Obscure Mania

Just took and passed my two tests from CompTIA and now have an A+ certification. After going through the prep classes at the college here, it was about six months later that I took the tests. Only using the original textbook, the practice exams on the included CD, I did pretty good. Since CompTIA doesn’t show you what you missed, I don’t know exactly what I got wrong on my two tests.

I took 601 and 602. Essentials and IT Technician exams. There were some questions in common from the two, but since I wasn’t sure I got them right the first time, hopefully I got them right the second time. If you have to retake a test, the only guide of what you missed is a summary of the “areas” where you got one or more questions wrong.

I looked everywhere I could for practice test questions, but they are few and far between unless you want to pay. The practice questions that come with the book were good but there were a lot of repeats. Four tests for each section (601, 602, 603, 604) fifty questions each. Out of 200 possible questions, I don’t know how many were unique, but I would guess about half, maybe more were actually unique.

This book is huge, over 1000 pages. After looking at reviews and other books on Amazon, I believe this is one of the best. I was looking for a smaller “cramming” book, but other book are just as big and it’s a little hard to cram for this test other than reading, doing the chapter questions and practice tests, start two weeks before you are scheduled to take the tests. I would love an audio version so I could listen while driving, but can’t find many technical books on audio, even though studies show you have better retention listening than reading.

It’s a nice start since this certification is one of the requirements on most computer jobs.  Not only do I get college credit for taking the classes, but the college gives a half price discount for the tests.

CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide, Sixth Edition

On one of my other sites, I mentioned one of the companies I recently worked for. My goal was to take over the number one position in Google with my site instead of their own. They have absolutely no on-site or any off-site SEO for this company name / keyword, the only thing I have to overcome is age and the company name in the URL. Pretty easy. It’s not even a fair fight, but why should it be? If you have the company name in your URL, why go for anything else? If your website is only a brochure and your business doesn’t come from your website don’t bother doing anything else. But if you’re website is a recruiting tool or is your way of getting new customers, you have to make more of an effort of getting your “brochures” out in front of your customers.

This isn’t much of an exercise or even much work. This is more of a personal project. I need to find a keyword with competition like this that will make money, but that’s the goal for all of us.

I have a couple of trucking sites that have a ton of authority, age, PR, content etc… Just linking to the new site has helped it a lot. After a few weeks here’s where I’m at.

Search Engine Update

My little search engine experiment is going pretty well. Three of my sites are on the front page for just a straight clark transfer search in google. Why aren’t they number one? Age has a lot of authority in Google so it takes some work to actually knock someone out of number one that’s been there for awhile, they have their name in their URL and besides, I’ve just started. Click the screen shots to enlarge.

But if you’re searching for driving for clark transfer in Google, as of this writing my sites are 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6. While clarktransfer.com is number 7. How does one site take up two positions? The short answer is that Google believes both pages have enough authority to be listed.

I got my last paycheck fine so why do this? For one, I hate companies that treat drivers like crap. I realize I could make a career doing this, but I know this one from first hand experience and it was really easy.

What about AOL, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines? Google gets 80% of the searches on the internet, everyone else splits the remaining 20%. AOL uses Google so they don’t even count. One of the reasons why Google is number one is they are constantly looking and indexing new content. Yahoo is good if you’re looking for old information. Yahoo doesn’t seem to send out its bots or search engine spiders very often or they don’t do as much work as Google. If you look for something that happened today, Google will probably have something indexed if it’s there today. Yahoo will show sites that have been there a long time with no recent information.

MSN (who?) has the same problem as Yahoo. They don’t have enough resources to keep up with the fast changing internet. Their listings are old and most aren’t relevant to what you’re looking for.

I listened to the unabridged version (full text read) from audible.com. My first impression – Great book. The first half was great, great situations and good action scenes. A little on the technical side, but not that much. The main detective character is computer and computer game illiterate so all of the technical details are explained.

The second half of the book, a little slow and as the technology gets more advanced, it gets a little unbelievable. You can see the ending coming from a few chapters away and the actual ending, doesn’t actually end. The book ends setup for another book.

Is it just me or I’d like to read a book that actually ends and I don’t have to wait a year for the next installment of the story, then it still doesn’t end. I listened to Stephan King’s Dark Tower, that was 6 books and the ending sucked, but it couldn’t really end in any other way. I read Eragon and the next book, but now I’ve heard that the third book in the trilogy isn’t the end and the plot was stretched so far it slowed down to make a third book.

Authors should finish a story and go on with the next one instead of trying to stretch the same story into another book or a long series of books.

And if I have it, how do I get rid of the Conficker virus? Stand up, run around your chair three times, sit back down, don’t buy all kinds of anti-spyware and anti-virus tools, don’t sign up for free scans or pay for someone to check for you. Don’t download some program that you know nothing about, making claims to clean your PC, speed it up and cure your cold.

This is what you must do, right now – R-E-L-A-X.

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If you don’t know the story of the two border agents being jailed you’ve been under a rock, but just in case a quick synopsis is one night on the Texas border two border agents were chasing someone that jumped out of a van full of marijuana and started running toward the border. One agent struggled with the suspect on the ground while his partner was coming up from behind.

The suspected drug dealer escaped from the agent and was running toward the border again as the two agents met, the suspected drug smuggler “turned with something shiny that appeared like a gun” according to the agents and the agents fired at the drug smuggler.

Thinking they missed, because the drug smuggler escaped across the border. Other agents and a supervisor arrived at the scene. What seemed like just another non-incident on the border, they did their oral report to their supervisor and picked up their empty brass, then went on with their patrol.

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What if Thomas Paine, the writer of Common Sense was alive today? That’s the premise of this video. I agree with most except for:

Term Limits: There probably should be term limits, but two may be too few for the House, that’s only four years. How about an age limit? Especially some of these old farts in the Senate, how much work do they do nowadays anyway?

Abolish the Electoral College? The electoral college allows the rest of the country to participate in the Presidential election instead of the two population centers of NYC and LA. You want the most liberal areas or the country to have control of the President? When it works, there’s nothing wrong with the electoral college

Required Service: Maybe. I don’t want the draft for the military. The military is the best in the world because it’s all volunteer. Draft people for the Peace Corps. You can’t force people to be grateful.

Don’t know who Thomas Paine is? Or his pamphlet Common Sense? Went to public school in the last 15 years? Thanks goodness for the Internet. Here’s a good place to start: Thomas Paine’s Common Sense

There are certain ways to speed up the process of building WordPress blogs. Why would you want to build multiple blogs? It’s part of Internet Marketing and creating Niche Blogs and there are other reasons why you would want to create a simple, WordPress blog fast.

The sound is a little screwed up because I was trying to cut the file size down. If it’s an issue, let me know.

This isn’t an Internet Marketing blog, but I am familiar with making money online myself and I know others that do as well. A few of the tools listed here like OpenX are designed for websites that make money through advertising.

There’s a dark side to the MMO niche. There are Internet Marketeers that prey on the dreams of people looking to make money online. People spend hundreds and sometimes thousands only to find out the secret of making money online is to sell crap to new people that don’t know any better.

One of those appears to be Site Build It. If you ever run across this “business opportunity” run, don’t walk. Don’t take my opinion on it, look at people I know that are sincere and honest in their teachings about making money online and telling the truth to people trying to make money online the right way. Vic at Bloggerunleashed has one of his famous post blasting Dr. Ken Evoy, Griz’s post about the Site Build it Scam at Make Money Online for Beginners and the post that started the firestorm Lissie’s Review of Site Build It, Steve’s Is Site Build It A Scam? post and another Site Build it Scam post from Jeremy.

If you’re ever looking at how to really make money online, look at those people above for the honest truth about making money online – It can be done and it takes a lot of work and most get rich quick schemes are the same as they are in real life, just scams.

This is the third and final video in a series about Installing OpenX. In this episode I show how to install the OpenX ad code into a WordPress blog.

Once you followed the first part of this series and OpenX is installed on your server or you have created an account on OpenX hosted, you’re ready to create your first ad campaign.

This is part 2 in a series about installing OpenX. This episode shows how to create an ad campaign, web zones, creating banners and linking banners to zones.

Part 1: Installing OpenX
Part 3: OpenX Installing Ad Code in WordPress