on my XP machine, but that computer (almost four years old now? where does the time go?) is feeling severely under powered these days. I rarely fire up Seesmic when I’m using it.

Not only did I manage to get the old backup of my userlists installed, but I updated this How To Backup, Export & Import Seesmic Desktop Userlists Lens to reflect the changes to the process since I originally published it.

It is a lot simpler now, and I feel a bit better connected to my Twitter friends now that I can sort them into categories again!

Getting ready for a new season using my Black & Decker Cordless Trimmer!

Updated: I’ve completed two seasons using my electric trimmer, and one of the best things about it is being able to enjoy the smell of fresh cut grass without having the stench of gasoline engine exhaust hanging around. I did find the original recharger that came with the electric trimmer to be inadequate for charging my batteries. I need 3 or 4 fully charged batteries to do my rather large yard. I bought two replacement batteries, and one of Black & Decker’s FSMVC 9.6-Volt to 18-Volt Slide Style Battery Chargers which charges the batteries much faster than the original charger. It also has an indicator light that lets me know when it has finished the charging cycle, something lacking from the original. Since I have quite a few Black & Decker cordless tools, this recharger has paid for itself in the time it saves me!

See the story about how and why I switched from a gasoline to an electric grass trimmer here.

The Indie Music Scene is booming even as the major music labels complain of declining sales and tremendous financial losses.

Indie Music has been around for a long time, but thanks to the Internet, the buzz of Independent and Unsigned music artists is growing stronger each day!

Indie Music Sites are growing more popular as they become Social Networks for up-and-coming artists along with more established artists who are connecting directly with their fans. They can distribute “Free Music Downloads Legally” and keep fans updated about future releases and personal appearances.

More and more artists are spending less time waiting for some faceless talent scout to see them so they can get signed, and spending more time being creative and productive as they build relationships with their fans.

(Read more)

When I agreed to be a regular contributor to the Squidoo Music Blog, I thought that it would be easy to find Lenses on Squidoo to link to, but now that we’ve been rolling for a few months, I’m not so sure.

There are plenty of music Lenses, but not all of them are “Quality”. Finding goods ones that are relevant to the subjects I want to cover can actually take a long time.

I’m not the only one with this problem, mysticmama has already put out the call for links to Squidoo Music Lenses on her Squidoo Music Awards and Sounds of Joy Lenses. GrowWear has put out the call for County Music Lenses on her Country Music Fest Lens.

Now I’m calling for more Classic Rock Lenses on my new Classic Rock Posts Lens!

With so many rock bands being related to each other, from influences and cover songs, to band members who have belonged to more than one famous band, there’s plenty of opportunity to link back to related Lenses… if they exist!

If you have a Rock related Lens, make sure to add a link the Plexo! If your Lens is related to an upcoming “rock anniversary”, make sure you leave me a note, it may go a long way towards your Lens being the next one I link to!

Whoa! Long time since my last post here!

I’ve been busy with an awful lot, including learning Drupal as I built my Career’s Resources website, starting a new Blog at Crabysbeach appropriately entitled What Was I Thinking since I can’t seem to keep up a regular posting schedule on any Blog I’ve started so far!

I also redesigned and relaunched my NRICS website as a Web Development and showcase of my Online endeavors, so far, but today’s big announcement is the release of the Squidoo step by step guidebook!

Ten Lensmasters, including yours truly, all of whom have been very active on and around Squidoo (including achieving the very prestigious status of Giant Squid), joined together based on an idea from Squidoo’s founder, Seth Godin, about the secret of the new marketing starts with finding “Ten People“.

We may have put our own spin on this idea, but one of the basics is spreading the idea to real people, not just the anonymous masses. To that affect, we’ve also setup an Online Hub at Ning called “Professional Squids” where people can interact with the authors behind the eBook, ask us questions, and learn more about Online Marketing success using Squidoo and numerous other tools across the vast expanse of the Information SuperHighway!

To find out more, and download your own copy visit Squidoo step by step guidebook now!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from Tenfinity!

I’ve been busy since completing September’s Giant Squid Challenge,  just not that busy on Squidoo. I’m sticking around the WiWon Team Ning now that it’s the new home of a_willow’s Fresh Squids and it’s exciting to see people so new to Squidoo getting a good start at Lensbuilding!

This particular post was inspired by a comment left in my Lens about Cash Gifting Scams. The subject still fires me up, and I just had to stop everything I’m doing to freshen it up a bit. I repositioned a few things, and added some new images.

Since the last time I had worked on this, I’ve discovered a bunch of sites with excellent quality Public Domain Photos and Images that are also Royalty Free. It’s nice to be able to add some pizazz to an article with images that help to break up the text and get the point accross.

I really need to free up some time to go over all of my Lenses, I’m sure that I now how access to more than enough Quality Photos to visually enhance all of my Lenses!

I was successful in my Quest to become a member of the Giant Squid 100 Club on Squidoo! A big thanks to everyone who has helped me along the way. I hope I’ve returned your support in kind and helped you in some way, too!

In some way it seems like it was a quick journey, in other ways it seems like it had been a long, hard road, but now that I’m done, I’ve come to the revitalization that I had never added the original Giant Squid Badge to any of my online profiles.

Now I also have the badge for the 100 Club to add, so I’ll be adding them in different locations, like this blog and my squidoo profile.

My next phase has already started, I have several projects I’m working on, and Squidoo will continue to be a part of what I’m doing, even if I may not be building new Lenses as fast as I had been.

It may appear as if I’m slowing down, but you can be certain that my online activities will be continuing at a very steady pace.

I still have a lot I want to do!

The Giant Squid Challenge for September 2009 is finally over, and I can’t believe that I haven’t posted anything here in almost 2 months.

My 100th Lens, Lensbuilding Blues, was done at the very depths of desperation. I probably could have slapped together some mini-Lensographies, but I really wanted number 100 to be something more special than that. I think, in the end, it came out pretty well.

Halloween is coming up real soon, and I was excited to get my only Halloween-related Lenses for this year, one about Spooky Party Songs and one about Scary Party Songs, into the SquidBoo Blast! These were very fun, and my only regret was only being able to fit 13 songs into each one.

Now it’s time to settle back, and figure out where I go next as I wait to see if I’m accepted into the 100 club. I’m sure that working on Squidoo Lenses will still be in the mix, and I hope to keep updates posted here.

100 Lenses was just the beginning!

Yes, I’m back on the WiWon Team, looking to qualify for the Giant 100 club! My first group of Lenses for the challenge are 2 product Lenses, Alice In Chains Music Bank & DeWalt – The Best Cordless Drill and 3 Squid Tip Lenses, Correcting Problems With Special HTML Characters On Squidoo Lenses, How To Promote Your Content: Getting More Out Zimbio & How To Link Squidoo Modules.

I have 62 published Lenses, and I’m really not thinking about how many more Lenses I need. I also keep getting distracted by other things. Not only did my Lens How To Disable PHP Register Globals — Drupal Status Report manage to get onto the first page of Google for the search term “php register globals” which gets a global monthly search volume of 4.4k, but someone posted a link to it in the Drupal support forums. I’ve been getting 60 – 80 visits a week on that Lens!

My Cash Gifting Lens is one of the few Lenses about cash gifting left on Squidoo, because it is one of the few that wasn’t actually promoting it as a money making opertunity, but exposing it for the scam it is. It has gone to the first page of Google for “cash gifting scam”, but has recently slipped to #11 over-all, which is the second page. I’m actually not too bothered by that, because in the past 3 weeks I’ve watched it go from page 9 of Google for the search of “cash gifting” to page 4! I don’t know why it lost ground on the first term, but I’d much rather get to the top for the second term, which is much more general, more sites are returned for it (more than 47x as many) and more searches are done for it — sadly, most people don’t think to question if it is a scam, especially when so many of the top sites say how wonderful it is!

Wow! Seems like I’ve been waiting forever, but I did make it this time!

I suppose it really hasn’t been that long, I’m coming up on my first year Squidoo Anniversary, but it feels like it took longer. It’s weird, but for some things it seems like I haven’t been a part of Squidoo for very much time, but as far as waiting to become a Giant, it’s been way too long.

The good news came after being removed from the Amazon Associates program due to Rhode Island passing a new law meant to collect sales tax from internet sales. So far it doesn’t appear to affect any of the other affiliate programs that I belong to, or being on Squidoo. Many of the merchants who dropped their affiliates in New York State, aren’t ones I have relationships with. Other merchants just registered with NY, and started collecting the tax. Amazon did, but for RI, North Carolina and Hawaii, they’ve decided to punish the affiliates over their disagreement with these laws.

I do most of my Squidoo’ing on my Laptop, which is about a year and a half old now. The cooling fan began to get noisy while I was still doing the final updates on my Lenses. It held up long enough to finish, but now I’m reducing my time with it until I change the fan. When the fan begins to run, it’s a steady buzzing, and the vibration feels weird on my wrists while I’m typing. Before I opened it up, and blasted some canned air into it, it would be too loud to run while the TV was on. At least I know I can handle replacing it myself – I’ve never replaced a laptop fan before, there’s a lot more to getting into it than it takes to get into a desktop.

Plans for the future will include working towards the 100 club, not sure if I’ll actually apply before the next deadline, but I think I already have my next Lens planned. The one about John Wetton has become too big. I could easily divide it in two parts.