Carl's Journal

One of the things I do in Spain is provide consulting services to people here who want to know how to promote their websites, too many people who own websites are also computer illiterate, it isn't their fault, but it means they have a lot of catching up to do.

I could waste a lot of time showing them how to create squidoo or hubpages, teach them how to blog, encourage them to join forums, but the reality is that none of these promote their business website fast enough. Article submission on the other hand is easy, effective, and a heck of a lot faster.

Article submission can still be time consuming if you write every article from scratch, and of course submitting the article also takes time. Now multiply that by however many article sites you want to join, and the workload becomes unmanageable.

Consequently I spin articles and then use an automatic article submitter, and I gotta tell you this works a treat. In a couple of hours I can write one completely new article, spin it using rewritten phrases, sentences, paragraphs and even synonym swapping, then submit the article to over 100 article directories. That is a huge return on my time investment.

Some of you reading this post will say, "Ah, but spinning never reads well", and I'd say you're doing it wrong! Read More

This Valentine's day I got a curious surprise from a friend who listening to my endless stories about renovating houses, repairing cars, and my fascination for space travel decided to challenge me to prove myself to her.

Now I don't know why I agreed, maybe it's one of those goofy guy things we do when we like a woman, or maybe she knows me well and the challenge is just an excuse I'm using to do something again, regardless I now find myself the slightly dubious owner of a project for her house in the countryside.

I should tell you my friend does a lot of cycling, and she struggles to life her bike off the drive and onto her patio, so she asked me to build a ramp. I've renovated houses, built a stoop and stairs, but I have no idea how to build a ramp.

When I think about a ramp I know it has a slope, and I guess it only needs wooden slats, but is the angle important, and how do I arrange the joists? Researching projects like these is much easier now that we have the Internet, and I love it!

Without the Internet you'd have to go to a library and hope they had a book that was on topic, or wait for them to order one, same thing with buying books, your local bookstore only has a small selection of books, but with the Internet you can pretty much find everything you need, including free information like the How to Build Things website.

My favorite page is how to build a rat rod, heck I didn't even know what a rat rod was until I read their article but it sounds like a really cool ides. Only problem here in Spain, I've yet to see a car older then 40 years on the roads, oh well, the ramp project is enough for now.

Do you love tinkering with your car? A lot of us don't, but a few of us really do, there's nothing quite like getting under the hood and getting grease and oil on your hands. I've got a friend who is never happy unless he has black grease under his fingernails from repairing his car.

Doing car repair in your own garage or out on the drive, with a set of tools around you and spare parts cluttering up the floor is awesome, frankly it brings out the best in some people because it opens the mind and shows you how things work.

Most importantly though it's a practical expression of ingenuity, and if you know what you're doing it saves money. DIY mechanics often get a bad rap for drinking too much, playing music too loud, burning rubber in the street, but actually that's a minority. Most car repair enthusiasts are decent folk with a hobby.

But repairing a car is more than just enthusiasm and tools, you also need knowledge and how many of us are trained mechanics - probably not many mechanics know everything as well, in fact they need to read up on different models of cars if they haven't worked on them before, so there is no shame in researching specific jobs you have to do.

Take the example of needing to repair brake system or repair fuel system, these are not car repair topics that can be easily guessed at, you need to know what you're doing, if only to be safe once the car is back on the road.

A few years ago I owned a Mazda RX7, it was a series 2 model, you know the long pointy one with the short back end, small bucket seats and barely enough room in the back for a cat far less a person. But I used to tinker with that car all the time. But you can bet I always made sure I had the right information first. Fast cars need to be safe. Scratch that, all cars need to be safe.