Aaron Ewer

In this part of the country, August will be the hottest, with high humidity and temperatures that can range from the upper 80’s to triple digits. Last year there was a full week of temperatures that topped 100 degrees and very little rain, which brought about water shortages in various parts and an outcry for fans and room air conditioners for the homeless and disadvantaged.

This year we have been lucky to have most days in the 80’s and only a few in the 90’s. At the moment it is 92 degrees with dark skies and the stillness in the air that precedes the summer thunder storms. The hot weather doesn’t usually other me much, but the air conditioning in my car has gone out, making the commute a little uncomfortable.

I took the car to my mechanic and had him run a check on the A/C system. That set me back 4 hours and $80 for the diagnostics and a squirt of freon. But the truth is, the condenser is on its last legs and my mechanic says I need a new one ASAP. He says he can’t even guarantee that the air conditioning compressor will last the rest of summer. But hold on to your wallet, folks - the estimate for him putting in a new one is $1,800.

This sent me right to the internet to check out the prices of an a/c compressor for my car. Found a site with a handy search tool and I went right to the page with information on the BMW AC compressor. Now that I see the cost for just the compressor runs about $500 I’m not so worried about the repair estimate. But this also gives me the information I need to go back and haggle with my mechanic to get the price down.

If you have any tips on shopping for a/c compressors and getting them fixed, give me a shout. For now, I’ve found a decent web site for parts pricing and that’s worth checking out if you are having the same problems that I’m having.

Back in the early days of the internet, it was an adventure finding email providers and deciding which email to use. Sometimes you would have two or three emails from different providers. I lost a couple of good ones, for various reasons, but usually because if you changed your internet service provider you would lose the associated email address.

Now every seems to be getting blogs and personal web sites. Although the kids or interested in the social networking sites, the adults seem more interested in something a little more sophisticated and don’t seem to mind paying a small reasonable fee for hosting services. There are a lot of affordable hosting services, and each one has different features or advantages.

To find your way through the maze of web hosting services, I found a site that reviews and rates the different sites. They have a list of the top hosting sites, in a chart format that shows different rates and features. A nice added touch is that site reviews and that users can add their own ratings. I like the way the users themselves can write the web hosting rating, not a paid promotional item. This gives you a little better insight into the good and the bad.

Forgive me for bragging a little bit, but I have always been so proud of my son for his work as a DJ. Our family has always been involved in the music business. My grandfather was a piano player for the silent movies back in the 1920’s and played the piano for thousands of events, like variety shows, beauty pageants, juke joints, and all kinds of dance jobs from weddings to sweet 16 birthday parties. My father played every instrument out there until he damaged his fingers on his left hand and couldn’t hold down the chords on a guitar anymore. So he played mostly piano and put together an orchestra aka the Ricky Ricardo Orchestra of the 1950′2. Later on, he managed several bands and handled the entertainment for a large pizza chain.

I took piano lessons for years but worked as a DJ for years for extra money. When possible, I would take along my son to help tote the gear into the venue and if it was an event for kids, I would let him choose the music, cue up the tapes, and eventually do some work on the microphone. When he got older, he started his own DJ company and has been thriving ever since. So that makes 4 generations of music in our family so far.

My son pays a lot more attention to the mechanics of music than I do. He actually mixes his own CDs and does editing, voice overs, and other technical things using the computer. He’s a big fan of a new software called MOV that lets him convert video files to MP3 format and lots of other features. It works with video, CDs and DVDs.

The mov converter does other cool things, like video editing, 30+ special effects and color adjustment operations. If you are into these technical things with video and audio, you should probably get this converter or at the very least check out their site. Even with the little bit that I know about this, I was impressed.

I’ve been percolating on a business idea that involves advertising for small businesses and I think the time is getting ripe to launch it in the next year or two. I won’t go into the details here, but it involves a custom made display for use in regional malls and I think I finally came up with the design that would work for my idea.

I’ve been looking at the mall kiosks and pushcarts and know that what they have available at the malls now won’t really adapt well for my use. So I started looking online for companies that make displays and found the Godfrey Group. I like their web site because it has lots of photos and good ideas of what other people have designed and use for their businesses. Of course, most of what is out there was designed for trade show displays. But I think it can be easily adapted for use in the malls, too.

I clicked on their tab for custom designs and found a lot of good information. And the Godfrey Group has a best price guarantee. So I can’t go wrong working with the Godfrey Group to fine tune my display design and get my new business launched early next year.

I’ve always liked maps and I love Google Maps. I even learned how to use Google Earth and love the way you can tilt and rotate the satellite version to get a different perspective on the locations.

There have been a lot of interactive maps developed that are based on Google Earth, which must be very gratifying to the people at Google who have been developing and working on this really cool feature. Some of the west coast newspapers have created maps of the California fires and making clickable information balloons to give details of each fire, such as acreage affected, percent contained, and links to photos. There are also earthquake maps and user generated multi-location maps of a variety of topics, such as all the NASCAR tracks, the most popular theme parks, and other cools things.