This is not the first time that I written a post with this same basic theme. I have changed the purpose of this website more times then I can remember. Really this domain name is the one that started it all for me. It was my first personal website that I had. Over time it was gone through several different variations and purposes but I think it has finally landed on its true purpose in life - A rollup for all the the rest on my sites.
Yep, as of today the idano Blog Network is born. This website will now be the portal to all the rest of the websites and blogs that both my wife and I manage which we are now giving the title of a “Network”. The idea here is that through this website a visitor may be able to discover other sites that are apart of our network.
I will blog here about updates to and around the network and hopefully give some good advise and insite into the world of blogging that will be helpful to others. I have definitely gained some expereince in the last couple of year blogging and I am more then willing to share the knowledge I have gained.
At this time we are not accepting other sites or authors into our network but that could definately change in the future.
Look for more updates to the site and the network in the days and weeks to come!
Well as you can see things are looking pretty different around here. It has been a while since I posted and/or did any maintenance around here but the day has finally come to clean this place up.
I have a new theme up named YoMel by andrastudio that I will be making modifications to over the next few days. The biggest change will be the color (I like blue) and I am going to aggregate feeds from the rest of my sites in the side bar.
Anyway, I am still around and kicking so you should see new and improved things popping up here and there from now on.
Microsoft Word and Outlook 2003 have been jumping to 100% CPU usage when opening and closing Word and especially when sending emails from Outlook for about a month now. It just started from one day to the next and just seemed to get worse over the last week. I searched on and off during the last week for a solution and finally found it today.
The Problem
I had a corrupted Normal.dot file.
The Normal.dot file is the template file that Word uses when initially opening and presenting a blank document to you (or an email if you use Word as you email editor). I can across this thread where a guy mentioned that his Normal.dot file was 3.6mb so I decided to check out how big my file was.
The Fix
I searched and found my Normal.Dot file under:
C:\Documents and Settings\dmasters\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates
The size of the file was an amazing 3.6mb as well. I delete it and left the folder open to see how big a new Normal.dot would be. I opened Word and then closed it and the new Normal.dot was created. It was a whopping 31.0 KB. That was a significant difference!
The next test was to see how Outlook performed with the old bloated file gone. Outlook opened quickly and sending out a new message was like a dream. Problem solved.
Possible Reasons for the Problem
I think there are several things that could have caused this issue but I think powering off my computer without shutting it down with Word open could caused this. I was having some issues a while back with my laptop getting stuck because of another program and I held the power button down to kill it.
Another possible solution is a virus. We have pretty good virus scan software here at work and I haven’t seen my computer do anything that would cause me to think that I had one.
Resources
Here are a couple of articles that outline possible causes along with a couple of other items that may help if the above solution doesn’t work.
Technorati tags: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, Windows XP, High CPU, Normal.dot, Troubleshooting
I have been having a phenomenal month with Amazon.com
due to a couple of RC Helicopter Reviews that I did for Air Hogs Havoc Heli
and Air Hogs Laser Battle
. I have search engine results for both and current have over a 20% conversion rate for people who click through to Amazon.
There was another helicopter that I reviewed called the Air Hogs Reflex . My review of this helicopter was not as positive as the other two reviews. On top of that I did not place a link to the Reflex on Amazon but instead to the Havoc. I did this because at the time I thought the Havoc was better then the Reflex.
Since the review I got my hands on some other heli’s and also another Reflex. I was pleasantly surprised with the Reflex and it was much better then I remembered it was. The problem was that I never updated my review with my newly acquired experience.
Today I logged into my Google Analytics account and noticed that my Reflex review was number 3 after the other 2 heli reviews. The Reflex review was pulling in over 10% of the traffic that my site was getting but I was getting zero sales from it 
. I had been sitting on my more positive view of the product for a couple of months and now realized that I was paying the price for it.
Needless to say I quickly updated my review and provided the appropriate links for BOTH helicopters mentioned in the review. I may have missed a chunk or change for this month but hopefully December is just as good for me.
There’s the Reflex on Amazon to the right if you want to check it out.
Technorati tags: Amazon, RC Helicopter Reviews, Air Hogs Reflex, Air Hogs Havoc Heli Laser Battle, Air Hogs Havoc Heli, Cyber Monday, Black Friday, Christmas
Wow, it only took me over a year but I finally made to the $100 mark for the month for Adsense. While this may not understand the significance of the $100 mark $100 is how much you need to reach for Google to pay you. I have been doing about $75-80 for the last 8 months getting a check every other month so for me this cool.
The downside to this is that it is most likely because of the Christmas rush so I expect it to drop back off after the first of the year.
I reality this month’s $100 is only a drop in the bucket in comparison to the money that I have made from Amazon this month. As of yesterday I have pulled in $1024 for this month. All of that money from advertising a couple of Helicopters.
My usual average every month from Amazon is about $150 so this jump has been real nice 
.
Technorati tags: Google, Adsense, Amazon, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas
There is a project that I had not worked on in a few weeks that was coded in .asp via Dreamweaver that ever time I tried open an .asp page it would crash. HTML pages were fine.
At first I thought it had to do with the fact that I had previous had Dreamweaver 8 installed and had uninstalled it. Reinstalling 8 did not fix the problem. I then turned to the extensions that I had installed. Disabling and then uninstalling them did not do it.
Finally I resorted to uninstalling CS3. While that was happening I once again started searching the web and came across this article from Adobe -Dreamweaver CS3 crashes after Daylight Savings Time ends.
In the article they talk about how the WinFileCache-AD76BB20.dat can get corrupted because of the time change. You simply need to delete the file and then all is well.
Unfortunately I was already past the point on no return in my uninstall so I as not able to very that this was my problem. My clean install seemed to have solved the issue.
As a side note - Dreamweaver CS3 takes an awfully long time to uninstall AND install.
Technorati: Adobe, Dreamweaver, Studio CS3, Web Design, Crashing
I was excited to find out that installer.app can now work with the 1.1.1 firmware. I installed it and add all the apps that I had before the update.
Unfortunately I uninstalled it after a day.
There was definitely a performance and stability difference with my phone right out of the gate. I had several lockups and had to hard reboot my phone a couple of times. Added to that the phone just seemed to run slower.
My advise is to wait until February until approved apps are released.
Google Reader just refuses to render pages from Digg correctly so I have had to remove it from my subscription list. The Mobile version of Digg work just fine.
It really bums me that this has gone unnoticed by Google for so long. I like using Google reader for Digg content because it would just give me a basic text and images instead of trying to reader the original site’s entire page.
Oh well, hopefully they will fix it someday…
Technorati tags: iPhone, Google Reader, Digg
Techcrunch had an article this morning giving props to Plaxo for its great ability to sync multiple calendars and contacts and then get them on your iPhone - all for free. This reminded me that I had setup Plaxo but had not really been using it.
I had spent some time to set all of this up a few weeks back but really have not utilized it to full potential. I think the main reason for this is that I do not doc my phone on a regular basis so I don’t get my updates. My calendar is becoming increasingly important though so I think that I am going to need to get in the habit.
BTW - I am syncing my Google Calendar along with my work calendar that runs off of Exchange. I have the Plaxo plugin setup in Outlook on my IBM laptop that pushes my work stuff to Plaxo. Plaxo then grabs my Google Calendar and pushes it down to iCal along with my work calendar. From there my iPhone gets updated with both calendars.
It takes a little bit of elbow grease and remembering to sync your phone but it does work pretty well.
Now only if we could get Bluetooth syncs then I would be in business…
Technorati tags: Plaxo, Techcrunch, Outlook, iCal, iPhone, Sync
I have installed the iWPhone plugin on this site which will automatically reformat this blog for the iPhone. So now you can load up idano.net quickly and formatted properly.
Technorati tags: iPhone, iWPhone, WordPress Plugins, WordPress, Blog Tools, Blogging
