Jason’s Random Thoughts

There’s no stopping the Sneaky Bastard’s internet marketing campaigns over at CashForComments.com, where you can get paid for comments.  After a minor setback on his site promoting a new movie about blogging, he’s back up and running and actively canvassing for ten bloggers around the world to share their stories.

His latest contest is the great “Contest Jet Train”, sponsored by Blogging the Movie.  The reason he calls it a Jet Train is because it allows people to go back and be part of the original list, which is always my preferred link train scheme.  This is one of the easiest ways to get paid with link love, and there’s even a good chance of having your site mentioned in his upcoming movie.

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Prizes

1. Win the 4-hour work week book copy for yourself.

2. Sign the Contest Jet Train Winner List on the another 4-Hour Work Week Book for the records. Then send this copy back to me to link up the photo of the book. You’re name will be forever part of this book and part of Blogging the Movie.

3. Be on the Contest Winners List, this list will be so popular because the contest will reset 10 times.

4. A short mention about your blog in movie, “Blogging the Movie” - a featured documentary about 10 bloggers all over the world. This contest will be mentioned however they are currently casting for bloggers.

Rules

1. Write a short blurb on at the beginning of blog using the following links:

• Link to CashForComments.com using “get paid” and “internet marketing” to CashForComments.com/contest-jet-train
• Link to Bloggingthemovie.com using the anchor text “blogging“.
• No Duplicate Content or Forum Submissions will be counted as an entry.

2. Next, copy the list of originals below COMPLETELY and add it to your own blog. If you’d like a different keyword for your blog then change it, when you do your post, and it should pass to most blogs with that keyword, provided the train keeps on spreading.

3. Add at least three new favorite blogs of yours to keep the contest jet train going. Make sure you contact the bloggers and insist they participate so they can keep this going.

4. Contact Cash for Comments dot com on his contact page letting known that you have entered.

Deadline for the first winner is 08/16/07.

Disclaimer: If you win and do not properly sign the book correctly and send it back you will be removed from the winners list and not be mentioned in the movie. We will be happy find a replacement for your spot on the infamous winners list.

Contest Jet Train Winners

First | Second | Third | Fourth | Fifth | Sixth | Seventh | Eighth | Ninth | Tenth

(only 10 will win, then be mentioned in movie - Blogging the Movie)

List

Blogging the Movie
Cash for Comments
John Chow
Dosh Dosh
Ms. Danielle
Enkay
Mr. Gary Lee
Why Go Elsewhere
Jamaipanese
Betshopboy
Contest Blogger
Online Opportunity
Derrich
Net Business Journal
Bloggrrl
Roberta Ferguson
The Prize Blog
Jason’s Random Thoughts
Nice4Rice
Rob Neville
Earn Money Online 
Paradise Philippines
Melo Villareal Photo Blog

Add your 3 blogs here.

This Contest Jet Train is the innovation of the Sneaky Bastard at Cash for Comments dot com.

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If you were not tagged, you can still copy the list and add yourself on. No worries, it’s a win-win for everyone.  If I see a backlink from you for this link train, I’ll add your site the very same day

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I’ve been reading quite a bit online about whether we should be prefixing websites with www or not, and it seems that I’m quite old-fashioned about the whole prefix thing.

The No-www initiative involves making all websites accessible from both the http://www.example.com/ and http://example.com/ forms of their names.  The reasoning behind this, is to standardize domain names providing web content and to avoid extraneous typing.  This can also be viewed as an extension of URL canonicalization, where URLs are modified and standardized in a consistent manner so that it’s possible to determine if two syntactically different URLs are the same.

Ah, I’ve been waiting so long to use those words in a sentence….

I’m sure it’s just a decade of personal preference, but I would rather see the www in place.  I know that there are many corporate sites and uncounted numbers of blogs out there without the triple-w prefix, however, seeing this prefix makes it immediately intuitive what www.example.com will resolve to - the domain’s webserver.  We know that ftp.example.com will point to a FTP server, and mail.example.com will point to a mail server … so why drop the www ?

Before installing Justin Shattuck’s WWW Redirect plugin, my host would allow people to come to this site with or without the www.  This was fine for most readers, but I found out later that it was causing a few issues with duplicate content on search engines.  To that end, I installed this plugin and forced every address to prefix with www if a user (or search engine) didn’t pass it.

I can certainly understand why short 15 or 30 second commercials might not want to waste time or screen space saying “www”, but let’s not kill the prefix just yet.

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The Dailymail seems to have gotten their hands on a video of a potential UFO sighting in Warwickshire, the town where Shakespeare was born.

This is just the latest in a string of recent UFO sightings over the UK in recent months, and it makes me wonder if they’re responding to the image of Homer, chalked out not too far from the famous Cerne Abbas giant (pictured below).

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EDIT: It’s come to my attention that the information this post was based on was false, and that Governor Schwarzenegger has not publicly announced any plans to fund a fusion reactor based on Dr. Bussard’s Inertial Electrostatic Fusion reactor designs. In the effort of transparency, I will leave the post up and vow to exercise due diligence in the future.

Governor Schwarzenegger is a bit of a heretic in government.  It seems that every time you turn around, he’s accomplishing another goal.  Be it in the fight against pollution, or the war against drugs, this man is on a mission and nothing is going to get in his way.

Of course, it’s because of his vision that he makes such an effective leader, and I respect the man for all his accomplishments.

So it comes as no surprise that word on the wire is that the Governor is looking to further cement his Earth-friendly image by launching a $200-million effort into the most efficient and non-polluting power generation technologies known to man.

Using technologies devised by Dr. Robert W. Bussard, the project is focussed on the Inertial Electrostatic Fusion reactor.  This radiation free fusion reactor has the potential to change the whole landscape of energy generation, which has typically been served by nuclear, hydro, coal and natural gas technologies.

As of 2006, California’s peak energy usage was about 40,000 MegaWatts and is expected to steadily grow at about 3% annually.  Fusion energy opens a whole new avenue of incredibly clean energy that could not only satisfy the growing energy needs, but also power massive desalination plants that could help reduce the state’s severe water shortages.

Fusion is not to be confused with fission.  Fission, used in our current nuclear power plants, is the process where unstable heavy atoms are split into radioactive atoms.  Fusion, however, is the process of merging two lighter atoms.  This process is the most abundant energy source found in the universe, and is found at the core of every star.

Dr. Bussard’s fusion process takes boron-11 and a proton, then fuses them together to produce an excited carbon-12 atom.  This excited atom then decays into one beryllium-8 atom and one helium-4.  The beryllium-8 then decays 10 seconds later into two more helium-4 atoms.  This is the only nuclear-energy releasing process in the world that releases energy and three helium atoms, with no neutrons.  This process is also 100% free of radiation.

The potential energy output of a single Electric Fusion reactor would be anywhere between 100 and 1,000 MegaWatts and would provide enough power for a quarter-million homes.  The expected cost of such a reactor is in the neighbourhood of $200-million USD, making it a bargain when compared to France’s planned $12-billion ITER reactor.

The potential benefits of this technology are enormous, and could open the doors to new ideas never before considered feasible.  Imagine having a few of these in every country, producing zero emissions and fuelling everyone’s electric-hydrogen vehicles.  Imagine space probes being sent out into the voids of space with power supplies that could allow the vessel to operate at 100% power levels for millenium.  Imagine having enough power at your disposal to pump drinkable water to anywhere on the planet.

Perhaps this vision is a bit altruistic but, with more politicians like Governor Schwarzenegger in power, it could become a reality.

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And here I thought that I was just going crazy …

The last few weeks I’ve noticed that Technorati has been having some difficulties with their pages.  Quite often I would open their site to see if any of my favourites had updated, only to find that my favourites had all vanished.  Often this would repair itself after a few hours … but that’s not the point.  Then the site’s login methods changed earlier this week and that had to be re-configured.  Then I notice that some of their crawlers are taking forever to update sites, but considering the number of blogs they monitor, I can certainly understand why some days will see a nine to ten hour delay in updating pages.

But earlier today when I tried to visit my site and found that, yet again, it was slower than grandma on the freeway, I was none too happy.  Turns out the Technorati Search plugin was to blame.

Last weekend the SETI@Home servers went down, and this was causing one of my other plugins to timeout, which meant that visitors had to wait about 61 seconds to see my site.  I don’t know about you, but unless I’m trying to Google instructions on removing snake poison while on dialup using a cell phone in the middle of a predator-filled Chilaen rain forest, I never wait 61 seconds for a page to load.  Even though SETI’s servers are back up, I think I’ll leave the plugin off for a little bit.

However, today’s slowdown was actually caused by Technorati being offline for a bit.  According to their blog, much of San Francisco lost power, and Technorati’s offices were subject to darkness.  What’s interesting is that their backup generators didn’t kick in to prevent the servers from going offline, but I guess this will keep their IT people busy for the next little bit.

They’re currently getting the crawlers up and running, so hopefully downtime will be minimal.

With all the websites out there that rely on content from other sources, it’s absolutely amazing how much of the world can be affected when certain parts of the web are missing.  This has certainly given me much to think about in terms of how I can re-write some of my PHP and 3rd-party plugins to react to such failures, and I think some of the solutions can be done relatively quickly.  It’s quite funny that I let my site get in to such a situation in the first place.

What plans do you have in place for events like this?  If sections of your site need to call to other servers, do you load those services last?  I’m interested to know what your take on the matter is.

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