Today I’ll be attending WordCamp Dallas, which Charles Stricklin and I jointly organized. We’ve got a whole line up of fantastic speakers including Matt Mullenweg, Jonathan Bailey, Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell, Liz Strauss, Lorelle VanFossen, Chris Smith, Aaron Brazell, Jacob Santos, and Mark Ghosh.

If you’re one of the WordCamp attendees and you happen to be sitting in the lecture hall reading along as I stand here on stage, well… deja vu! Otherwise, for my normal readers here comes a list of 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog! If all goes well we’ll be recording the lecture and will be able to append the video to this post later.
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A little while back the editors at Frisco Style magazine asked me to share my Top Digital Photo Tips, and the attached scan shows the article that ran in the magazine.

This article was written for absolutely newbies, so if you don’t have a lot of photography experience, this one is for you! These are the 7 most important tips to drastically improve the quality of your images. For ease of use, the following is the text from the article.
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I don’t normally pass along things that circulate the Inter-Tubes via e-mail, but this is pretty interesting information - if it is all true. I have no idea where it originated, but a family member sent it to me. I’d be curious if anyone could actually vet this info and prove / disprove it’s validity.

I don’t know what you guys are paying for gasoline…. but here in California we are also paying higher, up to $3.50 per gallon. But my line of work is in petroleum for about 31 years now, so here are some tricks to get more of your money’s worth for every gallon.

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Ok. You know how Microsoft seems like it always crashes at the most inopportune moments possible? Well frankly, it’s all your fault. What you need to do is type the following command: Hold ALT, CTRL, CAPS LOCK, and TAB while simultaneously pressing F8, HOME, ARROW DOWN, and ENTER.

This will bring up the following dialog box. Examine closely to adjust your systems preferences.

Years ago while attending the University of Texas at Dallas I took a government class with Dr. Judy Bundy (though I don’t think she’s at UTD anymore). Anyway, she related this story on the chalkboard to the class one day and it stuck in my head as one of the most brilliant analogies I’ve ever heard.

Here is Dr. Bundy’s story:

There was a man sitting beside a pickup truck on the side of the road not far from the ocean. The back of the truck was overflowing with fish and about 50 yards before the truck he had posted a sign which read, “FRESH FISH SOLD HERE”.

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This is just a quick tip… If you ever find that you need to transfer money to someone and wonder what it would cost to do it via PayPal then you definitely need to check out the PayPal Fee Calculator.

Two very useful things I can come up with for this site are:

1. You want to send money to a foreign country, but you aren’t sure what all of the fees are going to be.
2. You want to sell something on EBay and would like to set pricing based on how much you will receive after PayPal fees.

Enjoy!

If you happen to be a Hertz #1 Club Gold member there are elite status levels available which are (ridiculously) achieved by number of actual rentals, as opposed to days of rentals. This is one of the worst rental rewards policies in the entire travel industry because it will reward some travelers who are far less profitable for Hertz than others.

For example, if you rent a car 10 times on overnight trips for a total of 10 rental days you will achieve “5 Star” status, but if you rent a car 7 times for 4 days each for a total of 28 rental days you don’t get jack.

Well, there is a way around this.
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Everyone is aware of American Airlines and most other carriers elite status levels. These are the people who are invited to board the planes first, get free upgrades, and even get the best seats in the first few rows of the economy seating section (you might not have known that).

Normally in order to achieve elite status you would need to fly at least 25,000 qualifying miles in order to achieve the lowest level of Gold, or 50,000 to earn Platinum. However it is actually possible to get your upgrades with only 5,000 or 10,000 miles respectively.
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One nice thing about hotels is that they usually have commercial ice makers which are great for filling up coolers. But what about when you don’t have a cooler, but you have a few drinks that you’d like to ice down over night? Well, all you need to do is convert the sink into a makeshift cooler!

I never want to pay hotel rates for drinks, so I will typically stop at a store and pick up a few drinks. In order to cool them down I close the sink drain, lay the drinks in the sink, and proceed to fill it completely full of ice.
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Ever wanted to put your own design on a shirt and parade around with your totally unique idea plastered for the world to see? Well, with a few fairly inexpensive tools, now you can.

In this video Bre from Make Magazine and Matt from Etsy.com walk us through the process of screenprinting. After you learn this you can actually screen print anything, not just T-shirts.
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Let’s say you’re having a group of friends over, and people show up with warm drinks. Clearly they need to be cooled down, but if you put them in the fridge or a cooler it’s going to take hours.

Well, here’s a little video that demonstrates how to drop those baby down to about 40 degrees in 2 minutes flat.

This works on the same principle as a homemade ice cream maker, but if you’ve never used one of those it basically just involves adding salt to an ice-water mix.
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