Mrs. Mecomber’s Scrapbook

I have seen the Internet offer a lot of interesting stuff for sale, but this amazes me- police tactical gear! There’s everything from police mugs to baseball hats to tactical boots! See for yourself!

The prices are pretty good, actually! They also offer the Surefire flashlight, which is one of the best, I hear.

My sons would absolutely flip over this store. It was founded by police in Los Angeles, and has expanded to offer products to military personnel, professionals, and the public. The flashlights are a great deal…. no guns though! lol.

I gave Fida Abbott an internet award, but she rewarded me even more by telling me it was her first award given by a non-Indonesian! Woo! I am going down in Fida Abbott history! Check out her blog here. It’s a lovely blog, and I love her stories. 

And Hercules Mulligan is proudly showing off his award at Alexander Hamilton Patriot. Nice job, Herky!

As for the others… I haven’t even told them about their awards yet, oops.

I got an award! It comes from Elina at Immomsdaughter, a wonderful mommy blog from a lady raising two youngsters and a Big Kid in Malaysia.

Yippee! I have an Interesting Blog! I am pleased. Thank you so much for this honor, Elina. As a recipient of this award, I get to choose some winners!

Alexander Hamilton Patriot

The Handy Mom

Fida Abbott

Common Sense With Money

Frugal Dad

I’m sorry, I do not have any spectacular goodies to award you with– no bubble gum, no blue ribbons, not even used cisco equipment! But you get something better– you can put this button on your blog and give away some honors to your favorite bloggers.

I’m a BIG fan of the Firefox browser. It’s been having a few problems lately (usually happens after an update) and I think that my plugins may be going screwy on me. For some reason, Firefox won’t connect to the Internet when I use wireless. It’s driving me crazy! So I’ve been tinkering with the plugins. I hadn’t looked at their bank of plugins for a long time, and was surprised to see their “new look.” I was also surprised to be hundreds upon hundreds of plugins for everything to launching radio players to tips for acne treatment! Sheesh! It’s a bit much.

I did find a golden egg in the nest, though. I love this addon! It’s called Fancy Numbered Tabs and it simply does what it says– it gives your tabs little numbers so you can keep track of them. I always have a lot of tabs open and sometimes I get confused. It’s a nice addon.

I know I haven’t been blogging much here. I’m building a website (open house will be announced in the future). It’s taking up a lot of time and involves more writing than usual blogs do. I also have a LOT of writing assignments these days. So I apologize for the sparse postings! Go check out a few of my other blogs if you have a hankering to read.

I’m small-time blogger. I make a few bucks here and there, blogging reviews or adding some text links here and there. I’ve heard all the stories about bloggers like John Chow, who boasted recently of his $30,000 income for one month. One month! Incredible. I’d like to earn that. Who wouldn’t?

Running websites and blogs is becoming very high-tech. I’ve been trying to pay attention to my stats and search engine results, but I admit I am a real cheapskate– I use a little free web tracker. It only gives me information and stats for the first 500 visitors. I don’t think I’ll ever go “big time” for this blog, but stranger things have happened, so who knows! However, my home improvement blog and my travel blog are very popular. I am hoping that someday these blogs prove to be very successful. Lord knows, I spend enough time at them all day long!

So, I’m paying more attention to stats and information. Big-time webmasters use something called hosted web analytics. Now THAT’s what I’m talking ’bout! This is stat counter in hyperdrive!

Track and monitor the activities of every individual visitor to your website, web statistics, visitor system information, advertising campaigns, conversion tracking, and graphical statistics with the fastest growing web analytics provider in North America and the U.K. Knowing what your web page statistics are is the key to successful online business.

Iwebtrack is the best web traffic analyzer on the internet. Webmasters know that about 1/3 of Internet users block cookies, so stat counters aren’t always accurate. Iwebtrack uses javascript code to fix this problem. They also have a whole fully-loaded arsenal of other tools.

Thorough and detailed website and traffic monitoring
Analyze between PPC (pay per click) searches and natural results
Export reports to email or other formats
Affiliate program

Here’s a demo screenshot. Whoa!

Someday I hope to be able to get this successful. I do watch my stats and I do pay attention to what brings visitors to my blogs. If you have a blog and you either want to increase traffic and/or make money from it, this is a crucial component of blogging. Blogging is more than plunking down your personal thoughts and opinions; it’s become much more sophisticated, and if you want to rise with the tide, you have to branch out a little. Either that or hire a webmaster and expect to shell out tens of thousands. :-p Better to use cool tools like Iwebtrack.

I caught wind of a wonderful Wordpress plugin that allows you to shows “unconventional” fonts on your website.

Fonts on websites are a curious thing. Your blog posts might look wonderful with the “Brady Bunch” or “Comic Superhero” fonts. Your computer displays them beautifully. But any other person viewing viewing your page still sees the same old Arial, Georgia, Trebuchet, or Times New Roman fonts. Why is that?

It’s because that other computer user doesn’t have the “Brady Bunch” or “Comic Superhero” fonts installed on their computer. Those kinds of fonts are “specialty” fonts. They are not common to most computers. Most computers’ default fonts are the Arial, Georgia, Trebuchet, or Times New Roman.

I’ve lamented many times how boring the typical default fonts are on computers. I like artsy stuff, and I like a variety of fonts. Well, guess what, I caught wind of a wonderful Wordpress plugin that allows you to shows “unconventional” fonts on your website. TTFTitles Plugin for Wordpress users.

This plugin lets you use images to replace the titles of your posts, thus circumventing the problem of guessing what fonts your end-users might have installed.

Nice! I have yet to use it. It looks complicated, so I have to find some quiet time to go over it. But if you have been desiring the same effect for your blog, you might want to look into this plugin. Please come back and comment if you use it, and let me know how it goes.

Here’s an amazing thing: document scanning services! Sourcecorp, a New England company, provides a unique service with their document managing service, called ImageSilo. It’s a service geared toward making all the paperwork for businesses a little easier. Documents are scanned at the company, and uploaded to their “web based document repository” (conveniently named the “Image Silo”). It’s much like outsourcing your paperwork, except that this is an American company.

The documents are heavily encrypted, and the company promises 99.9% uptime so the data is always available. There’s a 30-day free trial. If you are a business owner looking for a way to consolidate paperwork and increase productivity, you might want to check into this. Online storage is available, too.

I’ve noticed that more document-type programs are going online. Spreadsheets, Word documents, and the like are becoming more popular as more applications go online. And everyone has heard of data backups. I don’t think downloaded programs will ever go away, but many computer-cluttering programs are going online.

We all can use some new fonts to spruce up our documents and templates, right? I do a lot of graphic design and template tinkering, so I have quite a collection of fonts. I have never paid one cent for a font collection. And you don’t need to, either. Here’s a little list of the best free fonts I have found.

Simply the Best Free Fonts
Search Free Fonts.com
1001 Free Fonts

Most fonts sites have the same fonts over and over again, I’ve found. Those three have the best collection, IMHO, and the easiest searching and downloading capabilities. There are lots of “small time” font makers out there who have created some nice specialty fonts. a Yahoo search will pull them up.

Be careful what you download, however. Browse wisely. I use McAfee’s Site Advisor, Netcraft, and update my anti-virus software before I go searching for fonts. Sometimes creeps will include malware or trojans under the guise of “free” fonts. So stick with the well-known font sites. Also, Kim Komando’s message boards are filled with advice on finding font sites. The boards are searchable.

I found a wonderful website (via Entrecards, again!) that is a great resource for finding free software programs. It’s called Softfreebie. I really like it. It has a growing list of excellent software found for free on the Internet. It’s a good one to keep an eye on for future resources. It’s got everything, looks like, from games, database tools, firewalls, educational tools, backup tools, proxy tools, Adobe programs! I didn’t see anything about online term life insurance quotes, but hey, who knows, maybe that’s next, lol! They’ve got everything else! The categories are varied and numerous, and I really like the style. I haven’t tried out the search feature, yet.

Keep an eye on this one of you are looking for freeware on the Internet. I know I will, because i always am.

I found a wonderful little tool for those of us who are “hue-challenged.” Lol. It’s the Color Match Remix, a free online tool to help you find colors for your blog. It matches hues and shades automatically, with handy little sliders. It makes me want to start up some new blogs, so that I can create some cool new color swatches! But I’ve already got enough blogs! I’m writing about everything including the kitchen sink! Actually, if I start up another one, it would have to be about kitchen faucets because I’ve already got the kitchen sink, lol!

This color mixer is a fun tool for anyone, blogger or not. It has a design layout preview and the hue color numbers are easily exported. Free to use, too!

As much as I love the Internet and the availability of information, sometimes I am fed up with the thing. I’ve been surfing through Entrecards, dropping my cards (from my travel blog and my home improvement blog) on other’s blogs. I have found some really, really great blogs out there! But unfortunately, I have also found some crude, bland, and outright disgusting blogs, too. Too bad. On one hand, I am glad to see that the anonymity-effect of the Internet has worn off (where people, thinking they are anonymous, post the stupidest or disgusting things that they wouldn’t otherwise do), but on the other, there is still a plethora of people who have nothing better to do than gather around a beer pong table to burp beer and gawk at immodest women. :-p I think the Internet should be used for good and to promote the good news of the gospel, not make it into a Mardi Gras of licentious behavior.

Once again, via Entrecard surfing (if you haven’t checked out Entrecards, you really should!), I discovered another very helpful blog for computer users. This one is called WatchTheTutor.com. It covers the most basic of applications, like how to StumbleUpon a website and how to start a Gmail account, and dabbles in the more complicated stuff like converting a DVD to mp4 to an iPhone and creating an ISO image from a directory. It’s a very new blog, so we will see how it develops.

If you haven’t tried Entrecards, I recommend you take a look at it. It’s a free, fun way to increase traffic to your blog or website. You essentially join the community, make a little business card for your blog, and “drop” it on other blogs. Other bloggers come by your blog to “drop” their cards. You can advertise your blog on other’s blogs, too, giving you “free” advertising. I put “free” in quotes because it doesn’t cost money, but it does cost “credits.” You get these credits by dropping your card. The entire system is designed to get you to visit other blogs while they visit yours. Some blogs are outstanding, and I never would have discovered them any other way. I love “shopping” for other blogs as I drop my card and look for blogs to advertise with. It’s almost as much fun as shopping at directbuy!

I’m enjoying discovering new blogs with Entrecards. I don’t use them for this blog, but I use them for my other blogs. Some blogs are real stinkers, but a wholesome amount of them are really great! An entire Entrecard subculture is springing up, looks like!

By far, the most popular Entrecarders are mom blogs. I’m a mom, but I am far past the baby cribs and baby foods stage. I prefer to surf the geek blogs! There’s a few very good ones I have discovered and bookmarked. From time to time, I hope to discuss them here.

The first one is a blog called the “Windows Vista Guide.” I remember when Windows XP first came out, a lot of people were confused over the new and altered settings, tweaks, and configurations. So a plethora of bloggers started “How To” blogs about XP. I have not seen many “How To” Vista blogs yet. Vista has been very slow to gain ground among computer users, so I suspect this is why websites about Vista haven’t taken off as much.

Nonetheless, XP won’t last forever! Here’s a great list of applications compatible with Windows Vista, from the same website I linked earlier. If you’ve got Vista, or are getting it, read as much as you can and that will make your transition much easier. Vista is quite different from XP, but I like it.

My generation (Generation X in America) grew up in what is known in popular culture as the “Information Age.” Technology was spawning inventions and geo-political implications, like the man on the moon, Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense plan, televisions and VCRs, and the inception of the Internet. Can you believe that all these things occurred only a generation ago? I remember when VCRs came out– the family was ecstatic! My stepfather was an electronics repairman, so we had the first of everything in my neighborhood. Today, those clunkers we call VCRs and tube televisions from the 70s are nothing compared to the sleek-looking HDTV models out there. Amazing.

I’ve been thinking that the generational age we are living in could be called the “Entertainment Age.” Never before in history have we used technology so much for our entertainment. It is truly a sign of the times. And sports is probably the most popular form of entertainment.

I heard that CBS (who has held the broadcast rights to the games since 1982) is going to stream the entire season of the NCAA March Madness on the Internet this year. The news commentator was joking that businesses would see a sharp drop in productivity, not to mention in clogged bandwidth because so many would be watching the basketball games. There was some speculation that businesses may add filters to their business Internet servers, to prevent workers from streaming the March Madness games.

Retrevo, an excellent source of news and electronics products (and one of my new favorites for news on gadgets and everything about technology), says:

Starting this year CBS will broadcast all games in the men’s tournament, both constant and flex, in HDTV . If you can receive CBS HDTV over the air or via cable you should be in good shape. For the women’s games you’ll have to get ESPN which will be broadcasting many games in HD.

Basketball can be very demanding for HDTV . A fast moving foreground (the action on the court) against a complex background (people in the stands) make it challenging to compress, decompress, and difficult to display without artifacts and blurring.

The very latest LCD sets that offer features like MEMC (motion estimation, motion compensation), 120 Hz refresh, and fast pixel response can help minimize problems. Sets with these features are just starting to show up and may cost a few dollars more.

On the other hand, if you’re willing to put up with a few possible annoyances for a much superior experience than your old standard definition set has to offer, you can get some great values in LCD, Plasma, or even Rear Projection sets for under $2000 and even under $1000.

Imagine, watching the NCAA games on a huge Plasma TV or projected on a huge wall through a high-tech projector? My husband would go bananas. All he’d need to be completely happy is to have Michael Jordan come back to basketball, lol.

There’s more information about entertainment technology here. I love this site because they are so thorough and offer advice and price ranges and examples of all the electronics they discuss. Bookmark that site for future reference (and they are also in my sidebar links).

Well, I have to wonder what will be next in this age of burgeoning electronics. Personal space travel? I still cannot believe that just forty years ago all we had was the tube television and the transistor radio… amazing.