Amazing Grace 2008 - Holdman Christmas Display from Richard Holdman on Vimeo.

I don't think anyone would argue the fact that it's nice to have a little extra cash.  I've tried several different ways to do this on the web and I've found two rather simple ones.  One is a company called MyPoints and the other is Survey Savvy. 

MyPoints is kind of like a shopping portal.  If you shop online at all you may be interested in joining MyPoints and just go there and click on their links to your favorite stores.  You will earn points for every dollar you spend at those stores.  They also have emails they send out with different offers.  You can earn points by just click on the offer to verify that you have "read" it and get 5 points or if you actually participate in the offer, you get more points.  The offers are from reputable businesses.  FTD.com, Barnes and Noble, Office Max, Sharebuilder are just a few that I can remember off the top of my head.   I usually do not participate in the offers but just click the links for a quick 5 points.  Once you obtain enough points, you can get gift certificates for your favorite stores, restaurants, hotels, etc.  My favorite is usually Starbucks gift cards.  Currently I have enough points to get $100 worth of Starbucks gift cards and still have points left over.

Survey Savvy is a company that sends out surveys.  Before you just start turning that off, it's really not that bad.  I am a part of probably 10-15 different survey sites and Survey Savvy is by far the best in my humble but accurate opinion.  You don't get as many opportunities with them but I think you actually qualify for more surveys that come from them and they seem to pay more than other sites do.  One of my first surveys I did with them, I got paid over $50.  I have not had any like that since then but I have had a $20 offer and many $5-10 offers.  They also have a pretty decent referral system to.  If you refer someone you get paid a small amount for every survey they complete and if they refer someone you also get a smaller amount if they complete one.  Yeh, I guess it's kind of a pyramid scheme but not like the preasure sales kind.  You can just do surveys yourself and do just fine that way if you want.  If you're interested, you can join under my referral id and help me out as well.  Here is the link to sign up https://www.surveysavvy.com?id=2770009&action=join

You won't get rich by any means off either of these, but it can help pay for that upside down Iced Caramel Macchiato with an extra squirt of vanilla and a slice of Pumpkin Loaf. 

WOW, seems like life will never slow down.  It's been nonstop since my last post with the exception of our vacation to Sanibel for a week, which was way too short.  Work has been extremely hectic since I got back with school starting, a botched upgrade to one of our lab systems, an automated process that decided it wanted to have problems for some reason this year, major hardware & OS upgrade to our student information system and all the other daily activities. 

Even though all this is going on, I'm enjoying being with my family immensely. Here are two pictures of me and Caleb recently taken. 

At a park in Altamonte Springs a couple of weeks ago.

Outside of Epcot, earlier this week.

 

Today starts my favorite time of the year.  College football starts tonight.  I am a Florida Gator fan but I'll watch almost any game that's on and on Saturday's will flip through as many as I can.  I just really enjoy college football.  Here is a list of all the games that are going to be on TV this season thanks to NBC Sports:  2009 College Football TV Schedule

One last thing.  CBI Sports has launched a sister site CBI Marine Supply, while we are still finishing up on the main site.  CBI Marine Supply will be selling name brand GPS systems, chartplotters, fish finders, EPIRBS, life vest, anchors plus much more.  More than I care to type here.   So check it out.  There are a few design issues that I'm still working on so some things may not look correct.  I'm going to try to have those resolved by this weekend.

Last week I decided that in my efforts to start moving forward with my hosting again I needed to improve some of my services.  The two things that have been the biggest complaints from my clients have been SPAM and webmail.   I was using MailEnable Standard but and older version that did not include webmail so I was using Horde for that.  The new version of MailEnable offered webmail, so I did an upgrade.  All went extremely well and the new webmail was great.  I only had one little issue with it but that was because I moved the webmail app from one website in IIS that it had configured to my current webmail website which had different permissions.    After getting that all working, it looked great.  However the next morning, a client calls and says they don't have their contacts anymore nor their calendar.  I hadn't even noticed that Horde had a calendar in it.  I was like ok, I'll upgrade to the Professional version of MailEnable since it supported the calendar and after looking at it, also had a better spam blocking support for both me, as the administrator, and the end user.  After I got that installed, my client who had the problem called me back and said that it looked great but all their contacts and events on the calendar were gone.  I had thought all this was kept in MailEnable but I guess Horde has it's own database for certain things as well.  Obviously I'm not extremely familiar with Horde.  So, I spent a good 3-4 hours trying to get Horde working again so that we could pull those things off.  After trying all kinds of things, I finally got it working again.  I logged into their account and was able to export their events and contacts.  The new MailEnable webmail was able to import the contacts with no problems at all, but the Calendar doesn't have any kind of import feature.

While I had all this going on with my personal business, I was helping my dad move to a new computer at the church.  That wasn't that big of deal really, it was just something else to do.  Then this week at work as been a pain too.  We've had little issues with several things.  One of our server's OS's got corrupt somehow so I was up there until 8 and still was unable to fix it.  So that's going to be a reload.  Thankfully, everything running on it is still working, so it's not an emergency to get it reloaded.  We had some of our automated student account programs not functioning as intended due to school being out that we are having to address in an emergency fashion, which I don't like.  I don't mind having to revamp stuff or work on different projects in general, but I hate it when it's in an emergency scenario.  

 Oh well, such is life being in technology.

Many of you know that I have been running my own web hosting and web design business since 2000.  It's been kind of a self maintaining business, not really doing much but paying for itself.  Well, I've decided to start pursuing it more again.  I'm in the process of redesigning the website and I've also incorporated a new self service side of the business.  For people who know what they want and know how to do their own sites, I've setup a reseller account that has a completely automated system, from buying domains to hosting their site and email to offering marketing campaigns; it's all there.  I'm looking forward to expanding and being able to offer these services as well.  I will still be offering custom solutions to those who are not sure what they want and need a helping hand through the process.  I'll still be hosting on my own server for these custom solutions so that I can have total control of whatever resources are needed.

 I'll hopefully have the new site up soon.  I let you know when it is.

What a fiasco.  We've been waiting for our business credit cards to come in before we finished setting up our accounts with distributors.   Well after 2 months, we finally got them.  So we are back on task again.  We didn't make my original deadline for a Grand Opening, but that was just my timeframe.  We will be up and running here shortly and I'll give another update when we have a set date for the Grand Opening.