CarltonBale.com

I happened upon the site WebSiteOptimization.com and started testing the performance of my site. I was astounded by how long it would take to load the front page of my site over a 14.4 kbps modem connection. True, not many people use a modem connection anymore, but still, 130 seconds is a long time to [...]

A few months ago, I noticed I was approaching my bandwidth limits on my hosting account. Switching hosting providers is a pain, so I decided to move some high-bandwidth graphics to Amazon S3, where the bandwidth is cheap and unlimited. All was well until I realized that Google was returning search results pointing to my [...]

I needed a new server case due to Antec P180 case becoming much to cramped. After reading many positive forums posts about the Cooler Master Stacker cases, I made my purchase. Here are my thoughts.
To be clear, this is the older Stacker 810 case, not the newer Stacker 830 Evolution. I think the 810 [...]

I recently needed to share some open source files via BitTorrent and wanted to host them on my Amazon S3 account.  For those of you familiar with S3, here is the short-answer: add ?torrent to the end of the URL of a public-shared file to get the *.torrent file, so the link would be http://s3.amazonaws.com/your_bucket_name/your_file_name?torrent
If [...]

I noticed a weird charge on my credit card from "Mnesvc Inc Seattle" on 9/1. I initially thought it was a fradulent charge, but it was for less than $2, so I was a little confused. After a little more research, I found that Mnesvc [...]

After two years of use, it's time to say farewell to my Palm Treo 650 and start looking for a new phone; this is my longterm wrap-up review. I've used a Palm OS device for the past 8 years. The OS is ancient and hasn't received any significant updates in years, but even [...]

As I stated in an earlier post, Google Reader is the best RSS Feed Reader on the Internet. However, it is not perfect. And the more I use it, the more potential for improvement I see. Here is my list of what I'd like to see changed with Google Reader:

Lack of Different Default Views [...]

I received a flyer in the mail yesterday from DirecTV. It was touting their newest MPEG-4 HD receivers or the 100 new HD channels they will be launching in the next couple of weeks. No, it was promoting features that will be available in a TiVo software update in early 2008!
This is pretty surprising, first [...]

I received my new Lenovo Thinkpad T61 and I've had a couple of days to play around with it. In summary, it is one awesome piece of hardware; this is the best laptop I've used. Unfortunately, it's not perfect. Windows Vista looks beautiful, but it's pretty slow and unreliable as compared to XP. Also, battery [...]

If you're like me, you probably registered a few extra domain names over the years and never got a chance to do anything with them. They just sit there and you keep paying annual renewal fees. While renewing one such domain name, I noticed that GoDaddy.com now offers a service that they call Cash Parking.  [...]