SpottedWalrus

If you run ads or want to manage ads on your site, Adregate could be the thing for you.

I’ve been building Adregate for a while now and it’s finally all coming together. We’ve been in private alpha for a couple of weeks now and will start sending out private beta invitations every few days soon.

Check out a few screenshots of things here.

So the past month I’ve really become a bit of a music junkie…more so than usual. I’ve purchased like 7 albums worth of songs and added a whole slew of additional albums I’ll be picking up in the near future.

One of the major contributing factors to this is eMusic. They don’t have as large of a mainstream selection as say iTunes, but they’ve got a massive collection of more independent and older tunes. It really is a gold mine of music.

In the interest of getting even more free music, I’d like to extend and eMusic referral to anybody and everybody. All you’ve got to do is shoot me a quick email (to josh at joshpigford dot com) and I’ll send you an invitation for 50 free songs…which is just plain crazy.

I won’t do a stinkin’ thing with your email address other than email you the eMusic link. After that I’ll delete your email forever and ever.

So, what are you waiting for? Get yourself 50 free songs! (again by sending an email to josh at joshpigford dot com).

Yipeee!

So for the past couple of years I’ve really become more and more fascinated with 3D art…more specifically 3D animation.

I’ve decided to officially jump in and start learning things. Maya (one of the industry standard 3d apps) has a cool setup with a free “personal learning edition” version of their software that is full-featured and just puts watermarks on your output images/movies. This setup is perfect for a guy like me who is testing the waters.

My plan is to post here as I learn more including tips, designs, thoughts etc. It’s been pretty hard to find info on exactly how to get in to doing 3d modeling and animation so hopefully these posts will be beneficial to others.

So, what are the first things I’ve done?

1. Joined CGSociety and started asking questions
2. Downloaded Maya PLE and went through their “Getting Started” tutorials
3. Purchased Learning Autodesk Maya so I could really get a solid foundation of knowledge on the subject

I’ll be posting helpful links related to 3D stuff here.

Wish me luck! And if you have any tips/advice, post them in the comments. I’m all ears.

So this past weekend I launched a new site called Decomodo (pronounced however you feel like).

It’s my little plot of intarweb real estate for me to post all the randomly sweetness stuff I come across day-to-day.

Basically, it’s the most awesome site you’ll ever see. Period.

Go visit Decomodo right now…or else!

So for about 2 weeks now I’ve been exchanging emails with Google AdWords support trying to figure out why my ads weren’t running at all. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. No impressions. No clicks. Absolutely nothing.

Now, when I say “exchanging emails” I mean Google AdWords support sent 7 emails in 2 weeks all saying the exact same thing. That the ticket has been escalated to the “technical team” and they’ll get back to me in 2-3 days. So every 2-3 days they got back to me with the same email. Awesome.

Well apparently after escalating my ticket 7 times, the guy with some brains got a hold of it and got my account working again.

So…why was my account not running ads for 2 weeks?

“Your ad previously wasn’t running due to a known technical issue.”

Ah. Okay. THAT technical issue. The one where AdWords just doesn’t do it’s job and show any ads. Fantastic. Might wanna check in to that guys.

/end rant

I’ve just placed a few items up for auction on eBay…if you’re interested.

So this past Friday was quite an interesting day.

It was a normal day of work here in my home office and I had just had a nice, hardy Grilled Steak Stuffed Burrito from the one and only Taco Bell.

I soon began to notice that my peripheral vision in my right eye was going in and out. I was beginning to think I was taking crazy pills so I went and took my contacts out and put my glasses on only for it to get worse.

Within an hour of that I had a pounding headache. I went back to my bedroom to try and maybe rest a little to see if that would help, but this headache had no intention of letting me do any such thing.

Thirty minutes later I called my wife to come home and take me to the E.R…I felt like my head was about to explode and I could barely walk…much less drive.

Long story short…1 CAT Scan, 1 MRI, tons of pain meds, throwing up, and 6 hours in the E.R., it seems I had a nasty migraine. I’ve never had one before and I sure as hades don’t want one again. So, I’m curious…has anyone heard of any correlation between migraines and computer monitors?

I sit in front of a monitor some 8-10 hours a day 5-6 days a week and if that ultimately will cause me to have more migraines, then I really need to do something about it.

So Unclutterer made a post today about a kitchen gadget that doesn’t pull its weight in relation to the space it demands. In other words, it takes up WWWAAAYYY to much space for doing such a minimal task.

And what task might that be? Freaking grilling hot dogs!

The Hot Diggity Dogger might be one of the most pointless, yet amazing gadgets to ever exist…period.

My gosh I want one.

I’ve got quite a collection of web design and development books covering every topic from typography to color to XHTML/CSS and every development language imaginable. I’ve even got 3-4 books on the same topic for some things. But over the past year or so I’ve found myself becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the books that have been coming on on various web topics lately.

It’s not so much that the contents of these books is irrelevant or badly written. What I’ve found myself thinking every time I crack open any of these books at Barnes & Noble is that I say to myself, “I could just find this online.”

So this got me thinking. Where will books, more specifically “web related” books, be in the next 5-10 years? The 37signals Getting Real book distributed as a PDF was a massive success and more authors seem to be going that route.

And even more than just “digital” books…will there really even be a direct need for entire books on topics? Practically ever bit of technical info you could possibly need is a simple search away.

Do you prefer books over searching online? Or the other way? And why?

I’ve been quite obsessed with IconBuffet for quite some time now and this is my quick little post to try and snag myself more points there.

So, if you aren’t a member of IconBuffet, you should be. And you should go signup using my referral link.

/end selfish iconbuffet promo