Adventure Phoenix

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I have heard this question alot over the past few months. What is Twitter ALL about? Its crazy how simple Twitter is to use and what it does yet so many people still are so confused.  My own parents still tell me that they do not get it.

Honestly to me Twitter is simple.  Its pure human thought put in 140 characters or less posted for your friends or the entire world to see.  Sound crazy to think that Twitter is the pulse of the human race.  What is even more remarkable with the recent death of Michael Jackson, it was wild to see the buzz on twitter build from a few dozen twitter people who were at the hospital to millions within a few hours.

I mean seriously, where else could you find out whats happening in the world in real time other than Twitter.  In no time in previous history have any normal person can find out whats happening in any city or world as fast as it is happening today.

Something to think about, the average newspaper in the U.S. contains more information & news than anyone read in a lifetime during the 1500s.  Think about that! We are in serious overload of information and yet we have adapted.

The trick to Twitter is to learn how to filter thru all of the information to find out what applies to you! I will be posting more information on how you can use Twitter and become more efficient using it on a daily basis.

tr.im your URLs

Have you ever wondered what are all of these services emerging out there such as bit.ly or tr.im or tinyurl.com.  More and more appear each and every day but what do they really do?  Well for those of you who use Twitter or other social networks where they limit the size of your text.  Short URL services are just about the only way to go.

On Twitter you are limited to 140 characters.  And if you want to pass along those crazy long URLs from websites such as facebook, which the URL strings can extend up to 300 characters sometimes.  You will need to find a service such as tr.im.

I have tried many services over the years starting off with TinyURL.com which is a very well known service.  My only problem with TinyURL is the length of the url strings.  Since you are limited to 140 characters in Twitter, real estate is very precious to me.

Tr.im provides the shortest URL strings i’ve found to date and they even have a free online tracking tool where you can see how many times someone has clicked on your link.  This is great to tracking the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns on Google, Twitter, or Facebook.

Now I know there are dozens of other companies out there but one thing is for sure, to me, I like simple, free services so at this time, I am endorsing tr.im for its elegances and simplicity.

Check it out today!

Over the past several years I have been following alot of open-source options to replace my linksys or dlink router’s factory firmware.  I soon discovered dd-wrt as my best option and installed v21.  I loved the simplicity of how their web-based admin works plus all the features they offer.

More recently I began to have serious problems with connecting to the internet.  It started soon after I added a 7th home workstation to my home network.  Yea I know, 7 computers is alot for a house but if you know anything about me, I’m a computer junkie.  I have specific computers preforming tasks, running my security system, tvs, etc…  My house is almost completely computer driven.  But thats another topic for another day.

After adding my new computer I soon discovered that pages like Facebook, NewEgg.com, etc… would time out on every third or fourth click.  I called Comcast thinking it was something with their system.  But they ran speed test & line quality checks to verify everything was running smoothly.  I even plugged my laptop directly into Comcast and did a speed test for my self and I downloaded well into the 28mb/s and uploaded well into the 7mb/s.  After a few days of playing around with settings across my network, I soon discovered a little setting in my firewall/router called ‘Maximum Ports’ which set a max amount of TCP/IP connections into and out of my network.  It was set to 512 but next to that was a small text that said default setting 4096.  I thought to my self for a second and said oh well lets try changing it back to its default.

Instantly my internet speed across all machines returned to normal.  After monitoring my router for a few minutes I noticed my active IP connections hovered around 800 sessions.  Thus this simple setting was my bottleneck.

Apparently when I upgraded from the first version of DD-WRT, the original default setting was 512 but now they upgraded that to 4096.  Regardless my wife & I are happy campers now with super fast internet.

What you can learn from this is that sometimes you just gotta try something totally unexpected and you might be surprised that the result actually works.

Best!

I have been pretty busy the last couple months trying to adjust to our new economy and figure out how to be profitable. So I must apologize yet again for the lack of blogs this year!

But I must say I’m renewed with a since of excitement to discover the awesome power of Wordpress self hosted blog servers!

If you haven’t thought about blogging before then I highly recommend Wordpress.com!

It’s truly remarkable how simple and accessible they have made it! Get this, you can write blogs or posts as they call it from Microsoft Word 2007+, from a powerful WYSIWYG admin, desktop applications like live or fireblog, and best of all, the iPhone!

It’s my belief that everyone should blog! After all WE are ALL human and individually we are interesting. The key is to figure out what YOU have to say that is important! Also being consistent when you blog whether daily or weekly, writing consistently will bring readers!

So if I could leave you with one great nugget of hope, step out side your normal routine and blog into success because YOU do have something important to say!