Everyone has one right? Even those adults amongst you. There’s no point in denying it. Whether you want something outrageous, something more practical, or a trip to Florida, there’s no doubt there’s something that you’d like. Me? Well, as some of you may know, using my own money, and some that family are giving me for my birthday, I’m buying a pretty swish $3,500 PC, with Windows Vista Ultimate, and Office 2007 Student edition. It’s a snazzy piece of kit, and is due to arrive tomorrow. Thought I’d warn you about the entourage of pictures coming! Hopefully Nate, my hoster won’t mind.

Anyhow, here’s my birthday list. It’s not till this coming Thursday, February 15th, but I think I have justification to post it up now.

Things I’ve asked for that I know I’m getting?

1) Socks

2) PC Games

3) Money

4) A New Surge Protector

Things I won’t be getting which I’d love?

1) Macromedia Studio 8 - Student Edition (£75 from Amazon)

2) Adobe Creative Suite Premium - Student Edition (£175 from Amazon)

3) Microsoft Student 2007 (£52 from Amazon)

And of couple of games which I’m too lazy to mention.

Zi Media is sorta like the parent company that owns Techzi. Why? Well, we’re hoping to launch a whole new range of ‘Zi’ blogs, so it’s only fitting that I register the domain, ZiMedia.net - Which I have done. Not much there currently, other than the standard error 404 page, but it itself with time, will have a company blog, as well as various pages providing overviews of the blogs we operate.

NOTE: Before the other ‘Zi Media’ made their presence known on the net, we were already live and running, operating under this name. They were though admittedly, without our knowledge operating before us. However, we’ve come to an agreement that should hopefully benefit us both in the long-run, and we will both continue to operate under the trademark, but independently, with neither sides pushing charges against the other.

I have a new title now… Spiffy, huh?

David Wilkinson
Founder of Zi Media
http://www.zimedia.net/
http://www.techzi.net/

Booyah! JohnChow.com - The spiffy entrepreneurial life of… You guessed it. John Chow. From his unique insights onto Canada’s best gourmet restaurants, to random things like Wordpress plugins & getting the most our of your RRSP, John has you covered. I’m posting this review on the photoshopped car-maniac, simply because I can, and because there’s an A-Rate linkback in it. Perhaps I’ll have to try a similar scheme myself, as it seems to be working…

Good grief… This guy’s smart. He’s brought so much into blogging aswell. From the ‘AdSense Pinging’ that he started with Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net, (You know that guy who brought me fame and fortune?) to his spiffy bribary competitions. What’s that you say? Well every couple of weeks, John sticks up a challenge, or a competition on his webpage, asking you guys, his loyal readers (as of now, here ye, here ye), to help out his blog in the rankings. Whether it’s adding JohnChow.com to your MyBlogLog community list or to your Technorati Favorites, John possesses an uncanny marketing ability, and is using it to squeeze the living daylights out of the blogosphere.

In a good way. What do me and John have in common? Almost everything. Even the seagulls love us. As it happens, we’re both evil masterminds too. (Yet to be confirmed by the Evil Mastermind Committy)

In short, if you love me, you’ll like John… Or was it the other way round? Heck… John, you’ll have to make do.

I’m on the verge of signing up with ReviewMe, Feedvertiser & Text-Link-Ads. Whether I’ll end up using any of them is another question, but it’s something I’ve been planning on for a while now, and when I saw the ‘Booyah!’ advert on ProBlogger.net, my memory was jogged into hysterical overdrive.

Truth be told, much as I love blogging, part of the reason I do it is for the money, even if it’s not the main reason. I admit it… I blog for you guys and if I can make cash at the same time, why shouldn’t I?

Just as we thought we were about to launch Techzi, we ran into a whole host of bugs, errors, issues, browser incompatibilities, and general bad fortune. This included me going down with the “24-hours sickness bug”. Supposedly this lasts 24 hours.

I’ve had it since Tuesday evening. It’s not Thursday evening. I hereby re-name it the “48 hours and en-counting sickness bug”. Far more accurate in my case.

Nasty stuff anyhow… Sorry about the delays. Anyhow, I can confirm that we have got ourselves the first set of sponsors for the Techzi Re-Launch competition. We expect this to get hundreds, if not thousands of entrants. So how do you win? Simple!

More details coming soon, but at current, there’s several hundred dollars worth of merchandise up for grabs. Some great news I suppose.

If humans are causing global warming, and global warming is causing the demise of the Internet, and humans are fueling the Internet with knowledge, yet at the same time destroying it through our wreckless actions, then what do we do? What does this mean? How can we stop it? How can we save the Internet? I don’t know about you guys, but I’m confused. ‘In a mega-pickle’ I suppose…

So what can we do? Be green? Listen to our piggy nosed scientists? Buy the fancy new H2O emitting car? Who knows… We’re in trouble though. I care about the Internet, so perhaps I’ll take note.

After my very sarcastic ‘Great day!’ post earlier, it turns out that actually, today has been great! With the help of 22-year old entrepreneur, Nate Whitehill, I now have my own Media Temple hosting, courtesy of InfinFX! Wordpress has now been set-up there fully, and you can see the test page anywhere at Techzi.net! Now just the Wordpress/Layout/PHP integration to go!

Heck… Today has rocked! Thanks for making it all happen Nate. I seriously owe you a big one. Put it there man! He stayed up till 3:50 AM last night helping me! Not to mention the fact that he got back up again six hours later! Customer satisfaction? I’ll give him an 11 (That’s out of 10)!

Looking to setup a website? Looking to get hosting? Want a new layout? Want a fully customizes Wordpress theme? Nate’s the man!

He also showed me this rather amusing cake too… Very nice. Apple lawyers, you on standby?

I present to you, the Apple iPhlake! (Sorry for the chocolatey pun… Ya’ know. Cadbury flakes? Gee… Nevermind. iPhone, iCake, so iPhlake? Oh forget it…) Bet it was strawberry jam sponge though… They don’t do all that much Apple jam round my way.

The blog’s had a great day! I’ve lost my e-mail account, the blog has been down for several hours, and I’ve succesfully mashed up pretty much everything! If you don’t get a response to any of your e-mails, you know why… They haven’t actually come. They won’t come either… Pretty poo, huh?

Please excuse the incredibly large, melodramatic ‘Red X’ too.

NOTE: Google just informed me that there will be a power outage on my blog server at 11AM PST too… Brilliant.

These past two or three days, I’ve not had much time for Techzi admittedly. What started off as a wild idea, has really impacted on me, and now I’m taking it as seriously as Techzi. This idea is big. This startup is big. This will be big. If any of you in the magazine/newspaper/printing/publishing industry are interested, let me know who you are, and where you work.

I’m teaming up with some of the biggest names in Blogging for this one. They’re attacking my ideas and contributing themselves, and at the moment, it looks great.

By the way, I should really credit Tony Hung for the b5media logo. Don’t be getting any ideas from it yet either… Nothing official has been said yet. Kinda…

Last night, once I’d left my PC to do homework, 11-year old blogger, Timothy Williams, wrote a post on Techzi, asking for money. He stated that he wanted to ‘get rich quick’ and was hoping that you guys would willing to give him money.

At Techzi, we have a moderation system. Our writers make posts, then save them as drafts, for me to moderate and post if I see fit. Unless there is some really hot news which one of our writers think is a ‘must-post-now’ article, then it should be saved as a draft.

Not what Timothy did! Without my knowledge or consent, he wrote the post, asking for money from you guys, and to me, from what he’d written, it sounded like I was endorsing it. I assure you that neither myself, Techzi, or any of the other guys here were affiliated with that whatsoever. Timothy’s post, and account have been deleted. Whether this will be a temporary measure, it remains to be seen, but once we move to Wordpress, I have decided that ALL posts will be moderated to avoid any incidents like this.

I hope the few thousand of you who visited Techzi last night weren’t put off by this, and we apologize profusely. Timothy abused our trust, my trust, and attempted to gain financially from it. He knew the rules… He broke them.

I’m waiting for him to come back online now to see if we can sort something out. That said, I have to admit I’m rather worried about both my blog’s reputation with you guys, and what lasting effects it will have. I’m not sure if any of you guys donated to Timothy or not, as I deleted the post from school, where I noticed it, and where flash wasn’t installed. Sorry about all this!

On a side note, Timothy succesfully dropped our main feed subscribers by 21 in less than 10 hours. Congratulations man… You’ve done me proud.