A couple months ago, I posted about how you could win a trip for four to check out SeaWorld’s new Manta ride. It seems they’re not done promoting it because now they’re giving people a chance to win a “Front-of-the-line” pass to Manta at SeaWorld Orlando to celebrate the May 22nd opening.
It looks awesome, and I’d love to check it out myself, so I entered already. All I had to do was visit http://www.ridemanta.com and check out the “Participate and Win” section. In that section, there’s 6 activities you can participate in. You don’t have to do them all, but here’s what participants get:
Upon completing two of the Manta site activities, you will earn ONE complimentary electronic photograph from your Manta ride experience at SeaWorld Orlando. If you complete all six of the activities on this site, you’ll go straight to the front of the line when you earn Manta “Front-of-the-line” pass* at SeaWorld Orlando.
As you can see, you get rewarded for just a couple. I joined in by first following @RealShamu on Twitter and sending out a tweet about the Manta ride. That was an easy one because I was going to anyway. I also created my “I Heart Manta” photo and uploaded it to my Flickr account. I’m about to dive in on the remaining activities. While I do, head over yourself and start participating. And when you ride the Manta, take photos and share them with me. I’d love to see all the fun everyone’s having.
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.
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.
