Cow’s Life - Thinking Outside Of The Barn

Just when I was talking about coming up with cool ideas on the Internet and experiment with them, Jim from www.krazydad.com (he is also a frequent visitor here) got BoingBoing’ d with his latest invention – a book browser wallpaper that he calls “the Graphical Cover Explorer”. He puts thousands of Sci-Fi book covers on a wallpaper. Move your mouse around and the book cover shows up. Click on any books, the site takes you right to the spot where you can purchase it.

Now that’s a brilliant idea as a book browser/explorer, an Ad page, a piece of coolest wallpaper, background, screen saver, etc… I think Jim should take this idea to the next level to make real dollars. Patent it, get advertisers, and sell books while having fun by stacking up anything visual on one piece of digital paper.

There is no limit when it comes to human creativity. Like I said earlier, have an idea and experiment with it, ‘cause there is also no limit of what you can do on the open Internet.

It took long 4, 5 months for Google to update the PageRank for the new sites. I just noticed that Yunasville.com got 5 out of 10 ranking and so did a lot of other new blog sites that got started around the same time. I am very thrilled to see this since that empty bar with 0/10 had me feeling frustrated for a long time.

When I first started blogging, I thought it would take many months to get a decent ranking and a good number of incoming links. But the reality proved that the hard work did pay off. To summarize what I have learned so far, I made a list of the things we can do to improve PageRank and invite incoming links:

1. Write star posts. Most of my highly linked posts are the ones that got featured on other blogs or dug out by larger sites. And almost all of my star posts took me a significant time to complete. Recent example is the MillionDollar page copycats.
2. Blogger networking. Talk to other bloggers, communicate and build communities. Eventually, we will start to link back and forth to comment on each other’s posts or take other bloggers’ projects a little further.
3. Read the blogs that interest you and leave quality comments.
4. Submit your posts to the bigger sites and email the bigger sites about something you wrote that they may seem to be interested in. I submitted almost 10 posts before one made to digg.com’s homepage.
5. At last, write quality original contents that we all find fun and informative. Personality is also important since that’s how we distinguish our sites from others. I have noticed a lot of sites blogrolled me and I am truly flattered.

Happy blogging everyone!

Author’s note: I just exhanged an email with Darren about his Problogger.net’s low PageRank (6/10). According to the Windexl tool, his site gets a whole lot more links than mine. His opinion is not to take too much weight on Google’s PageRank. Another example is that a new b5 site suddently received ranking of 7. Now that’s a real screwed up algorithem from Google to give a 4 week old site 7 out of 10.

Yes, we squashed the Y2K bug pretty hard, leaving many of us wondering if the billion dollar spending was actually worth while. Although I wasn’t directly involved in any Y2K projects in the late 90’s, every architecture paper I produced back then had to have a Y2K chapter to indicate if we were Y2K compliant.

I just read a technical but very interesting article about the potential 2038 problem. Basically, it is because of the limitation set in a type of a programming language (C to be exact) which does not allow the number of seconds to go beyond 2,147,483,647. Anything written in C language will break on Jan 19, 2038, which is 2,147,483,647 seconds after the beginning of the C time (12 am , Jan 1, 1970).

Based on my knowledge after consulting with 30+ companies in the past 10 years, majority of the companies and the government agencies have at least a portion of their systems written in that language.

However, I don’t think the problem will be nearly as severe as Y2K issue since

A) we still have 33 years before the bomb goes off
B) Unlike Y2K, only a subset of the systems worldwide are written in that language
C) Since everybody is moving to Java or staying put with Cobol, I don’t think C will stick around for too long.

This is definitely a good opportunity to sell “Re-Engineering” proposal to the clients to re-write their legacy systems from C to something else. It looks like someone just found another gold mine for the starving IT consulting industry. Wait, the next line on the proposal would probably say, “In order to reduce the cost and improve efficiency, we will offshore this task to India and China.” Oops! Another lost opportunity for the American IT workers. Well, this is a whole different kind of topic…

The next time when you see those credit card offers or balance transfer offers in your mailbox, don’t throw them away. You can really make some money with them.

The concept of “Using Other People’s Money”
It’s all about “using other people’s money”. In this case, I am using bankers’ money to invest and make money.

I have been using this trick for years. If you are willing to spend some time dealing with the paper work, you can make a few hundreds or even couple thousand easy dollars.

Here is how it works:
I get quite a few balance transfer offers with 0% introduction rate every now and then. I pick the ones with lowest transaction fees (no more than $50) and a longer introduction rate period (usually 9 to 12 months).

I take maximum amount out of the credit cards (leave enough space for the $50 balance transfer fee), and deposit the money into high interest paying accounts such as ING Direct Orange saving or a CD.

I just took out $25000 this week from two of my MBNA credit cards. Currently, ING is paying 3.4% interest, which is $850 annual payment. So, minus $90 balance transfer fees, I can make $760 with just 15 minutes of work.

The 0% rate is good till next Nov. Since the principle is sitting in my bank, I can pay off the credit cards right before 0% expires. I usually transfer the balances again to another 0% credit card and keep the interests rolling in my saving accounts.

Other benefits
Another benefit of doing this is that I am forced to save by making minimum credit card payments every month. Then, the money becomes part of my savings over time.

It may not seem that much, but it adds up after playing with quite a few cards after quite a few years.

I have used the same trick to buy new cars since I can really lowball the dealers with cash payment. I also used the trick to come up with down payments for the real estate properties I bought. Again, it’s all about “using other people’s money” to make money for you.

What’s the catch?
Here are a few things to keep in mind if you want to try this:

• You need to have quite a few cards. Credit card companies normally won’t offer you good deals unless you keep zero balances on the cards for a while. So I usually occupy a few cards and leave many of them with zero balances for a year or two. I like Citi cards becasue they usually waive the fees. MBNA is another good one. They usually offer me zero percent deals again within 2 months after my previous balances are paid off. I have 8 MBNA cards and for a few years I didn’t even have to go outside of the MBNA family to seek for free funds.
  Many people think owning a lot of credit cards is a bad thing. My personal experience has proved to me that having a lot of available credit helps me to gain a better credit score simply because my debt/credit ratio is much lower. So I usually grab the 0% credit card application when I see one.
• I have tried to use this “borrowed funds” to play with the stock market once and I lost a few bucks. I guess since it was the borrowed fund with a dead line, I couldn’t follow my usual investment principle and tried to make bets. So, if my Dad told me, “Never gamble with borrowed money”, I better listen to him.
• You have to be very rigid on making on time credit card payments. If you are late even once, the penalties incurred will offset any gains. So schedule auto payments on all of the cards except the ones you use for daily purchases.

Most searched words
I am getting a whole lot more search hits from MSN than Google and Yahoo combined. Despite the change of the search engines, people are still searching for the same thing! Yes, Yuna and her hot ass with the addition of some very eye popping phrases:

• Yuna anything with her feet
• Interview with Yuna (Do people really think she is for real?)
• Yuna naked in 3D
• Yuna 3d sex

I have to admire people’s innovative thinking and the desires for the 3D technology.

A poll from Darren’s site shows that the majority of the website hits are from search engines. It’s certainly not the case for me. I get more than 85% hits from the regular readers and only a handful from search engines every day. I guess it is pretty hard to achieve keyword density when I am not talking about a niche topic.

Most viewed photos
Surprisingly, MuddVolleyBall is still the #1popular album on the site although ColoradoMemory and Katrina album are catching up very quickly. But the most popular photo is from the ThongsMustDie album and it doesn’t even qualify as a photo.

Most viewed posts
Besides the two posts that received the spotlights (elite blog and losing bet to MillionDollarHomepage), the most clicked post is “help Katrina victims” that still sits on the top of the site. It seems that Real Estate rule also applies to the Blogotown — Location, Location, and Location.
The runner-up is my ThongsMustDie joke. Boy, aren’t we all in love with those hot sexy undies!

MillionDollar Page not so “million”
After losing the bet and paid my dues. I got about 600 visitors per day from that site in the first 2 days and then the click rates drop so significantly that I start to wonder if I am getting anything at all from that site. After my icon appeared on the million dollar homepage, I got total of 1636 clicks. I am not impressed at all.

Glory days with digg.com
When a post hits the spotlight, that post is going to circulate on the Internet for a while. My elite blog post managed to generate 2500 clicks in Sept even after digg.com striped it away from its homepage. And I got tons of incoming links because of this post. Although we are all taught to produce quality contents on a regular basis instead of chasing star posts, I think having a few star posts definitely help the bloggers to gain some exposures.

There is no one size fits all
I have always wondered if a personal blogger like myself should chase after the readers or those interesting random thoughts that stimulate my own brain. I choose the latter.

However, because of my persistence of blogging about my own interests, I have pissed off a regular reader (see his comment at the bottom), and bored another one (yeah, my post did the final push to put Mr(Ms) Yawn to sleep). My friends also complained about my occasional long lasting geeky mood that leaves them nothing to read.

If I tell you that I don’t care about my regular readers fleeing away, that’d be the biggest lie. I do care. I actually care a great deal about the regulars. But I also believe that a personal blog is a mirror that reflects the uniqueness of the blogger. If we lose our own styles, then, there is really no point to blog. So for the time being, I intent to keep being geeky about core processors and gigabits, business news and financial news. Climbing topics will always be there, as well as the dick jokes and relationship topics. At last, the focus of Yuna’s Village is to collect positive and inspiring thoughts. So I still plan on being super serious from time to time.

Blogger Depression and Blogger Holidays
I don’t know how many bloggers are under the gun point of the blogging schedules nowadays. I used to blog whenever an idea stroke me. Posting schedule? You kidding me? What the hell is that?

But after blogging for a while, especially after gaining a nice size of readership, the idea of posting schedule starts rolling in.

We are humans and one of our limitations is not able to come up with good ideas everyday. I noticed that I started to shift from “blog when I want to” mode to the “blog because I need to” mode. That just killed my creativity.

Although I said in my own research paper that a successful blogger should post everyday and on schedule, I am going to declare Blogger Holidays. And my first holiday is next week so I can focus on my own job and my Playstation2 for a while. After all, it’s a hobby and there is no reason to get burned out because of something I am supposed to be enjoying doing.

You bet! That’s why Microsoft is still pushing for Xbox 360 after losing $4 billion since the launch of Xbox 4 years ago. And Bill Gates is preparing to lose even more when Xbox 360 releases in Nov. “We are thinking long term.” Said Stephen McGill, head of UK marketing. Translation? Long term plan is to kill Sony, kill EA, kill Nintendo so everybody plays Microsoft games on Xbox 1200 in the long run.

But this time, it’s not going to be as easy as crushing Netscape or driving Apple out of the door. They first have to worry about Sony’s consoles. Everyone knows that game software is where the money is. To take over the game industry, Microsoft has to do what they did in the browser war with Netscape by leveraging the base, OS at that time, but console base this time. A game console is equivalent to the Operating System. Without taking over the base install, you can forget about game software monopoly. As far as the market concerns, Sony still holds majority of the shares. According to DFC’s forecast, Playstation 3 may be able to grab 53% market share which leaves Nintendo and Microsoft to grab a quarter each.

Sony knows very well where they stand. According to this month’s official Playstation magazine, it roughly takes $500 to manufacture a Playstation3 hardware but the retail price is set to $399. Merrill Lynch Japan has predicated a 1.18 billion loss for Sony after the first year launch. Sony might lose even more if Microsoft decides to cut Xbox 360’s price when Playstation3 hits the store shelves. So the budget gamers might be able to get a deal if a few month waiting doesn’t sound too terrible to bear.

Assuming Microsoft is able to take care of the Playstation problem, they still have to worry about EA and Nintendo, currently the two top game publishers in console game sector. It’s going to be tricky to hijack Mario and Madden NFL, Mr. Gates!

With a deep pocket and the determination to win the billion dollar interactive entertainment market, it’s anyone’s guess whether Microsoft is able to repeat the history and win this video game war.

This is the guy who leaked XBOX’s 360’s specs earlier. Oh, this is not Star Wars’ Han Solo reliving in the 21st century. This guy works for Factor 5, the company develops Star Wars games. So if he has posted something on a public forum to purposely leak the info out, I’d say the odds of specs being accurate are probably pretty high.

So, let’s take a look at a few highlights of the new Revolution specs:

• 1 dual-threaded IBM Custom PowerPC 2.5 GHz core with 256KB of L1 cache, 1MB of L2 cache, rumored to have L3 cache as well.
• GPU core at 600 Mhz that will support up to 2048×1268 resolution, though HD support is still being decided.
• 256 MB’s of 1T-SRAM which is much better than the Gamecube
• Main memory:512MB of 700 MHz 1T-SRAM
• The physical processing chip will have 32 MB of its own RAM, which will link to the CPU and GPU and the Controller.

Although XBOX 360’s specs shows three 3.2 GHz cores and two hardware threads per core (yeah.. no comparison I know), but I doubt the gamers are expecting Nintendo to win the power processing war here. I know I don’t and I never will.

But I sure hope they will consider HD as part of the package. Ahh… Mario brothers in High Definition…. Now that’s something sweet for everyone to have…

Wait… Are there any gamers on the site who care for the GHz and Mhz? Or just me talking geeky by myself here?

Million Dollar Homepage Stats Effects

For those of you who are curious if Alex’s Million Dollar Homepage is indeed bringing in lots and lots of traffic, the answer is yes and no. The numbers from my stats are actually quite close to the figures he measures. I got 170 extra visitors in the last 6 hours. So you can see that this is no Fark.com, but decent enough for any starter sites to gain some exposures. However, I think Alex is charging far more than any real estate developers in the whole world for his digital land. Thus, if you are looking for a spot to put Ads, I’d go somewhere else. But wait, somebody started to catalog the purchasers now. If enough people study the site, you may get thousands of links…Who knows…anything can happen on the Internet nowadays so go figure!

I banned the whole world

A crock came to my site and left his marketing link today. See the comments section of the “losing bet” post. That jerk stole other people’s ideas, designs, even text and shameless claimed that everything was his invention. I hate this kind of intellectual thefts. So, I tried to use my host server’s “Banning bad IP” function to ban this guy from coming to my site. The second I did it, I realized nobody could access the website including myself. Turns out.. my complicated site code conflicts with my hosting company’s functions. BANG! I banned the whole world from accessing Yuna’s Village. It took me an hour to find the line of code that says, “Deny all accesses from everywhere”. This is hilariously sad that I was trying to ban a bad guy but accidently hacked my own site.

If you missed the Webmaster story I : Revealing blog reader behaviors from the stats, go check it out.

The biggest news in the SEO world today is probably Google’s backlink updates taken place as we speak.

One thing I don’t understand is how the heck Google is so lazy on updating links while their PageRank currently stands as the most important indicator of the importance of a site?! A lot of commercial site’s Ad revenues somewhat depend on the PageRank.

Speaking from personal experiences, I set up yunasville.com in late June. By the beginning of Sept, Google still hasn’t updated a single backlink while Yahoo, MSN are showing hundreds (the last row is Yuna’s Village’s link counts):

It doesn’t really matter to me since I don’t bid for Ads. Yunasville is only a hobby site. But for hundreds of thousands of other folks, 2 months could be a long wait. With Google’s capability, I don’t think making the updates more frequent than once every other months is too much to ask. But again, only the Google guys know what their agenda is.

For those of you who want to check if your links have been updated by Google these days, go to one of the following Google datacenters and type: link:www.yoursite.com
72.14.207.99
72.14.207.104
72.14.207.106

Another good read on why Google counts only a fraction of the links that other search engines found: Google vs Yahoo.

Yes, Apple is one hot fruit on the market right now, thanks to the phenomenal iPod sales. How about a pair of $300 shoes that bear Apple’s logo? Interested? I know you are so eager to click that link to check out the hot fruit shoes. According to digg.com’s post, people are pretty crazy about it by throwing all kinds of “cool” “woo” and “wow” in the air. Com’on, Nike doesn’t even charge that much for their best pair of basketball shoes. It seems that anything has “Apple” or “i” attached can be sold for an extra zero, even a pair of shoes that have no chips and zero wires.

I wonder if people still have any HOTs left for Apple’s core products – the Macs! According to Apple’s own top seller list, iMac, PowerMac and eMac are no where near to the top.

I love Apple. I love Apple’s computing technology so much that I poured a big chunk of my work study money ($3200) to buy a Mac that had only 80mb hard drive in 1992. Even 13 years ago, Apple’s internal cards (e.g. a network card) were all snap-ins instead of PC’s nails and screws. Why Mac rocks? People have beaten this topic to death (just google “Mac vs PC”) so I am not going to write a dissertation paper on it. I am happy that after all these years of struggling and begging (Microsoft, Adobe, etc… to write compatible software for Macs), Apple’s fate is saved by its own MP3 player. At the same time, I am worried that the Mac’s future will be lost in the bigger than ever iPodosphere.

Will Apple ever change its DNA? Only time can tell.