So I finally got myself a decent phone. I’m not saying my old nokia 5800 was that bad. Well actually it was a slow, single touch device with very little useful apps. It didn’t even have proper threaded messaging for crying out loud. So that’s why I’ve gone and gotten myself a brand new Samsung Galaxy S 2, code name I9100 for all you tech geeks out there.
I’m really happy with for now, although I’ve still got a lot of apps to find and customize the hell out of it. And that’s actually what I’m doing now. I found this WordPress app and I’m taking it for a test drive.
So I guess I’m done for now.

Technorati Tags: galaxy, phone, s2, samsung, sgs2, tech

No more exams.

It’s a mind boggling thought. I can not believe that from now on I can actually learn what I want to. Don’t get me wrong. I definitely picked the right school to go to and the courses themselves or rather the ideas for them were mostly OK. The problems lay in the execution of these courses. Some went too deep yet others went to wide. Professors didn’t seem to get were the sweet spot is. The worst thing about it was, that they didn’t seem to try or even care and find it. This left us students frustrated which is not a way to go if you want to motivate young minds. I must admit that these last 2 exams took everything I’ve got to get through. But I did it and I’m really proud of myself.

So what does this mean? It means I’ve only got one thing left to reach the end of the path that is formal education – diploma. On Friday I’m going to hand in all the forms and papers to make it formal. If you’re interested my thesis is going to be about Recommender Systems. I’m still waiting on a formal title, but that’s my mentor’s job. I’m actually really looking forward to getting to work. Should be fun.

Just to keep this a wholesome post let add that this is the only part (finish school) of my New Year’s resolution I’ve been working on. With exams behind me it now makes it a lot easier to focus on other goals. My parents were kind enough to help me through the past few months financially, but getting a job is now quite high on my priority list. I’ll also start working out as it started to warm up outside. Socializing is probably the last on my list, but I’ve got to make sacrifices somewhere, don’t I?

Technorati Tags: goals, school

Let start with what I accomplished over this past year. As I didn’t yet have a blog back then, I posted this on Facebook:

2010 New Year’s resolutions? Got those. Maybe too much of them, but the biggest ones: Finish school (due date January 2011), finish at least four small and one medium/big project and go on one bigger trip (probably Australia). Other ones are of secondary nature or still under consideration.

Unfortunately most of these fell through. Why, you ask. Let’s see – Australia didn’t work out because I didn’t have enough money. And school just got dragged out a bit. I did manage to publish at least one small project – MvcOpenID. And this blog can be another one.

But it’s 2011 now, so let’s focus on that. A few goals will closely resemble last year ones. As I don’t have that much school to worry about I’m also adding some new ones. And here, in order of order of importance, they are:

1. Finish school – With some luck I’ll finish it by June, but the end of September is the ultimate goal to get my diploma.
2. Get a job – I want to stay in Ljubljana, but for that I need a job to pay the rent. This goal is a bit on the urgent side, as I need the job by the end of this month. Wish me luck.
3. 4 web projects – I won’t specify sizes this year, but I hope at least one of these 4 will grow into something bigger. This is the only real all-year-long goal and as I want to make a career with web projects, I’m setting a goal at at least 300€ a month from these projects.
4. Travel to USA – This is 2011′s big trip plan. Me and my mates are planing to go to the west coast of USA. You know – LA, San Francisco, Las Vegas, maybe a bit of Mexico. The trip should take place at the end of summer or in the start of fall. After all of us get our diplomas. This is another reason I need a job.
5. Loose weight and get fit – This is a topic I’ve written about before. I’ll give it my all this year. And because they say goals work better if your specific – I want to have 70kg and a six pack before summer.
6. Socialize more – I’ve been neglecting my social life a bit over the past year as I focused my attention on school and career, but I hope to find time and get out a bit more.

There you go. Seems a lot to do, eh? Well it probably is. But I’ll give it my best shot. I’ve read an interesting article about New Year’s resolutions and it gave me an idea. I’ll have some kind of a goal management system that will keep me on track and enable me to further specify my goals. I’ll of course write about these goals and how they’re coming along right here, on my blog.

Well that’s that. Wish me luck and if you have any New Year’s resolutions yourself, share them in the comments.

Technorati Tags: goals, new year's resolution

I chose a desktop computer over a new laptop because of a few simple reasons. First, I’ll still have this laptop if I need one. I don’t really need my primary machine to be portable and with tools like DropBox I can always have the important stuff with me. The second reason is a bit subjective. With a laptop I don’t really feel that I have enough control over the hardware. Yes, you can change the optical unit, add more memory, swap the hard drive, but you can’t really change the important stuff like the CPU or the graphics card. And don’t event get me started with how you can change a thing about the cooling. And you can do all of these things with a desktop computer, hence my choice.

I found quite a nice pre-built computer on an Austrian online shop, but could not order because I don’t live in Austria. So I started reading reviews and test and other whatnots about the hardware out there. I was at it for almost the whole per-Christmas week. But I did it. So let me present you with a list of the components I chose:

• Asus Sabertooth X58 – a motherboard with a bit of futuristic stuff like USB3 and SATA3, 2 PCI-e slots and quite a few good reviews.
• Intel i7-950 – a snappy 3.06GHz processor with 4 cores.
• Corsair XMS3 6GB Triple Channel DDR3 Memory Kit (CMX6GX3M3A1333C9) – 3 times more memory then my laptop should suffice for now. The motherboard will still have 3 empty slots so an upgrade to 12 or 18 GB won’t be a problem in the future.
• Sapphire 5770HD 1GB GDDR5 – the graphics card that should play all the modern games and full hd 1080p videos on my 24″ LCD.
• Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB – a hard drive that is big enough to hold all of my data.
• Samsung SH-S223C – a cheap DVD burner just so I have an optical unit.
• LC-Power LC6650GP3 V2.3 GREEN POWER – a 650W power supply should be enough to power all of components above.
• Antec SLK3700 – an older Antec case to fit in all the parts.

If you know anything about computer hardware (and I think you do if you’re still reading), you see that this will be quite a powerful piece of machinery. And that’s what I wanted. I finally have a computer I always wanted.

So the orders are in and I hope to get all the parts in first week of 2011. I’ll post some pictures of the components themselves as the come in and then the whole rig. So stay tuned.

Is programming your passion or is creating your passion?

This made me think. Here’s my answer:

For me, creating and programming/coding exchange the roles of passion and medium.

Let me elaborate that a bit. I have 2 things that get me going – an idea for a project or a puzzle.

Puzzles are pure coding challenges for me and while I usually feel intrigued by them, most of the time I get a guilty feeling of procrastination. I’m talking here about coding puzzle like Pex4Fun where the only thing you get from solving a puzzle is self-confirmation.

If I start with an idea coding is my medium to release the creative energy that has built up inside of me while playing around with the idea in my head. I’m not one of those programmers who just write code to create and say they’re done when the application has all the functionality they envisioned. No, I also want to make my code pretty, clean with lots of cleverness in it. I hate spaghetti code and I love refactoring. I also love code architecture and patterns. This is where creativity becomes a medium to my coding passion. This is also where puzzles come in. As I said, I love solving puzzles and this time I don’t feel like I’m procrastinating. When I feel happy about the code I start implementing new parts of the idea and here the roles changes again. I get the feeling of completion when I feel happy both about the product and the code behind it.

Technorati Tags: ideas, me, programming, puzzles

On the 13^th of December I’ll have my penultimate exam. It’s nothing I’ll be looking forward to, but it’s necessary evil. The only thing that matters is that I get it done and over with. I want to start living my life and finally start working on my ideas and projects that have been growing in my head for a while now. That and the fact that after 17 years or school I’ll actually get a real and more importantly an official profession are the only two things that keep me going. I know there’s a diploma I’ll have to write after I finish the exams to be able to graduate, but I’ll be treating that as one of my projects, so it should be fun.

As you can see I have my goal set and the reward for completing it is very compelling. This keeps me somewhat motivated. The problem isn’t the reward though. It’s that it is far away. 2 weeks can be a long time. If you’ve read my post Time is a Perspective you should understand that 2 weeks with so much things to learn can seem like at least a few months. This is way the ultimate reward of being school free has a very limited motivational value.

To make studying an easier job I needed to find a way of getting more motivation. I found it while reading a great article my friend suggested – Steve Pavlina’s Overcoming Procrastination. In section 6. Poor Time Management Habits he suggest an idea he calls timeboxing. You can read more about it in his article, but the main idea is to take a fixed amount of time and make yourself do something for the duration of it. After you’re done, you reward yourself. For example I made myself write for 30 minutes and then I rewarded myself by watching an episode of House. I’ve tested it with studying and it works quite well. I did come up with a few variations though. They depend on the type of the task you want to do and how much time can you allocate for rewards.

Closed and open ended time frames

There are two types of time frames – closed and open ended. When using the closed ended version you stop doing the task when the time runs out. This is useful when you want to limit your output. I use it when writing the first draft of an article. This helps me focus on the most important parts of content I want to include. For these types of tasks you should use an alarm clock. When it goes off stop what you’re doing and claim your reward.

For tasks that you need a push to get going an open time frame is more appropriate. You can use a clock or a stopwatch to know when the time is over. An alarm clock is not suitable for this as you don’t want to get distracted when -(if) you get the momentum going. The time frame is there for you to know that even if you fail to accomplish anything in it you can enjoy your reward guilt free. This is really suitable for studying. For example I give myself a 45 minute block of time. After a few blocks like this I can study for 60 to 90 minutes before I feel a craving for a break. I then enjoy whatever reward I promised myself.

Limited and unlimited reward lengths

You will notice that I didn’t mention what kinds of rewards you can choose. That’s because it doesn’t matter. Anything from taking the rest of the day off, eating something or a TV show will do. The only condition is that you find you reward enjoyable. That will a motivation boost inside of you and you’ll feel less reluctant to take up the task at hand.

An additional condition can arise when you don’t have a lot of time to get something done. Unlimited length rewards are just not an option in this case. When you have a due date date of some kind limited length rewards are the way to go. These types of rewards are essentially closed-ended timeboxed rewards. The best kinds of rewards here are the ones that take up only a limited amount of time by their very nature. Watching an episode of House takes about 45 minutes where as something like browsing the Internet can easily take up a few hours without you even noticing.

Progressive timeboxing

I also like to employ a technique I call progressive timeboxing. What I do is I gradually increase the duration of time blocks. This is comes in handy when trying to find the optimal amount of time for timeboxing. I usually start with 30 or 45 minutes add see where it takes me. I usually get up to 60 or even 90 minutes. I depends on the type of task I’m trying to do. Pick a short enough block so you don’t have to shorten it later on, but also don’t make it too short as it won’t bring you much closer to accomplishing your task.

Timeboxing can be a very effective motivational tool when used correctly. By completing a session you also get a sense of achievement which boosts your motivation even further. I suggest you try it out and see if it suits you. I would of course like to hear what success you’ve reached while employing this technique. And if you came up with your own derivation of it don’t feel hesitant to share

Technorati Tags: motivation, procrastination, self-discipline, time management, timeboxing

I bought this toothpaste the other day. It’s a toothpaste that’s good for my gums. But boy it tastes bad – and I knew it even before I first used it

Technorati Tags: humor

So what was I up to, you might ask. Well I’ll tell you. I decided to publish my first open source project. It’s an OpenID Starter Kit for ASP.NET MVC. Essentially it is an ASP.NET MVC empty project with the added functionality that handles users logging-in with their OpenIDs. I’m still at a very early stage, but the core is there. I plan to break the project into 3 parts – Basic, PopUp and AJAX. The difference is essentially in user’s experience when logging-in. Basic and PopUp have a separate page for login. After entering you OpenID the Basic method will redirect you to your OpenID provider’s page while PopUp will open a smaller PopUp window. AJAX approach will have a box popup wherever on the page you are. I’m still unsure how the user gets to OpenID provider’s page with this approach, but I’ll get to that when I get there. Each of these 3 parts will be implemented using Razor and ASPX view engines.

As I’m not a reinventing-the-wheel kind of a developer my project is using a library called DotNetOpenAuth by Andrew Arnott. It is a very extensive library for OpenID, OAuth and InfoCard for .NET and I’d be a fool not to use it. The project also uses Entity Framework 4. I’ve also added a guide how to convert the project to get the new features of Entity Framework CTP4 like code-first. But I couldn’t ship that as the CTP license does not permit it. As far as I came to understand from that lawyer talk.

And speaking of licenses, was that a pain to choose. I spent 3 or 4 days just reading articles, forums and of course licenses themselves. I really liked what Jeff Atwood wrote on the subject in his article Pick a License, Any License. Choosing a license is a very crucial step when publishing an open source project. Without it people can’t do much more then look at your code or they’ll violate your copyrights. This is where your chosen license steps in and let’s them know how they can use your code, where are the limitations when publishing their code that uses yours and if/how they need attribute you or the project. When choosing a license I found that the answers to these three questions will leave you standing with just a few choices. That’s a good thing.

After reading around I was left with Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), Apache License, version 2.0 and a MIT-style license. I looked what similar projects use. By similar I mean written for the Microsoft’s .Net framework and preferably an ASP.NET MVC related project. It seemed that most of them used Ms-PL so I chose that one, but switched to Apache License v2.0 soon afterward just because it seems to be more widely used so more people will know what’s it about and how to use the source that’s licensed that way.

That was pretty much it for last week. If you’d like to check out the project itself there’s a few ways to do that:

• MvcOpenID on CodePlex – this is the primary hub for the project. Any discussions and issue tracking will take place here. You can download the code or use Mercurial (Hg).
• MvcOpenID on GitHub – this is another repository I push the code to. It’s mostly there for git users and also because the GitHub site has a lot of awesome features.
• MvcOpenID on Ohloh – I’ve also submited MvcOpenID to Ohloh. It’s a free public directory of open source software and people.

Check the project out and I hope you like it. Any feedback I can get is of course very welcome.

Technorati Tags: asp.net mvc, mvcopenid, open source

So yet another post that is meant mainly for myself, but maybe someone else will find in it as well.

The ignore pattern I use for Visual Studio projects is the same for both Mercurial and Git:

build/
*.suo
*.user
_ReSharper*
*.csproj.user
*.resharper.user
*.suo
*.cache
*.trx
Thumbs.db
[Bb]in
[Dd]ebug
[Oo]bj
[Rr]elease
[Tt]est[Rr]esult*
_UpgradeReport_Files
*[Pp]ublish.xml
*.project
*.metadata
logs
*.generated.cs
T4MVC.cs

The only difference is how to set global ignore rules for each of them. I found these two great tutorials for this:

• Mercurial (Hg): http://geekswithblogs.net/rob/archive/2010/07/16/mercurial-hg-global-ignore-file-on-windows.aspx
• Git: http://help.github.com/git-ignore/

UPDATE (16/11/2010): After using Hg for a while with my ASP.NET MVC projects I’ve added a few things to the ignore list.

Technorati Tags: git, hg, mercurial, repository, visual studio

*.o *.lo *.la *.al .libs *.so *.so.[0-9]* *.a *.pyc *.pyo *.rej *~ #*# .#* .*.swp .DS_Store *bin *obj RECYCLER Bin *.user *.suo VSMacros80

I use it for Visual Studio for now. I will update this if I add something along the way.

Technorati Tags: repository, svn, visual studio

I was so impressed by this I went to their MySpace page and they’re apparently not a YouTube one hit wonder. There’s a couple of good songs there. I encourage you to give them a hear.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: iphone, music

Time is a funny thing. We measure it in absolute units, like “24th September 2010, 11:25″. That tells us precisely when in time we are. But a lot of times we find ourselves saying things like “Time is just flying by today.” and “Is it 10 o’clock already? That meeting went by fast.” or “I can’t believe we were in there for only an hour. I felt like days.” But that’s exactly it. We “feel” time. In our heads it’s not measured by minutes, seconds or hours, we just get a feeling of how much time went by. I believe that this feeling reflects a number of significant events that happened to us in some period of time. These are the events we remember.

Let me paint you a picture to show what I mean. Have you ever traveled around for a month? I bet you felt like you’ve been gone for year when you came back home. Well that’s because when we learn to estimate how long something took we develop a certain ratio between significant events and an average time between these events. Each person has his or her own ratio which depends on their lifestyle. And changing this ratio takes a long time and it usually involves changing a part of your lifestyle. So even though you were only traveling for a month you saw  a lot of new things, seen a lot of new faces and did a lot of interesting stuff. These just a few examples of significant events. And having experienced so many of them in such a short time confuses your mind. It is still using you “normal” ratio to calculate time. This results in a feeling of time that is a lot longer then the time that actually passed.

That’s the core of my idea. The most important part of it are significant events. I gave a few examples what these are, but it’s a bit more elaborate than that. Living our lives we get used to some events and we get used to the world working in a particular way. A significant event takes place when something happens that we didn’t expect. Of course not all events are equally significant. Someone cutting the line in front of you is nowhere as significant as a car almost running you over. As you can see these events can be good or bad. The easiest way to see how much significance is in a particular event is to see how good you remember it. If it’s still vivid in a week or two it’s quite significant. So you see our mind learns how often these events happen and how significant are they. Then it uses this to give you that “feeling of time”.

The same principle can be applied to our estimation of how long something would take. As these events haven’t passed yet we imagine what would happen in some period of time. This is why I always underestimate it would take me to clean the kitchen. I my mind I just have to clean the counter-top and some dishes and mop the floor. But then I get to it and see that the fridge is a mess and there’s a lot of dust on the shelfs and all these little things add up and suddenly I get the feeling this won’t take an hour, but 3 or 4 instead.

As you can see I put some thought into this and I think it came out quite good. With this explained I think I’m ready to finish up my Time-boxing article. In the meanwhile have a listen to some songs I’ve been listening to while writing this article:

Technorati Tags: concepts, ideas, thoughts

As every year at the end of September I can finally create a daily routine for myself. A bit of consistency in my daily life. Getting my sleep in check is of course the first thing. Hence today’s early wake-up time. But this year is a bit different. I have 2 exams left and after that the diploma. This means that right now I don’t have any obligations and I can finally concentrate on myself and my projects.

I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time now and a have quite a few things I want to concentrate on:

• Physical  fitness – If you remember I took up jogging during the summer, but had to stop as I was unable to learn because I was too tired. Well I’ll be taking jogging up again. I start next week and will report back. I think I got a few good ideas I want to test out.
• Social life – This past month has been a disaster in this area. Mostly I’ve been at home studying and the urge to go out and just hang with my friends has built up inside of me. So that’s what I’ll do
• Projects – Small web projects to be exact. As the college era of my life is coming to an end I have to build up my business. To do this I’ll be starting with a few small projects I’ve been thinking about for a while now. I’ve already started on one, but ran into a problem with my hosting. I’ve been dealing with support over at Arvixe. They seem to be a good ASP.NET 4 hosting provider, but Visual Web Developer 2010 Web Deploy was messing up my permissions. Well this morning we’ve finally sorted things out which means I can start with the coding part
• The rest of college – As I said I’ve got 2 exams and the diploma left. This are still my top priority, but for at least a few weeks I can’t do anything about it.
• Job – I’m also thinking about getting job. I need money to be able to stay in Ljubljana. And of course I want to reach total financial independence from my parents. It would also be good to get out of the apartment for a few hours each day. I don’t want a very engaging job on the other hand. A regular 8 hour work day would be nice, so that when I get home I can focus on my projects and building up my business.

Well this may seem like a lot, but if I organize myself I should have more then enough time to fit it all in. I think

Technorati Tags: goals, jogging, projects

Technorati Tags: climbing, extreme job, heights, transmission towers

I've managed to set this impressive (at least by my standards) record today – 30 seconds for the Intermediate size

Technorati Tags: games, minesweeper, records

Technorati Tags: music

Technorati Tags: puzzles, rubik's cube

How didn't I think of this pun before? It's brilliantÂÂ

Source: http://www.dixiworld.com/2010/03/breaking-apple-ipad-leaked-prototype/

Technorati Tags: humor, ipad

Found a really cool site for solving Rubik’s Cube. All the steps are animated so it’s quite easy to follow.

Check it out: http://www.ryanheise.com/cube/beginner.html

Technorati Tags: puzzles, rubik's cube

I’ve also had an exam to deal with. And I still have a few of those left. 4 to be exact. According to my calendar I should be done with them a day or two before my birthday, 24th of September. I really hope it goes according to my plans and I pass all of them as they are starting to affect my future plans way too much. The problem is in not being able to get a routine in my daily life. I function way better when I have one and am a lot more productive as well. Help out and wish me luck

I’ve also stopped jogging as it used up too much of my energy and I couldn’t study. I haven’t given up though. I’ll be taking it back up as soon as I’m done with school stuff. I actually miss jogging and I feel it in my legs. They get very jittery from time to time and I can hardly sit still when that happens.

As you can see school has (again) taken over my life and I really just want to be over with it. The last thing it’s been messing with is my writing. As you can see this is my first post in 2 weeks. And it’s not for the lack of ideas. I have about 4 draft post on my posts list. I make those so I don’t forget any good ideas I get. And I’ll have to make a few more for the ones that are still in my head.

I’ll probably take the next few hours for writing and hopefully I’ll pump out some good content. I’ll post these over the next few weeks. So stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: jogging, school, the challenge, writing

Tuesday

Tuesday was hard. I pushed myself on Monday to complete my goal of jogging a full lap and even though I didn’t achieve it I burnt a lot more energy and my calf muscles were really soar. I had to take 3 pauses during my jog and it took me about 22 minutes to complete the lap. I wasn’t really happy about that. I also went jogging at 10 PM, because it was raining before. It was almost pitch black. There was a glow from the city that illuminated the path just enough for me to see the puddles from the rain earlier. Well at least most of them. Good thing it’s summer and it’s not cold outside or my feet would have frozen solid.

Wednesday

This was the day when it finally happened. I did it! I completed the whole lap, the whole 3.16 kilometers of it I was extremely happy when I got home. But also very exhausted. Physically I should have given up way back, but I just kept going and going. It was a mental win. I took me 16 minutes to do it. It’s not my best on this lap but I don’t care.

Thursday and Friday

On Wednesday I overdid myself again. My calves were killing me and I had low energy. On both days I had to take 3 pauses. The times were OK, but I wasn’t happy with my performance.

Saturday and Sunday

I took Saturday off. Well off from jogging at least. I had to mow the lawn in my backyard. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if there wasn’t a slope in the back part that leads to a stream. That slope takes quite a lot out of a person. Mind you we don’t have a self-propelled lawn mower. It was all me. It just spun the blades around.

Sunday was a day off as well except this time I didn’t do any other physical activities. It was a rest day. A day to think.

Next week and new goals

As I achieved my goal on Wednesday I had to come up with something new to jog to . Next logical step would probably be to try and get at least 2 whole laps in the same week and then build on that number until I can jog the whole lap each day of the week. I’ll be going back to Ljubljana soon though as my exams are getting closer. I have to find a similarly long lap there. It probably won’t be a perfect match but I’ll do my best. Oh, and I’m switching back to jogging after I wake up.

Technorati Tags: jogging, workout

There’s quite a few reasons an error could occur. What to do with specific error is left entirely up to you. In this article I’ll explain how to fix “Not Found” crawl errors using rewrite rules in Web.config file.

The first thing you should do is check the “Linked from” list for outside links. If someone out there is linking to your site with a wrong URL it won’t do you much good. There are two things that you could do:

• Contact the site that’s linking to you and ask them to correct the link.
• You can make a 301 redirect to the correct URL. This will be explained later on.

All of ‘Not Found’ URLs should return a 404 HTTP status code. You can check this with the Fetch as Googlebot tool. There are 2 options you have when dealing with these:

• If the URL is pointing to a page that was on your site but no longer exists you should return a 410 HTTP status code. This will tell your users, Google and other search engines that your site is ‘Gone’.
• If the URL is pointing to a page that was moved to another URL you should do a 301 redirect that points to the correct URL.

Rewrite Rules and Web.config

Rewrite rules are a set of rules that tell your web server what to do with some URLs. These rules can be quite complex. But

Technorati Tags: 301, 410, iis7, rewrite rules, web.config

I said to myself that I wouldn’t stop moving the entire length of the lap. I was either going to jog or walk. The walking parts are a kind of pauses between jogging sessions.

The week started without any goals. Every day after waking up I went at it. Usually I started around 12pm as I’m a late sleeper. I just wanted to see where my stamina is at. It turned out I wasn’t in such a bad jogging shape. I ran about a third of the Lendava GG1 before taking my first pause on Tuesday. I took a total of 3 pauses that day. As the days went by I could jog a bit further every day and I managed to eliminate one pause before the week ended. I took Sunday off. A bit of time for my muscles to regenerate.

During last week an internal goal started to emerge as I learned how much my body is capable. I wanted to jog the entire length of Lendava GG1 yesterday without pauses. I seemed quite an achievable goal. But I couldn’t do it. I managed 2/3 of the lap before taking a break. This was the only break I took though. And I managed to cut my fastest time from 19 to 14 minutes. Which is great. I would probably have done it if my sleep wasn’t cut short.

All in all I’m quite happy with the result and I’d like to achieve the mentioned goal during this week. Also this week I’m jogging in the evening. Around 8pm. I want to test out different time periods. I’ll report back about my performance next week.

Do you jog? Let me know how you do it in the comments below.

Technorati Tags: jogging, workout

So I went investigating why the traffic was significantly higher on those days. I poked around my Google Analytics reports and in Content » Top Content I saw entries like these:

Wordpress previews in Google Analytics

The p=<number>&preview=true part of the highlighted URIs was the key. Apparently the WordPress plugin I’ve got installed for Google Analytics and stuff like Bing WebMaster Center, Yahoo Site Explorer, Google WebMaster Central added the JavaScript code that counts visits even in previews. This wasn’t OK, because it blurs the real traffic results.

So I had two choices. Either change some PHP code of WordPress or the plugin or make Google Analytics discard the preview visits. Neither of these choices isn’t perfect. The problem with the first one is that when WordPress or the plugin get updated my code will be gone and I’d have to do it all over again. The second one on the other hand only works for Goolge Analytics. If you’re using any other traffic analysis services or tools, you’d have to do this for every one of them. I chose the second option as Google Analytics is my most used tool for traffic statistics.

The way to get rid of unwanted URIs in Google Analytics is via filters. The sad news here is that they only work from the moment you add them. You cannot change any data from the past. So I suggest doing this as soon as possible.

So to add this filter I went to my Google Analytics account and clicked on the Edit link in the actions column of the profile I use for this blog. There I clicked on the Add filter link in the upper right hand corner of the Filters Applied to Profile box. I’ve highlighted it here:

Add filter to Google Analytics

I didn’t have I filter like this in my Google Analytics account yet, so I had to create one. The was to be a custom filter that would exclude all of the URIs that have preview=true in them. I called it Discard Previews and when I filled out the Add filter form it looked like this:

Discard WordPress previews filter for Google Analytics

And that was it. The filter was set up and the traffic stats will be much more representative now.

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This started about a week ago. First I noticed the blue line and then the yellow patch, but the yellow line appeared just yesterday. Don’t know what’s going on really.

I bought this LCD about a year ago. It’s my second 24 inch monitor. The first one, a Samsung 2493HM, died on me after just 7 months. Fortunately I’ve got a laptop so I wasn’t left screenless, but going from a 24 to a 15.4 is quite a shock. But it seems I’m going to have to go through it again. I just hope that Samsung service in Slovenia works a bit faster this time as it took them 2 months to return the money last time.

UPDATE (July 11th 2010): Today I noticed another 2 vertical lines. They are in between the previous blue and yellow lines. One of the new ones is red and the other is blue, but not as bright as the first blue one. I also think that the yellow patch got a bit bigger as well.

UPDATE (July 15th 2010): A bunch of new vertical lines started appearing. Some of them are full strength now and I could swear that the patch is getting bigger by the day. This is starting to get a bit annoying now.

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Wakeboarding @ Planksee, Austria

Wednesday was a great day. First I passed another exam – only 4 left now – and straight afterwards we packed our swim shorts and headed off to Planksee. That’s a cable wake park in Austria located just across the boarder with Slovenia at the

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Get on Amazon

This song is just amazing. I’ve been listening to it over the past few days and I still can not get enough. Especially the para para pa pa… part gets me. The song is a part of the Plans album:

Here are the lyrics as well, because if you’re like me you’ll be signing along in a jiffy

 

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This all started 3 months ago. My friend was massing around with affiliate marketing and showed me what great payouts HostGator has. So I made an affiliate account. I knew I’ll use it once, but wasn’t planning on it yet.

I’m also a member of Aardvark, a Q&A network. Have been for quite a while now. A year, maybe more. So I was just doing my own thing when a MSN window pops up. It was a question from Aardvark and this is what happened – http://vark.com/t/2ac765. I know my marketing techniques aren’t the best but it worked here. The guy liked what I said and bought the hosting. And so I made my commission.

HostGator has a bit of a confusing payout schema. According to When and How Often Will I Be Paid section of their Affiliate FAQ, one is eligible to get paid 60 days after the commission was made. That’s 2 months. I made mine on April 7th so I was all good on the June 7th. This means that I should have gotten paid last week, but I wasn’t. No really sure why. But that really doesn’t matter now

This money will probably go towards buying my own hosting as I’m currently leeching of of my roommate’s. It’s a shame HostGator doesn’t have any shared Windows hosting plans as I need it to host my ASP.NET MVC websites. Although they did have beta testings late 2009. I wonder whatever happened with that…

All in all I am extremely happy about my first few bucks earned online

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, commission, hostgator

This is when I started noticing ads for courses that teach people how to do it. I did a bit of research and found affiliate marketing and article marketing and SEO and writing blogs about specific topic and all these other techniques being used to get people to buy your products or someone else’s products where you would get a commission. This was a very exciting time for me so I started doing a bit more research. But then came a problem. I found so many websites and videos and all this other sources of information that my head just went nuts. There was too much information out there to take it all in. And people providing this info were also very vague with it. They just gave you a bit and then wanted you to buy their course. Well I’m a student, I don’t have much money and I’d rather spent the little I have on a beer, because I know what I’m getting there.

So there I was confused as ever and ready to give up. But then, surfing YouTube about internet marketing one day, I saw this funny looking Aussie fellow. He was talking about teaching people earn money online, yadi yadi ya. Another one of those, I thought. But I’m a sucker for English accents so I watched a bit longer and it got interesting. Most people name their price at least one in the first half of their video, but there was no mention of any payments here. So I clicked on link in the description – www.thirtydaychallenge.com. A big 30 Day Challenge logo, but still no dollar signs. I entered my name and my email and ended up on the training section of the page. And there they were – all these videos about how to earn your first buck online. And it was all free. That was about 2 months ago. I watch the first few videos, but got stuck searching for a niche and there were also my exams for college. So I said I’ll put it off ’till summer and then face it head on.

Well the summer is here and I’m ready to rumble. The thing that makes 30DC (30 Day Challenge) different from all the other I’ve encountered is that they do it fresh every year. They film new videos and update their techniques. They used to do this in August. So my plan was to go through 2009 videos first and when August comes I’ll be ready with lots of questions and ideas and I won’t be the biggest newbie, so it’ll be easier to follow.

But Ed Dale (the funny looking Aussie guy from the video) changed things around a lot this year. First he dropped the 30 Day part from the name. So now it’s just called The Challenge. But this wasn’t just the name change. The Challenge isn’t a thirty day thing anymore. There will be 7 modules and one pre-challenge module. Each of these modules will take 7 days and between individual modules there will be 7 days off. Ed says each part will take only 30 minutes to watch the video and then take action. I’m a bit skeptic about that, but we’ll see. So 8 modules x 7 parts in a module x 30 minutes per part gives us only 28 hours of work. Well hell, I though, I have a lot more time than that – I’ll give it a go.

The first pre-challenge video was up yesterday. It’s about UStream. As I’ve done preseason for the 2009 30DC and even more so because I’m a computer geek, I already know about this. So I’ll watch pre-challenge just to see what’s new, but the part I’m really looking forward to at the moment is Module 1. Can’t wait.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, tc10, the challenge

I’m currently finishing college. There’s really not much to talk about there – school’s school and that’s that. It does bring an important change to my life though. Being so close to finishing this chapter of my life made me want to make something of myself. Well, even more than before. I’m studying computer science which means I’m a programmer. I’ve been a programmer since the age of 10, if I remember correctly. That’s about 13 years now. So setting the 1st goal is really not that hard – finish school and get the diploma.

I always liked creating stuff and programming is was what I could get my hands on early on. This is also where I see myself in the future. At least the career part of my life. With internet b(l)ooming I found an (almost) perfect platform for using my creativity. So here lies my second goal – bring to life (start and finish) at least 4 of the ideas that are in my head. I’d really like to create a sufficient passive income with this as well, but that’s of secondary importance. The key to this will be motivation, determination and discipline. I got motivation, some determination, but I’ll have to work hard on my discipline.

The third goal is more of a physical nature. Over the last year or two I’ve let my body go a bit. Not too much. I’m at 78kg with 178cm of height. This puts my BMI just under the upper limit of normal weight-to-height ratio. That’s all good, but I just don’t feel good/happy about it. Though I like doing sports this is where my lack of discipline kicks in again. Extreme sports like skateboarding, wakeboarding, snowboarding are some of my

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