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Table of Contents for this
issue.....
1.
Authors Comments
2.
Q & A, Suggestions
and Comments
3.
Follow up on eBay
feedback
4.
ASK Database
5.
Backup Your Computer
Hard Drive
6.
How Do I Print What I Am
Viewing on my Screen?
Author's
Comments
Did
you know that I speak Volkswagen? I
am a quail hunter and in
South Texas
, every serious quail hunter has a
hunting car or truck. Mine
is made from a VW bus. My
original VW hunting car, the Quailmobile, broke apart after 25 years.
I bought a 1970 VW bus body to build the Quailmobile II using all
the knowledge I gained from patching the old one for 25 years.
(It had a lot of burned welding rod on it).
On
top of all the work at my day job and my online job, I am trying to get
this finished for hunting season this year, and I am running out of
time. I have posted a couple
of pictures of me working on it. It
is lying on its side so my helper and I can weld the steel support in
place on the underside without having to lie on our backs and have
welding sparks falling in our faces.
I will probably write more on it for those who are curious about
it. I will post a
picture of the final product. It
is a one of a kind vehicle and it is fun.
A
few years ago, for a project (I seem to have too many of them), I
rebuilt a VW Thing. It took
five years to complete since it involved taking it apart screw by screw
and then putting it back together. We
used it for a few years and when our children did not need the
transportation anymore, we sold it.
It was fun, but I will not undertake a project of that magnitude
again.
John
measuring for cutting steel brace
John
welding brace in place
Linda
and I are flying to
Dallas
this week end on our company plane
(Southwest Airlines) to visit our son, Travis, and his lovely, talented
wife, Linda Lee. Since I am
married to a Linda and he is too, we tagged our daughter-in-law with her
middle name so we would not get the Lindas mixed up.
Travis turns 31 next week and we are having a birthday
celebration for him. They
have tickets for us to go to the Plano Symphony.
Linda and I will really enjoy this.
Kingsville
does not have this available, and we
consider this a real treat.
Q & A, Suggestions and Comments
Tim
Know, one of our mentors, made the suggestion that we not use a full
page for the width of the Boomer Video eZine.
He suggested setting up a 700 pixel wide table on the page and
put all the text inside that table.
We
tried his suggestion and it makes a world of difference in the
readability of the page. We
hope that you think the same.
Please
send us your comments on this style change via our new suggestion form.
We will format the future issues to please our readers.
Submit your input at our suggestion
form
http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Suggestion_Form1.htm
Follow up on eBay Feedback
In
the last issue we discussed the need to achieve positive feedback for
ten or more transactions to be creditable on eBay.
I want to share with you the feedback generation for
10-17-06
.
I logged on eBay and searched for ebooks for $.99.
There were 1,688 available. I
bought the following. A
cookbook with 11,000 recipes for Linda, Every Book on eBay plus resale
rights to 1000’s more, Be Your Own Boss plus resale rights, Instant
Affiliate Link Masker software, and 100 Feedback in Seven Days (I need
to read this).
For
fun I searched on ebooks for $.01 and found 678 ebooks for $.01.
I bought one of these on How to Sell Books on eBay.
A
friend who is a Boomer Video eZine subscriber bought one of the videos,
and I bought one so as of
10/17/06
I have eight transactions and I am waiting for the feedback on them.
I am still waiting for my children to buy the videos.
At this rate, I guess I will have to cut them out of the will.
Ebooks
are good items to buy for feedback.
They are inexpensive. They
are delivered immediately so you do not have to wait a week for shipping
before leaving feedback. You
can leave feedback in a few minutes after the purchase and if the seller
is on the ball, he/she will leave feedback quickly.
Author’s
Note: I just took time to
read the “100 Feedback in Seven Days”.
It is a seven page book that says to search for items for $.01
that are “Buy It Now” information products with no shipping cost.
Buy 100 of these whether you need them or not, leave positive
feedback and in one week you will have 100 transactions with positive
feedback for the total price of $1.00.
I
was looking for more value so I started at $.99 for the items for which
I was searching. However, for building feedback, the $.01 item with no
shipping cost is the way to go.
ASK Database
When I set up the
Boomer Guru site for selling videos, I wanted to get feedback at the end
of video so I could determine if there was something outdated in the
video or get any suggestions for improvement.
I also wanted to collect any suggestions for a new topic for a
video.
After checking
around on what was available, I settled on ASK Database.
This is an amazing site that will handle the task of setting up
forms to collect information and provide tools to help you analyze the
information.
When you join
ASK, you can set up various types of question formats and it generates
the HTML code for you to copy into your web page for the form.
When the reader completes the form, the data is logged into the
ASK database and is available for you to read or analyze.
I have used ASK
to set up a suggestion form for Boomer Video eZine at http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Suggestion_Form1.htm.
I would really appreciate your going there and leaving your
suggestions or comments. This
will help us improve the eZine and will also debug the website.
You will get a
“Thank You” page after leaving your suggestion.
This is a custom Boomer Video eZine page
If you did not want to make your own page, ASK has a default
thank you page.
ASK has a 21 day
free trial and then it costs $19.95 per month for the silver membership
and $29.95 for the gold membership. This is not cheap for the starting
entrepreneur. The cost of
this service makes this one of those tough decisions.
Will my site grow so the cost per response and the data collected
justify the cost? Our
decision is “yes”. This
will be an invaluable tool for improving the quality of this site and
other sites that we manage.
To learn more
about ASK, go to www.askdatabase.com/cmd.asp?AF=503396.
The ASK Database
is another tool that the successful online entrepreneur should have in
his/her bag of tricks.
Back
Up Your Computer Hard Drive
What is your
backup procedure? I REALLY
hope you have one. Most
people back up to some type of media, but then store the media next to
the computer. This takes
care of the hard drive crash, but it does nothing about the house
burning down along with the computer and the backup.
As we have
expanded our online business, “My Documents” (for non Microsoft
Windows users, this is where all user documents and files are usually
kept) has grown exponentially. I
now have 1.5GB in My Docs. I
used to burn my backups to CD, but each CD only holds about 650MB which
complicates the backup procedures.
I now have a
large amount of valuable data on the computer that took many man-hours
to create. I DO NOT want to
have to recreate it. I doubt
if I could remember half of what I have already created.
I began exploring
using an online backup service. In
the process of doing the research, I read a good review about it in P C World (
June 2, 2006
)
http://pcworld.com/article/id,125729-page,2/article.html.
The article picked these are the top
services in order IBackup,
XDrive, Acpana Data Deposit Box, Elephant Drive, Mozy.
The article picked IBackup first, but gave mention of Mozy which
is in Beta form.
I looked at the choices and I like Mozy.
You know why? Mozy is
free for the first 2.0GB. It
costs $4.95 per month for 30GB. Before
you read too far about Mozy, it only works with Windows XP so check out
other sites if you do not run XP operating system.
To use Mozy, download the Mozy software
and it takes care of the backups. It
has an automatic feature the analyizes your hard drive and presents you
with a back up set that it develops.
You can make changes to the backup set as you see fit.
It develops the backup set based
on file extensions that it thinks you will want to back up.
It backs up Outlook or Outlook Express.
The backup works on files that are open.
Your first back up will be long (mine
was over 24 hours), but each backup following that is incremental.
It only backs up what has changed and it does that automatically.
The backups are done in the background only when the CPU usage on
your PC is low.
Here’s what
Mozy says about itself:
* Is simple to
set up
* Performs backups automatically in the background
* Encrypts all files on your PC before transfer
* Performs incremental backups
* Backs up only blocks that have changed
* Backs up open/locked files
Alternatives to
Mozy (this is copied from the Mozy site)
I highly recommend that if you do not
have one, you start a backup procedure.
It is not a question of if the day will come when you need the
backup. The real question is
when.
Don
’t be the one who
says “I wish I had listened and backed up my computer”.
I recommend that you sign up with Mozy (www.mozy.com).
Since it is free for backup under 2.0GB, you have nothing to
lose. On the sign up form,
there is a place for a referral
code.
Please do me the favor of entering my code which is 3FWLA1.
I do not get paid directly in $$$, but I get 250MB additional
backup space for each member who joins and right now my backup is 1.9GB
out of the free 2.0GB so I am pushing the size of the free membership.
Linda and I work hard each week to bring
you this eZine without volumes of advertising.
We would appreciate a favor in return.
Thanks in advance for your kindness.
How
do I Print What I Am Viewing on my Screen?
Some readers may already know this
trick so no offense to them.
If you want to print the contents
of the screen that you are viewing, click on the Print Screen key on the
keyboard. This does not
immediately print the screen but rather, it puts a copy of the screen on
the clipboard. This allows
you to paste the image into another document.
Now that the image in on you
clipboard, open Notepad or Word and position your cursor in the middle
of a blank document. Right
click your mouse and select “Paste” from the dropdown box.
The image will be pasted into the document.
If the image is small, click on the
image to select it. You will
see small boxes at each corner of the picture.
Place your cursor on one of these small boxes, hold down the left
mouse button and drag away from the picture. This
will resize the picture to a larger size.
You may have to expand the margins of the document to really blow
it up.
This is a handy tool to know how to
use so keep it in mind for the next time you want to capture a screen
shot.
I have prepared a short video of
this procedure. View it at
http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Videos/V1I28Video/Click-to-Play.html
That wraps up our
issue for this week. I
cannot stress enough about backing up your computer.
DO IT NOW!!! Until
next week, stay tuned.
John and Linda
Howe
www.boomer-ezine.com
www.boomer-guru.com
www.boomer-entrepreneur.com
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Copyright 2006 John Howe, Inc.
