Monthly Archives: March 2009

Time to Shake Things Up

Posted on by under blogging, curriculum vitae, interviewing, random thoughts, search terms, software, work
Monster.com visits the Craigslist office
Image by unfurl via Flickr

Sometimes, I’m a little dense.  A little thick-headed.  A little dumb.  But eventually, I learn.  And I have finally learned something.  What was it?  That what I’m doing to solve my current situational problem isn’t working.

Well, now I think it’s high time I recognized continuing to do things the same way is going to lead to the same results, and y’all, that ain’t good.

So, I can’t promise I’ll be as active online for a little while as I try to straighten out my resume.  I’m going to try for a new format and a few variations on it, to see if applying for positions with something more specialized helps.  In time.

I’ve been putting this off for a long time because I hate the idea of struggling to come up with buzz words (and not knowing that they should be!), and fighting to make correlations between my actual skills and things being sought in the marketplace.  No more.  I can’t run the machine the same way anymore.  Just can’t.

So, despite my procrastinated desire to work on my manuscript, I have to put that off and look at doing something drastic to my resume and see if I can land the elusive job in the land of 8% unemployment.  Since this is priority one, I’ll have to put off other writing things I want to do, too.

Wish me luck, and if any of you have specific buzz words you can offer me from today’s employment market, please feel free to do so.

See ya when I can!
-JDT-

Related articles by Zemanta

Another Blog Traffic Tool

Posted on by under blogging, Computers, hobbies, Linky Love, random thoughts, software, traffic
Blogging For Dummies
Image by Somewhat Frank via Flickr

I’ve talked to you before about a great li’l thing called AlphaInventions.com, a web site which presents your blog to other bloggers and visitors to the site.  It’s a fantastic and FREE way to get your blog(s) exposure.  Who knows?  You may even pick up a new follower or two, and you might connect with others you’re interested in following.

Well, I have a new one for you.  It’s the same general idea — a round-robin display of various blogs from around the blogosphere — and it works in a similar way.  Not speaking from a technical standpoint, because I have no shade of a clue how those programmers did the juju they did, but from a practical standpoint, it’s easy to use.

The site is Condron.us, and it’s very simple to use.  Go to their home page, enter your blog or web site’s URL, click add and voila! — blog exposure to dozens of new readers.

The home page has a link at the top that says Add Your Blog.  Click it.  Enter the URL, and your email if you’d like (it’s optional), and then click the SUBMIT button.  That’s it!  You’re in the rotation and you will get more hits, guaranteed.

In addition, you can write a nice review of their site (like this one) and their page will auto-insert the URL into their rotation.  More hits again.

It’s a great tool and very useful as a method of getting your blog out there to people, especially when you don’t have control over the meta tags of your site (like us WordPress.com users).

Check it out!

-JDT-

Related articles by Zemanta

Traffic Patterns and Blogging

Posted on by under biodata, blogging, curriculum vitae, hobbies, random thoughts, search terms, social networking, traffic
Blogging Readiness
Image by cambodia4kidsorg via Flickr

So it must be wedding season in south-central Asia.

I can tell, because most of the time, my daily posts will outstrip the posts about bio-data information during the week, then lag behind over the weekend when I’m not posting.  It’s always neck-and-neck, down to the wire, but my posts are usually more popular in terms of views on a daily basis than the bio stuff.

Not so lately, though.  This week, the wedding resumes are more popular by a fair stretch.  Today (as I write this, which is a Wednesday), it’s a 33% margin of lead.

I get over a hundred views a day now pretty consistently, but I owe most of that to the personal and professional bio-data information I compiled last year.  If I remove that from my blog (and don’t think I haven’t considered it), I wonder where I’ll end up?  Probably something more akin to what I have on my fiction blog (which ain’t much, rarely more than five and never consistent).

It’s been sort of tricky for me to figure out what would drive traffic to my blog over the time I’ve been interested in that.  For one thing, I don’t have a consistent topic about which I blog.  For another, my search terms were always slanted toward the personal CV stuff because I mentioned it in a post once.  Since it was ticking me off, I decided to give ‘em what they want, and now, I have no other search terms at all bringing people to my blog.

Nothing wrong with being focused, I guess, and having a targeted audience.  That just isn’t the one I wanted.

Here’s a few things, if you’re interested, that I found in my research to drive traffic to your blog:

  1. Comment on other blogs.  Folks who see your comments around the blogosphere will follow you home, so to speak.
  2. Join a forum.  Got a hobby or interest you like blogging about?  Find a forum about that topic, comment and post, and put your blog address in your signature.  Voila, more hits.
  3. Put your blog address in your signature on your emails and anywhere else you might correspond or be seen.  Your Twitter profile for instance, or your Facebook or MySpace page.
  4. Make sure you link to other blogs similar to yours or of interest to you and your intended audience.  Also communicate with similarly targeted bloggers and see about exchanging links and link-backs.
  5. Make use of ping sites like Technorati.
  6. Add chicklets to your blog for sites like Technorati, Reddit, Digg, Del.icio.us, etc.
  7. Put an RSS feed button on your blog.

Just some general items you can use to pull some traffic your way.

Related articles by Zemanta

Paranoia State

Posted on by under ghost stories, life, random thoughts
Image by Henry Fuseli depicting Hamlet in the ...
Image via Wikipedia

So, I might’ve mentioned I sometimes watch Paranormal State, a “docu-drama” about paranormal investigations conducted by Ryan Buell‘s Paranormal Research Society based out of Penn State University.

I watched an episode on March 23, 2009, wherein Ryan and his intrepid band of fellow club members take on a case in Kentucky where a family is reporting paranormal activity.  Through the course of the show, PRS is led (back) to Quincy, IL, where a young girl previously had a “demonic possession“.  PRS called in a priest, who performed an exorcism, and everything was hunky-dory for a while.  Six months, I believe they said.

So Mr. Buell and his brave band of followers and ghost hunters went back to do battle with the demonic force haunting and harming the little girl.

I’m willing to give a pretty wide berth for shows like this.  I just love things paranormal and while I watch them for entertainment and fun, this particular episode left me … well, disappointed would be a big understatement.

For the life of the show, people have leveled accusations of staged events, and the suave, smooth presentation Ryan Buell gives is clearly rehearsed.  But the show’s been pretty fun and has had some moments I thought were pretty interesting.  (For instance, watching the temperature on a thermal camera drop 30 degrees.)  But overall, these shows are pretty hokey and you have to take them with a large dose of sodium chloride and whatever flavor of liquor will help you swallow bovine fecal matter.  I mean, none of this stuff is hard to make up and generate as special effects.

So anyway, on 23-Mar-2009, I watched what was presented as an “exorcism”.  I have to tell you, a more poorly acted drama I’ve not seen in a long, long time.  I saw werewolf movies with Lon Chaney which had better and creepier elements of the supernatural, and in the end, I saw a young girl who probably needed acting classes more than she needed a priest.  I saw a priest who had more questionable theology than almost any (almost) I’ve ever met in person.  I saw an old man who, every time he comes on the show, seems desperate to bag as much camera time as he can and likes to make the editors censor out his foul language, and who presents himself as someone who chats with the dead or demonic — but only he can hear them.  That’s right, the voices speak only to him.  Take that how you will.

I saw a show that probably shouldn’t've been aired, frankly.  It was overwrought with manufactured drama and “tension”.  I only pray my fiction’s not as bad.  Please, Lord.  It was awful.

It sort of bummed me out, because I was really starting to enjoy the show.  Oh well.  I still have Ghost Hunters and Ghost Hunters International to entertain my ghost addiction.

And I can’t figure out why I can’t get a job.  Ha!

-JDT-

Related articles by Zemanta

Paranormal Investigation

Posted on by under hobbies, life, random thoughts
Ghost hunters taking an EMF reading which prop...
Image via Wikipedia

Paranormal investigation is sort of a field of interest right now.  Like becoming a crime scene investigator shortly after the debut of CSI on television, there is a higher interest in paranormal investigation and the process involved, thanks in no small part to two Rhode Island plumbers who operate a high-tech group along the Eastern seaboard.  (The fact that it’s become a franchise and has moved overseas notwithstanding.)  They’ve attracted a lot of attention to the field of paranormal investigation, if not research.

One of the first things which springs to my mind when someone says they’re hearing and seeing things in a set environment, but nowhere else, is carbon monoxide gas.

Carbon monoxide gas can do a lot of nasty things to your body and mind.  One of those things is hallucinations.  A lot of older houses – like might be found on the Eastern seaboard where our nation is oldest – have less than ideal furnaces and sometimes, high CO output should be a suspect in the cases investigated by these paranormal investigation groups.

Most of them are not full-time researchers on the paranormal and occult.  Most of them claim to have had a paranormal experience.  Most of them say, over time, they have become more “sensitive” to paranormal activity, are more aware of it, able to detect it sooner and perceive it more clearly, as they gain exposure to the paranormal itself.  No one ever checks for carbon monoxide.

What they will check for, though, is EMF, or electromagnetic fields.  And I’ve noticed when they measure for EMF, they’ll rattle off numbers and fractions of units, but don’t provide the unit of measure.

An electromagnetic field is a magnetic force created by passing current through a wire or conductor.  The unit of measure for an electromagnetic field is the Tesla, or amperes (amps) per meter.  Now, there’s a whole big thing here; almost everyone is exposed to low levels of EMF everyday, because the very wires webbing the house you live in and the surrounding buildings and such all emit a low-level EMF.  Most common materials don’t shield against them, and they’ll pass readily through stuff, so you can’t just hide from them.  But there’s no way to know if the levels of exposure seen on TV are of any significance when the investigators rattle off their numbers, because the common measure for EMF is mT, or milliTeslas.  That is, thousands of Teslas.  There’s a lot of debate about what effects the EMF generated by extremely low frequency (or ELF)  EMF waves, and you’ll have a great time if you choose to Google that topic, I’m sure.

But, they never check for the more common problem of carbon monoxide.  Why not?

If I conducted a paranormal investigation in someone’s home, the first few questions I’d ask would be:

  1. When was the last time your home was tested for carbon monoxide leaks and exposure?
  2. Do you have carbon monoxide detectors in your home?  Do they work and have you tested them?
  3. Does anyone else experience the things you’ve discussed with us when they visit you?  If so, is it only after a prolonged visit of a few hours or more, or does it happen right away?

Some other things I’ve wondered about is why the ghost hunting has to occur in the dead of night.  Don’t the investigators have to determine when the most likely time for contact with the paranormal situations will be and investigate during those times?  I assumed it’s because most paranormal investigators have to hold down day jobs and can’t go crossing the streams in the middle of the day, but if your client mostly encounters paranormal activity in the afternoon just before her daughter gets home from school, aren’t you inclined to study then, and not at three o’clock in the morning?  The only ones aware of paranormal activity then will be the investigators; no one else is up … maybe not even the ghosts.

Just some thoughts on what I find to be an interesting topic.

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

Related articles by Zemanta