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I sometimes ask myself, if this blog has a theme - and I usually come up with the result that it does not, alt least not in the way as internet marketers, bloggers and SEOs define it.

It certainly has the theme of showing all the things that irk or interest me - but I suppose that is a category that is only relevant to me.

Now I got reminded again through Steve Pavlina’s blog article “How to Make Money From Your Blog” that, in order to be able to monetize a blog, it needs some kind of focus on some niche. Does that mean that I will never be able to monetize this blog which has pretty good search engine ranking?

So far I have used this resource of good standing with Google to tell the search giant to come by and take a look at a site that I needed to get indexed quickly. One of these sites was our tie-dye clothing site ThaiDye.com that, whenever I mentioned it here on this blog, gets a visits from Mr. Google the next day.

With a site as broad as this - I mean what could be broader than all the things that irk me? - I probably have to do it the other way around - get a real niche site going very strong and then this can drive traffic to my catch-all site here. And then I might actually be able to monetize this site - huh, maybe…

In the beginning of the World Wide Web transferring data was slow and costly so methods were devised to minimize the amount of data transmitted and still convey the message.

One of the results was the ‘Smiley’ - an icon consisting of only a few characters and thus very cheap and fast to transmit. The added advantage was that with just three characters you could indicate that you were smiling  :-)  or frowning  :-(  instead of writing a little novel to express that this was your emotion when writing an email or quick instant message.

Since then bandwidth has become a lot cheaper and the reason to reduce the amount of data is not relevant any more. But in our illiterate times it is still necessary for many people to have the means to express that they are saying something humorous or threatening…

• I’m going to kill you   
• I’m going to kill you   

Obviously specialized areas of the www thought that they require such symbology as well and today we show you one area where such iconography was very successfully implemented - in the description of the female breast - a never-ending interest of the male population.

Without further ado, here are the your breast smileys…

Perfect breasts

Fake silicone breasts

Perky breasts

Big nipple breasts

A cups

D cups

Wonder bra breasts

Cold breasts

Lopsided breasts

Pierced Breasts

Hanging Tassels Breasts

Grandma’s Breasts

Against The Shower Door Breasts

Android Breasts

Martha Stewart’s Breasts

I had been wondering for a while why my XP machine took so long to shut down. Very close to the end, only the background image showing, full disk activity, waiting in the range of a few minutes to finally shut down power.

The it dawned on me, that maybe I had once set something up to clear the paging file before shutdown to remove all accidentally left behind decrypted passwords in that paging file.

And I did indeed, I found that I had forgotten I set this once. So, if you ever wonder what your computer thinks about so long before going off to never-never land, maybe you have set that as well.

1.	Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe).
2.	Change the data value of the ClearPageFileAtShutdown value in the following registry key to a value of 1: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management If the value does not exist, add the following value: Value Name: ClearPageFileAtShutdown Value Type: REG_DWORD Value: 1

This obviously the instructions of doing the opposite - to clear out the paging file, but set the value to 0 to turn it off.

OK, so I did not discover this all by myself - but I heard about it and verified - and here is the story - and I’m sticking to it. If you have some time to waste just ry it yourself.

Did our Prez hid facts he knew from the public in order to get his way? (Somebody in) Microsoft thinks so.

Here is the proof…

For all my text editing needs on my windows machine I am using Visual Slick Edit - and old but reliable version. I use that editor to create a text file aaa.txt and enter the following text

I then saved this and opened it in Microsoft notepad

Adding anything to the file - even a single space after the text - and notpad shows the correct text. So I am sure that this is not a bug.

So, here you have it! This is the official version of notepad, so Microsoft knows that Bush hid the facts.

This message…

the list of servers for this workgroup is not currently available

must be one of the most annoying messages in Windows you could imagine. You have two computers on the same LAN, you can ping, so you know that the connections are right, but if you want to access the files on a share of the other computer you get this message without any hint what might be the cause.

I could try to explain why you just have to set this registry entry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetBT\Parameters

to 1 (instead of the 8 it was set to on two of my computers), but you are probably in a hurry to just access the other file and are not interested in research. If you are interested in the why then continue searching the web. I did and found my answer.

But as I said, you are most likely in a hurry, so set that registry value and reboot, and if you are as lucky as I am then you will be able to see the other machine(s) on the LAN and share happily.

Did this ever happen to you…

The first time I had this happen to me, I have to admit, it was rather creepy. But since then I got so much used to it that I hardly ever notice the Google guy standing in my living room.

The only times I do still get a bit freaked out is when I look for this kind of amateur two-some and the Google guy enters my bedroom. But I think just a few weeks and I will also be used to that.

I remember it was Mel Brooks in his movie Space Balls who invented this kind of concept. Watching a movie about the own situation and then fast forwarding to find out what will happen. Wonder if Google pays Mel Brooks some kind of intellectual property fees?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a challenging field that I have myself involved in. It is like one big puzzle of little pieces of information how Google is doing this and how Yahoo is doing that. Once the pieces of the puzzle come together closer and closer we actually get an image of how this all might work.

Backlinks are the big item of highest value. A backlink is a link from another site to the one being optimized. Google sees that as a vote for the site - Google listening to the ‘word of mouth’ of the internet.

Now, if an ax murderer is talking highly about you that might not be considered a good vote for you and your character. That means Google is looking for ‘quality’ links, it is disregarding links from sites that just list one site after the other. The question is then what is a ‘good’ link, and this article is an attempt to find out.

• I am now offering you, Google, this link to a website I want to test: The Alpha to Omega of Website Linking.
• Dear Google, I am now very curious what you will do with this link.

I will report how it went.

I had this situation that I once logged into somebody else’s paypal account (with permission, mind you) and since then this this login email address was apparently permanently burned into the login screen.

I just could not get rid of it and it became very annoying because I had to select it first before I could type the first letter of the my own email for firefox to allow me to select the right one from a list. Before that I did not have to do the selecting - just type that first letter.

Today - finally - I had enough and went on a goose chase. The things I had learned to make firefox forget remembered form entries - Shift Delete, or was it Shift Backspace - did not do anything good.

I wasn’t sure if it wasn’t a cookie kicking in so I deleted all paypal cookies - no go!

To make a long search short - here is what I found: The file signon2.txt in the profile. There were data blocks starting with a period and I got rid of all those blocks that had paypal in it - and that pesky login email. Also got rid of all the paypal URLs at the top of this file and - voila - pesky entry gone.

Hope this helps somebody.

I had one big scare this morning after booting up my HP laptop. I just had to check something before breakfast, then did my morning routine of taking a shower (yes, I do this once in a while!), easting my breakfast, sending the wife to work and beating the kid (for all you people from child services - I am kidding!) and went back into my office, only to find the screen displaying the terrifying message

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt
C:\windows\system32\config\system

You can attempt to repair this file by starting windows setup using the original setup CD-Rom.
Select “r” at the first screen to start repair.

I know you Mac user are now just giggling but I had such a scary message on a mac as well a while ago. There it was something that I only got the text prompt to log in and no graphical user interface. I like the Mac and am actually thinking of switching to it, but this specific point is not one to snicker about.

Obviously the first thought is “When did I back-up last?” and I was not too bad in this department. I would have lost some bit but not too critical.

OK, so it was finding a disk with XP Pro. Could not find the one with XP SP2 but I thought it would do. Pop it in and restart but after a while, instead of getting to the screen where I may type that ‘r’ I get a message

ntfs.sys corrupt - can not continue

or something to this effect. How could this be?? I am booting from a CD but to make sure I find another CD and try this one, with the same effect.

NOW WHAT?

Thoughts of evil-doing hackers enter my mind. I had this computer temporarily put in the DMZ of my router because this was the only way I could get bit torrent to work at a decent speed, but it still did not make too much sense because - I am booting from a CD!!

Maybe the installation looks for an existing OS on the drive and gets so confused by some nasty hackers droppings that it goes to heaven? And I still can’t find my CD with an XP Pro SP2.

Now thanks to Google - after booting up another computer - and some inspired searching I find a hint that this might be a memory problem - somebody had solved his problem by changing a memory module.

That’s definitely worth a try. Out comes the screw driver, the laptop flips over and is gutted from it’s memory. First attempt to just swap the two modules. There is a change, the computer error-beeps on startup, but still the message that this essential system file is missing.

Now the process of elimination - which is not too involved with only two memory modules, and we have the culprit…

Now I am writing this with a computer with only half a gig, but I have to say, I don’t really notice the difference - maybe if I want to start up photoshop and illustrator at the same time.

But not a problem, it will be a trip to the computer store and just get another one of those.