Karlonia.com

In order to keep up with eligible search queries during the week, I have been keeping a running list of them in a separate text file on my computer’s desktop. However, in addition to the queries that I eventually answer in these posts, there are several others of a different type that have been accumulating in the list from previous weeks. These are queries that I do not have immediate answers for because they fall outside my particular areas of expertise and would require more research than I have time for at the moment. Therefore, this week I have decided to switch things up a little bit and post some of these phrases from my “not sure” section in the hopes that some of you can answer these more easily than I can. If you happen to have some relevant information for any of them, you can simply copy and paste the phrase into the comment section and type your answers below it.

what is the maximum withdrawal from atm machine in us — This probably varies according to the associated bank or maybe even the ATM network, but I do not have an exact figure handy for the overall maximum limit. There may be regulations at the state or federal level that would apply here also, but I would need to research this.

processor specs — They are probably referring to a computer’s CPU (Central Processing Unit) and are looking for an easy way to access the technical specifications.

how to change processor speed from registry — Similar to the processor specs query above, it is possible to use the registry entries to alter the CPU? Changing the registry is usually seen as a fairly drastic step and not something that should be attempted by novice users, so I would definitely want to get more specific information on this before recommending anything.

will tv work after getting wet? — Back when I was a small child, I remember managing to short circuit a TV once when I accidentally spilled some soda through the little grooves in the back of it. As far as I know, the TV never worked afterward. However, I’m not sure about whether modern televisions are still similarly vulnerable to getting wet and malfunctioning like this. It has been a long time since I have done any serious TV watching.

how to trick the atm — This is somewhat of a “black hat” query, but if anyone knows of a situation in the past where an ATM has been successfully tricked, it might make an interesting article idea for my humor category.

something to snack on that won’t make me fat — I could probably come up with some relatively low-calorie snack options if I thought about it long enough, but I wouldn’t really consider myself an expert nutritionist at this point. Some of you may have some creative ideas on this, which could also form the beginnings of a separate article.

maximum withdrawal ATM machine bank of america — This is something that I would actually like to know because I happen to use a Bank of America ATM for local cash withdrawals. However, my account is with another bank, so I don’t know what their maximum limit is. The most that I have ever withdrawn from one of their machines at any one time is $200, but the daily maximum amount may be higher than this.

do i need photographic proof for having a mortgage — I’m not sure about this one because I have never tried to apply for a mortgage before. But I know that lots of other people have.

do you have to claim child support on mortgage application — I asked my mother about this one, and she seems to think that the answer is no. But again, I have no personal experience with this, so it never hurts to get a second opinion.

should the internet be blamed for decrease in standards of grammar and written language — According to my mother, who has ample experience as a professional educator, part of the reason for the decline in correct English grammar usage is that it is simply not being taught or emphasized in the schools nearly as much as it once was. I’m not sure that I would credit/blame the Internet as a contributing factor to poor English usage, however. If I could gather enough opinions and/or statistics on this, it could make for a very interesting (and perhaps controversial) editorial opinion piece.

During the past week, I have encountered three separate instances of lead vs. led usage errors. Normally this would not be Earth-shattering news, but what surprised me was that in each instance, the error was contained in a public press release that was presumably vetted by professional proofreaders or copyeditors before being published. Moreover, the organizations in question — one of which was a well-known affiliate network –were large and well-established enough to be expected to follow standard English guidelines when it comes to public correspondence.

Naturally, seeing the prevalence of these errors has led (not lead) me to our next English lesson. First I will deal with the different meanings of lead:

As a verb, pronounced LEED:

• To show the way; guide, conduct, direct, steer, or escort.
• To proceed on a course or for a certain distance, often used in reference to roads, pathways, and the like; extend, reach, go on.
• To be in a position of authority, take command of something, or play an executive role of some sort.
• To pass through in a certain way, usually used in reference to a person’s life.
• To begin with some type of introduction or preamble, often used in reference to written works; introduce, precede, preface.

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This article by Francis Leary describes some of her ideas for ways in which parents who have successfully implemented the work-at-home lifestyle can spend some “quality time” with their kids. Interestingly, the last time I published an article that had anything to do with kids turned into an unexpected controversy in the comment section when someone submitted the article to StumbleUpon under the “Parenting” category. Apparently some of the Stumblers disagreed with the author’s suggestions for relatively healthy snack foods that parents could get their children to eat without too much fuss. If you want to read the article and register your opinions on this topic, it can be found here at Healthy Snacks Your Kids Will Love.

As work-at-home parents, we’re due some time to reflect on how we can thrive in our businesses and continue to be good parents too. Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the work. It’s easy to tell our children “wait a minute” or “as soon as I finish this”, and then before we know it the day is gone.

The reason we’re working at home in the first place is so we can be with our children, so it’s absolutely necessary that we not only make time for them but that we enjoy them each and every day. Independent play is an important skill to learn, and our children can develop that during the parts of the day when we’re working. But…this CANNOT be the entire day. They need direct interaction and affection from their parents.

So…how do we fit it all in? Well, preparing a schedule is essential. What else can we do to make sure we spend enough time with our children?

Here are some fun and easy ways:

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The popular traffic exchange EasyHits4U has launched its own toolbar today, hoping to provide members a convenient way to access the site’s surfbar along with many other options. Recognizing that some of my search engine visitors have been looking for information on this particular program, I have posted their latest news update below. Meanwhile, if you already have too many toolbars and are looking to remove some, you can look at my posts on uninstalling the Yahoo toolbar from Internet Explorer and Firefox.

To bring your EasyHits4U traffic exchange to the next level, we have created a special toolbar which is full of handy features and absolutely free for all our members. It has absolutely no spyware or adware. This toolbar platform is used by Greenpeace, Discovery Networks, Answers.com, Lufthansa and many other respective companies.

Preview of EasyHits4U toolbar — in reality it has way more features than above and highly interactive:

Here are some of the main reasons to use it:

1. Direct surfing links and complete EasyHits4U site navigation;
2. Highly customizable — if you don’t need some of its components, just choose “Toolbar Options” in the system menu between the EasyHits4U logo and the search box to remove those unneeded items. You can always put them back later if you change your mind.
3. Email Notifier (get notified of new messages in your mailboxes), Messages Center, Community Chat, Web Radio, Weather, Google Search, and cool Gadgets (you can switch off any of these options any time);
4. Optional popup blocker, cache/history/cookies cleaner;
5. And of course, some special bonuses/contests will be available to our toolbar users only (as soon as our toolbar community gets enough members, which we hope will be very shortly

Try It Now!

Fully compatible with both Firefox & Internet Explorer. Installation takes about 15-20 secs.

Even if you were not going to use any kind of toolbar, just give it a try — simply install and use it. We really hope that you will like it and it will become your everyday tool with all those handy features inside.

This morning I received an email from LinkShare, a large affiliate network that I signed up with a few months ago. Apparently the company is appointing two people to act as co-presidents and has issued both an email notification to its affiliates and a press release to the media announcing the recent change in leadership.

Interestingly, I detected an English usage error in the very first sentence of their letter — they used the word “lead” where they were supposed to use “led”, which is the correct spelling for the past tense of this particular verb. I have marked the error in the reprinted copies of the letter and press release below with the strikethrough feature. This will make excellent fodder for my next English lesson post that is scheduled for the upcoming weekend.

Meanwhile, if you’re a webmaster who would like to make some extra money by adding some more affiliate marketing opportunities to your repertoire, you can sign up for LinkShare’s publisher membership by clicking through to their site from the banner below.

Dear Valued Partner,

I am pleased to announce that beginning today, LinkShare will be lead led by Jonathan Levine, who you may know is our CTO, and Yasuhisa “Yaz” Iida from Rakuten. They will be co-presidents.

Jonathan brings extensive knowledge of LinkShare’s technology and our Lead Generation, Affiliate, and Search businesses to the organization’s presidency. His appointment underscores our commitment to technological innovation and leadership.

Yaz brings deep experience in merchant services and sales from our parent company, Rakuten. As Executive Officer of Rakuten’s Ichiba Business Unit, he managed merchant services and sales during a period of great growth there. He will also help LinkShare continue to leverage Rakuten’s experience and resources as we grow and diversify our business. Yaz has lived and worked in the US and UK, and held senior management positions at Gilette, The Walt Disney Company, and Dyson Ltd.

On a personal note, while I will remain Chairman of LinkShare’s board, I will be stepping down from my executive roles at Rakuten and LinkShare on July 31.

Please join me in congratulating Yaz and Jonathan. I look forward to seeing many of you at the LinkShare Symposium in New York on June 24.

Best Regards,
John J-H Kim
Chairman
LinkShare Corporation

Here is the official press release. It seems that the lead/led error managed to slip past their proofreaders and copyeditors — oops!

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Unless you’re a libertarian political junkie, you may not have noticed that the Libertarian Party’s website was redesigned over this past weekend. The new facelift comes at an opportune time, as the LP has recently nominated former Republican Congresscritter Bob Barr as their Presidential candidate for the 2008 election cycle. Although somewhat dependent on the outcome of upcoming ballot access drives, Bob Barr is slated to achieve record-setting vote totals for the Libertarian Party this year. Here is the official announcement from the LP on the new site design:

If you haven’t looked at the LP in a while, you might want to take a look again. We have given the old LP.org Web site a facelift, and are proud to announce our new look for 2008!

The new LP Web site provides the functionality, utility and information needed to make the Libertarian Party even more successful in 2008, and the years thereafter. By existing as a portal to volunteer activities, information distribution and member resources, the new LP Web site will engage visitors in a way that was never possible before.

One of the most noticeable additions to the Web site is a live donation bar that currently is set to track ballot access for the LP. The interactive view, which allows visitors to see their name pop up on the front page of the Web site, makes donating to the Libertarian Party exciting. I personally took a screen capture of my donation to proudly display!

The Web site also makes volunteering easier to do with a simpler way to sign up with our volunteer coordinator. Additionally, it is easier to become a member of the Libertarian Party, or to renew your membership.

You may notice that the new LP Web site looks familiar, especially if you’re coming from the Ron Paul Revolution. That’s because the Libertarian Party was fortunate to retain the services of the SAME PEOPLE who designed Congressman Paul’s presidential campaign Web site!

We’re very excited about our new look, and hope you are too. The praise has already been coming in from many of you, and the Independent Political Report noted that the LP now has, “quite easily, the most functional and best looking website of any third party in the United States.”

Please take some time to explore all the new features that the Web site offers, and while you’re at it, donate to the Party and watch your name come up (or not, there is that option too!) on the front page!

In Liberty,

Andrew Davis
National Media Coordinator
Libertarian Party

Although I personally do not use screensaver programs anymore, many people still enjoy them as a form of “eye candy”. This article by Lynn Sullivan describes a new type of virtual aquarium screensaver that has become popular over the past few months. Also included is a brief history of why screensavers were originally developed and were actually necessary before the advent of modern types of computer monitors.

Screensavers enable consumers to personalize their computers and cell phones. Although they are no longer strictly necessary, the popularity of screensavers has not diminished. Millions of users from the United States visit Screensavers.com each month to select from thousands of virus-free and spyware-free downloadable content items. Some screensavers have even advanced to the point that they deliver real time images on their displays.

Originally, screensavers were intended to prevent phosphor burn-in, or screen burn, on CRT computer monitors. When this happens, “ghosting” can be seen on the surface of the screen. Phosphor burn-in was widespread with monochromatic CRT screens such as the amber or green monochrome monitors commonly used with older computer systems. The most prevalent burn-in image on early televisions was caused by the RCA Indian Head test card. Anyone who remembers the earlier days of television might remember this icon – it was the one that was displayed before color bars were introduced. This picture would appear after the American national anthem was played as stations shut down for the day. People would forget to turn off their televisions at night and the phosphor dots would burn out over time, thus imprinting an outline of the image into the affected TV screens. Here is a picture of what the original image looked like:

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Once again it is time to review the search query stats and select the next batch of questions to answer. Although the topics of rejection letters, ants, and gasoline/crude oil are still the leading pages for attracting search queries, my little tutorial articles on How to Uninstall Yahoo Toolbar from Firefox and How to Remove Yahoo Toolbar from Internet Explorer have managed to rank fairly well in Yahoo and are now picking up some traffic. Meanwhile, my little blog commenting campaign from last week is still producing favorable results from MSN, with 68 hits coming from Live Search during the past 24 hours, plus a few more queries that are fully displayed in FireStats.

does amazon accept alertpay — According to their site, apparently not. Amazon does not accept PayPal either, although they do accept many other types of payment methods. Here is the official word on this from Amazon’s Help page:

Payment Methods We Accept

Amazon.com accepts American Express, Diners Club, Discover, JCB, MasterCard, Eurocard, Visa, Visa Check Cards, payment from your bank account, Amazon.com gift cards, Amazon Store Card, Webcertificates, and checks, money orders, traveler’s checks, or cashier’s checks denominated in U.S. dollars and drawn on a U.S. bank.

We do not currently accept international wire transfers, PayPal, or Smart Cards. For grocery purchases, we are unable to apply manufacturer’s coupons, food stamps, or any other payment method not listed above.

easyhits4u is it scam — No, EasyHits4U is just a regular manual traffic exchange. You do not have to pay anything to join, surf, or receive traffic from them, although they do offer the option of purchasing blocks of traffic or upgrades. You can read my latest post on EasyHits4U here.

how does USAA atm fee reimburse work — Any ATM fees incurred are reimbursed all at once at the end of each month. However, before the end of the month these fees are still counted as debits, so you may need to keep track of them for a while if your account balance is low. Note that USAA has a reimbursement limit of 10 withdrawals or $15 in total fees per month, whichever occurs first. The reimbursement payment will show up as a deposit on your monthly bank statement.

general tso’s sauce recipe — I have a pretty good formula for a General Tso sauce here, along with the full recipe for the chicken and batter.

pro and con of paying taxes on internet — I have been receiving several of these types of searches lately (a related one is “pros and cons of the current tax system”), but they are difficult to answer because I cannot think of any pros to Internet taxes or the current tax code, except perhaps in the case of very specific special interests or politicians who have some sort of sadistic desire to take away more of our economic freedom. Overall, the tax system is in need of a major overhaul in terms of both fairness and simplification.

“selling articles” writing — If you’re a writer, you can sell your articles at Constant Content and even make a pretty good income with it after you get a significant number of articles approved. I have recently received two payments from them for previous article sales; eventually I will put together the relevant information on this and write up an official payment report.

speed up process of drying phone — There are a few different methods for this, including hair dryers, putting the phone in dry rice, or even putting it in the refrigerator. You can read more about how to dry out your cell phone after it has gotten wet here.

there their they’re where were lesson — Although I have not yet dealt with where vs. were, I have a fairly comprehensive article on the correct use of their, there and they’re here.

Recently I have been seeing the two homonyms roll and role used incorrectly on forums and message boards, so in this week’s lesson I will explain the distinctions in their meanings so that readers can avoid confusion. The word roll has many meanings - some dictionaries list more than twenty - and can be used as either a noun or a verb. In the interests of time and brevity, I will quickly review the most common, easily distinguished meanings here:

When used as a verb:

• To move something forward along a surface by repeatedly turning it over or revolving it on its axis, as in rolling a ball across the floor or rolling a boulder down a hill.
• To travel or move somewhere while on wheels, as in rolling down the street on a bicycle, scooter, skates, etc.
• To wrap around into a cylindrical shape, as in “roll a cigarette” or “roll up the poster”.
• To begin operation or movement, often used in media-related expressions such as “roll the cameras” or “roll the presses”.
• To recur or move forward in time, as in “the days rolled along” or “January rolled around again”.
• To lean or rock from side to side, usually used in reference to ships or airplanes.
• To lay out, extend, or flatten something on a surface; one can roll out a ball of yarn, roll out some rope, or roll out a piece of dough.
• In gambling or board games, to start a player’s turn by throwing one or more dice; used in the expression “roll the dice”.
• To play a prank on or trick someone, as in “rick rolling“.

When used as a noun:

• The act of rotating something around its axis or turning it over.
• Something that is wound or coiled up into a cylindrical shape, such as a roll of toilet paper, a roll of tape, or a roll of cloth.
• An official list of people’s names that belong to a certain group; a roster.
• A small, rounded piece of bread, usually served as an accompaniment to a meal.
• A maneuver in which an airplane makes a complete rotation about its longitudinal axis without changing direction or losing altitude.
• In music, a series of short blows on a percussion instrument, as in a drum roll.
• In gaming, a single throw of the dice.

For role, things are not nearly as complicated. There are only two commonly used meanings:

• A character or part played by a performer; may be used in reference to movies, plays, or any other type of theatrical performance. It may also refer to certain types of gaming (RPG is an acronym for role-playing game).
• A person’s expected function or behavior pattern; may be used in reference to a specific situation or the overall society.

Now we can look at some cases where people are prone to mix up the two spellings:

Incorrect: An RPG [Roll Playing Game, not rocket propelled grenade] based on the Columbine massacre — post title of the January 13, 2007 entry at VisualConsumer.blogspot.com

Correct: An RPG (Role Playing Game, not Rocket Propelled Grenade) based on the Columbine massacre

Incorrect: Pancakes Play a Starring Roll at Gingham’s But the Supporting Cast Struggles — Title of an article by Ann Lemons at SauceMagazine.com

Correct: Pancakes Play a Starring Role at Gingham’s But the Supporting Cast Struggles

Incorrect: The seafood platter included fried clams, 2 fish fillets, maryland style crabcake and 3 jumbo fried shrimp with fries cole slaw and dinner role for a $12.99 price tag. — user “dkrizer”, attempting to write a review of Ogei’s Grill at Restaurantica.com

Correct: The seafood platter included fried clams, two fish fillets, a Maryland style crab cake, three jumbo fried shrimp, fries, coleslaw, and a dinner roll for $12.99.

Incorrect: Author Lisa Belkin opens with a confession that once, long long ago, she snitched a role of toilet paper from the restroom of the company she worked for. — Karen Burns at KarenBurnsWorkingGirl.com

Correct: Author Lisa Belkin opens with a confession that once, long long ago, she snitched a roll of toilet paper from her employer’s restroom.

As a general “thumbnail” usage guide, if you’re playing a part in something, use role. For everything else, use roll.

This morning I received an email containing a list of short but funny sayings that seemed to have a central theme. Most of them were humorous, often cynical modifications of old axioms, clichés, or common phrases that are already familiar to most of us. After doing some further research, I found several websites that had a list of these same sayings, along with some others that were different but still fit the same general theme. Neither the email sender nor the other sites displayed any sort of attribution for these statements, so I am not sure who gets the credit for their original creation. Nevertheless, I have compiled most of them here for your reading pleasure. If you know about any others that would fit this category but are not included here, you can post these in the comment section and I will include them in the list.

• It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
• Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don’t have film.
• Flashlight: A case for holding dead batteries.
• She’s always late. Her ancestors arrived on the Juneflower.
• Honk if you love peace and quiet.
• A day without sunshine is like, well, night.
• On the other hand, you have different fingers.
• I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met.
• Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
• Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.
• Back up my hard drive? How do I put it in reverse?
• War doesn’t determine who’s right, just who’s left.
• I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory.
• Always remember that you are unique, just like everyone else.
• When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty.
• Seen it all, done it all, can’t remember most of it.
• 98.23 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.
• He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
• 99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
• Half the people you know are below average.

  Read the rest of this entry »

Following up on their earlier announcement of a new 6% flat rate commission structure for affiliates, renowned bookseller Barnes & Noble is now offering magazine subscriptions online in addition to their usual repertoire of books, music, video games, and membership options.

Barnes & Noble Magazine Announcement

We are pleased to announce we now carry magazine subscriptions online. Choose from over 1,000 print and digital subscriptions with thousands of single issues available for download. Find what you want in more than 50 categories - from Fashion & Style to Business & Money, Computers to Cooking, or Entertainment to Science. You can browse magazines by format, price range, language, or country of origin. Post banners and links to our magazine store offering savings up to 90% off newsstand prices!

In accordance with the new flat rate commission, all online magazine subscriptions will receive a commission of 6%.

Regards,

The Barnes & Noble Affiliate Team

Meanwhile, readers who do not find their favorite selections at B&N can check out Amazon’s magazine offerings, many of which can now be delivered electronically through the new Amazon Kindle.

As I was looking through my traffic statistics yesterday, I clicked through on a visitor’s MSN Live search query for “karlonia” and discovered something interesting. Included in the first page of results at #6 was my Adbux referral link! Here is a screen capture that I took earlier today of the results page (click on the thumbnail to enlarge the picture and see the full image). I have drawn a little arrow to the left of the position where my referral link is displayed.

It is also rather odd that MSN is ranking my About page at #1 and my main URL at #2 even though my About page has very little content. Meanwhile, sitting at #4 is a snippet from a comment I had made on another blog a few months ago in a mostly successful effort to get my post on gasoline and crude oil ranked highly enough to bring in traffic.

Perhaps more significantly, I noticed that my overall search traffic volume for yesterday had sharply increased from the previous levels. At the time I checked the stats, there were 86 hits coming from search.live.com within the last 24 hours compared with an observed average of 25-30 hits per day since February. It just so happens that on the day before yesterday I had embarked on a blog commenting spree and dropped comments on about 30 other blogs and linked these with my most recent post on the Entrecard outage. Since this was the first time since January that I had made any significant effort to gain more backlinks through blog comments, there is some anecdotal evidence that these links may have served as tasty food for the MSNbot spiders, leading to more of my pages being indexed and perhaps higher rankings as well.

I have already observed a similar pattern with MSN back in January when I had made a similarly concerted effort towards blog comment linkage and noticed an increase in Live Search queries from about 7 per day up to the average of 25-30 per day as mentioned above over a two-day period after making the comments. There was also a very favorable but delayed response from Yahoo and Google in terms of the number of pages indexed and the overall search traffic volume. The increase in traffic from Yahoo was more pronounced and occurred about two weeks after the comment links were placed; it took Google about one month to fully credit the links but the results were still noticeable.

These observations may have notable implications for beginner or intermediate bloggers who are looking to increase their all-important targeted search engine traffic. Commenting on other blogs with well-placed links to the internal pages of your site can give you a significant boost with MSN and eventually the other search engines as well. Since Microsoft’s notoriously sucky search engine (did you know that only 28.8% of MSN searchers actually click on an organic result while the other 71.2% of them are going for the sponsored links?) is actually indexing referral links amongst their other oddly placed results, it is theoretically possible to make some extra affiliate sales by matching up chosen usernames with whatever keywords you think might draw traffic from MSN searches.

The SendEarnings GPT program has just released the June edition of its monthly newsletter. For this month, they seem to be emphasizing their Cash Games section, where it is possible to earn extra cash from playing various online games either solitaire style or in competitions with other players.

If you’re wondering about payment reports, I have the confirmation on this posted here. According to my account stats, it looks like some of you are beginning to sign up and accumulate earnings with this program, and one of you has even been paid already and received a free Gold Membership (Yippee!). Information about similar earnings opportunities in the GPT world can be found at my earlier review article on Treasure Trooper.

Cash Games Has Fun, Excitement

Have you tried Cash Games? It’s a fun and exciting way to earn cash simply by playing your favorite online games. You can play just for fun or you can add to the excitement by competing with other players to win cash. In addition to winning cash, for the month of June, you’ll also earn Sweepstakes entries to win great prizes from SendEarnings. If you haven’t swung your mouse by Cash Games yet, try it and check out all the fun you’ve been missing out on!

Cash Games

If you haven’t tried Cash Games yet, you’re missing out a fun and easy way to quickly boost your SendEarnings earnings. Sign up for your free account and you’ll automatically get your first deposit matched. That’s up to $10.00 or $20.00 in game credits you’ll get for free to compete against other players to win even more cash! Anyone can join in on the fun because each game is easy to access, easy to learn and has unlimited free games!

Set up your free account and browse the site to get more familiar with it. Click on a couple games that catch your eye, such as Bejeweled, Scrabble Cubes, Solitaire Rush or Family Feud. Play as many times as you would like for free, either with yourself or compete against other players. After each game, you’ll get a profile of how well you did and you’ll get to see your improvement with each game.

After you’ve sharpened your skills, you can choose to move from the free games to competitions, where you’ll play against other players of a similar skill level to win cash. You can turn your free $10.00 or $20.00 in game credits into even more real cash with your victories. In addition, for each dollar you play, you’ll earn cash back in your SendEarnings account.

See how fun and easy it is to start earning cash just by playing your favorite online games!

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Members of the Entrecard community experienced an unexpected interruption in their card dropping routines Saturday night when an electrical fire at The Planet, a major data center in Houston, Texas that houses the site’s servers, required all power sources (including generators) to be shut down according to instructions from the Houston Fire Department. This took the Entrecard site completely offline for a few hours while crews at The Planet worked to assess and repair the damage. Shortly after midnight on Sunday morning, the Entrecard staff emailed members to let us know what was happening:

Greetings,

Unfortunately, there has been an electrical fire at the data center housing Entrecard’s servers. The servers have not been damaged, but the site may be down for as long as 12 hours.

Entrecard is hosted with ThePlanet, and this fire has affected over 9000 websites, as many of the world’s most popular websites are hosted with ThePlanet. They are working around the clock to get their data center back online, and we are hoping that they get it back online fast.

Thank you for your patience and understanding with this rare and frustrating problem. Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing we can do but wait for The Planet to get their datacenter back online.

Please check back with Entrecard in 12 to 24 hours.

Thanks,
Entrecard Team

Fortunately, the Entrecard staff was able to respond fairly quickly and managed to get a basic splash page up that informed visitors about the outage and restored the widget graphic on Entrecard-enabled blogs, which prevented us from having to worry about displaying server error messages on our sites where the widgets would normally be located. There was also a link on the splash page that directed us to The Planet’s forum, where we were able to learn more specific information about the extent and actual cause of the outage from their management:

Read the rest of this entry »

In spite of a recent power outage at Entrecard’s data centers due to an unexpected electrical fire, traffic from the search engines is holding up pretty well. Even with the removal of all traffic from Entrecard over the past 24 hours, I am still maintaining a traffic flow of over 320 unique visitors per day for Sunday, which is normally my lowest day of the week in terms of search traffic. This indicates that my overall SEO strategy is still humming along nicely, although I still need to get out there and drop some relevant comment links on other blogs in order to give us a more substantial boost in the rankings. I am hoping to eventually bring this site up to at least 1000 uniques per day, which would increase the potential for significant monetization and perhaps open the door for some private advertising deals.

maximum atm surcharge state of michigan — Although I was ranked #1 for the keyword at the time of my clickthrough, my article did not directly address this. I looked at some of the other results in an attempt to find a more direct answer to the query, and the closest thing I could find was an article referencing a General Accounting Office (GAO) study which found that the maximum ATM surcharge fee for Michigan at that time was $3.00. The average fee for all banks was $1.00, while the average was $1.27 if banks not charging ATM fees at all were excluded from the calculations. However, this data appeared to be several years old, so the maximum fee may be higher than $3 by now. If you happen to have more recent data on this, please let me know about it in the comment section so that it can be included in my article.

how to find good clickbank product bum marketing — According to the Affiliate Project X guide, Clickbank products with a gravity between 10 and 70 are generally good targets to use in articles for bum marketing purposes. It is still possible to use products with a gravity greater than 70, but you will likely face much steeper competition and need to target your keywords to more specific phrases. The standard “[product name here] review” types of posts will be difficult to obtain good rankings for at this level.

Choosing products with a gravity below 10 can be more risky because they have not proven themselves yet and may not convert well for you. In all cases, it is a good idea to check out the product’s “pitch page” (that is, the long copy sales letter that attempts to sell the product) before promoting it. If the copy is poorly written or does not make the product look very enticing, you would probably be better off by choosing another product.

Most recent non leap year that is divisible by 4 — The most recent year in the past that meets this criterion would be 1900. Going forward, it’s 2100. For a more specific explanation, see my article on Leap Year Facts and Trivia.

clickbank check — A copy of my most recent Clickbank check can be found here. They’ve been around for about 10 years now and have proven themselves to be a reliable affiliate network that provides an excellent monetization option for websites, particularly when good SEO strategies are implemented by the site administrator.

reclaim bandwidth from XP — Yes, this is possible; by default Microsoft operating systems will reserve about 20% of the bandwidth for themselves, which is usually more than is necessary. You can reclaim this bandwidth by tweaking your Control Panel settings. This may result in faster Internet surfing and download speeds. The instructions for how to do this are explained in my Microsoft Sucks Bandwidth article (look below the video).

find recipe for pulled pork sandwiches — Here you go: Harley Hog Pulled Pork Sandwiches. I have made this one several times, and although it requires some time and preparation, the overall “yummy factor” is definitely worth it. I still need to take a good picture to include in the recipe post, however.

the process of making gasoline from crude oil is called? — In general, we just call it “refining”, or the “refining process”, but a more specific term would be “fractional distillation“. See the linked article for a more detailed explanation of this. Meanwhile, if you’re looking to save money because of those frustratingly high petrol prices, you can check out this new product I found that is supposed to provide information on adjusting your engine to use fuel more efficiently.

is clixsense a scam site — No. I have actually received a check from them, and so far they still seem to functioning well. Although I have not been as active with Clixsense as I was before, I have been bringing in some small earnings from them through referrals. If you can manage to attract some referrals who upgrade to the Premium account and will stay fairly active, you can receive a nice boost to your affiliate income.