John Reel’s Blog

One of the things I dislike about Internet marketing are the association that some Internet marketers have created between legitimate products and scams… in order to make affiliate commissions. 

People create adword ads or e-mail subjects with titles like, ”Is product Y a scam?” or some other variant.  These purposefully induce fear of getting scammed to get people to click on a link that is actually promoting the very same product, or a similar competing product, for affiliate commissions. 

Whenever I see ads like that that, which point to an affiliate link for my products, I inform the affiliate that we will disable their account unless they remove or change the advertisement.  It simply isn’t acceptable to allow them to tarnish my reputation or the reputations of my peers, just to make some money.   I encourage all of us to ban any affiliate who does this!

For a current example, try doing a search for Internet marketer John Reese, and you will see ads like,

“John Reese Fraud?
91% of Them are Scams
There is Only 3 That Really Work.”

and 

“Gurus Suck
Don’t buy anything from
John Reese until you read this.”

Both promote competing products, and I suspect both are affiliate links, as opposed to ads created by the product owners.  Worse, both make John Reese look like a potential criminal, even though neither landing page makes any reference to him!  Yet, the first thing anyone doing research on John Reese would assume is that he’s an evil scammer, and that they should not get involved with him in any way.

Because this is done on pretty much every product name and every guru name, anything to do with Internet marketing looks like a scam, and therefore anyone involved with Internet marketing looks like scum.  While there are a lot of shady things going on this industry, there is no reason to take people down who are doing good stuff, just to make a few bucks. 

Let’s stop this behaviour, ban affiliates who use these tactics, and raise the bar for Internet marketing, thank you very much!

Now, here are some real Internet scams to avoid.  Please don’t use them for inspiration!!!  ;-)

http://www.cracked.com/article_16648_5-retarded-get-rick-quick-scams-people-still-fall.html

When Google Chrome came out, I switched to it as my default browser because of one significant feature:  Each tab runs in its own process.  I was using Firefox as my default browser before and I frequently had to kill all my tabs because one of them would start taking up 100% CPU power.  Of course, I couldn’t figure out which one, and killing FireFox killed all the windows and tabs.

With Chrome that isn’t a problem in theory.  If one tab is causing problems, I simply kill it, and the rest keep going.

However, Chrome has loads of other problems.  

• Rendering a page when you switch tabs usually takes just an instant, but sometimes it can take 30 seconds or more.
• Several pages do not work or display correctly in Chrome, including the web mail on my server (Horde mail) and the new otherinbox that I’m testing.  So, two of the sites I use the most don’t work right in Chrome.  
• While the way Chrome handles downloads is cool, I cannot download Wordpress or Wordpress plugins with Chrome.  The download button on that site just doesn’t do anything.  There are other sites with the same problem.
• Video is a nightmare on Chrome.  I’ve even downloaded the latest developers release that supposedly fixes it.  As soon as streaming video loads up, Chrome usually makes my computer very sluggish.  Switch to Firefox and all goes well.
• I also find the back button frustrating with Chrome.  When I click back to a form submission, it doesn’t work the way other browsers do, and I usually cannot get back to where I’m trying to go.
• Finally, when one Chrome tab is doing anything bad, I cannot access any of the other tabs, or windows, which makes little sense, as they are supposed to be separate processes.  Sometimes it locks up my entire computer while it figures things out.

Overall, I like a lot about Chrome.  I could write a big list of reasons why I prefer chrome, but it simply isn’t working for me.   Apparently I’m not the only one, as people are switching back to IE and Firefox.  Chrome’s early market penetration has started slipping.

Next I’m trying Safari.  I’ve used it on other computers to test web sites before and found it to be shockingly fast.  Hopefully it will actually be usable.  Sadly, I had to switch to Firefox to download Safari, because Chrome wouldn’t download it.

Update: Apparently MashedLife is a direct (and poor) word-for-word rip-off of www.PassPack.com.  Having written software that gets poorly copied by other companies, right down to the marketing material, I can relate to how annoying it is.  Don’t use MashedLife.  Use PassPack.com instead.

Just the other day, I was lamenting at the end of this post about how I’d have to use some sad password manager that only kinda did what one would expect.

And now, a new free service called MashedLife.com has been released that does it perfectly.  You can now manage all your passwords online and login to any site with one click, from any browser, on any computer, with no downloads. This solves all the problems with logging onto web sites!

It’s sheer brilliance and I’m now switching to MashedLife for all my password management.  And of course, I signed up with my new OtherInbox email account, so I can easily manage the emails they send.  Within a minute of signing up, I put my OtherInbox login information into MashedLife and added the Login bookmark to my bookmark list.  Now when I go to that site, I just click the bookmark and it logs me in.  Genius.

By the way, the signup was really quick and they have the coolest “captcha” ever.  The only problem is that their Terms Of Service didn’t open in a popup, so I had to fill in the form again, after I clicked it.

I feel like computers are finally starting to get useful after all these years!

I’ve been practicing and teaching Yoshinkan Aikido for something like seventeen years.  This is a very powerful martial art, and the official style of the Tokyo riot police. 

When I started, I was blessed to join what was at the time probably the best dojo outside of Japan.  People flew in from all over North America to join us for our monthly intensive training sessions, and we flew in guest instructors from Japan and elsewhere on a regular basis.  The day I joined there was about three new people like myself, and several dozen brown and black belts, including three fifth degree black belts who had just returned from training for three years full-time with the founder of our style.

Those instructors were out to prove themselves by creating the best Aikido trainers they could, and I was one of them.  I soaked it up, loving every minute of it.  Each of the top instructors had their own very different styles, and I tried to take the best of all of it.

When training in Aikido, the goal is to learn while being safe.  Our training partners are kind enough to lend us their bodies to practice on, so we return them in the same shape we got them in.  We take people slowly through learning how to move while keeping perfect timing, control, and balance, while taking their oponent’s balance.  This alows small people (like me) to easily control and pin much larger opponents.  We also spend a lot of time learning how to easily and safely fall, so that we can advance you up the ranks to more exciting techniques, without risk of injury.

For the past year or two, I’ve been donating my time to help a dojo get going here in Guelph.  It was started by a former student of mine from back when I had my own dojo.

It’s been a rough road, as we’ve been forced by circumstances to move five or six times, starting in Fergus, then Elora, then Guelph.  We thought we had a big space right downtown, around the corner from my new place, but it didn’t pan out at the last minute.  I thought that might be the end for this little club.

However, last week, a new place was found downtown.   Yesterday I taught the first class there and we had about a dozen people show up.  Apparently the new location is a hit and the club’s web site is getting more hits than ever before.

If you are interested in seeing some Aikido videos or trying out a class, check out our web site at Grand River Aikido.

Why the heck didn’t I think of this?

Last week I reached a milestone of 30,000 unread e-mails.  Beat that!

Over the years, I’ve come up with various methods to deal with all the lists I sign up to.  For instance, since I had my own server, I setup a catch-all e-mail account for lists, and then I would sign up with ListName@MyDomain.com for each list.  Then if I got spam email going to one of those addresses, I knew who the culprit was, and could just redirect that email address to null and void.

That got tedious so I eventually just made up a single e-mail address for all the lists I’m on and all the products I buy and just let it collect there.  For a while I would setup rules to collate those emails into separate folders, but that was too much work so they now all end up in one big-ass folder.  Sometimes I glance at the subjects for something interesting, but I hardly ever read them.  

Well, someone took those two approaches and combined them into a new service called OtherInbox.  I just nabbed one of the 500 beta invites from TechCrunch, and boy am I happy!

This beautiful service lets me create email addresses at their domain, one for each list, just like I used to do.  Then it automatically removes any emails coming to that address that don’t belong, meaning I don’t have to bother with the spam or redirecting those emails to null.  Then it goes a step further and organizes all that email by each list.  

It’s everything I wanted for dealing with lists, rolled up into one, and automated!

Now, I just need to setup something on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to get 1,000 workers to move my 30,000 unread e-mails into there, unsubscribe me from all my lists, and resubscribe me with the my new OtherInbox email address.  lol.

Having had hard drives crash over the years, I know how important backups are.  Many years ago, I was making a backup of all my important data to my re-writeable DVD.  It was such a hassle that I only got around to it every three or four months, but at least I was doing something.

But, right in the middle of that backup, it all went to hell.  The computer crashed, the hard drive died, and the backup was corrupted.  I lost years of work and had no backup.  In an attempt to recover from this complete cluster-f**k, I sent the hard drive to the kind of specialists who wear space suits and work in a clean room and recover your data bit-by-bit.  They quoted me a very big number (over a grand) and said it was unlikely I’d get anything back anyway.

I told them to toss the drive and I very seriously considered shutting down my business that day.

Flash forward to today.  I now pay a measly $49.95/year/computer for unlimited backups of my data on Carbonite.  It’s a great “set it and forget it” system for making sure everything important is automatically, always backed up to the cloud.

The peace of mind of knowing everything is always backed up is wonderful.  I continually recommend this service to people, though most seem to be more comfortable with having their data on a DVD where they feel in control.  Of course they only make backups once in a while, and if their house burns down, the DVD’s are going with it and they lose all their photos and financial records.  But that’s their problem.  I’m safe with Carbonite.

Yesterday, something new came out on the market called DropBox, which is something I’ve been waiting for.  DropBox allows you to sync your information between computers, have shared folders between friends/colleagues, or grab your important files from any Internet connected computer.  It is totally seamless, so anyone can just start using it.

Up until now, I’ve been using Google docs for shared access to files, which is okay, but loses a lot of the formatting of Word and the accessibility of having my files on my own computer where I can use them offline.   Dropbox fixes both those problems, and at just the right time as I’m moving mostly offline.

Finally, I can put all my important files onto DropBox and they will be automatically synced between my computers, or friends who I share them with.  They have free accounts with 2GB of data, and for $99.99/year, you get 50GB.  I probably will be fine with the free account, but have no issue whatsoever paying for this great service.

Just to make things even easier, I’m also following this advice and installing PasswordSafe to create and manage complex passwords.  Then I can just keep that encrypted file in my DropBox folder so I can access my passwords from anywhere.  It isn’t too hard to get passwords into a web site, but it would be  nice if it had browser plug-ins.  Of course, my browsers can remember my passwords on my laptop, so I only need to do it manually when I’m elsewhere.

My work-life is getting easier to manage today.

As part of my experiment to be able to work more effeciently, and work off-line, I’ve setup my laptop for coding.  This is also neccessary because the Internet connection in our house keeps briefly disconnecting, making working directly on a server rather challenging.

Mostly so I don’t forget what I did in case I have to do it again, I’m documenting it here:

1) Platform: Apache, MySQL, PHP 4.x using Xampp For Windows.
This is the platform on which we develop applications, so I needed to duplicate it on my laptop so I can run/test the applications we write locally.

2) IDE: Eclipse Platform
I’ve been coding in VI, a unix text editor, directly on our server since 1992.  I’m finally stepping up to an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), and chose Eclipse for now.

3) Debugging: Zend Debugger Eclipse Plugin
For debugging PHP scripts.

4) Javascript Editing/Debugging: Aptana Eclipse Plugin
Aptana has some very interesting tools, which I need to look into more.   This plugin apparently adds jQuery and EXTJS support, which are the two javascript libraries we use in our development.

5) Versioning: Subversion Eclipse Plugin
Still getting this installed, but should have it working soon.

Already have the current side-project I’m working on on the local machine and working!  Now, I just have to learn to use Eclipse!  Shouldn’t be hard.

Please help me to setup my experiment.

I want to eventually travel and work from anywhere, which means I won’t always  have an always-on high-speed Internet connection, something that I’ve had at my disposal for well over a decade.

How can I do what I need to, without being connected 24×7 as I am today?

With the exception of online radio, all I really need to do on-line is write, upload and test code, read and write blog posts, and e-mail.  Everything else on the Internet is just distraction, eating up precious hours of my life that could be spent, um, living.

To prepare myself for being able to do this, I am going to do an experiment and see how long I can go without having a persistent Internet connection.

Here’s my theory for this experiment:

Writing, uploading, testing code
Right now, I do a lot of my coding with VI and terminal emulation.  (I had given up coding, leaving it to programmers I hire, and I should go back to that.)  Until I do give up programming again, I can setup my laptop with everything I need to run my code locally and just upload it when it works.

What do you recommend as the best platform for coding, debugging and testing PHP/MySQL software on my Windows XP laptop for distribution on a LAMP platform?  (Free or commercial.)

Writing blog posts
There are various free and cheap Windows software packages for writing blog posts and automatically uploading them when you are connected.  I don’t have to do it directly in WordPress online as I am right now.

Links to blogging software: Smashing Magazine

Any suggestions on the best one to use, again for Windows XP, free or commercial?

Reading blog posts:
With RRS aggregates, whenever I’m connected, more news can be downloaded than I can read in a day.  And really, most of the blogs I read I don’t really need to read anyway.  But, they are good for inspiration here and there.

I know nothing about this.  Any suggestions for Windows XP software that will automatically download blog posts when I connect?  How about forums as well?

E-mailing:
The time management skills taught in “The 4 Hour Work Week” mandate that I only check and respond to e-mail once or twice a day.

I currently get my mail from gmail, hotmail, and my own webmail on my domains.  I could continue to do that, but I’d be happier if I could do it all offline and upload it, while still being able to access my email from any computer.  Perhaps an IMAP connection for my work emails with Outlook, and continue to use online accounts as they are.  Thoughts on the best solutions?

So the only Internet I need is a single trip a day to an Internet-enabled cafe. While I check and respond to emails, my code and blog posts can upload, and the blogs I read can download.

The benefits of this are that without an Internet connection, I won’t be distracted by constant e-mails coming in or long instant messaging conversations.  Instead, if I’m at my computer, I’m being productive, and I won’t have the option to just while away part of my life aimlessly surfing, learning things that I’ll forget the next day anyway.  And, I get a nice social break once or twice a day at the cafe around the corner when I do connect.

It will be an interesting experiment to see if I can go without the Internet.  Your feedback will help me get started, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Thanks!

On a totally personal note, on September first I’m moving in with my girlfriend, Rebecca, pictured to the right.  We’ve rented a house together, with a third person to keep costs low and to add some extra fun into the mix.

What makes this especially interesting for me is that Rebecca and I will have only been dating for three months when we move in with each other!  This is unprecedented for me.

Here are some of the exciting things we plan to do together:

1) Living raw
I’ve been vegan for 21 years, and Rebecca is a fairly recent convert to vegetarianism.  She also has some training in raw food cooking and we’re going to take classes together and start “cooking” predominantly raw food.  I am really looking forward to this, and to having regular sit-down meals with the household and friends.

2) Yoga in the morning
She teaches yoga.  How yummy is that?  I love the idea of doing yoga in the mornings and have wanted a partner for that for years.  We’re going to keep the living room free of furniture, and full of pillows.

3) No television
I’m going to get serious about selling my stupid big television.  No cable and no renting movies means more quality time spent doing things with friends.

“Wait a minute, I like watching movies” she said, when reviewing this post.  Okay, maybe we’ll keep the TV, but no cable!!!

4) Music
The thrid person, Ken, is a professional musician.  I play the guitar somewhat.  Rebecca used to play the guitar and organ quite well so perhaps she’ll take them up again.  With many musical friends between us all, we intend to have lots of jams and singalongs to fill up all the time we might have been sitting around watching television.

5) More travel
My girlfriend is an accomplished world traveller, much more so than I.  We should soon both be able to get to a point where we can work from anywhere, as we both work in the computing field.  This means some extended trips, exploring the world while we continue to work.

6) More blogging
Rebecca has quite a following on her personal blog and on FaceBook and I’m learning to be more open about my life.  We plan to blog about our adventures when we start travelling.  (We already are doing some small trips, but nothing extensive yet.)

7) Massive purging
Rebecca has done some purging of stuff she owns.  I’m doing a massive purge.  Everything that is currently in storage will be brought out and either put to use, sold, given away, or thrown out.  All the stuff that I’ve been pack-ratting for years will be gone, reducing my load for living and travel.

Exciting times ahead!