Luna Tail

I was browsing the web today and found a site that said you can make money selling pictures online. You upload them to the companies’ websites, and when they sell it, you get a portion of the sales.

So I signed up for three of them. One of them rejected all my pictures right off the bat. *cry* But that’s okay. Here is one picture of the agility trial (yeah I know it’s a dog, but most of my pictures are dogs!). I didn’t submit this one, but I think it’s one of the better ones. However, the focus, I think, is on the tire, not on the dog herself. And I’m not sure how to get the focus perfectly on the dog. I focus on the tire and then when the dog jumps through I click. If I have the camera on continual focus, it’s not fast enough (I don’t think) to adjust the focus and click on the dog. But I’ll have to play with it a bit.

My photos were rejected because the focus was not right on the dog. So… I live and learn. I signed up for a photo community, My Shutter Space, and hopefully my profile will be approved and I can read up on some good action shot tips! I love taking pictures, and I love making money… so I do want to put the two together!

I’m thinking of taking a photography class locally… but I don’t have time now with it busy dog sport season. Maybe in the summer I can fit something in.

This is one of the places I joined… still waiting to see if they approve any of my photos:

One of my pet peeves is when a system is supposed to be better, and yet it’s just more frustrating to use! For me there are two systems right now that I am not at all happy with that I use on a regular basis.

Well, one I use on a regular basis, anyway. That’s Wordpress 2.5. Dangit! I’m finally getting used to it, but there still are some things I don’t like. Especially the widgets. You can’t move them from sidebar to sidebar, you have to delete them and then recreated them. So who thought that was a good idea? Ugh. I don’t know, but that guy should seriously be reprimanded.

And then there is Social Spark. I am not liking how the navagation in it is, at all. The sort sucks, it either looses the sort or looses the filter, which is ridiculous. And how come you can’t save your sort or selection criteria? Not being able to see which blogs qualify for which opportunities. And what is the deal with having to wait for opps in a Queue? Who came up with that idea? That guy, also, should be reprimanded!

I guess I’m on a rant today. Oh well. I’m not happy with these systems even though they are supposed to be better than before. But, I guess, these are new ‘features’… here at work when we find something we don’t like in a program, we call it a ‘feature’!

A while ago I posted about how I’d outgrown Thunderbird and needed a new email client. I found The Bat! and tried it out. Well, I purchased a copy because I liked it so much.

Thunderbird was just too slow for the amount of emails i was getting. It would be deathly slow to just read an email when I had a whole bunch of them… I’m not really sure how many, but I’m sure it was about the same as I have in The Bat!

The Bat! allows me to have an inbox per account, and so I have five. Some are from my VPS to catch server emails. Currently my main email account, which is actually hosted by Google Tools now and catches 3 email addresses, has 83 emails in the inbox, 69 in the sent box, and 96 split into various subfolders. And there is no noticable slowing in reading, deleting, or organizing emails.

And that’s just one account. In my VPS email I have 157 emails stored, in one account, 61 in another, and 5 in the third. I’m not even going to add all those numbers up but you get the idea. Would Thunderbird be able to handle those numbers? I don’t think so.

It’s fast, and clean, and I love the layout. I also love the templates you can set up. So if I want to send emails from an account, I can set up a template that will be used for every sent email. This includes a signature, where the courser starts, and a greeting, if any.

Yup, I’m sold on The Bat! If you are looking for an email client that can handle the abuse, I would highly recommend it!

So did Google change it’s policies and go back to ranking blogs that do paid posts? I wonder… because low and behold, this morning, like magic, all of my sites have page rank.

I gave up caring… but I will admit, I do make a bit more money when I have page rank. Not that I blog just for money, because honestly I don’t. I love to blog. But the money does help my dog habit for sure!

Tip Tail actually did have PR for a while, the last month or so. Now it’s a 2. It was a 3… so that’s a bummer.
Luna Tail, this blog, has a 2.
Tatum Tot has a 2 (it is not monetized).
Pixie Tail has a 2.
And Tail Pix, my photo blog, has a 3.

So interesting… we’ll have to see if these numbers stay around for a bit. You just never know with Google.

Though I’m not quite sure yet. I think I get OpenID… just like finally I get del.icio.us. Here is my OpenID page if you care to see:

So with OpenID… it has to be a URL / domain name. I guess… you can use your own domain name. If you don’t have a domain, you can sign into one of the companies (like ClaimID) and they give you a pseudo domain name that is your OpenID.

I think I was thinking OpenID is more than it is. I was thinking it was a social type network thing… and I guess it can be, but it’s not really, yet.

What is it, you may ask? OpenID is an ID you can use to log into websites that support it. When you post to a blogger/blogspot blog, it will give you the option of using your OpenID as one of your logins (if the blogger has set it up this way). But.. as far as I can tell, you have to use one of the publicly hosted OpenID sites to host the OpenID. ClaimID is one of them. Then… when you log in using your OpenID, the login page checks… err, checks something, not sure what, to confirm your OpenID and log you in.

What does it check? What does it know what to check? The geeky side of me wants to know!

I was thinking OpenID was a website in and of itself. Well it is, but you can’t get an OpenID from the OpenID website! Or at least I don’t think so. You get one through ClaimID or sites like it, such as MyOpenID. How does ClaimID talk to OpenID? No idea. Maybe someone will come along and clear this up.

I was thinking OpenID was a website where you could enter your information, link to other people with OpenIDs, and have a good old time. But… it is not. However, ClaimID seems to be, though it’s limited. You can claim your websites, and you can have contacts that have other ClaimIDs. I have one.. Johann The Dog. So if you have a ClaimID OpenID, I hope you’ll consider being my friend… my ClaimID is very lonely!

I need some home theater furniture to sit in while I figure this all out. OpenId really should be easier to understand than this! Or, sometimes, I’m just a bit slow.

No.. not the singing kind. The web browser kind. I installed Opera the other day to see if I like it. And so that i can drop Entrecards without clearing my cookies out of Firefox all the time. I really hate that, I like to have Firefox keep my logins.

Anyway, I like Opera more than I thought I would. I don’t like that it doesn’t have a decent del.icio.us plugin like Firefox does. And I don’t like how it defaults opening new links in new tabs in the foreground. I have to right click and select to load it in the background. I like my Tab Mix Plus plugin for Firefox. And I don’t like how, when I close a tab, it goes back to the most recently selected tab instead of the tab next to it. Bugs the crap out of me but I don’t know if I can change that, either.

So far, I still like Firefox better. I’m going to try Safari, too. Why not. I really don’t like Internet Exploder!

Well, my continuing Saga of my Entrecard aventures…. it seems I don’t have the necessary bandwidth, either at home or at work, for speed dropping. That’s unfortunate because I’ve been having fund dong it.

I will still drop, but probably no longer get 300 in a day per account. I have three accounts. Now I am going through my drop inbox with OBLife Dropper Script. This allows me to put in my RSS feed and drop on the last 50… or it seems more, people who have dropped on me. On my Tip Tail account I got over 100, I think it was up to 130 before the feed ran out, so that’s not too bad.

Also, since I really am tired of clearing my cookies out between accounts, I installed Opera, and had it, Firefox, and Internet Exploder all working at the same time. I am satisfied to report that I can drop two cards in both Firefox and Opera before I can get Internet Exploder to load one site for me to drop on. So… IE sucks, but we all knew that anyway.

I’ve also scanned my laptop thoroughly with two virus scanners, two adware programs, and a malware program, and it found nothing. So not sure what nginx is, or how I can detect it on my vista system, much less how to remove it. And the LAN guy at work today said it’s no longer a big deal… so I’m back to happily working and surfing in between.

I usually have my laptop on at work running all day whether I use it or not. Today the LAN guy comes by and says that my laptop’s IP is producing something to do with nginx and it’s making the big LAN guys nervous up top.

So I’ve been trying to find what the heck nginx is… and it seems as though it is a web server, like apache. I don’t now why it is on my laptop. I have Vista Home Premium on my laptop and it sure as heck doesn’t need a web server running on there.

Google has nothing much about nginx as to do with windows. Perhaps one of the applications I recently downloaded, and run, has this attached to it? The big LAN guys flag it as spam or adware or malware. It can be malicious, I guess, and it doesn’t have to be. I’m running virus scanners and adaware on my laptop now, to see if they pick anything up.

If anyone know how I can remove this from my laptop, please let me know!

Well, according to my husband, we get the maximum bandwidth through our ISP. Which doesn’t seem like that much. He says (he’s the network guru in the house) we get 1.5 mbs down and 600 up.

From work today I tested out loading a bunch of web sites to drop Entrecards on at once… and loading 20 pages brings my bandwidth up to about 5.3 mbps. So… no wonder I drag our whole connection down at home.

So I’m not sure if dropping Entrecards is going to be practical for me from home. Maybe in the mornings, but it takes the sites so long to load when I do a bunch at once, that’s it’s not much worth it.

And dang blogging from BlogDesk… really kills my spelling! I’d forgotten how much I depend on Firefox to alert me of misspelled words. Hrmph. Maybe some acne treatment would help me out with blogging!

Well I just upgraded all but one of my blogs to Wordpress 2.5. Yeah yeah yeah, I should have just done one and then seen how it is. But I thought it looked good but I’ve discovered a couple of things I don’t like.

I do like the new layout and look. Change is good and I never really liked the layout of the admin panel 2.3 and prior. I like this layout better. More Ajax features which are nice, mostly with the comments. The comments are handled well an so are the plugins.

I do not like how images are handles. Instead of the nice bar underneath the Write Post where you upload and select images, now it opens up an awful popup. And if you don’t have your browser full screen, you can’t see the little close x on the top. I hate hate hate that! Plus, my Flickr plugin is not working. I see no where to add flickr images. I have read the flickr plugin site, and even downloaded and installed the latest version, and still no go. Hrmph.

Also, when I edit a post from the main page, and then hit save… it used to go right back to the main page. Now it doesn’t. Just keeps me on the edit page. Just another click as I have to click on View Site again. Hrmph.

Hopefully these things will be worked out in subsequent releases. And hopefully my flickr plugin will work in the future too!