Tyler Whitaker’s InfoTech

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As many of you know, I recently spent 2 weeks in Peru and Ecuador seeing the sites and working on content for our new travel site, MunchkinTravel.com. We took our 4 year old with us and he had the time of his life.  This is the second in a series of blog entries detailing some of the technology I saw on the trip.

Ever since I saw my first GPS I’ve had an strange desire to go to geographically significant places. Last year we took a road trip to Bad Water, Nevada in Death Valley National Park which is the lowest place in the western hemisphere at -282 feet below sea level. This year we went to the equator near Quito, Ecuador.

First thing I found is that their are two "equator places" in Ecuador. The first is Ciudad Mitad Del Mundo or Middle of the World City. This is the bigger and more commercial place to see the Equator. This traditional site was based on work of 2 french geographers during the 1700s .  Interestingly enough, this is not the true location of the equator. It’s actually 240 meters to the north at what is called the Intiñan Solar Museum.

  The Intiñan Solar Museum is billed as the actual equator based on measurements taken by military GPS. This fun little museum has some fun equator experiments and Incan cultural exhibits. 

They have a number of different sun dials which show you how the sun spends half of the year in the northern sky and the other half in the southern sky. No trip to the equator would be complete without trying to balance an egg on the head of a nail. Which I have to admit was pretty easy.

One of the most mind bending demonstrations was of the Coriolis effect. This is the force that supposedly causes drains to flow in opposite directions depending if your in the northern or southern hemisphere. To demonstrate this behavior our guide took a mobile sink filled with water, pulled the plug, and tossed in some leaves to show the direction the drain was flowing. He did this 3 times: once on the equator (no drain rotation), once on the South side (clockwise), and finally once on the North side (counter-clockwise). Some say it’s a trick. Here’s the video for you to decide.

One thing was bothering me at both of these sites. My Magellan Explorist 600 GPS wasn’t reading all zeros for Latitude. So I started walking north, through the Intiñan Solar Museum  grounds, out through the parking lot, and finally out on to a busy road. And wouldn’t you know it, right on the far white line the counter hit zero. So dodging big trunks and heavy traffic, I got my picture to prove that I had been  to the Equator!

As many of you know, I recently spent 2 weeks in Peru and Ecuador seeing the sites and working on content for our new travel site, MunchkinTravel.com. We took our 4 year old with us and he had the time of his life. Playing with the local kids and exploring a new world. Hopefully this will be the first of a series of blog entries detailing some of the technology I saw on the trip.

One of the most interesting things we saw was the use of solar panel technology throughout both countries. One such example was on the Eros floating Islands on Lake Titicaca near Puno, Peru. For those of you not familiar with the Eros Islands, it’s an amazing collection of 70+ floating islands built entirely out of tora reeds. The early inhabitants used these naturally growing reeds to build floating platforms to escape persecution from the Incas and early Spanish colonizers. 

We stopped at the Island of Apu Inti which some of you might recognize from Elder Rasbands recent talk. This little island, that is home to a handful of families, sits in about 55 feet of water and is 7-8 feet thick. Most life on these islands centers around tourism, with the natives showing the traditional tasks of life, the uses of the tora reed, how the islands are built, and dressing their guests up in native costumes.

Not being one who likes to dress up and dance, I quickly grabbed the nearest native and with my broken Spanish asked to see his solar setup.  The 53 watt solar panel, made by Condumex,  feed through a charging unit in to a water proof 12 volt car battery. He also had a circuit breaker / distribution unit that powered a compact fluorescent light bulb, his TV & Stereo (so much for be true "natives"), and his neighbors house.

I asked how long he had been running this setup. He told me that the President of Peru had given the solar panels to the people of the Eros islands 6 years ago. Apparently they had been using candles and had trouble with their homes and islands burning down. Go figure. No doubt the gift was an attempt to help keep the tourist trade going.

The Eros Islands were not the only places we saw solar panels.  We found them all over Peru and Ecuador and on the islands of Amantani and Taquille. Look for pictures of these wonderful islands on our MunchkinTravel.com  website in the coming weeks.

I think the wide spread adoption of solar is directly related to the lack of quality power infrastructure. In many ways, countries with emerging markets are perfectly positioned to leap frog the US in the coming green technology revolution because they don’t have existing infrastructure that is still trying to pay for itself. It’s true that  technology is often driven by the underlying business model. It’s also true that disruptive next generation technology is also held back by existing entrenched infrastructure and it’s associated economic model.

Just to be clear, all of these conferences are great. I’m just not into them this year. It doesn’t work with the travel budget and I’m busy on other projects. But watching the coverage of all these other conferences has left me feeling a little like I’m missing out.

So, I thought I would cover The Big Business & Technology Expo at the McKay Events Center on the campus of the soon to be Utah Valley University. Being armed with my camera and a couple of extra free tickets (explained later), I was off for my conference experience.

After seeing the big press coverage and the expo’s PR machine at work I knew I needed to show up early.

Parking was crazy, even at  11:10am on opening day, just 10 minutes after the show opening. These people were so excited to get here, they stole cars from a local dealership and had to park on the grass just to get a close parking spot.

The show floor didn’t disappoint. It seems like it is exactly the same size as in years past. Among the many marketing companies, banks, and promotional item salesmen, the big surprise was how many people were playing Rock Band or Guitar Hero in their booths. There is nothing like a good guitar riff that screams "We should be your business partner."

The highlight of the expo is the free lunch from Bajios (Fresh Mex), Goodwood BBQ (BBQ at it’s best), or Rumbi Island Grill (Hawaiian goodness). Your entrance ticket is also your meal ticket. Thus, the best tip for those of you going to the Big Business Expo: Take extra tickets. That way you can get multiple meals (which are currently running small on portion size.)

Yesterday I had an interesting experience helping a good friend and neighbor set up some CATV wiring in his basement. Now I’ve done this kind of stuff in past jobs and even in my own basement. So you would think that there should be no problem whatsoever. Think again.

To be fair, he hasn’t had that much experience with Ethernet, 10-base-T, CATV, or the like. He was able to run all of the cabling himself. He followed the instructions on modular wall jacks. He had picked a wiring scheme (T568A) and was consistent. The problem was getting connectivity. There was none.

We were able to isolate the problem to one section of cabling and the connectors on each end. We verified the right order of the colored wire pairs on each end of the connection. But still no luck.

We came to the conclusion that it had to be one of the follow problems:

1. He had miss labeled the some/all of the 15 different cables.
2. The cable had been cut or damaged during the dry wall installation.
3. The ends were incorrectly wired despite following the diagrams.

This is the point when a good cable tester is an invaluable tool. Luckily I had suggested that he pick up a LinkMaster - Network testing device from IDEAL.

This little tester is great. It was able to quickly show us the problem with one of the connections. Despite following the wiring diagrams exactly, the tester turned us onto a problem that the manufacturers connector wiring diagram was printed incorrectly. It showed the connector upside down, from the text. A quick fix on that end of the cable solved everything. It’s a good thing we had the LinkMaster CATV/10-base-T tester.

Richard K. Miller wrote a post yesterday in part about documenting your daily work. He quotes Jon Udell’s idea of narrating one’s work from day to day. That way your experience can help others and do something other than bounce around inside your head looking for a way out.

All to often I find myself running as fast as I can on a project or research topic and not stopping to blog about it. Sometimes I get stuck in the quandary "Is this topic too boring blog about?" vs. "Is this information too valuable as a trade secret to blog about?" In the end both my blog and readers suffer.

I think the best thing to do is to blog. Get information out there where it can have the biggest impact. Thanks to Richard for sparking that thought process.

This post is another my in the ongoing series detailing how I’ll going to both increase traffic and page rank of tylerwhitaker.com.

Ok, so I had a little fun with the title of this post. But, I’m going to share with you my top secret Google keywords. These aren’t just any keywords. These are the Google keywords that rank tylerwhitaker.com in the top ten search results on Google. I’m not really sure if other Internet Marketers share this kind of intel. But, In the interest of setting the baseline for this blog, here’s the list:

Tyler Whitaker - Rank: 1  I think this is has a lot to do with my domain name. I’ve owned tylerwhitaker.com for years. Owning a domain name for a long time with your keywords is always a big help.

tyler whittaker - Rank: 2  This is a funny one since my last name is spelled with only one ‘t’. I must have some backlinks somewhere with my name mis-spelled.

is there a tyler whitaker anywhere - Rank: 4  This is a good question and most days I have a good answer.

racellete - Rank: 5  This is the name of a specific cheese and a popular meal I fell in love with in Switzerland. I tried to find a local Salt Lake City supplier of racellete when I got back. I wrote a blog post about it. I think racellete is a misspelling. The correct spelling is Raclette.

"s infotech" - Rank: 5  This must be a typing mistake. Some kind of truncated version of title of this blog. "Tyler Whitaker’s InfoTech"

flying dragonfly - Rank: 7  Last year a wrote a post about the RC Flying Dragonfly from Wow Wee. It’s a remote controlled plane of sorts that is shaped in the form of a dragonfly. This might be a interesting keyword to use for a future marketing experiment.

tyler "news com" - Rank: 7  I have now idea why I’m listed here.

apprentice tv show 2008 - Rank: 8  I recently posted my thoughts on Donald Trump’s Apprentice TV Show. This current 2008 season has a group of celebrities competing. To bad it’s not more about business.

whitaker business solutions - Rank: 8  This blog is about technology business solutions.

The next step is to increase the rankings of this site using some of these keywords. Stay tuned.

One of the first things I realized was that tylerwhitaker.com was pretty light on plugins. I have been running Akismet for spam (and it works great.) But the rest are new. If you know of any better plugins, please let me know.

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. By Matt Mullenweg.

All in One SEO Pack
Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. By uberdose.

Contextual Related Posts
Show last 5 contextually related posts on single blog posts, increase exposure By Mark Ghosh (LaughingLizard). I did some editing on this one so that it would work with my theme.

FeedBurner FeedSmith
Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. By Arne Brachhold.

ShareThis
Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites. Questions on configuration, etc.? Make sure to read the README. By ShareThis and Crowd Favorite (crowdfavorite.com).

Twitter Tools
A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. By Alex King. My Twitter account is tylerwhitaker come follow me when you get a chance.

What Would Seth Godin Do
Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors. By Richard K Miller. Richard is a good guy and I’m glad to support him and his plugin.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been doing some research into the field of Internet Marketing. Specifically, I’m interesting in blogs, SEO, Google AdSense (and other ad networks), webstores (amazon, eBay, yahoo, etc.), and keyword selection. While I’m finding a lot of content that is both good and bad, I’m learning that there is more art than science to increasing page rank and driving traffic. I think that is in part due to the secretive nature of Google’s page rank algorithm and those finding success using SEO techniques. Don’t get me wrong, there are definite steps and methods to follow.

So I’ve reached a crossroads of sorts in my research. I’ve learned a fair amount through passive research. And now I’ve come to the conclusion that to learn more I really need to become active in the field and run my own experiments.

I think that means working on this blog. Setting up a couple more highly focused blogs. And generally rolling up my sleeves and getting dirty. I hope to record my success and failures here as well.

So to set the baseline. This blog is currently at a Google toolbar page rank of 3. And sense I haven’t been writing much in the last few months, the traffic is next to nothing. I’m currently sitting at 4 feed subscribers.  I have upgraded to the latest WordPress, updated the theme, and installed a number of plugins. (More on the upgrades in another post.)

So on with the fun. Check back often to see my progress.

I keep hoping that Donald Trump’s Apprentice will deliver more of the insights from his book The Art of the Deal. But, the celebrity edition of the show is just more of the same. Robert Merrill has a great post on his blog about Trump’s decision to keep Omarosa over Tiffany. I couldn’t agree more. The problem with the Apprentice is the constant back stabbing and distortion of the truth. It’s great TV, but terrible in a real business.

Wow. It has been a really long time since I last blogged. I chalk that up to getting busy with life. I.e. spending time with the family, working with BDS, and taking some time off. I have kept up with my monthly column. You can see most recent articles on my articles page.