We are officially moved out of our place – currently bunking with the in-laws until the departure to the Motherland (Ukraine), which is TODAY.  We’ll be there for a month.

Immediately after the arrival back in the States, we’ll move to Texas.  This move saved us rent and unitilities, as well as the car payment.

I got my brand new Exilim, so I’ll try to capture some Ukrainian hillarity for ya’ll.  Are, like, all pf bloggers traveling this month?

After being cameraless for about a month now, I realized how much it sucks being cameraless. I enjoyed the ability to quickly and secretly snaps some pics of crappy cars as well as anything else I thought was cool. I used to have a silver Casio Exilim EX-Z40, but now I (finally!) have a Casio Exilim EX-S600. And no, I’m not trying to be just like Nev, it’s just the vendor ran out of blue cameras, and I didn’t want another silver one.

My old camera:

My new camera:

I ordered this little hottie online (of course), and with two-day shipping it cost around $270. If you do a little search on eBay, you’ll find very few people trying to offload this unit, which normally means it’s solid. Also, you’ll see a TON of vendors peddling this unit, which means it’s popular. However, I did not find an appealing listing where a person is selling a camera like this as I didn’t want to buy from a faceless online store.

FYI: I foud this exact camera in a local mall for $350.

I almost bid on a $300 + $19.99 Buy It Now listing, but remembered that Nev paid a similar price from this unit like a year ago. Realizing that prices for older technology do drop, I went comparison shopping to PriceGrabber. The first online store that came up was Abe’s of Maine at $258.89.

Here’s the eBay screenshot for comparison.

Suspecting that $50 price fluctuations normally signify REFURB items, I decided to check. I called and got a real person who assured they sold only new items and explained that placing an order over the phone is the same as placing it online (they literally punch the order in online when they are talking to you). The site looked a little shabby and had some glitches in Firefox, which was a major turn-off. I reopened in Explorer and decided to try to place a sample order.

Everything seemed to work in Internet Explorer, so I decided to continue (I also emailed support and asked them to fix Firefox glitches, which they promptly did). I went to my credit card site, created a new temporary account number, and placed the order.

The camera was by my door two days later. Go Abe’s!

So it is cool, is it cool?

Oh yeah. However, as with anything, there are some upsides and downsides.

Old Camera (EX-Z40) pros:

• Perfectly sized, not too big, not too small, square-ish, solid.
• SD card goes in and out easy.
• Battery really lasts.

Old camera (EX-Z40) cons:

• USB 1.0 makes it slow to transfer images.
• Slo-o-o-o-ow operation.
• Cannot edit video in standard video editors (Muvee, Adobe Premiere).
• Video quality is crappy (320×200, 20 frames ps).
• Obsolete.
• Not as cheap as you’d expect from an older unit.

New Camera (EX-S600) pros:

• USB 2.0 makes it easy to transfer images.
• Fast in operation.
• Video editable in standard editors.
• Video quality is better (640×480, 30 frames ps).
• Visual appeal.
• Smaller cradle.
• Dedicated button for video shooting.

New Camera (EX-S600) cons:

• Almost too small and thin, harder to hold. I’m afraid if I give it so someone to snap a pic of my wife and I, that someone is going to drop it.
• Short lanyard makes it very hard to snap pics while having the camera secured on the wrist.
• Hard to get the SD card in and out.
• No dedicated button for Macro shooting (up close).

Since I’m back in business, expect more pics. My 300SD site was really beginning to suffer – the big reason for starting it was to fill the lack-of-old-diesel-pictures void on the Internet.

My comments:

• eBay sucks. My general perception is that even though one can get a good deal, (s)he will wait forever to actually receive the item (slow shipping). Also, eBay dropshippers suck as much as eBay does. eBay is great as a yard sale venue, but not as a store (unless buying used from an individual … which makes it a yard sale venue).
• Reputable online vendors rule. Shipping is fast, return policy is better, the price is lower, and there’s a better legal recourse if things get sour.

Awesome.

UPDATED: A man arrested for wireless piggybacking

Ok, I’ll admit it, I’m totally in love with my new laptop. I know it’s not really that fancy (no BlueTooth, etc), but it’s been extremely liberating to take my work/play on the road. Nev, for instance, is taken with his tablet PC, but I’m pretty good with the keys and I’m against the smudge marks on the display =)

Shortly after getting the laptop, I installed a Wireless-B (cheaper, older) router in my place, thus enabling myself to roam freely. Of course, I threw a security key on the connection, however …

… apparently, there are people in town who don’t know how or don’t want to secure their routers. That top unsecured connection was snached up by my laptop while I was driving through town. I did not realize how many people actually live in wi-fi enabled households! It was a complete shocker to see how many people ran unsecured wi-fi!

So I surfed the net for a little bit while being parked next to a few houses, and bookmarked a few addresses with strongest signals on my Google Earth globe for future reference.

Then I did the first thing any IT person would do when (s)he sees an unsecured wi-fi network named linksys or netgear: open browser, punch in 192.168.1.1. When the login prompt came up, I punched in admin for login and password (or blank) for password.

Voila …

… I’m inside their router. I can do whatever the hell I want now, like knock out their Internet alltogether (by changing one digit in the DNS), or create a secured connection for one’s own hypothetical dirty deeds. Of course, their cable hookup would still work, and they could hook their computer up by bypassing the router and going straight to the cable modem. However, if it’s some computer-illiterate Joe Blow’s apartment, is he really going to find that router setup CD, reset the router by holding reset button for 5 seconds, and re-run setup? Yeah, right.

So perhaps he gets a flyer the next day saying something like, “Internet stopped working? A new superscary deadly credit card-stealing virus is going around!” and advertising a quick $29.99 fix … Too sleazy for your taste? It could happen …

The lesson here is this – always secure your wi-fi connection. It’s not that much more complicated to create a meaningful 10-digit key, though you must use hexadecimal base (numbers 0-9, letters A-F). The router wants to assign a complicated key, like A7C0BF96D4, but you can always make up your own by visiting Scrabble Dictionary and punching in ABCDEF into their word builder. Good key components abound – ACE, BAD, BADE, BEAD, BEEF, CAFE, DEB, DEAF, FAD, FADE, FACE … Why not secure your network with a cool, easy-to-remember and give-out-to-friends key like BADACEDEAD, or DECAFFCAFE?

Yahoo! Publishers’ Network is no AdSense.

The latter is a magic bullet that allows some lucky website builders/owners to throw together a keyword-friendly site and make fifty bucks in the first two weeks. I say “some” because it’s becoming kind of an exclusive club. I say “lucky” because they are not shut off yet. It’s not uncommon for a little-to-medium-sized blog to make 3-5 bucks a day on AdSense. It’s not uncommon to pull $8-10 when combined with other sources.

I, however, was banned from Google in a pretty harsh way – right before I was due for a $300 payout, I got an email stating “I was associated with an account previously banned”. The “previously banned” account was banned because of some “illegal clicks” from overseas. The only possible way for me to get back in the game is 1) register a business at the local courthouse 2) host new project on an entirely new host 3) never mention my new projects in my existing projects. Despite those hurdles, I just might do it.

Though I believe “pay-per-click” scam is about to end, it’s a good source of money for a publisher. Don’t be fooled by Yahoo! and eBay getting into the PPC game – it won’t last. It’s too easy and too good to be true, and such things don’t last. But then again, I may eat my own tongue on this one.

So I got approved by Yahoo! after brisk 8 months of waiting (and you thought your rebate checks took too long to arrive). How is it going? Well, it’s basically crap.

Yeah, I know. Ten bucks – and that’s after 3 months on three sites visited by 30 uniques daily. Everyone came from search engines, mind you, so they really don’t have any other way to click out. Before I got shut off, Google paid me about $2 per day per site. “Aha … So that’s how some people make a living“, I thought.

The reason for such crappy performance is Yahoo!’s targeting – it sucks. On a very topical site like 300sd.com, Google used to serve up ads with almost perfect accuracy and relevancy. No weird ads – just 100% import/diesel/Mercedes car and accesory-related ads. Yahoo!’s ads, however, can be likened to those created by a cracked out prostitute.

What, Yahoo? Really? Market Center Financial News? Banking Industry Analysis? On a site where every fifth word is Mercedes, diesel, car, or repair? Whatever. No wonder Linkworth is full of bitter AdSense rejectees.

When you want something done right, do it yourself.

I have a decent-sized web application project pending, and I am very reluctant to start it. The reason for procrastinating is rooted in not wanting to design yet another website from scratch. It’s a time-consuming process that requires good layout skills, Photoshop skills, not to mention html and CSS skills, as well as decent programming foresight. However, I just want to do the programming, and not the tinkering with Photoshop layers.

So I did the next best thing: I went to Template Monster and bought a template. I figured, it will save me from the creative agony of laying out a site. Well, it really didn’t. As I said, I am trying to avoid designing while focusing on the programming instead. This experience has proven to be more of a pain than a benefit.

• All Flash templates require the heavy Macromedia Flash package (though available free for 30 days) and decent Flash-editing skills.
• Most templates are table-based. What does that mean? Well, if you want to add/remove a row, you can add the tr tags, no problem there. However, if you want to add a column, good freaking luck – now you’re dealing with colspans and the resulting throbbing headache.
• Most templates are poorly coded. On top of table design, each individual cell is endowed with three lines of cell-specific code as opposed to one line of code formatting the entire block in the external CSS file.
• Even Cascading Style Sheets-based templates are poorly coded. The programmer has never formatted such important elements as heading tags and unordered lists.
• You cannot get a refund of your money if the template does not work out for you.

Again, I though it would be smart to just buy a template, format it within an hour, and move on to the heavy lifting. Instead, I’ve spent an hour just learning how the template is written, a couple more hours designing stupid navigation buttons in Photoshop (who the hell still uses images as navigation buttons?), and the rest of the day making the damn template work in Explorer and Firefox.

It’s been nightmarish. And I’m a developer. Don’t buy templates.  Worst $60 you’ll ever spend.