Remember to come join me over at jonbarnhardt.com (or midspot.com, same blog) and be sure to re-subscribe if you are not already using the feedburner feed.

After my venting last week about not being able to move my wordpress.com site to my own wordpress installation, one of my faithful readers came to the rescue.

Rob over at Lagesse.org left me a note that indicated formatting may be the problem. After I dug a little deeper I found that the spam comments I had not yet deleted were being included in the export.

I trashed those, did a new export and kazaam! I was able to import into a test bed site on my dev server.

Then I just exported the db and imported it to the live site. Midspot.com will now forward to jonbarnhardt.com. Not sure if I’m going to fix the alias so the site will show midspot.com in the address bar, or if this is the time to spread my wings and fly on the jonbarnhardt.com domain. I have had urges in the past to do this anyway, so this may be the perfect time…

Either way, for now they will both work.

So come join me over at jonbarnhardt.com and be sure to re-subscribe if you are not already using the feedburner feed.

Thanks again Rob!

Technorati Tags: wordpress, install, transfer, blog

We seem to have a problem with our air conditioner. After it runs for about an hour it mysteriously kicks the breaker out in the breaker box.

I don’t think there is a short anywhere but more likely an weak breaker.

I got to get an electrician out to take a look though…

Last year when we got a couple of weeks of sweltering heat it went on the fritz due to an improper charge and a plugged coil.

I learned one thing then, It’s a lot easier to fix an air conditioner when it it under 100+ degrees outside!

This year I’m getting the jump early so hopefully we have a comfortable house when the heat comes…

Technorati Tags: air, conditioner, climate, heat, breaker

I’ve done close to the impossible.

On Friday May 11th, I purchases a domain. I set up a site on the domain that evening. I also posted a couple of posts to the new formed blog.

Today (May 14th) I noticed that it was number one on Google search for the two words I wanted it listed for.

No it’s not an obscure word or phrase but rather common. In the IT world anyway. Actually it is the number one result out of 1.4 million results.

The phrase?

I can’t tell you yet, but I will soon. I want to build up the domain with more content before I start targeting traffic to it.

I also took a screen shot that I will post later to prove that in 3 days I went from non-existent to the first search result.

Who said search engine optimization is hard? I’m not guaranteeing that I will stay there for long but I was surprised to see myself there already…

Remember to keep watch for how I done it coming soon…

Technorati Tags: SEO, search engine optimization, Google, internet, marketing

I have this problem. The thing is I am a collector. I’m one of those people that would rather save everything than throw away anything.

Mind you this sometimes goes in spurts. For awhile I will get pretty good about throwing things away but then all is lost and I resort back into the same old habits.

The thing I find most discouraging about throwing things away it there is always a period that they may be useful for. For example if I upgrade the RAM in my computer and replace the current stick with a larger stick, the old stick may serve a purpose in another machine sometime down the road. The same mentality applies to just about anything. Do you ever save a piece of paper with a note on someones phone number or appointment date only to find it three years later?

That’s were I go wrong. I have no problem deciding whether something is worth keeping or not, I just have a problem of never having the time to go back and re-evaluate it three, six, or even one year down the road.

The same goes for computer files. Especially computer files. As hard drives keep growing and growing, I just keep saving and saving. I have literally saved the C++ assignments from the first year of college. These were some of the first files I ever created. I still have them. Now it’s more for nostalgia, but you get the point.

Anyway enough rambling.

On to the point.

I had one… I think?

Oh yeah.

Organization. I collect bookmarks on the Internet like most people, but I save a lot. I mean a ton. That’s why I thought del.icio.us was the answer to my prayers but it just wasn’t user friendly and it is un-godly slooowwww. I thought it would help when Yahoo! bought them, but apparently they paid enough to buy them, but not enough to afford new servers.

I used to just put them in my bookmarks, but in the average week I will use 3-4 differnet computers and then I never have any of them synced together.

The common thread I have is that I use FireFox almost exclusively. And that is where the FoxMarks extension comes in. This is the answer to my prayers. I have no problem keeping all my bookmarks in sync on all my computers now and I don’t have to do a thing to keep them synced.

The only problem is I went from having only a handful of my most visited sites in my bookmarks to hundreds, cross that, thousands.

I have 18 folders in the base of my favorites to try to organize the chaos but at least they are there. Probably never to be visited again, but they are there and I take comfort in that.

Thanks again FoxMarks for adding to my vice.

Technorati Tags: organization, gtd, bookmarks, FireFox, extensions, add-ons, FoxMarks

I felt inclined to share a story about my mother, who has come a long way with technology over the years.

I remember when she first got email, she would send me a message and then either call or email me again, just to see if I had received it.

Another funny thing was I think she thought they delivered email only once a day, because once she had checked it for the day, she did not expect any new messages until the next.

Jokes aside, she is becoming more computer literate with each passing year and at Christmas I even converted her over to Ubuntu, which has been a blessing to me because no more Windows support calls!

Anyway, happy Mother’s Day Mom! Now if we could just get Dad to use the computer also…

Today is a good day. I finished my classes for spring semester and can enjoy the summer weather for a few months now!

Look what those wacky scientists are up to now:

Cigarettes without the Consequences

I also got a project I’m working on in the background… More to come next week…

Technorati Tags: college, school

With more and more people using debit cards exclusively these days, myself included, there comes more problems.

I’m starting to see more and more stories of people either being overcharged or having holds placed on their accounts for various reasons.

Here are some of the downfalls I’ve seen of using debit versus credit cards:

• some places put holds on your accounts to insure payment (gas stations, hotels, etc)

• you may not benefit from the same protection as credit cards when it comes to unscrupulous merchants, fraud, etc. (I had an experience with this last year where the bank specifically told me they could help me if I had used my credit card instead of my debit card…)

• credit cards sometimes offer cash back rewards or airline miles per dollar spent

• liability protection is better in most cases (smaller liability limits, if any; it doesn’t hold up your funds if something goes wrong, etc…)

I have not bought checks for about three years now and don’t plan to any time soon. I have been using my debit card but I am thinking about switching to a credit card instead (with cash back incentives or airline miles included of course) and just paying the balance in full every month.

With all the risks: holds, overcharges, limited protection, etc; it seems to make sense.

What are your thoughts?

Technorati Tags: money, budget, creadit card, debit card, finance

This is an open call to Matt and his team on how to resolve this export/import problem that many users are facing as indicated in this thread.

I’ve tried to export my blog and import it to my own install many times over the last few months, trying any method I can find in the forums to no success.

I’ve tried multiple servers in multiple data centers with multiple host OS’s and PHP installs.

I’m led to believe that the export from wordpress.com to import in a wordpress.org installation just does not work.

Please prove me wrong.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, support, matt, install, export, import

You’re right Jason, but I doubt most people will see the pun:

Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo

(To those that don’t get it: It’s a play on words related to the movie Team America)

Technorati Tags: Team America, headline, pun