Today, I decided to write about contests, the Top Affiliate Challenge, BlogWorld, and other things on my mind. I realize that I’m a little overdue for a post and I’ll have some more fun tech stuff coming soon.

$100 every month
First, let’s talk about contests. For a few months now, I’ve been assisted by some other great blogs in giving away $100 every month to a lucky winner. While it is certainly fun and I enjoy doing it, I’ve decided to cease involvement in the $100 contests. Managing the contests and selecting a winner has proven to be much more time-consuming and arduous than I had anticipated and I would rather let someone else take over than continue to select a winner late every month. I had been waiting to collect all entrant data for April and May, but will proceed with selecting winners for those months and make sure they get paid soon. Thanks to everyone who participated!

More contests
Coming up, I’ll be reviewing another product of the techie variety that I’ve actually had sitting on my desk for a while now. Watch for that post. I’m going to give it away to one person who links to it, stumbles it, etc. That should be in the next few days.

Jim Kukral convinced me to buy a Pure Digital Flip and he’s giving his away. I got an email from Jim reminding me about it. Here’s how it works:

The deadline to be qualified to win my Flip camera is a week from
tomorrow. Monday the 16th. I’ll choose the winner that day.

You can still enter, just link to or write a blog post about
the www.onlinevideotoolkit.com and then send an email to me at
jim@jimkukral.com letting me know where to look. That’s it.

I am enjoying my Flip a lot. You should enter and try to win Jim’s, because it’s really a fun and useful gadget.

Vote for Ty Hurd
Top Affiliate Challenge is a battle of affiliate marketing prowess, and they’re looking contenders for the TV show. A lot of people have submitted auditions, but only a handful will make it to the show. I’ve been in communication with Ty Hurd in the past and was pleased to see him leading the pack in first place. He’s been helpful to me in the past without asking for anything in return, so I knew right away where my vote would probably go. After viewing other submissions and seeing that his was a parody of one of my favorite shows, Myth Busters, the deal was sealed. Head over and vote for Ty, but remember to vote his audition a “10″. See you on TV, Ty! Good luck!

BlogWorld
I’m still working on the details, but I’m definitely going to BlogWorld this year. Are you going? Let me know. I’d love to meet some of you there and I have all these business cards to hand out. If you are planning on going, let’s talk about meeting up.

Guest authors get paid
OK… Not everyone gets paid, but as promised, I set aside $5 per guest post to go to one of my guest authors. I randomly chose from the three posts that were published and Santousha of Seeking Serenity who wrote Laptop Maintenance for Noobs Like Me gets the $15. Congrats!

Today, once again “Something is Technically Wrong” with Twitter. From my memory this, just happens to be the second time that Twitter has had to restart the caching system. According to the Twitter blog.

Part of our caching service required an unscheduled restart. That means a slow rebuilding of data. You may notice some of the normal browsing related features (such as pagination) are missing while we repopulate the caching service. This is so we can get it done quicker.

This seams to spell trouble for Twitter, while Mashable blames the Democrats, (Deep down so do I) I think this is something deeper in the works of Twitter. According to an uptime tracker Twitter is online 98% of the time, but it seams to go down at the worst times. This year Twitter crashed during the Macworld Keynote and whenever something significant happens Twitter starts to get slow.

Twitter likes to blame Ruby on Rails, their web framework, for all their downtime. Something Twitter likes to refer to as “scaling problems,” and there have even been rumors Twitter might rebuild the system completely with either Java or PHP.

But for now it looks like were stuck, Twitter is “stressing out” so it looks like this bug is temporarily prevalent for everyone.

* Matt is a guest blogger for JoeTech. He blogs for fun and profit at Duhh and SocialFeed.

Mrs. Tech and I have been busy, trying to get our house into shape before the next round of house guests fly in Wednesday. It’s tiring, but we’ve been meaning to get some things done around here. We decided to sand the ceiling to remove the textured look. We tarped off the kitchen, and had been taking turns sanding yesterday when our Black & Decker MS500 Mouse Sander just wouldn’t come on again. Figuring it may have overheated, we stopped for the night and threw in a DVD. I snapped a photo for you guys in case you need something to laugh at.

This morning, the MS500 still wouldn’t work so we decided to do a combined techie project for you (and to try an recover our sander). Michelle took it all apart and cleaned it out and I checked the connectors and put it back together. This was all done outside, this time, due to the large amounts of ceiling/paint dust in the sander.

Take it apart
Did you unplug it first? I hope you always unplug anything before you start taking it apart. It’s a rule to literally live by.

	Remove the bottom screw…. Or not. It’s there, wanting you to remove it, and we did, but it appears it’s better to leave it there. We removed it just in case. All you really need for this project is a single screw driver.
	Those four holes there… They each have a screw you need to remove. User a slotted (”flat-head”) screw driver. Get all four and then pull the two halves apart.
	There it is all opened up.

Clean it out
We decided to try cleaning it out really well, first because we thought dust and dirt in the wrong place could be a problem, but you should be in the habit of cleaning your power tools regularly, anyway.

	If you don’t have any compressed air, go get some. This stuff is handy very often around my house.
	Get in there and blow the dust out of all the crevices.

Check plugs and connections
Often, when a piece of electronics stops working out of the blue, it can be something as simple as a loose connection. This possibility increases exponentially when the use of your toy or tool involves a lot of jarring or other movement. The very nature of a sander’s operation breeds possibility for loose connections. Black & Decker designed it pretty well so that this would not be a problem, but someone has to be that one percent and I think we just got lucky. Check your connections before throwing something away.

	Start with the power switch. Make sure there’s not any room for it to be any tighter than it is. It should be nice and tight and completely plugged in. If not, plug it in the rest of the way.
	Next, check the power to the motor. It’s the same deal here. Check that both connectors are snug. In my case, the bottom looked a little loose, so I tightened it up and that did the trick.

If none of the above gets your sander back into working shape, you should weigh the cost and effort of buying a new motor and trying to put it in against simply buying a new sander. We were happy to not have to make that choice, and were able to finish sanding (and painting) our kitchen ceiling. Next up is the track lighting. I’ll document the process and probably share it tomorrow.

Day one of Affiliate Summit West has come and gone, and for me, it brought a lot of new contacts and a long day. I got a late start with the registration, and I was unsure how long it would be before I bumped into someone I’d talked with online. Before the Meet Market even opened, I found myself in the company of Ian Fernando, joining him in his two-gun pose for photographs. I also had the pleasure of meeting Zac Johnson who has been turning heads in the affiliate marketing arena with his successes as well as Jim Kukral.

After a lot of walking around and meeting with an abundance of companies to talk about affiliate marketing, I headed back to my room to get ready for the ShareASale party in the Sky Villas at the Palms. Michelle went with me and we had a blast. The place was filled with affiliate marketers and vendors, and it was pretty casual. While there, I bumped into John Chow, Mark from 45n5.com, Roger from Think Like an S.O.B., and Fat Man Unleashed. We had a blast and the first day has been great. I’ll write more in detail later but for now, check out some of the photos.

Me and Ian Fernando

Jim Kukral and me

Roger of Think Like an S.O.B. and me

Me, Mark from 45n5.com and Isreal of Fat Man Unleashed

If you’re geeky like me, you already know how to geekily say “I Love You”, but what if you’re not and you want to say “I Love You” in a geeky way to your geeky loved one? Don’t worry. I’m here to help.

1. Send an e-card
Send your loved one an electronic greeting card via Blue Mountain or Hallmark.

2. Buy them something extra geeky
Show your smushy-face huney-buns you know what they like by getting them something from Think Geek. If they’re truly geeky, they’ll love it.

3. Say it in Klingon
I’m not a Trekkie, so don’t ask me, but I’m sure there’s a way to say “I Love You” in Klingon.

4. Better yet, say it in Binary

010000100110010100100000011100110111010101110010011001
010010000001110100011011110010000001100100011100100110
100101101110011010110010000001111001011011110111010101
110010001000000100111101110110011000010110110001110100
01101001011011100110010100101110

5. Do it with Code
Grab the code for your geek’s favorite programming language here and just replace “hello world” in the code with “I love my geek” or any other message. Don’t worry. These are usually only 1-3 lines of code, so you should have no problem.

So how would YOU say “I Love You” in a geeky way?