Ouch. A hen in Eastwood, UK lay this record-breaking egg with a diameter of 9.1 inches. The hen is only six months old and only just started laying eggs.

Volume Conversions. Have trouble remembering how to convert gallons, quarts, pints and cups? Print out this neat conversion graphic and put it on your refrigerator. (Click here to download a Word document with the graphic.)

1. Read Descent into Hell by Charles Williams. Great suggestion! Charles Williams’ novels are the best theologically-poetically-historically informed supernatural thrillers you will ever read. Question for John: Why did you pick Descent into Hell over All Hallows’ Eve?
2. Watch one of the following: Charlie Brown Halloween special; original Frankenstein; or The Village. I like all three, but I vote for Charlie Brown.
3. Recall for your family the righteous dead of your own line. If you don’t have a godly heritage, borrow the heroes of the faith. Interesting suggestion. I never thought of doing this.
4. Do give out candy and not tracts. I know a lot of Christians would disagree with me here, but I’m with John on this one. Maybe a tract with the candy, but definitely not instead of.
5. Scare a friend or family member. Hmmm. Watch out family and friends!

What do you think? Do you have any suggestions for Halloween?

Our eagle-eyed church treasurer noticed an additional charge of $39.95 (plus $2.00 state tax) tacked on to the end of our most recent phone bill. The new monthly web charge was billed on behalf of a company called JumPage Solutions. I did some quick research and found that this is a company that has been reported to the Better Business Bureau for the practice of “cramming.”

The FCC defines cramming as:

the practice of placing unauthorized, misleading, or deceptive charges on your telephone bill. Crammers rely on confusing telephone bills in an attempt to trick consumers into paying for services they did not authorize or receive, or that cost more than the consumer was led to believe.

The company first calls your church or business to verify your contact information. They may offer you a free service — which later converts to a paid service without your knowledge or consent. The charge then shows up as an additional item on your regular phone bill. If you do not notice it, you will end up paying for a service that you never authorized or requested.

I called our phone company (Verizon) and asked the customer service representative how Verizon could bill me for another company’s services without even checking with me first. She said all accounts are set up that way unless you tell them otherwise. I told her, “Then I am telling you otherwise.” She agreed to reverse the charges and change our church account to protect from future cramming. I then called JumPage and reported my complaint to them. I also filed a complaint with the San Francisco Better Business Bureau.

Action Points for Churches and Small Businesses:

1. Check your phone bills for additional charges that should not be there. If there are unfamiliar charges, call your phone company immediately to have them removed.
2. Tell your phone company you do not want outside providers using your phone bill for third-party billing.
3. Beware of Yellow Pages representatives calling to verify your information or offering you free services, especially when they ask if you are the authorized person to make changes on the account.
4. You can report any violations to the Better Business Bureau or the FCC.

You can learn more about JumPage and “cramming” at these two links:

• JumPage Solutions – Questionable Business Practices
• Targeting Area Businesses with Deceptive Invoices

Have you had problems with “cramming” on your phone bill? Share about it in the comments.

• Freqently Asked Questions – I
      1) What is the SAT 1?
      2) Should I take practice Sat I tests?
• Frequently Asked Questions – II
      3) What are the PSAT and NMSQT?
      4) Should I Take the PSAT?
• Frequently Asked Questions – III
      5) How important is stress reduction?
      6) How is the 2005 SAT 1 different from other SATs?
      7) What About Learning Disabled Students?

Stobaugh also offers his personal recommendations for the day of the SAT:

Here is one example of a typical test-day schedule. Times will vary depending on the actual time of the test, how far away the test site is, etc.

(Learn how you can survive the Digg effect below.)

What is the Digg effect, you ask? Digg is a social media site where users share and promote content from all around the internet. The most popular articles get “pushed” to the front page. This results in the Digg effect, where thousands of visitors suddenly surge onto your site in a relatively short period of time. If you have a dedicated server with plenty of bandwidth and memory resources, it is not a problem. But if you are on a shared server, like I am, your server host can shut you down for consuming too many resources.

Well wouldn’t you know it! Friday afternoon a post I wrote last summer got picked up and featured on the front page of Digg (Map of the World’s Religions — 1,200 Diggs and counting!). My blog was immediately overwhelmed with visitors, and my server host shut me down. Of course I was away from my computer at the time and didn’t discover any of this until late Friday night.

I immediately called my host. They agreed to re-open my site and temporarily increase my allotted memory resources. I also made some tweaks to my web page (explained below) to decrease the load on the server. As soon as they re-opened the page, the visitors started streaming in once again. The web page held until about 10:00 Saturday morning when it went down again. I called my host, suggested some more tweaks to streamline performance, and convinced them to open me up again. They did, and my site held through the afternoon before it collapsed again at 4:00 p.m. This time they did not re-open my site until Sunday afternoon when traffic had finally slowed down a bit.

So just how big is the Digg effect? Well, my little website normally receives about 1,800 page views a day. With the Digg effect I was suddenly deluged with 6,000 hits/hour. That’s 100 hits a minute, over one and a half hits every second. You can see the jump in visitors on the graph below. Remember, I still got this jump even with downtime on Friday and Saturday.

                                (Click on the graph for a larger image.)

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO PREPARE YOUR SITE FOR DIGG? (or an onslaught of traffic from any of the other big media sites like StumbleUpon or Reddit, etc.) Here are some of the things I learned from my experience.

HOW TO SURVIVE THE DIGG EFFECT:

THREE LESSONS LEARNED:

1. Plan ahead. I never expected to hit the front page of Digg, so I never prepared for it. Although I got a lot of new visitors, I estimate I missed another 100,000 because of downtime on my blog. (Ouch!)
2. Bandwidth won’t help if you have limited memory resources. I thought I was all set because I had 5000 gig bandwidth with my hosting account. But all the bandwidth in the world won’t help you if you have limited memory resources. I am on a shared server, and I learned that I am only allotted 10% of the server’s resources (CPU and memory) at any given time. I got shut down the first time because my site was using 12.56% of the server’s resources. When I called tech support, they agreed to increase my limit to 25% for the weekend. That helped keep me afloat for most of Saturday until my site eventually peaked at 27.4% of server resources.
3. A shared server will not handle the load. If you are on a shared server, know up front that you will experience problems with a huge traffic spike. There is just not enough memory to go around. So, should you switch from a shared server? The main advantage of a shared server is price. You can purchase hosting on a shared server for about $7/month. A dedicated server will cost you closer to $250/month. Some people recommend a Virtual Private Server (VPS) as a midway solution at about $50/month. However, a VPS may not fare much better than a shared server with a large influx of traffic. The price point fixes it for me anyways. I can’t pay $250/month for a personal website. But if you are making money off your website, it may make sense to upgrade to a better server.

FIVE THINGS YOU CAN DO NOW BEFORE YOU GET DUGG:

1. Streamline your website as much as possible for quick loading times and efficient performance.
2. Remove any unnecessary plugins.
3. Avoid large image files and animations. You may want to host your videos and images offsite at places such as YouTube or Flickr.
4. Install one of the following plugins to cache your pages and ease the load on your server (if you have a WordPress blog).
   • WP Cache 2.0
   • WP Super Cache
   • Digg Defender

   The first thing I did after tech support put my blog back up was install the WP-Cache plugin. This kept my blog afloat for most of Saturday. Of course if I had installed it before the Digg rush, I would not have lost those high traffic hours on Friday night.

5. Give your visitors a way to subscribe. It’s great to get lots of visitors, but you also want them to come back. I use the What Would Seth Godin Do plugin to give every new visitor the opportunity to bookmark my site or subscribe to future posts. During this Digg rush my subscriber base increased by 15%!

FIVE THINGS YOU CAN DO DURING A DIGG:

1. Call your server’s tech support immediately. Tell them what is happening and ask them to temporarily increase your allotted memory resources. If my host had not increased my resources to 25% I would never have made it through Saturday.
2. Disable plugins that are not absolutely necessary.
3. Streamline the page where the Digg visitors are arriving. In my case, they were being directed to my home page. I normally show 10-20 posts on my home page, so I cut this down to two.
4. Re-direct incoming traffic to the correct post if necessary. Digg users often link to an image rather than a post. On my blog all image links come straight to my home page. Visitors arriving at the home page had no idea where to find the actual post. So I put up a short post at the top of the home page with a link to the original post. (See example here.) I actually had two Diggs going on simultaneously, so I provided both links. I kept moving this post to the top of the home page for several days after the Digg rush for any continuing traffic.
5. Continue to monitor progress as much as possible during the Digg. If your site goes down, call tech support and see if they will put it back up for you.

RESULTS:

I am experiencing some great residual effects from Friday’s Digg. The post has been picked up by multiple websites, my stats are up, and my subscriber count has increased by 15%. (Welcome new readers!) But if I had been better prepared, I could have seen even better results. I believe by applying what I have learned from this experience, I will do much better on my next Digg. But at least this time around I can still say, “I SURVIVED THE DIGG EFFECT (And So Can You!)”

For further reading:

• 5 WordPress Hosting Lessons :: How to Survive the Digg Effect
• Beginner’s Guide to Surviving Digg’s Front Page
• How to Design WordPress Blog To Survive the Digg
• How to: Survive the Digg Effect (The Ultimate Guide)
• Optimizing WordPress and LAMP to survive the Digg effect
• Survive DIGG effect with smart hosting and optimization
• Surviving the digg effect
• Web Hosting for Surviving the Digg Effect

Privacy
We ran out of oil for our furnace last week, which I have since discovered is not a good thing. I knew we were getting low, but with oil at $3.85 a gallon, I was trying to nurse it along to the end of the heating season. Obviously we didn’t make it. When we first ran out, I thought we could get by without heat and fill up the tank later when prices are lower. But after a couple nights with the house temperature dropping into the fifties, I quickly changed my mind.

I called some local oil companies to get a delivery of 20-25 gallons just to get us to the end of the season. No go. Every company had a 100-gallon minimum for delivery, and no one was budging. However, a couple of the companies told me that diesel is actually the same fuel as home heating oil. So I filled up two five gallon containers of diesel at the local gas station and poured them into the tank through the outside fill line. The furnace still wouldn’t start.

I did some poking around online and found out why it is not good to let your tank run dry. First of all, you suck all the sludge from the bottom of your oil tank into your oil lines, filters, strainer and nozzle. And secondly, you usually lose your prime. Well, I didn’t know what to do about the first problem, and I am not much of a fix-it-man, but I did some more searching online for how to prime the oil burner pump. Here are the basic DIY (Do It Yourself) instructions:

First, make sure that your thermostat is turned on. Then, 1) turn off your furnace, 2) open the bleeder valve on the fuel pump, 3) turn the furnace back on, 4) allow air, oil and sludge to escape from the bleeder valve until you get a solid flow of oil (be sure to catch the escaping oil in some kind of container), 5) close the bleeder valve, 6) repeat the whole procedure if the furnace still does not start.

I found a couple articles explaining this procedure in detail, but the best one by far was this one at WikiHow: How to Restart a Furnace After Running out of Oil. The other articles instructed me to hold a container under the valve when you opened it to catch the oil that would come spurting out. But this WikiHow article gave me the best tip of all — run a short section of 1/4″ nylon tubing from the bleeder valve to the container. I picked up a two-foot section of nylon tubing at the hardware store for 80 cents and went home to bleed the fuel line and prime the pump. The tubing worked perfectly and prevented a huge mess of oil everywhere.

The instructions online told me this was about a five minute procedure. I multiply estimated times for projects by a factor of six, so I guessed it would take me about half an hour to get this done. And it did! But the furnace is running again, and we now have heat to warm up the house in the morning. I would refer you to the WikHow article referenced above for complete instructions, but here are some helpful hints I learned along the way:

1. Don’t let your tank run dry.
2. You can substitute diesel for home heating oil in a pinch. (Five gallons of fuel will give you about five hours of running use.)
3. The bleeder valve is located on the side of the fuel pump, pointing down diagonally, usually at the 4 or 8 o’clock position. It most likely takes a 3/8 inch wrench.
4. Run 1/4″ clear nylon tubing (1/4″ inside measurement; 3/8″ outside measurement) from the bleeder valve to the catch container to prevent a mess. Clear tubing will allow you to see when you get a good flow of oil going from the pump.
5. You may have to repeat the procedure several times to get the prime going. I didn’t get any oil flowing until the sixth try.
6. If your reset button is in lockout mode (mine was), you will have to press and hold it for about 40 seconds in order to reset it.
7. You can take the oil you capture in the container and pour it back into your tank.

If you came to this article looking for information, I hope that helps. I am not very good at this stuff, so I am guessing if I could get my oil pump primed and running again, so can you!

Click here for more Helpful Hints.

I first read his twelve principles several years ago and have found them extremely helpful in finding things. But the most helpful principle for me was #10, what the Professor calls “The Eureka Zone.” Most missing objects are within eighteen inches of where you think they are. You just have to look more carefully. I have applied this principle again and again, and it seems to hold true. In fact I used it to find some missing electrical tape in the garage just last week.

Here is the Professor’s explanation of the Eureka Zone:

The majority of lost objects are right where you figure — once you take a moment to stop and figure. Others, however, are in the immediate vicinity of that place. They have undergone a displacement — a shift in location that, although minor, has served to render them invisible.

Some examples:

• A pencil has rolled beneath a typewriter.
• A tool has been shoved to the rear of a drawer.
• A book on a shelf has gotten lodged behind other books.
• A folder has been misfiled, several folders away from where it belongs.

Objects are apt to wander. I have found, though, that they tend to travel no more than eighteen inches from their original location. To the circle described by this eighteen inch radius I have given a name. I call it the Eureka Zone.

Check out the Professor’s other twelve principles, too. They just may help you find that something you’ve been looking for.

Click here for more Helpful Hints.

HT: Lifehacker

A LITTLE HISTORY:

If you have a blog, then you probably want to know how many people subscribe to your blog. There are plenty of programs to help you track visitors, but tracking subscribers is a particular challenge. Most blogs generate several feeds, and subscribers use a variety of different feed readers. How do you capture all this information in a single number?

Enter Feedburner. Feedburner provides a way to consolidate all your feeds into one “burned” feed and then gives you back detailed information about your subscribers — such as how many subscribers do you have, which feed readers do they use, what items on your blog do they view, etc. This is helpful information for any blogger, and Feedburner provides all these statistics free of charge.

However, many bloggers hesitate signing up with Feedburner because they do not want to lose control of their feed. The question arises: “If I sign up with Feedburner, and all my subscribers subscribe to my new Feedburner feed, what happens if I ever want to leave Feedburner?” Sure, you could ask all your subscribers to re-subscribe to a different feed, but not everyone will, and you could lose some subscribers along the way.

That is exactly the situation I faced last summer when I was trying to decide whether or not to go with Feedburner. One possible solution was to use Feedburner’s MyBrand. MyBrand allows you to use Feedburner while running everything through your own domain instead of theirs. The problem with MyBrand, however, is that the set-up is somewhat technical, and you still need to create a new feed name to use the service.

THE HACK:

Here is a much simpler way that allows you to take full advantage of all of Feedburner’s services while still maintaining control of your original feed and subscribers. Basically, you redirect all your feeds into your one burned feed, but then have new subscribers subscribe through your original feed on your Feedburner landing page. Here is how to do it. (Note: If you already have a Feedburner account, you can skip straight to Step 3.)

1. Sign up with Feedburner. Give them your original feed, and then choose a name for your new “burned” feed. Here is an example using my own blog feeds:
   Original feed:  http://www.rayfowler.org/feed/
   New burned feed:  http://feeds.feedburner.com/rayfowler
2. Follow Feedburner’s instructions to redirect all feeds coming from your blog to your new burned feed. (Note: If you have a self-hosted WordPress site, the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin will do this for you.)
3. In your Feedburner Dashboard, click on the Optimize tab at the top (second tab over).
4. Under Services in the left sidebar, select BrowserFriendly.
5. Scroll down to Content Options at the bottom of the page where you will see these words highlighted in blue: “Use your redirected feed URL on your BrowserFriendly landing page.” Click on the words, and a hidden option will magically appear: “Redirected Feed URL” with an empty box next to it. Put your original feed in the box (here is an example from my blog once again: http://www.rayfowler.org/feed/), and then click Save at the bottom left-hand corner of the page.
6. Voilá! You now have full access to all of Feedburner’s services, but you have created a direct path for your subscribers to subscribe through your original feed.
7. You can see how this works on my site by clicking the Subscribe button near the top of the right sidebar, or you can just click the word Subscribe here. Either one will bring you to my Feedburner landing page. Even though my burned feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/rayfowler) shows as the URL, if you click on any of the subscribe options under Subscribe Now, they will automatically subscribe you under my original feed (http://www.rayfowler.org/feed/).

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Although this method is not foolproof, you will find that most of your subscribers will end up subscribing under your original feed. A few may still go to the trouble of copy-and-pasting the burned feed from the landing page URL, but most subscribers will just click on one of the links under Subscribe Now. So far this method has worked great for me. What are your thoughts?

Click here for more Helpful Hints.

Totally Scored makes it easy to track your favorite sports or teams using any RSS reader by subscribing to the feed. You can customize the display so that you only see the results you are interested in. Whenever a game ends, the final score will be automatically downloaded to your computer, cellphone, or other RSS reader.

The site gives you scores for both college and pro teams. You can use the RSS feature or bookmark the site with your browser and check back for scores later. I just signed up for the Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees and Florida Marlins; the Boston Celtics and Miami Heat; and the New England Patriots and Miami Dolphins.

By the way, if you enjoy the posts here at RayFowler.org, you can subscribe to this blog by RSS or email, too. It’s easy, and it’s free! Click here to subscribe.

Click here for more Helpful Hints.

HT: Lifehacker

1. Ignore advice to “remake” yourself the first day you get to college … Your family history and heritage matter … be wary of making big changes quickly.
2. Do something each week that puts you in contact with people older and younger than your peer group.
3. If you have a decent relationship with your parents keep it up. Remember that they are going through a tough transition too.
4. If you are going to college, then go. You are in college to learn … School is your full time job, put fifty hours a week into it or go home.
5. Find a faculty mentor during your first year. If you cannot, then your college is charging you for an education it cannot deliver.
6. Take classes that are hard from full-time professors that love to teach.
7. Secretaries and support staff are overworked, underpaid, and very powerful. You should be good to them out of virtue, but you must do it to thrive.
8. Books are not yet antiques. Go to the library. Talk to librarians … Spend hours a day reading.
9. Don’t be too quick to pick a major, but try to do so by the end of the first year.
10. Live like an adult in college which includes moderating your passions.

Those are just the main points. Be sure to read the whole article for more of John’s thoughts relating to each of the points presented above.