When I was seven, our family didn’t really have the time to go to Church and we just stopped going for the next few years. I didn’t think of it at the time, but my life didn’t dramatically change at all when I stopped praying to God and I didn’t feel like I was missing anything. Maybe God was testing me, or something like that, but I just didn’t feel the need to pray or go to Church anymore. If God is there and feels I should worship him, don’t you think he would make me feel the desire to do so? That’s basically why I don’t go to Church.

Why I don’t make any sense of the Christian bible can’t be expressed in one blog post alone. I be could the saying that “God created the world in 6 days.” And counter it with, the Earth wasn’t spinning until it was created, so how would he know it was 6 days? Time also wasn’t even invented… So I’m not going to point out anymore of these because you probably have your own take on them (which I’d love to hear in the comments!)

My last question for you as a Christian is, why do you pray/worship to God?

I apologize in advance if I offended anyone, but I’m just curious to learn more about religion as I’m deciding how I’m going to live my life. /

We got a “Pay As You Go” plan, where you buy the phone and get a $50 credit. It sounded great, because more money could be loaded on the next month and rolled over to the next month if I didn’t use it. We also got the second cheapest phone, but the final price didn’t turn out that way.

The first two phones we had picked weren’t available (out of stock), so we had to pay for a more expensive one that was “their best phone.” Which I didn’t really get because they also had $299 phones, but whatever. The lady started scanning a $29 memory card, then we looked at her, “Oh sorry this is a card to store your music, its very useful…” No thanks. I’ll use my iPod. Anyway, next was a $15.99 plastic case that weighed almost more than the phone itself. My mom gave into that one because she told us the warranty didn’t cover accidental damages.

Then we chose the features for the phone, which we from the started didn’t want to add because we wanted to use the phone strictly for phoning. As the lady at the store was reading the list of features she checked off each feature on the computer. Then we said, “No thanks.” And she click next.

Luckily, I had noticed that she didn’t uncheck each one and if I didn’t tell her I’d be billed an extra $70.99… No joke.

It doesn’t stop there.

I told everyone my number and the ended up texting me to chat. I didn’t really want to text, but my friends texted me and it cost me $0.15 per text I received. I wasn’t never offered a way to opt out or enable texting, but now I’ve got $2.50 or so on my bill from texting I never agreed to. I ended up purchasing the cheapest plan which gave me unlimited incoming, that was another $5.00.

So if you didn’t have an eagle eye and noticed all these little added prices, you’ll end up paying $238.33 instead of $110.55 which you expect to pay. (price of phone plus taxes)

What I find the worst out of all of it, it might have just been a bad employee, is that they charge you TO BROWSE A STORE. I was browsing the ringtone store on the phone, and I was charged $0.05 per page I visited…

I saw they had a free ringtone to download, which you could preview the entire ringtone. So it sounded awesome, get a free ringtone, awesome, eh (I’m Canadian)? But on the confirmation screen that it will cost me a 50 cents to download a free download! However, when you listen to the preview you’re downloading it already and I wasn’t charged to listen to the preview. So you charge me for something that doesn’t cost you anything… Not a good way to bring in a potential customer.

And if you didn’t pay attention to your bill then you’ll end up paying a lot of extra charges.

I said carriers in Canada, but I’ve only brushed on Telus. While I might be picking on the, it isn’t any different with Rogers or Bell (the other two leaders in the market) but I still find Telus the best. You may also notice I didn’t go into the awesome features they offer, mainly because there aren’t many… but also because you probably already know them.

Got any others? Post a link in the comments below.

For one, I discovered that they really can find out a lot more than I intend to share and you really have to be careful what you enter online.

By the time I realized my information was online I had about 200 friends. Not only did I go in and delete information that I felt was too sensitive, but I deleted people I hadn’t met in real life or seen/made contact with in years.

Now that was year ago when I deleted all of those friends, and honestly I regeret it. Right now I have a video podcast, a website and 400+ friends checking Facebook once a week at least. What does that mean? Those people sent you friend requests because they want to see what your up to and you can use that to promote your products.

I’ve got 400 friends on Facebook and about 375 followers on Twitter. When I post a link to a new episode of my podcast on both networks, I get almost double the click rate (amount of people clicking on the link) on Facebook. Why?

When you post a link in your status on Facebook it appears on every of your friend’s homepage. If one of your friends has 500+ friends who are active, it probably won’t stay on the top of their homepage for long, but it’ll appear next to your name on your profile, next to your name in Facebook Chat, and could be displayed on “Highlights”, making all of your friends see it, and even some of their friends you don’t even know.

What I’m trying to get out is Facebook is an amazing tool for promoting your website or product. I just went over if posting a link on your status. You could also make a Facebook Page which people can fan. If your friends with someone who fans that product it’ll be displayed under the ads advertisers pay for. It’ll appear in everyone’s news feed that, “Nicholas Montgomery has became a fan of Blastr, ” and the person’s profile.

I could give countless examples of how different aspects of Facebook are very powerful to share things with your friends.

If you read this the first half of this and have already logged to Facebook and added 50 random people hoping a few would accept and you’d be able to get some more traction on that next blog post, you can’t undo that, but if you were thinking, don’t do it

Don’t be a spammer and blast links. Engage in conversations, help people out who are new, comment on photos - basically just be active and people will find you. When they come to you and send you a friend request, you’ve acquired one more person who’s going to be paying attention to you.

Starting off, Pork Chop piggy bank. Not the best thing to give to a vegetarian.

USB Powered Mini Fridge Can Cooler - Why did anyone actually bother trying to sell this?

WTF Stamp

WTF?!?

Here’s a USB electronic cigarette that provides inhaled doses of “vaporized nicotine.” And some good news about smoking… The smoker won’t pass along the deadly effects to second hand smokers and only costs $33, but since you look stupid smoking a normal cigarette, you’ll probably look like a goof with a plastic one…

Oh, totally unrelated but a man recently punched a woman for telling him to stop playing a game on his cellphone.

This would certainly come in handy when I’m tired at school.

Icon A5 Personal Aircraft, it costs $139,000, but screw a Gulfstream if you had to pick which one.

Got any others?

Above is basically everything you’re able to do with Wordpress’ built in comment system. If you’d like to be able to have visitors reply to comments, you’ll need a plugin for that. If you’d like to have commenters be emailed when they’ve got a reply, you’ll need another plugin for that. Or if you’d like to have avatars, or video responses or really anything else, you’ll need another third party plugin for that… And those plugins might not work properly with you’re theme and some make break others, it can be a big mess.

I finally found a solution, a plugin called IntenseDebate. IntenseDebate includes all of the features I would have implemented with 5 other plugins, in one. The plugin is free, but you’ll have to have an account to use it. When I imported all my comments, it told me something went wrong importing them. I checked my posts and all the comments appear to be showing, so I’m not quite sure what it was trying to tell me. I then refreshed the page and it showed a progress bar. I’m not sure if its in beta, but I did find a few bugs.

Overall, I’m really impressed with IntenseDebate. It looks great and didn’t screw up my theme like many other commenting systems have. It provides more features to any commenter, looks better and can increase your pageviews by having visitors return when they’re notified via RSS or email of a reply to their comment.

So I’d highly recommend it to any blogger with a WordPress blog out there, and please let me know your thoughts about it.

A few readers have asked which WordPress plugins I use for this blog. I don’t use as many as some other blogs I’ve seen, but I’ve got all the necessities.

Akismet - Best spam filter out there, nothing gets in with it.
FeedBurner FeedSmith - Redirects all feeds to feedburner.
Favicon Manager - An easy way to add a favicon without having to mess around with the theme.
Google XML Sitemaps - Creates a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Not sure if it helps, but it can’t hurt.
GoStats - One of the many tracking apps.
Instant Upgrade- Although WordPress now has a built in upgrader, I haven’t had much luck with it.
StatPress Reloaded - Yep, another stats plugin, and I also use W3Counter…

WP Security Scan - Gotta be secure.
WP-ServerInfo - While not necessary, interesting for sure.
WordPress.com Stats - Incase the others fail

I used to swear by WP-Cache and thought it was essential for any WordPress site, but I’ve had some problems and haven’t started using it since. Once I work out some other bugs in the site, I’ll probably have that back up.

I use many other tools to optimize my site that aren’t plugins, but I’ll share those later. There are a few others I’d like to start using but haven’t configured yet, but if you’ve got an excellent plugin, please share in the comments.

I’m just wondering, when you’re writing a blog post, what motivated you to start writing it and finish it? Please include a link to your blow

Using any of those methods of sharing files can be perfectly legal, yes even with LimeWire. So why do people say LimeWire and BitTorrent are illegal? The software is not illegal, just the way the users use the software is illegal. Think of it as a gun, the people who make a gun can’t be fined for making them, they don’t have any bad intentions, its the user of it who screws up. But why do people illegally steal music in a way that can get you fined or worse, placed in federal prison?

The RIAA, sues about 10 000 people every year, but divide that by the 100+ million users and your odds of being fined are very low. But let’s look at some of the recent cases:

1. RIAA fines student $ 3,750
2. RIAA fines 41 year old disabled single mother
3. Woman with no computer sued by RIAA
4. University student with no money sued for $5,000 by RIAA, forced to drop out
5. RIAA sues 79 year old retiree who doesn’t own a computer
6. RIAA sues family of 5 $20,000

So who they’ve decided to sue looks a bit harsh, but it shows it can really happen to anyone. So now you’re at the stage where you’re thinking, why don’t they just shut down LimeWire and all the problems will be solved? They’ve tried this, but like my example of the gun, they can’t because the software has perfectly legal uses. Another site, thePiratebay.org is facing the same issue, and even though 99% of their content is illegal, they don’t host any of it, the users do. Even better for thePirateBay, the laws in Sweden are so lax that what they’re doing is perfectly legal in the host country.

Almost everyone pirate, but as a result, artists have probably been hurt.

Trent Reznor of NIN says he’s seen a drop in sales of his record, but knows more people out there have his music. He proposed several different methods of selling his music, but his record label rejected all of them. After his last record he has on his contract, Reznor gave away his album, Ghosts. By giving it away he still made a stunning million dollars in three days, amazing for any business, with no record label and no marketing campaign.

Or let’s just look at Radiohead’s scenario. They let fans pay any price they wanted to for the album, yes, even nothing By being able to obtain the album at high quality from the artist for free, there was no reason to pirate the album.