Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

Anyone who saw Next Internet Millionaire probably remembers Thor Schrock. He made it to the final three in the contest, and easily had some of the best business sense. Anyway, www.topaffiliatechallenge.com is Thor's new project with many similarities to the original contest, just hosted in Lincoln Nebraska and with more of a reality feel. Contestants will be able to work when they want, how they want, and using any resources they want to accomplish the task. This sounds cool, so I might have to see what we can do about sponsorship or maybe submit a video audition. Good luck with the whole thing, Thor.

We just re-launched www.properpet.com recently, but that doesn't mean it won't see huge changes again soon. I've seen time after time where sites get some improvement made and then stand still for months while the designers take it easy. For us, standing still is not an option. If you watch over the next 2 weeks, you should see some huge changes rolling out. I won't give too much away, but I will say that these are all going to be changes made with the customer in mind that will be migrated to ToolBarn.com shortly. It should be fun.

Ever wanted to see what NPMMO meetings are like? I posted an hour plus of video on the site on this page . Let me know if you have any feedback on the video. It was difficult to get decent audio out of the video, but I cleaned it up as much as I could. Enjoy.

I got a Greenway water cooler for my office and tried hooking it up today. After plugging it in and marveling at the blue light under the tap, I turned the switch on the back to the "On" position. Granted, this was a remanufactured tri-temp dispenser, but as soon as the switch was turned on there was a big spark out the back of the unit and the lights went out. Last I checked, this was not a good sign. Luckily, the unit was sitting on top of my mini-fridge and not on the floor or next to the wall. Had it been closer to either, I think we could have had a fire here. Here's to hoping that Greenway can get this issue resolved quickly.

We're trying a promotion at ToolBarn.com for the next week. It'll be interesting to see how it works. You can hear what it is at http://blogs.toolbarn.com/podcast/ and tell me what you think will happen with this promotion here. I've got my opinions, but tell me what you think. I might even send out goodies to someone that makes a guess.

We had a blog, hosted on our servers but powered by Blogger, get marked as spam. By the looks of things, some of the drafts were considered spam and that got the blog flagged. Here's the deal: the blog is customer contributions, making it necessary to allow anyone to send to it. However, spammers like sending to blogs, too. I go through and delete a few hundred every now and then, but without bulk delete it is very difficult to get very far. In reading on Blogger's TOS, they say you can request a manual review, but they never say how / where to request that. Thanks for that, Google. How about a form to fill out?

We went and saw The Bucket List today. It was very well written and was a great movie. Of course, big name actors like Nicholson and Freeman wouldn't take a horrible script. There were a few continuity errors in it, but those can easily be overlooked. I don't recommend going to this one and not stopping at the refreshment stand, though. The napkins come in handy at the end.