You heard it all here first. (Yes, both of you.)

The new site is a place to find all things BBQ, from rubs and sauces to blogs and message forums. It’s called “BBQ Grails List”, and can be found at http://www.grailslist.com .

I kind of like the design of the place. The letters in the logo are built to evoke the burning coals of a BBQ. The boxes for each category are built with a “masonry” add-in I found. I like how the boxes flow together like a rock fireplace automatically. If you refresh the page, the category boxes are displayed in a different order each time, but the masonry effect keeps them together.

The site has some advertising, using scripts from Amazon and Google Adsense. The ad content is supposed to be mostly BBQ-related items. So the site is ‘live’ and you will find some good items in most of the categories, along with links to the item’s web sites.

There’s been a bit of tweaking to some of the other sites, including putting some historical family pictures on the family web site. I found a great PHP-based program that automatically displays pictures in a folder. The style of the gallery pages is somewhat customizable, but  [...]

    Continue reading Friday Afternoon Recap

Working on an update to CellarWebAds (my free ad placement program). In the finals on this one; working on tweaking the docs, and some minor interface changes to some of the data screens. Plus some final testing of the whole process.

Along with that, final tweaks on a new site for the BBQ Grail. It needs to have CellarWebAds to help with the rotation of ads, so both are on today’s to-do list.

And, some work on the family historical site, uploading some ancestral pictures and implementing them into the family wiki. So I do have enough to keep me busy.

If I can drag myself away from the “Joe Pickett” book series (by C. J. Box). I have enjoyed reading those stories on my Nook. I am at the 10th in the series, and quite enjoy them.

Think of your personal data. All of those pictures on your camera, your phone, your laptop, or your computer. Or even the non-electronic data like printed pictures, slides, important papers, journals — the list is almost endless. Protecting that data from different kinds of loss is important to a business, and to individuals.

And there are lots of ways to back up that data, no matter what it is. On a personal level, you can copy files to CD/DVDs, or to an external hard drive (USB thumb drive, external hard disk). Those are valid solutions. But only if you remember to do them. And then there is the storage issue. Where do you keep these backup copies? Keeping them in the same physical location protects the data — until there is a flood, or a fire, or tornado, or a theft, or … well, the possibilities for data loss have not been fully mitigated.

One of the solutions I have used for a couple of years is an on-line backup service. The service I use is from Carbonite (www.carbonite.com), and costs $59/year for unlimited, automatic on-line backup. Tree important words in that statement. Unlimited backup takes care of all of my files at the same basic  [...]

    Continue reading Saving My Data

Hi,

Just writing to let you know our trip to Madrid, Spain has been a mess. We were having a great time until last night when we got mugged and lost all my cash,credit card cellphone It has been a scary experience, I was hit at the back of my neck with a club. Anyway, I’m still alive and that’s whats important. I’m financially strapped right now and need your help. I need you to loan me some $$, I’ll refund it to you as soon as i arrive home.Write me back so i can tell you how to get it to me.

Regards, Kenneth

This is quite sad. Poor Kenneth. Stuck in a foreign country, no cash, no credit cards, so he can’t get home. I should send him some money to help out.

Except I don’t know a Kenneth. Even if I did (and this scam sometimes is from a name you recognize), not a good practice to send money to someone without verification. Unless you don’t care if you ever see that money again.

These types of messages might come to you from you “cousin” or “granddaughter”, and might include information that seems valid. But it is a scam.

Be careful out there!

Here’s a couple of links about this: http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/06/9986119-new-virus-raids-your-bank-account-but-you-wont-notice and http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/01/05/spyeye-bank-trojan-hides-its-fraud-footprint/ .

Your defense? Those four things we mentioned here http://cellarweb.com/securitydawg/?p=56 : Windows updates, application updates, anti-virus updates, not browsing as an administrator. Those would be a great start.

And the 30th birthday of our son, Jason. Long-time readers (yes, the both of you in the back there) will recall that Jason took his life almost 5 years ago.

We still miss him. Some of our memories are at the memorial web site — www.jasonhellewell.com .