By Ian Lee on Dec 9, 2008 in Technology | 2 Comments
Has anyone else experienced problems logging into Google services lately? Periodically, we have not been able to to access gmail, Google Sites, Google Apps for Business, AdSense, Google Calendar or even Google.com. All of which are great tools but lately when we try to access them, things just time out and other times, it is just painfully slow. Anyone else feeling the pain of cloud computing?
By Ian Lee on Nov 25, 2008 in Technology, Web Server Setup | 3 Comments
Have you ever wondered what makes the ultimate data center? From a business perspective, the main objective for choosing the right data center is to minimize downtime of its servers. The decision to choose a data center is a critical step and deserves much more consideration than just finding the lowest cost option. As technology advances, online marketers have been patiently waiting for an important feature previously only available at an enterprise level to filter down to the small businesses. It was only a matter of time but the ultimate data center is finally here!
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By Ian Lee on Nov 19, 2008 in Events | 1 Comment
The Miku Restaurant held their North American debut party in Vancouver last evening. Tora Corporation already run 8 successful restaurants and is adding to their global brand by opening Miku, a Japanese fusion fine-dining restaurant specializing in Aburi-style sushi (lightly flame-seared and infused with savoury French sauces); there are also plans to open restaurants in New York and LA.
This Vancouver grand opening event was well attended and organized. There were various pieces throughout the evening including a Taiko drum performance, a traditional Japanese religious prayer and even a swing band to follow. Of course, there was plenty of good food for all who attended. Here are a few photos from the evening.

Aburi-style, flame-seared sushi!
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By Ian Lee on Nov 19, 2008 in Software, Technology | 4 Comments
If you are like millions of internet users out there, then you will agree that your web browser’s bookmark is probably less useful than it had been in the past. In reality, we bookmark more than we can ever use and more often than not, we never go back to old bookmarked pages. So what is the solution? Google has the answer.
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By Ian Lee on Nov 17, 2008 in Business, Hardware | 2 Comments
In the past month, I personally experienced two instances where used merchandise was sold as new without disclosure. The first time, it was with a brand new Dell Vostro desktop where the hard drive turned out to have been already used for 15,000+ hours! The second time, A-Power.com sold us a used hard drive telling us it was a new unit.
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By Ian Lee on Nov 14, 2008 in Events | 3 Comments
The gang from Blink Media (AJ Vickery, Lindsay Smith & Mike Agerbo) hosted a social networking event at the GetConnected TV Studio. Turnout was great and it was pretty cool to see the actual studio where the GetConnected TV show is recorded. Remember, it’s always important to make it a few networking events now and again.
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By Ian Lee on Nov 13, 2008 in Software, Technology | 1 Comment
Since Google is forcing a migration of all Feedburner accounts over to Google accounts be sure to update all your feed services including places like twitter, facebook, blogs, feed readers, itunes podcast accounts and anything else that you have associated with your Feedburner feeds! With all their technology, I am surprised (and disappointed) that Google did not put in place a seemless transition so feeds just don’t disappear overnight! And the no response from Google tech support does not help the situation. Thank goodness for our Google rep. Now, back to fixing dead feeds.
UPDATE: Nov 13, 2008 - Looks like some of our old Feedburner URL’s are now being auto-redirected to the new Google feed domain. Wished this would have worked right from the start. It would have saved hours of work trying to update all our feeds earlier this morning!
UPDATE: Nov 16, 2008 - Auto redirect from feeds.feedburner.com to feedproxy.google.com has broken once again. Time to update all final feed URL’s. Don’t forget to update the email subscription service if you run this feature.
By Ian Lee on Nov 12, 2008 in Software, Technology | 1 Comment
Have you ever wondered what your computer’s CPU or hard drive temperature readings are? What about how many hours your hard drives have been powered-on? Most users, indeed, will be able to retrieve these computer component temperatures. Given most computer systems have sensors to monitor these readings, it’s just a matter of using the right tool to retrieve the data.
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By Ian Lee on Sep 12, 2008 in Software, Technology | 10 Comments
Over the last few weeks, our office LAN became extremely unstable under certain circumstances. In particular, a Vista Business machine would hang randomly and cause the network to slow to a crawl. The first wave of fixes involved downloading the latest hardware drivers and Windows updates for all machines on the network. After further testing, it turned out that 1 particular XP (SP2) machine would crash the Vista Business machine when accessing a mapped network drive on the Vista box. It seems that this issue has been documented in a few places online but no fix has ever been posted… until now that is.
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By Ian Lee on Aug 5, 2008 in Internet Marketing, Technology | 2 Comments
The purchase of a company for its intellectual property and assets is common practice in the business world. But sometimes, companies often make a purchase that does not seem to make any sense… at least not in the short term. This was the case for ValueClick purchasing Be Free in 2002 for over $100 million dollars. After the dot com bust, this valuation seemed overly aggressive. Fast forward six years to today and the real reason for the high-priced purchase emerges.
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By Ian Lee on Jul 18, 2008 in Advertising, Internet Marketing | 7 Comments
Online marketing is becoming more sophisticated and marketers are looking for even better tools to help them do their jobs and more importantly, to gain that edge over competitors. In the past, it was difficult to target a specific audience in a Google AdWords campaign. Normally when you use keywords in your ad groups to contextually target ads, Google will match them to relevant pages across the hundreds of thousands of sites on the Google content network. But have you ever wanted to bid more (or less) for a specific content network site you’re contextually targeting? Or write customized ad text for a precise group of pages, such as news articles or relevant discussions on social networks? Now you can!
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By Ian Lee on Jul 14, 2008 in Internet Marketing | 5 Comments
As of today, it looks like Google Adsense is requiring publishers to update their logins to a Google Account if you have not already done so. As mentioned in an earlier post (Confused by Google’s Consolidation of AdSense Login to Google Account), Google did not allow users to use an existing Google Account to update your AdSense login if it is already associated with an AdWords account. Although the instructions indicate that you should update your AdSense account with a Google Account, it looks like you can still use a non-Google Account to do the update.
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