Welcome to Something for Nothing

I don’t know how many of you still use an analog phone line. You know it’s you if you are still paying money to Sprint or someone like that for your phone line. Many of you even pay for the full service with call waiting, caller id, last call return, answer service, etc etc etc. Adding all of those up the local phone company is going to be charging you about $40 for all of the above. I’m sure many of you are thinking that you only pay $15-$20 for your local phone line. Well, if that is the case then you don’t use any long distance and you don’t have many(or any) of the above services.

Why am I ranting about the cost of a local phone line? Hold your horses.

You and each of you should get rid of your local phone line and start using VoIP. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ll make it simple for you. VoIP is basically having your telephone go over the internet. No, I’m not talking about hooking up a headset to your computer and then using your computer to call someone(although that’s possible too). I’m talking about plugging in a regular phone into a box that then converts your phone call so that it can go over your internet line. Simple as that.

I personally use Vonage which allows me to call the entire US for free(or for the standard $25 a month). I can even call Italy for free(which I’ve used extensively). Plus, for that same price I get all the benefits listed above: call waiting, caller id, last call return, answer service, etc etc etc. I personally love not having to worry about who I’m calling and keeping my call short if it’s a long distance call. It’s freeing to be able to talk all I feel like.

I could go on for hours about this, but that should be enough for you to start looking at VoIP. Oh yeah, and if you do look at Vonage. Let me know and I’ll send you an email. If you sign up from the email I send you, then I get a free month. Just comment on this post and I’ll send you info on Vonage. It’s well worth it.

If you want to try something to waste some time check out this site called LikeBetter. I’m not sure how it works, but I love seeing the various pictures and it did know I was a boy. Great fun!!

I know you are telling me that Halloween doesn’t happen until the End of October. I know I know. You must not understand my wife. The fact that my wife still hasn’t selected Halloween costumes already is astonishing for me. She just loves to plan Halloween costumes. She’s even made a few, but lately she’s been all about purchasing a nice costume. It’s even gotten worse since we had our first child. I can’t imagine what will happen when our second kid arrives. Can you just imagine the baby Halloween costumes she could buy?

It’s hard to decide. Take a look at just a few examples of things she could choose from:
pirates (even Capt. Hook), Robin Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Snow White, Cinderella, Dorothy, Good Witch, Tin Man, Scarecrow, and many more.

I decided to make it easier. I’ll post a few choices so she doesn’t have to stress over it:

Fireman Costume(Great Since 9/11)

Doggy Costume

Our good friend Travis Wall from So You Think You Can Dance has a nice video of him teaching people to dance. All you Travis Wall lovers will love this video:

Read more…

I don’t know why the past 2 days I’ve gotten questions out of the blue from people I know about creating a webpage and optimizing it for search. In one email I got they asked if I could get them to the top of Google. If I wanted to be quick I would have just said, “Sure, just sign up for Google Adwords and bid on a keyword and you’ll be at the top of the search.

Of course, that wouldn’t have been very nice of me and would have given them a simple answer for a much more complex question.

A better answer would have been to point them to a white paper on paid search. Here’s some of the major topics the white paper covers:

1. Natural Search vs. Paid Search
2. Narrow match is much better than Broad Match
3. Measure your Results
4. Calculating Bid Limits

After reading this we could have a much more intelligent conversation on getting their webpage to the top of Google.

I’m not a big history nut. In fact, I hated all my history classes. However, I do find stories interesting. So if you take history and wrap it in a story then I like it. I also like knowing interesting facts.

Well, I just said all of that for no reason, because this post is about a website that shows a picture from American History every day.

I normally don’t care too much, but the 2 that I’ve looked at were quite interesting. Here’s today’s picture:

I wish I could find an archived list of the pictures.