Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Tricia’s Musings gets organized!

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Remember those posts two weeks ago about finding this sites focus and working on re-organizing it?

Well ….

Didn’t anyone notice that the site looks a little bit different?

I really thought about designing or heavily modifying an existing theme to give this site a new look, but it seems that the majority of my visitors actually like this fresh green theme, so I decided to keep the current theme.

I did however tidy up the sidebars. See … look at the left side, isn’t that a lot nicer to look at? Yes I still have banners and advertising but a lot of it is in expandable menus now so that if you chose to look at the banners and buttons you can easily do so. I got rid of a few things too. Hopefully the site loads a bit faster now.

The right sidebar still has advertising but it’s mostly text ads. I did ad one new form of advertising to the right sidebar thought. See the “Ads by AuctionAds” section in the center of the “google” area in the right sidebar? That’s a new advertising site created by Text-Link-Ads. AuctionAds just launched a few days ago.

The auction box shows hot eBay auctions from categories that I’ve selected for this site. Keep an eye on that box. You might find a deal that you can’t pass up.

Take a good look around. I’ve added some new plugins that help organize this site better, and provide some benefit to my regular visitors.

I’ll tell you more about the plugins in another post.





Are you participating in the Lifecruiser Cyber Cruise?

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Thirteen Things about Mrs. Lifecruisers Cyber Cruise

This is Thursday Thirteen #37

1…. Mrs. Lifecruiser decided to have an elaborate, and I mean elaborate blog party! She’s calling it a “Cyber Cruise”.

2…. The Cyber Cruise starts tomorrow and runs through to the end of the month!

3…. We’ll be hitting ports from all over the world as different bloggers host the Cyber cruise on their own sites.

4…. This is going to be a great way to meet other bloggers, and discover some great new sites. You might even make a friend or two as you mingle at one of the banquet dinners or lounge by the pool.

5…. The lovely Mrs. Lifecruiser had asked who wanted to host the Cruise in their “port”. I opted to be a party goer rather than a host this time round. Perhaps next time round there’ll be a Toronto port on the Cyber Cruise.

6…. I’ve been looking through my cyber closets to find a few lovely evening gowns to wear to the dinners. So far I’ve found a lovely emerald gown that will set off my eyes, hair and fair skin nicely. I’ve also chosen two traditional black gowns – ones a little skimpy! Oh yes, I’ve also got a hot little red number.

7…. I’m hoping that Mrs. Lifecruiser lined up a lot of entertainment for this long Cyber cruise. Hopefully there’s some great rock n’ roll bands. I love mingling with rock stars.

8…. I think that everyone should bring a flag from their Country to hang over the side of the ship. That way we can show how truly international our Cyber Cruise will be.

9…. Now I’m trying to think of what else to pack from my Cyber drawers and closet? Hmmm some bathing suits? yeah I think I’d better bring something to swim in and tan in.

10…. Some of the ports that we’ll hit should be warm too so I’ll have to bring some light clothes – shorts, light tops and some good walking shoes just in case we hit any tourist areas as we travel across the world on the Lifecruiser Cyber Cruise.

11…. I’d like to try some chocolate from every port we hit. mmmm I love chocolate!

12…. Oh and I guess I should try a traditional food item from each country we visit too huh?

13…. I hope you’ll join us on our Cyber Cruise! I’m sure the host of the whole show, Mrs. Lifecruiser herself will drop in at some point today to tell us more about her huge Blog party/ Cyber cruise. I can’t wait to find out if there’s any last minute details?

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

Make your dreams come true with Dream Manifesto

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Everybody has dreams and wishes. Dreaming about our future life often starts when we are just small children playing games with our friends. I don’t know how many people ever end up being what they dreamed of being as a child, but I bet, even if they didn’t follow their childhood dreams that a little bit of the dream is still alive in them today.

The great thing about having dreams and goals for ourselves, our family and our futures is that we can set new goals or start new dreams at any point in our life. It’s almost never too late to change the track that your life is on.

Dream Manifesto has created a software program that helps your focus your dreams and your goals into successful accomplishments. The companies motto for their new software is – Dream Manifesto – Create Prosperity & Abundance in Your Life. Sound good?

It’s an interesting software concept. You just use the Dream Questionnaire or the Wizard to create a dream that you want to manifest in your life. The software then helps you direct your thinking towards making your dreams and goals come true. There’s nothing like having a program on your computer that works to motivate you towards making things happen in your life.

Here’s a recent press release from the Dream Manifesto company, read it to learn more about this interesting software program:

PETALUMA, CA (March 9, 2007) – Dream Manifesto, LLC. releases the Dream Manifestation Wizard V1.1 for Windows & Mac.

The Dream Manifestation Wizard® is a software application to manifest your goals & dreams and to create abundance & prosperity in your life.

Once started, the Wizard will ask you what dream you want to manifest in your life. If you are not certain about it, you can use the built-in ‘Dream Questionnaire’ to find one or more powerful dreams that you would like to manifest in your life. Learn the simplicity of creating your dream template that consists of text, an image and your voice. This template will function as your dream blueprint.

Command the Dream Manifestation Wizard® on how often per day you want to program your dream into your subconscious. Once this is done, relax, sit back and work normally on your computer. The Dream Manifestation Wizard®, running in the background, will provide an audible cue – a gong – before it appears on your screen.

The Dream Manifestation Wizard® comes complete with over 100 dream templates, so you can start immediately manifesting what you always wanted.
The Dream Manifestation Wizard® creates an exact blueprint in your subconscious of what you want to manifest. Your subconscious mind will immediately start to work on turning your dream into reality, applying the latest discoveries in quantum physics to shift and direct your attention toward new possibilities.

Requires Windows XP, Vista or Mac OS 10.3 or later.
The program is available for immediately download or on CD-ROM and costs $29.95. With the current promotion you save $20.

Mind numbing weekend

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I’ve spent the weekend working on all of our websites and blogs. Mostly behind the scenes stuff like organizing categories and fixing messy code. Mind numbingly boring stuff if you ask me, but it had to be done.

As you can see I haven’t even begun to start fixing this site up. Yes the side bars will get a make over and I’ve got some new features that I want to try out on this site that I think you’ll enjoy.

Unfortunately when I get busy working on a site I loose track of time. Next thing I know it’s 4 a.m. and if I’m close to finishing what I’ve been working on I just stay up and finish it. No matter how tired I am.

I wish that I could tell you that I did something exciting this weekend, but unless you find staring at a computer screen exciting it’s been a pretty dull weekend over here.

There should be some great changes on all of our sites over the next week. As you visit this site and our other sites and notice the changes I’d love it if you’d give us some feedback on the new features and look of the sites.

New digital media convert makes it easy to convert video and audio formats

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Last summer I was lucky enough to be given a free Nokia smart media phone. My new phone could take pictures, record audio and voice, play MP3’s, and record video. One of the very first things that I did with my new phone as I returned home with it was to record a video as we were driving. You see, my husband and I had accidentally discovered that we could drive on the Molson Indy race track that was being set up in downtown Toronto the day before the big race was to start.

How exciting! Our car on a race track and we could record our adventure too!

Unfortunately, when we got home I discovered that our new cell phone recorded video in 3GP format. At that time, I don’t believe that YouTube or Google video accepted uploads in that type of format. That was a huge drag since I wanted to post my little film on this site.

I got busy searching the internet for a free program which would convert the 3GP format over to AVI which was accepted at Youtube at the time. Problem was I could only find programs that would convert 3GP to another format, before I could use yet another free conversion program to convert the video to AVI. My video lost a lot of it’s quality along the way and I was very disappointed with the results. As a result of this I’ve made very few videos with our cell phone.

Lucky for me, and any of you who have gone through some of the type of experiences I’ve just described there’s a new digital media converter available and it converts a multitude of video and audio formats quickly and easily. No more fiddling around and losing quality!

You can easily convert video and audio files from one format to another. You can even batch convert too. Common formats that work with the new digital media converter are VCD, DVD, AVI (DivX, MS MPEG4, uncompressed, etc), MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (PAL, NTSC), MP3, MOV, WMA, WMV, DVR-MS, ASF, AIFF, AU ,VOB (DVD Video files), SND, DVR-MS (including radio station DVR-MS file format), 3GP, DV-AVI, MP3 and WAV formats.

We have a DVD recorder but it doesn’t record in a format that our DVD player accepts. Now, if I were to get this software, I can record shows and movies with our DVD recorder onto a re-recordable DVD disk and pop it into my computer and convert it to a format that our DVD player will accept.

You can also use this converter to extract the audio from a video and save just the audio tracks. That would be great for recording really wonderful movie sound tracks wouldn’t it?

There are all kinds of great features in this new digital media converter. Using the advanced settings you can change the video frame size, audio/video compression codec, number of channels in an audio stream and the frequency too.

I think I could go on and on about this media converter. Probably because I spent so much time searching for a decent one last summer. So I’ll just tell you about one last feature that I think just about everyone would want to try. If you have an iPod, Sony PSP or another type of portable media device and say that you are about to take a long road trip, or perhaps your commute to work daily is by bus or train and it takes an hour or so to get from home to work. Why not convert DVDs and films that you like to a format that works with your portable media player so that you can watch them whenever your out and about, traveling or commuting? I know that if I had a long commute or a long trip coming up I’d do that.

You can learn more about this digital media converter by visiting the information page I listed above. You can also read a number of articles that will teach you how to use the media converter in different ways.

If you want to try this software there’s a free version at http://www.Deskshare.com. You’ve got nothing to lose by downloading the free trial. Give it a try.

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