Monday, September 20, 2010

Toddler And Kid Computing

After watching the kid use his mom's iPhone for the past 6 months we decided that it could be interesting to give him his own computer. So i dusted off an old laptop i had laying around and got to researching kid software and configuration.

Initially was going to load up windows 7 then go through and lock it down tight using some third party tools as well as the built in parent controls. However, after I got started I realized I wanted something more out of the box and easy, so back to google.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Building a Pine Kid's Desk

Pine desks can be pricey when bought from a furniture store, however, with some elbow grease one can be built for about $60.

Kid's Pine Desk Complete










Step 1: Plan it

Planning should be the first part of any project and Google Sketchup was used to plan this one. Google sketchup is a great piece of FREE software for do it yourselfers. After going through a few of the tutorials you will be able to design a few basic things. This desk's dimensions is  H25" x W36" x D20".

Desk Design Done in Google Sketchup 










Monday, September 6, 2010

Island Slang

In October, 2007 over the course of a weekend Island Slang (http://www.islandslang.com) was born. I Literally had an idea for a small web 2.0 app and implemented it over a 3 day weekend. It is a site that lets people define slangs used in different islands across the world anonymously. The app is written in C# ASP.NET 2.0 (webforms) with a SQL Server 2005.

After developing Island Slang, I did about 10 minutes research on google adsense (using google search of course), added an ad bar to the right, hit publish and broadcast on my facebook wall that my new site just emerged into existence and sit back and waited for the rush of millions of visitors to the site. Of course that didn't happen, but what did is a constant very tiny trickle of folk ranging from 1 - 10 visitors per week, with approximately 6 percent of them click an ad, which results in a few pennies added to my adsense account.

So after 3 years of the site running adsense earnings just hit $8. Not quite a good return on investment monetary wise, but was a fun and easy project, and I definitely did learn alot about creating a web presence and now I see that there is a significant amount of work needed to succeed in the web ad business.