Deck,
originally uploaded by 131j.

We’re 3/4 done with the deck! here’s a good picture of the joist attached to the beams.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

If you haven’t herd the news yet, Heather and I are having a baby girl! We went in for our week 20 visit today and all is well. The due date is January 13, 2009.

Heather and I have been relatively quiet about the baby for a number of months now. It was suggested that we don’t share the news right away just in case something were to happen. We’re now more than 1/2 way through the pregnancy, we think it is now safe to let the world know of our good fortune.

We are just now looking at preparing the house for the baby. Last weekend we picked out a green paint for the baby’s room and purchased matching bedding. I’m pretty sure I’ll be spending a lot of time researching baby car seats and other important baby items. So as long as I have time, I’ll blog about my research as well as other baby happenings.

Thanks to everyone on-line, on messenger and on Twitter for the congratulations! Heather and I greatly appreciate it.

What a week! Heather and I traveled to Las Vegas last week, where we promptly went to Salt Lake City to visit friends for a few days before the New Media Expo. First, my Avis Car Rental rant.

Avis Car Rental

I paid an extra $10 a day to rent a Chevy Cobalt or equivalent from Avis rather than from other car rental places such as Budget or Enterprise because Avis offered a that size car with cruise control. I specifically wanted a compact car because of the price of gas.

When it was time to pick up the car, they didn’t have a Cobalt or any sub compact car available. They had a very compact car that didn’t have cruise control or a full size car. After arguing with them, they finally found me a PT Cruiser. Reluctantly I accepted this and went on my way. As Heather and I got into the car to head to Utah, I noticed that the car didn’t have cruise control. Agg! I then turned around, went back in and at this point I was fuming! When I came back in and insisted on speaking to a manager, they just so happen to get a Cobalt avaialble for me to rent. Man was I not happy. So we got the rental car we wanted and we were on our way.

When we were just north of Las Vegas, we started looking at the car closely. We discovered that not only did we get a sub compact car with cruise control, we also had an XM radio, OnStar, a CD mp3 player with an auxiliary input jack and heated seats. Aside from the lack of power in the engine, this car was nicer than my 2007 Honda Civic Si!

Will I rent from Avis again? Maybe, I’m not sure. I talked to a few other people who have rented cars over the past few months and they all have had a similar situation with other rental places. It sounds like many people who rent cars are no longer opting for the free full size car upgrades, which is making it harder for the car rental places to keep the sub compact cars in stock.

Salt Lake City

It’s a very pretty town. Lots of Wal-Marts! Very high gas prices too. It was great seeing our friends! Thanks Kirk and Katie for a great time in SLC!

On the way to SLC we spent the night at a Fairfield Inn hotel in st. George. I accidentally left my mp3 player in the room. I called them and they found it and kept it for me in their safe till I could stop by and pick it up. Great service, if I ever need a hotel in St. George again, I’m staying at that hotel. Thank you Heather, the Fairfield Inn employee who contacted me about the mp3 player.

We got to see the downtown area and the Mormon grounds. I’m not sure what this area is called, I’m sure I’ll get comments about what it is called. It was very pretty but I was a bit upset to find out that I couldn’t go into some of the buildings because I was not Mormon. I may not be the best Catholic or Christian, but this seems to go against what I was taught. As we walked just outside of the grounds, we saw a homeless child walking down the street. I mean no offense to those who are Mormon, but there’s no way I could practice such a religion. Blame my Catholic background or Midwest mentality, but that’s not how we do things where I come from.

New Media Expo 2008

The New Media Expo this year was awesome, from a vendors perspective having a booth that is. The first day was rather slow, reminded me of last year’s Sunday, which was a 1/2 day with very sparce attendee traffic. Friday was in full force though, and I was told Saturday had pretty good traffic as well. It was too bad Saturday was a 1/2 day, cause it sounded like it out performed Thursday’s attendee traffic.

We shipped a lot of swag to the New Media expo. Over 250 pounds worth of show notepads (1,500 roughly), which we (RawVoice) are known for. This year we handed out about 250 pads, or 42 pounds. We had plenty of people come to the booth that weren’t interested in the swag. My theory is, since there was no sponsor for a New Media Expo swag bag during registration, attendees didn’t have a bag to put swag into and there for weren’t interested in carrying swag around in their hands. What a bummer too, since you can buy a box of 500 bags for less than $50. Anyway, this may not be the factor why not as much swag was handed out, but it makes sense to me.

Coverville 500 Concert

We (RawVoice and Blubrry.com) were a sponsor of the Coverville 500 concert at the New Media Expo this year. I am certainly proud to support these events which promote new media and podcasting. The show was awesome! From the numbers I’ve herd, they had about 600 attend the show. What’s exciting to say, we (Blubrry) gave away over 130 tickets to Blubrry.com, TechPodcasts.com and PodcasterNews.com community members. That’s over 20% of the guests who attended the show who have used one or more of the web sites I’ve helped develop over the years. I’m so proud to be part of this magic.

All of the acts during the concert were awesome. The last artist was Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine. Musicly, they sounded great. There was an issue though, which if you’re following all the buzz around Coverville or New Media Expo then you already know what went down during the last act. My take on the whole thing: Richard Cheese has been misleading the podcasting and new media community. The weeks before the expo, I went to Richard Cheese’s web site and saw that he was supportive of podcasters playing his content in their podcasts, so as long as no one profits from it. Sounds like someone who gets the whole podcasting and new media space to me, I couldn’t wait to see him live. Well during the first song performed by Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine, Richard expressed to the podcasting and new media audience that he didn’t want them to use cameras. At first, I thought he was just being funny, part of the act. Anyone who gets podcasting and new media knows each artist who played at Coverville had an opportunity of a life time: have a bunch of tech savvy bloggers and podcasters do their thing to promote the artists on their blogs and podcasts. By the end of the first song, it was pretty obvious that Richard Cheese wasn’t interested in growing his audience or taking advantage of the marketing that would have come from all of the audio/video taken from the show but was more concerned with his self image. He grabbed a camera, threw it at the audience and then spit on others in the crowd. Well, bloggers and podcasters are vocal when they think they’re getting a raw deal, and Richard Cheese should expect a wrath of negative publicity, because face it, he took an opportunity to get a huge amount of positive publicity and flipped it negative within 1 song.

One perspective: If we were news reporters, would Richard Cheese have taken the video camera and thrown it or spit on the camera man? Anyway, this whole incident reminds me of the SEOColumbus/DSW/Zappos Twitter incident. You can’t say or do stupid things in public or on publicly accessible web sites. If you do, you the world will find out about it.

New Media Expo 2009 Suggestions

I think the New Media Expo could be considerably improved so it can grow additional traffic. Here’s some thoughts.

• Return the Peoples Choice Podcast Awards - I’m not sure what the real story is why the Peoples Choice Awards were not at the New Media Expo, but it should have been at the Expo this year. I think this one extra event during the expo would have helped encourage more podcasters to come out to the Expo. Todd and Tim, work it out and make it happen next year.
• Coverville 652 - Definitely need a Coverville concert for next years expo. Actually, if it wasn’t for Coverville, I suspect many podcasters would not have come out to the Expo.
• Change the Sessions - I think the whole idea of sessions at a conference needs to be seriously looked at. I’m not sure what the magic bullet is, but perhaps a PodCamp format would be more ideal. Technically they can’t have a “PodCamp” since the new media expo is a profitable event, but who is to say there’s a PodCamp at the New Media Expo that’s managed and funded separately from the rest of the expo?  There’s a huge audience of podcasters who don’t bother with the New Media Expo becuase they’re part of the PodCamp franchise. I think if there is a way to make PodCamp part of the New Media Expo you will get these high profile folks to finally come out. This is key since they represent pretty much all of the New Media that’s going on along the East Coast.
• No more 1/2 day - I think the best formula is a 2 day event. After attending these first 4 Portable Media, Podcast and New Media Expo’s, I think the best formula would be a Friday and Saturday full day conference. It allows for those who have full time jobs to come in for a full day on Saturday while offering two weekend evenings for serious events like another Coverville.
• Ontario, California - As I suspected, having the event in Las Vegas made for a lot of distractions. I think the expo should return to Ontario, California simply because it puts the expo as the primary reason for being their, where Vegas created situations with too many options. The Wednesday and Thursday nights, it was hard to figure out who was at the casino hotel for the New Media Expo, and who was there for other reasons. Basically, New Media Expo hotel attendees were morphed by many more hotel guests who were their for other reasons that were more profitable for the hotel.

Conclusion

It’s taken me almost a week to catch up following the Expo. I still have to send emails to the folks I met at the Expo, which I’ll be doing this weekend. Did I have a great time? Oh yea! Will I go again next year? You bet!

I just found out my Internet Service Provider (ISP) called WOW Internet and Cable has been monitoring our web traffic since March of 2008 for profit. The monitoring takes place by installing hardware made by NebuAds within the ISP’s network, WOW Internet in my case. Web traffic from WOW Internet customers (like me) is routed through these hardware devices for tracking. The data (html, javascript, images, etc…) that customers like myself request from web sites such as Google could be modified in order to display targeted advertising. According to DSLReports, WOW cable (and other NebuAds clients) can make at least $2.50 a month per customer.

I was made aware of this by a local TV station here in Columbus, Ohio.

When I spoke with WOW today, they informed me that I was recently made aware of this change when they sent me a notice in the mail of recent change in the terms of service. Like any trusting customer, I did not read the fine print. The notice did not come with a cover letter explaining what part of the notice changed and/or why. See Third Party Advertisers section of WOW Internet Terms.

Notice that in the WOW Internet Terms they created an acronym for “Personally Identifiable Information” as “PII”. The way the acronym is written in the sentence it implies that it encompasses other items. Make no mistake, they clearly state that PII is your name, address and phone number and nothing else. They do not state that IP addresses are PII. In my opinion, your IP address on the Internet is just as personally identifiable as your telephone number or street address. An IP address identifies you on the Internet so data knows where to be directed over the entire World Wide Web. The same can be said about telephone calls and snail mail. Apparently WOW does not believe that your IP address on the Internet is considered “personally identifiable information” even though IP addresses have been continually used to identify individuals and is commonly added to header information of many Internet protocols such as email and web browsing.

Users may opt out of the service on a per browser bases using cookies. This means that anytime I decide to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox, Opera, Safari or another computer for that matter, I have to remember to follow a procedure (that I currently do not know) to add a cookie to each browser I use to turn this tracking off. Further more, I now have to do this for every computer in my home and for anyone who visits who uses my Internet. This means that browsers used in my home must support cookie handling, removing my choice (or anyone else in my home’s choice) of turning off cookies in web browsers. For 3rd party applications (Non web browsers) that use the Internet (such as to download or check for product updates) will continue to be tracked by WOW.

WOW Internet is the 12th largest Cable provider in the United States. WOW has been using NebuAds to profit from its customers since March/April of 2008. For the past three months, WOW has made more than $7 from myself alone. I have yet to see any savings passed onto my bill. It appears this $2.50 is an additional revenue stream for WOW and is not something they are using to pass savings to their customers in exchange for invading their privacy.

The 3rd largest cable provider, Charter Communications, recently decided not to use the NebuAds service to make money from its customers. Charter decided to abandon the practice following the release of a report that caught the interest of the United States Congress into the legalities of the adveritsing targeting mechanisms.

The most upsetting aspect of this whole thing for me personally, is that I’ve discovered that this tracking is known to cause problems with Google Gmail. I use Gmail and Gmail for my domains and have come to rely heavily on Google’s Gmail service. Since March I have experienced issues with Gmail and for the longest time have presumed Gmail was the problem. Now that I know that my ISP, that I’ve been paying over $100 a month to provide me reliable access to the Internet, may have been the cause of the problems I’ve been experiencing with Gmail frustrates me greatly. I’ve lost a lot of time and productivity with the problems I have had with Gmail. Email is a vital service, especially for someone who requires not only for tracking and paying bills but for employment and work as well.

I’ve called and notified WOW that they will have to contact me in 7 days to let me know that they will no longer be tracking my Internet and have stopped modifying my Internet traffic. Otherwise I will switch to another ISP. They have until July 7th to resolve this issue, or they will loose me as a customer. If after July 7th, they do not rectify this problem with their service, I will contact federal, state and local government representatives in my area of WOW’s shady practices, notify my neighbors what WOW is doing with their Internet usage, and make it a point to NOT recommend WOW for Internet services.

WOW, you have 168 hours. What is your answer?

UPDATE (GREAT NEWS)

WOW cable called me today (Thursday) at about 4pm to let me know that they are removing the NebuAds for all of their customers! I no longer need to switch ISPs! What an emotional roller coaster but unlike some businesses apparently WOW does listen to its customers. I’m going to stick with WOW now that they will no longer deploy this questionable intrusion of advertising in my web surfing.

As soon as I have a press release to link to I’ll create a new blog post about it.

At the last minute I was able to free my schedule and go to the June Columbus Tweetup. What a lot of fun!

The Tweetup was organized by @JenniferLaycock. You can learn more about today’s meetup at Jennifer’s Small Business Answers web site.

Check out the pictures: http://www.flickr.com/groups/792807@N23/pool/

Last week Heather and I received our Federal tax incentive check and decided to go ahead with getting a fence for the backyard. We wanted a dog eared 4′ wood fence to match our neighbors which we plan to connect our fence to.

So here’s the story. We got a quote from Lowes a little over a month ago to have the fence installed. They quoted us about $1,200 for treated pine lumber plus labor, roughly $2,500. So moving forward with the idea that materials would be about $1,200, we decided to install the fence ourselves.

As the process moved forward, I did some research on some home improvement web sites and found that the treated pine tended to warp, split, crack, etc.. over time. From observing our 15 year old treated pine deck, I do believe these home improvement web sites are right. So I decided to go with red cedar since it has a better reputation for holding up with minimal shrinking, cracking, cracking, etc… So now the material expenses are up near $1,600.

We wanted to match our neighbors fence as closely as possible. Both Home Depot and Lowes only sell 6″ dog ear pickets, which doesn’t match our neighbors 4″. After making some calls, I was recommended to call Sutherlands. After a quick call with them, I found that all for the materials for the project were priced competitively and they have 4″ red cedar dog ear pickets too. So I ordered all the materials on Wednesday, everything arrived that Friday.

The first step in installing the fence was to dig the post holes. I called 811 on Wednesday afternoon to get the utilities marked in the back yard. On Friday, I rented an auger from Home Depot with a 10″ bit to drill 10-12″ post holes. It took my brother-n-law and I about an hour to drill one 30″ hole with the 10″ bit. We kept hitting rocks in the ground which made the process take a lot longer than it otherwise would have. The whole was between 12-15″ wide. We decided to get a 6″ bit for the auger after starting hole number 2. An hour later, we got the smaller bit in, and started drilling the holes faster, though by hole 4, we didn’t just have rocks to deal with. We hit an unmarked coax cable in the ground. After further examining ,we determined the cable was for Time Warner Cable to my house. I’m currently a WOW customer, so we decided to just keep going on our path.

We then started drilling our holes across the back of the property. This is where the real fun started. At our 4th of 9 holes, we hit the main WOW cable. It was marked about 2 feet from where the cable was actually in the ground! Needless to say, we knocked out cable service for the rest of the neighborhood. In the process of waiting for WOW to come fix their cable, we started remarking the fence 3 feet from the back of the property line since we no longer trusted the markings. As the WOW repairmen came to fix the line, we started drilling our remaining posts on the new 3 foot back line. Just as the WOW folks left, we were finishing the last hole and discovered their line again. This time, we were 5 feet away from the closest marking on the ground. luckily we caught it before the auger tore through the cable.

The rest of the weekend Heather’s dad, my dad set posts and mixed concrete. On Sunday we only got 2 posts completed mixing the concrete by hand. On Monday, we rented a concrete mixer, thankfully Home Depot Rents was open that day! If you have more than 4 bags of Quikrete to mix, I highly suggest renting a mixer. It cost about $45 and was worth every penny.

On Monday, Heather’s dad and I got the remaining posts set and concrete poured, except for the remaining hole where we discovered the WOW cable a second time. Heather’s dad did a great job setting the posts, they are very level and plumb with each other.

On Tuesday afternoon, the WOW folks returned, tested their line and decided to replace the portion of the line where I found their main cable. Once the guy left, I hand digged another foot beyond the cable line to reach 30″ for the last post. This manual digging was a pain and I believe resulted in seriously hurting my back. Then I plumbed up the post, mixed the concrete and set the post just before the sun came down.

On Wednesday, I returned the extra materials (3 posts, 8 bags gravel, 4 bags Quickrete) I purchased as well as exchanged 20+ pickets that I discovered were damaged from the original delivery. That evening, Heather and I returned the truck (we’re on our own now).

This morning I did some clean up and removed the remaining braces holding up the posts. Phase 1 complete!

Next weekend my dad and I will be working on phase 2, which includes installing the runners and the pickets. Dad has a pretty nice wireless drill, so this process should go rather quickly. The red cedar pickets are rather fragile though, I am planning on pre-drilling the holes for the screws, but besides that the picket installation should go as quick as any other picket fence.

Materials

• 19 4×4x8′ red cedar posts
• 32 2×4x8′ red cedar rails
• 6 2×4x12′ red cedar rails
• 310 4″x4′ red cedar dog ear pickets
• 2 self closing spring hinge gate kits
• 2 5lb boxes 1-5/8″ cedar screws
• 1 5lb box 3″ cedar screws
• 24 80lb Quickrete
• $10 scrap lumber for plumbing up posts
• 36 lawn stakes
• 2 day Auger rental from Home Depot
• 1 day concrete mix rental from Home Depot
• A lot of patience

Conclusion

I’m never installing a fence myself again. Installing a fence is a lot of work and full of obstacles that cannot be foreseen. Looking back, it may have been worth $2,500 to have someone else do it, though I will have to say that I don’t think the installers would have put this much care for quality as we are.

Update!

The fence is complete. Read more.

I haven’t blogged much lately, I’ve been pretty sick the past two weeks. My sister believes that I caught a virus when my allergies flared up two weeks ago. Check out all of the medications she recommended I take!

I first started taking Claritin for my allergies but found Zyrtec worked much better. I am not sure what exactly I am allergic to, but every April I sneeze and have irritated eyes for 7-14 days. It always happens at the first sight of dandelions. After the first week, I started having other symptoms and apparently now I have a virus. No one else I’m around is sick, so that is good. I am glad I am not getting others sick.

The Benadryl is powerful stuff, the first time I took it was in the afternoon. I was out the rest of the night! It sure helps to take it about 1 hour before going to bed.