The past couple of years I have been looking at a half dozen photoblogs and marveling at the talents of these photographers from all over the world. I especially like one blog by a man in the Czech Republic. He does not post photos very often, but when he does post something I am always impressed. He takes portraits of every day people and shots of things in nature, such as trees in a forest or a hawk in flight. It is amazing and very generous of him to share his work on the internet with us and not expect to be paid.

I would love to create a photo blog and upload some of my own photos. I love to take photos and think that some of them have turned out very nice. It would be fun to see if other people like my photos, too. With a little encouragement I might buy a more expensive camera and start working on this hobby more seriously.

Today Reba McIntyre gets the honor of having over 1 million Facebook fans. There are only 10 country music stars with that many fans on Facebook (and one of them is dead – how weird is that?). Reba has been averaging over 11,000 new Facebook Fans each day.

The other country music stars who have over 1 million fans include:

Taylor Swift,
Johnny Cash,
Carrie Underwood,
Lady Antebellum,
Rascal Flatts,
Kenny Chesney,
Jason Aldean,
Tim McGraw and, my favorite,
the Zac Brown Band

This morning I realized that my internet sites and accounts are adding up. I get a notice in my email at least once every month about one or more sites that need to be renewed. Every time I renew a web site, it costs more money and I hear that the costs are going up again in July.

When I renew a site I take that opportunity to review the dedicated server hosting service and make sure that I am happy with that service.  I take a look at the regular charges and review my notes on the history of that site over the past year. Some of my sites have been hacked and most of my hosting services have been a tremendous help getting that resolved and my content restored.

The sites that need the best support are the ones that have managed hosting solutions. Because the servers can be located anywhere in the world, having access to live technical support 24 hours can be important. One of my servers only allows contact by email. That’s not good enough for my important sites, so i will be probably be changing when my annual contract with them comes up for renewal.

For the most critical sites, a host that offers colocation services gives you the best assurance of a quick recovery in case of a major outage or hacking. Outages can occur because of natural disasters, like earthquakes or floods, and disruptions in the power grid. I’ve heard that a series of sunspots over the next several months can be expected to cause some disruptions to satellite services as well as possibly the power grids for a large part of our country. So we have to be prepared for anything!

My Facebook has a red white and blue wreath application for Memorial Day that I posted.

The wreath app asked me to click that I “like” being conservative and showed an old picture of President Reagan.

I don’t know if I AM conservative. I don’t think that I am particularly liberal, either. How do you know if you are left or right?

Maybe I don’t fit any of those labels. And that’s OK.

I am just now starting to appreciate Facebook andd am learning how to use it properly. It is a different concept to have something you write be broadcast to all the people who have signed up as your “friends.”

To be totally honest, there are several Facebook friends on my list that I’ve never met. But I was “introduced” to them via other FB friends and I’m getting to know them all by reading their profiles and their wall posts. Now my list of friends has really grown. I’m having fun with it and I see that some of my friends have even come ove rto my blog here and commented on some of my blog posts.

So if you are new to my blog and coming here from Facbook, welcome!

The huge snow storm in the Washington DC and Maryland area has everyone freaking out. I’ve been trying all day to call my sister’s cell phone and check on her, but I can’t get through. It seems like a lot of the cell towers are overloaded or not functioning properly because of the snowstorm.

One of the big problems with emergency situations is that people rely on their cell phones and the internet for more and more in their daily lives. In fact, if the internet goes down in the largest chain convenience stores, they cannot do business and have to close down until the internet is restored. But they all rely on cable internet connections and none of them have dial-up for their business internet.

In my opinion, it would be a smart business decision to sign up for a cheap dial up service as an internet backup. that way, if the cable and dsl internet providers are shut down or disrupted, you can switch over to dial up and still get online.

I think that if your entire business or livelihood depends on constant access to internet services, then it makes sense to have a back up plan for your internet connection so you don’t go offline and lose out on a lot of business.

When I logged into WordPress today I noticed the banner advisor telling me to upgrade my WordPress version. Again.

This time it is version 2.9. This is like the 20th time I have had to upgrade this year. Some of them have been actual improvements for the user. But most have been technical things and anti-spam or hacker tactics. This is getting so tiresome. I like the application but the constant upgrading is not just an inconvenience – it is a huge problem for people who do not have immediate access to their domain servers to install the new version when its released.

After I cleared my inbox of Spam today, I had 2,284 comments flagged as Spam. That is an incredible amount of internet traffic that was wasted, my time reporting it as Spam wasted, and all that time reading and deleting the unwanted messages was wasted.

I supposed some of these idiot messages do slip through the cracks and get approved. So it must pay off for these spammers. But it is a sad waste of time for me and hundreds of thousands of others.

Turns out that the email sent by my photographer friend was a note to let me know that he and his family are going on holiday until after Christmas. So he will not be posting any new photos on his photoblog until they get back. But then I expect him to have lots of great new photos to share with us.

Every once in a while I’m surfing the internet and I come across something that is not written in English. In fact, the other day I got an email from a photographer friend and he wrote it in Czech. So I had a need for a translation and I had to figure out where to get the email translated so I could understand what he was trying to tell me.

So a little poking around the internet and I found a site that provides a translation service. This site has teams of professional translators that can handle all kinds of translation assignments. They have reasonable prices and some of their services are even free. The translators also understand and respect deadlines for their assignments, which is important for business translation requirements.

Even though I took six years of Spanish in high school, there is no way I can call myself a translator. If I need to convert a document from Spanish into English, I would not hesitate to call on a professional translator to help me get it done right.