KingsAge - fully upgraded city

Today I had some more spare time. I tend to have a lot of that lately. So I decided to find something to do. Being at work, I couldn't exactly play Starcraft, so I began browsing the web in search for a nice little browser game. I came across KingsAge so I gave it a try.

The first thing that stood out was the fact that the map overview resembles the one from TribalWars so I thought that this one is made by the guys at InnoGames. But it's actually made by Gameforge Productions GmbH, the creators of Ikariam.

Now here's the funny part: Grepolis (from InnoGames) looks like Ikariam (from Gameforge) and KingsAge (from Gameforge) looks like TribalWars (from InnoGames). It's like these guys just copy each other :). I'm kidding of course.

But back to KingsAge. I always find it more exciting if I know what I'm going at. In other words, when it comes to browser based games, I want to know what my village/town/polis or whatever it's called, will look like. I want to know how a fully developed city will look like. And since I already made a few mock-ups with Grepolis in the past, I thought I'll give this one a go too.

And here it is, a KingsAge fully developed or upgraded city. And I must say that it looks pretty nice. I don't know why but it reminds me of Age of Empires. As almost any strategy browser game, most buildings have 3 different images that show their level of development. So there are 3 images below, each showing the buildings in the 3 different stages. Some buildings (like the Memorial or the Hideout) have only one image no matter the level and that's why they look the same in all images. The Residence has two images.

I can't really form an opinion on whether I like the game or not. I'll have to play it for a few days. But so far I'm not really impressed with anything in particular. It looks like it's just one more browser game.

PS: These are mock-ups, manufactured images, don't think I've reached that level and that my city is fully upgraded. I might even quit playing in a day or two. Please don't ask me any questions regarding the game also. I'm a newbie too. Check the Help pages and the Forum. You'll find all the information you need there.

Grepolis - fully upgraded city

Because I had a little spare time on my hands I started playing Grepolis, the latest game from InnoGames. I enjoy this kind of strategy games but they can be very time consuming and you get really frustrated when you lose everything you've worked for over night. That's the reason why I quit playing by the time my city is fully developed. But this time I decided I would have a look at how a fully developed city would look like. And If anyone else is interested, here's a sneak peak.

The first one show the Grepolis city with all the building at the level 1 and with the Oracle and Thermal Baths built. Some of them will change appearance as they level up but some will remain the same. The second image shows the Grepolis building at intermediary levels and the last three show the city with the buildings at their top level. Also the Olympic Games and the Triumph are in full display and all the buildings that have animation have been activated, as if they're working. Sadly, I don't have the patience to make an animated version of the town so you'll have to settle for the static ones.

Because certain building in Grepolis city view share the same spot in town, the last three images show the various buildings in this order:

1. Library and Tower
2. Theater and Trade Office
3. Thermal Baths and Oracle

One thing I didn't manage to display is the Statue. I'm not even sure how it's supposed to look like, but it should occupy the same place as the Oracle, Tower and Trade Office.

And after all the trouble I went through, I found this little app that would have made everything extremely easy. It even shows the Grepolis statues. Bummer! Oh well, that's life. At least my pictures have the Olympic and Triumph in town :-)

Oh, oh, and if you find the pictures helpfull and would like to give the game a go, please use this link: Sign up to Grepolis. Thanks.

Playing around with my phone

It's been a few days now since I noticed that the battery on my Nokia N81-8GB is starting to discharge a little faster. I think it might die on me. Or maybe I installed some sort of application recently that's using it. Or just maybe I used the phone more during this period.

In any case, I was looking around on Nokia's Ovi Store and I accidentally found an application that shows you in real time the power consumption on your phone. The app is called Energy Profiler, ver. 1.22. Because it was free, I decided to give it a try and see what it does. After reading the instructions I got a little more details about it. It seems to be intended as an "S60 development tool that enables programmers to optimize software for maximum battery time by profiling power consumption of applications". Or at least that's what the Help file said. It computes the power consumption by reading the built-in current meter once every 0.25 seconds and the voltage meter every 10 seconds.

What I really liked at it was the fact that you can save your recorded measurement and the fact that you can export them as PNG or SVG file. Bellow I added two images created with this application, recording power consumption while performing some tasks on my phone.

What I noticed from these is that wireless connections consume more power than Bluetooth and browsing and streaming video consume a lot more. I forgot to try a Bluetooth file transfer or communication with another Bluetooth device, but I expect it to bee lower than browsing. I was surprised that listening to music doesn't consume that much. Taking that picture with flash turned on was killer, almost 4W. And even moving the camera around uses more power than listening to music. I really enjoyed the fact that when the screen is turned off, the power consumption is close to 0. So it really does save power.

Anyway, that seems interesting. And this application does have a lot of other features, but not being involved with mobile phone programming, I can't really appreciate them to their real value.

Are these readings normal? If anyone else has done this kind of tests on a Nokia N81-8GB, please let me know. I'm really curious to see if there are any differences.

September 13th - Death of Tupac Amaru Shakur

Today is the anniversary of the death of Tupac Amaru Shakur, also known by his stage name of 2Pac or Makaveli, who died on September 13th, 1996 as a result of the four shots he received 6 days earlier.

But probably many of you that are familiar with his music already knew that, so there's no point in reminding it. Songs like "Dear Mama", "Changes", "All eyez on me", "Keep Ya Head Up" or "California Love" are forever engraved in the memory of those contemporary with Tupac. And most likely in the memory of those that followed, seeing as they're as popular as ever. And how can anyone forget, Thug Life ("The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody")? Not just the group Tupac was a part of, but the way of life. Because, you see, in his eyes, thus is "someone who came from oppressive or squalid background and little opportunity but still made a life for himself and was proud".

So what can we say about such a great character that hasn't been said already? Even after so many years from his tragic death, 2Pac still remains an icon, and one of the great artists of his generation. I guess it's safe to say that his death only made him more famous. And, sadly, allowed others to take advantage and earn celebrity off his name.

I heard a lot of people claim that they're big fans of 2Pac's music, but that's not the only thing about him. Tupac was also a poet and an actor. His poems are published in the volume "The rose that grew from the concrete" and are very similar to the things he depicts through his music. Here's one of them here. All the others can be found in the book, which I'm sure you can buy on Amazon, and some of them are scattered all over the Internet. I got this one from 2pac2K.de:

In the event of my Demise by Tupac
In the event of my Demise
when my heart can beat no more
I Hope I Die For A Principle
or A Belief that I had Lived 4
I will die Before My Time
Because I feel the shadow's Depth
so much I wanted 2 accomplish
before I reached my Death
I have come 2 grips with the possibility
and wiped the last tear from My eyes
I Loved All who were Positive
In the event of my Demise

I sometimes wonder what other thing would he have accomplished, had he lived. He is one of those artists that I never get tired of seeing or listening to. From my point of view, and I'm sure others share my opinion, Tupac Amaru Shakur reinvented hip-hop. You could say that he was the successor of The Sugarhill Gang, bringing a new type of music to the people, a different way of seeing things.

Google Chrome: the new way we see the Internet?

Like many other people, I've also learned about Google Chrome, the browser Google is planning to launch. To me and probably to many others, this came as a surprise. The collaboration between Google and Firefox is a long and fruitful one. So why did Google start to develop it's own browser, instead of investing more in Firefox?

One possible answer comes from their announcement made on the official Google blog: "Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web". Everyone likes to say that. But can they really deliver?

I took a look at the comic book they made to introduce the features of Google Chrome. What can I say? Looks awesome. The fact that each tab is a separate process with it's own memory allocation and it's own CPU thread would bring a lot of stability to the browser itself (or we could say "browsers", seeing that this approach actually replicates multiple instances of the browser being opened at the same time). I can't remember how many times I had to kill Firefox because of some crappy designed web pages or pages overloaded with Flash, JAVA applets and JavaScript snippets, taking my CPU to 100%. And keeping it there. And that meant closing even the working tabs. Thankfully there was the Session Restore, but it's still not a pleasant thing. So regarding the multi-threading part, I can hardly wait for it.

Now the JavaScript applications. Well, don't get me started. Yes, they're nice, they're useful. But they're huge and resource consuming, they're sometimes slow and they slow down your entire machine. I sure hope their solution works. You can find a detailed explanation of it in the comic book. But with every solution, comes a whole new set of problems. Making JavaScript driven applications use less resources might mean that people will begin to create even more complex applications, and also begin to disregard optimization. Much like what many programmers did when they got better CPU's and a lot more memory. They got lazy.

As stated by the Google team, the Google Chrome browser is largely based on existing Open Source applications. They took what was working and improved it, in their own vision. And what was not working, they made it work. Or at least tried to make it work. I guess the user will be the judge of that. Things like the quick buttons starting page (Opera had that, from what I remember) and the anti-phishing/malware warning that pops out when you're on a suspected page (I remember seeing that many times in Firefox) just prove that the Google team took really into consideration the user.

Since it's still in Beta (and on top of that I haven't had a chance to try it out) I still can't say for sure what I like and how I feel it behaves under "stress". But I'll consider making a new post after I give it a spin. By then I'll be able to say what I like and what I don't particularly like about it. But being a Google fan, I'll try of course to see all the benefits.

Until then, you can find more information on TechCrunch.com here and here.

Talk of the fair

Image by jnxyz

These past days have been very agitated with one thing. It seems this one thought was on everyone's mind. A lot of well established bloggers talked about it. People like John Chow (from JohhChow.com), Darren Rose (from ProBlogger.com), Daniel Scocco (from DailyBlogTips.com), and many others, were talking about it. If you haven't guessed it by now, let me tell you. It's about the BlogMastermind.com training program.

Still doesn't ring a bell? Then this means you're not subscribed, either by RSS feed or by email, to any blog that has as point of interest the online money making niche. Ahhhh! you might say. Yes, it's yet again about making money online. Although I already openly stated that this blog will be a personal one, there are still some attempts of producing an online income. Failed attempts I might add. But that's another story.

I started to talk about the BlogMastermind Blog Profits Blueprints, as they are called by the author and the man behind the whole thing, Yaro Starak. The purpose of these is to teach you, a novice in the Internet business niche, how to produce an income through your website. A web-blog in this case. From what I could tell, these are only pointers meant to get you started in forming a strategy of your own. As Daniel Stocco says on the main page of blogmastermind.com: "I wish there was something like this around when I first started out making money from blogs".

But since this is not a post that is ment to promote a specific product or service, I will stop right there with the presentation. What I was planing to say was this: this program has been the "talk of the fair" these last few days. My RSS reader couldn't handle anymore Yaro Starak or BlogMastermind posts. It all started a few days earlier with the presentation videos (see first video). I admit, I was first very interested in what they had to offer. And I still am. But these days I'm waiting to leave on vacation, so I'm saving up the money I have.

Trying to keep up with what has happened in the world lately, I bumped into this program at every step. It might be the search patterns I use, the feeds I'm subscribed to or who knows, but I continually ended up at a page talking about it.

Today however, I curiously checked my RSS reader to see if there are any more feeds regarding this subject and I happily noticed there weren't. This might mean that it's finally over. At least for now. Soon I'll be expecting the wonderful results people have been obtaining through the blogmastermind.com training course. And then things start all over again.

And with that I end my pointless and random rambling. Hope I've got at least a few people bored or frustrated for loosing a few moments of their lives. After all, everyone needs a purpose. And this post's purpose is just that.

A nice Monday for a change

Image by justmakeit

You all know what day is today. It's Monday. And like any other Monday, I expected this one to be yet another boring and exhausting one. But, fortunately, I was wrong. It proved to be a pretty interesting day. And because The Yoboo is now a personal blog where I have the opportunity to bore everyone with my tales.

So I got to work like any other workday. It took a while to get comfortable, to fully wake up, and other things I do so I don't have to start working just yet. But all those things were in vain for, you see, there was no work to be done!!! That was the first thing that made me thing that probably today was going to be a nice day after all. As the time passed and I surfed from one website to another, the boss left who knows where. So questions like "have you finished that?" or "can you improve that?", minimal chores just so I don't sit around doing nothing, were out of the equation. You could almost say I had a day off, but I had to spend it in the office. It's not that bad as long as I have a computer with an Internet connection.

After that I played a few small flash games, browsed a few more pages, checked on my favorite "to be released" game, "Starcraft 2". With this occasion I found out (I'm probably the last one) that Blizzard Entertainment will release "someday" a new game, "Diablo III". Upon finding out something like that, I almost fell off my chair, Diablo being my all time favorite RPG (maybe the first one I've ever played, from what I recall). The game is currently in development and a release date has not been set yet. You can check out their website at www.blizzard.com/diablo3/ for more information and updates. Looks like Blizzard finally realized that there is a lot more to gaming that World of Warcraft, even if that has a huge base of fans. Ignoring the rest would be a mistake.

Drawing the line to make the total of the day, this Monday was something special. I could really use more days like this one. But I'm pretty sure that what I expected to happen today, will happen tomorrow, and probably even more. I need a vacation soon.

This is getting stupid!

Image by bunnyandcoco

My last post stated that The Yoboo will be reborn and that I will dedicate more time to keeping it alive. Or something like that. That was a lot of bull. I've said that so long ago and I realize now that I've made nothing to accomplish that goal. The Yoboo is still alone and ignored in his forgotten corner of the Internet.

Besides the fact that this ashames me (I'm almost sure that's not the way you spell ashamed at first person, but I was never very good with English grammar or spelling), it also irritates me. I hate when I say one thing and for one reason or another, or simply because of the lack of the necessary mood, I fail to accomplish what I plan.

The fact is that I have not forgotten about The Yoboo. In fact I kept on visiting the front page over and over again and there were times when I was almost ready to write something. But either I lacked the necessary mood, either something else came up (boss came with an "urgent" matter to attend to, a nice movie was on the TV, a friend wanted to hang out, and other stuff like that). But if I were to make up excuses, it would take you about 3 days to finish reading this :). And the only thing I would accomplish would be to make myself look like a jackass.

But still, something still remains. I recall I've said it before: I have no idea what The Yoboo is about. In it's early stages I was very sure The Yoboo would be a blog where I write about all sorts of graphics (drawing methods, nice tutorials and effects, cool photography, special drawing methods, and other things that would involve a visual graphical result). Soon after I've realized that there are other things I want to write about. Stuff like making money online, which I was (and still am) a beginner at, so I was to write about my experience. Soon after that, although the subject is very attracting and interests me very much, I guess I got bored or maybe realized that the expression "make money online" is in most cases associated with viral networking pages. I say in most cases because there are websites/blogs out there that really help you on the matter and offer really helpful tips.

After noticing that making money online is not what I want to be associated with, I can't even remember what I started to write about. It's been so long ago. The main idea though is that I almost figured out what I want to do with The Yoboo: nothing in particular. That's wright. Absolutely nothing in particular. It's not that I will abandon it. It's just that unlike most other blogs, The Yoboo will not have one theme of interest. As I remember saying before (maybe here, I'm not sure), I don't have only one hobby or area of interest. With that in mind, if you subscribe to the RSS feed or keep on visiting this blog often (although I doubt it) expect to see here anything from web design, Photoshop tutorials, CSS tips and tricks, PHP scripts, electronic gadgets, thoughts of the day to online or offline games and probably a lot more.

Basically, with these being said, I now declare The Yoboo a 100% pure personal blog, a mash of everything and anything that crosses my mind, a place of "pointless ramblings in the pursuit of something that is always just out of reach".

The new Yoboo

It's been a while since I posted here. It feels like I'm starting all over again. And I am, to some extent. One of the things that I have decided to change was the old design. I think this is the fourth time that I've done this since I gave birth to The Yoboo. Some might say that it's little too often seeing as this blog barely has 6 months. But I was just not happy with it's overall look and feel. So I decided to go for a design that someone else created. And this is it.

Aside from the layout, other things have been changed as well. Most of them involve removal of a lot of elements the former Yoboo had. Here's a list of the changes:

• First of all, the design change. I looked around for a nice looking Blogger template, but I couldn't find one that would be as pleasing as this one. It's called Minyx and you can get it here. I like the fact that it's clean, not overcrowded. At least that's my opinion.
• Removal of a lot of the elements that were present on the old blog:
  • Kontera In-Text Advertising - it just didn't work for me. I didn't earn a single dollar from that. I guess it's aimed at high traffic web sites. Hence, useless for The Yoboo. On top of that, even I find it intrusive.
  • BlogRush - I don't think I've received any visitors that would be interested in anything that's posted on this blog. Maybe I don't know how to make use of link-baiting. Or maybe people are just too used to seeing that widget and don't pay attention to it anymore.
  • Sphere - "connects your current articles to contextually relevant content from your archives as well as from Blog Posts, Media Articles, Video, Photos, and Ads from across the Web" - that may be so, but I never used it on other blogs. I didn't even see it on that many web sites. The idea behind it is nice and I might even go back to it some day.
  • Entrecard - I guess I don't have to tell you what this is. As I already said in an older post, the bounce rate is indeed huge from this. You might even get a visitor that's not in such a hurry to "drop and go" once in a while. But that wouldn't happen very often. It seems it has worked out for others, but you have to put a lot of effort into promoting yourself through their system. And I just don't have the time to do that. So I decided to quit and removed the widget.
  • Statcounter - a nice analytics tool. One of the first ones I've tried and it works out great. Unfortunately, I'm addicted to Google and I'll stick to Google Analytics. For a while I had both of them running at the same time. Pointless, I know.
• Change in ad positions - I decided to do a little more research, but I didn't overdo it. I found out that the highest paying AdSense are the 300x250 boxes so I changed the one I had with one that can fit this new template. I have also added a big bottom banner, so it wouldn't bother anyone. And a post footer via FeedBurner, just to cover the maximum of 3 ad boxes possible on a single page.

These changes were made because of several reasons. One of them is the fact that The Yoboo is my first project that I tried to make it work this hard. So I guess I owe it to myself to keep going. Another reason was the fact that I ran the old layout through a test at websiteoptimization.com and I was not at all happy with the result. Even in this time of high speed Internet connections, we still need to consider the optimization of a web site. And with this new template, I'm happy to say that things are looking better. They're far from perfect but we still need to consider looks. But at least I've noticed a drop in the amount of requests needed to display the page, the size and number of the scripts and the total page size the user needs to download. I'm sure I can tweak those a little more if I try, without affecting quality. But it's pretty good for now.

I said in the beginning on this post that it feels for me that it's a new start. It could be because it's spring. But I decided to grant this project a little more attention. That's going to be a little harder since I already started another blog, Fresh IT News. But I hope I'll manage to keep both of them as active as I possibly can.

That's about it for now. I'm going to make sure I haven't messed up tot many thing when I changed the template. See you soon.

How I'll defeat the common cold

"The common cold is actually any of over 300 different viruses. Each one of them, like the chicken pox, can only be caught once in a lifetime."

As I've already said, I have iGoogle set up as my homepage. One of the widgets that I've placed on it is the "Gullible Info" widget. What that does is it gives out a quote every time I refresh the page. And the quote that started this post is just one of them. You should check it out when you have the time. There are really quite a few interesting things there.

But the reason that this one caught my attention is, well, because I have a cold. Not something out of the ordinary. I mean everyone has one at least once a year. And whatever you do and no matter how much you take care of yourself, you still catch one sooner or later. What intrigued me was the fact that you can only catch one form of the common cold once in a lifetime. That means your organism develops immunity to that particular form of the cold. I didn't believe that. So I decided to do a little more investigation. And what other better resource there is that the good old Wikipedia. And right from the start, I had my answer: "once one has caught one of the many cold viruses, one is immune and may never catch that particular strain again". Bummer, I was sure they got it wrong. I'm only counting the times I caught a cold. It 's possible there weren't 300 colds in my life time, but each year I catch another one? It's like I'm a "common cold magnet".

After that, I tried to find out if there are indeed that many forms of the common cold. But I don't think it was there. It's even possible that no one knows how many there are, so I assume the information is somewhat correct. Three hundred seems like a reasonable number. And then it hit me. My genius plan was set: I will catch every single form of the cold so I will be immune to the damn virus(es). So I started to do a little math, just to see how long it will take for me to become invincible.

Invincibility calculations

• if I catch one cold per year I would need more that 300 years. Since I don't plan to live that long, I deducted I would need to speed things up;
• if I manage to catch a cold about 4 times in one year, it would take me about 75 years. Awesome but I should have started a little while ago. I'm 24 already I should have caught about 96 forms of the cold so far. And I doubt it. I need to speed things up even more;
• if I can get sick about 10(ten) times in one year it would only take me about 30 years to pull this through. Since I think I managed to catch about 50 strands so far, maybe even more, I'll be somewhere in my late 40's when I will be totally immune to this horrific disease.

OK, now that I've got all those things sorted out, what's the easiest way to catch a cold? My mom always said to wear a hat and gloves when I go out. "You don't want to catch a cold", she said. If she only knew of my great plan. But apparently Wikipedia doesn't agree with my mom: "experiments so far have failed to produce evidence that short-term exposure to cold weather or direct chilling increases susceptibility to infection". That's not so good for me. What this means is "seasonal variation is instead due to a change in behaviors such as increased time spent indoors at close proximity to others". And there you have it. The best way to catch a cold. Thank you Wikipedia. There must be some other cool informations in there, but I'm not in the mood to go into any further research. I have what I wanted.

And now, let me get on with my plan. The only thing I need to do now is put my body through a lot of temperature changes like jumping from the fridge to the oven and look around for people that have a cold and make them cough on me or rub against me. That sounds pretty easy. And I only have to do this for the next thirty years. This way I'll break once and for all the myth that says: no one is immune to the common cold.

Boy, I sure hope it will be worth it. That's a bad way to waste your life.

Microsoft won't buy Yahoo...

... Google will buy Microsoft. And that's that!

The latest rumors that are going around are starting to get out of hand. Everyone is a investments expert all of a sudden. People are making predictions about this and that, about the impact this purchase will have on we poor end users. The market will be dominated by Microsoft. Boy oh boy, what will we do? The answer is simple: nothing. We'll just go on with our lives the same may we always have. Who still uses Yahoo! anyway? I know I've given up on their mail service a long time ago. Yahoo! News are more on the media-MTV side as far as I'm concerned. If Microsoft would buy Yahoo then two of the major instant messaging clients would have to be merged together and that can only be good news for the users.

Sure, it's one of the companies that helped mold the Internet to it's present shape and size. We could consider Yahoo! one of the founders of the Internet. But it's going down hill people. If someone doesn't buy it, it's going to disappear without leaving anything behind. And let's face it, Microsoft could use a little user sympathy. They need something that will take away from that cold corporate image, something to help them relate to clients. And besides, from what we've seen in recent acquisitions, being taken over is not such a bad thing for the users of the service. The products have only been improved after they were bought: YouTube, Ask, Blogger, Macromedia products and many others.

And if all else fails in trying to convince you that the world moves on, here's an older video from YouTube. This is to back up my initial statement: Google will buy Microsoft.

See that? Everything is going to turn out OK. No need to worry about it anymore.And please stop making all those predictions. Most of you don't even know what you're talking about.

Now that got me really mad !

Wandering from stumble to stumble (StumbleUpon, that is) I've just read an article published a few days ago in Times Online here. The fact that this article is 100% accurate doesn't bother me. I know first hand what Romanians are capable of. I mean, I'm one of them. What really bothered me was a comment left by Graham from Loughborough, England. Labeling an entire nation as "Nazis or gypsies" based on the bad deeds of a small percentage of them is utterly stupid in my opinion. The fact that only the bad things about people makes it to the head lines of the papers doesn't help. It' doesn't tell you anything about a nation. It just points out bad actions of individuals. If we would generalize in that manner, we could simply say the following:

• all Americans are trigger happy and war fanatics
• all Iraqis are terrorists
• all Britons are arrogant
• all German are Nazis
• all Russians are communists

And the list can go on for every nation of the world. I don't mean any offense, I'm just trying to make a point of what preconceptions may lead to. And another thing, stating that Romanians are gypsies is probably one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Romania itself has a gypsy problem, or to be more ethnically correct, a Rrom problem. I'm talking here of the Rrom population that has been granted Romanian citizenship. That doesn't mean they're Romanians, they hardly follow Romanian laws and they're the major cause of crime related problems that the world heard about. I'm not saying Romanians are saints, just look at it this way: if you ignore all the crimes where Romanian citizenship Rroms were the cause, then you would have never heard of the Romanian crime rate. It wouldn't be close to 0, but it wouldn't be that high.

And one last thing. Again, I'm not saying that Romanians are innocent. For what I know, it's possible that they're the ones scamming people on eBay or who knows where else. But who is stupid enough to buy the town hall, a MIG (that's a fighter plane, for those that don't know) or a helicopter for that matter(an older story, also a Romanian involved, also on eBay) on an online market place? I mean, come on people, what the hell are you thinking?

Following the big boy's steps

You've probably all seen the famous John Chow AdWords campaign "Your Blog's a Money Maker: Do you have a blog? I'll show you how to make money from it 100% free". I know I've seen it so many times I'm sick of it. It's true there's something catchy about it. I mean, who wouldn't dream of quiting their 9 to 5 job and make and income from the comfort of their own home?

John Chow is really one of the big rollers in the business of making money online. His web page has formed a real community around it. And I don't think that there is someone out there, that tries to make money from a blog or web page, that is not subscriber to his feed, either by email or RSS. As one of the "big boys", he has a lot of people that try to mimic or to use the things found on his blog. One of these actions is the subject of this post. As I said, you probably know the campaign. Today I've come across something very similar. I fact it's exactly the same thing. Here's a screenshot I took right here on The Yoboo just a few minutes ago:

Notice anything strange? I wonder if you can have a copyright on AdWords campaigns? Oh well, I decided to go to that web site (I didn't click the ad as that would have been against AdSense rules) and see what it's all about. And yes, as I expected it's another money making tips web site. I didn't have the chance to browse through it as I absolutely had to come back and tell you about it. And about something else that I found truly hilarious. This is a screenshot of the MoneyBlogger.org homepage:

That's pretty funny, isn't it?. Anyway, no harm intended.

Time to write about something, anything

I planned to write a post all day but never had the time to do it. I had a lot of work to do today. One of the main things that took up my time was to find a Adobe Flash application that replicates those cool Apple / Mac image slide shows. You know, the ones with the gloss and the mirror effect. I needed one to implement it on a website, but none would provide me with that cool effect. Actually there were a few, but I needed a freeware or open source application. I eventually found one that uses AJAX instead and a lot of images. Although it was nice and had a nice transition effect, it was very slow on the computer I've tried it on. So I'm still on the lookout for a cool free nice looking slideshow thingy. If anyone knows one that meets these requirements, please drop a link.

After I was done with searching the web I decided to check my RSS feed reader just to see what others have been up to. I've recently decided to switch to Google Reader just to have all my feeds in one place and online . This way I won't lose any of them if I happen to reinstall my operating system. I took that decision because of something that happened to me a few days ago. I had to reinstall my Windows XP because it was too old I guess and was beginning to choke on simple tasks like booting. And in the process I forgot to save or backup my Firefox bookmarks. It isn't the first time this is happening to me. And this really frustrates me. On the same note, my bookmarks are now managed by Google Bookmarks. So adding things up, I'm using several products from Google: the Blogger blog, the bookmarking service, the Gmail email, the Google Reader, iGoogle as homepage of course, Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Google AdSense and FeedBurner. Oh and let's not forget Google Earth, Maps and YouTube. All in all, I have to say I'm a pretty good fan of the things these guys have released or purchased and promoted. One of the things I'm trying to quit that's related to them is Firefox. Don't get me wrong. I love that browser. Since it was released it has become my number one software favorite. But as all good thing, it has a few bad habits as well. Some of which have forced me to switch to Flock. The good thing about Flock is the fact that it's based on Firefox and supports several of it's add-ons. But the best thing about it is that, from what I've learned or heard on the Internet, they have solved that infamous CPU hogging that Firefox had. I'm still not sure yet. I haven't had any problems so far, but who knows.

Anyways, I was saying about the fact that I went on reading the RSS feeds I'm subscribed to. One thing popped up right away: I need to subscribe to some feeds that are not in the too(?) crowded niche of "make money online". I guess I've read today about two dozen posts on how to increase your feed subscribers, how to make money with different programs, how to optimize your layout and who knows what other things. I normally don't mind that as it interests me, but today I wasn't in the mood. I started reading quite a few just so I won't miss anything. But then I got bored and I marked them all as read. These are some days when you have the need to do something different. I'm not sure what I'll be doing today as it's almost 10 PM, but I'm sure I won't be reading any more blog posts.

On another plane of thought (I'm not even sure what that means, if it means anything at all) I took another design decision. I decided to add more media to my posts, just to add a little bit of color to the overall look of The Yoboo. I noticed that people are doing it very often and it does indeed make things look a lot nicer than a page full of text. I don't know why I didn't do that earlier. I guess I'll start with this post and I hope I'll keep on doing it in the future. With that in mind, now I need to find a few nice and free image collections. Do you know any?

Back from the holidays

It's a new year and a whole new beginning. Yet again. I thought about what I am going to do this year. Mostly because I don't like to do a retrospective of the year that just passed. I might come out empty :) But I still have a few loose ends that I planned to tie up and I didn't have the time.

One of them is the stopping of using auto-surf programs. The reason for doing this is an email I received from Google AdSense. It was more of an warning. Here it is.

It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have been generated on your Google ads, posing a financial risk to our AdWords advertisers. We've found that users of third-party programs have been paid or provided with other incentives to visit your site. Such programs include, but are not limited to, auto-surf, pay-to-surf, pay-to-read, or pay-to-click sites. Please note that any method that artificially generates click or impressions on Google ads is strictly prohibited by our program policies, as such activity may artificially inflate an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings. We understand that you may want more information about the activity we detected. However, because we have a need to protect our proprietary detection systems, we're unable to provide our publishers with any details about their account activity, including any web pages, users, or third-party services that may have been involved. Thank you for your understanding. We recommend reviewing these references to learn more about invalid click activity and other activities that could endanger your account standing: https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_US https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms?hl=en_US http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=8426&hl=en_US If you need help logging the traffic on your site to determine the source of your visitors, we recommend trying these Google search terms: Webmaster resources Website tracking and logging Site traffic analysis In addition, because we credit advertisers for any invalid activity we detect, we may adjust your account earnings for any days during which such activity occurred. Lastly, please note that if we continue to detect invalid activity from these services on your Google ads, we may take further action on your account in order to protect our advertisers' interests, and payment may be withheld. Thank you for your understanding. Sincerely, The Google AdSense Team

Thank you very much. I have a pretty good idea what caused this email. It was an error in one of the auto-surfs that gave me a huge increase in (worthless) hits in one day. They've also sent me an email saying something like this: "unfortunately for us ... but good news for you ...". Some good news. Anyway, this has convinced me to stop using this kind of programs and the rest is, as they say, history. That's one of the loose ends. Another will be presented in the next post.

Finally got the keyboard fixed

I had a small problem the other day: I spilled a whole cup of coffee on my keyboard and I didn't have the time to make another one. So I left home without a coffee. That was awful. Oh yeah, the keyboard wasn't working anymore when I got back home. And the desk was all sticky.

It was something funny: when I hit a key, any key except <return> (I don't know how that one survived), I would hear a beeping sound coming from the system speaker. At first I didn't know what is going on but then I opened up Notepad and started to type something I realized that there must be a short-circuit somewhere. Every key would print out 3 to 5 symbols, <esc> acted like <f5>, <ctrl> like the Windows key and other stuff like that. It really threw me off track. And provided me with a good laugh. When I had enough I decided that I need to clean it. So I took it apart, removed the electric part, all the buttons, cleaned all the breadcrumbs, hair and dust collected over time then I put everything under the shower. The hardest part was to get them all dried up, so I can put everything back together. Of course I used a hairdryer. Now it's all nice and clean and it even works.

But after all was done, I realized that it would have been faster and not even expensive to buy a new keyboard. At least I had something to do. And something to write about.

Browser stuff - compatibility

So I came back with a thought. I needed today to add a "snow fall" script to a page. You know, the lame and useless eye-annoying usability-impediment ones. Wow, that almost made me swallow my tongue. I'm sure you've seen them at least once in your life. Most of them appear around this time of year.

For those of you that don't know, most (if not all) of those scripts are made in JavaScript. They simply create new layers (divs) that contain a GIF image representing a snow flake or I've seen some containing just the * symbol (I think it's called asterisk). Move them randomly across the screen and repeat the process over and over again. Until your user's eyes get tired trying to read the content of that page, curses the guy that had the bright idea of inserting the script and leave. And one more guy won't come back to your page. At least until spring comes and you remove the script.

But I didn't want to tell you about that. I had to insert one of those stupid scripts and that's that. Looking for one that would be compatible with all browsers, I got really frustrated. You see, most all JavaScript functions have one problem: browser compatibility. It's not that it can't be achieved, it's just that it's a stupid idea to make a script compatible to a browser that doesn't stick to the standards. Yes, you got it! I'm talking about that blasted Internet Explorer. The browser that makes all web developers sick to their stomach. But what I'm really trying to point out is that it's not just the browsers fault. No, wait, gimme a second to explain what I mean.

For those of you that don't really understand what's wrong with IE (Internet Explorer) here's a short version (the extended version would be enough to fill a few books): there are some things that are called standards. Maybe you heard of them. They're all over the place: cars, PC's, TV's, office equipment, books, furniture and almost anything that is manufactured in this world of ours. The thing is standards have a very important role: they're guidelines that people must follow so everybody can know what someone else used when he tried to do something. To exaggerate a little, if there would be no standards, a Japanese car could only be repaired in Japan, and only by the guy that built it.

The Internet also has to follow certain guidelines set in place at an international level. Web developing, web applications, instant messaging, email, web pages - they all have to respect those standards. Here is where the problems occur. Although most browsers stick to the rules, IE does thing it's own way. And I'm not talking about JavaScript alone. It also has serious problems with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), Adobe Flash and who knows what other issues with the many 3rd party plug-ins. The reason for this, in my opinion anyway, is that it was developed by a company that made a history from keeping most of it's code secret (that's OK, otherwise they would have probably gone out of business), but also tried to take over the market on as many planes as possible. For the Internet browsing branch, they developed IE and they did it in a time when standards were not well implemented. But when they were finally in place, the browser was such widely spread that all the web developers already had to make their pages compatible with it. And this is how the Internet had to shape itself after a crappy browser.

But I was saying that it's not just IE's fault. So it's a lousy browser that doesn't stick to the standards and makes every web developer's life a living hell. But it's not the only one that sucks, there are others. The problem is with it's users. The fact that Microsoft releases it together with it's operating system makes it such a widely used browser. It's the user's fault because he's too lazy to get a proper browser, one that lives in harmony with this world of ours that we call Internet. One that doesn't force it's "way" on everything else. One that follows the guidelines and respects both the user and the web designer.

I think you got the idea. So please people, make everyone's life just a little bit easier and get a "standard compliant browser" as it is called in the industry. Anything you like. There are so many to chose from: Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Apple Safari (even on Windows). I personally use Firefox and I highly recommend it. You can find the link at the bottom of this page. But it's your choice, just try it. Hell, you can try them all. Find one that works for you. You won't regret it, I assure you.

Happy, happy day

Because it's my birthday! Well it's not exactly my birthday. I was born in April. But according to our customs, today is my "name day". It's Saint Andrew's day. And my name is Andrei (meaning Andrew in English), so it's my day.

Although I'm not a religious person, I can't just pretend that this isn't a very important day. It's the day of the historical (biblical) character that inspired my parents to give me this beautiful name. Actually I'm named after my grandfather, but that doesn't matter. He was probably named after the saint. Or his grandfather, who cares. Anyway, as I was saying, this is Saint Andrew's day. With that idea in mind I was trying to remember what exactly did this character do to become a saint. What were his great accomplishments? You see in Romanian tradition, maybe in other cultures, there are at least two customs related to this day. I mean two that I heard of, it's possible there are more. But I'll tell you about them later. First I did a quick search on the Internet, to see what I can find out about the guy whose name I bear. And this is a short version of what I found:

Saint Andrew is a Christian Apostle and the elder brother of Saint Peter. Boy, those two must have been the joy of any parent :) He is the patron saint of Romania (that's were I live) and Russia. That's the country everyone thinks Romanians are from when they hear them speak. I don't know why, there aren't many things in common between the two. A Romanian can't understand the Russian language and a Russian definitely can't understand the Romanian language. But anyway, back to Saint Andrew. After all that wondering through the world spreading religion to all those barbaric tribes (or maybe running from the romans, who knows), he was crucified on a X-shaped cross, now commonly known as "St. Andrew's Cross". Why X-shaped? It was his request, because he didn't consider himself worthy to be crucified on the same type of cross as Christ. So he died and became a saint. Good for him.

I was telling you about the fact that there are two traditions related to this day. So here they are:

• the first one is related to love and romance and happy things. It is said that on the night of St. Andrew, whoever places a little sweet basil under his/her pillow dreams that night the one that is his/her soul mate. That's an old habit told by the elders and many people believe it's true.
• the second one is on the horror side. It is said that on the night of St. Andrew, the so coled "strigoi" (after a quick dictionary search, it seams it means ghosts or specters in English) come out to stalk and attack people. Pretty much like Halloween. To be protected from these creatures you must place garlic at your windows and doors frames so they can't come in the house. That reminds me a little of the Dracula stories. Maybe Bram Stoker was inspired from more than one of the local legends when he wrote his famous book.

There might be other traditions related to this day in Romanian culture, but these are the only ones I know of. The first one I only recently heard about. I don't believe and I don't practice any of these, but are really nice stories and go well on a cold winter night, in front of the fireplace, with a cup of hot wine/chocolate/tea.

But now, I'm off to get drunk, because it's my name day. So it's a happy, happy day. For me and for those that I'll have to buy drinks to. I think I'll end up broke after tonight, but it doesn't matter. I'll be really drunk and I won't care.

Yet another day

I thought about what I should write about next. And guess what? I've got nothing. It seems that my life doesn't have all those exciting moments it had when I was a kid. Man, back then I could have talked for hours about anything. Life was great, no worries, no work. The only problem I had to make a decision on was what game I should play next. Ahhh, those were the times. And look at me now! I sound like an old man, all nostalgic and I'm not even 24 years old.

But the reason I'm talking about this is of what happened this morning. I woke up all grumpy and with no mood to go to work. Mind that I'm supposed to get to work at 9 am. I usually wake up around 8:30 sometimes even 9, and get to work around 9:30. But the boss is OK and it isn't actually someone or something that requires me to be there at a certain hour. Anyway, today I got up around 8:45 and I immediately noticed it was a bit colder than usual. I started getting dressed, I now remember I forgot to wash my face, I never take a shower (in the morning, I mean). I grabbed a cup of coffee and I headed towards the window. It was all white. At first I thought it was because of the difference in heat and I tried like an idiot to wipe it clean. That until my eyes started to open up a bit more and I realized that the entire hill in front of my apartment is covered in snow. A beautiful white coat all over the almost whithered grass. The trees carried a pretty decent weight on their branches and the cars could barely be seen (those that were left anyway, the lazy ones I mean).

At that point I felt like I was a five year old kid all over again. I really felt like it was winter, not just a grumpy and cold season. You see, for me and I'm sure that others feel the same way, winter is just not the same if there is no snow. Now I can get in all that holiday spirit, enjoy Christmas and New Year's Eve. That didn't last very long. The damn Sun came up and the snow began to melt. Now it's just like autumn all over again. Damn it. I just hope there will be snow for the holidays, unlike last year.

A new week

So the weekend is over and a new week has started. Back to work.

It's been an hour now since I should have started to do something, anything. Like at least pretend to work. But I have absolutely no motivation. I'm so tired and I want to go back to bed. Or do anything else, it doesn't matter.

I tried to read a few feeds, find out what else has happened in the world while I was relaxing, enjoying the weekend. But that didn't work. My eyes were shutting and my head was tilting left and right. I'm constantly yawning and stretching my muscles like I just got up. And the worst thing is it's only Monday. And even worse, I still have 7 more hours until I go home. Sad.

I think I'll download a game or something. Or play one on line. Anything to get my mind of the fact that I might be doing this for the rest of my life.