So Antonia thinks my blog is too nerdy… Well to make “Canada” happy I’m going to post a none nerdy post…

The holidays were good. Lots of family, lots of wine, good food and good friends!

Happy birthday Turk!

This week is very mellow so I am catching up on some loose ends at work. Doing some network maintenance, going to the gym and making it to the range a couple times this week. (Antonia loves guns!)

Mallory and I made a warm tomato and spinach salad last night. I don’t remember the amounts but below is how we did it… We almost have it figured out… Next time we need more tomatoes and we need to put the tomatoes into the pan last and then put the spinach in and toss it in the wok.

Fresh garlic, minced
Salt
Extra-virgin olive oil
Raw baby spinach
Soft goat cheese
Freshly ground pepper
Brown sugar
Fresh roma tomatoes
1 lemon

We used a large Wok over medium flame, heat olive oil until just hot; then reduce to low. Add the brown sugar and stir until dissolved. Add garlic; continue cooking for 30 seconds. Turn off heat; add lemon juice and pepper. Add tomatoes and cook for 2 minutes. Add spinach and cook for 30seconds. Remove from heat and add to plates. Top of chilled soft goat cheese and pecan pieces.

I just wrote my first recipe. High five. Mallory is the master cook so when I say “we” I mostly mean her…

So since I’ve built my new laptop which is running great by the way… i’ve never seen CS2 load this fast on a laptop before (yea 7200rpm drives) Anyways this holiday season I’ve been getting out of the house during the day and working from coffee shops. I’ve been trying to give this local cafe a chance.. “E Street Cafe” in Encinitas off the 101. They push “high speed fiber free internet” and everytime I stop by there is at least 10 people with laptop surfing anyway. So I drive over and grap a coffee and setup. Well its not high speed fiber and its not free. Its a service called “Cheetah” and you have to get a user name and password from them and for every $10 you spend you get 30mins. I won’t get into that, but fuck that. Not to mention they have really bad live music really loud every night. So sadly the only cool place in my area is just up the street by at La Costa Coffee Roasting. Its free and fast. I can actually talk with skype over it. Great coffee and wonderful outside seating. Thumbs up!

However I am thinking of getting a t-mobile hotspot account again (starbucks, airports, borders). The t-mobile hotspots are very fast (T-1) and you can find them anywhere. Its $30/mo. Anyone wanna share an account? I don’t use it enough to get it again just for myself. Lets share.

Not sure if you guys saw it last Saturday night but SNL has a rare moment of genius with The Chronic of Narnia Rap. I finally found it online. So check it out…

I’ve never been a fan of search engine optimization. I’ve always seen it as a joke. I have clients that spend $3k a month to pay some search engine firm to get them on the first page with a random keyword and then I have clients that have never heard of search engine optimization and they are the first page on all their keywords. The difference? Popularity. If you have a lot of people going to your site and talking about it in blogs and message boards thats more than money can buy you. Bands own the search engine market and I doubt they have search engine firms helping them.

So I decided to actually do something about zeropresence’s search engine status. Being has how I named the company after BBS handle I used to have back in the day when I was 13, I always thought it was weird enough and random enough to not have much trouble with the search engines. (Although there are days I wish I had a newer more creative company name, but it works and its worked for a long time). I’m not going to change ZP to a pop punk band name like “Forget our sunday love” with a photo of a dead tree. Moving along… A google for “zeropresence” show a lot of our stuff and of a lot of some kid that creates counterstrike maps. So to fix that I got ahold of a copy of Web CEO. Its a great little tool. It runs a lot of reports for you. For example it looks at your meta tag keywords and then go into google (about 100 different other search engines if you want) and compares your keywords to your rankings so you can see what keywords are working and which ones aren’t. It will also give you advice on what keywords to used based on the amount of results per keyword. I could go on and on… but check it out there is a free version. for me its not worth buying the full version but its a tool I would use every couple months to help a client get off the ground. As a client it would be nice to see what is working and what is not all in a nice report.

I’ve been working on a video podcast for a client tonight. I wroted my own RSS code and it passed the RSS validator the first time. Couple of tips I learned the hard way.

1. Most of the RSS feed makers don’t write clean code that works with video ipods.

2. Feedburner is only good as a “Feed Links” site to allow people to view your feed in many different methods (different RSS readers) other than that I don’t see the hype.

3. I decided to go with H.264 (.mp4) format over the .m4v format for quality reason. However beware you can’t go over a 768kbps data rate if you want your vidcast to work with video ipods. I must say though if I was doing a hour+ long vidcast I would run .m4v for the smaller size.

4. The itunes:image only works after you have submited it to itunes.

5. In the length=” field you will need to take the total mb of your file and put it into bytes and put the total number of bytes here.

I just did a video podcast for zeropresence with some “making of the site” type stuff. I submited it to iTunes as well…

iTunes

XML

Feedburner

Recently in my area they have been carrying Fat Tire beer. I’ve grown to be a huge fan of this beer during drips to Colorado and Washington. I haven’t seen it in a six pack yet, but the 22oz bottles are everywhere now. Pick up one and try. Also I’ve never been a fan of Samuel Adams, however their Winter Lager is actually really good. It’s a good choice for that holiday party.

After playing with wordpress for hours and hours for a client today I decided to switch my blog to it. Why? Mostly because I am more familiar with the way it is designed and I can install and write plugins a lot easier. So enjoy. I have summarized my favorite links from my old blog at the bottom of this one…. So on to the news…

-This firefox extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (2 GB) for file storage. It acts as a remote machine. You can transfer files between your hard drive and gmail.

-10 reasons not to buy an xbox 360

-Mac G5 optimized Firefox 1.5 and Mac G4 optimized Firefox 1.5

-Flickr photos in your wordpress? Check out this great plugin.

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Old blog favorite links:

-voltron gets served
-Now playing in your itunes on your blog
-Bill Gates goes to college
-Melanie Pullen = AMAZING
-leo burnett
-abandon amusement park
-Greeting cards!
-Paperboy
-Anti-gay phone company?