Tom Printy’s Blog

Blogging Experiment is giving away $100 this week

All you have to do is place a link on your website (either a blog post, text link on a content site, etc) to the blogging experiment. You can link to any page on this site, but I’ll give you some sample link ideas below you can use if you want…

Once you post the link on your site, leave a comment below with the URL of the page the link is on and also use your paypal email address in the email field so you can get paid if you win.

Here’s the catch (always a catch right?)…

You will have to send at least 30 unique visitors to blogging experiment from that link between now and Monday night at 10pm eastern (when I announce the winners). That’s a whopping 5 visitors per day. In other words, it just means you need to put the link someplace where people will see it and click it, not buried at the bottom of your site somewhere.

To make the drawing fair, I’m going to let you pick the winners. I don’t feel like dealing with the whining again like last contest : -)

On Monday, I’ll ask you to pick 4 random numbers and I’ll use those to select the winners.

I thought that it would be fun to see if I can actually send the required amount of traffic to his site. So help me out and click the link

Does Elgin IL need a coworking space?  I would like to think so. There is a small tech community in Elgin that is growing. I can’t help to think that most of these people work out a home office.

What is coworking:

Coworking is cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents.

Or, it’s like this: start with a shared office and add cafe culture. Which is the opposite of most modern cafes.

To prevent spam, we have a password on this wiki. It is coworking with the two “o”s being zeroes!

Welcome, have a look around! The best places to get started are right below:

 http://coworking.pbwiki.com/

I think it would be really neat to have a space like this in Downtown Elgin.  Anyone want to help me put one together?

From mashable.com

Goodrec, a new social recommendation engine, has received $900,000 of a desired $1.05 million in funding from their series A round.  According to PEHub, the funding for this round included SoftTech VC and Chance Technologies Seed.

Little is known about the company to the general public as it is in locked testing for the moment.  What is known is that the service is looking to build a new system for remembering and sharing recommendations.  The project is the brainchild of Mihir Shah, a former product manager at Yahoo Search.  There is no word when the site will open to a wider testing, or even go public, but we’ll be sure to let you know.

I am not sure what “social recommendation” are, and how this differs from del.icio.us  or other bookmarking services.  I guess we will have to wait till they open up.

From alarm:clock

Israel’s Jinni has raised $1M in a first round from Start-Up Factory.

Jinni is developing a content search and discovery systems with personalization for consumers to discover movies, TV shows, and online videos. They plan to launch an affiliate program for Internet TV operators as well as to license its solution to global TV operators.

The premise is that consumers all gravitate to Iron Man and other blockbusters because they have a tough time discovering films and TV shows that suit their tastes. Yes and no on this. Consumers gravitate to IronMan because $200M was spent on it and because its nice to talk with others back at work who have seen the same movie. They can easily scan the film section to find other films that may or may not appeal to them but most don’t want to take chances on wasting a precious Friday night on a dud.

Jinni was founded by CEO Yosi Glick who was VP Marketing & BD at Orca Interactive.

There is a lot of competition in this space. It will be interesting to see if they are able to differentiate themselves.

Has either of these companies participated in the Netflix Challenge?  If they did and were able to score a decent RMSE they might have something.

I just wanted to thank to members of the city council for comments that they made during last night’s meeting

First I would like to thank councilman John Walters for keeping pressure on city staff to fix Edison Ave after the sewer work that was done on the street over the winter.  With his help this maybe this nice street will return to the very nice street that it used to be.

Secondly I would like to thank and encourage  councilman Michael Powers to bring back Public Access television to Elgin. We have a channel that airs some city announcements but it would be great if we could fill that dead air with some interesting content produced by the citizens of Elgin.

Lastly Congrats to Councilman Rober Gilliam for 35 years or service on city council. WOW!

I was happily sleeping this morning when I was woken up by the a strange sensation. I thought to myself wow this feels like an earthquake. It appears that I was right. There was an earthquake. Here is the map image from the USGS.

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UPDATE:

The following is a release by the United States Geological Survey, National Earthquake Information Center: An earthquake occurred 35 km (20 miles) SW of Vincennes, Indiana and 205 km (125 miles) SW of INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana at 3:36 AM MDT, Apr 18, 2008 (4:36 AM CDT in Illinois). The magnitude and location may be revised when additional data and further analysis results are available. There have been no reports of damage.

This large region borders the much more seismically active New Madrid seismic zone on the seismic zone’s north and west. The Illinois basin - Ozark dome region covers parts of Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas and stretches from Indianapolis and St. Louis to Memphis. Moderately frequent earthquakes occur at irregular intervals throughout the region. The largest historical earthquake in the region (magnitude 5.4) damaged southern Illinois in 1968. Moderately damaging earthquakes strike somewhere in the region each decade or two, and smaller earthquakes are felt about once or twice a year. In addition, geologists have found evidence of eight or more prehistoric earthquakes over the last 25,000 years that were much larger than any observed historically in the region.

Earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S., although less frequent than in the western U.S., are typically felt over a much broader region. East of the Rockies, an earthquake can be felt over an area as much as ten times larger than a similar magnitude earthquake on the west coast. A magnitude 4.0 eastern U.S. earthquake typically can be felt at many places as far as 100 km (60 mi) from where it occurred, and it infrequently causes damage near its source. A magnitude 5.5 eastern U.S. earthquake usually can be felt as far as 500 km (300 mi) from where it occurred, and sometimes causes damage as far away as 40 km (25 mi).

The short answer is yes, you can make money taking surveys online. You won’t make a ton of money, but you might make enough to buy yourself lunch. I use these surveys as part of my mutiple streams of income approach. Let me review the two survey companies that I have had the most luck with.

Pine Cone Research: This was the first survey company that I actually joined. I learned about it on another website and decided to give it a try. They generally pay you 3.00 per survey. You end up filling out a lot of qualification surveys but once you are qualified you are directed to a more in depth survey. Survies generally take between 10 to 20 mins.

MySurvey.com: This was second survey company that I have joined. They don’t pay you per survey but instead award you points per survey that you take surveys range from 10 points for qualifying surveys to several hundred for a full survey. Surveys take anywhere from 10 mins to 45 minutes to complete. I have learned about some interesting new products on this site. As a bonus they also offer a monthly prize of $10,000 just for logging into the site and checking to see if you have any surveys. Sign up and try it out!

So while it isn’t going to make you rich I think it is a fun little thing that you can do in your spare time.

UPDATE: You can signup for Pine Cone research at  http://www.pineconeresearch.com/signup/ds500Referral1.asp

On the B-List I was refered to a meme for top used commands here are mine:

history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head
191 ssh
74 sudo
38 ls
27 ping
23 exit
22 cd
19 vi
15 ps
13 kill
11 ./slttest.py

This year I made a new year’s resolution to start one new website a month. Well Seeing as this is April I am 4 websites behind. Last week I decided to take action. I wanted to see if I could start a new webiste working only 20 minutes a day.   I had the idea already so that was already done. The hard part was putting it all together.  The tools I used where Wordpress, MySQL , and some perl code that I threw together. By Sunday afternoon I released my new site www.learn2strum.com on the world. The site is for video guitar lessons.  I picked this niche since I have been watching a lot of these videos lately.  This is a big step for me. It proves that I can produce something kinda cool in a couple of hours. If you do check out the site let me know what you think?

About two weeks ago I worked a booth at recent Chicago Dice Career fair. There were may 15 other companies with booths there. This fair was devoted towards job seekers who considered themselves technical or software development related. This fair was interesting to me because it gave a real sense about where the economy is and what types of people are looking for jobs and what types of people are not looking for a job. The good news is (based on my observations) is that if you are a good solid software developer you are employed and not looking. Te bad news is that if you are a Project Manager (PM) you are out there looking for new gig and you are not alone.  I must have had at least 80 people in a 4 hour period ask if my employer was looking for a Project Manager.  I would tell them that we are looking for developers or sysadmins and they would frown. I guess they were hearing that a lot.

What does this say about the economy? To me it says that we are in the very early stages of a slow down or  recession. It seems that companies are just starting to trim the fat (Project Management) and have decided to keep the meat (developers).  This also means that there possible could be more fat trimming and even meat trimming in  the near future, and that we haven’t even started to see the effects of this recession or coming recession.

As always keep your resume polished and ears to the ground.

I just finished watching “The Big Lebowski” on Hulu.  Hulu is the best new site to come out in a while. Were else can I get all this content for free and have it be legal? Sure there are some commercials but I can stand a 30 second interruption every now and then while I watch a free movie. There is also a ton of NBC and FOX network tv shows on the site as well.

As this service get bigger it would be nice if they implemented a recommendation engine but at least for now the movie content is small enough that I can figure out what to watch.

If you are looking for something to watch but don’t want to trek to the video store or wait for your next DVD in the mail you can always watch the content on Hulu.