Days of My Life

Directed, co-written and acted by Sylvester Stallone, Rambo is an excellent film that incorporate current events into its plot very well. Excellent directing by Stallone, too, that made the film very real, more so than its predecessors, with an excellent storyline that connects the years pretty well. It was a good decision for him to continue his saga; otherwise, it wouldn’t have been as good as it is. A word of warning: This film is NOT for children under 14 in any circumstance.

Overall, this deserves an A.

“Live for nothing, or die for something.” — Rambo

Yeah, I wish it was Friday. I feel so lazy and kind of down today. Life’s a drag. Work’s a drag. Everything’s a drag. I feel so… bleh. Maybe it’s the rainy weather. I’d at least sleep in if it was the weekends. Oh, well…

I almost became a victim. When I tried to login to my online account to schedule a monthly payment, the site locked me out. So I called in to see what’s up. Apparently, my card was flagged when a merchant called in about a suspicious customer who attempted to use my number to purchase something over $1,000 without an ID. Fortunately, my card company detected it and deactivated the card. I obviously canceled it and requested a new one.

I wonder how my number got stolen. I shred everything, and I don’t shop at rogue / unknown sites. My mother is a secondary holder, so someone at one of the local stores must have swiped it somehow. Who knows…

Just in case you missed it, see Siggy’s entry about my “pimping business.”  It cracked me up so bad that I couldn’t stop laughing for 5 minutes!

Seriously, though, I shouldn’t approve advertisements with photos like that — especially since it doesn’t have anything to do with the site itself.

I’ve received a “complaint” in my PayPerPost account from one of the advertisers stating that I’ve “gross” spelling and grammatical errors in my posts. I disagree.

First, I use FireFox which automatically checks my spelling for me, and I use a voice recognition software to type most of the time. Thus, I simply cannot have gross spelling errors.  Second, I’m really “anal” about spelling and punctuation errors, so I’m really offended by that complaint. Third but not the least, while I admit that my English is not perfect, I don’t believe I have gross grammatical errors in my posts.

If you do see any “gross” error, please let me know.

My workplace is a small local non-profit organization, and as such, we don’t have a separate IT department; in fact, there are only 5 of us excluding data entry people. So when our developer changes something on our site, we all chip in and test the site for any bug which is fine and all — especially since the base code that was written by our previous developer is such a mess. However, I don’t think it’s necessary to test other functionalities of the site when a new section gets added. I mean, why would anything else get affected when something that is based on new codes is added? I even have to check every link on the site which sometimes gets broken because it’s on the development site and not do live one.

I’m not complaining, really, but it’s kind of difficult to work with people who has have no programming experiences.

As you can see on that third column right below the calendar, I’ve added Scratchback that allows instantaneous linkage upon payment. Basically, advertisers pay to rent a space, and you get to set the price. For now, I’ve set the price at $1.50 $5. I’ve read that it uses “no follow” for the links, so it shouldn’t be a problem with Google.

I’ll get rid of it if I don’t get any request until the end of this month. Hopefully, I’ll get some money out of it.

The ol’ man had me purchase an used golf iron set off eBay for $400 while my mother and I are trying our best to pay the mortgage off.  I can’t even afford to replace this sluggish 6-year-old desktop which was purchased through an organization that assist students like myself in Hawaii.  Needless to say, I was biting my lips when I emptied my PayPal account to pay for it.

Anyhow, the item was shipped from Japan last Friday, and it’s departed from San Francisco, CA, yesterday morning.  So unless it gets lost in the system, it will come when it’s time.  However, he asks me to check the status of it at least twice a day when it doesn’t even get updated daily.  What’s the friggin’ point?  I don’t even want to know…

…in my opinion, that is. Thanks to EntreCard, I’ve seen quite a lot of different blogs in the last few weeks, and the following made me want to leave as soon as possible without even glancing at the contents:

1. Don’t make users scroll down for your contents by making your header too large. I’ve a 20′ LCD monitor set at 1600 x 1050, and if I still have to scroll down, your header or contents must be damn appealing.
2. Ads are fine; in fact, I’ve them as well. However, don’t put a 400 x 400 ad within your entry / post. Not only does it make it difficult to read your content, but it also looks ugly and greedy. Instead, try to maximize the usage of your white spaces. Also, if it’s possible, make the ads blend in with your theme.
3. Don’t put more than 2 third-party AJAX widgets as they make loading of your site very, very slow. Users will just leave if the site takes longer than 3 seconds to load. If you have to put more than 2, make them load after your contents; e.g. in your footer or the last thing in your sidebar. For the same reason, don’t put too many graphics and clutter your sidebar; if you absolutely have to, tidy it up by organizing those graphics into groups. Remember, not everyone has a 5MB connection.
4. Users usually don’t care who else visited before them, so don’t put widgets up that show information on previous visitors. This not only adds to the loading time, but it also makes paranoid users even more paranoid.

What do you find annoying in other blogs? And even on mine?

Using the Broken Link Checker extension, I’ve spent the last few hours getting rid of broken links in my posts, because as you may know, having broken links on a site is bad for SEO. Most of those broken links were pointing to CNN and other news sites as well as some blogs I linked to. I ended up deleting majority of those posts, because they either had only one to two sentences or were not important enough to keep them around.

After that, I re-submitted my sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. I guess this was my major spring cleaning…