It has been a very long time since my last post, but I’ve had a ton of stuff going on. 

The major thing that has affected my life is the new diagnosis of my daughter, Erin.  She has been diagnosed with Fibrodisplasia Ossificans Progressiva, or FOP.  The short story is that FOP is a genetic condition that turns muscle and soft tissue into bone.  It is a progressive disease, so it gets worse over time, so we get to slowly watch our daughter turn into a statue.  We have another blog going about this issue at www.cureerinkate.com.

We’ve started several fundraisers to help with the medical bills (there’s alot of stuff that insurance doesn’t cover when you have a rare genetic disease).  Alot of free time has been spent on the fundraisers, doctors visits, and general family stuff.

Because of all the stuff going on, we decided it was time to take a family vacation.  We realized that we need to do as much with Erin as we can while she’s still mobile.  We went down to Astoria, Oregon (yes, where the Goonies was filmed) and stayed at a KOA campground in one of their cramped Kamping Kabins.  It technically had internet access, but I literally had to raise my laptop above my head to get enough of a signal to check email.  Good thing I queued up a lot of news and articles, so the site ran on autopilot for a while.

Of course we went to Canon Beach (also where The Goonies was filmed), and I even visited the famous “Goonie House”.  I’ve been there before, and I played tour guide to several others who hadn’t been there.

On the way back up to Seattle we stayed at the Great Wolf Lodge, which is basically a frickin’ huge indoor waterpark with a hotel slapped around it.  While there, I got a chance to actually meet Don (our latest kickass staff member) in person. 

Right before we left on vacation, I had fiber internet installed, so I only had a day to play with it before I was whisked away to life without Internet.  Since I’ve been back I’ve been doing a bunch of testing making sure it is stable enough to support all of my web servers.

While this other stuff was going on, we had finally gotten our crap together and files taxes for several years (don’t ask).  When we got back from vacation, we had two new IRS checks in our mailbox… so it was time to take care of a lot of things we’ve been needing to do forever.

We got several large things for the house (that we hadn’t been able to afford), fixed our family car, paid off bills, bought new hardware (to support the OCMS server move), and of course we couldn’t resist the temptation to get a few toys that we’ve been denying ourselves.

There’s several little detail-y things here and there, but basically dealing with new installations and things that break. 

That’s the overall gist.  The past month or so has been so busy that I’m amazed that I have anything to return to.  On a sad note, one of the OCMS staff members have left in the midst of all this drama, partially because I had to put some business aspects of OCMS on the backburner while all of this other stuff got sorted out.  I really appreciate the support that everyone has shown during this time, especially for the current OCMS staff members that continue to stick it out with me.

Who uses a Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feed? Maybe the better question is how many are not using RSS feeds?

Before we go any further let’s talk just briefly about what RSS is and why it’s important. Real Simple Syndication is a process that allows individuals to subscribe to content distribution. This is not like subscribing to email marketing or an ezine. This content is custom fed to your reader and viewable when you choose to listen, watch or read the content. That’s right, the content captured by a RSS reader is not confined to text information.

Say for instance you have a podcast you like to listen to; an RSS reader can capture the podcast and download it for quick listening when you’re ready.

OK, now that we’re past the primer, let’s get back to the subject at hand.

Who uses an RSS feed?

Your average information consumer thrives on RSS information, but there may be an even more interested group of users.

Many business bloggers have very specific RSS subscriptions. If a business blog is dependent on information about a very specific trade or business discipline they can, in turn, provide their readers with some of the most up to date information available.

Their RSS reader scours the Internet looking for the specific information the business owner requests. The information received through an RSS feeder can help the business bloggers establish themselves as trusted resources for quality information.

The truth is there is a two-step marketing plan that is happening when a business blogger uses an RSS feed to find information they can use. The first step is for the original writer of the article or the producer of the audio or visual content. The RSS feed is helping them reach a very specific segment of the online population that is motivated by the material they present. The second form of marketing is when the business blogger redistributes the information. It is marketing for both the business blogger as well as the individual or organization that supplied the original story.

If you are looking for fresh content for your blog or even your website you can utilize RSS through a free article directory that can allow you quick access to the latest content from a specific writer or on a specific topic.

The growth of RSS is incredible. You might even liken the service to something like a newspaper being delivered to your reader that only feature topics you’re interested in.

This can be a great resource for business as well as an incredible time saver as you can bypass multiple online searches for the same information that can be direct delivered to your RSS reader.

The work of online business is already hard enough. That’s why using an RSS reader is a component that can enable you to have more available time to work on other marketing chores and business development.

In an online world that recognizes the power in knowledge-based content RSS has become a goldmine for those interested in passing the wealth along to their customers.

The beginning of OCModShop was a hobby, and it certainly LOOKED like a hobby site.  We had some cutting-edge quality content, but the site design was severely lacking, and everyone took product photos with digital cameras that can be bested by the average 6-year-old.

People will pretty much take you at your own reckoning, so if you look and act like an amateur, then no one will take you seriously.  You have to “fake it before you make it”.  One step in looking like a professional is to take some kick-ass product photos.

Other webmasters disagree about the importance of quality product photos… after all, if you have good quality content, that’s all that matters, right?

WRONG!

Any webmaster that looks at their logs will realize that most visitors don’t actually READ much of the content you spent hours editing.  People only trust headlines and snippets… and photographs. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, so they say.  Not only can good photographs make vendors stand up and take notice, but you look more credible.  We are visual creatures, and our initial impressions are influenced by appearances.  The average person will put more value into a review with good photographs rather than the article that looks like some kid in his garage.

Incendentally, I take all of my photos in my garage, and anyone who actually saw my “studio” would think I was a madman… it’s cluttered with comptuers, gear, boxes, and other junk.  But, my photos don’t look like it.

Not everyone can afford studio lights (even though they’re not as expensive as you think: read about cheap photo lighting here), but it really doesn’t take much to step up your photographs a notch.  Every one of the photos in this post were straight out of the camera without any editing, and I used very cheap Britek lights that any serious “professional” would scoff at.

Just get a white sheet (or posterboard), two “full spectrum” desk lamps, and a digital camera.  Drape the sheet over a tall box, making sure there’s a good slope that cannot be seen.  Put the lamps on either side of your product, and snap away… and for the love of all that is Holy, turn off the flash!Â

I can get excited about online marketing because I know that when used properly it can help change lives.

Everyday I hear of dreams people have for business. In some cases these individuals want a magical five-step plan to get them going, but it simply doesn’t exist.

If you have a dream then you know the desire for easy answers. You’d like to be able to say that your dream has a 100% chance of success, but you just don’t know so you sit back and let the idea simmer while you begin to embrace the possibility that it will remain nothing more than a dream.

Many will tell me that they would move forward, but they are just no good at marketing. I will state this once and the rest is up to you, “Hogwash.� Was that harsh?

The truth is marketing is a learnable skill that is not dependent on intuition or some genetic predisposition although many respond to marketing as if it were something you are either born with or not.

What’s more, I have never encountered one singular source where every answer can be found in regards to marketing. There are many great sources of information, but they will not likely answer every question you encounter.

This is why it is important for you to research various marketing ideas. Explore the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and find out what type of additional advertising might work best for your situation.

I can promise you that your business is either doomed to failure or minimal success if you refuse to learn marketing skills for online business.

I know that for some there is already an innate fear of the computer, but as Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.� You can learn the skills you need to succeed online. The question is, do you want to succeed?

Are you willing to invest in the dream that burns within you? Do you have a fighting instinct that will move you forward when it would be so easy to abandon the idea as too difficult?

Be willing to boldly ask others about what they went through on their path to success. You will find they encountered great difficulties, but the only way through those times was to keep walking. To retreat meant absolute defeat.

The struggle to give a dream life is not unlike the struggle a butterfly has in their fight to emerge from a cocoon. The extreme work it takes the butterfly seems almost cruel to observe, yet if they did not have the work out that went along with emerging their wings would not function correctly and they would never be able to fly.

Struggle will always be a part of any success story. Difficulties will always dog the man or woman who attempts to do something with their dreams. Some will argue it can’t be done and it will be easy to believe them, but don’t. Don’t give in, never give up, always keep reaching.

After it is your dream – fight for it.

Today has been all about cleaning up hard drives and organizing stuff, trying to prepare for the emminent FIOS installation.  As I’m uncluttering both my virtual and physical spaces, I’m finding lots of stuff that needs to be consolidated.

I have serveral computers that are no longer in use (partly due to dismantling my Media Centers), so I need to find a use for them.  I’m turning one into a new 64-bit server with 8GB of RAM, and throwing others into the spare parts pile.  I think I have about 6 unused HTPC cases, so it’s time to get them ready for eBay!  I need to put all the parts together, clean them up and get them nice and shiny… oh, and pack them up so I don’t get screwed by “estimating” how much they will weigh. 

I hadn’t sold cases on eBay before simply because of the high cost of shipping, but why should I worry about it: the buyer will be paying the shipping anyway.

I can go ahead and build some computers, but I need to get some more equipment so I can do it right the first time… like getting large hard drives before installation so I don’t have to go through the upgrade hassle later.

I took a buttload of product photos the other day, and now I’m getting ready to have a huge article-writing frenzy.  I already did one today about the ATEN Dual-DVI KVMP switch, which really helps with doing these server and firewall installs.

Also gotta get ready for Casual Connect (coming up next week), and PAX (coming up next month).

I’ve been tempted on more than one occassion to host my websites at home, but up until recently there wasn’t a fast enough connection to make it feasible.

Cable is fine for home use, but even their business packages max out at 2Mbit upstream.  I ordered a FIOS package with 20Mbit down / 20Mbit upstream, which will provide plenty of overhead for future bandwidth needs.

In the datacenter, I pay by the Mbit, so I throttle some sites to make sure I don’t get charged over.  I also have been delaying other site services (video and file downloads, game servers) because of the huge bandwidth requirements.  Once I get FIOS installed in the house, then I’ll kick these things into full gear, which will give OCMS a big shot in the arm!

There are some things I have to consider that are actually quite scary.  For one, I have to put the servers in a location where heat can be exhausted, and doesn’t disturb us.  Servers are LOUD, especially several of them in a rack.  I also have to be concerned about heat, because our house doesn’t have central A/C.  What about natural disasters (Seattle has been known to get an earthquake or two)?

The electricity also goes out like clockwork in the winter, and although I’m getting a major UPS for the rack, I’m not sure how any outage will affect the fiber lines.  The fiber box has a battery backup, which should keep the lines up for 8 hours, but it remains to be seen how reliable this will be.  I’m running a business, and I want 99.99999% uptime, just like in a datacenter.

What prompted me to make the sudden move is the rising datacenter costs.  I got a “pretty good” deal from my current datacenter, but the monthly prices would make the average internet user cringe.  Now they want to nearly double that, charge me for electricity, and increase the cost for bandwidth.  They want me to pay $100 per Megabit… so if the average cable internet customer were charged that then they would have $800 bills every month.

Going to another datacenter is also alot of trouble.  Yes, I can strike deals and get sponsorships and other stuff, but in the end it’s really just too much trouble… and if you get behind on the bills then they lock you out of the building, so what’s the point of paying all this money for 24-7 access? 

So anyway, OCMS (and all her sister sites) are getting a major fatpipe upgrade, which hopefully will be in place by the end of July.  I’ll be adding game servers, video downloads, file downloads, and tons of other features.

I had a weird task manager problem while copying files to my NAS.  When I open Task Manager to look at my network utilization, the little Taskman load bar appears in the bottom right, as expected.  But, it flickers like a bat out of hell.  Clicking and right-clicking on it does not do anything. 

I figured taskman might be off screen, so I tried to do the little trick on moving off-screen windows (read how here), but I couldn’t get any options to come up.  I tried to resize my desktop, but all desktop personalization options wouldn’t show.  A reboot didn’t help either.

I need to kill the task manager, but I can’t access through the gui.  So what do you do when the GUI fails you?  Go into the command line!

I had to go to the command prompt (type cmd.exe in a Run dialog).  Then type “tasklist” to bring up a list of all running processes.  Sure enough, taskman.exe was in the list.  I took note of the process id (in this case 4397), and then ran taskkill to kill the process, like so…

taskkill /pid 4397

The hung process immediately  stopped, and task manager was visible again.  The Desktop Management windows that were hung also appeared.

Hopefully this little tip will help someone overcome some goofy problem that can’t be resolved using the Windows GUI.

I’ve been working with Home Theater Computers for over 10 years.  Back in the day, a HTPC was the only way to get a progressive-scan DVD player.  There were lots of caveats, and there were no fancy 10′ interfaces like there are today… it had the same usability as a computer.  I used a highly-programmable remote to attempt to automate everything (turn on everything at once, open up the DVD player application), but it ended up being many many hours spent with very little benefit.

There are a few media center suites, but the most popular by far is Windows Media Center.  The appeal to transforming a computer into a HTPC is that you can access all of your media (downloaded Divx movies, mp3s, HD-WMVs, DVDs, home videos, photos) from one location.  Imagine replacing an entire rack of home theater equipment with a simple box.  The HTPC cases available today also make your PC look like home theater equipment.

I’ve been using Windows Media Center for about 4 years, and I have a love-hate relationship with it.  A general-purpose computer will NEVER be as reliable as an appliance, and that’s my major problem with it.  Sure, it has features that other appliances can’t touch (download DVD titles over the Internet, stream NetFlix in real time), but it just isn’t reliable. 

You have to consider the SAF (Spousal Acceptance Factor).  You’re probably a busy guy, and do you really want your wife and kids bitching at you to fix the TV because it froze or crashed?  If you have a HTPC then you must realize that have to add “TV technition” to your list of support roles. 

One of the reasons I use Media Center is to save on the $5 fee that DirecTV charges for their DVR service, which calculates out to be $60 a year.  You can easily spend four times that in a new hardware upgrade.  Not to mention the electricity costs… a typical HTPC will eat up abour 200 watts, and it has to be on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (4800 watts a day x 365 = 1,752,000 watts or $140 a year).  Compare that to a typical DVR appliance which uses between 20-30watts, and it costs $14 a year… 

I have several Media Center PCs (so we can watch recorded shows on any TV, no matter where they were recorded), so the electricity costs start to stack up.

Several other gripes: the remotes “crash”, not all of the buttons work, a PC is always noisier than a DVR appliance, the electricity and heat issues, hunting down the right codec when your DivX movie has no sound, limited high-definition recording options, tweaking your video card to get the best output…

You can spend a lot of time making things work more smoothly, but then you’re spending more time fiddling with the damn thing then you are actually enjoying watching TV.

So I’m getting rid of Media Center… I’ll watch my downloaded videos on a Playstation 3 (which also has a BluRay player).  I’m using a QNAP NAS to store videos, and it can stream directly to an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, which reduces the need for a HTPC… and the NAS only uses up 5 watts of electricity.

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Ad tweaking is one of those things that every dot-com mogul must do from time to time.  I spent alot of time this weekend compiling reports and running metrics on my ads to see which are effective, and which are not.

I’m always trying to find a good balance between having effective ads while not annoying the readers.  I’m also improving the usability on the main site so the articles are easier to navigate.  I always have a long laundry list of items, and I’ve just added a few dozen more just on ad tweaks.

On another note, it’s freakin HOT in Seattle… we got near 90 degrees.  Some of you in other parts of the country might not think that’s a big deal, but you must consider that most people in Seattle don’t have air conditioning (because it rarely gets this hot). 

So, our house bakes like a conventional oven… it traps in all the heat and doesn’t let it out.  The temperature drops at night, but the inside doesn’t get below 80 until about midnight.  

The temps are returning to our normal mid-seventies this upcoming week, though.  We usually have a one-week heat-wave in August, so there’s that to look forward to.

I’ve been using ergonomic keyboards ever since they came out… I just can’t have my hands all scrunched up on a “normal” keyboard… it’s stoopid… and some of the best gaming keyboards are NOT ergonomic at all.

I’ve been using the latest Microsoft ergonomic keyboard… it’s quiet and comfortable, but there are virtually no extra features on it… just some lame “quick-assign” buttons to open up web pages or whatever… not even media controlls.

So anyway I totally spilled pepsi on the side of the keyboard… I thought I caught it in time, but I went to use the computer this morning, and most of the keys wouldn’t work… I lifted up the keyboard and saw a pool of brown liquid… ugh.  I flipped they keyboard upside down so it can drain… hopefully it can be revived.

I’m using the Razer Lycossa keyboard (reviewed here) right now… it’s a fine keyboard and the keys have a nice rubbery feel to them, but my hands are still all squished together.  I will say that the low profile of the keys make for shorter finger movements, though

So now I have to find a new ergonomic keyboard, and right now the only thing out is the same MS one I’ve been using. 

Maybe it’s time to whip out the OCMS credit card and test out some keyboards for review… a fine idea, but I’m still backlogged on other reviews I have to get out…