If you're not familiar with DealDotCom and you are interested in internet marketing then you need to check this out. The folks from Woot! are starting a new site which opens for business Tuesday. The site is much like Woot! in the fact that they will offer a single deal each day. In terms of advertising this could mean some incredible deals on marketing your site.

They also have a nice affiliate program, so signing up now is your best bet.

I'm excited. As a long time Woot! fan I can't wait to see what sort of deals there will be on DealDotCom!

My son has been begging me to take him to E For All, the extension of E3 for the public. So I decided to order tickets online. He had been sent a "VIP code" that allowed earlier access than the general public and a discount on ticket pricing.

Now mind you, this even is $65 per person for a weekend pass. Not cheap. Considering the amount of revenue this venue probably generates one would think that they would spend the cash to have a nice user-friendly registration process. Not so.

During the registration process there are two codes you can enter. Neither of them matched the code I had. There was also a notice that I could enter another code later in the process. I never saw this. Upon calling customer service I was told "Oh another company was doing registrations. We aren't using those codes anymore, anyone who registers before tomorrow gets VIP access". OK, Im cool with that. Would have been nice to put that info on the site and save me a half hour.

So I start the registration process again. WTH? I can only register on person at a time. So instead of saying I want a quantity of 2 tickets I have to go through the entire process twice. Each time filling out a lame, long survey that I am pretty certain is going to get me on a massive number of junk mail lists. Weak.

Moral of the story: make your web applications easy to use. NEVER FORCE THE USER to complete two orders to get a single product. It just irritates them.

I've been using Vista for about 9 months now. I used it during beta and continue to use it today. I do maintain networks and desktops for some of my clients and as such I feel I must be ahead of the curve with software so that I can have a leg up on issues my clients experience.

Overall I like Vista. As an avid gamer I find it performs nicely if given the right resources. I really like the Aero interface (mind you when I was using XP I always used the classic interface). Direct X 10 is pretty sweet. However, I have a considerable amount of complaints. I have had numerous network issues I have been unable to track down. Some things are harder to manage or find if you are not experienced with Vista, so new users have found it frustrating. Clients who have opted for Vista have experienced numerous issues with hardware, forcing me to roll them back to XP. I also hate (as it seems most folks do) User Account Control. I turned that off since day one and haven't looked back. So much for enhanced security. Worst of all my Sony F505V, a decent digital camera, has no Vista drivers and it looks like Sony won't be making them.

Vista has a feature that allows you to track application crashes and try to find a solution via their online solution database. I decided to prevent Vista from reporting these automatically, for obvious reasons. That was 60 days ago. Today I decided to review this. To my surprise there have been over 260 problems in 60 days! To be clear, Windows has worked well, no hangs or crashes. These are problems with applications and drivers. Of those 260+ issues Microsoft has solutions for 8 of them. That's a pretty low problem-to-solution ratio! It also makes me wonder how much productivity I am losing due to these issues, an average of about 4.5 issues per day.

So, as a long-time MS user, administrator and Windows advocate would I recommend Vista to my friends, clients or family? No, I would not. I am having clients hold off until at least Service Pack1. Given the history of XP, I would safely say Vista won't be ready for mainstream until SP2. For the new notebook I just purchased I installed XP.

If you're a gamer and have the cash to fork out for a DX10 video card then I recommend trying Vista ONLY if you have a lot of patience.

For the past few years I have really not had a need for a land line. I have a single mobile number that serves me well for personal and business. In 2005, to reduce the number of minutes I used, I ordered a SpeakEasy VoIP line. I was amazed at the quality of my calls, and the cost was a flat $30 a month (on top of my internet costs).

Over the last 8 months many of my clients have considered moving to VoIP. Naturally, due to my experiences with SpeakEasy's excellent customer service and high quality VoIP, I recommended my clients to them. SpeakEasy also offers a small business numerous lines without the expensive hardware requirements of Enterprise-level VoIP. The system hosted by SpeakEasy but the client has full control over call-flow and other management features via a web portal. I assisted two of my clients in moving to the service and received rave reviews about call quality, even calls from the US to Australia. I thought "VoIP is finally here!".

Recently, with this influx of new business, I have noticed VoIP vendors becoming less and less responsive on the customer service side. VoIP promised within 30 days is not scheduled for three weeks after signing a contract. The ball is dropped on telephone number transfers. Client questions about contracts are brushed aside. It seems the VoIP industry is overwhelmed and understaffed. The client suffers and there seems to be a lack of concern among the VoIP vendors about this. It seems the important thing to them is getting as many contracts signed as they can.

Many of these vendors are traditional ISPs, so it begs the question" Do these vendors have the infrastructure, manpower and experience to handle the mass transition to VoIP?" . In my recent experience, they do not.

I am constantly being asked, almost expected by these vendors to become a VoIP installation partner for them. I do not have the desire to do so, it's not a core offering of my business nor is it as profitable. Additionally, service offerings from VoIP vendors are changing constantly, making it difficult for one to actually know what to recommend to clients.

Given these circumstances I have had to take a step back from VoIP and really analyze whether or not it is a good time to recommend VoIP to clients. I have realized that for my clients now is not the best time to start making the transition. Considering the horrible experience during the last installation I have decided it will be worthwhile to wait until the industry has settled down and can again go back to offering excellent customer service, something I expect from all my vendors. Although I realize VoIP is an excellent technology that can save my clients considerable sums of money and offer more features less expensively than traditional PBX system, it simply is not worth putting the client through the aggravation of dealing with a vendor who simply has too much business.

I would love to hear your experiences or your thoughts on this too, have any good stories?

Many of you who know me, or read my blog comments on others' blogs, know that I am passionate about supporting Microsoft products. I support Microsoft products primarily because I think they are great products when you have full knowledge and know how to use them and how to maintain them.

Now, this is not to say I do not support Linux, Sun or Apple. I actually very much believe Linux and Mac are great operating systems. I use Linux in day to day operations both for myself and clients, generally for routing and firewalling using the OSS IPCop (linux-based). IPCop has also never failed me. I also have recently been recommending MacBook Pro to a few clients, mostly because the machines are so damn durable. I own two Macs, a Mac Classic and a 500Mhz G4. That G4 cost me $3k and I can't upgrade the CPU. Because of this it was the last Mac I owned.

I also fully support OSS. I even have some open source projects out there, and am working on more. I utilize MySQL, NMap, and a host of other packages for network management, ColdFusion application development and web hosting.

Today, I read this article on CNN. I must say I am fully disappointed in Microsoft. I also think this is one of the worst things Microsoft can do to their business.

I do not have a problem with owning intellectual property. I fully support it and I think it's great that so many companies and private individuals can make a profit from their IP. It's one of my goals and, until now, was part of my 10 year plan. However, there is something inherently wrong with a company as powerful as Microsoft strong-arming the rest of the world with the threats of licensing IP of 235 patents.

The first issue I have with this is that it will seriously stifle innovation. Do you know which 235 patents Microsoft is talking about? If you said yes then you need a life, seriously.  The rest of us don't have the time or financial resources to spend sifting through thousands of patents to determine if the product we are developing violates one of these patents. In the end, the little guy loses. We will be unable to develop new products without the fear of being sued by the giants, even if what we developed is given away freely and we do not make a profit from it! If this endeavor by MS is successful we will no longer have the freedom to develop open source applications, and small companies will not have the resources to develop software due to the massive financial burden created by the need to research software patents to determine if they are in violation.

This will also drive the cost of commercial software through the roof. As companies must spend more money on IP research the costs of development will increase, and thus be passed on to us. As the costs increase so will piracy, with fewer and fewer people able to afford these products. As the piracy rate rises companies will be forced to again increase their prices to recuperate from these losses. This sets up a vicious cycle. Additionally, since Microsoft will have a even deeper hold on the market they will be able to increase their licensing costs, since companies will be forced to license from them or leave MS as the only supplier of certain technologies.

I believe that a part of what is going on here is that Microsoft is scared. Microsoft sees their share of desktops declining. People are choosing Ubuntu (or other Linux desktop) and OS X over Windows. It is cheaper and now these desktops can offer much of what Windows accomplishes very easily.

Rich Internet Applications are quickly going to replace many desktop software applications, With the advent of Adobe's Flex and Apollo, Sun's JavaFX, AJAX and numerous other technologies it is quickly becoming apparent to MS that they are loosing their foothold in this market. It is also becoming easy for large organizations to duplicate the functionality of many of the standard desktop applications at a much lower cost using these RIA technologies.

Rather than embrace this movement Microsoft is lashing out, punishing innovators and threatening our industry with collapse.

As a Microsoft enthusiast I encourage Microsoft to reconsider. I encourage them to take a look at ways to open this technology to everyone. Otherwise they are setting themselves on a course to be hated, not just by their competition, but my the hundreds of thousands of developers and small business owners who rely on open source products in our day to day operations to make a living.

Lastly, if you have a blog, I encourage you to voice your opinion to Microsoft. Be professional, but be blunt. This is a serious issue which effects everyone who uses, develops, or sells technology.

So I have been checking out Text Link Ads. It seems like a great program. The only caveat is that there wasn't an integration method for ColdFusion.

Using the Text Link Ads PHP integration method as a template I have created a CF version. I approached the Text Ad Links folks via email about letting them use it on the site, but haven't received a response yet. I am releasing this on RIAForge as an open source project. if you have something to add or find any bugs let me know. Or just tell me how you feel about it!

you can grab it from cftextlinkads.riaforge.org