I can’t believe that it has been an entire month where I didn’t write a damn thing on this site. WOW

It has really been crazy around here.  The first week of September I was on Vacation in NYC.  If you have never visited New York, do it soon.  It is really a blast and you can do it on the cheap.  The shopping, Central Park, the shows and the people are amazing.  We have been there twice in the last 12 months.

After I got back from there I worked a 60 hour week and then headed to the IEEE sections Congress in Quebec City.  This was a great trip, I was able to hang out with a lot of great people and meet some new friends.  IEEE is a great place for Engineers to network and meet people of the same vein.  Engineers are a odd bunch they usually have to have two lives, one geeky one at work and a “normal” one at home.  When at an IEEE event you can sit down with a beer and talk about sports and the LHC.

I even had time inbetween meetings to tour around the city. Old Quebec is the closest that I have ever been to an old European city.  It has made me decide that I Old Europe is my next adventure.

And then last week I was in Minneapolis to visit a generator manufacturer and get some classes in.  It was a decent trip that involved a very convoluted trip from Halifax to Minneapolis, but that is a story for another day.

I didn’t have a lot of time to spend touring the town.  I was staying directly across from the University of Minnesota, and that place is huge.  I ended up working in a coffee shop across from the hotel, which was a lot of fun.  I talked to some of the students, not locals since I don’t think that I talked to one person who was actually from there.

And then I spent last weekend and this week trying to get everything settled, put out some fires and figure out where all my projects stand.  I finished that by the end of the day today, so now life should be reaching something closer to normal.

So what is next?

Well I am back to developing my business plan.  There are some courses that I have to finish and then I am going to get back to developing my latest project.  I still have the intention of reaching the modest level of $500 of passive proft by end of year.  Currently I am at $200 so it is entirely doable.

I would take the advantage of my growing audience to mention something that you as fellow online entrepreneurs can do to help others around the world. Kiva!

What is Kiva?

Kiva is a person-person micro-lending website.

Kiva partners with existing expert microfinance institutions. In doing so, we gain access to outstanding entrepreneurs from impoverished communities world-wide. Our partners are experts in choosing qualified entrepreneurs. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva, our partners upload their entrepreneur profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them. When you do, not only do you get a unique experience connecting to a specific entrepreneur on the other side of the planet, but our microfinance partners can do more of what they do, more efficiently.

How it works

It is a real simple process, simply get an account, add some cash via paypal (you know you have some in there).  Then you can browse the available loans, and pick an individual that you would like to support.  Once you support the business that you are interested in, you watch everything happen.

When the loan term is complete the money that you gave out is put right back into your account so that you can then use it again to start a new loan, or withdraw it.

So what are you waiting for?  Get over there and get yourself started, make sure that you tell them that jeff{a}hosernews.ca sent you :)  And if you are interested in viewing my profile simply click here.

I finally got Wordpress Link Cloak working on my site.  It took some figuring out, and playing with the settings but all is well now.  One think that is not a huge plus for Wordpress Link Cloak is the cost.  It is $77!!!, however I think that it is well worth it for the time that it is going to save me on many of my different sites.

However the down side that almost had me asking for my money back, is the customer service.

I know that this is probably a one man show, but being a paid plugin means that it doesn’t have much of a community to help people out when they run into problems.  But even being a one man show shouldn’t mean that you don’t reply to your emails for days.  I bought the plugin a week from today, couldn’t get it to work and emailed the support.  I didn’t hear back for a couple of days and when their fix didn’t work I emailed them again.  I still haven’t heard back.

But anyway, if there was a free product out there that did what this WP Link Cloak plugin did, I wouldn’t be using it.  The fact of the matter is that there is only one other plugin that does the automatic keyword linking that this one does and that cost another $20 on top of the $77 of this one.  The free ones out there need you to automatically copy and paste the URLs, which is not a big deal for a new site, but for an old one that can be very time consumming.

I will be writing a more indepth review of the software in the future, but for now give WP Link Cloak a try and let me know what you think

I am finally decided to end my Twitter experiment. I will probably stay a member but won’t be actively building my Twitter community. There is no point. Whenever I have something neat to say it is down.

If they had the ability to scale then I am sure that I would stick around longer. But for now I am going to get out of the micro-blogging space. Maybe when fall comes around I will join up on FriendFeed.

What do you think about Twitter. Are they on the brink of failure, or have they already started on the downward spiral?

I wrote a post a while ago about writers block, however it has not helped me very much lately.  I take a note book around with me everywhere.  It sits in my bag and when I think of something that I think that I should write about, or a niche idea that I think I should explore I write it in there.

The pages have been very empty lately.

I think that it may have something to do with the amount of stuff that I do during the summer.  It is really too nice to be inside, and I have also filled my evenings with sports.   This does not leave a lot of time for sitting and thinking, which in turn leads to burn out.   I am starting to feel like I am sinking in a hole, which leaves my mind not relaxed.

I have been trying to get to the gym.  Hitting the weights has always been a good way for me to clear my head of everything.  When you are there the only thing that you think about is the amount that you are lifting, or the speed that you are going.  it really helps to focus for the rest of the day, but I haven’t been doing even that lately.  I have been playing ball hockey and ice hockey very late so that means that I am not getting up early enough to hit the gym.  This is something that I am missing out on, and it is something that I am going to have to make a priority if I don’t want the advances that I have made in the last month to slde.

So now I am off to play hockey, and then it is off to bed.  Tomorrow morning I am going to begin my new workout at the gym to see if I can get focused again, both at work and at home.  I hope that this new routine will get me motivated like I was last month.