It’s time once again for a fantastic contest from Beyond the Rhetoric. In the past, I’ve given away everything from cool computer games to personalized iPod skins. For this contest, the prize has gotten a little bigger. Or perhaps it’s better to say prizes.

What Can I Win?

A big box of stuff! More specifically, the box will contain a variety of things that I collected from Computex and from the Vancouver International Game Summit. You see the prizes above. Some of the items that you can win include:

• Shuttle premium pen and diary set
• Slant Six Games t-shirt
• Crossbox USB PC-to-PC data transfer solution
• Thermaltake magnetic business card holder
• MSI ionic sports watch
• Solar charger with USB and AAA output
• Dice-shaped salt and pepper shakers
• And more!

There may be a few extras thrown in between now and the end of the contest as well

How Do I Enter?

You may recall that I mentioned the possibility of this contest when I was still in Taipei. When I did, I said that you would have to exercise a certain level of creativity in order to win.

What you see above is are a couple of photos I took during the Gigabyte party at Computex 2008. Shortly after I took the pictures, the rest of the dot com pho crew decided that it could be perfect fodder for PhotoShop. This is where you come in.

1. Edit the above party picture(s) as you see fit. (You can click on them to get higher resolution versions.) Add, remove, distort, supply captions… do whatever it takes to make for a funny picture. I wonder what John Chow could be holding.

2. Post your funny creation on your blog, linking back to this contest post and the Beyond the Rhetoric homepage. You can use whatever anchor text you want.

But I don’t have a blog!

If you don’t have a blog, you can still participate. Post your picture on Flickr and include the URLs to this post and Beyond the Rhetoric in the description. Whether you opt for the blog or Flickr route, it is probably best to send a trackback or leave a comment in this post to make sure that I know you entered.

Everyone who is reachable by standard postal services is welcome to enter the contest. Whether you live in Portugal, Singapore, or Vancouver, you are eligible.

Who Will Choose the Winner?

I will act as the final judge for this contest. Whichever entry that I think is the funniest or most creative will be the winner. That said, I am open to any (unbiased) feedback as well. As such, I may post a weekly update linking to the entries received in the previous week.

When is the Entry Deadline?

The contest runs until the end of this month. Be sure to send a trackback or leave a comment in this post before 11:59pm PST on July 31st to be eligible.

Good luck! I look forward to seeing your creations.

With a whole bunch of things on my plate on Monday, it slipped my mind to keep an eye on the top commentators list for the month of June. I usually make sure that I’m around to see who is topping the list when the clock strikes midnight, but that simply did not happen on Monday night. Thankfully, I was able to use the cache function in Google the next morning to at least grab a snapshot of what the blog looked like on June 30.

The cache was displaying Beyond the Rhetoric as of the morning of the 30th, so it was just a matter of logging into the Wordpress Dashboard and looking into any new comments that were posted on that day. It’s a good thing that I took this extra step, because it did affect how the overall rankings panned themselves out. As you can probably imagine, the list of top commentators for June 2008 contains a lot of familiar faces.

Who Are the Top Commentators for June 2008?

Sitting atop the list yet again is Jorge. He was sitting in second place for a while there, but with a huge surge on the very last day, Jorge trudged ahead to grab the number one spot with a total of 41 comments. That’s nearly twice as many as he posted in May and four times as many as April! To top it all off, Jorge still manages to find time to find amazing and funny videos.

Coming in at number two is Nick, the same guy that won the Market Leverage contest from John Chow. The RomanDock.com blogger posted 38 comments in the month of June. Who’s the man behind the blog? Nick comes forward with 8 random facts about him, just so that you can get to know him better. Did you know that he is a Rubik’s Cube pro?

Betshopboy nabs the third spot for June with 17 comments. It seems that he is a huge soccer (football) nut and was following the Euro 2008 tournament religiously. Along the way, Betshopboy posted some nice articles covering the beautiful game, including one that applauded the Spaniards. Viva La Espana!

Well, it’s not completely true that Betshopboy has third place all to himself, because Paulette also had 17 comments. I guess you could say that they tied, but because of the alphabetical arrangement of the top commentators list, it appeared that Paulette was fourth. Maybe to celebrate another appearance on a top commentators list, she should do a little dance to Hard Candy by Madonna.

Sneaking into the fifth and final spot for June 2008 was Derek Semmler. The guy with the killer commute still managed to put up 16 comments on this blog last month. If you want to know how to add an AdSense block above your first post, you’ll want to hop on over to the recent tutorial posted on Derek’s blog.

Thanks again to everyone who contributes to this blog. Without the commentators, I’d be screaming into a vacuum. Here’s to a healthy and fruitful July!

As important as it may be to get out there and live life, you probably need to buckle down at some point and actually start working. Whether you’re a freelance writer, a webmaster, or some other kind of online entrepreneur, it’s likely that you spend a lot of time in front of the computer.

For today’s edition of What’s Up Wednesdays, we take a look at a few posts related to the business of blogging, protecting yourself online, and having a little fun along the way too.

You may be wondering about the bad guy in the picture above. He comes from Contest Blogger where you will find a post that teaches you how to avoid getting cheated in a blog contest scam. Five different kinds of scams are outlined, as well as five ways to identify them.

Less is more. Nick Ramsay decided to apply the 80/20 principle to his workspace and while he wasn’t quite able to eliminate 80% of the useless junk, he is quite pleased with his new office. Clearing the clutter on your desk can also clear the clutter in your mind. Maybe.

People are going to disagree with you. They may cuss and complain. But should you censor comments on your blog? There are certainly both advantages and disadvantages to censorship, but in the end, Dave Taylor feels that it’s “okay to delete comments that are in violation of your site’s standards of conduct, whether stated explicitly or not.”

Doctors go through years of school before they are entrusted with your lives. Mechanics have a fair bit of training before they can tinker with your car. Freelance writers do not necessarily have the same level of education, so Chris Bibey is offering a freelance writing course and training. A hundred bucks a month gets you personal mentoring and exclusive email updates.

As you know, I took a recent trip to Taiwan for Computex and it was a lot of fun. Overcoming the language barrier was interesting, but the fun of international travel ultimately boils down to the company that you keep. My good friend Stephen Fung has compiled a video that summarizes our Dot Com Taipei adventure and it’s pretty epic. You can’t go wrong with Weezer.

I guess last week’s competition didn’t really sort things out quite as well as we had hoped, so you are getting treated once again to a double dose of Dot Com Pho.

We’ve had some lunch gatherings in the past that were attended by over 20 people, but this week’s meetup was not nearly as large. I guess some people are too busy being tourists in their own town or something.

One of the appeals of coming to Dot Com Pho is that you are able to get some free publicity. Not only did my half price review special get mentioned in a recent speedlinking post on John Chow dot Com, it also get some airtime in both versions of our video-ified lunch. Better still, newfound Dot Com Pho regular Ray got himself a special present too.

Anyhow, here are the two takes on Dot Com Pho. Stephen’s is first and John’s is second. Keep those comments coming and we may finally be able to decide who gets to run the video production full-time. Who will be the iron dot com pho director? Whose video will reign supreme?

[Flash/Javascript needed. Go to Beyond the Rhetoric if you can't see the videos.]

I don’t know about you, but it’s really hard for me to believe that it is June already. When I was still in school (many moons ago), the two month summer vacation felt like it lasted forever. It offered so much time for immature tomfoolery and Nintendo video games. It’s so true that time goes by faster the older you get, so don’t forget to stop and smell the roses.

For this edition of What’s Up Wednesdays, we take a look at everything from the Dark Side of the Force to making the most of your sleeping hours. Now I just have to figure out how many midichlorians I have.

Let’s kick things off with a visit to Shibuya, the same place where Ed Lau happens to be hanging out these days. It is there that Danny Choo decided to terrorize the people of Tokyo as a Rock Trooper. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s when you dress up as a Star Wars Storm Trooper and play electric guitar till the Ewoks come home.

There are a lot of things to consider when it comes to blogging and Martin Reed addresses one of these in a recent post. He discusses how long a blog post should be. There are certainly pros and cons to both long and short posts, so you’ll just have to weigh your options carefully.

In the highly anticipated sequel to My First Pho, ThinkComputers’ own Bob Buskirk steps out of his element for his first tea. Yes, Bob has never had tea before. Ever. You’ve been living in a cultural bubble, Bob. It’s time to get out there and try some more exotic cuisine.

Are you getting enough sleep? As it turns out, you might already be getting too much. Rob Malon came across a study saying that people who sleep less actually live longer. It’s not so much about the amount of sleep you get as much as it is about you getting optimal sleep efficiency. Can you cut back and still survive?

Last but not least, we head over to British Columbia’s capital city, Victoria, to find that the politicians there may be getting swayed to the Dark Side. Fabrizio Pilato took a stroll over to Parliament Building to discover a carving of none other than Emperor Palpatine. He sure looks different than his podcast counterpart.

Want to be featured in an upcoming edition of What’s Up Wednesdays? The best way is to get my attention on Twitter.

The Dot Com Pho phenomenon is taking the world by storm. Everyone is getting more and more interested in our weekly lunch gatherings, because we exchange all sorts of useful tips about making money online… it just happens that our discussions get side-tracked into other areas pretty easily. You know, like the Flip Flap from Gigabyte (it’s actually made by Tomy).

Everyone from the Dot Com Pho crew that went to Taipei for COMPUTEX got hooked up with a Flip Flap. The solar powered plant happily dances under the rays of the sun. Its slow, rhythmic movements are very soothing after a long day of freelance writing and maintaining the lifestyle of a dot com mogul.

For this week’s edition of Dot Com Pho, we have two competing directors. John Chow is normally the one who does the video recording, but Stephen Fung really enjoyed his time in the director’s chair as well. As such, we will have two versions of Dot Com Pho for you this week, much like how we had multiple versions of our experience eating out of a toilet in Taiwan.

Which version do you like better? John’s or Stephen’s? Voice your thoughts though the comment form below.

[Flash/Javascript needed. Go to Beyond the Rhetoric if you can't see the videos.]

John Chow’s Dot Com Pho

Stephen Fung’s Dot Com Pho

On a side note, I’d like to mention that this was the virgin Dot Com Pho for Tyler Ingram. Welcome to the family, Tyler. You’re not quite loud enough to replace Ed Lau, though, who will be in Japan for the next three months.