It was my wife and my 2nd anniversary this weekend. For our first anniversary we stayed at the Bear & Bison in Canmore so we thought we might start a bit of tradition and went back there again this year. Why? Because it one of the most fantastic bed and breakfast places we have been to.

It is situated in Canmore, Alberta just outside of Banff National Park in the Rocky Mountains. Canmore itself is a beautiful little set in the mountains west of Calgary. There are a few golf courses and a trendy main street with a lot of shops and restaurants.

Here is the site for this Canmore bed and breakfast.

Bear & Bison

The B&B itself is on the north side of the highway up the hill a ways. The owners are a husband and wife team with some extra staff. The husband is actually the head chef at the restaurant where they do dinners as well.

There are 10 rooms and we have personally stayed in room #3 and room #9. Both were fantastic. Both have a very large jacuzzi tub, fireplace, balcony, kind size bed, and very nice decor.

Room 3 I think is definitely the best. The jacuzzi tub is on the east wall and there is a huge window spanning the length of the tub that looks out to the mountains on the east side. You can look at the window to the mountains are at the television and fireplace about 10 feet away. Very relaxing.

Room 9 doesn't quite have the view of the mountains, but you are only a short walk from the hot tub outside and the price is a lot less.

Food

I can't say much about lunch or dinner since my wife and I ate down in the town, but breakfast was fantastic. Both mornings we were served a different breakfast. One morning was spicy hashbrowns and eggs together sort of thing, fruit, and a cinnamon roll type pastry.

Cost

They have a Valentine's Day promotion that is good until the end of March. It is $175/night that includes any room in the Bear & Bison, chocolates, early checkin, room service breakfast, and champagne. For only $99 you can add on a weekday night as well. I believe this is a spring special. This is Sunday night through Thursday night.

I think the personnels' attitude is one of the best features of Bear & Bison. We called in the morning to ask when we should be out of our room and their answer was "whenever it works for you".

They also have a very good discount for late bookings. If you book within 48 hours because the room is still unavailable, you receive a 30% discount on the room. We managed to take advantage of this the last time, but I wouldn't bank on it. It is a fairly popular B&B as they handled over 70 weddings last year.

Access the Bear & Bison website

More Photos

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Here is my March recap for Thoughts From My Life. Overall, I think this has been a successful month. It is in my opinion, my first breakout month. Before now, I averaged around 10 unique visitors a day and just a few dollars a month income. This month, over 60 uniques a day is normal and the revenue has also increased.

I will outline was has changed, the traffic for the month, and set some goals for the upcoming month. Please post a comment or two if you have any suggestions.

What Changed?

I have been continually writing content, the same as before. But I have been doing a few more things that I think helped get things rolling. It doesn't help to have another couple months of Google indexing under the belt.

• Reading other blogs more frequently and posting comments.
• Participating in other blog contests and getting link backs through them.
• I dugg a couple of mine own articles. I know...bad. Wanted to see what would happen.
• Joined a blog network called BlogMad.

Traffic

This was the highest month ever with 1738 unique visitors and 4641 page loads. This averages out to 56 uniques and 146 page loads a day. Not bad, considering my spike didn't happen until a few days into them month.

Here is my traffic chart below. I have switched to Google Analytics and will be providing some of their statistics for April's recap. Notice the low traffic at the very beginning of March. That was the typical volume for the first few months this site was up. Hopefully the trend at the end is what will continue.

Revenue

The total for the month came to $83.70. This is best month ever. Before I was happy with $7 or $8 which came only from Google. I have added Kontera's ads and have written a few paid link blogs as well to help pay for the site. Fortunately, Google picked up the pace this month just as I added the other sources. Here is a breakdown...

• Adsense: $17.49 (21%)
• Kontera: $16.21 (16%)
• Chitika: $0.00 (0%)
• PayU2Blog: $25.00 (30%)
• PayPerPost: $25.00 (30%)

I have only seen $25 of it so far as Adsense and Kontera require $100 total account balance before they will pay out and PayPerPost has a 30 day waiting period for each posting.

Paid postings account for 60% of my revenue so far, so this will need to change. I want Adsense and Kontera to pick up if possible. I am hoping to be approved by Text-Link Ads sometime soon as well. I would like to add them to the mix. If Chitika doesn't start performing, I will be removing them as well.

Goals For This Month

I am establishing a few goals for this month.

1. Read more blogs and comment more.
2. Try to think up a contest or gimmick to get some more traffic.
3. Find some blogs willing to do link exchanges.
4. More SEO analysis. Try to tweak the layout of my pages.
5. I am finishing up some touches on the stock trading part of my site. It lets me paper trade and see quick summaries of what trades are performing and what aren't. Each trade has a corresponding blog posting and can have unlimited comments. I will add a "suggest a trade" feature as well.
6. For fun, my goal this month is to have the google search for Neil Galloway show my site as #1. I have added my name as author to all my articles so far.

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I have just posted my second batch of PayU2Blog postings. I have read a lot of reviews complaining about these guys. I have to say, they have worked out fine for me. They even phoned me personally to explain things and let me know how it works.

They give me an assignment once or twice a month and the only criteria is to use the link with the keywords they give me and the posting must be 60 words long. It doesn't even have to be on the front page. I am going to give them a little bit more for their money's worth however.

Here is a review of the second batch of postings. I will give a link to the posting and the keyword link I used.

• Clocks and Decorating Your House - grandfather clock
• Truck ToolBoxes and Storage For Your Truck - truck toolbox
• Video Conferencing and Cost Effectiveness - video conferencing
• Upgrading Your Computer Memory - computer memory upgrade
• Do You Have Enough Drive? - Levitra

Check them out if you want. They have some neat products or services. The computer memory upgrade one I thought was pretty cool.

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Okay, I am a little bit biased towards the new daylight savings time dates. I don't like them, plain and simple. Not the dates themselves, but the fact they had to change.

That is why I am going to be all over this latest article called Early U.S. Daylight Savings a bust in power savings.

There is a quote in there as follows:

"We haven't seen any measurable impact," said Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co., one of the nation's largest power companies, echoing comments from several large utilities.

I work in the technology sector and their are a lot of systems that needed to be upgraded. Some are simple patches, but that isn't the case for everyone. Some systems required major upgrades and serious amount of testing done.

I am all for saving the environment, but I am wondering how much thought actually went into this and if the amount of money spent by organizations to prepare for this change was ever considered. Speaking of environment, I drove myself back into work an extra day to work on it, so the lights of my office and the fuel I burned to get back to work are added into the mix. I was expecting them to say there was a marginal improvement. This wouldn't be enough to cover the cost and bad side effects this year, but pay off in years to come. This makes it sound like it may never pay off.

I do hope that their are some good, solid long term effects from this. Perhaps we will need to wait until the fall to see it as well. Hopefully they don't switch back, unless they find out it is actually worse.

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Want to try and make some money with your home videos. MetaCafe has an interesting feature called Producer Rewards.

If you post a video, you are the author, it is an original work, does not have copyrighted content, and you have the consent of everyone in the video, then you are eligible for Producer Rewards. Producer rewards are payments for how many times the video is viewed and how well it is rated.

Formula

It is pretty simple. If the video has been viewed 20,000 times and maintains a rating of 3/5 or higher, then you are eligible for $5 per every 1,000 views. This means you should be able to get $100 once you pass the threshold. I assume they verify the video's eligibility at the point.

I entered a video a few months ago. I call it the Elephant and the Stupid Tourist. I was in the Ngorongoro Crater in July of 2006 and this woman walked into the path of this elephant. She didn't get hurt, but it didn't look good.

Embed this video in your website with a link to my site and receive a free linkback from me and I will embed a video for you as well.

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For all of you signed up with Google Adsense, you might have noticed something called Channels. This is the closest thing Google gives you to figure out where you make your money.

Adsense lets you create up to 200 channels using different names. Your adsense code can then reference these names. Google will summarize your revenue by channel if you want them to. Breaking them down based on your channel names.

Why Would I Want This?

Now you can categorize your ads however you want and see how they perform. For example, I named the large 300x250 square ad different then the my horizontal set of links at the top of the page. The row of links paid me next to nothing, while 99% of my revenue came from the 300x250 ad. It means I might as well be using the top space for a different kind of ad or for my own graphics and menus.

Recent Changes to ThoughtsFromMyLife

I have recently create some more channels to get a real handle on what is going on. I have a channel called "homepage" and a channel named after each of my categories. For each ad clicked on the homepage, it will register with the homepage channel. For each category page and specific posting page, it will register the clicks and revenue under the channel with the name of that category.

I wrote my own code in php so I just changed the part that prints out my Adsense code to change the channel name to whatever the category is.

I am hoping to see who is the higher paying within a few weeks. I will be sure to post the results.

In the mean time, look at creating channels for your site. Try to think of inuitive ways to figure out your revenue sources. You could have channels for variety of breakdowns. Here are some ideas.

• RSS feed
• Categories
• Ad styles (i.e. vertical banner, horizontal banner, square ads, image ads, links, etc.)
• Homepage
• Posts
• Category pages
• Non posting pages (i.e. About Me, Links, etc.)
• Position on page (i.e. square ad at the top, square ad second from the top, etc.)
• Search results page
• Top Posts page
• Specific postings/articles
• The list goes on ...

Have fun with this. Let me know if you find any interesting trends yourself or other breakdown areas. I will modify the article and give you a linkback if I like them.

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This has got to be one of the coolest custom web applications I have seen. A coworker of mine has use Google Maps to indicate the location his albums were photographed at.

If you check out the screenshot below you can see how it works. Using the Google maps API, he attaches a longitude and latitude value to each one of his albums. He uses these to put pins on a global map for the various locations he has been.

If you click on each pin, it will bring up the album or albums that are available with their highlight photo. You can then click and enter the album. You can even zoom Google Maps into his homecity of Calgary and it will show you where in the city the album was done at.

This is seriously impressive. If you want to do it yourself, he has provided a brief tutorial on his site.

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Making a photo black and white is a faily simple process. I used to just use the grayscale option in Photoshop, but it doesn't always do a good job of it. Blonde hair can be too light or other features will not show up properly. I will explain the method I use to have a bit more control over the final picture.

I use Photoshop for all my editing so these instructions pertain to that.

Find a photo you want to convert to grayscale and open it up in Photoshop. For the purposes of this tutorial I am going to use the photo below. This is the same photo I used for my article Correcting Colors in Photographs Using Photoshop.

The Photo

Here is the photo. Notice the baby has light colored hair and their is a bright light being cast from the left side of the photo. It keeps his face bright on that side and there is a contrast as you move across.

Grayscale

My first impulse would be to just convert it to grayscale. This can be done by going to Image -> Mode -> Grayscale. Refer to the screenshot on the below.

Here is the result. Now this isn't bad. Personally, I wanted it a tad lighter and the infant's skin has too even a tone across it. Doesn't really reflect the color we saw in the original photo. But I still want to keep his light colored hair dark.

Time for Saturation Layers in Photoshop

Let us use saturation layers now. This will give us control over the darkness of the various colors in this photo. First, we need to create two saturation layers on the photo. Refer to the screenshot at right.

Now double click on the graph icon of the top most saturation layer (the last one you created). It will open the dialog you see in the screenshot ot the left.

Adjust the saturdation to 0 or all the way to the left. This will turn the image grayscale. Click Ok after that. Basically the same thing Photoshop does. However, it looks a bit bland like the Grayscale photo we did above.

Now, double click on the graph symbol on the first saturation layer you created. This one will control the individual color tones. You can select the color of choice from the picklist. Then adjust the brightness for each one. You will notice some color choices don't affect the photo at all, where other ones have a dramatic effect.

I personally chose yellow and reduced the brightness substantially. This darkens blonde hair and his shirt somewhat. Secondy, I chose red and adjusted it down as well. This put some more contrast back into his skin and face.

Here is the final picture below. The original color photo, the saturation level adjusted photo, and a Photoshop Grayscale photo.

Original	Saturation Levels	Grayscale

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According to Technorati and Tristan Louis, my blog is worth $5,645.40. Wow, look at how much money I have made. But who is going to pay that?

The creator of this little "worth calculator" says he created this

"applet using Technorati's API which computes and displays your blog's worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal."

I haven't heard of personal blogs that have ever sold, but it is an indicator of how connected the site is in the blog community and on the net in general. I will post this value with my monthly stats on revenue every month. We can see where it goes.

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Well, it took over a week before the PayPerPost people reviewed my articles. I was surprised it would take that long. Anyhow, they have posted my "to be paid" earnings and I have to wait 30 days for them to verify the posting stayed up before they will pay me.

For those of you who don't know what PayPerPost is, it is a company that registers blogs who are willing to do postings on their site for money. Companies set up ad campaigns with them and select various criteria. The article must include certain links, images, and have positive, neutral, or any kind of tone, and maybe include a specific phrase they want. All postings must also have a disclosure stating that you are being paid to do it.

I feel like a bit of a sellout, but it does help pay the hosting bills. I only accept ads that look half interesting and don't require me to promote a product I don't believe in. Anyhow, I'll try to do a few here and there.

Now that mine were finally approved, I have a good understanding how it works and what I can and cannot do. I had to resubmit a couple times because I didn't read the rules. I violated a couple things.

• Other advertisements were on the article. I forgot to disable my Adsense and Kontera ads on the PayPerPost pages.
• They said I didn't have disclosure on one of my articles. I thought I had disclosed it well enough, but I stated it a second time to make sure.

Here are the postings I have done so far:

• Opportunities in the Futures and Forex
• What Kind of Insurance Do You Need
• Dell Days of Deals and Finding Coupons
• Online Dating Without the Price

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