Elvis Blogs - Elvis McNeely

If you have been listening to the news lately I'm sure you have heard that our taxes are going to go up, on the state level and federal level. It is a crying shame that our government is broke and doesn't know how to deal with the situation, outside of raising our taxes.

This is a shout out to the Drupal community that I am for hire. New and existing clients are shrinking their budgets and community opportunities are dwindling.

If you need help (or know someone who does) on your Drupal project or just need some direction, drop me a line. I am flexible and willing to meet in person if necessary.

It seems the FairTax is getting some deep thought in other parts of the world.

If you want to fax multiple pages to a fax machine with Microsoft's Fax Console,  here is how you do it.

1. Make sure Fax Console is enabled.
2. Next open up Fax Console, goto Tools > Configure Fax
3. Now create a document (Word, Excel, Text, Gif etc). Don't close the application yet.
4. Next, goto File > Print and choose Fax.
5. Fax Console will open, just fill in the required fields.

Upon submit Fax Consule will send your multi page fax.

American Express Executive Office
( aka Executive Customer Service)

American Express
200 Vesey Street
New York, NY 10285
(800) 297-6197
or (212) 640 - 2000

Card holders, tired of getting no where with American Express customer service? Give the Executive Offices a call and raise your issue.

Before I begin I must confess I am not a big trader. Matter of fact, I enjoy practicing trading currencies within a demo account at https://fxtrade.oanda.com. From my understanding of how the demo account works, you place your trades based on real-time data. But my trade doesn't effect the real data.

Today I logged in to Google Adwords and began managing my ads. A few clicks later I got the "sorry" message. Usually, if you reload a few back pages you don't have re-login - bypassing this message. But not today, Google decided to block my every attempt to get into my Adwords account.

I know this is the unpopular stance but I can't find a better reason to change it. After seeing the burning down the house video(s) on youtube, it became even harder to reason this bailout bill.

Over the past year some online services have popped up offereing busienss owners the ability to spy on their competitors. Spying as in knowing what organic keywords their competitors are ranking for as well as any paid advertisments and those related keywords being used.

I stumbled upon keywordspy.com while looking through my logs, to see what recent referrers I have received. Seems like someone is spying on my site :)

I am happy to report that my server came in today, all 105lbs of it! I couldn't believe that thing weighed so much. In case anyone is interested in the specs of it:

Dell PE 6650 - 2x3.0/4M 4G-8 P3DC 1x73G(10K) 2x146G(10K)

If I wanted I could add two more cores, two more drives, and 28 more gigbyte of ram.

Why am I buying a server? It is pretty simple. The savings over time. The server itself plus shipping was a little under $1,900. I currently pay $167 for renting a dedicated server. $167x12 = $2004/year. But, this server package is limited, it does not have the same specs as the server I just purchased.

If I upgraded my rented dedicated server at dedicated now my monthly costs would be $667.50/month or $8010/year.

I'm excited to know that my blogging website now has a page rank of four. It only took about 1.5 years!!! With the page rank of four, I guess I can now start blogging for major blogging companies!

I really enjoy blogging. I've been writing for/journaling/blogging for somewhere around 14 years now. Writing has fundamentally changed my life, al
low me to express myself privately and publicly. When you start writing to the online world you begin to think a little bit more about what you want to say and how you want to say it. Not to mention if your English is correct. Nobody wants to look like a dummy :(

Some months back I decided it would be good business to provide services to local small businesses here in my hometown (Lafayette / West Lafayette). There are some developing businesses already most charge an arm and a leg. And when you think they are reliable, then end up going out of business.

I have found over the past year I enjoy consulting and helping local business owners with web endeavors. I get more satisfaction out of that than actually getting paid. And, I have been told that is a start to something good!

Yes, it is true. I was approached the other day from a young man who was selling leaves. These weren't just any leaves (no they were not marijuana leaves either), these were hand picked from the yards of our neighborhood.

What was amazing was the price structure. I asked, in a surprise tone (surprised I didn't think of the idea of selling leaves myself), how much are they? He went on to explain, "$1, $.50, or or, free", pointing to the whole bag of assortments.

"Hmm, what a deal", I thought. I think the free ones would suffice. I went on to ask, "Where do all the profits go?". His business partner jumped in and said her half goes to those who need money. And he quickly added, "Yes, I am doing the same as her.".

Tonight I was watching a show called Flip this house, or something like that. Basically, people buy houses cheap, fix them up within 4-6 weeks, then resell them within 2-4 weeks. In the end they make a very decent profit.

I saw some parallels with flipping houses (reconstructing or redeveloping) and taking an idea and created a site to sell it. I thought it was interesting how the online world does and can reference the offline world - when it comes to this kind of business.

On one of the house flips, one couple shared how they learned a few lessons. One of the major lessons, was to sell the first flip before moving on to another. That definitely applies to the online world.

Well, I am hopefully about done with the current project. I am not sure if I can announce it quite yet since it is not my website, once it goes live I will give an update with a link to the site.

I can say that the site is a community site that focuses on practitioners interacting with those who have chronic diseases. I have spent a huge amount of time building the "profile" up for a user. I never knew that would take so long. There are a lot of conditions to satisfy.