The Random Blogger

Years (and years) ago, when I first started working in what used to be called Data Processing before it was renamed as Information Technology, there was a cartoon strip going around that was affectionately known as “The Swing”.

It was one of those things that, like Dilbert, is both true to life but sad at the same time, and my much-photocopied version has long since been lost.

However, I was delighted to uncover, tonight, an updated version of this classic cartoon, which you can find at:

http://www.dlevel.com/blogs/alex/images/software_development.jpg

Enjoy!

Anybody who earns their money from the Internet these days knows the need to generate backlinks to their site - and preferably one-way links, as the days of reciprocal (aka two-way) links are maybe not dead, but they’re certainly not in the best of health any longer.

And while you can still try to contact webmasters and ask for a link back to your site, this is a lot of effort and is a lot harder to succeed at these days than it was several years ago.

Internet marketers are nothing if not creative, and so the concept of three-way links and one-way links building services was born.

There has been some debate for years about whether Google can detect a three-way linking network, and I have to confess that I’m sitting on the fence on this issue at the moment.

But one-way link networks - that’s a whole different ball-game!

Jonathan Leger’s 1WayLinks is a great service, maybe the best - until I heard about the imminent launch of a new service called ezArticleLink.

This new service, which is due to launch on 22 February 2010, takes the one-way linking concept even further by automatically building one-way links to the sites that have one-way links back to your site.

(You may need to read that previous paragraph a few times for it to sink in.)

It looks as though they will have two membership levels - a free Silver level and a paid Gold level - and for the next couple of days, you can sign up to be an ezArticleLink JV Partner, get a free Silver account and earn passive income from people who sign up under you (as well as account credits when they have articles they submit approved).

If this sounds a bit garbled, then apologies, but I’ve only just come across this and thought I’d let people know about it, given that the pre-launch phase is almost over.

Anyway, it’s free to sign up as a JV Partner, and you do get a free Silver account, so what have you got to lose?

I’m certainly going to give it a go, and will try to report back on how well it works at a later date.

There are many ways that you can have a healthy diet.

For example, you could eat less food, although calorie-counting is not necessarily the best way for long-term weight loss and may not make your diet any healthier.

Or you could try food-combining, which can make sure your body receives the right balance of nutrients.

Or, you could eat “the right food”, whatever that may mean today (as the medical profession change their minds about what is healthy or not on an all-too-frequent basis).

And part of deciding what is “right” or not is based on the ingredients.

Which is why manufacturers nowadays are obliged to print details on the label - so you can see exactly what is in the product.

But there is, of course, a problem with this - the number of unhealthy ingredients that are in some of these foods.

As an example, let’s take a product called Chef Boyardee Beefaroni, which is basically macaroni and beef in a tomato sauce.

The version we’re interested in here comes in a 14.5 oz (or 411.068085 grams for you metric people) microwavable tub.

The first two things we look at on any food label are the amounts of trans fats and sodium in the product.

Now, the good news with Beefaroni is that there are no trans fats.

However, the amount of sodium is somewhat scary - 920mg, which represents 38% of your RDA (i.e. Recommended Daily Allowance):

Just by itself, nearly a whole gram of salt in such a small tub of food is too much …

… but then you realise that this 14.5oz tub is meant to contain nearly two servings, not just one - they claim the serving size is 249 grams (or 8.78 ounces).

I don’t know about you, but half a tub of Beefaroni is not going to cut it - even as a snack. Even a full tub needs topping up with something to transform it into something worth eating.

And in case you can’t see what the wording says on the left of the label, let me spell it out for you - it says “Big Size Bowl - For Big Appetites“.

Yes, it’s true - for those people who don’t have a “big appetite”, they also make this product in a 7.5oz (or 212 grams) tub, although I’m not sure who the target audience is for this size of Beefaroni, as even our Chihuahua could polish that off without any trouble.

Anyway, back to the label.

So, once you realise that in spite of what they say the serving size is, you actually need to eat the entire tub to even begin to feel like you’ve eaten anything at all, you find that you’re actually eating almost 1.5 grams of salt, and that means you’ll be consuming nearly two thirds of your daily sodium requirements - in a single small tub.

And that’s why they quote their nutritional facts using absurdly small serving sizes - because if they showed the size of portion that most real people eat, some of those nutritional figures (especially the sodium content) would be so high that nobody in their right mind would buy them.

While working on one of our many websites a day or two ago, I found a really cool image magnification effect that I’d not seen before.

Eager to track it down, my first port of call was my favourite site for this type of script, Dynamic Drive, and lo and behold, I found it instantly.

It’s called jQuery Image Magnify v1.1, and it’s dead easy to install (and it works on IE, Firefox and Opera).

Give it a try - you’ll love it!

One of my favourite recent finds in the world of music is a group that has actually been around since 1987 or so: the Gipsy Kings.

Yes, as is often the case, I’m way behind the times when it comes to music, but the fact that their music is still available shows just how popular this group is.

They come from southern France, not far from the Spanish border, and their music, and their voices, are distinctive, but perhaps hard to classify - the nearest I can come up with is flamenco, but it’s more than that.

I first came across them when watching The Heist (a pretty good movie starring Pierce Brosnan and Tom Skerritt), where their version of the famous song My Way is played (except they call it Mi Manera, and, at the expense of upsetting Frank Sinatra fans, I actually prefer it to his version).

Anyway, well worth checking out!

… are OK for adults but not for children?

Many children may grow up without friends for any number of reasons, and in most cases, having an imaginary friend to share their days with probably causes no lasting harm. It’s a habit most children grow out of, once the need disappears.

And yet their parents will often see this as a bad thing, and try to stifle their children’s imagination and creativity.

But what about the socially-acceptable imaginary friend that a huge percentage of the world’s population talks to?

I am, of course, talking about (more…)

Gastromyopia is the condition that most of us are familiar with, which describes the situation where our eyes are bigger than our stomach.

Did you hear about the man who suffered from premature ejaculation but didn’t tell his girlfriend?

It was a case of the sin of emission.

I’d never really thought about this matter until one of our customers asked us a question about it, but did you know that there are different canine blood groups?

According to Wikipedia, there are as many as 13 dog blood types, and of these, eight of the so-called Dog Erythrocyte Antigen (DEA) types are internationally-recognised as standard canine blood types.

And, just like humans, some dogs’ blood type can be considered a universal donor type (that would be DEA 1.1. Negative, in techno-speak).

Conversely, others that are known as DEA 1.1 Positive (which represents just over one third of the canine population) are universal recipients, which means that they can receive transfusions from any canine blood type without risk of adverse reactions.

My brief research took me further, and at a bit of a tangent, as I found that there are even different diets for different blood types, which is an interesting concept I may pursue, if and when I get the time.

(See my previous post, My Internal Jukebox for what this category is all about.)