Archive for January, 2008

My home network, part I

I want to share the way my home network is setup because it works for me, and I might give you ideas as to how to set up yours. My data is very valuable to me and I will also share with you how I protect and access it from (almost) anywhere. A hard drive failed on me about 5 years ago and my data (music, documents, videos, photos…etc) was lost forever. I did manage to get a few files back from online/CD backups, but for the most part, I lost the files and I couldn’t afford thousands of $$ on professional recovery. First, I will list the devices I have running and their roles:

ii. Internet. I chose Charter as my ISP because they have proven to be reliable and they offer the fastest internet connection in the area (10/1 mbs). But as soon as FIOS starts laying down that sweet optic goodness in my area, I’m giving Charter the boot. (more…)

My 1st website review

I’ve decided to review a website to generate a bit more traffic to my blog. But first, let me give you a bit of background on how I found the site I’m about to review: I came across TylerCruz.com thanks to a suggestion by Google Reader (you know, “Top Recomendations” area on the top right), and after reading a couple of his posts, I decided to become a subscriber. I have found numerous quality sites thanks to Google’s recommendations in the past. Then I came across this post where he reviews blogs that review him, and decided to give a shot to reviewing his site for one in return (I could use criticism, constructive or otherwise). A full-blown review from Tyler costs $100, and that is something I might consider doing in the future. (more…)

More clear objectives for this blog

I’ve been reading lots of other blogs, specifically blogs about blogging (hold on, that is not redundant) and the reason why I’ve been doing this is because I want to increase the readership of this blog and potentially monetize. After doing this bit of research I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to define a couple of elements:

1. A Business Plan: as John Chow explains, one needs a defined business plan, and more specifically, one needs a goal defined over a time-period. Based on this, my goal is to have 300 RSS subscribers and 500 unique daily visits by January (more…)

My blog’s new design

I launched this new design about 2 weeks ago, and just until now I realized that I needed to write about it. First, let me give credit where credit is due. I did not write the entire theme by myself, as a matter of fact, I didn’t write any of it, I just modified and added lines of code (mostly CSS). I did all this thanks to Sandbox, which is basically a clear canvas for people who want to start out making WP designs. I did run into some trouble making the whole thing centered, but nothing too complicated.

I started out with the new logo design in Photoshop CS3. Tried out some new fonts (after installing 4200 of them, which I had archived) and came out with the new JJMELO wording. Then I took one of my favorite pictures (the biplane, original here) and turned into a vector file with Illustrator CS3. Then I made a shield (learning how to use the pen tool in Illustrator) and put the plane on top. After that I installed the Sandbox theme then used Dreamweaver to modify it to my liking and about 4 hours later, this is what I got.

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Arctic Monkeys live

Favorite Tunes of 2007

Here is a list of songs that I may have listened one too many times in 2007. If you’re not familiar with the song, just click the Video Clip here link to watch the Youtube vid.

  • LDN – Lily Allen. This song makes me happy (and my mom loves it!). Video clip here.
  • 3′s and 7′s – Queens of the Stone Age.  I love the raw guitar in this tune. Video clip here.
  • T.H.E.H.I.V.E.S – The Hives. Funkalicious!. Video clip here.
  • Working Class Hero – Green Day. Just had to include this Green Day song here…everyone who knows me knows I’m a huge Green Day fan. Video clip here.
  • Little Cream Soda – The White Stripes. One guitar? Really? I had tickets to see them, but they canceled their tour because Meg was “stressed”.  Video clip here.
  • Brainstorm – Arctic Monkeys. I became a huge fan of Arctic Monkeys after seeing them live at the Trubador in May. I can’t get enough of them. Video clip here.
  • Tarantula – The Smashing Pumpkins. “…a millions watts of sound…”. Video clip here.
  • Bleed it out – Linkin Park. A song perfect for anger management. Video clip here.
  • Sofa Song – The Kooks. Saw them live at Jimmy Kimmel live, where they More >
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