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I was reading through one of the love and relationship articles on my website, when I noticed one of the ads on the side.

I glanced at it with a little inner chuckle. It was advertising love and love potions–and they were guaranteed. I scrolled on down, double checking my article for spelling and appearance. As I scrolled back up, I confronted the same ad for love potions again with a fresh thought.

I was struck with the picture of an advertisement on the internet for love through a love potion. The ridiculousness of the thought turned into a hilarious thing to me in a moment.

Here we are with the technology to interact at a world wide level with people from all walks of life in an instant. Was it not a strange irony to find this extreme technology being used to advertise a love potion?

With just a very little thought, I can force this question into realms of human spiritualism, belief systems, and Harry Potter style uses of technology that seem the very heart of irony.

We have come so far, not to have come so far.

Or, perhaps, we want technology to enhance what makes us human rather than remove it.

Well, I don’t know about love potions, but I do know a few folks that find the love and relationship in their life with this technology. And, like anything, just as many use it for false love and relationships.

It seems we can’t create anything good that isn’t all at once as bad as it is good. But, it isn’t the creation. It is the user.

So, do love and be loved. Find a relationship and give to it. Use whatever you have as a good tool in good hands. Love through technology is as magical as all the love potions ever were. To many of us older folks, these levels of technology are rather magical in themselves.

Regards.

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Don’t want to read? Click here: gamehouse.com,

Several years ago, I started an online business. I made just enough money with that business to reclaim my online investments and to keep me interested in doing business online.

In the course of tweaking my websites, I learned a great deal about Search Engine Optimizations.

A couple of years ago, I had a personal financial collapse. It had nothing to do with my online businesses. But, I pulled out of everything so we could pull ourselves out of disaster. You can read a little about that here.

This year in january of 2006 I started playing with getting online again. I was chatting with a programmer online about his work. He mentioned his online experience with games. I went to a site where game programmers got together. It seemed there was a chance to make good money programming and selling games through affiliate programs and online publishers.

I used to mess around with games programming quite a bit, just for fun. So, I started writing a game.

Well, I’m not a person who wants to spend a year of effort in something without testing the market first. So, I thought I would find a game publisher and join as an affiliate. I had used Google Adwords before. So, I was able to get up and running right away.

I knew the power of offering free things from my marketing before. So, I looked for a Free Game and online Game source that was totally free.

I also knew exactly what I wanted in a web host. I wanted unlimited bandwidth if I could find it, free domain parking, free domain name, and free sub-domains. Well, 999 gigabytes of bandwidth turns out to be impossible for me to use in a month, so that was as good as unlimited bandwidth to me–plus 50 gigs of storage. I found everything I needed plus an extremely easy setup console and 24/7 toll free support at BlueHost.com It’s absolutely the best host I have ever used. This blog was an easy few clicks to setup. It was all automated. They have every kind of site you could imagine just a few clicks to setup. I highly recommend them.

So, then I setup my free games and online games site from gamehouse.com.

It was a snap.

I started using adwords for traffic. After I tweaked my ads, I was able to turn a profit advertising gamehouse.com, free games, online games, download games, etc.

So, I kept programming my own free game with more levels available. Also, I was thinking about how to place links to more free games, and to my gamehouse.com site inside the free version of my game. This would make it viral. All the while, I was looking for more effective ways to advertise.

That’s when I came across information about the success bloggers were having with traffic to their websites. Naturally there were plenty of new sources for income that this kind of free traffic made available. That’s when I started this site you’re reading right now. I just started typing original content I thought others would like.

BANG! The first month there were over 11,000 pages read. I couldn’t believe it. That was absolutely free, not a penny spent on traffic.

And, that’s when my old page optimization knowledge kicked in. I’ve been seeing most of my articles listing on the first or second page in the major search engines. I still can’t believe it. But it’s true. Every time the search engines visit my pages and update, I’m amazed at the new searches that find my site.

Now, I’m scrambling to find the best ads and advertisers for the blog as well as the free games and online games. There’s so many ways to make money online now. It’s hard to believe.

This time around, I have every confidence of being able to retire with this in a couple of years.

It’s really fun this time. And, writing articles for traffic instead of paying for traffic makes for an incredible ROI. And the beauty of this, is each article is a new way to be found in a search. I’m ranging anywhere from 5 to 300 visitors per day per article. Write it once, get traffic forever! I love it.

Regards.

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If you work for a company that does any fabrication and has more than one hundred employees, then you have most surely heard of lean manufacturing.

I won’t give a full explanation for the unschooled, but here is a short description of lean manufacturing:

The main feature is the goal to eliminate all waste of any kind from every aspect of the business:
• customer relations
• product design
• supplier network
• factory management

The principles applied in a lean enterprise can be stated simply:
• Zero waiting time
• Zero Inventory
• Scheduling — internal customer pull instead of push system
• Batch to Flow — cut batch sizes
• Line Balancing
• Cut actual process times.

Once you have your employees on board and understanding lean principles, there are very few enemies left to overcome in a working lean manufacturing environment.

I have discovered two major enemies in our business to lean manufacturing.

We have some lines in our product stream that are very friendly to lean principles. They have very similar, repetitive assembly and processing functions.

One difficult fabrication area has two real problems.

1) Extreme Variation.
2) Short Runs.

Extreme variation is a problem in lean manufacturing because it is perhaps the anti-type to lean manufacturing principles. A well functioning lean product stream attempts to remove all variation. When this is impossible, the next step is to standardize the processing of the variation–effectively minimizing the negative impact of any variation that is inherent in the product. The variation in this fabrication area isn’t bad variation. I’m talking about the difference in one part from another, not poor designs or bad components.

This leads to the second problem, though part of the first problem. Our average production run in this problem area is less than ten units per run. We started trying to look for similar products on different work orders in an attempt to reduce the variation–treating them like a single run. We had very little success with this. Why?

1) Huge Product Line.
2) Extremely Short Lead Time.

The huge product offering keeps similar products separated more often than not.
The short lead time keeps us from being able to schedule similar products together. The first work order usually can’t wait for the similar product on another work order. One day turn around for custom built units happens every day.

We will not abandon continuing to make this better. In fact, we are far from exhausting this effort.

I think the next step for us in lean manufacturing for this problem area will be a heavy effort aimed at treating the processing of small runs like the product itself.

In other words, short runs have a bulk of the percentage of effort into getting them out the door wrapped up in their processing. A gain in cleaning up the processing is as good as a gain in fabrication in the net result.

Combined with this, I want to get standardized work and work stations established to the max in this area. We have had a very busy season that kept us from fully implementing all that we want.

Also, we still have a lot of material movement to streamline.

Lean Manufacturing is the only way to go. It is, however, quite challenging in some situations.

It will be interesting to see the hybrid approach these problems fashion over the next few years.

Maybe I’ll write the new version of lean manufacturing for the anti-widget industry someday.

Regards.

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When I first started working where I have worked for eighteen years now, there was a guy running one of the departments that used to really bug me.

The business we are in has an extreme pressure for quick turn-around. We are often called upon to stretch our manufacturing capabilities as well as push the threshold for how we assemble and what materials we use and what, exactly, we can do with materials and processes.

Well, back when I first started, I was mister gun-ho. I was always running around getting extreme things done in departments that had said, “We can’t do it.” I received several awards in those days and moved up quickly.

Over the years, I continued to make it happen. I still make it happen all these years later.

However, these days, I often say, “We can’t do it.”

I keep waiting for some young gun-ho person to come along and make things happen I just said, “We can’t do.”

After a while, you get tired of the seventy hour weeks.

Now, I’m just like the guy that used to really bug me. It’s a shame. But, we have to find a comfortable place to live for the long haul. I wonder what cool thing or process hasn’t been developed because we want to go home and hug the kids?

It’s one of those ironies of necessity for living a real life. We have to give it up to have it.

In some ways, I still long for the days when I always thought I could fix this–this being the lumbering processes of a large fabrication facility.

I still can fix it. But, you know what I say instead?

“We can’t do it.”

Regards.

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