Do I really lead that sheltered of an existence? During one of my weekly dot com pho lunches with local bloggers and other internet entrepreneurs, I think I came across a water pitcher with three spouts for the first time.

When I displayed my mild state of shock to Ed Lau, he immediately pointed out my ignorance, utterly amazed at my level of amazement. He asked, and I paraphrase, “How is it possible that you have never seen a three-spout water pitcher? Have you been living under a rock this whole time?”

He then promptly whipped out his Apple iPhone to take the picture that you see above. Yes, I’m about as Chinese as it gets and that’s why my eyes disappear when I smile. OK, you can stop looking at my face now and start looking at the pitcher.

I can’t possibly be the only one who has never seen a pitcher with three spouts before. It’s a brilliant design, as you can surely tell, because the regular spout can be used for dispensing water, while the two side spouts can clunk out the ice. Stupendous. They didn’t even have these to accompany our $60 burgers.

Anyways, there you have it: a three-spout pitcher. One of mankind’s greatest achievements can be enjoyed next to a seven dollar bowl of Vietnamese noodles.

Although there’s a big backlash in the blogosphere over the whole PageRank bitch-slap fiasco, most people — myself included — still use many of Google’s services. I still log into my Gmail account on a daily basis, catching up with freelance writing clients and getting informed of any comments posted on Beyond the Rhetoric. Another part of my daily routine is to hop over to my Google Reader, the main application that I use to keep track of several RSS feeds.

As with all of the other Google services that are available on the ‘net, Google Reader periodically goes through an upgrade or two. A couple months ago, it learned to count past 100, letting me know if I had 101 or 531 remaining items to be read. Jumping into Google Reader yesterday, I discovered another trick that the old dog had learned. It may have been there for a while (or not), but I hadn’t noticed it until yesterday.

Since when did StumbleUpon and Google forge a relationship? I’ll admit that I’m not the first person to ask about corporate mergers and newfound agreements, but I thought that StumbleUpon had nothing to do with Google, just as Technorati has nothing to do with Alexa (as far as I know). That said, StumbleUpon has been a great source of traffic for certain blogs and I still get a trickle from time to time for certain articles.

Logging into my Analytics account (another Google service), I still see a few visitors to my Million Euro Wiki post via SU. I’m a little surprised, considering that I thought more people would be interested in how to insert Adsense into Million Euro Wiki. But I digress.

How much further will this integration go? When I’m within a particular post in Google Reader, will I then be able to submit it to StumbleUpon immediately? What about other social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us, Reddit, and Digg? Are those on the way too?

Strangely, I don’t always see those navigational links at the top of my Google Reader page. Sometimes, I’ll be presented with a blank white bar rather than links to Gmail, Calendar, Photos, and so on. What has your recent experience been with Google Reader? Are you pleased with the StumbleUpon integration? Will you stumble this post? Whatever the case, it doesn’t seem like anything is going to stunt Google’s growth.

Although I’ve been friends with Gary Jones from BlueFur Web Hosting for a few months now, I haven’t really made use of their hosting services until just recently. In fact, I didn’t purchase a hosting plan from BlueFur until I launched my fighting games blog. Well, seeing how even their cheapest hosting plan (the one I have) allows for an unlimited number of domains, I decided to finally migrate Beyond the Rhetoric over to their servers.

While I review all sorts of technological gizmos, I’m not as well-versed when it comes to coding and migrating websites. As such, I wasn’t 100% confident about the process of moving this blog (and my freelance writing site) from Dreamhost over to BlueFur. I asked for Gary for some instructions and it seemed simple enough.

As far as I can tell, the propagation is currently happening and I should have completely migrated within the next 24-72 hours. If you come across any strange 404 errors or other mishaps, please contact me. Also, if you’ve posted a comment in the last couple of days and it’s not showing up, it probably means that it’s stuck on the old server. Feel free to re-iterate your thoughts.

Along with the new hosting plan that I have with BlueFur, I also signed up for their affiliate program. Based on my experience thus far and the experience of other BlueFur customers (Ed Lau and John Chow are probably two of their better-known clients), I highly recommend BlueFur for all of your web hosting needs. Their servers are incredibly speedy (much faster than Dreamhost and GoDaddy in handling dynamic content) and uptime is absolutely top notch.

It’s not like I’m going to leave you guys with no incentive either. As part of their affiliate program, I am able to offer you a 10% discount off any hosting package. Simply enter the coupon code ilovepandas to receive your discount. It’ll automatically be taken off of your total bill.

Migrating the Wordpress blog to a new server was actually a lot less painful than I thought it was going to be. Naturally, transferring my static freelance writing site (MichaelKwan.com) was basically a cut-and-paste effort. I’ll write a dummy’s guide to migrating Wordpress blogs soon; I know I would have appreciated one.

On a semi-related note, I’d like to thank Matt for concocting some custom code for me. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’ve ditched the fugly .aspx extension on all of my posts, opting for a more universal Wordpress permalink scheme. Old backlinks still work because they’ve been redirected to the new URLs. Thanks Matt! I owe you big time.

Every time that I sit down to write one of these posts, I find it hard to believe that the week is already half over. Today is no exception and as we ease our way into the holiday season, I’ve unearthed some rather timely blog posts that talk about all sorts of things, ranging from the business of freelance writing to an interesting discovery in Africa that is sparking all sorts of controversy. Let’s see what the blogosphere has to offer this week.

Ms. Danielle is quite the pro when it comes to search engine marketing and search engine optimization, but she knows a thing or two about alternative advertising techniques. The lovely Danielle has put together a guide that provides tips on buying flat-rate text ads. Speaking from a publisher’s point of view, text link ads have been among the most lucrative blog monetization method, but what about if you’re the one wanting to do the advertising? Danielle gives you a simple mathematical formula to find out whether a particular ad spot is worth your while.

Rock Diesel is still hard at work becoming an affiliate, but he totally recognizes the Christmas shopping season as a great time to make some money, both online and offline. He’s narrowed down the huge number of options out there to 6 toys to target this holiday season. We already know the Nintendo Wii made the list, but what about the other five? You may be surprised.

Jennifer Mattern is a freelance writer like me, so I’m she battles through many of the same issues as do like finding respect and keeping it fresh. She also has a great system for setting freelance writing rates the right way. Many people set out on a career like this hoping to make as much as they do from their regular job, but $20 an hour there is not the same as charging $20 an hour as a freelance writer. Jennifer explains why.

Etienne Teo has been reasonably successful with this whole “make money online” endeavor, telling his friends that he makes more working from home than they do at their conventional jobs. Following in a similar line of thought, Etienne discusses how to make money money without spending a dime. Yes, you can embark on a line of work that costs you next to nothing on a monetary basis, but can open up opportunities for all sorts of fame and fortune. Can you guess what career that is?

Last, but certainly not least, is the blog post that provides the title to today’s edition of What’s Up Wednesdays.

Thinkreferrals Blog Network has something for you to consider. A new dinosaur has been discovered deep inside of Africa and its name has sparked a fair bit of controversy. Dubbed Nigersaurus, the long-necked dinosaur is a “younger, smaller cousin of the North American Diplodocus.” It’s quite common to name dinosaurs after the region in which they are found — Nigersaurus was found near the River Niger — and it’s assumed that the dinosaur’s name is pronounced like the country: “nahy-jer”. People say the name is not politically correct, but I say these people need to grow up. On a side note, it’s interesting that this sauropod didn’t tower its head above the trees, rarely lifting its head above its back. It “grazed on plants near the ground more like a type of cow rather than a reptilian giraffe.”

Hey Ed, I’ll tell you what the hell happens on 01-18-08. Ever since I saw the first trailer prior to watching Transformers the Movie, I was hooked. I had to find out what was going on with this secret JJ Abrams movie. The first trailer was one crazy teaser and it got people talking. It also sparked all sorts of viral websites, but only 1-18-08.com is supposed to be real.

What you see above is the second official trailer to the movie and it turns out that Cloverfield wasn’t a working title or a codename for the monster/action flick. It’s the actual movie title, because they clearly feature “Cloverfield” at the end of the video. Outside of this, not much new information is revealed, but we do get to see the military firing some rather heavy artillery at some sort of giant monster. Commenters at Slashfilm say that you can briefly catch a glimpse of the beast between the smoking buildings. More information in this post.

I’m psyched. I don’t care if it ends up being a cheesy Godzilla rip-off. I have to watch it just to satiate the thirst created by the hype and buzz. On side note, here are a couple of things you should know about 1-18-08.com in case you didn’t know already. First, you can move the pictures around by clicking and dragging. Second, you can flip the photos over by grabbing one and then rapidly moving left and right. Some will reveal some writing.

I just caught word that CashQuests.com has been sold for $15,000.

For some time now, many people have wondered whether Kumiko Suzuki was for real. We questioned whether the person behind the money-making blog was male or female. We questioned whether the person running the blog was really just a middle-aged man in Arkansas pretending to be a pretty Japanese girl in hopes of making a big splash in the ‘make money online’ blogosphere. Naturally, the geeky guys on the Internet are much more attracted to pretty girls than they are to fat slobs who enjoy World of Warcraft. After all of this controversy, we still don’t know and it looks like we will never know.

If you hop on over to sitepoint, you’ll find that CashQuests.com was placed in their marketplace and it was sold for $15,000. As it stands, the blog makes over $1,300 a month, so the new owner should be able to recoup the expense within about a year.

You’ve probably noticed that Kumiko Suzuki has been slowly removing herself from the site. Do you remember when the quest was taking place on Blogspot and it was actually called Kumiko’s Cash Quest? Do you remember the “peace sign” photograph, the only picture that we have ever seen of the elusive Kumiko? Here, let me refresh your memory:

That was when Beyond the Rhetoric was a featured ad on her site. In fact, the skyscraper banner was the first of several ads by Kumiko.

After moving over to her (his?) own domain at cashquests.com, the transformation continued. The picture of Kumiko was removed. The color scheme switched from the girly-girl pink to orange, and then it changed again to red. I talked a bit about this transformation four months ago, clearly noting that Kumiko was removing herself from the site, presumably with the intention of selling Cash Quests somewhere down the line. (Foreshadowing, anyone?) Soon after, the byline disappeared, effectively creating an anonymous blog. At that point, Kumiko ceased to exist.

Cash Quests went from a sea of pink with a personal (although possibly fake) touch to what it is today:

Interestingly, there is no mention of the sale on the Cash Quests site itself. The way I found out was through this post by Jane May. Ironically, my dot com pho buddies were discussing Jane May just this past Saturday. We wondered what happened to Jane, because she hasn’t blogged in such a long time and then as soon as she re-emerges in the blogosphere, she breaks this huge story. Welcome back, Jane! We missed you.

As for Cash Quests, there’s no word on who the new owner is and so it’ll be interesting to see if there will be any changes implemented to the site. If the sale of Career Ramblings is any indication, the new owner of Cash Quests will keep things pretty much the way they are. Best of luck to both the new owner and Kumiko Suzuki, even if the latter isn’t a real person.