Living Wills In Minnesota
With the mess going on in the Terri Schiavo case I figured i'd look into creating a Living Will myself. The State Of Minnesota has a fairly easy to read statue dealing with this and even provides the guidelines and example for a
Minnesota Living Will. I decided to create a one page summary of the law with a description of what informtion is presented in each chapter. It wasn't easy to find the statute so a page seemed like it might be useful.
Nikon D70 Digital SLR Camera
Last night I started working on a page that would show off the
Nikon D70 Camera that we've been using. I purchased it for my wife for Valentines day and at first we weren't sure if we liked it. Once we got out the manual and learned a few things we were hooked. The picture quality is far superior to our point and shoot camera and the ability to add a zoom lens has me thinking of all sorts of places I might go and shoot pictures. One of the unique things in this article vs other D70 reviews is the mention of the cheap Nikon Nikor AF lens i'm using as a zoom lens. I picked this up for $170.00 vs almost $500 for the DX lens designed for digital SLR cameras. So far I haven't noticed anything my cheap lens isn't doing so hopefully that will help someone out who wants a zoom lens but doesn't want to pay 50% of the Nikon D70's cost for it.
Car Fire Pictures
As another example of how all things in life can be posted. Here are pictures of a
car fire from 3/26/05. This guy somehow turned his car around in the opposite lane and then staggered from his car as the fire melted the front. When I got there the cops and fire trucks were just arriving and the guy was walking around dazed. I wish I had more than just a camera phone with me at the time.
Finding Keyword Niches
Today I focused on finding keyword niches. Gaps in the search engines where people were asking for information and not much was to be found that matched the keywords exactly. I have two experiments running. The first focuses on the keywords
AOL Phone Number. I figure people might be looking for the do it all phone number at AOL and I'll have page that provides that. Next we'll see if it ranks in the SERPS. The other was based on a page I already had. It was about the headquarters for the Minnesota State Lottery. What I found is that the keywords
Minnesota State Lottery have many more people querying that then Minnesota State Lottery Headquarters so I modified my page to reflect this. We'll see if the traffic floods in.
Zylstra Harley Davidson Comes Through Again
So for a long time i've been singing the praises of my local Harley Dealer
Zylstra Harley Davidson in Elk River Minnesota. I've never bought a bike there but i've had service done on multiple bikes since they opened in 2000. Each time the service has been great and in several occasions they've gone above and beyond. If you've read my earlier entries you'll see i'm trying to ship my Buell to Canada where the person who bought the bike lives. Zylstra provided a Buell pallet and let me drop off the crate I built. They are draining the bike's fluids, strapping it to the pallet and rebuilding my crate for a very fair price. Because I don't have a forklift this would have been tough to do at home and trailering the Buell plus crate panels to the Roadway depot would not be fun.
Zylstra Harley Davidson in Elk River is hardly making anything on this but was happy to help me out. If you need a Harley, some parts or service stop in because these guys make Harley Dealers look good.
DFL Tactic? Go ahead make my day....
So I just finished reading about the Minnesota DFL's latest tactic to make Minnesota Republicans look like obstructionists. According to the
StarTribune article The DFL proposes to solve the budget deficit before any new spending can be proposed. The theory is that it will make things like more education money impossible to spend and force Republicans to act like the spenders that the DFL members really are. To this I say go ahead. I'd gladly go another two years on a no new taxes no new spending plan. This puts increases in areas like education in the hands of local voters where they can decide what type of education their community should offer. Those that don't like that voters agree to can move to other places that like high taxes and lots of diversity coordinators and assistants to the assistant to the senior administrator. Hope I didn't spell anything wrong here. Might show how I vote on school board tax increases.
Online Wine Store Guide
So I had an idea to try writing an article about
buying wine online and try and provide folks with a review of online wine stores like
Wine.Com,
BevMo.Com and places with hard to find wines like
PrimeWine.Com. It would be a nice resource for my own online wine buying and hopefully it will help folks out.
Shipping Motorcycles From USA to Canada
In case anyone ever needs this info here is what you need to ship a motorcycle from the US to Canada. When you ship the motorcycle you included the original title and two copies. These travel with your Bill Of Lading and Canadian Customs form. You need to find out what the US side port your motorcycle will stop at before it crosses the border. This office will require you fax the a copy of the title 72 hours in advance. They say that they will need to open your crate and see the VIN number so keep that in mind when building a crate. Accoring to Canadian Customs no interaction by the shipper is needed with them as they just stamp the title. You may want to call them in advance as certain motorcycles aren't allowed to be imported into Canada. Hope this goes smoothly, i'll keep you posted.
My crate is a crate
Ok my crate is complete. I used 2x2x8 to build a nice frame around my pallet and then 1/8 inch masonite (cheapest I could get) to add skin to my crate. Stupidly I built my wall over the holes where the forklift slides in. A couple quick cuts with the saw and my end wall is now shorter. An interesting experience but I don't think i'd go through the effort again. I'd only ship using a simple pallet no more building wood crates. Now I have to get this bike from Minnesota to Canada, tomorrow I research paperwork and procedures.
Long way to go to sell a Buell
Beer234
So i've got this 98 Buell S3T that I bought in February 04 from a Honda dealer. It was a fun bike but just didn't fit me so it was uncomfortable on long rides. I've had it forsale at
All year and finally I got a bite. A guy from Canada who despite my revealing all its problems wants the bike sight unseen. I've been trying to figure how i'm going to get this motorcycle to Canada. Today I lucked out.
Zylstra Harley Davidson in Elk river gave me a pallet which looks perfect. I started building walls and a roof to form a crate. My plan is to bring the Buell to Zylstra, then have them prep and mount the Buell to the pallet. I'm hoping to prep the walls so they can just put the crate together and have Roadway pick it up and send it north. Lots o work just to sell a bike though.
Here we go....
Well I never though i'd try one of these as the things others might be interested in I may not want them to know or can't disclose. We'll try it and see if it stays interesting. I run a very small business creating websites and using advertising to generate revenue. It's a good little business in that it challenges me to think up new things to pursue. For this initial post i'll lay out my sites and their themes and hopefully later i'll have interesting things to say about the work as they grow.
http://www.gallconsulting.com My main site which hosts my PC Repair business. Thanks to my new advertising venture I don't have to do much consulting anymore. Much nicer that way.
http://www.sandalspictures.com My Pictures From Sandals Resorts In Jamaica site. This is my favorite as it lets me escape to Sandals Negril, Sandals Dunn's River and Sandals Ocho Rios each time I work on the site. A pretty active forum has sprung up as well and i'm enjoying the interaction with the visitors. The url for the Sandals Resorts Bulletin Board is
http://www.sandalspictures.com/discus/messages/board-topics.htmlhttp://www.napavalleypictures.com This site covers pictures and information from San Francisco and Napa Valley. I travel to the bay area every six months and i'm having a blast taking photos and posting them on the site. This is a tough market to get into as there are a billion other Napa and San Francicsco relates sites.
http://www.sturgistravels.com This is a site I started to cover my trips to the Sturgis Bike Rally in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Based on this I started
http://www.gallconsulting.com/blackhills which is more of a Black Hills Tourism site vs a biker ralated site.
http://www.hdsportsters.com This was a quick site created out of my love for Harley Davidson Sportsters and the fact that I think they don't get the respect they deserve.
http://www.atvcrazy.com Just another quick site with pictures from when I owned an ATV
http://www.gallconsulting.com/twincities/twin.cities.places.htm This is my latest and largest project. Because I live in the Twin Cities and can't travel to exotic lands for now i'm just recording places as I visit. This has been my most successful venture yet and so far is a blast to create several pages per day.
Last but not least my pet project
http://www.minnesotamotorcyclist.com I created Minnesota Motorcyclist so people could sell their motorcycle for free. Cycletrader.com charges WAY to much in my opinion and I hate the StarTribune so I figured i'd give people a shot to post full color motorcycle for sale ads for free. (I was actually hoping to get the first shot at any cool bargains that were presented.)
Well that's it for now, we'll see if this is interesting at all and go from there.
Later
John
