product workshop

Information product Workshop

by with No Comment entrepreneurship

I facilitated a workshop at the Internet Marketing Business meetup events  at St Kilda yesterday. I had no business cards and there were some pretty cluey people at the events so I pointed people this way If anyone was there and wants to catchup to discuss ideas etc contact me via contact page and we could maybe do lunch in the CBD or meet after work sometime.

All ideas that were thought up during the workshop are public domain and people are willing to give them a go if they want. I think I may have a go at one of them.

If anyones interested I did the slide pack in google presentation at it can be found below

Below are the ideas that came out of the workshop

red dog2

Big Diggers

by with No Comment humourMaths

Last week I went to watch Red Dog which is a lovely movie about a dog in WA in Mining country. I’d recommend it. It made me want to go out and see some mining in WA. Mining is questionably what is driving the AU economy’s boom at the moment. And although most mining companies are small about 1/4 of all the companies in the Australian stock exchange are in mining related. Australia pulls alot of stuff from the ground and is the worlds largest exporter of coal.

  • Iron ore – Australia was the world’s third largest supplier in 2008 after China and Brazil, supplying 342 million metric tonnes.[7]
  • Nickel – Australia was the world’s second largest producer in 2006 after Russia.[8]
  • Bauxite/aluminum
  • Copper
  • Gold – Australia is the second largest producer after China.[9]
  • Silver
  • Uranium – Australia is responsible for 16% of the world’s production and was the world’s third largest supplier in 2009 after Kazakhstan and Canada.[10]
  • Diamond – Australia has the third largest commercially-viable deposits after Russia and Botswana.[citation needed] Australia also boasts the richest diamantiferous pipe with production reaching peak levels of 42 metric tons (41 LT/46 ST) per year in the 1990s.[citation needed]
  • Opal – Australia is the world’s largest producer of opal, being responsible for 95% of production.[11]
  • Zinc – Australia was second only to China in zinc production in 2008, producing just under 14% of world production.[12]
  • Coal – Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal and fourth largest producer of coal behind China, USA and India.[13]
  • Oil shale
  • Petroleum – Australia is the twenty-eighth largest producer of petroleum.[citation needed]
  • Natural gas
  • rare earths

But there is some dangers dangers in the big mines. Its pretty interesting

adminer1

Reporting In WordPress

by with No Comment entrepreneurshipProductivity

I have been looking for decent plugins to setup some reporting on my wordpress sites for a while. My search is now over I have found the

best reporting plugins for wordpress

They are Adminer and Exports and reports
Adminer gives a way of quickly viewing and running sql scripts on wordpress tables within wordpress. Exports and Reports gives a way of generating reports from those scripts within wordpress. I have not found anything else like them. I was using them to setup some reports and that was when  I came up with my first problem with queries on wordpress tables it was

How to run a SQL Query to show the post details with the category information.

I was trying to join the wp_post table to the wp_term_taxonomy table so I could find
the categories that match the posts. It took me a while. Below is a diagram that shows how the category information is organized in

the category id is not in the wp_posts table in wordpress

The code I wrote to do the join is below
select a.id ,b.term_taxonomy_id,c.term_id 
from wp_posts a, wp_term_relationships b,
wp_term_taxonomy c,wp_terms d 

where	a.id = b.object_id and b.term_taxonomy_id = c.term_taxonomy_id 

and c.term_id = d.term_id
integrate-google-analytics-with-thesis

Google Analytics

by with No Comment entrepreneurship

A small finance website http://fatcatsfinance.blogspot.com/of mine has recently leaped in traffic by a factor of 8. The biggest source was google.com. I don’t understand this because breakdown of traffic sources is

  • 11.11%

Direct Traffic

  • 82.57%

 

Referring Sites

  • 6.32%
Below are the “Referring sites” as you can see most of the “referrers” are google!?

 

Search Engines

Visited Visits Av time
None
1 google.com 132 1.17 0:00:21 97.73% 84.85%
2 google.co.in 51 1.1 0:00:10 100.00% 92.16%
3 google.co.uk 28 1.18 0:00:18 100.00% 82.14%
4 google.co.id 24 1.08 0:00:31 100.00% 91.67%
5 google.ca 21 1.14 0:00:03 100.00% 85.71%
6 google.com.au 21 1.29 0:00:45 95.24% 80.95%
7 google.com.pk 16 1.06 0:00:05 100.00% 93.75%
8 images.google.com 15 1.33 0:01:22 93.33% 73.33%
9 google.com.ph 13 1.08 0:00:40 92.31% 92.31%
10 google.com.my 8 1.12 0:00:13 100.00% 87.50%

 

Highly confusing

cure for dry eyes

Cure for Dry Eyes

by with No Comment Health

I have been having trouble with my eyes for about 3 years

  • Dry eyes
  • A scratch on my left eye that won’t heal
  • A red mark on my nose near my eye
  • Headaches / right eye pain

I had a bad week with my eyes playing up and I decided to have a go at seeing if this problem could be caused by nutrient deficiencies. So I am embarking on a 1 month course of supplements to see if they can fix it

  • Vitamin A
  • Vitamin B6
  • Cod liver oil
  • Mens multi (including magnesium and potassium)
  • Carrot Juice

I’ll do a follow up post in a month

Background

About 2 years ago I bought a coca cola in a bar and drank from glass forgetting there was a straw in the glass. It hurt like hell , everyone I was with thought it was hilarious. I have to admit if had been someone else I too would have found it hilarious. A month later I woke up in agony holding my eye.

What followed was $600 is specialist bills to be told I have a corneal erosion in the eye I scratched. What was happening was that the scratch was not healing and sticking to my eyelid causing it to tear when I woke up. My eyes are also very dry I believe the scratch not healing and the dryness are related for this reason I am trailing supplements to see if it may be caused by a nutrient deficiency.

If it doesn’t work by June 31

Next Steps

1. Treatment with oral tetracycline antibiotics (such as doxycycline or oxytetracycline) together with a topicalcorticosteroid (such as prednisolone)

Patients with recalcitrant recurrent corneal erosions often show increased levels of matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) enzymes.[9] These enzymes dissolve the basement membrane and fibrilsof the hemidesmosomes, which can lead to the separation of the epithelial layer. Treatment with oral tetracycline antibiotics (such as doxycycline or oxytetracycline) together with a topicalcorticosteroid (such as prednisolone), reduce MMP activity and may rapidly resolve and prevent further episodes in cases unresponsive to conventional therapies.[10][11] Some have now proposed this as the first line therapy after lubricants have failed.[3]. Source wwikipedia

If that doesn’t work

  • Chinese Medicine Practitioner
images

Carbon Footprint Nonsense

by with No Comment Behind the Newspower
  • Carbon Offset
  • Carbon Footprint
  • Carbon Trading
  • Carbon nonsense

I am getting increasingly irritated by the fuss about carbon. If you assuming global warming is the biggest problem the world currently faces I do not agree that reducing carbon is the solution. I believe a focus on reducing pollution and clean efficient technologies is a good idea to help the environment but to blindly just to to reduce you “carbon footprint”

Global Problems

  • Potable water shortage
  • Food shortage
  • War
  • Destruction of the natural world (you kill this we all die)
    • 95% reduction in all food crops genetic diversity in the last 100 years.
    • x acres of farmland turned to dessert
    • Genetic modificated organisms are currently cross-pollinating with natural occurring species which could screw up all the rest
  • The countries we live in are run by people with more power everday caused by erosion to our civil liberties increasing


gun

Gun Ownership vs Homicide Rate

by with No Comment Behind the NewsMaths

An assumption I have always had is that more gun ownership causes more murders. Recently I’ve heard some things that made me question this assumption so I have completed a little basic analysis and thought I’d share my findings.

My Analysis

I took the homicide rate per country from wikpedia (the countries were ordered by homicide rate). I then went to another website called http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region to get the % people with guns. I amended the gun ownership figures to the top and bottom and a few countries in the middle. I didn’t get all the % of gun ownership figures because it was too time consuming and I didn’t have time.

Results

>>For the full Spreadsheet showing all 186 countries in order of homicide rate click here
Comment
My analysis did not come out as expected. According to table I put together I can say there is no clear correlation between gun ownership % and homicide rate .  If it plays a role then I  can defiantly say it not the lead cause. The US leads the world in gun ownership and it has a high homicide rate for western countries (5 deaths per 1000) compared to say the UK which is (1.28 per 100) or Australia (1.3).  There were a number of Nordic countries such as Switzerland (45%), Norway (31.3%) , Austria (30%) that have high gun ownership that were in the lowest 10 for  homicide rates.

Conclusion

Based on this quick bit of analysis  it looks to me like war and poverty do look like they correlate with homicide rate but gun owenership does not have any appreciable correlation.

My spreadsheet  can be found here

I would appreciate any thoughtful comments. If you have better data that show things in a different light then I would appreciate it if you could send it me and I’ll continue this post once I look at that.

carolinetowers_movie_poster

Graphic Design on a Shoestring

by with No Comment entrepreneurshipMusicProductivity

The image above I had made up for $150 using

The way it works is that you setup a prize action and people submit designs you then choose the one you like. If you don’t get any you like you don’t pay. Below is how I briefed in my design and the ad I put up. I received 2 designs , the one I choose went through 1 iteration.

The project is a Rock Show based upon the movie I imagined- details can be found on www.carolinetowers.com

Below is my brief

A poster is required for the action movie “Caroline Towers”

Summary
3 Main Characters – Richard Steel (hero), Leader of the resistance, Architect

About

  • Huge building
  • Lower floors = lower class
  • Lower floors being filled in and occupants murdered so the tower can continue to grow.(The big secret)

Poster Style
below are some I like

More Details

I was absolutely stoked with the results , especially when you look at the awful drawing I did above for guidance! I would recommend the site for anyone after artwork. Anyone else had any experience with 99 designs. As ever any comments are most welcome