Friday, December 23, 2011

YouTube Has Removed Friends

YouTube is in the middle of a major re-design process right now. The entire YouTube site is being changed. The home page, the channel page, everything is getting a makeover. I have been updating Pirate Lifestyle TV from the old design to the new design.


A huge change, a major change, a change that will seriously affect how we communicate is the removal of YouTube friends. Yep, friends are now officially gone. All of your friends, like me here on Pirate Lifestyle TV, have migrated to the all-new Contact list, which is an address book…basically.


YouTube's explanation, "Friends and Subscriptions work similarly in a lot ways and a large amount of users were both subscribed to and friends with one Channel, making receiving updates incredibly confusing for many."



Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Kiva

Kiva is a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world. 




I just made a loan to Celia Jenny - http://www.kiva.org/lend/373474




Celia Jenny is 42 years old, a widow, living with her father and her 14 year old son. She lives in the Ventanas canton of the Rios province.

The service point El Recreo is located in the San Vicente Las Lomas area, belonging to the Ventanas canton. This service point is dedicated to short cycle farming such as growing corn, rice, beans and soy beans.

Jenny has been making a living growing corn, beans and rice for the last three years. She buys her products in Ventanas and sells her production in the same place.



Saturday, December 17, 2011

Tasty Apple Smiles - Yummy Fall Treat


Your young and old scallywags and hooligans will absolutely love this treat.




In this video, I will make a yummy tasty fall treat, you will see all the ingredients and exactly how to do it, so you can make these treats for your scallywags and hooligans.


CaptRob

Friday, December 16, 2011

Generate, Create and Use QR Codes on YouTube Videos


I have been playing around with QR Codes for a while and I have also posted a few blog articles. If you look around, you will notice QR Codes are everywhere. Here is a magazine with a QR Code and here are a bunch of bananas we picked up at the grocery store and they have a QR Code on them. Why?

I was watching a Chris Pirillo video and Chris was doing a QR Code experiment. This got me to thinking? 

YouTube does not allow us users to link outside of YouTube. The exception is in the description of a video. But here on the video, all links must be in YouTube.





So generate a QR Code for one of your URLs and add it to your videos and see what happens.

CaptRob

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Troubleshooting a Charger System Problem on sv Bella Rose


Ahoy me hearty.

Well, last night I noticed the fan running a LOT on our Xantrex battery charger. Cheri and Jonathan are away, and I am sitting here by myself (and the pets). I was reading, TV turned off, and my laptop was running. So it was quiet, and I could here the fan clicking on and off, in what I thought, short intervals. I didn't actually measure them but is was probably 15-20 seconds...
  

 


Knowing something wasn't right and even though it was after 8pm, I decided to look into it. I removed the pots and pans fron their cabinet and removed 2 screws from one side of a pegboard that separates the boat guts side from the pots and pans side. Bending the pegboard out (it was still attached on the far side), I could see the current lights on the charger were randomly flashing...Not a good thing. Grabbing a flashlight I looked in and saw the vents on the charger were covered with a quilt, I mean bunch of lint and dust. 

So I shut down the charger and vacuumed up the crude. I double checked the batteries in their cabinet and they looked fine and felt cool (not hot). I let the charger set for about one hour and then decided to go ahead and turn it back on, rather than leaving it off until morning. 

More too come as I continue with this problem...

CaptRob 

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

YouTube Launches New Channel Design


About December 1st the YouTube Team launched the new Homepage, new Channels, and a new overall design.



Many partners have been playing around with the new design for several weeks, using Cosmic Panda and more recently Channels_Preview.



Obviously the change is coming, maybe in a few weeks, but definitely within a month or two. So last week I began to seriously play with the new design. It is easy (now) to opt-in and opt-out of the new design and I figured I might as well get used to it before we have no choice! J

Note: when you opt-in to the new design everyone visiting your channel will see the new design.

Here is an image of my new design and my old design.



As you see, my old background was a photo of water and had a half-dozen photo images, three per side. By any standard it was busy, looked best on 1366 pixel or smaller monitors, but this was the norm at the time.

As I played around most of last week attempting to create a background for the new channel design, I was very frustrated. No matter how much I tried, I was very unhappy with how cluttered my channel looked. I realized I was trying to bring the old to the new.

After looking at a few other partner channels that have switched over to the new channel design, I noticed they were all using a simple and clean design. I realized the way to go was a simpler background that doesn’t compete with the focus of the channel, the videos. So, I went with a simple feathered background, a dark-blue background that will look good on any sized monitor and a brighter light blue that draws your eyes to the featured video.

I used the same banner on my new channel design background as I had on my old design. On the new design the banner is part of the background and it is not a separate image. So now I have a bright, clean, and simple channel background.

Here is my Partner Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/PirateLifestyleTV

What do you think of my new channel design?

Have you switched to the new design?

What does your background look like?


CaptRob

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Empire Ave Louie Report For 12-03-2011

Empire Avenue report. Yesterday I had ZERO shares sold. Thank you to all my shareholders. I appreciate your trust and dedication!! Arrrrr.






Capt Rob

Friday, December 2, 2011

Empire Avenue - Great Day!

Ahoy again me hearty!

To be honest, I didn't plan to post about Empire Avenue so soon. But I had such a great day yesterday, I wanted to share it.


Today is December 2nd. Here is my Louie report you can see my growing and improving statistics. The most noticeable things, everyone is buying and only one person sold one share (weird? 1 share?). My value is growing, all statistics are up (in the green). And my daily dividend are very good.




I was off-line most of yesterday. Zoe, one of our cats had to go to the Vet. Thursday is our shopping day, and my Admiral and Deck hand are leaving for Maine today (Friday) so we were getting organized. 


CaptRob