In case you were wondering, I am traveling right in southern Asia. Currently in Sri Lanka actually. It has been a blast and I'll be back to blogging soon. Not that I have written many articles lately anyways.

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I had a scary moment on my most recent trip. My card appeared to fail after I had taken a week's worth of pictures in Nepal.

My Nikon D70s started flashing "For", which indicates the compact flash card inside needs to be formatted. I was unable to view the pictures and if I put it into a card reader and tried to access it on Windows, it just wanted to format the card.

I waited a month, until I arrived home, to try and recover the pictures. I tried 8 different programs and I found two that were able to do it.

RescuePro was one of them. They let you download a trial of it and see if it will actually work before you have to buy. It will access the flash card and then scan it. After awhile, it shows you thumbnails and will let you recover a small number of the files for free. If you see your files and think it is worth it, then you can pay the US$40 for a license.

Active File Recovery is the other one that worked. This program is a little more full-featured. It can recover files on hard drives as well. RescuePro was strictly for flash cards.

Anyhow, if you have ever deleted, formatted, corrupted, or had some other failure with files or flash cards. Don't just erase the card and start from scratch thinking you lost everything. Download a trial copy of RescuePro from the link above and see if you can spot your missing items. It will be well worth the $40 in a lot of cases.

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I thought I would try out Windows Photo Gallery as a tool to work my photos. This application is included with Windows Vista. Basically you can import your photos into this application and then use it to tag, rate, filter, edit, and perform some other tasks to them.

Anyhow, I uploaded all my trip photos as well as the photos from others on my trip and I have over 3,700 photos to go through. What I did was put them all into the same folder and import them into Windows Photo Gallery. Next, I sorted them by Date Taken so that I had all the photos in the correct order (you need to make sure everyone had the same date setting on their cameras).

Once a double clicked on the first one, it opened up into full screen and it allows you to navigate through the photos one at a time. While looking at each photo, you can press the arrow keys to go forward or back. The other thing you can do is press the number keys 0-5 to rate the pictures with the corresponding number of stars. Check the screenshot below of my photo of Hong Kong blown up. Note the stars on the right hand side. You can click to rate the photo or just press 0-5.

Basically, I would go through the photos and rate them with a 5 or 4 if I deemed them worthy of developing or publishing. As I went forward and maybe saw a better candidate photo of the same location or person, I would quickly go back to the one I rated 4/5 and press 0 to clear its rating again.

At the end of this exercise, you now have a set of rated pictures. Windows Photo Gallery will then let you display sets of photos based on their rating. You can even select all of these filtered photos and copy/paste them into another folder or do whatever you want.

This is a very similar method to a lot of applications like Adobe Lightroom or even iPhoto on the Mac. Regardless, it is free and already installed on Windows Vista, so why not make use of it.

By the way, it also supports other media files like video.

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This is what you freak out over just before you leave on the big holiday. Did you bring enough stuff? What happens if there is an emergency? The best thing to do is write your self a travel checklist a month or two in advance and keep it on hand all the time. Ask people who have been where you are going what you might need. If you are traveling with others, split the shareable items to lighten the load. Here is a travel checklist that you might find handy.

I got that idea for this post from 101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle on I Help You Blog.

If you want to build your own, try using the following categories. My own list is farther down.

• Before You Leave
  Make sure everything is going to be okay at home while you are gone. Will Fido be taken care of?
• Documentation Essentials
  These can take the longest to be ready, so start early. You cannot even get on a plane nowadays if you do not have your passport on you.
• Clothing and Shoes
  You will not enjoy your trip if you don't have the proper outfit. Remember, some places you can buy what you need for less money than at home, if you have the time to do so.
• Toiletries
  Another biggie. If you need anything special and you are going somewhere it cannot be purchased, it can really ruin a trip.
• Medical Supplies
  Some people would lump this in with toiletries, but I like it in its own section. Typically things that would go in a red emergency kit.
• Essentials
  These are must haves that don't really fit into the other categories. I always take flat duct tape for fixing stuff. Sunglasses fit in here as well.
• Extras
  Same as Essentials except not as big a priority. Throw things in here that would be nice to pick up for the right price or a friend will let you borrow.
• Food
  That is right. It is good to take along some snacks, vitamins, and protein bars to help you through some days where you do not have the time to eat or what there is to eat is not very appealing.
• Photography Equipment
  This will appeal more to the photography crowd, but everyone will still take a camera. Make sure you do not have any down time with your camera because pictures is the biggest "souvenir" from your trip.

Keep in mind that this is never complete. If you have any suggestions, email them post a comment on this article. If I like them, I will add your suggestion and your url to the article. My checklist is for a lot of situations and you can scratch off anything you know you don't need.

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I have been looking at others ways to increase revenue from my site recently. I recently signed up with Amazon as an affiliate to selling merchandise they carry. You earn commissions of varying amounts for the different items.

I have no idea how well this will work out, but being that I do review products from time to time, I thought I might as well add a link to a place where you can purchase them too.

Three Methods of Product Placement

I have done three things to get the products out there.

First, in posts where I review products that they carry, I will specifically add a little banner or advertisement square for the exact product that I am talking about. One example is my recent article about recovering pictures or files on a flash memory card. You will see an advertisement for Recover Pro on there.

Second, you will see at the bottom of posts there is a banner that has 2 or 3 advertisements for different products that Amazon carries. Over time, they analyze each page that their ads appear on and then tailor the product selections to the theme of the page.

Third, I have added a Thoughts From My Life Store. Basically, this is my own little on-line store that allows me to pick the categories and exact products I want to display. So I only went through and picked out items that I own or have used in the past that I would recommend. The other handy thing about this place is that if you ever see me talk about a product, there is a good chance you will find it in the store and can go read up on it at Amazon. Amazon has a lot of reviews, which I also have used in the past when buying stuff, even if I don't buy it through them.

Summary

Anyhow, the whole thing is a little experiment to see if I can generate a few more dollars and cents out of my traffic. Regardless, it does add some extra content and a simple way for people to go see reviews and such.

I'll keep you posted on whether I think it has been of value to me or not. I was using Chitika and Bidvertiser in the past, but the results have only been in the dollar or two a month range. Poor ad placement on my part could be the problem, but I have not been able to get them working better.

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