For several years now, I’ve been getting by without one. I borrow one when I need it. So my car needs, and some of my car wants are met very economically and with minimal environmental impact.

But it cramps my style. I can’t always get car access when I want it, I don’t have convenient and spontaneous use of the car, and there is always the negotiation if if and when I can have car access.

Yes, being car-free has reduced my environmental impact and reduced my expenditures, but it’s wearing thin.

So I was starting to think that maybe I should get myself a car.

From an environmental point of view, I considered the fact that an old cheap car might be the best choice. I don’t drive all that much, so fuel consumption will be minimal, even if consumption per mile is high.

An old car that no one wants any more still comes with it the energy and environmental impact of production - that’s all oil under the bridge.

Then, just last nigh, I heard that a friend of a friend is leaving the country for a year or two, and wants to get rid of her 1993 Chrysler Concord.

Apparently it is in very good shape, no rust, new engine as of 2004, and (surprisingly for a Chrysler) very reliable.

So I’m thinking about it. Probably I will say yes. At minimal cost, I will have access to a car, which would otherwise go for a few parts and scrap metal - a major waste of a car that works.

Now the product has been redeveloped, and it is even better!

Check out this video to learn more. Oh, and be sure to sign up for the free mini-course on internet marketing

I heard that MSN is cheaper, so I nearly signed up for it. Then I discovered the billing method Microsoft uses.

They have a monthly budget. You get billed every month for that amount. When that amount is used up, your campaign stops. You can increase the budget of course, but then your budget is increased for the next month too! You have to remember to bring it down again if that’s what you want, and it is unclear what happens if you get part way through the next month before you remember to reduce it.

This might be OK for businesses that have a fixed monthly advertising budget, but it does not suit a “lets see how we do and then change the budget, the product, the sales letter” type of approach.

As I am at the experimental stage, deciding what ads, keywords and budget make sense for my business, MSN does not seem like a good choice. Google does - although as I say, it is a bit expensive.

Still, I highly recommend Google for adversing.

You can try it out yourself:

Have since found a great new way of keeping up on my travel web site.

I have finally got speech recognition software to work reliably and efficiently.  The trick, is to use a headset that works well with speech recognition software.  I’m using an inexpensive Logitech model which plugs directly into the laptop soundcard.  There are much more expensive versions that plug into your USB.  I am told they have excellent sound quality, but I doubt there any better than the cheap model.  Anyhow, the $20 pair works extremely well for voice recognition.

Since using this new setup, I have found that have been able to post to several blocks easily every day.  Although I can type very quickly, and have scorned voice recognition software for years, I do find it much easier to talk and type.  For this kind of content, I find it easier for my brain to compose by voice than by keyboard.  I’m sold!

I suspect it has been my lack of new content that is responsible for the plummeting of my page Rank on both this site, and my travel web site.  Since I enjoy going to my old travel journals, I plan to post to my travel web site.  In a few months, I will see how this affects my page eight.  Meanwhile, I am seeing a few more visitors to my travel web site, and they click a few ads.  Just a trickle of visitors, but if every click is worth what I’ve seen so far, and the number of visitors go up, then it will all be worthwhile.

I’m not sad though.  Hate to say it but this site doesn’t make a whole lot of money.  The allergy site does.   The change in PR seems to have corresponded to a massive increase in traffic on that site, which I am super-happy about.

Particularly active lately have been articles about gluten.  For some reason, lots of people want to know about it lately, and I am happy to provide visitors with information on the subject, in fact I am encouraged to add more material to the allergy site about gluten.

So imagine how please I was when I discovered just the other day that the term allergy ranks at about 170 or so! True, I’m not going to get a lot of traffic sitting that far way down the list, but if I at least rank in the top 1,000 then there is hope to get onto the first page. Even getting allergy to appear on the second page would probably garner some traffic.

Today, just a week after making this discovery, I found that allergy now ranks at 98! True, this will not increase the amount of traffic in the slightest. No question about that. The point is that the term allergy is on the rise, and quickly too.

I do hope that when it finally does reach the first page of Google, that it actually does send traffic to the website. I was all excited about the term mold allergy, but now that it ranks at 9, I really don’t get much traffic from that term at all, despite Overture showing that there were over 2,000 searches for that term last January. What does this mean? I have not idea. Maybe the description in Google doesn’t grab anyone. Perhaps not the best description around, but I’d still expect some traffic. Strange!

The two are actually related, I realized, after reading a section in the book Free To Fly.

First of all, allergies can affect your mood - no question about it. I did a survey on Allergy Details about allergies and mood, and found that most respondents did notice a correlation between allergy symptoms and mood. This comes as no surprise to me.

The part that never occurred to me was the link between allergies and dysfunctional families. It sure makes sense though. It is easy to understand that a chronically bad mood and negative outlook will affect interpersonal relationships.

Notice the rise of allergies and the rising divorce rate. Coincide or cause and effect?

One of the guys in The Secret explained how he used whiteout and a pen to doctor his bank statements, adding a few zeros to his balance. Imagine having that much money in the bank! The idea is not to imagine the idea, but really feel how you would feel if you really had a bank balance like that.

Here is how you can apply the same principle to your Google AdSense Report. Save the HTML to your hard drive, then use FireBug to copy all nine css styles sheets, and past them into .css files. Next, change the HTML to load up those style sheets. Then, I save the Google logo and change the HTML to load it up from the correct location.

Now, replace the text showing Today’s Earnings, Earnings for all channels, and Total earnings. Remember to change the number of page impressions too.

Save it, then browse to the doctored html file, and there you see it! A very convincing report showing your Google income for the day, but with a few extra zeros!

For this to work, it has to be a believable number for you, so don’t go too crazy with the zeros, at least not until your real Google income is approaching your intended one, expressed as a doctored report.

Happy earnings!

True, once you get set up, the domain does get forwarded to your host. But thats about it.

The rot sets in as soon as you try to register a domain. You can only register one at a time, and they have the most clunky interface for registering a domain, with as many obscure clicks and confusing screens as possible. Sometimes, you end up in an endless loop, going back to the same screen over and over again.

Once registered, there is no easy way of knowing when your domains expire. When they do, they are just automatically renewed without asking you.

Trying to do anything in the control panel is an exercise in frustrating. Nothing is organized, nothing makes sense, and there are just as many clicks as possible for every operation.

Deleting a domain involved going to a separate website with it’s own weird set of steps. This doubles as the place where you turn off auto renewal.

To make matters worse, when you delete a domain, you are informed that the private registration will be turned off and your contact information will appear in the whois database. Thanks! Why do you think I made my registration private, you idiots!

Each time you register a set of domains, it goes into a separate package. This makes it impossible to list all the domains you have. This piece-meal approach is made even worse because they prevent you from selecting and copying your list of domains.

I don’t think 1&1 wants customers. They treat us with disrespect.

For this reason, I am switching my domains to another registrar with a sensible system.

I recommend that you avoid 1and1.

The course is basically about achieving results with elegance and grace, and attracting the right energy, people and resources into your life.

Talking about the law of attraction has become very popular lately. Some of it sounds silly or cliché. Practiced the right way though, it does work.

I knew this before the course, just though observation in my own life. I have found that focusing attention in a particular area brings results, but not always from the expected direction.

For example, you can be a searcher or a finder. A searcher will always be looking, but will never actually find what they are looking for. Many if not most people operate this way.

A finder may do some searching, but they are focused of finding what they are looking for, on success. When they find it, it may not come from the places they have been searching. Because finders operate on the law of attraction, the attract what they are looking for, and most importantly, recognize it when it comes.

The way of the wizard does not necessarily require a lot of energy. It does require practice and discipline. Once you develop the discipline to allow things to happen, the rest is (relatively) easy.