Sorry for not posting yesterday. Been a little too busy. Anyhow, today is a bit of rehash of blogs I have been reading, but check out the links. These articles are pretty good.

• Five Things To Do When You Have Nothing To Blog About

Chow is funny. He seems to post something just before or just after I have an experience that is applies to. This is a good little article to help with brainstorming articles and writing ideas.

• When Nerds Run Your Website

The title is the funniest part of this article. NetBusinessBlog talks about the latest drama on Digg with the HD-DVD stories being buried.

• Bob Meets World

Everyone else is wishing Bob happy birthday so I will too. A little too late, but oh well. Happy 30th Bob. All the best in the next decade.

• 7 Ways To Get Readers To Stick

A good refresher article on trying to get your traffic built up and a consistent readership base. I am trying out his #2 point on giving the option to sign up for the RSS feed at the end of every post.

• Giving Underporming Posts A Second Chance

I like this article. Sometimes your best new ideas can come from rehashing an old post, update it with reader comments, refreshing the information, honing the placement of keywords and links, dividing it up into separate pages if it is long, and you get the idea.

I am thinking of this with some of my articles. I have had more than a few reader suggestions for my credit card articles like Aeroplan Versus Airmiles to include other credit cards like American Express or whatever.

Hope you enjoy these articles, I will try to do one of these periodically when I read some good blog postings.

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All of a sudden this weekend, my computer decided to act all wonky. I don't know if I have a virus or what it is.

Their is this process, winlogon.exe, that is running 50% to 100% of my cpu usage when I look in Task Manager. I can't kill it, because it is a system process apparently.

I have googled it and no one seems to really know what causes it and it goes away after awhile. I don't run a virus scanner, but I do have a free copy provided by my employer for personal use, so I'm installing it as we speak.

It is starting to get really annoying though. I'll try the antivirus and let you know if it picks up anything.

If anyone knows anything about winlogon.exe, please post a comment.

I still haven't totally fixed it, but I have gained some ground. I have tried some of the techniques found on this forum on winlogon.exe, but it still did not fix it. After killing the InoRT.exe, InoTask.exe, and InoRPC.exe, the winlogon.exe drops to around 1% of the CPU load.

I can now use my computer, but I have to kill those everytime I start it up.

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I have decided to branch out a bit in my quest for traffic from article sites.

If you do not know, there are free article directories on the internet where you come submit your articles. Other internet users will then read and republish these articles on their own site. They are supposed to include the whole article, links and all, as well as give you credit for it.

This was the first thing I started doing to generate traffic for my site. It would give me a quick spike for the first couple days and then slow down, but I believe they helped to increase my search engine rankings and results.

What Sites Are There?

There are more than a few out there. The only one that gave me results so far as been Ezine Articles. Two to avoid that didn't send me any traffic were iSnare and GoArticles.

I was recently reading a John Chow article that featured some other sites so I have decided to try them out. Basically rehashing some of the ones I published to eZine, but at least it will get them exposed to a larger audience.

The sites are...

• ArticleCity.com
• ArticlesBase.com
• Articles Factory

Submitted My Higher Traffic Articles

I just submitted some of my more popular articles to them today. Time to wait and see what happens as far as traffic goes. Here are the articles:

• Collecting Air Miles and Their Value
• Collecting Aeroplan Points and Their Value
• Aeroplan Versus Airmiles - Comparing Them
• How To Analyze an Investment Property
• Understanding the Value of Wide Angle Lenses
• Camera Shake and Image Stabilization (Vibration Reduction)

Stay tuned for an update.

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7 of my articles were published on Articles Base yesterday. Unfortunately, I haven't received one piece of traffic to my site from them yet.

I am waiting on the other two I mentioned in my article Using New Article Submission Sites. One just approved me as a contributor and the other let me contribute articles right away, but they have yet to approve them.

I am a little bit disappointed so far, but the good thing is that it wasn't as much work as when I posted them on Ezine. I could basically copy and paste the text with a few modifications into these other sites.

PageRank Increase?

I am hoping I will get a PageRank incrase as well. These sites will all have linkbacks to mine now, so it should increase my overall PageRank and clout with Google. Hopefully.

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After an extended absence from the weight and fitness rooms, I can proudly say that I am back. I started last week by running a 5K twice on the treadmills. This week I have ran a 5K twice and now lifted weight twice.

It is shocking how out of shape my body had become. Not only have I become the heaviest I have ever been, but my strength really waned. Sore and tired for the first week, I am just now starting to feel that extra energy that comes from daily exercise.

One of the handiest gadgets to encourage me (because I like gadgets), even though I don't need it, is my heart rate monitor. It is made by Polar and is pretty cool. You basically strap it around your chest and then put on the watch. The watch has a wireless connection with the chest band and it displays your heart rate at any given time. It does a variety of other calculations for you based on your age, sex, height, and weight to show you calories burned and your optimum training heart rates too.

It has been the best thing for my running. You progress very quickly in the first bit, so I like to keep an eye on my heart and make sure I am keeping it elevated to around the same place. I have had to keep bumping the speed up to do this.

The weights have been easy. Write them down and look to exceed the reps and/or weight in the next session.

What is My Goal?

My goal is to drop 15 pounds and lean up a bit. I'll see where I end up by the end of August.

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I am off to Montreal for the long weekend. I will post lots of pictures and a follow up next week on what I saw. I'm quite excited. It will be my first time to this province.

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I just picked up my travel visa for China the other day. For your information, I am a Canadian who applied for a Chinese, single entry travel visa. I did this all in my hometown of Calgary.

The process was very simple. First, for the most recent information and instructions you can go to the website for the Chinese Consulate in Calgary. They have the information here, but I did find it hard to navigate and some of the office hours seem to contract themselves. i.e. Office hours are different than the phone hours, but after seeing how busy it was, maybe there is a good reason.

You can pick up your forms and information there if you want as well, but I would not go out of my way since it is available online anyways.

The main page you will need is the Chinese Visa Instructions page on their website.

Steps to Get A Canadian Chinese Visa

1. Fill In the Application

I downloaded and printed off the chinese visa application (PDF) from the forms download page.

It is fairly simple. When it asks for your reason and destination, I just put the cities I knew I would be in and Tourism as my reason.

2. Get a Passport Photo

My wife and I got our photos from the photo booth in the mall. These have always worked fine in the past, but they didn't seem to like them at the embassy. They let it pass this time, but next time I am supposed to get the proper sized (2 inch x 2 inch) photos. Just paper clip them to your application.

3. Drop Off the Application

If you live in Calgary, you must go to the consulate to drop off your application. Otherwise, you are allowed to mail it in (I think you need to include a paid postage, return envelope too). The Chinese consulate is just west of downtown Calgary on 6th Avenue and 10 Street SW. If your drive past the consulate (6th Avenue is a one-way avenue west bound), you can take your first left and there is meter parking on the side street. I only needed a half hour, but it was only moderately busy at the time.

You need the following items:

• Completed application form.
• Attached passport size photo. Use a paper clip. Do not staple.
• Your passport. It needs to be valid for at least 6 months from the date of travel. It also needs one totally blank page because the visa will take up the whole page.
• Any extra documentation, if you think it is necessary.

Check their website, but office hours when I went were 9AM to 12PM Monday to Friday. You just walk in, stand in line, and drop it off. Do not worry too much about missing information on the form and being out your visa fee. They look at it when you drop it off to much sure everything is in order before processing. They will give you a pickup receipt for you when you come back.

Note: You have to pay when you pick your passport, not when you drop it off.

I dropped my application off on a Thursday and it was ready on the Tuesday morning (Monday was a stat holiday as well). This was the standard service in May when I applied. The cost was $50 per visa. This is your standard single entry tourist visa. You can pay more for rush service, multiple entries, extended stay, etc.

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I had the best Sushi I have ever had in Calgary last night. Globefish is an awesome little place on 14th Ave and 3rd St. NW Calgary.

They had some of the tastiest rolls and sushi I have had and a super cool atmosphere. There is a patio and plasma televisions that were playing the hockey game.

There menu is awesome too. Pictures for every item and lots of selection. Plenty of combos to suit every style.

My wife and I went with another couple. We had the Roll Combo, Flames Roll Combo, Globefish Sushi Combo, Assorted Tempura, and Gyoza (dumplings). The whole meal was around $65 including our tea and we were completely full.

Check it out. Tastes good and its a nice place.

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I am a computer engineer and certified geek. But I cannot figure out my computer of late. It has been giving me a lot of grief and I have had a hard time figuring it out.

Now when I boot up, there are no icons or the start menu bar at the bottom. The only way I can load programs is by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete, going into Task Manager, and using the Run menu command to start up programs. I have to remember the command though.

So just in case you are wondering, these are the ones I have used so far.

• iexplore.exe - Internet Explorer
• calc.exe - Calculator
• outlook.exe - Microsoft Outlook
• winword.exe - Microsoft Word

I am sure I will be learning more until I figure out my problem. My PC is over 4 1/2 years old now and has turned pretty grump the past 6 months. I even did a reinstall of XP on a brand new hard drive (my other one crashed) and it has been worse than it was with a 4 year old installation on it before.

Thanks to Rob Dunn's, I downloaded autoruns from sysinternals. I installed it, disabled third party startup files I didn't recognize and now my computer is running better than it did before.

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I was having some computer issues for awhile now. My computer would boot up, be incredibly slow, and then it would boot up without the start menu bar or desktop.

After putting a post up about it on my blog, Rob Dunn left a comment on using Autoruns by Sysinternals.

Basically you can download the program from the Sysinternals - Autoruns web site at Microsoft. It is a zip file with some files inside of it. Just open it up and run autoruns.exe.

It will take a few minutes to load up. It lists a number of files that run at startup or for other situations. I went to Options and selected "Hide Microsoft Signed Entries", closed the program, and restarted it. This time it had a lot shorter list of applications and libraries that were loaded. Quickly scanning over them, I unchecked any that I didn't not recognize or I recognized and knew I didn't need. Afterwards, I just clicked save, closed the application, and rebooted my PC.

After I rebooted, my computer logged me in faster then it ever has and it is performing awesome. Definitely check out the Autoruns app if you are looking to fix virus/malware type problems or just improve your PC's performance.

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