Trying to learn another language before leaving on the big trip? Or you just want to try something new? I had never even tried to learn another language (besides French in grade school) until 2005. That year I was leaving on a trip to South America.

Don't worry, I'm not pitching for you to buy anything. Just go to the library and borrow these.

I wanted something simple to use since I don't have the resolve to bear through lesson plans and didn't feel like spending the money for a course. So after lookingaround, I found out that audio tapes/CD's were the best bet for me. Something that I can do in the car on the way to and from work.

After talking to a few different people and trying a couple different ones out, I have to say that the Pimsleur line of language learning audio CDs are by far some of the best ones out there.

Now I'm not recommending to get them. Each volume is ridiculously expensive (like in the hundreds of dollars). They are available at the library, so just put one on hold there and go pick it up.

Structure

Each volume (of the ones I have done) have 30 chapters. Each chapter is half and hour.

Basically, each lesson starts out with two people having a conversation in another language. Then for the rest of the lesson you learn the vocabulary so that you can understand and say the conversation yourself.

The lessons start very simple and work their way up. As you progress through the lessons, you find i will all of a sudden bring back a word from a few lessons ago. It jogs your memory by forcing you to concentrate and remember words from the earlier lessons.

They are definitely focused on conversational capability. Definitely a good one for the traveler.

I have personally done Volume 1 of Spanish and I have done a few lessons of Volume 1 Russian. There are quite a few languages that they cover. Search for them at your local library and see what you can come up with.

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I found another interesting blog the other day. Bob Meets World posts on a regular basis and has something interesting to say.

He pulled off a neat little traffic technique a few weeks ago by posting a challenge on his blog and getting it on reddit.com. He gave away $25 to the first person who would show him a screenshot of a folder named con on their desktop. Pretty ingenious. These guys make me jealous when I hear of these simple schemes that work.

I haven't quite figured out what his blog is about yet, but it is just interesting to read nonetheless so I will say signed up for his feed for now. Make sure to check him out.

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When you are starting out your blog, it is critical that you consistently post. What do you do when you are not around though? A lot of the large blogs have guest bloggers to cover for them. It is worth their time and money, because they are generating the kind of revenue.

What about you? If you are like me where a couple dollars a day is good day right now, you can't justify having a guest blogger at this point. Advance posting is the best technique you can do.

What is Advance Posting

This is publishing content with a future timestamp on it. I wrote my own blog software from scratch. It is pretty basic, but one of the basic things it does, it only show blog postings that have happened in the past. This allows me to put a date on a post that is a few hours or even days ahead.

When that time comes, the next person who refreshes the page will then see the new posting. I have a trigger to create the updated RSS feed and all is fine. You have a newly updated blog that you haven't touched that day.

When To Use

Whenever it is convenient. If you are taking holidays, you are working another job, you want the posting to go out at a specific time and don't want to forget, and etc.

Word of Warning

Don't be writing time sensitive postings that will be out of date when they get posted. Also, readers like fresh content, so don't do it too much. Spontaneous blog posts in the middle of the day have a certain feel to them that readers appreciate.

I personally try to write one each week day and have my advance postings fill in some time gaps here and there. When I am on holidays this summer, I will have quite a few advance postings.

Here is another article I found on advance posting at technosailor.com.

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This is one of the coolest sites I have seen in awhile. Worldmapper generates a variety of world maps that take into account different variables.

It takes your normal world map and then resizes the regions based on the criteria you choose. For example, Canada is the largest region on a normal map because of its land area. But if the criteria is population, then China and India become the largest countries on the map.

It is impressive, because the countries still retain the shape somewhat, so it makes it easy to recognize.

My only criticism is that most of the maps are based on gross numbers. So the big countries are always dominating the maps. They need to use more "per capita" values to see countries that are outside the norm.

Here are some examples. The first is a normal map and then the second one is a map of the world based on population. I have listed some more examples as well.

Go check out the site. Personally, my favourites are:

• Wealth
• Internet Users
• War Deaths (1945-2000) and War Deaths in 2002
• Total Births in 2000
• Total Children
• Prisoners
• Health Service Quality
• HIV Prevalence

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I don't want to be too negative and I have tried to avoid negativity in general on this blog. However, in this article I'm going to vent a little bit.

I have been trying to get more involved in the blogging community since I started Thoughts From My Life. So I started to add more blogs to my RSS reader and read an increasing amount of articles.

In particular I have been reading the comments and looking to provide some feedback myself via the comments for a blog post. However, on the larger blogs, I have found that there are these "fan club boys" that consistently post useless comments on every posting.

Why?

Why? I don't really know. Perhaps they are trying to get a "top commenter" ranking or get people to click back to their site via the backlink on their name. Maybe they feel somewhat connected to the blogger if they praise him even though they do not have anything constructive to say.

Chow's Site is a Prime Example

John Chow's site is one of the worst for this. "Way to go John!". "You did it again". "Hope I can be like you someday". "You're incredibly evil John." (from his recent root of all evil campaign)

The list goes on and on and I have seen it a fair bit on ProBlogger as well. I do not blame the blog owners. They have done such a good job that they have attracted the hordes of followers and these types of comments are bound to follow. You think people could at least add a comment that would further add value to the posting. John's articles are excellent and should generate a lot more question and answer comments.

Conclusion

I was recently at Kumiko's Cash Quest and she wrote a pretty good article titled "Where Did All The Bloogers Go". Basically, it outlines how constructive some of these blogs are (or non-constructive). It furthers along this line of poor content in the comments section.

If these commenters are looking for some traffic through the backlink on their name, they can forget it. If it doesn't interest me, I don't click. What's the point.

On a lighter note, a blog isn't necessarily a forum, which implies a good back-and-forth conversation. So maybe I am being to harsh. I only wish I could have the 100 plus comments the John gets on his more popular articles anyways.

Then again, perhaps I am a big, fat hypocrite for avoiding negativity on my own blog.

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I wrote an article on March 17th about an experiment with flights prices on Expedia. The goal was to see how much variation there is over a 2 week period and if there is any sort of pattern.

Anyhow, I am going to update this posting every day with my findings. If there are some interesting trends developing I will post some graphs as well.

Last Updated: March 27th, 2007

Well I might be proven wrong. There is a bit of fluctuation, but nothing substantial yet.

Calgary to Montreal Round Trip (May 18th, May 21st)

Calgary to London Round Trip (July 4th, July 23rd)

Los Angelos to Quito (July 20th)

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This is my official entry in the Life Is Risky Challenge. I am trying to find what Google searches I am ranked #1 in. It is actually quite interesting. Even though my Aeroplan versus Airmiles series of articles are quite popular, they haven't broke into number one except for a few obscure searches.

Anyhow, if you want to see my site at the top of Google, then here are the searches I have found. I listed my more impressive ones first.

• mortgage rrsp insurance
• connect to windows xp through a router
• setting up a blog making money
• d70s infared remote
• aeroplan airmiles vancouver to moscow
• thoughts from my life
• mosaik upgrade
• "best shaving cream in the world"
• payu2blog advice

If you can find any more, let me know. There certainly is a variety here. I guess that is a good indication that my blog is a bit too generic. Oh well.

The order of the words is definitely important to Google. When I changed the order of the one search to rrsp insurance mortgage, I didn't even show up on the front page. Interesting...

I feel a little bit ripped off as well, because some of my published articles on Ezine Articles come up #1 as well. i.e. camera shake and image stabilization. I won't even go there though. These articles have links back to my site anyways.

If anyone can be #1 without using the title or slogan of your blog, post a comment and I will give you a permanent link with those keywords or any other keywords that you want.

I'll post further updates in the future if I find some more search queries.

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Boy, I have really been pumping out the reviews lately. Seems like everyone is doing the "review me and get a linkback lately". Anyhow, I was pleased to see that netbusinessblog recently posted this linkback offer.

This is actually the first blog I ever started reading about making money with a blog and blogging advice in general. There is pretty good readership (over a thousand feed readers according to Feedburner) and they post on a regular basis. When I think about it, even though it was my first blog on making money, I have never posted a comment on there. I didn't feel like I knew what I was talking about to begin with so I stayed away from posting my own comments.

The slogan is "making a living online". I won't go too much in to analyzing this blog. It has a great layout, consistent posting, interesting articles, easy to read, not too many articles, good number of comments and disucssion on the postings, and everything else you are really looking for in a blog.

My only knock on his site is there are way too many categories. I like to browse back sometimes and I prefer the monthly archives because he has over 20 categories to go through. Then again, I'm one of the more generic blogs out there as well, so I can't say too much I guess.

If you like the money making stuff, then check him out. If you have a blog yourself and are looking for linkbacks, then take advantage of his A Page From the John Chow Playbook linkback article.

Now, for my favourite part of blog review posts. My recommended postings. Check these out if you haven't already.

• Paid Reviews is Just an Incentive
• How I Got 283k Feed Subscribers in 1 Day
• 5 Blogging Methods That Work
• Little Known Link Building Secret - Being Friendly
• 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Make an “I Got Dugg” Post
• Building a Niche Minisite
• Optimizing Images for SE Traffic - Is it Worth it?
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Have you ever wondered how much power you are using? I'm a bit of a geek and I always wanted to know how efficient the devices are in my home. A friend of mine recommended the "Kill-A-Watt" a couple years ago and I have ended up buying them for gifts now (for those fellow geeks who would appreciate it).

I ordered it online and I can't even remember where, but the thing is called the "Kill-A-Watt". It plugs into the wall and has a plugin receptacle on the front to plugin whatever device you want to test. There is also a digital display to show the results.

Anyhow, once you plug it in, you reset the values and just wait. Kill-a-Watt measures how many killowatt/hours the device has consumed. This directly translates into how you pay your energy bill.

I stole this picture from The Gadgeteer so I will give them a free linkback for stealing their bandwidth. I think you can order it from there. You can read more about it anyways.

I did my two slice toaster and I figured out that for every 40 pieces of toast (20 times I ran it) that it only consumed 1 cent worth of power.

Stay tuned, I will post other energy findings in later posts.

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For those of you in the dark on Bittorrent, it is time to come out and give it a try. If you remember Napster, Kazaa, and have even tried Limewire, then bittorrent downloading might be the next step for you to take.

There is no spyware, system slowing applications, fear of exposing files, or other things to worry about. It just takes a bit more understanding to get it to work.

How It Works

Basically, it is a peer to peer network (P2P) just like Napster was. There are computers/servers out there that are acting as trackers. They maintain information about who has files to download. When someone requests this file, it puts them in contact with the other computers who have the file and are available to downlaod from. The computer can then download parts from all the other users and assemble it into one file on his end.

One of the side benefits of the bittorrent networks is that while you are downloading you are also sharing the file out. So the more popular the file is, the more people there are to share it and the faster it downloads (generally). It has incredibly high performance for the content in highest demand.

A Bittorrent Client

You need to install bittorrent client on the computer you want to download to. There are a host of them out there. I have used Azureus for the past year and was using before that. The popular one now seems to be Wikipedia article on bittorrent clients. Pick one and install it.

Finding Trackers

This is the other key component. Once your PC or Mac has a bittorrent client installed, you then need to find some trackers. There are a number of different websites that provide access to .torrent files. These are the files that outline the address of the tracker and other pertinent details to the download.

These sites maintain a list of torrents that you can search and some have neat categorizing and sorting options. These sites have been getting shutdown in the recent past however. The MPAA takes legal action and goes after them one by one. Fortunately, more spring to life as soon as one is closed.

Two Styles of Tracker Sites

There are free to use sites where you just search and download the torrent files to your computer. There are ratio sites as well that have criteria requirements. You must create an account, which aren't given out all the time. Afterwards, whenever your download something, the size is recorded and you have to upload an equal or other amount to have a good ratio of upload to download. Having a ratio greater than 1 is ideal for most sites (you upload more than you download).

The ratio sites (like bitmetv.org) are more restrictive, but tend to have higher quality files and the downloads are extremely fast. I will hit around 100 kilobytes/second on mininova.com, but on bitmetv.org I have hit 1000 kilobytes/second very often. A 1 hour show can be downloaded in 5 minutes in very good quality.

What Are Some Tracking Sites

Some of my personal favourite sites are...

• BTJunkie.org
• Mininova.org
• TorrentSpy.com
• isoHunt.org
• bitmetv.org (ratio site)

Search these sites for video, audio, text, applications, and other materials. If you bittorrent client is installed, you be able to open the torrent links and your computer will open the file using your bittorrent client. It will start the download process and you are good to go.

Conclusion

Once you have downloaded your first file, you will be addicted. Be careful of you bandwidth though. It is easy to get a call from you ISP if you are moving too much data. Try playing with the settings of your bittorrent client as well. You can throttle your upload/download speeds and set a host of other options to make sure the program does not become to "busy".

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