Archive for November, 2007

Mrs. V’s Homemade Goodies

Friday, November 30th, 2007

One for the holidays

Man, can you believe it is already December? I remember last Christmas like it was yesterday. Anyway, here’s a marketing experiment. My mom, Mrs. V (figure it out), cooks a lot of stuff. Baked goodies suitable for gifts, complete meal sets for catering events and parties, and anything edible. When she started it was a simple side-business thing and now it has consumed most of her daily schedule. December, like most other businesses, is her month.

Her top-sellers include macaroons, oh and by the way, her’s is the exact same thing being sold in all Seattle’s Best Coffee branches – macaroons and fudge bar. Food for the gods, ensaymada, apple pie, chocolate cake, rhum cake (yeah!), and most recently, cupcakes of all kinds and colors. For viands, well, just about anything.

She does catering, special Christmas packaging and free deliveries – but I believe there’s a minimum and it might depend on your location. We are located in Alabang, Muntinlupa. For inquiries, email me at mark.verzo[@]gmail.com (so I’ll know which ones I’ll get commissions from), or post a comment here, and I’ll send you a price list and/or give you our contact numbers. I might even deliver it to your doorstep. Time to put on some holiday weight!

I’ll be constantly updating my gallery with more picture samples and box/packaging samples. Click on the photo below to view them. Remember, mark.verzo[@]gmail.com for inquiries.

Mum's cupcakes

Trillanes day

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

Stupify

I officially declare November 29, Trillanes Day. Such a weird day, poor Manila Peninsula. Plus, a November 30 12:00 a.m. – 5:00 a.m. curfew to top it all off. Good thing I have nothing planned tonight (NU Rock Awards is tomorrow). But seriously though, who is with this guy? I don’t really care much about politics, and little did I care when my country voted a jail-bound senator, but man, Trillanes did a mighty good job stirring up red-hot emotions of anger and grief in my household. He’s like the second coming of Gringo, only a thousand times less ingenious.

Mark wants a Verzio

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

Hey all, check out this new mobile phone brand trying to penetrate the Philippine market – Verzio. Just came across it on Abe’s blog, thought the name sounded cool. Why? Because soon our quite-unique surname will be associated with a mobile phone. Might as well endorse it. Verzio’s thing is their phones are dual-simmed to begin with. Not quite new (dual sim idea) to us Filipinos but at least now it really is part of a stock phone. Come to think of it, I’ve kind of always wanted a dual sim phone. Smart-Globe, Globe-Sun, switichy-switch-switch.

Hey, when I get a Verzio, you’ll hear me referring to it as “Mark’s Verzio” or “Verzo’s Verzio.” There you go, the only reason I wrote this post.

The theme song from Joey

Thursday, November 22nd, 2007

You like Joey also? I do. Most people say it’s not funny but I say otherwise. Joey is indeed funny. But, it’s only a sixth as funny as Friends. Anyway, the opening song from Joey, the one that goes “yeah, yeah, yeah, you wanna be alright you gotta walk tall,” is entitled “Sunny Hours,” by the band Long Beach Dub Allstars. It came from their 2001-released album entitled Wonders of the World. The band disbanded in 2002.

Missing AdBrite checks

Monday, November 19th, 2007

November 24, 2007 update

I’ve been contacted by AdBrite support. Apparently, they came across this blog post as well. Yes, they do reply, just not as fast others but they won’t leave your queries unanswered. They are investigating if the check has been cashed. Just waiting now for they will eventually figure out.

Fingers crossed

Holy matrimony, Batman, I don’t want to go through this whole thing once again. I’m now two months late. Thing is, I don’t quite remember if AdBrite checks come in via registered mail. Unfortunately, there is no other payment option in AdBrite. They do, however, come in like clockwork on the the second week of every month. I have already written to AdBrite support (they’re not the best), and still waiting if the checks have been cashed somewhere. Wait, my CPX Interactive check is also about a month and a half late. Crap, crap, crap! Please, oh please. This led me to thinking – if I had a corporate bank account, and checks are payable to said company name, would it be harder for a check thief to encash it?

Gayuma wins 2007 Red Horse Muziklaban

Sunday, November 18th, 2007

Gayuma, the band

The grand finals was held yesterday at the Marikina Sports Complex. Ok, I wasn’t there, and I don’t know anything about the band. But before you go, let me say that this blog has been successful in attracting attention and noise for the soon-to-be-known – just look at what we’ve done to Ellen Adarna. In fact, I did this post for the sole purpose of gathering information about the band. I’m curious as to where Red Horse Muziklaban’s direction as a mainstay “career-maker” goes.

So far, these are what I think holds true for the band and the event. Gayuma hails from Batangas. Gayuma is female-fronted (not sure). Mental Floss (band) was favored to win. The grand prize is Php 900,000 (mutherfunker!). Winners had text-votes influence. Another finalist named “Dog Fight” represented Butuan City, Mindanao. Fans did not like this year’s venue. No one died of stampede this year.

More keywords

Red Horse, RedHorse, beer, champion, grand champion, grand finals, winner, ambot sa emo.

November 29, 2007

Apologies. Gayuma is not female-fronted. See band line-up from the comment by anonymous. Still haven’t heard their music. Can someone please lead me to possible samples online?

Finally stopped phpBB spam

Saturday, November 17th, 2007

Finally

My most-hated fight with phpBB (forum/community software) has come to an end. Spam and phpBB is synonymous with each other. My experience with running and maintaining forums has taught me one major lesson – stay away from phpBB. Unfortunately, phpBB has been my most-familiarized forum software, and there was really a time when phpBB was worth it. It’s open-source, 100% free, easy to modify, supported by thousands of users and developers, and has tons of free ready-made themes. Everything still holds true for the software, but spammers have taken control.

One of the main reasons phpBB attracts so much spam is it’s popularity. Spammers weigh the ratio of how much work they’ll devote (creating spam scripts) over the number of available sites to spam. In one of my forums – bilyar.NET – it came to a worst-case scenario 30 bot registrations and 35 spam posts per day. I’ve invited a number of people to moderate the forums, but human brute force is nothing compared to automated spamming. Believe it or not, I’ve met people who’ve said “Ay bilyar.NET? Puro viagra naman dun eh.” Ouch.

The solution

There are a number of different third-party mods to fight phpBB spam. I’ve tried a few, but I’ve never really raved as much as I have over this. The mod is called RAC or Registration Auth Code. By the way, forget about Visual Confirmation (Captcha) in phpBB, spambots get around those easily. The mod adds a random admin-generated code that is linked somewhere within the site. See it in action here, look at the field “Authorization Code:” Once a spambot figures out a way around the code, I simply add a new code and change the link where the code is located. The mod installs in about 3 minutes. See the official link to the mod here. So far since installing this mod, number of spambot registrations = 0.

Thoughts In Binary October 2007 income

Friday, November 16th, 2007

Better late than never part two. I do monthly income reporting for this blog on the second of every month, so this is for October – which was supposed to have been posted last November 2. The goal – to increase income for Thoughts In Binary every month. So far, $21.13 last August, and $35.54 last September.

Income

I have been bragging about adding more income streams for this blog, optimizing my layout for ads, etc. So far, last month, still found no time to do such things. Last October I earned $37.89 from Google AdSense, $13.99 from Amazon Associates, and $2.25 from Text Link Ads. Grand total = $54.13.

Thoughts

Ideally, I should be earning around $150, given an ideal but attainable CPM from my blog’s statistics. I’m still using the default Wordpress template which is not really optimized for ads. Still can’t find the time to look for, or code, a new template, but I do what I want on this personal playground. But hey, did you know that some paid-daily-to-blog people get as low as Php 3,000 a month? I got around Php 2,200 for 15 posts last October. Not bad, maybe.

Thoughts In Binary October 2007 statistics

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

Better late than never. Here’s my blog’s statistics for the month of October. I do this monthly on the first of every month but unfortunately, November didn’t really start ideally. Last September, my blog experienced it’s second only ever monthly decrease in statistics. This month, I’m happy to say that my blog is back on track – increase traffic every month, and I’ve also surpassed the last record which was on August.

Statistics

September saw a whopping 29,587 absolute unique visitors. Almost 10,000 more than my record-breaking August 2007 statistics. I also nearly doubled my number of visits at 46,721. My blog server 107,247 page views at 14.89 GB of bandwidth. Average daily visits ended at 1,507.13 per day. 6,727 referrals came from Google, a whopping 7,017 from Google Images (wow, never really thought how keyword-rich my gallery is) and 1,746 from Yahoo!

How?

To tell you the truth, I used some (wasted) resources to produce these numbers last month. My original goal (on posting statistics) was to see how much I can manually increase my blog traffic without utilizing my network’s resources. I did a little experiment last October and this is what I’ve come up with. I can easily double these stats if I abuse my resources even more; but, that wouldn’t help in my journey to understand blogging and search engines. I have less time experimenting nowadays, so I couldn’t possibly keep up with increasing my traffic (quality) monthly. Maybe I won’t do this next month.

My YouTube channel

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

Video blog?

Whatever they call it these days. Wait, wouldn’t it have been more appropriate if I meant Iyot Tube? Anyway, I have always wanted to have the ability to take videos instantaneously, which is one of the reasons why I chose a Sony Ericsson P990i. Yes, I know the quality of the videos are somewhat subpar but it’s a start. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up buying a camcorder in the future – depends on how much I enjoy this. I’ve decided not to embed my videos here, in fact I’m not going to embed anything here. It’s just redundant that way. And, the way I see it, YouTube viewers who chance upon my videos are potential blog (and other sites) visitors.

For now, majority of my videos are reserved for relatives and close friends. All videos are public though, but you might end up saying “What the hell are these?” if you don’t really know me personally. For future blog visitors and everyone else, this post will end up in a 1-post category called videos. To view my videos, visit my YouTube channel below. And hey, if you have a YouTube account, add u me!

http://www.youtube.com/ThoughtsInBinary