Evsion Lab

Do You Really Need a Degree to be Happy?

Posted by Eunjin Gregorio under Uncategorized

Leandro from Brazil wrote in with a classic and crucial question: Do you need a college degree to be successful? Leandro is 21 and currently studies computer engineering and does NOT like it. His parents think he absolutely needs the degree - he doesn’t :o)My take: No. You don’t need a college degree to be happy and successful.

I myself have a university degree (a masters in computer science) - but I chose my studies 100% based on my interests at the time. I was a major geek and my studies let me do some pretty cool stuff.

And while I would not have gotten my first “real” job without my degree, I would of course have gotten another job - even without the degree. And anyway, my first job sucked :o)

1. You’re good at
2. You like doing
3. Someone is willing to pay you for

Popularity: 6% [?]

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Technorati Gives Blogs an ‘Authority’ Ranking

Posted by Eunjin Gregorio under Uncategorized

“Ben has noticed that Technorati have started giving blogs an ‘Authority Rank’. The Top 100 list used to be base upon incoming links but now is based upon ‘authority’ (although I don’t see much has changed in that list so far). There’s nothing about how they’re coming up with authority rankings yet on their blog - it’ll be interesting to see if this is just a new new name for the old ‘incoming links’ description or if they’re making bigger changes. PS: It also looks like they’ve changed the way that blog’s profile pages are displayed. I don’t remember how the old ones displayed but here’s ProBlogger’s page. Now with screen shot of the blog, ‘blog reactions’ (what others are saying about the blog) etc. I also note that they’ve started calling those favoriting a blog ‘fans’ which could indicate some more changes in the favoriting system are under way. [ Via ProBlogger ] “

Popularity: 6% [?]

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Microsoft’s iPhone Launched…

Posted by Eunjin Gregorio under Uncategorized

Well atleast that was the rumor then. Microsoft has just launched Surface. It is now official that this is not an iPhone competitor. This is a much bigger device and not comparable to iPhone (although it seems like it utilizes similar technologies). Similar to iPhone, Surface allows people to interact with information using touch, natural gestures and physical objects. So no need for additional peripherals. Check out Microsoft.com/surface for more information. Play around with it, come back here and leave your comments.

Update: This is CNNs coverage of Microsoft’s Surface.

“SEATTLE (Reuters) — Microsoft Corp. will unveil a coffee-table-shaped “surface computer” Wednesday in a major step towards co-founder Bill Gates’s view of a future where the mouse and keyboard are replaced by more natural interaction using voice, pen and touch.

Microsoft Surface, which has a 30-inch display under a hard-plastic tabletop, allows people to touch and move objects on screen for everything from digital finger painting and jigsaw puzzles to ordering off a virtual menu in a restaurant. [ Read more ] ”

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Make Money Online With John Chow dot Com E-Book

Posted by Eunjin Gregorio under Uncategorized

I spent a good chunk of my day reading John Chows’ newly published eBook. Another chunk learning what he had written and how I can implement them on the site. If you’re looking for a great read and would like to learn a thing or two, head down to to his blog while its hot.

The eBook is divided into 9 chapters. I’m not going to explain every chapter because I’d like you to read it yourself. He first wrote about different money makers and ended it with his personal story on how he first started blogging online. If you already know about different money makers, for example, Ad Sense, Text Link Ads, Kontera then this is probably not the eBook for you.

My overall review of the eBook - 8 out of 10 but mainly because I already knew most of them otherwise I would have given it a perfect 10.

Download Make Money Online With John Chow dot Com

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FatDoor Launches Social Network for Your Neighborhood

Posted by Eunjin Gregorio under Uncategorized

FatDoor has been under wraps for some time now, but has launched its alpha version at the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose. See our Where 2.0 Conference roundup for information on the other attendees.

FatDoor is a way to get to know your neighbors on a very local level, and displays information over a Microsoft Virtual Earth map that can toggle between 2D and 3D views. It’s like a Wikipedia for the White Pages. FatDoor isn’t limited to people, though. Information regarding your local businesses, events, shopping deals and organizations are accessible using FatDoor as well. And this information can be modified by the users in the community, adding images, descriptions, addresses (not for residences) and groups. If a neighbor hasn’t been to FatDoor to “claim” their location, their icon will be shown on the street as opposed to their house, and you can leave messages for them that they will see once they’ve signed up to use the site. You can invite users to FatDoor with their email address or their street address.

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7 Essential Wordpress Hacks

Posted by Eunjin Gregorio under Uncategorized

There’s no doubt that WordPress rocks as a blogging and content-management system. Once installed, you can do amazing things with it right out of the virtual box.

But even a good thing can be better. There’s certain essential tweaks that should be made for maximum effectiveness. And even cooler, there’s an entire community of WordPress plug-in developers and theme creators who are willing to contribute their talents for free.

This video series highlights 7 of the most important tweaks and plugins that any WordPress user should know about.

1. How to Get More Search Engine Traffic With One Simple Tweak
2. How to Make More Money With AdSense
3. Feedvertising: Make Money With Your RSS Feed
4. More Feedback, Less Spam: WordPress Contact Form Plugin
5. How to Increase Comments and Page Views With One Quick and Easy Plugin
6. How to Stop Comment Spam without Lifting a Finger
7. Back Up Your Blog or Risk Losing It All

[ Via Tubetorial ]

Popularity: 9% [?]

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5 ways to start a company (without quitting your day job)

Posted by Eunjin Gregorio under Uncategorized

Almost everyone stuck in a cubicle dreams of starting his own business. Here are 5 ways to use your current gig to launch a new venture.

Erick Schonfeld, Business 2.0 Magazine editor-at-large [ Via CNN ] May 2, 2006: 9:38 AM EDT (Business 2.0 Magazine) - If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you’ve always wanted to launch your own startup. According to our research, roughly half of all Business 2.0 readers dream of founding their own companies.

Odds are, however, that you’re still working for someone else. Maybe it’s because you’re afraid to give up that steady paycheck. Perhaps you’re simply terrified by the thought of placing yourself at the mercy of greedy investors, cutthroat competitors, and a potentially indifferent marketplace. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that there’s a lot of unrequited entrepreneurial longing out there.

So we set out to see if we could help. We wondered, what if cubicle-bound employees could use their current gigs to launch new ventures? Of course, starting a company while employed by another one can be tricky — especially if you’ve signed agreements promising not to compete with your employer or not to hire away colleagues. Indeed, in many cases anything you invent while collecting a paycheck can be considered the boss’s property. James Geshwiler, managing director of CommonAngels, a Boston investment group, warns that from a legal perspective, cubicle entrepreneurs often “tread on very sensitive ground.”

Still, working for a corporation affords access to several things that are vital to a fledgling company: money, customers, market research, personnel. And it turns out that many former wage earners have successfully exploited these resources — legally, and in some cases with the assistance of their employers — to realize their entrepreneurial dreams. Some actually built their startups while working for someone else, while others simply tapped previous employers’ people and cachet.

All of them, however, learned to look at salaried life as a springboard rather than a prison. Daniel Curran, a management consultant who lectures on entrepreneurship at UCLA, suggests, “When you come across hidden customer demands in your job, turn them into a business.”

Here are five ways to get started.

1. Use Your Salary as Funding

Gregory Moore financed his big idea one paycheck at a time.

The opportunity was obvious: Gregory Moore wanted to create a company that would securely transmit patient and payment data between hospitals, doctors, clinics, and insurers. In 2000 he took the proposal to software maker TeraHealth, which then hired him to make it a reality. But TeraHealth didn’t pursue the effort, so Moore began building the business on the side. He used his salary to hire a coder and spent nights and weekends filing incorporation papers and creating sales brochures. He even set up a basic office.

The Monday after he left TeraHealth in March 2001, his new company, Harbor Healthcare, was open for business. Moore booked his first revenue about a month later. TeraHealth grumbled, but Moore had records proving that he’d hatched his idea long before he joined the company.

The key, he says, is “to use your salary to invest in the startup as much as possible before jumping ship.” After five years and several rounds of angel funding, he still owns a majority of the firm’s equity.

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Interview with Truemors

Posted by Eunjin Gregorio under Uncategorized

[ Via Folksonomy ] Guy Kawasaki is the co-founder of Truemors. Guy is also a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures. Visit Guy’s blog here.

How do you respond to people who say “Truemors is only news because Guy Kawasaki is launching it”?

They have a firm grasp of the obvious.

If it fails, it will only be news because it’s my company. If it succeeds, it will only be news because it succeeds. Such is life.

How often is the criticism Truemors receives helpful? Do you ignore the criticism?

It was hard to ignore because of the high volume. The issues were along the lines of

1. stupid idea
2. too much spam/crap
3. slow
4. Guy’s censoring.

My responses, respectively, are

1. It’s only stupid if it fails, and it hasn’t failed yet. Even if it does fail, it was only $12,000.
2. If you provide a tool like this, some people feel compelled to test the edges. On the first day, we deleted about 50% of the posts. Some people posted crap, complained that there was crap, and then complained that I censored crap. This is like someone murdering his parents and then asking for a lenient sentence because he’s an orphan.
3. It was slow. We changed ISPs. Unfortunately, this quintupled our breakeven point–from $30/month to $150/month. Life’s tough for a startup.
4. I’m censoring and proud of it. If a posting isn’t a “true rumor,” it will be deleted. The purpose of Truemors isn’t to provide a place for rants, raves, spam, ads, or censor bait.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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Reddit hacked

Posted by Eunjin Gregorio under Uncategorized

Update: Looks like the malicious code on the comments is now being replaced with “i am a terrible person”. But it is still possible to submit malformed URLs, and it remains to be seen whether the exploit is completely fixed.

Digg this story if you want to read the comments of gloating Diggers- Digg does not allow any markup(or markdown) in its comments, so there is no risk of such an exploit:

reddit, one of the most popular social news sites, has just been hacked with a pretty bad exploit. As a story making its way up reddit’s front page demonstrates, reddit’s programmers have made a major mistake in designing the site- they did not validate input in any text boxes on the site. From a security standpoint, this is a massive flaw.

Because reddit does not validate input and strip out potentially malicious code, anyone can enter a script that, using XSS, can steal your login and password for reddit or execute malicious code. As far as exploits go, this one is extremely serious. A similar exploit on MySpace wrought havoc with the site. It remains to be seen how quickly reddit responds to the threat. As of right now, the exploit is still working. So far, redditors are just playing around with the exploit, but it is only a matter of time before someone writes a malicious script that will start hijacking reddit accounts, perhaps using them to upvote stories for their own benefit.

An interesting twist in the plot: The creator of reddit found the same exact exploit months ago on YCombinator News, which is based on reddit code. Although it was “fixed fairly quickly” at Y Combinator, apparently the same exploit remained unchecked on reddit itself. [ Via Neomeme ]

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Google One Step Closer To Controlling Online Publishers

Posted by Eunjin Gregorio under Uncategorized

Update: I have been asked to delete this article by Geek With Laptop. If you’re still interested in reading the post, refer to [ Via Geek With Laptop ]

“Good evening Eugene,

It has come to our attention that you are using our content and also
generating income from it with the Kontera Content Links ad system as well
as Google adsense.

Article in question on your site:

http://www.evsionlab.com/2007/05/27/google-one-step-closer-to-controlling-online-publishers/

Our article:

http://www.geekwithlaptop.com/google-one-step-closer-to-controlling-online-publishers/

Granted, you linked to our original post but you did not ask for our
permission to aggregate our content and since you are generating revenue as
well, effective immediately you must remove our content from your site.

We will be aggressively searching your network of sites for more of our
content and we will also be notifying both our reps at Google and Kontera
about this matter.

If you feel this is a misunderstanding and would like to rectify this, let
us know within the next 24 hours before we move forward with legal action.

If you’d like to work out something were we provide content to your network,
let us know. That can be arranged for a fee.

Kind regards,

Geek With Laptop Legal Department”

Popularity: 7% [?]

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Weathering heavy traffic with WordPress and Turbocharged

Posted by Eunjin Gregorio under Uncategorized

Everyone’s been there at least once. One of your blog pages gets dugg or slashdotted. What to do?

WordPress is often maligned as a resource-hungry blog platform — one that requires a lot of resources to run in high-traffic settings. But believe it or not, it’s possible to survive traffic spikes, while still serving pages to your audience swiftly. And you won’t need big iron to do it.

Throughout this guide, I’ll make a few assumptions on your part:

1. You’re using Apache to serve your pages, and you can change your Apache configuration.
2. You’re storing the contents of your blog in a MySQL database, the configuration of which you can change.
3. You’re running Turbocharged, or you have access to install WordPress plugins.

If these don’t apply to you, don’t worry — we’ll explore (sadly, less effective) alternative approaches so you can still fend off traffic storms. [ Read complete post ]

Popularity: 9% [?]

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We’re sorry.

Posted by Eunjin Gregorio under Uncategorized

Sorry the site had to go down for a little bit. We’re sorry. No excuse. To make the story short….uhmm we broke the site and had no backup. We’ve learned our lessons and we promise it’ll never happen again. So..here it is - our new site. Hope you guys like it. Please feel free to leave your comments. Cheers!

Update: 05/26/2007 - We’ve made improvements to the site and hope you guys like what you see. We want to make the site as simple as possible and avoid page clutters…. We’re here for you and we would to serve you better. If you have any suggestions on how we can improve the site, please let me know, call me, email me at evsionlab (at) gmail (dot) com. Cheers! 

Popularity: 6% [?]

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Facebook Platform: 30+ Awesome Applications for Facebook

Posted by Eunjin Gregorio under Uncategorized

The Facebook Platform, which goes live today, means you can use lots of cool new applications within Facebook. We’ve tested most of them, as well as gathering together all the announcements made today. Here are more than 30 of the best, with more being added as they are announced - come back later for updates. More than 70 partners have already signed on.

Editor’s tip: We probably shouldn’t tell you this, but you can gain access to all these apps by logging in to Facebook and going to http://apps.f8.facebook.com/apps . Soon they’ll move over to the main Facebook domain, but for now, let’s keep it between you and me.

Add CollegeHumor content, be it videos, images or articles, to your Facebook profile with one click. You can send the content to another Facebook user as well, adding to the viral nature of CollegeHumor content. CollegeHumor has also included the ability to add applications that showcase the newest and the most popular content, content from their school, as well as an application to insult their friends. Should be fun.

FeedBurner has built its Headline Animator on the Facebook Platform, and it will display the latest headlines from your FeedBurner blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds to Facebook users. The Headline Animator is a dynamically generated graphic that can be customized as well, and will show on your Facebook profile. This feature isn’t an added reader option, but it will enable you to create a Headline Animator for your blog and put it on your Facebook profile.

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This week’s best posts

Posted by Gina Trapani under Uncategorized

Ok kids, we're skipping out early today to get started on 3-day weekend fun early. To all of you in the U.S., enjoy your Memorial Day weekend. Don't forget: you can get once-weekly notification of Lifehacker's best posts using our Highlights feed. If that's not quite enough, instead grab our daily top stories feed.

This week's best posts include:

• Exclusive Lifehacker Download: Trick out Google Reader with Better GReader
  "...welcome GReader tweaks like maximizing the viewing area, skipping Google's default subscribe mechanism, and adding keyboard shortcuts all rolled up into a single Firefox extension, called Better GReader."
• Top 10 Mac OS X tweaks
  "OS X ships with some odd and sometimes inconvenient default settings, and it's got a few nifty little perks for power users who enable them, no third-party software required."
• Automatically upload a folder's photos to Flickr
  "...a cross-platform script called uploadr.py can watch a folder of your choice for new pictures, then automatically upload them to your Flickr account."
• Useful search plugins for Firefox and IE7
  "One of the most convenient features of modern browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 is the built-in search box in the upper-right hand corner. But besides the standard Google, Yahoo and Amazon options, do you have the search plugins you need?"
• Coolest Workspace Contest: Music and miscellany
  "Today's workspaces have a common musical thread, but overall they represent a mix of the best workspaces that didn't quite fit in with our other categories."
• Amplify your car remote signal with your head
  "This video shows you how to extend your car alarm remote's range by holding it to your head."
• Mount remote file systems with MacFusion
  "...a friendly user interface for mounting remote file systems over FTP or SSH using MacFUSE."
• Free your Mac of Microsoft Office with NeoOffice
  "...a free, full-featured office suite for your Mac based on OpenOffice.org."
• Al Gore rocks multiple monitors, could stand an inbox
  "Al Gore's got a sweet multi-monitor setup, but wouldn't win any coolest workspace contests."
• Allocate your money in envelopes with Budget
  "Your grandparents may have used the envelope method by distributing their money into real paper envelopes marked with the name of the expense; i.e., electricity, food, rent, etc."

101 Essential Blogging Resources

Posted by Eunjin Gregorio under Uncategorized

With the amount of tools and programs cropping up all over the web for every type of person imagineable, its about time that someone wrote a massive list of resources for bloggers. Fortunately, I’ve taken up that responsibility to share with you some of the tools I use in my daily blogging life. Please note that by no means is this a definitive list, so please let me know if you think I’ve missed any out!

Domain Registrars

If you’re starting up on the web, then you’re gonna need an address where people can reach you:

1. Namecheap - $8.88 per year with free WhoisGuard
2. GoDaddy - $8.95 per year (and lower)
3. 1&1 - $5.99 per year with free private domain registration
4. MyDomain - $8.25 per year

Popularity: 8% [?]

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5 Ways to Start Your Own Company

Posted by Eunjin Gregorio under Uncategorized

Do you ever want to start your own company, but you’re too afraid to lose that steady paycheck from your day job? What if I told you, that you could start your own company from the very cubicle you’re sitting in? Sound too good to be true? Not so. I’m a great believer in entrepreneurship and the following article from Business 2.0 (my favorite business magazine for those wondering) suggests different ways to build a new company from your current gig.

The 5 Ways to Start a Company (Without Quitting Your Day Job)

1. Use Your Salary as Funding
Finance your idea from your paycheck for as long as possible before selling a big stake to early investors.

2. Turn Common Complaints Into a Business Plan
Just because the company you are working for isn’t filling a customer need doesn’t mean you can’t go off on your own to fill it.

3. Make Your Boss a Beta Tester
Try your product out first on your employer, and then perfect it.

4. Cash In On Your Company’s Reputation
Use your connection to your former employer to open doors.

5. Convert Your Employer Into a Business Partner
Convince your company to spin off your unit.

Happy venturing to those considering, and let me know of any success stories! [ Via Kineda ]

Popularity: 7% [?]

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