Blow That Computer!

Some time in the middle of 2008, we bought a couple of Alienware M7700 laptops, which for the most part have been very good.

However, towards June or July 0f 2009, mine started to make strange bleeping noises, and both the Caps Lock and Num Lock indicators would flash a few times – anywhere from two to six times, on average.

We couldn’t find any documentation that would tell us what this meant, although it didn’t look or sound healthy, so we contacted the company we bought the laptop from to ask them.

Weeks went by, and no response, but I thought, no problem, as the bleeping and flashing had stopped.

Until a week or two ago, that is.

Now, we live in a mountainous area of Arizona, where it’s permanently windy, with dust and other crap blowing around all the time, which means all of this stuff settles all over the house all of the time – especially as we have seven dogs as well to help spread it around.

So, we were looking around the laptop, to see what, if anything, we could find, and when we checked underneath, we noticed that all of the fans were more or less clogged up with dust bunnies.

I was all for ordering one of those micro-vacuum cleaners that are especially designed for computer keyboards, but we couldn’t find one that had good reviews, so in the end we bought Read more…

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How Much Would You Pay To Save Your Cat?

Today, I was shocked to learn from one of our customers that her vet had tried to charge her $12,000 USD to save one of her cats from Feline Distemper (aka Feline Panleukopenia, and which is the feline version of Canine Parvovirus).

Whichever way you look at it, that’s a huge cost, but what makes this even worse is that the vet failed to save this cat, and was all for killing the lady’s other three cats on the grounds that they would probably die in a day or two as well.

Fortunately, apart from the fact that one of her cats didn’t survive, the rest of this particular story has a happy ending – she refused to accept the vet’s recommendation to murder her cats (although they call it “euthanising” or “putting to sleep”), contacted us and was able to save all three of her other cats using safe, chemical-free natural products, and for less than $150 USD (and that included the cost of overnight shipping).

We see this sort of thing all the time, although not usually with such astronomical figures, and, sadly, far too many people will believe what their vets tell them and kill their pets without even giving them a chance of pulling through.

Most vets aren’t aware of these herbal alternatives, and those that are tend to be very dismissive – not that they usually have any experience of such products, of course.

Previous to this, I’d heard from a few other customers that they’d been quoted $10,000 USD to save a dog from Parvo, but $12,000 USD, for a smaller animal, is outrageous.

So, if there is a lesson to be learned from all of this, it’s this: question everything, because in our extensive experience of helping pet owners treat both Canine Parvovirus and Feline Distemper at home, vets don’t always know best, and are all too quick to recommend euthanasia (which can cost more than the usually effective herbal solution) without exploring other options that can be both cheaper and more successful.

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Website Not Accessible

A few days ago, I bought a website from somebody, and the first thing I did was accept the domain name transfer into my own registrar account.

Next, I logged into my cPanel to make sure I could access that, as the site was hosted with a company I’d never used before.

I also got hold of the FTP details so that I could download a copy of the entire site to my hard drive.

My next step was to log into the server using my FTP client, and begin the download.

And that’s when things started to go screwy!

Firstly, Read more…

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Validate Your CSS!

Today, I continued my lessons on CSS.

I’d spent a fair while trying to work out why a new site I’m working on looked great in Avant Browser (which is essentially Internet Explorer), but in Firefox, it wasn’t picking up my stylesheet at all.

Being aware that Firefox does have a few “quirks”, I started doing my research, on Google, trying to find out what might be the cause of this problem.

I was led up a couple of garden paths before I came across the blindingly obvious way to diagnose the problem – validate your CSS!

As I had subsequently found that the same issues were present with both Safari and Opera and thus realised it probably was something fundamentally wrong with my code, I heeded the advice, popped over to the W3C CSS Validation Service, pasted in my CSS code and clicked the Check button.

Sure enough, it found a parsing error – there was a round bracket instead of a curly bracket! – which I fixed and, lo and behold, my stylesheet was now being picked up and used in all four browsers, looking exactly as it was meant to.

So, my lesson for the day is: validate your CSS code, as it’s a lot quicker than spending hours of frustrating research that may not lead you anywhere.

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How To Create Pull Quotes Using CSS

I wasn’t exactly looking for this information – in fact, I can’t remember what I was actually searching for – but I have filed it away in my swipe file of potentially useful code.

What are pull quotes?

Well, they look like this:

And if you want to know how to create them on your website, here’s the link:

http://www.sitepoint.com/test/pullquote.htm

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What I Learned Today

I’m starting a new category today, called “What I Learned Today”.

I’ve always believed that if I don’t learn something new, every single day, then that day has been wasted.

So, this new category is an attempt at documenting what it is I learned each day.

Now, remember, this blog is random thoughts and random posts, so there’s a good chance I won’t actually post something every single day.

This does not mean that I didn’t learn anything (and even if I do post, it doesn’t mean I only learned one thing) – it probably means I’ve not found time to write a post about it, as time is the one commodity I have very little of, given my other commitments and projects.

Anyway, maybe you’ll learn something from what I’ve learned, so enjoy!

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Traffic Armada – 50 Ways To Get Traffic To Your Site

Although this one’s not free, it’s so cheap it may as well be!

Traffic Armada consists of 52 professionally-recorded videos that cover the 50 different ways to get traffic to your site – fast.

You’ll learn both basic and advanced techniques, how to get traffic for free, as well as much, much more.

All of these videos are supported by a 31-page PDF guide that summarises the techniques taught on the videos.

I’m not going to spoil it by telling you how much this mammoth video tutorial series costs, but if you hurry, it works out at less than $0.20 USD per method.

Even at the regular price, it’s a steal, but if you go there quickly, look for a purple rhinoceros at the bottom of the page, because if that’s clickable, you’ll save even more money!

I highly recommend Traffic Armada – if you’re a complete novice at Internet marketing, then this is a gold mine of information that could otherwise take you years to accrue, and if you’ve already got some experience, you’ll still learn things you didn’t already know.

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Attract Highly Targeted Free Traffic With Unique Content To Your Niche Blogs – Automatically!

It’s time for another freebie for you!

If you run any blogs, then you’ll know that keeping them up-to-date with fresh and unique content (as Google especially prefers this to what they call duplicate content) can be a real challenge.

Yes, it’s nice to write your own articles, put your thoughts out there for the world to read (and criticise, maybe), and whatever else you want or need to tell people about, but we don’t always have time to do that as often as we’d like.

Well, that’s where today’s free report comes in – it shows you a quick and easy way to add unique content to your blog in a truly set-it-and-forget-it way.

And the best part about this is … it’s 100% free!

So, download your free report by right-clicking on the ebook cover and selecting the Save Target As…(or Save Link As…) to save it to your computer, and enjoy fresh content as often as you want.

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