If you are considering moving your blog or site from one domain name to another, you may want to read this post on how not to do a domain change. I wonder if there will be a follow-up post on what to do differently and avoid those problems?

I also found a somewhat amusing collection of print advertisements that were likely very effective in their mission of selling a product.

For those of us who like to keep at least one eye on the market, here is an article that examines REITS (real estate investment trusts) and questions whether now is the time to buy them.

Last but not least, BetshopBoy entered a contest that I will probably enter as well. I’m not a huge fan of iPod simply because I don’t like the idea of being forced to use proprietary software, but I did consider getting a touch before I got my iPAQ.

This is not something that is necessarily universal to all bills. The ones that this would be most useful with are those that are paid on a monthly basis. If they are paid any less often than that (for example, my car insurance comes due every six months) it might not have the effects and benefits that it will with the monthly bills. For the monthly bills, the idea is not to overpay an extreme amount but in moderation to enjoy some of the benefits.

In order to realize how you can acquire the benefits, you first need to understand the concept of this system and how it works. The easiest way to explain the system is to think of it as “rounding up” to the next $25 or $50 depending on what your budget will allow and what seems reasonable for the given bill. For a brief example of the method, if you have a bill that is eighty-five dollars each month, start by sending them one-hundred. The next month your bill will be for only seventy dollars. That month, if you send one-hundred again, your bill the following month will be for fifty-five. Depending on your budget, the next month you might want to send either seventy-five or one-hundred. The idea would to then do this for all of your bills. The benefits of doing this might not be immediately obvious, but keep reading…

The first benefit that you will notice is that balancing and subtracting out of your checkbook will be much easier. This may or not be a benefit depending upon your lifestyle. If you write checks for the exact amount on a regular basis, some of this benefit will be minimized. If, however, you are like me and use the checkbook almost exclusively for paying bills, you will almost be able to balance your checkbook without using a calculator.

Secondly, using this method “builds-in” more room in your budget for unexpected expenses or shortfalls in income. This is because if you are overpaying your bills, your budget for an eighty-dollar bill will be one-hundred dollars yet the amount due in a particular month might be only fifty dollars. There is an extra $50 cushion that you can use to cover unexpected expenses without having to tap in to any emergency funds or worry about falling short on your bills. It will also make it easier to plan a budget because you will have a set amount budgeted (higher than the bill ever is) for a bill such as your electric bill which might vary quite a bit from one month to the next.

Along these same lines, if you do this on a regular basis, you will occasionally get your monthly statement from your cable, electric, or cell-phone provider and it will show a credit and say “do not pay” instead of having an amount due. This can be a nice treat because you don’t have to pay that given bill that month and can use that extra money to buy something unnecessary or add to your savings.

There are some bills, however, where the benefits discussed in these last two paragraphs don’t apply. With these bills, there are different benefits that can be achieved. The bills I am referring to are debts: loans and credit cards.

The way that these bills are calculated, your monthly amount due is generally the interest accumulated for the month plus a given percentage of your outstanding balance. Any extra amount paid is put towards the balance and a new amount due is calculated as usual for the next month.

However, three benefits of overpaying these bills include that you will have paid less total interest when the debt is paid off, you will get it paid off sooner, and (depending upon the way that your loan is set up) your monthly amount due may get smaller each month.

When this happens, it is a prime time to make use of the contact form that most websites have available. Here is a checklist for reporting these problems to the person in charge of a given website that will make their life easier, make you seem more informed, and make the problem more likely to get fixed.

First of all, try viewing the page in a different browser if you have one available, if you don’t have another browser available it’s ok. If you are on a Windows machine and using Firefox, try viewing the site in Internet Explorer just to see if you get the same results. By having this information available, you will make it easier for the person on the receiving end of your email to find the problem.

Next, locate the contact form or a contact email address for someone in charge of the site to report the problem to them and send a little message to them. However, don’t just say that the site wasn’t working properly.

Here is a checklist of things to mention and include:

If you don’t have all of these pieces of information, don’t be afraid to report the problem, but the idea is to be as specific as possible.

In many cases, a low-cost homemade antenna may be a great choice and offer benefits not available with commercial antennas. In this post, you will learn how to make your own single-band vertical antenna.

The only materials you will need to build this antenna are a piece of coax and a connector that will be used to attach the coax to the antenna jack on the back of your radio.
	To begin, I attached the connector to the end of the coax. The process for doing this may vary depending on the type of connector that you are using, but should be fairly easy to figure out. This is also possibly the step in which the most technical ability is needed.

Now, go visit my antenna length calculator and determine how long the antenna would need to be for the frequency or band that you will be using your antenna on. The antenna I built is “tuned” for 146.000 and thus can be used on the entire 2 meter band with very low SWR.

For my purposes, I entered 146.000 into the calculator and used the measure for a quarter-wave antenna. At this point, it would be wise to add a couple of inches to that measurement because it’s easier to cut off excess later than try to add more.

Now, strip the outer shielding (the black part) off of the end of the coax opposite of where you installed the connector. Strip an amount equal to the number you arrived at after adding to the results of the antenna length calculator, being careful not to cut the outer conductor.

This next step may take a little bit of time and may seem tedious, but does not take much thought so you can probably do it while watching TV. Start at the end and begin pushing the outer conductor back down the coax. Eventually, it will become loose enough that you can fold the outer conductor back over the part of the coax that still has the outer insulation. You will need to continue to work the outer conductor from the end and eventually it will be folded back over the remainder of the coax. I would suggest you keep working it until it is good and tight against the coax it is folded over. A piece of tape may be needed to hold it in place at the end and will not affect the performance of the antenna.

Now we are ready for the (almost) final step. Refer back to the calculations from the antenna length calculator and cut both the outer part that was folded back and the remaining center conductor (with the inner insulation still covering it) to that length. Then you can simply hang it from the ceiling or tape it to a wall and you are good to go.

Finally, connect it through your wattmeter and check your SWR to make sure all is good. Trim and adjust the length of the two parts to obtain an optimal SWR, and you have just made an easily storable, low cost, well-functioning antenna.

…in no particular order, here are some of the happenings from this previous week:

Over at j2fi.net, Jason celebrated his 29th birthday, and the very next day his PDA gave him a not-so-nice late birthday present when it finally gave out and broke for good. I guess he knew this was coming, but the timing wasn’t very good.

At Beyond the Rhetoric, Michael Kwan developed a pretty good April Fool’s gag by writing a post that announced he got a job writing for the New York Times. This was probably the most entertaining and believable April Fool’s joke I caught wind of this year.

Angela from bostonbrat.net also had a couple good April Fool’s jokes that she was able to pull on her dad and anyone who is a NFL fan will probably find them funny and worth checking out.

Another site that always has interesting and entertaining stuff to read is dereksemmler.com, and this week was no exception. While I’m not exactly sure what to suggest for him, if you have opinions about laptop computers, he is asking for suggestions. Derek is looking to get a laptop to bring with him to blogging conferences and other trips that he may take. Oh, and did I mention he is giving away some free advertising?

To wrap up this post, an interesting point to ponder is whether or not technology can actually have a negative effect on the quality of education that students receive and how much they learn. While you’re thinking about that, visit bloggrrl.com where Michelle explains why she thinks technology is the reason that kids can’t read.

There are three areas where his reporting of his blog income could use a bit of work. First of all, when he refers to the income his blog generated in a previous month, he refers to his blog revenue rather than profit. As most people know, profit equals revenue minus expenses so to be a bit more straightforward and not “pad the numbers” he should refer to his blogs profit rather than revenue when reporting his numbers.

The second issue that I would like to address is that of affiliate commissions. According to his March income report, he made $7,729.37 from this income source in the month of March. While this is a respectable amount, I am not entirely certain one should consider it as a portion of the blog income.

I understand that without the blog, this revenue stream would not exist, however, this revenue stream is not entirely dependent on the blog’s existence. By their very nature, the majority of these affiliate earnings would continue even if John decided to take down his blog tomorrow.

While we are on the topic of affiliate earnings, I think it would be nice if he would breakdown this revenue stream in a way similar to the breakdown of the total blog income. Wouldn’t it be nice to see how much affiliate income came from the different sources such as Kontera, BlueFur, Text Link Ads, etc? He could then report this separately from his blog income. He could even spawn it off into a separate company under the John Chow L.L.C. and call it John Chow Referrals, John Chow the Affiliate, John Chow Affiliates or something like that.

The third issue is the one where he is really lying to his readers. In his monthly breakdown, he categorizes the income by source. This is nice of him to do and helps his readers to see where the money is coming from. This also makes it more understandable how he can make such large amounts of money from his site. However, regular readers of his site will notice that almost all of the ReviewMe reviews are written by Michael Kwan. While I haven’t asked him directly, I would almost be willing to bet money that he does not do this for free.

I don’t know how much he gets for each review that he does, but there is no mention of this expense in the monthly income report. Revenue from ReviewMe accounted for $5,000 in March for John Chow dot Com. I don’t know for sure if this is before or after ReviewMe takes their 50% cut but would imagine that it is after.

However, the only expense listed for March is $520.45 for advertising. If the $5,000 is after ReviewMe takes their 50%, the total paid to ReviewMe for reviews would be $10,000. Dividing $10,000 by $500 per review would show that there were 20 reviews for the month. If Kwan gets $50 per review of the $250 that ReviewMe distributes to John, that would equal another $1,000 of expenses for the month.

Using my suggestions above, the guess of $50 per review for Kwan, and the figures that Chow provided here is a recalculation of the income for John Chow dot Com from the month of March:

Revenue:
Private Ad Sales: $15,230.00
ReviewMe: $5,000.00
Text Link Ads: $2,031.90
Kontera: $1,000
TTZ Media: $384.24
FeedBurner: $45.73
Subscription: $20.00
Total Revenue: $23,711.87

Expenses:
Contextual Advertising: $520.45
Michael Kwan for reviews: $1,000.00
Total Expenses: $1,520.45

Profit:
$23,711.87 - $1,520.45 = $22,191.42

While $22,191.42 is a very respectable amount of money and I commend John for being able to make that much off of his blog on a monthly basis, it is quite a bit less than the $31,441,24 that he reported and will likely use to refer back to this post in the future.

The question though, is just how far would you go to make a statement? At what point is your own convenience more important to you than the statement you are trying to make? I would presume that this would depend significantly on the issue and how strongly you feel about said issue, but it is an interesting point to ponder nonetheless.

Because of this, the physical length that an antenna is going to have to be in order to radiate properly will be shorter than the theoretical and electrical length that is calculated by my antenna length calculator. There are those who may use different formulas to arrive at the correct length for an antenna and a rule of thumb that seems to be followed quite often is to multiply the results by .95 when converting from theoretical to actual length.

The most accurate way to calculate the correct length that an antenna would need to be, however, would be to not actually calculate the precise length at all. Because the radio waves are going to slow down when they get to the antenna, it will almost always need to be shorter than the theoretical length. The surest way, then, to make sure that an antenna is tuned properly would be to build it to the theoretical length, connect it to the radio and a watt meter, and begin trimming off a little bit at a time until the SWR is optimal. By doing this, you will be assured that your antenna is tuned to an optimal length on a given frequency and not be as concerned with the exact length of the antenna as it can very between different types of coax and different kinds of wire.

While I must admit that I do not use it very often, FileZilla has been a great FTP client on both my Linux and Windows machines and I have not found much in the way of short-comings. Other than command-line FTP tools, this is the only FTP client that I use.

Some of the benefits of it include supporting FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) so pretty much any connection type is available. Also, I really like that you can set it to resume transfers because I hate it when I get disconnected in the middle of a download or upload and have to start all over.

With as many options as FileZilla has and as much control as you can have over the program’s behavior I do know know why anyone would want to use a different FTP client, especially if it were one that you would have to pay for!

While these are generally not the highest yielding of securities, they are one of the safest options available. This should make them attractive to investors because while they may pull the yield of your portfolio down a little bit, they will also reduce the total risk that you face and provide another means of diversification within your portfolio.

While it is possible to purchase Treasury securities from most banks and brokers, the US Treasury offers an online portal to purchase these securities directly. The online portal for the US Department of the Treasury is called TreasuryDirect. I’m not sure if there are any major advantages or disadvantages to going directly through the Treasury Department, but it seems simple enough that I am planning to give it a try.

Unfortunately, signing up for an account with them is not quite like signing up with most other online services. You can sign up in about 5 minutes, but you won’t be able to login for approximately 2 weeks after creating your account. As an added security measure, aside from having a username and password, they also send you an “Access Card” in the mail.

I have not received my “Access Card” yet, but it looks to be a credit card sized item that contains a serial number as well as letters across the top and numbers down the side forming a grid. The rest of the grid is filled with random numbers and letters. The idea is that you enter the serial number of your card and then the site asks for a series of characters designated by grid coordinates.

While this might be a moderately more secure way of managing login information, it is also a bit annoying to have to wait for something to arrive in the mail in order to login to an online account that was created online.

My recommendation would be to get signed up ASAP so that your card can get to you in the mail. Then you will be able to purchase these $100 securities at any time and not have to wait for it then when you would rather be investing. Even though the interest rate on US Treasury securities may be only marginally better than you can get with some savings accounts, remember that diversification is important.

-Read the press release announcing $100 minimum investments-