Random Order Weblog - Nothing’s too random!

Note: You can get Harry Potter Ringtones by clicking here.

Recently I’ve been going through a ring tone / ringtone craze and had to get me some Harry Potter ringtones. As I browsed the web looking for the best place to get Harry Potter ringtones I finally found one site that has a ton: Thumbplay. They have a ton of different Harry Potter ringtones to choose from, and the best thing is that they have a ring tone promotion going on right now where when you subscribe you get 10 bonus ring tones for free. Unfortunately for me they also have more than 10 Harry Potter ring tones to choose from, so I was actually able to use up the entire ringtone bonus and still didn’t have all the Harry Potter ringtones . I know, I’m an addict… but hopefully most of the people reading this blog are big Harry Potter fans too . Okay enough blabbing–if you’re looking for Harry Potter ring tones, you can get ‘em by clicking this link

And just because I’m so nice I threw in a Harry Potter picture .

So with the new (and final) season of The Sopranos just around the corner, I decided to jump the gun a bit and see if I could find some Sopranos ringtones.� Luckily, it wasn’t too difficult and I managed to find the Sopranos ring tone over on the thumb play website (click here if you want to get the ringtone) fairly quickly.� Good stuff!� Love the Sopranos, and love the Sopranos ring tone even more

Aside from my love for the Sopranos ring tone (I’m kind of a ringtone buff) I am also looking forward to this new season.� A lot of people really slammed the last season, but I didn’t think it was too bad, just not everything we’d anticipated and hoped for.� We’ll see if in the end the Sopranos lives up to its hype that it has rightfully earned, particularly earlier in the series, or if it flops.� I’m crossing my fingers hoping it’ll be a great finale to a great show.� In the mean time, I’ll just hang out and enjoy my Sopranos ringtones .

Get Sopranos Ring Tones / Ringtones here.

Note: this post is a paid review of the ReviewMe.com site.

I was reading Aaron Wall’s blog over at www.SEOBook.com, and saw a new post about a service that he himself had actually released (I assume he is part of a team). The idea is a very cool one, and reminds me of what the founding principles for text link ads were just a few years ago. At that time, straight text links were really the key to high search engine rankings, and SEOs (as well as regular old web masters) were throwing money at anyone with a high PR site.

Today, what SEOs and site owners are looking for with regard to Google is a little more difficult to find. People are looking for contextual, relevant links that are incorporated into text and are on quality sites. Quality sites is no longer synonymous with high PageRank; today, the quality of a site is dependent on a number of factors, perhaps most importantly the concept of “Trust.” Is the site linked to by reputable sites? Does it have a natural linking structure? Or does it look like another SEOd spam site? The links you want are the ones from the most legitimate sites.

To the best of my knowledge, prior to the release of ReviewMe, no company has served as a facilitator for finding these kinds of links. I love the ReviewMe idea, which is essentially that blog owners could earn money by writing reviews of relevant sites on their blogs. The owner of the site being reviewed would then pay the blog owner and get a quality, contextual back link in return. All around a great deal, and a great company idea.

Having just graduated from college, I was getting ready to send out my resume to a number of prospective employers, but when I opened up the old file I quickly saw that what I had prepared a few years ago wouldn’t get me much attention. The resume looked dull and didn’t stand out, not to mention the fact that it was outdated and didn’t include my degree information or most recent employment history.

So, being the internet geek that I am, I of course began searching the web for a site that could help me put together a resume that would blow the others out of the water. I found a number of good sites explaining how to write a resume, and I feel like what I have now is a solid, well rounded, unique resume that will stand out and get me some attention.

Now that I have what I feel is a solid resume, I’ve sent it around to friends and family to get their input. I always find that it is hard to judge your own writing objectively, and hopefully this feedback will give me a unique perspective and ideally reveal some problems I might not otherwise have realized.

Once my counterparts have reviewed the resume, I’m going to look around at online job sites and also contact the career center at my old school (UCSC) to see what employers look best based on my individual skill set. I’m thinking of something that combines the tech industry with financial services—maybe a Wall Street type of firm with an emphasis on technology. The best, of course, would be a Venture Capital job, but those are just way too competitive for new college grads to really stand a chance, at least from what I have heard. I will probably try a few just in case, though, and I will be sure to keep the blog updated with my progress.

Later this year I will be taking a couple weeks off for a vacation somewhere outside of the United States.   I spent a year living in Denmark and traveled all over Europe, and while that was absolutely incredible, it has also made me want to travel in a “new,” less heavily traveled area.  I’m thinking that a trip to India could be just what I need.  Perhaps it is because I work with so many Indians on the internet and they have piqued my curiosity, or maybe it is just because India is a little bit more unique than the typical vacation destination; either way, I’m feeling pretty sure about it.

The question, then, is where in India is the best place for a tourist with absolutely no familiarity of the area to go?  I have had a couple recommendations from Indian friends online, including Tamil Nadu, Orissa, and Bihar.  Tamil Nadu is a state on the southern tip of India, while Orissa is an eastern Indian state about “mid-way” up.  Finally, Bihar is close to Orissa but a little further north.

While this is a good starting point, it is also obvious that I am going to have to narrow my selection as I am the kind of person that likes to relax in one place when I’m on vacation.  I don’t like to feel like I have more work to do when I’m away than when I’m home.  So with that in mind, I will be doing some reading on Orissa travel options as well as on Bihar travel and Tamil Nadu travel.  I think a good starting point is the forums, so that is where I’ll begin, and just sort of ask around and see what others have to say about these regions.  There is certainly no shortage of help to be found on the internet.

So maybe I am a little late, but I thought I should do a quick post on Halloween.  Chris and I both dressed up as “ninjas” (pardon my ignorance for those who are well-informed on martial arts). At first, we were trying to throw together costumes with things we had laying around the house, but we both ended up looking pretty silly and people couldn’t really tell what we were.  That would simply not do, so we started searching online for ninja costumes and what we ended up doing was purchasing costume materials from real martial arts sites.

There are a number of quality websites out there that can provide martial arts supplies that are completely authentic.  Although authenticity wasn’t our number one concern (we just wanted people to understand what we were), it was a nice bonus.  We ended up buying a bunch of sparring gear and wearing that as our costumes, so we were sort of “ninjas in training.”  I thought it was pretty cool.

We started the night out by heading to the big “Castro” party in San Francisco.  It seemed pretty insane with literally thousands of people roaming the streets.  Quite a few of the party participants were pretty heavily inebriated, and you could sort of tell something bad was going to happen.

After about an hour of hanging out, we heard a banging noise that sounded link fireworks, so we turned to look and saw that what we had thought was the bang of a firecracker was actually a gun shot.  It was quickly followed by about 10 more.  The crowd started literally stampeding away, with some people even pulling down fences to get as far from the action as possible.  Chris and I, being the morons we are, just sort of stood there.  After about 30 seconds we went over to see if anyone needed help, but the police were already on the scene and asked us to leave.  It turns out that we had actually seen seven people get shot in some kind of gang related violence.  Crazy night, eh?

One thing I’ve learned since I began working on my own blog is that while blogs are fun and entertaining to keep, they don’t necessarily hit the ground running for everyone.  My blog gets what I would consider to be a medium amount of traffic… some days I get only 5-10 unique visitors, while other days I get closer to a hundred.  It really seems to be dependent on whether or not I have blogged on something that is currently in the news.  When I do that, I seem to get some traffic for a little while but it shortly trickles into nothing.

Since I would like to get a little more traffic to my blog, I have spent some time looking around for tips.  With blogging being as popular as it is today, it was not a problem to find some good sites with quality information on everything from releasing a new blog to boosting an old one.  Mine is sort of new, so I’ve followed the advice for new blogs.

Right off the bat I noticed that my blog is lacking in a couple departments that more experienced bloggers believe are very important.  For example, my about us page is.. well.. lacking.  I also do not know much about RSS, but I think that since I am using WordPress as my blog software I should have that all taken care of for me.  Other good tips were to include things like a Digg or Delicious button at the end of your posts so that it’s easy for your readers to actually promote your site to other potential visitors through bigger sites .   One final good point that I have definitely been neglecting is that it is generally a good idea to visit other blogs similar to yours and leave comments so that you get the word out about not only your blog, but yourself as an individual.

Everyone says that the real estate bubble has been building for years and is about to pop.  But guess what?  This is the same thing they were sayng years ago.  Now I’m not saying that they are wrong—there very well may be a real estate bubble just waiting to explode at any moment—but I will say that they (meaning almost every major economic magazine and author) was very wrong about the timing, and it has really cost me thousands of dollars.

For example, if you were to have purchased Breckenridge real estate or Summit County Real Estate just two years ago, you would have made an excellent return on your money.  It would certainly have been higher than anything you could find in a standard or even high yield savings account.

Why do I mention Breckenridge specifically?  Because Breckenridge is a place my family and I go on a regular basis for skiing.  While I’m on the topic, I would also strongly recommend skiing in Breckenridge, Colorado, to all of my readers.  You can plan your trip easily online these days and really save a lot of money.  You can also keep tabs on important things like the latest Breckenridge weather updates, snow conditions, etc. over the internet.

Back on topic, however, despite all my ranting I am still too afraid to purchase real estate.  The market is a cyclical one—something we have had proven to us time and time again for literally centuries, and right now, if you ask me or just about anyone else, we are on a very clear up tick.  The difficult part is not recognizing that, but instead it is recognizing how far up we are.  Are things about to turn down, flatten out, or are we just beginning our climb?  The answer is worth millions…

I have been looking for a while now for someone or some company to take care of some SEO and web design work I need done, particularly on some of my smaller projects that have literally dragged on for months simply because I have not had the time to deal with them myself.  While doing this, I have been frustrated by the fact that so many companies do either SEO or web design, but not both.  It seems to me that in the process of doing SEO you would be so exposed to HTML, PHP, etc., that you would, just by contact, have learned how to do web design as well.  Unfortunately that does not seem to (at least universally) be the case.

I have however found a few companies that are capable of doing both services.  Then, the issues is to find out if the company is good at both of them.  In my opinion, even if a company is good at one side, it is not a sure signal they will be good at the other.  For this reason it is my belief that you have to evaluate a company’s SEO abilities entirely independently from its programming or website design abilities.  The two are related, as I mentioned earlier in the article, simply because of a little overlap, but I do not think they are so closely related that you don’t need to consider them separately.

The other issue is, as usual, price.  Price is always a concern simply because of the wild variations you find when shopping on the internet—particularly for services like web design and SEO.  From my experience, price is really not at all related to quality.  Sometimes the best service providers also charge the least amount of money.

Now that I have my own blog and spend what I consider to be a fairly decent amount of time blogging, I have really come to understand why blogs became so popular. With my newfound respect for blogs, I’ve begun to looking around for interesting ones I can read and enjoy. Some of my favorites are those that belong to “gurus” in their particular industry. Sometimes such blogs can reveal unique tactics, marketing techniques, web development tips, etc., that I otherwise would never have thought of in a million years.

As I have grown to appreciate blogs more, I have also started to actively search for others that may also be of interest to not only myself, by my sites’ visitors. Then I can link to these blogs either so I personally remember where they are and to check up on them, or because I feel my visitors would like to know about them.

As I was searching for other blogs I came across something very cool—a directory, similar to the DMOZ and other major directories, but one that specializes in blog sites (blogoozle.com). So basically the site categorizes a huge number of blogs by subject matter, etc., and lets people like me who are looking for blog sites find them quickly and easily. Furthermore, this is a great way to find some of the lesser known blogs that haven’t been around for ages. When I use search engines to look for blogs, I find that they are generally older blogs that have just built up an insane amount of link popularity simply by virtue of being around forever. Often times newer sites offer just as much, or sometimes even more enlightening information, yet they are buried in the SERPs. The blog directory mentioned above really helps to get those kinds of blogs some more exposure.