I guess hitting refresh just wasn’t satisfying enough today.

Use this link to sign up for Empire Avenue and make me virtually rich. That means fake, online rich on only one website, if you were wondering.

I guess I should go find someone to buy shares in.

First up are some personal finance articles regarding the new 2011 tax numbers released each year by the IRS. Some of these numbers change every year, like the 2011 mileage rate, that varies according to the average gasoline prices during the year. Others change according to either new tax laws, or specifications within the existing tax laws such as the Roth IRA income limits 2011.

Some tax numbers are linked to the rate of inflation, so they go up some years, and even down in other years. One number that many people are interested in now that 2010 taxes have been filed and they are looking forward to do advanced tax planning for 2011 is the standard deduction 2011.

Of course, good 2011 tax tricks and advice isn’t all just about what the new IRS tax numbers are for the year. There are plenty of important income tax deductions to look for. Saving receipts and buying the right things at the right time can go a long way toward lowering the taxes you pay each year.

Once you know all of that helpful tax advice you still have to actually do your taxes. I’ll be scheduling some upcoming tax articles an things like how to do your income taxes yourself and which tax software is the best for small business owners and other types of people. After all, we’re all in the same boat. The only two things in life that are certain are death and taxes.

What is not certain is how much we have to pay in taxes and the wiser and better informed taxpayer is the lowest income tax paying taxpayer.

Good luck in 2011 and beyond, everyone.

First up, is photography settings basics and more that is a nice linking article to a lot of other digital photography information. A while back I wrote some other articles about digital camera settings including this one about shutter priority mode and this one about portrait photography techniques.

There is plenty of other good stuff about photography techniques and picture taking tips. I like to focus on digital photography because I never really got good at taking pictures until after I got a nice Canon digital SLR that finally let me not only use all of the camera settings, but allowed me to take enough pictures to really learn about photography.

Of course, few things taught me more about photography than building a home photography studio and using a simplified portrait lighting setup to take beautiful pictures of people with a digital camera.

On the more technical side and with a slight legal twist, I also researched and wrote about how to copyright a photograph. As it turns out, the answer is pretty straightforward. Your photos are copyrighted the moment you take them. Of course, how you protect that copyright and whether or not you can collect reasonable damages if copyright infringement ever occurs, is a different matter.

I have tons of other photography articles published there with plenty of useful photography tips and advice. Just click on one of the links above and check it out.  Then, click my name if you like and see what else I have written up.

And, of course, as always, you can check out my professional freelance writing website which is the home of my own freelance writing business.

Have fun out there taking pictures, or reading new stuff. Either way, your life will be richer and fuller.

Before we go too far, we’ll start with a gratuitous reference to one of my article published elsewhere about Citibank ThankYou rewards. Now, moving on…

Unlike most people, I am a professional writer. That means that every day, my writing gets graded, just like when you were back in high school. My grader is not a school teacher trying to ensure that my writing is correct enough to get a passing grade on the state’s standardized writing text, but rather an editor who

a) knows just as much about correct English grammar and punctuation as any writer,

b) may very well have an advanced degree in either English or Writing,

c) probably could teach most high school English teachers a thing or two about grammar

Oh, yeah and:

d) decides whether or not the grammar I use in the writing I turn into him or her is good enough to accept my work and pay me, or that it needs to be edited and corrected before it is good enough to accept and pay me.

In other words, grammar matters to me. A lot.

That means that not only have I learned a lot about writing and grammar over the years, but I keep learning new rules and guidelines because there always seems to be another way to write something that does not fall among the rules and standards that I already know.

Long story, short – I do my best to not correct other people’s grammar no matter how terrible and I struggle each day to hit Cancel or Delete before pointing out that “your” means something that belongs to you, while “you’re” means you are.

That being said, today, I found myself on the, “Hey, wait a minute, is that right?” end of my own writing.

First came spell-check’s red squiggly underline beneath the word “triaging.” Fair enough. I’ve never looked it up. Maybe the ‘e’ is supposed to be left on the end of the word before adding the ‘ing.’  It’s unusual, but not unprecedented.

However, that spelling, “triageing” came up with a red squiggly underline as well.

That sent me to Dictionary.com which has the word triage, but nothing about making it an active verb.

From there I went to Merriam Webster’s website who had nothing for me.

And, finally, to the actual, printed, hardcover dictionary in my bookcase. It too has no record of any such word.

For well over a year now, I have been telling people, often in writing, that I was “triaging my email,” which is my way of saying desperately trying to find, and take action on, all of the important emails while sorting the remaining email into their relative levels of importance ranging from important, but not urgent, all the way down to they’ll-get-over-it, and lastly, spam.

It seems that I have been making up a word.

That’s fine for rappers and high-school girls (“Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen.”) but not so great for writers. Although, you can have “jackassery” when you pry it from my cold dead hands. I don’t care what Merriam, Webster, or Mrs. Jones in 4th period English say.

The Bane of My Existence

Next up, was the spell checker overload when I finished a lengthy tirade in which I, somewhat comically, continuously re-used the word, “bane.” Unfortunately, I did not use the word, “bane” at all, but rather, “bain.” Oops.

No harm, no foul, here as it wasn’t something to be professionally submitted, but it brought a smile to may face anyway, particularly because about one-half of my friends couldn’t use the word in a sentence let alone be familiar enough with it to judge the mistaken spelling.

Be that as it may, we march on. Brian Nelson is out…

Lately, however, there haven’t been any short answer writing assignments on Demand Studios. I’ve checked by selecting the AnswerBag website as the “publisher,” which is where I understand most of the short answer questions and answers end up. I’ve also tried selecting “short answer” as the format, and just for grins, even tried searching for $3 assignments. All three screens of results showed up empty.

Maybe I’m blocked from writing those, maybe they just don’t have any writing opportunities in that category right now, or maybe I’m doing it wrong (not likely, it’s pretty simple).

Then again, maybe Demand Studios is not making any money off of those short answer articles, or maybe Google’s ranking algorithm is finally doing something to find good search results other than just matching the title tag and counting up the number of automated links programed to each article by big websites with lots of pages to point links from.

Either way, I wrote this instead of earning $6 or $9 while waiting for my friends to show up. No big deal, but if you add up the number of times I do that each month, it actually might cost me a hundred bucks or so

I guess that I’ll live. Maybe I can start using that time to find higher paying writing gigs to send resumes to instead.

Almost.

It all started with some business infrastructure problems in the form of an email server nightmare. I’ve always just used whoever was hosting my websites as my email provider and never thought any more about it than that. Once I had my email accounts setup in Thunderbird or another desktop email client like Zimbra, I made the terrible assumption that everything that hit my server was dutifully being passed along via IMAP or POP3.

I never bothered to re-check my POP3 settings for Gmail or my IMAP settings for other email accounts so long as email kept showing up in my email client. Unfortunately, just because some email was showing up, didn’t mean that all email was showing up. I probably lost out on some clients and had to do major damage control with some others.

Here are some of my recent published freelance writing articles at BrightHub.

Top 10 Windows 7 ScreenSavers

Windows 7 Media Center Review

Funny Thanksgiving Photos: Ideas & Tips

Sample Funeral Program Layout

Poems for Funeral Programs

Learn About Networking Windows 7 and XP

Solving Gmail Connection Problems

Tips for Creating a Funeral Program

Anyway, the moral of the story is to never take anything in your freelance writing business for granted. Check, double-check, and re-check.

Oh, and for your critical systems like email, you might want to consider paying a little extra for a specialized email provider with fully-skilled tech support waiting to not only help you if you notice something go wrong, but who can also proactively alert you if something might be going wrong.

Lesson learned.

Starting out with my own freelance published writings and websites, of course.

As a professional freelance writer I often tell new entrepreneurs just starting a freelance writing business to write what you know. For me, writing about home theater equipment reviews is an example of expanding upon writing what you know and moving on to writing about what you love.

You see, I have some nice home theater equipment, but obviously, there is a point where you don’t really purchase new things like Sony Wireless home theater speakers when you already have your own home theater wired up and running. On the one hand, that means that I can’t literally write a review of a Sony wireless home theater system like the ones created using Sony’s S-Air product. On the other hand, I know plenty about home theater systems in general thanks to researching high-quality home theater equipment with a good value price when buying my stuff, as well as just understanding the technology of electronics. Stuff like knowing if my reciever will handle 4 ohm speakers helps me be able to read between the lines on both manufacturer specifications and electronics reviews. That means an informed review of new home theater equipment is just a demo away.

To take it another step further, a freelance technology writer has to be good at filling in the blanks and being able to point out the pros and cons of some gadgets and other equipment just from what you can see on paper. Of course, I never represent that I have personal experience with something I have not actually seen in person.

In the end, writing is about communicating what you know, not about communicating everything there is to know. There is always room for another writer or technologist to fill in the gaps that may have been overlooked by me or another writer.

So, check out some of these home theater receivers and big screen televisions I have posted about and have a fun time putting together your own surround sound system and home theater setup.

Google Voice is a free service from the Big G that allows you to better manage your phone by enabling things that should have been offered for free by the major phone companies for years! Except, most of those things are ways to control who calls you and when they can call, which is not good news for companies that make tons of money connecting telemarketers long-distance and selling phone number lists to whoever wants to pay.

Fortunately, with Google Voice, you can now make your phone not ring after a certain time of day, or only allow friends and family to call after business hours. The boss gets voicemail if he calls at 6:30 PM.

Google Voice Review What Does Google Voice Do For You

Check it out. I’m sure that you will find Google Voice a powerful tool to help better manage not only your phone bill and family time, but for better time management overall.

While you are at it, check out Google Docs as a way to show friends or clients a rough sketch of what you are thinking about. Set up the presentation or document prior to calling and then nonchalantly say, “Can you get on the Internet?” Then show them what you got.

No, seriously.

I have an extraordinary list of bookmarks, tools, online services, web apps, bookmarklets, writing websites, research sites, plug-ins, utilities, applications, and (whew!) much more that make the life of the professional writer much easier. Unfortunately, a lot of it is on pieces of paper, or text files, or notes, or – more recently – in Microsoft Office OneNote 2010. Of course, many more are buried in the bookmarks of the four different browsers I use on a daily basis. Plus the top writing help sites and writing tools on the Internet which have special homes on my Speed Dial Groups (Firefox) and also on my Morning Coffee for Chrome and Morning Coffee for Firefox setups. I fired up this post to explain what was going to happen here: I am going to write some posts or pages with lists of tools professional writers use for productivity or research, as well as to get a start on that list by having a place to “dump” the ones that come to me on a onesie-twosie basis.

Some of the electronic writing gadgets, online writing tools, and software applications for writing I use have become so second nature to me that I forget that they are stand-alone apps and services that writers can use to improve writing quality and profitability. I wanted a place to be able to jot them down without them getting lost in my online writing bookmarks at Delicious or the like.

Best Writing Plugins For Firefox – Best Writing Extensions for Chrome

If you are unfamiliar with the latter two browser extensions, then consider this your reward for reading this far even though I told you at the beginning that you were too early to get the actual list of killer writing resources and best writer tools and software.

Speed Dial is a plugin for Mozilla Firefox that allows you to create a speed dial similar to the one in Opera and Google Chrome. The difference is that unlike Chrome, Speed Dial lets you manually set which websites get to be on the speed dial and in what order they are displayed. Furthermore, the Speed Dial plug-in for Firefox lets you create more than one speed dial. These are called Dial Groups and they appear as tabs across the top of the speed dials. This lets you configure workflow based speed dials, or dials for other purposes. For example, you could make a dial group for games with your top 9 gaming websites and another dial group for finding freelance writing gigs with your top 9 freelancing websites. Even better, you can change the default layout from a 3 x 3 layout to a 4 x 4 or even 6 x 8 or whatever you like. This is a huge bonus for those of use with big widescreen monitors that can clearly display a dozen or more top writing websites.

Morning Coffee extension for Chrome or the Morning Coffee plugin for Firefox offer a similar functionality as Speed Dial, but are designed instead to be configured not as a screen where you can select the one website you need to find and open, but rather as a way to open all of the websites you need for a particular function at once.

For example, if you search for writing jobs on the job boards on Tuesday mornings, you could setup a “Tuesday” Morning Coffee session that opens five or ten or twenty writing gig websites all at once. Then, if on Wednesdays you read a bunch of technology websites to stay on top of technology news in your capacity as a freelance technology writer, you can set a Wednesday Morning Coffee session to open a dozen tech review websites.