John Gall Internet Income And PC Tips And Tools

I’ve learned in the past 18 months that managing my life works much better if I manage it like my business. At work for years i’ve managed my team using MBO’s or Management By Objectives. This involves setting goals on a periodic basis and then scoring the goals at the end of the period. This year I decided to lay out some goals I have for myself for 2010. Last year I was focused on getting out of debt which went well. I paid off all my credit cards, my own vehicles and my primary residence. So my goals for 2010 are as follows.
1: Pay My Taxes By 4/15/2010
2: Complete the Learning Spanish software packages I received for Christmas 2009 and start another course preferrably a tutor or class to learn to speak and read Espanol.
3: Pay off my wife’s truck
4: Purchase one additional rental property

I’m sure as 2010 begins i’ll have new goals but for now I see 1 and 2 being accomplished in the first 6 months. Hopefully by years end i’ll have all goals met.

I tried to install a newer version of PHP last night and discovered that PHP5ISAPI.DLL was missing, completely gone and my web server would no longer show any PHP content. I even tried a few versions older and still the PHP5ISAPI.DLL was missing. After some messing around I learned that the folks who make PHP have discontinued using PHP5ISAPI.DLL and replaced it with something called FastCGI. You can get both FASTCGI and PHP installed at the Microsoft Web Platform Installer website. I still was not able to get it to work and needed my stuff back online so I uninstalled all PHP installs and just reinstalled an older one that will use ISAPI and my stuff is back online. I’ll try getting FASTCGI working with PHP on a test server before I attempt another PHP upgrade.

Holidays are great ways to provide useful content. They do require yearly updating but can be a great way to provide a service and generate revenue. A great example is my USPS Holidays 2010 website. A year ago I discovered that every time there is a holiday people want to know what the USPS Holiday dates are and whether they’ll get mail on certain holidays. So I created a website that lists all the holidays in 2009 that the USPS celebrates and does not deliver mail. This makes for an easy lookup for folks to determine if they will get mail that day. I just updated the website for 2010 and it took about 5 minutes and is good to go for another year. I may start a blog on it to deliver more specific information each holiday.

Ok this topic has been done before but I still had trouble with it so I decided to make some notes on my Adsense blog in hopes of simplifying the process and maintaining it for myself in the future. If you want to do some split testing of your Adsense ad blocks ( Commonly called A/B testing). You’ll need to first create two ad blocks with a unique channel assigned to each. I am usually testing differen’t sizes like a 300×250 vs 468×60 so I name my Adsense channels with 300 after one and 468 after the other, or you could use red or blue if you were testing colors etc. So now that you have the code for your two ad blocks paste both into Notepad so you can work with them. Now take this code and paste it into your website or blog where you want the ad block to appear.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
    var random_number = Math.random();
    if (random_number < .5){
        //your first ad unit code goes here
    } else {
        //your second ad unit code goes here
    }
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”     src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”></script>

Ok now the tricky part. Where it says “//your second ad unit code goes here” or “//your first ad unit coes here” remove that and replace it with the INSIDE of your Google Adsense ad block. Here’s my code below. Notice I only included the code that starts with that is the tricky part. So the part I inserted from my code is in red. Enjoy your testing.

So you have the Windows Picture And Fax Viewer set to open TIF and TIFF files but when you try to open one in your IE browser it fails and you see QuickTime trying to open your TIFF files. Here’s how to stop QuickTime from trying to open TIFF or TIF files in your IE browser.
First start up QuickTime by clicking Start, Programs, Quicktime and then run Quicktime Player.
When QuickTime Player is open click Edit and click Preferences and QuickTime Preferences.
Click the Browser tab and click the MIME Settings button.
Click into the Images section and uncheck the box next to TIFF Image.
Click Ok
Click the File Types tab and verify that TIFF is also unchecked in there.
This should now cause your IE browser to use the Windows Picture And Fax Viewer when opening TIFF files.

The Outlook Autocomplete List or Outlook Nickname Cache is the lists of names that is shown when you start addressing and email using the To: CC: or BCC: field. It may be however that you want to start a new Outlook autocomplete list or maybe you want to prevent anyone from seeing who is on your Outlook autocomplete list. To clear the Outlook autocomplete list you want to start a new NK2 file. The easiest way to do this is to let Outlook create a new blank one after you delete or rename the curent NK2 file.
Close Outlook 2003 or 2007
Look in c:\documents and settings\username\application data\microsot\outlook on Windows XP or on Vista c:\user\appdata\roaming\microsoft\outlook for a file ending in NK2 then rename or delete the NK2 file and reopen Outlook. This will cause the Autocomplete list to be blank and it will build as you send emails.

If you are seeing an error in Outlook 2007 that states Cannot Send This Item when trying to reply to an email or forward an email it could be related to an image in the signature of the email you are trying to reply or forward to. A workaround to get emails in Outlook 2007 to reply and forward without the Cannot Send This Item error is to change the format of the reply or forward from html to rich text. Changing to rich text seems to convert the body of the email to the more secure rich text vs html which likley has a security problem with the graphic embedded in the signature. To change the message to rich text click on Options on the Outlook 2007 ribbon. Then in the Format section change to Rich Text. Then hit send and your message will go.

If you are a landlord in Minnesota and your tenant doesn’t pay early you’ve probably received all the rental income you are going to receive in 2009. This means you can go ahead and get your MN Renter Rebate forms to your tenants. These are also known as the Certificate Of Rent Paid which your tenant can use to obtain a refund based on rent paid during the year 2009. The idea is that rent paid is used by the landlord to pay property taxes so the state of Minnesota gives your tenant a refund based on the amount of rent paid during the year. There is a fine if you do not get the forms out by the end of January 2010 so be proactive if you can to stay out of trouble with the state.