Created by OnePlusYou

I am a sad robot junkie.

In the early 1970s the Russians followed the American jet train research by sticking two Yak-40 turbo-jet engines to the lead car of an ER22 train. The SVL (high-speed laboratory car) was intended to be used on the Troika Express and during testing is was able to reach speeds of 180mph (250km/hr)..

Like it’s American counterpart it never really went any further than that.. We can only guess, but I suspect that the only more expensive than trying to fly over dirt would be trying to fly over dirt on rails.. Jet fuel costs, noise levels, and probably just the fact that this is plane old silly contributed to the closing of the programs in both countries..

It’s a real shame that when projects like this end there is no budget for storing them for later viewing.

I love weird tech, and it’s really hard to beat the weirdness that the cold war created here and in Russia.. I grew up at the tail end of the cold war that Ronald Reagan, all praise his name, helped bring to an end while I was still in high school.. Anyway, where was I?? Oh, right, jet powered trains.. Really, jet powered trains..

In 1966 New York Central converted a Rail Diesel Car in to a jet powered train by adding a pair of General Electric J47-19 turbojet engines.. Normally these engines sit under the wing tip of a Convair B-36D intercontinental bomber.

To help the train cut through the air better a large nose was added to the train. Apparently it was pretty fast too. It reached 184mph on it’s way to Ohio. Not too bad for a train in the 60s..

The jet trains don’t end here. I found a Russian version made just a few years later.. But more on that in a few days..

Wow, look at all the categories this one drops in to.

Just a quick note to let the loyal readership, all three of you, that I’ve decided to expand my company again and branch out from a single customer jeweler / web guy and hang out my developer shingle again..

Large Orange Pop is the name of my new internet marketing company and will be a sub division of SG Design Studio.. I’ll be offering internet market help, SEO, and web development as appropriate and needed.. While I have no real intention to stop “doing the jewelry thing” I find I miss the fun of helping build up a new business online and look forward to working 90 hours a week again.. Well, maybe not that last part so much..

I expect the marketing / SEO parts of this website to be absorbed in to LOP shortly, and hopefully this site will go back to being a little more fun with some geek stuff and generic weirdness..

I’m off to get my intravenous caffeine port hooked up -

I suppose that a necessary evil of ranking well is hunting out links for your website.. And with more and more webmasters getting very tight with the link you end up forced in to looking more and more at link directories.. But how to find decent directories to use??

I started a new directory of directories the way they should be done the other day at DirectoryRecap.. The directories are grouped by type and they have a rating system to allow people to rank them in a 5 star system.. Also included is the PR and Alexa rankings of each directory number of inbound links and more.. All updated roughly weekly, of course.. Between the listings and the ratings it can be a pretty straight forward process to find the good directories to submit to..

On top of that, we are also providing the entire directory listing, broken down in to niches and categories in a DigiXMas format.. You can download the list from us and dump it straight in to digi for doing your link submissions.. How much easier can we make it??

I also found a decent Deep Link Directory as well.. It’s run by a friend of mine so it wasn’t very hard to find.. It’s not much right now, but the deep links are cheap and I know that he is putting a lot of effort in to it to make it a useful resource.. For $2 it’s kind of hard to complain in either case..

If you know of any other good link building resources feel free to let me know without being a spam whore about it..

Ok, so I may not be completely up to speed on all things Wordpress so a lot of people already know about and use this great title tool.. But I just discovered it and wanted to share the love a little more..

The SEO Title Tag plugin for Wordpress allows you to override the default titles for pages and posts, and allows you to have decent titles on your pages.. Best of all it can be used to strip the blog name from the individual posts and pages allowing for a much cleaner title..

SEO Title Tag for Wordpress

Tab Mix Plus

One of my biggest complaints with tabbed browsing in Firefox has been the inability to right click a tab and open it in a new browser.. Tab Mix solves this and several other issues for me..

Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.

Definitely a good add-on to add to FireFox.

I really have stayed away from eBay for several years simply because I have almost no self control.. And there are so many cool robots there

But maybe this is a good thing.. If I only buy things with money I make from selling off what is left of the old comic book store, then maybe I won’t get beat in my sleep by my wife.. Maybe..

Anyway, you can find me over at eBay http://myworld.ebay.com/feydakin or you can read my new eBay blog over at http://blogs.ebay.com/feydakin .. Now let’s just hope I still have a place to sleep once the wife finds out that I’m on eBay again..