My VWD Lottery Experience.

I’m sending out a newsletter to all my prospects and subscribers for March.

Elottery March newsletter

Well done Trevor Edwards (elottery) for becoming a Senior Affiliate!

Trevor has been steadily increasing his team size for the past 2 years and it just goes to show, you can run this business as a sideline to your normal daily activities. Because this business doesn’t require huge running costs, most people are happy with their increased chances of winning and only promote to people that they know. Doing this consistently will ultimately bring rewards in the form of more winnings and more monthly commission. The best thing is, all the affiliates that Trevor introduced will do the same thing and earn him even more money!

Another successful affiliate of The Empire Group!

Thanks Trevor for all your efforts.

It’s Chinese new year!

Happiness and Health to everyone!

I have been playing with my new phone, the XDA Orbit. All I can say is “WHAT A GREAT PHONE!”. I had the XDA IIi PDA phone before and although it was packed with features, it left a lot to be desired when it came to actually functioning. The (XDA IIi) battery would run down super quickly, the touchscreen would occasionally not work with certain letters and when I installed TomTom on it then it would always crash (the pda, not the car) at a complicated junction. It was also pretty clunky and completely impossible to use one handed.

All that has changed, the XDA Orbit is fantastic. Some of the new features:

A scroll wheel on the front like an ipod, it also has a small track ball in the center of that which really helps to select icons and options. It has a few extra buttons like an “ok” button, a windows key for opening the start menu, a GPS key and two soft keys. And that’s just on the face of the phone.

Built in GPS receiver with option to add an external antenna. I was a little dubious about the built in GPS functionality at first seeing as it didn’t seem to bulge the phone but after installing TomTom 6 and seeing the phone locate my position in less than a minute and then continue to function flawlessly for my whole journey I changed my mind (and felt a little gutted about having bought a TomTom 910 a couple of months ago!!)

The size is much better too, it doesn’t look as small in pictures but take it from me, it’s a usable size. The battery life is very good too, play mp3’s with the screen set to always on will allow you to listen for over 5 hours! amazing.

The camera is a 2 megapixel affair, not too shabby but not super high rez either. The interface for the camera software is good though, it takes landscape pictures and there’s plenty of options available on the touch screen. I particularly liked the scroll wheel being used as a zoom dial. To take the picture you can touch the screen or use the camera button located on the bottom right of the phone, which becomes the top right when the phone is being used as a camera - the same place you would expect a button to be on a camera. There’s no flash but it takes decent pictures if the lighting is good, on screen buttons can adjust the contrast, lighting, resolution (with settings for MMS size).

It’s got a fast scanning FM radio too, you have to use the headphones supplied as they act as an antenna but you can still output the sound through the speaker once they’re in.

Also, voice dialling which worked really well on the phone and through my bluetooth headset. Press the button, wait for the beep and then say your pre-recorded name. It plays the recording back to you before it dials so you can hear that you’ve got the right number (useful on a bluetooth headset).

The OS is windows mobile 5 and works much faster than previous XDA’s. No agonising wait for the phone interface to come up if you’re using other apps. The screen is good quality, I used my previous XDA to read ebooks using MS Reader and it works just as well on the Orbit, even better perhaps because the scroll wheel is a much more natural way to turn the page.

I downloaded quite a few apps for it this week, my favourite is the PPOD which turns it into a virtual ipod which displays the ipod on the screen and even uses the touch screen for the scroll wheel. It looks and feels just like an ipod! lame I know but I never bought an ipod so it pleased me no end! see here for a video showing ppod on a windows pda

The XDA Orbit uses a micro-sd card for expanded memory which is a little fiddly to install because the port is located under the sim which means you have to switch the phone off to change cards. Not a big deal really if you have a big enough card to start with.

The charger, data connection and headphones all fit into the mini-usb port at the bottom of the phone so you can’t charge and listen to the radio at the same time which, again, is no big deal.

They managed to put the stylus in a tight fitting hole this time so it’s not going to fall out like the last model, I have found I rarely have to use the stylus. Only when I’m sending text messages will it come out from hiding. Another bonus!

All in all, I love this phone. It’s not because of the amount of features but simply because it works and works well, everything is easy to get to and use. The position of the buttons and their function are natural.

This is what all my previous smartphones and pda’s should have acted like.

bye bye Nokia!! hahaha, in the bin with you and your “wait a couple seconds between menus” lol

I want to give a free ‘plug’ for MSGTag Status 2. I have used msgtag for a long time now, I’ve upgraded every time and found it really useful. For those of you that don’t know, msgtag is a program that adds a small footer to your outgoing emails sent from your pc, by monitoring when that tag gets viewed by the recipient they can tell how long it took for them to open your message.

You can set the program to leave a visible tag saying “msg tag has notified the send that you have received this message” or you can set it to not display anything. I used to keep it on the invisible setting but I have found that by having the tag there people tend to respond to a message because they know you know they know (you know what I mean?)

It’s also a real bonus to be able to know if someone has opened your email or not like when I send emails to a company requesting a quote, if the msgtag status 2 icon moves in the systray then I can click it to open up the interface which shows me a list of emails that have been sent and if I see the company email has been opened I know I can expect an email soon.

I had issues with my upgrade and the customer service I received was quick and precise, a couple of emails to and fro and they managed to determine that an errant underscore was the reason my smtp server wasn’t responding. A quick del here and everything was back up and running. cushty.

You can download a free version of msgtag that adds a footer to your emails and when someone opens a message from you msgtag will send you an email with the results. As long as you set your automatic send and receive to 5mins then you get to know almost as soon as someone opens your mail. pukka.

You can get it by visiting MSGTag Status

oh the satisfaction from doing a job well!
I managed to put in some coding today for a site I am doing, it grabs a news story from a popular website and displays an image and excerpt with a link to the full story. It looks really neat and because it is created on the fly, search engines and your average Joe will see it as part of the original page giving the site a dynamically created ever-fresh content. yey!

I also played with my “who knows I’m here?” script which takes the terms given to it and goes and finds which page the site appears for those terms on most search engines. I found out that the site mentioned above has a number 1 on page 1 result on Google as well as other Page 1 on Google terms.

I’m quite pleased as I have really put the effort into this site to get it noticed with traffic and reciprocal links and the Google results show that it works. I kept an accurate record this time of what things I did and what things I added later. I’ve got myself a really sweet system now for future build and promote commissions!

oh and I am currently the lowest unique bid holder for the Bravia TV. 4 hours to go, I’m going to put my thoughtsicle’s onto “high positive thinking mode” and Jedi it to stay the lowest and unique until 11pm

tomorrow I shall be posting a picture of the thing I am going to win tonight.

…I will! you just watch me

[edit 21:52]….ummm
the nicest way of saying it is “I got to have 10 more lowest unique bids”.
A frenzy has happened and all my unique bids have depleted…..BUT…. I saw the same model tv on a list of prizes on a competition and entered that today so I’ll just have to win that one instead.

I’ve been bidding all day long on the elotbidder site after I noticed that I had 80 bids that had rolled over the months that I have been busy doing other things. I thought I’d put a spreadsheet together and print out some stuff and then keep a detailed record of the hints that appear after a bid is made.

It’s doing this that enabled me to work out exactly how many empty bids were between two points and then narrow that down so I knew there were say 10 between two points that were 25 apart. I used up 80 bids and got 22 uniques! I logged on to another of my accounts and was able to use the same method to knock off the lowest unique bid twice.

I’ve got 20 bids left which I’ll save for just before the auction and see if I can knock off the last lowest unique and make my uniques have a much better chance of become the lowest.

that tv is mine!! unless of course you play and knock me off! click this link to try (first time is free) Free lowest unique bid

here’s one of my long paper printouts that helped me. [edit]…grr , just got an email saying I lost one of my unique bids [/edit]