Got a bottle of wine on hand but no corkscrew to get it open? You can argue all you want about whether or not the guy in this video really needs more wine, but you can’t argue with the results.

As you can see, all it takes is a shoe and some pounding. The shoe isn’t a necessary component, of course; you just need something to soften the blows so the bottle doesn’t break. We’ve detailed how to open a bottle of wine with a hammer and screw, but this method really ups the ante. Thanks JNeumann!

[via Boing Boing]

A group of UCLA researchers has determined that for middle-aged and older folks, using the Internet, particularly search, causes enhanced neural stimulation leading to better reasoning and decision-making.

At a recent presentation at the Neuroscience 2009 meeting in Chicago, the scientists stated, “The results suggest that searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults.” Defying folk wisdom regarding old dogs and new tricks, the research was conducted on Internet users aged 55 to 78, about half of whom rarely used the Internet.

Previously, the same researchers proved that conducting searches online doubles brain activitation in older “digital natives” compared to older “digital immigrants.”

One of the authors of the study, UCLA psych professor Dr. Gary Small, said, “We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function.” In other words, it takes just a matter of days for older first-time Internet users to catch up to their more experienced counterparts in terms of brain activity.

More at: Get Granny to Google: How the Internet Helps Older Brains.

One way to make this good first impression is to have a well designed professional looking website. And regardless of whether or not you’ve hired someone to do do the job, it is important to verify that it does not look amateur.

Below we have listed a few things that your website should avoid.

1. Lots of Colors

There are a lot of beautiful colors out there. However, that does not mean that you should put them all on your website.

For a professional-looking website, colors should be kept to a minimum.

2. Centered Text

Centering might work well for certain headlines, images, or captions. However, you should avoid centering the bulk of your textual content. According to published research, users prefer to read from left to right. As a result, centering your text makes it more difficult for users to digest your content

3. Font Woes

There are many ways to convey amateurism by improperly using font. Here is what not to do:

* Use many different font faces

* Incorporate text of all sizes, as well as several variants or bold, italic, and underlined text

* Use multiple fonts colors

4. Excessive Use of Exclamation Points

There are better ways to convey excitement than by overusing punctuation. Remember, your website is not an infomercial.

5. Animation

Sometimes people include animated graphics to add excitement to a web page. Unfortunately, this conveys something very different. Sure, you might find your bouncing logo quite eye-catching, but you don’t want to distract users from your content or come across — once again — as an infomercial.

6. Too Much Content

While you might have a lot of things to say about your services or your company, it does not all need to be put on your website. Instead, try to find a concise way of summarizing your content and effectively describing what you can offer.

Additionally, if you have a lot of content which you feel should be included in your website, consider breaking it up into small pages, instead of cramming it all into one long slow-loading page.

In order for your website to be successful, it will have to inspire trust and confidence. As a result, you should keep these tips in mind when evaluating your website.

via Does Your Website Look Like An Amateur Built It? – Web Development Blog.

Visit Gregg at: http://www.3wdesign.com/

Weekly-contest-09-promo So let’s be honest, the last link contest we held was just a blast. So we did some pinky-twisting and Jared Madsen (our founder) consented to an idea of pure madness. We’re going to run the contest again, only this time – we’re going to give away a bike every week.

You read that right – we’re going to give away a MADSEN bike every week. The contest rules are basically the same. You link to us from you site, Twitter account or blog – and someone clicks the link (could even be you!) and you’ll be entered to win.

We’ll announce a new winner each Wednesday here on the blog. To be eligible to win, you just need to link to us from your site, and have at least one person follow the link from your site to ours during the week preceding the announcement.

You can also earn an entry by following us on Twitter and/or joining our email list.

We also created a whole new juicy set of banners you can use to link, if you’d like (or you can just use a text link if you prefer, no biggie).

For all the links, banners and details, head over to our contest page.

See you back here in one week where one lucky winner’s getting a new bike!

GL

KMFDM Records releases Legion Within’s fourth album Mouth of Madness on June 16, 2009. Mouth of Madness follows up 2007’s the empty men, which had exclusive pre-release online distribution thru KMFDMStore.com. Legion Within will celebrate the release with an All Ages show, supported by God Module, in Seattle, WA on June 20th. A brief West Coast tour will include headlining appearances at Release the Bats in Long Beach, CA and Bar Sinister in Hollywood, CA. Fall dates opening for KMFDM to follow. Interest has already been expressed from Licensing Companies for opportunities including video games. Interview requests have also begun for summer online and printed publications, as well as podcast and web radio spots. Mouth of Madness displays Legion Within as a mature band who have blended darkwave and industrial into their own distinctive genre of dark rock. Crafting Mouth of Madness over two years was an arduous process. Written throughout a time when band member’s lives were rife with personal tragedy and upheaval, disquiet lays heavy within the music. The songs range from romance, escapism, and tragedy to tongue-in-cheek dark humor and flights of sadistic fancy. Bouncing back from the industrial political-angst of 07’s the empty men, Mouth of Madness embraces the current political and emotional climate with a firm hand. Singer William Wilson calls it, “Courageous Nihilism. From day one we are all doomed. But that’s just the way it is, we deal with it.” “[Eight] years and three albums into their career, Legion Within are a steadily rising force in the arena of modern music, complete with the KMFDM seal of approval.” ~ ReGen Magazine

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Kind of reminds of of Peter Murphy’s vocals with maybe… Bauhaus? Each song is different in style but with PM type vocals

[display_podcast]

Is that $15 each or for the whole 1000? That’s one and a half cents per account. Say you can do 20 in an hour. That’s 30 cents an hour. That’s 50 hours to complete the job. That’s more than 2 solid days of someone’s time that you want to pay $15 for. Plus you have the gall to ask for “people with feedback!!!” What type of person are you hoping answers this ad? Where on this earth could there be someone who is so desperate to work for 30 cents an hour? What kind of monster would exploit that person so blatantly? At first I though this was funny and now I’m just puzzled.

But I had to show someone.

Gregg

Update: 42 bids. Average bid $31 and “Eye4Details” canceled the job. She probably thought $30 was too high. You can go to the site by clicking on the graphic. Look at the other jobs she has posted and try to figure out what she does. Everyone has their niche I guess.

GL

Today I was publicy but lightly rebuffed by @baldheretic for having the words “Social Media Marketer” in my Twitter bio. His tweet: If your twitter bio says “Social Media Marketer” and you follow me you are likely to get denied and blocked like @greggluhring just did.”

I had just followed the chickenshit man because he was touted (maybe by himself) as a “Social Media Expert.” I did not ask him anything that would allow him to deny me anything. And the fact that he blocked me just showed me and the world that he was able to dish it out but was not willing to take it. By blocking me he effectively keeps me from replying to his twisted way of thinking. Usually you block someone if they are bothering you or if there’s a creepy situation like: they have no followers and are only following one person: You. I’ve blocked several people like that.

So what is the difference between a marketer and and expert? I call myself a marketer because I use the skills I’ve gained to help my clients in their marketing efforts mostly on the web. The things I’ve learned this year alone in Social Media would make most peoples’ heads spin. That’s why they hire me to do what I do. Because I understand and I have the aptitude in my skillset. I suppose you could call me an expert but I’m not so bold.

The man that calls himself an expert is an expert only in broad generalizations and blind classifications. Instead of Expert, I would call him a Social Media Dick. He kind of looks like one.

Aren’t blogs fun?

GL

While I was “studying” Pansy Warrior Princess from the previous post, I found this. This is a classic. Scary Mary…

Did you see her head spinning? I can’t imagine why I haven’t seen this before. Have you? Seen it?

If you know of other things out there that are so cool and bizarre please email me.

GL

I think I like it… Pansy Warrior Princess

GL

Music Non Stop

I put this blog up because I wanted to do something different. I had Red Record Box up for a couple of years but it was kind of spotty and sometimes I wanted to talk about other things besides music. So I can talk about music here if I want. (This week it’s Kraftwerk. Did you know that every album they put out had an English and a German version?)

And then about a month ago I got back into Twitter and I went from like 20 followers to 6500 in 30 days all because of this program/course that I bought called Twitter Traffic Machine. So that’s been fun and I learned a lot about how twitter works and how to find very targeted followers. But I am so busy at work that whenever I do twitter stuff I think about what else I could be doing to earn real money instead of affiliate money.

I did prove something to myself that I had wondered about for a long time. I proved that if you pick one of those money making marketing deals that you find all over the Internet and stick to it from beginning to end, you really can make some decent cash. And if I had the time to spare to be able to put together maybe 20 of those deals I could probably make a pretty good living off of it. The only thing is that I would probably have to work harder at all that than I do now at my real job and I can’t really imagine working more or harder than I already do. But I make enough right now off the Twitter Traffic Machine to put alittle extra cash in my pocket. I also learned so much from doing it all that I’ve been able to start help marketing my wife’s paper doll business on Twitter using pretty much the same methods for MyBarackObamaPaperDoll.

So… I forgot what I was going to complain about. Go buy the Twitter Traffic Machine and learn some cool stuff and make a little money too. Or buy a MyBarackObamaPaperDoll and have some fun with the President!

GL

If you are a Twitter addict and reading this, then you certainly found the best automated Twitter program ever released.

There are now dozens of applications for Twitter, with more coming down the pike every day. From simple posting applications to automatic content generators, the scope is enormous, so how do you choose the one that can help you to be most effective? Well that is what this review will try and explain, the answer to automating twitter and what the benefits are of using the Twitter Traffic Machine System.

Now it doesn’t matter if you have the latest product or the greatest website if it does not make you the kind of money that it should. This can only happen through traffic to your website, and With Twitter Traffic Machine it easily solves the problem of bringing in unique visitors to your websites.

Whether you already have an existing online business, or just starting one, you can use this software to easily generate many more sales and leads. Traffic equals sales, and when you use Twitter Traffic Machine the whole process becomes automated.

Bill Crosby is the inventor of Twitter Traffic Machine and he swears by his product and so do many other undeniable Twitter addicts”. If this machine didn’t work why would some many of the top Tweeters and Gurus of the internet be using this system. The answer is simple, because it works!

Check out the link below to see if there are any bonuses or discounts offered on the Twitter Traffic Machine right now.

Visit Site: Twitter Traffic Machine Website

Written By: Paul Conor

via Website Review | Is It a Scam Info | Rip Off or Not Exposed: Twitter Traffic Machine Review – Automated Twitter Traffic.

Twitter is the new social media push with our clients. We have a couple of early adopter clients that are getting into it; The Ephraim Inn in Ephraim, Wisconsin and The Egg Harbor Lodge from, of course, Egg Harbor.

In my second post about MyBarackObamaPaperDoll.com I don’t even know who that guy is. It’s not me. I think it’s a friend of my niece’s at a tavern downtown Chicago. Or it could be someone that sent their picture in to Barb with their MyBarackObamaPaperDoll as part of a contest she’s running.

Speaking of the photo contest, Barbara was just in Madrid visiting our daughter at school, and she’s got a bunch of really good photos of Barack enjoying the museums and restaurants of central Spain.

Anyway, Follow me on Twitter and maybe I’ll show you how to make a lot of money just by having fun.

Gregg

This is not Barbara

Barack Obama has been spotted in Door County, Wisconsin. That’s thanks to Artist/Cartoonist Barbara Luhring and her new products at MyBarackObamaPaperDoll.com.

Luhring, of Sister Bay, in Door County, Wisconsin and her sister Beth Anderson have been busy lately dealing with the brainstorming, creation and fullfillment by US Mail of the MyBarackObamaPaperDoll starter kits.

More to come…

Gregg

Door County Superhighways

This, my first real post here, is an experiment to see how many days it will take to show up in a “Door County, Wisconsin” Google Alert.

Because my company, 3W Design Group, is based in Door County, we have quite a few Door County clients.

For the past year we have been nagging on our clients to get with it and start blogging. There is no way faster to get your business in the Google pages than to blog. (verb) There have been points in the last 8 or 9 months where we will post in the morning and show up in a Google alert that same day. More recently we’ve been seeing a 2 to 3 day lag. This is still not close to bad. If you happen to keep up on things like this as we do, you’ll recall that it wasn’t more that 2 years ago that it would take a Door County business from 3 to 9 months before showing up in even a terrible ranking position of 100 or more.

On a different note, every web site owner in Door County wants to show up in Google when someone types in “Door County.” So (I’m guessing here) let’s say there are 500 business web sites in the county. There are 480 of those sites (sorry) that will not make it to the first page, or top 20. That presents quite a dilemma, hey? You need to email my wife and partner Barb. She’s got solutions for you.

So anyway, check back soon. Hopefully I’ll be reporting my results on this test early tomorrow. By the way, I didn’t do anything in this post or to my blog that you can’t do or I can’t help you do. No big tricks here. This has to be simple so we all can get our piece of the Google Door County pie!

Gregg