I always seem to have a camera be it video or a dslr with me. I just never seem to use it when I should. I often see many a photo, or video worthy things taking place. But I am always thinking to myself “Ah man it is too much trouble to get that camera out.” Well not today! Today I caught an interesting event taking place that I decided I just had to video. After getting permission to post this video to youtube from the main “talent” I knew this was one I had to upload. No fancy editing here. Nothing extra ordinary, but I think you will enjoy the video none the less.

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It seems no matter where you look on the internet today you will see ads everywhere telling you how you can make money from the internet. Now I do not deny that you can make money on the internet. I mean I do it every day, I have adsense ads on some of my sites as well as paid advertisers. But make a nickel per click or less is hardly what I would call making money on the internet.

True I have built and managed many online stores and they have all made money as well. But they have had to sell products. It takes money to buy the products to sell, money to store the products etc. I have also been paid for teaching people how to do things. But this was always a one shot deal. That is until I decided to make some informational products and sell them on the internet.

This is not a new idea of mine, and in a sense I have already been doing this. I mean I have many photoshop tutorials on this site that have adsense ads plastered all over them. But I have always want to make and sell training videos. So I decided to get more involved in this. Along the way I came across Kevin Rileys Program How To Make A Bundle Of Extra Spending Cash For Christmas – In Just 3 Days From Now. The price was right and I thought hey this would be a good way to cut my teeth on marketing an information product. Besides, having a product in three days. How could that not appeal to you?

I got the paid my money and promptly got distracted onto something else. Almost forgetting about it, and then I thought you know it is time to get off my butt and give this a try. That is exactly what I did. Kevin Rileys instructions were clear and very logically laid out. He takes from finding the idea of what to write about, actually writing the guide, to putting it online and making sales as well as promoting it. In less then three days I had my guide “Pictures Sell!” written and on the internet.

The one thing I didn’t really do from Mr. Rileys guide was promote my new product. In fact all I did was add the link to my signature on a few of the forums I visit regularly. Well the morning after I had my guide posted I was checking my e-mail as I always do and I was surprised to see not one, but a couple of sales for “Pictures Sell!”. I always love the excitement of selling something or getting money from an ad click. But this time instead of a puny few cents I had made close to $10.00. I know, big wow right? But it didn’t stop there through out the day I kept getting e-mails that another copy of my guide had sold. I mean come on, I haven’t even started promoting it yet. Now I really look forward to checking my e-mail because just about every time I do I find I have made another sale.

Kevin Riley is a stand up sort of guy. In fact he has even given me a little additional help over Skype. Not only is he very helpful he is a lot of fun to talk to. Although I always feel I am infringing on his valuable time, he never makes me feel that way. When Kevin asked me to write a testimonial for How To Make A Bundle Of Extra Spending Cash For Christmas – In Just 3 Days From Now I jumped at the chance. It was then I realized that I was not really sure how to write a testimonial. But it was easy because “How To Make A Bundle Of Extra Spending Cash For Christmas – In Just 3 Days From Now” is truly a great product.

The only possible flaw it could have is telling you how to take and edit the pictures. But don’t worry about that “Pictures Sell!” will teach you how to do that with FREE image editing software.

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I think every blogger at some point has the dream of getting paid for blogging. Most bloggers run across sites where the blog owner is doing just that. Let’s face it we are envious of that lifestyle. I mean wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to work from the local coffee shop via a wireless connection and your laptop? No boss, no designated work schedule. The freedom to set your own hours. Your salary only limited by how much you want to do.

Working for oneself is rewarding and working from the comfort of your own home is even better. But how exactly do you go about doing that? I am sure you have all seen the ads on the internet claiming to make you a millionaire or something crazy like that with no work and in a short period of time. Well you know the rule, if it sounds to go to be true it generally is.

Most of us bloggers sign up for a Google Adsense account and wait for that glorious Google money to start pouring in. But after weeks upon weeks of only receiving pennies from Adsense many people get discouraged. In fact I know many a person who has never even received their first payment from Google. Getting to that $100.00 mark can take a very long time. I have been fortunate, I generally receive around $120 US ever three months. But let’s face it that is not going to pay the mortgage.

At this point many people give up on the whole idea of being able to make money online. But what if I told you that in only three days you could be making some quick cash for Christmas from the internet? That’s right in three days you could actually be seeing some cash from the internet. I have caught your interest now I bet. If you are serious about doing three days worth of work to make some quick cash on the internet I guarantee you will succeed. Click here to find out how.

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 Well after months and months of no activity here on Tenacious Creations I thought I should write a post of what has been happening. As well as maybe a glimpse into the future of Tenacious Creations. First off I want to thank all of you who keep coming back to this site even though there has been no new updates. Surprisingly my traffic has not dropped off as much as I thought it would.

 Secondly I want to apologize to all those whose blogs I used to regularly read and comment on. I just have not had the time to keep up with them. Although I have been able to rearrange my schedule a bit so I can start regularly reading a few blogs again. So look for my comments to start flowing once again.

 So what has been happening around here. Well I was running a small tech company on the side and that was taking up a lot of my time. However I have scaled back operations with it which has allowed me free time to start taking care of this blog some more.

 Here are some of the upcoming posts I am working on and which should be published soon, but not necessarily in this order:

 So those are a few of things I will be posting articles on in the near future. Hopefully you, my readers, will find them interesting and useful. If you are worried about missing these posts I suggest you subscribe to my RSS feed. I hope to hear comments from you all, and if you are a new reader I hope you will keep coming back for more.

Till the next post!

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 As of late there has not been much action going on with the Tenacious Creations site. Other projects and hobbies have place constraints on my time. Unfortunately Tenacious Creations has kind of been left out in the cold.

 But as another year comes to an end it is time to take a look back at some of the most popular posts of the year.

 These were the top three posts of 2008. I am hoping to get some new posts happening in 2009. However as with most New Years resolutions this one may get broken before it is started.

 Thank you to all who have read and commented on my posts through out 2008, I wish you a prosperous New Year and I hope you will continue to rad my posts for 2009.

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 I am sure just about everyone has heard of Skype and perhaps a lot of you are already using it. Now it is not too often that I give a product rave reviews but once again Skype has performed above my expectations.

 For some time now I have been using Skype as an instant messenger and for some conference calls. Yes that is right you can do conference calls with Skype. Not all your participants in the conference call need to be on a computer either. You can use Skype dial out service (for a reasonable fee) to call participants and involve them in your conference call.

 But what has impressed me the most about Skype is that this morning I used it for an online conference call with two other people. Now this may not sound that amazing, but when you factor in that one person was in England, the other in Japan, and me here in the center of Canada. It is pretty amazing.

 There was virtually no lag time and I could hear each person clear as a bell. In fact the clarity was much better than I have found on land line international calls. It was so clear that when one of the participants cell phone rang I almost thought the phone was right beside me and not on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

 If you are only using Skype online than you cannot beat the price, its free! If you are in North America or most places Skype has monthly packages if you are calling land lines. The price verys from place to place but I find it is extremely reasonable.

 My only complaint is that I cannot get a land line phone number here in Canada for land lines to call me. That’s right if you live in the US or England, and a few other places you can get a phone number that regular phones can call. You can answer these online or have them forwarded to a phone number of your choice.

Hopefully Skype will be offering this service in Canada soon. If you have never tried Skype, give it a try. Oh I also forgot to mention that you can also do video chats with Skype. It is an excellent piece of software that I highly recommend.

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 Well I thought I better write a quick update as nothing has changed on this site for a while. As some of you might remember I was working on some software to work with AdSense a while back. Well I am happy to report that a company, that I can not name (nondisclosure agreements and all), and I are currently negotiating the sale of that software.

 Due to the fact of that software running on this site and the legal negotiations I have been very reluctant to post anything. In fact I cleared this post with my legal team before posting it.. I will try to keep you my loyal readers updated as much as I can as things progress.

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 If you have been following my blog, you know that I have repeatedly reported on how evil FaceBook is.

 You may also know that I had disabled my profile on FaceBook. Well if you know me on FaceBook you may of noticed that I did indeed re-enable my profile a couple months ago. Now I know this sounds a little bit hypocritical. Well the reason is I was coerced into developing a couple of FaceBook applications with a business partner.

 These applications (which I will not name) did quite well and generated some decent income. They derived most of their income from data mining and selling the information gathered from our users. All through the process i did not feel right about doing this. I tried to convince myself that this was okay. My partner would say things like “They are going to call you a prick anyways, they might as well call you a rich prick.”.

 For a while I somehow managed to settle my conscious on this. But always in the back of my mind I knew it was wrong. Hell I used to be one of those guys developing encryption software so people had the tools to protect their privacy. Now here I was invading the same privacy I once was trying to protect. In some ways I felt like I did indeed sell my soul.

 Now don’t get me wrong I do not think making money is evil. But I do think it should be done in an honourable way. I felt like a spammer by using peoples personal information in a profitable way. Sure I didn’t take their information, I didn’t force them to reveal so much about themselves. Its not my fault that they don’t know any better. I mean I don’t even know them so why should I care?

 Well I still do not know why I care and why it bothered me so much. However I am happy to annouce that as of 13:00 h today I have sold off all my interests in these FaceBook applications. I will no longer be developing FaceBook applications.

 Maybe it was dumb to get out of a money making enterprise. Maybe I just don’t want success. In any case I feel much better about myself now.

 I was tempted by the dark side, lured by the money. However I am a JEDI and will never turn to the dark side.

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 You may remembering my post FaceBook is pure evil that I deactivated my Facebook account. Now when one deactivates their account you would tend to think that all your information would be deleted. Not so with FaceBook.

All your messages, the stuff on your fun wall, super, wall your photos etc. are still there available to other FaceBook users. FaceBook maintains this is so you can seamlessly reactivate your account when you decided to go back to FaceBook. Lately this little feature of FaceBook has been prevalent in the news. Many newscasters referring to it like the song Hotel California “You can check out, but you can never leave.”.

 So what can you do to get out? Well if you are like me and have already deactivated your account you have to reactivate it. Go in and line by line delete all the information in your profile. Delete all the applications that you may have signed up for such as Fun Wall and Super Wall. Delete all your inbox and sent messages, delete all the photos you may have uploaded. Once you have done all that deleting once again deactivate your account.

 But your presence is still not completely gone. Facebook maintains back ups of this information on its servers. In order to have this removed you must e-mail FaceBook. From what I have read this is no easy process, and some people have even resorted to legal action in order to get themselves removed. Do you need more proof that FaceBook is evil?

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  In my post on link love. It was brought to my attention that the no follow tag would placed with the links of other bloggers who left comments. So while the Commentluv plug in displays the link Google still will not follow it. That prevents my site from spreading any Google love.

 Well with the addition of the Do Follow plug in WordPress will automatically remove the no follow tags from the comments after the comment has been posted for 2 days. Why 2 days? Well although I do moderate my comments the occasional spam comment gets through. I am hoping the two days will give me enough time to weed those out.

  I would also like to thank Geek Mom for her excellent post on dealing with the no follow tags and Commentluv.

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 Just about everyone on the web has heard of Face Book. Heck I thought it was a great idea when I first signed up. I mean I have moved around a lot and I thought it would be cool to catch up with long lost friends and such. But you know, I never felt quite right using Face Book. I mean I’d like to think that I have been around when it comes to the internet. When using Face Book I just never had that “warm fuzzy feeling” (this is how we describe things in bomb disposal when things are going right – if you don’t have it something is about to go wrong).

 You see I just couldn’t figure out how Mark Zuckerberg and his investors from Face Book were making any money. Sure they had advertising on the site but who clicks those anyways? (Judging by my AdSense stats not many) However Face Book kept getting bigger and bigger and here I was getting more and more Zombie, Werewolf, Vampire, and who knows what else requests. It seemed odd to me that all these Face Book applications required access to your profile and such. Then it dawned on me – data mining. Face Book was one vast Data Mine!

 What is data mining you ask? Well briefly it is extracting useful information from a large amount of information. Basically Face Book knows your age, your geographic location, your relationship status, your education, your profession, your mood (if you choose to update it) and a bunch more. Not only do they know this about you but they also know this about all your friends as well. This is valuable stuff if used in the right context. I mean this is marketers gold! Don’t kid yourself that they are not selling it either. Don’t believe me? Check out these videos.

 I don’t know about you but having my information sold like that just makes me feel dirty. As of January 6 2007 I have deactivated my face Book account. When Face Book asked me why (a nice courtesy to keep you in their evil clutches). I wrote a them a nice note about how data mining ranks up there with spammers.

 As always I want to hear what you think, good or bad.

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 In Canada the day after Christmas is boxing day, a day when most stores put on fabulous sales much akin to Black Friday after Thanks Giving in the United States. I really do not enjoy crowds or shopping that much in general so it normally does not mean much to me. However this year there was one item which I did have an interest in. A SanDisk Cruzer Micro USB 2.0 8 GB Flash Drive. They had these things on sale for $49.94 which incidentally is the same price they had the 2 GB version priced at (more on this later).

 Now because I hate crowds and I knew that being Boxing Day there would probably be one. So I decided that I would go first thing when the store open at 8 am Boxing Day Morning. Hoping that, even though there were many boxing day sales going on, most people in my small town would not be there that early. When I got there I was rewarded with the fact there were very few other people there, more than normally at this time but by no means crowded.

 So we entered the store got a cart and proceeded to do some shopping heading straight for the electronics department. Well lo and behold the 8 GB USB Flash Drive I was looking for was no where to be found. They had a similar one in the same packaging and for the same price but it was only a 2 gigabyte drive. Not the 8 gigabyte drive they had advertised in the flyer. If you weren’t paying attention it would be easy to buy this 2 gigabyte drive thinking it was actually the 8 gigabyte one.

 I was keen enough to spot this. So I got my wife to ask a sales associate where we would find the 8 gigabyte version (I loathe talking to sales associates). We were informed that they showed 15 in inventory and that they just had not found them yet. These were a while quantity lasts item and while this is a small town, 15 still seems like a low number. I would expect them to have at least 50. However the sales associate was very friendly and helpful and told me that she would take my name and phone number so she could call me when she found them. This sounded reasonable so I gave her my number and we finished our shopping.

 Around noon I became a little worried if they were going to call me or not. You see I need this USB Flash Drive for a project I am currently working on because its U3 and will allow booting off the USB drive. Now as I stated earlier I hate talking with sales associates in person and even more so on the phone. So after a little convincing I talked my wife into calling Walmart to see what was up. Well they had found the USB flash drives and yes my name was on the list so they would put one aside for me at the electronics counter.

 WooHoo so off we go to Walmart to pick up my USB flash drive. When we got there the parking lot was packed as you can see in the picture at the beginning of this post. The parking lot was full. It seems as though the rest of Estevan woke up and went there. I dreaded setting foot inside the store but off we went. Since my wife knows how much I dislike crowds she went to the electronics counter to pick up the USB Flash Drive. While I searched to see if any were put on the shelf.

 There was of course not a single one on the shelf. My wife was told by the sales clerk that these USB Flash Drives seem to be a popular item (duh). So this brings some questions to my mind. Were they ever going to put them on the shelf? Were they being hidden away so sales associates and there friends could have first crack? Is this a marketing ploy by Walmart to con its customers into buying the 2 gigabyte drives that looked identical and were priced the same? Something just seems a bit fishy here. Come on Walmart I know you meticulously track data on your customers and there purchase habits, including how the weather affects their buying habits. You can not play dumb and say you thought that 15 of these would be enough to even satisfy a small percent of your customer base here.

 Don’t get me wrong. I do understand the idea of putting a limited quantity priced really low to attract customers. But I mean come on, you have to make them at least available. Even though I was able to purchase the USB Flash drive that I wanted I still some how feel cheated. I shouldn’t be made to jump through hopes in order to spend my hard earned dollars anywhere. If a customer comes to me I certainly do not make them jump through any hoops. I am curious if this happens at other Walmarts or just my local one. Let me know leave a comment and let me know about your experiences.

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 Years ago I read a really good by called The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Cliff Stoll. Its a fascinating true story how an astronomer from Berkley caught a hacker who was stealing government secrets and selling them.

 The book is a great read and I wish I would’ve been able to read when I was younger. If I did I am sure I would’ve made it my mission to attend university at Berkley. I highly recommend reading this book if you are even remotely interested in computer security. It is by no means a technical book on computer security just an excellent read.

 Cliff Stoll also include his recipe for totally awesome chocolate chip cookies in this book. So through out the years I have made these cookies calling them Haxor Cookies. Well through a random mishap I packed some of these cookies along with a banana for lunch one day. The cookies took on an most delectiable flavour of banana. This got me to thinking that I should try and add some banana too them as you would for banana bread. The result is a banana / chocolate chip cookie hybrid and I must say it is awesome. So I have decided to pass on the recipe so you can try it for yourself. Give it a try and tell me what you think. Also what should we call these hybrids?

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First off I would like to apologise you my regular readers for lack of updates. My day job has been keeping me quite busy. However then will be some more tutorials posting soon.
Secondly I’d like to put out a request for photos for me to use in some tutorials. I am looking for some portrait shots, landscapes, interesting buildings, and of course any pictures that did not come out just right and need to be corrected. Full credit will be given to the photographer of any pictures used.
Also I need some ideas as to what you my readers would like to see as a tutorial. Give me some suggestions on how I can help you with your Photo Shop problems. I look forward to hearing from you.

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 So recently I decided that it was time to upgrade from a Nikon Cool Pix 3200, to a Fuji FinePix S5700. You see I have progressed in my photography skills and wanted something better. Now any one who knows me would likely describe me as cheap. I prefer thrifty myself, and as such I research any big purchase to death. Whether it be a BBQ, software or a digital camera. I like to know exactly what all this stuff about mega pixels, ccds, and zooms is all about.

  Well it turns out there are a lot of people out there who like to know what they are buying. So while I am not promoting the Fuji FinePix S5700, I will share with you my reasons for buying it and what I found out while doing the research on it.

 If you have been looking at digital cameras you have no doubt heard the term Mega Pixel. Well what is a Mega Pixel and more importantly how will it affect your photos. Well a pixel is short for picture element which is essentially a single point on an image. This point is not round nor square but an abstract sample. A Mega pixel is simple a million of these points. When used to describe digital cameras the number of mega pixels describes the number of sensor elements with an array. For example a 3.1 mega pixel camera would have an array of 2048 × 1536 sensor elements.

 Okay so what does this mean to the average user. The number of mega pixels generally determines the size of print that can be made with out distortion. While there are ways around distortion when printing a large print (check out our tutorial on how to enlarge photos with out distortion) here is a general guide as to how many mega pixels you need in order to print the desired size.

• 2 megapixels or less — It will be hard to make a high-quality print of any size, but these are just fine for e-mailing photos .
• 3 megapixels — You can print great 4×6 images, decent 5×7s and, depending on the camera, you might even get a good 6×9 or 8×10.
• 4 megapixels — You’re getting nicer. These images make practically photo-lab quality 4×6s, and great 5×7s and 6×9s. Not only that but you can print a nice 8×10.
• 5 megapixels — This will produce excellent 8×10s, and even good 11×14. You are getting closer to professional photographer quality.
• 6 megapixels and greater — 11×14 can be printed with excellent results. Although some professional grade cameras go up to 10 mega pixels, many photographers rarely shoot above 8 megapixels.

 Now for the bad thing about having large megapixels. The more megapixels the more expensive the camera. Not only that when you are shooting pictures in the high end of the mega pixel range they take up more space. This means you will need larger memory cards to hold these pictures and more hard drive space to store them on your computer if you so choose.

 CCD stands for charge coupler device and CMOS stands for complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor. Basically both these devices are image sensors. Both CCDs and CMOS imagers can offer excellent imaging performance when designed properly. CCDs have traditionally provided the performance benchmarks in the photographic, scientific, and industrial applications that demand the highest image quality (as measured in quantum efficiency and noise) at the expense of system size. CMOS imagers offer more integration (more functions on the chip), and consume less power. When I was researching buying a new camera I discovered that almost all professional grade cameras had CCD technology.

  One interesting thing I discovered when learning about CCDs is – size mattersCCD size can be stated in “Number of Pixels,” or a ratio related to physical measurements of size, usually a number like 1/1.8″, for example. This is tricky to explain and would take a lot of time. So if you are really interested in this read this link.

 Basically bigger is better when it comes to CCDs. But once again be careful, the bigger you get the more it is going to cost. The camera I just recently bought has a 1/ 2.5-inch CCD and performs awesome. From my poking around on the net I found that many professional photographers use cameras will similar size CCDs.

  When you are looking for a camera you will no doubt be looking for certain features. A word of caution here, just because a camera has a huge array of features does not make it better. The feature that I would recommend being high on your list is the optical zoom. Notice I said optical zoom and not digital. Many cameras boast outrageous digital zoom rates. I have never had a good quality image using digital zoom. In my research into buying camera every site recommended going with optical zoom and I must say optical zoom produces much better results.

 Other features include the ability to take pictures at night, panoramas, portraits etc. I strongly encourage you to read your cameras manual so you can take advantage of all the wonderful features it has.

 Well with any luck you now have a good background knowledge to go and purchase yourself a good digital camera. So go get one and start taking some pictures! Send your pictures to me if you like, as I do enjoy looking through pictures.

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I would like to take this opportunity to welcome everyone to the new and improve Tenacious Creations. I am taking this site a whole new direction. I plan to post useful tutorials for the average user, and maybe some for the not so average user.
I have a series of tutorials showing some neat effects in Photo shop and the Gimp for you to use on your own digital pictures. Whats the Gimp you say? Well it is an open source graphics manipulation software that (get this) is freely down loadable. Well it may not be as polished as Photo shop and it may have some limitations when it comes to commercial printing it is more than powerful enough for most tasks non graphic artists will want to do with there pictures.

Whats that you say? You don’t know where, or how to install the Gimp. Never fear we have an up coming tutorial on how to do just that in Windows XP.

Another series of tutorials we are tackling are all about Open Office. All inspired by a friend of mine who whenever I ask for a copy of some document informs me “Well I can’t give it too you it is in Open Office.” To which I always respond “Its all right I can open it.”.

If you the reader has suggestions for tutorials or questions please post them in the comments. We’d love to hear from you.

So what makes me qualified to write tutorials? Well nothing really other than I have finally come to realise that sadly I am a computer geek. While it is true I hold a bachelors in computer science and have worked as a professional computer programmer in past years it didn’t really dawn on me how much of a computer I am till recently.

You see many of my friends are average computer users with average computer user problems. When ever I hear them talking about their problems I can almost always talk them through to a solution. To which I am always asked “Well can you come over and show me?”. Most times for the price of a cup of coffee I agree. But I find showing some one is never really effective. More often than not when you show some one they end up forgetting and sometime in the future encounter the very same problem. I find if you teach them how to solve the problem, where to look for the solution, and how to fix it they tend to remember. Not only that, but if you teach them enough they start to solve the problems on their own. They are not always successful, but they have made the effort, and lets face it even the geekiest of computer geeks is not successful all the time either.

I look forward to you the readers comments on our future tutorials. I also look forward to hearing your suggestions for tutorials and maybe even some of you will submit your own tutorials.

I suggest you check back often as the tutorials will begin to be published shortly.

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