Blogs

I have used eBay for both buying and selling and have made some good deals doing both.

I made a good deal buying on eBay recently when I purchased a piece of original artwork, an oil painting, from a listed artist for $125. You have to be careful when buying anything on eBay but especially art, but in this case I got a good deal. When buying art, it makes sense to buy something you like and want to keep but don't expect to make a profit selling it in short order.

I have made good deals selling on eBay as well. I sold Klipsch audio speakers that were from the 1970's and sold for over $700 for the pair. I also sold a removable hardtop for my Porsche Boxster that was more trouble than it was worth to take on and off and to store for $1300.

But when you want a continuous stream of income from eBay, then you need inventory. The best way to have inventory is to have a wholesale supplier. I have one in mind if you want to read this.

I have been anxiously awaiting the release of Visual Studio 2010. I have been working with Visual Studio since it first came out in ’97. The new IDE better supports multiple document windows and floating tool windows, while offering better multi-monitor support. The IDE shell has been rewritten using the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF); whereas the internals have been redesigned using Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) that offers more extensibility points than previous versions of the IDE. The new multi-paradigm programming language ML-variant F# programming language will be a part of Visual Studio 2010; as will be M, the textual modeling language, and Quadrant, the visual model designer.

Visual Studio 2010 will come with version 4.0 of the .NET Framework and will support developing applications targeting Windows 7. It will support IBM DB2 and Oracle databases, in addition to Microsoft SQL Server. It will have integrated support for developing Silverlight applications, including an interactive designer.  Visual Studio 2010 will offer several tools to make parallel programming simpler. In addition to the Parallel Extensions for the .NET Framework and the Parallel Patterns Library for native code, Visual Studio 2010 includes tools for debugging parallel applications. The new tools let parallel Tasks and their runtime stacks to be visualized.  Tools for profiling parallel applications can be used for visualization of thread wait times and thread migrations across processor core.

I am most excited about the Silverlight features in Visual Studio 2010. I don’t think Silverlight is ready to build serious business applications. Microsoft should have it ready to do just that once Visual Studio 2010 comes out.

I recently purchased a cabin in the mountains. This is a cabin that I can go to for weekend retreats. The cabin is so far away from power lines that I wanted some limited power for lights and TV but did not want the expense of connecting to a power utility line. I began thinking that solar panels may be the answer and cheaper than connecting to the utility company.

I started researching all this from batteries to solar panels as well as wind turbines. I found that this could cost me a great deal and I stared looking for alternatives. Then I ran across a video training product that told me how to build solar panels for a lot less than buying them. I really suggest that if you are looking for green energy solutions to check out Earth4Energy.

When I first started doing web site development I had no idea how traffic came to my web site. My first web site was built after a friend and I returned from a trip to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was quite an adventure; we got many pointers from friends who had been there before on what to do and what not to do.

We took so many pictures and had so much travel information that I put together a web site that offered certain information for free and additional information that the visitor got after purchasing a subscription using PayPal.

The problem was the visitors never came! I than tried Google Ad Words and lo and behold the traffic came. But it soon became apparent that the money coming in from the subscriptions was even or less than the amount of money I was paying for the Ad Words.

Then I started doing research online about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is a way to build you web site with the correct content and keywords where search engines that crawl your web site will pick up on your content and rank you high enough so that when a visitor to a search engine web site enters a keyword that will bring up a high enough ranking where you will get a click to your web page.

The way to get web traffic is a science and is best if you make a purchase for a product such as Keyword Elite. Using this software you will get web site traffic without going through the headache and frustration of trying to do it otherwise.