My favorite show on TV is Lost. I love how they outlined the series for a full 7 seasons before it even started.

One of the Christmas gifts I gave my wife was a yearly subscription to the Lost magazine (she is a big fan too). Our previous favorite show was the West Wing - but it had to end. I wish it was still on with all the exciting election coverage. They were great about fictionalizing the behind-the-scenes of real-time events.

With putting kids to bed around 8pm, we only get to watch a few shows a week. So, it is good to have Lost back on again.

The 2 hour premier is on Thursday night.

I gotta find out if they will all get rescued or will there be yet another twist to make them stay on the island? Some return at some point (hence, Jack & Kate’s freaky scene from the future at the end of the last episode).

My favorite on the show is Ben. He plays the bad guy role perfectly.

Castle Rock has a surprising number of expensive rentals ranging from about $1,500 to $2,000 a month for such as small town.

Perhaps it is because Castle Rock is just a short drive to the Denver Tech Center. For those that work at the tech center this is a great location to rent a house in Castle Rock.

As you are traveling on I25 you can’t miss the butte in the picture above. I believe the butte is located in Rock Park just east of I25.

Castle Rock is home of the Red Hawk Ridge Golf Course, I have driven by there but have not played it yet.

Around 2pm today I started getting automated emails from my error exception page telling me that something was wrong with the connection to my database server.

I was returning home from picking my oldest from school when this happen and when I got home my site was no where to be found! Stress me out!

I called my hosting company CrystalTech right away and asked them what happened. Over the weekend I had switched from Coldfusion 7 to Coldfusion 8 but got 100’s of errors so I had them switch me back to 7 a few days later. But an automated script came along today at 2pm and erased my entire site from the Coldfusion 7 server because it thought I had moved on to 8.

So I worked with the CrystalTech team (thanks to Josh and Justin for helping) and we rebuilt the entire site in about 3 to 4 hours. The site was mostly running after an hour and a half.

After this I’m ready to move the site on to my own box where this can never happen again.

I have run RentVine through many test but not all my tests yet, so if you see anything wrong please shoot me an email. Thanks to those who emailed me when it happen.

Well since I updated the look of the main RentVine site recently, I thought it would be good to finally match the look of the WordPress blog to my main site so it didn’t confuse visitors.

I think sites that look good and have a more consist feel will tend to have people trust it more. Perhaps it will help me convert a few more sales.

I could have gone with the logo on top of the blog similar to the main site, but I really like the picture of our old grapevine from the old house so I kept it.

What do you think, do you like the new look?

I took the day off on Friday and went boarding up at Copper Mountain Ski Resort with some friends.

It was 2 degrees when we got there, and colder at the top of the mountain. We had to stay on the bump runs to stay warm.

Always good to take the day off. The boss didn’t mind.

It was so cold I had to wear my super loud hot pink glove liners under my gloves. I went hiking with a friend in the northeast (Mt. Washington) and we need some light gloves for the day and all they had left in the store was these hot pink gloves so we had to buy them. I use them here and there mostly as a joke and to see what people say.

Boy! Updating the site took much long than I expected. I started before Christmas and thought it would take just a few days. Working with CSS and different browsers can be a pain.

I mostly changed just the look of the site. With the exception of the log-in area, it was mostly a change in the CSS file.

When I showed the new site design to my wife, she thought it looked pretty much like the old one. Oh well, at least I think it looks better.

I also updated from MySQL4 to MySQL5 so my database is on a new server now.

If you see any formatting issues, please drop me a line.

Since RentVine is as old as my youngest daughter I thought it was time to give RentVine a face lift after 3 years.

I started working on this before Christmas and thought it would be easy. Boy was I wrong. It is not hard, but it is taking much longer than I expected.

Mostly I am changing the CSS file which controls the look of the site. I am close to being done, hopfully it will only take another week to finish.

One of the things I am doing is increasing the width of the page by around 140 pixels. I noticed big sites like Amazon, EBay and many others have gone to a width over 940 pixels. Mine won’t be that wide because still 8% of my visitors have a resolution at 800 pixels.

Once the LCD monitor came out it was amazing how many people all of a sudden had high resolutions because the LCD monitor’s native resolution is set up that way out of the box and the old CRT’s had to be set manually.

Since my last year’s predictions post got a lot of views and comments, I thought I would give it another try for 2008.

1. There will be little or no acquisitions in 2008. None of the sites in the housing rental space I track will be bought by large companies.
2. Since Rentals.com TV ads did not work out for them, look for Primedia investors to get impatient with CSI management. Don’t get me wrong, I think the online rental advertising industry will still grow in 2008. I just think that the investors see a largely untapped crowd of owners not using CSI with the TV play gone and will want CSI to come up with another idea to get the word out.
3. Rentals.com will fall from its top traffic spot and RentalHouses.com will take the lead going into the summer time when advertising hits its peak.
4. RentalHomesPlus.com will stay at the #3 spot and we will see them again lower their prices from $49.
5. RentalHomePros.com will come out of beta in March of 2008. I predict a very slow start for this NARPM backed company in getting NARPM members to switch from their current advertising methods to their new system.
6. Look for prices to stay the same across the board (except for RentalHomesPlus). However more and more volume discounts will be handed out by the top 3 in the $15 to $20 range to property managers.
7. RentVine will drop in traffic a little for the month of January, but will steadily increase traffic for the remainder of 2008.
8. House.info will get hit with having too many subdomains and buying links, and will fall in the rankings.
9. Look for HotPads.com to run out of funding and sell to a company that wants them just for their Flash mapping actionscript code.
10. I will still be working part time on this site and loving every minute of it!

If you have a prediction you would like to share please add it below.

This week I am kicking back and taking it easy - oh and eating way too much!

Here is my youngest ice skating, it was a real fun day!

RentVine had it’s Christmas party this evening. Well, the party consisted of my wife and myself.

We had a really nice dinner out with lots of wine and then went to see the new National Treasure movie that came out tonight. I think my wife drank a little too much because she started to fall asleep at the movie.

I am a big Nicholas Cage fan. This one was good but not as good as the first one.

The bartender took a picture of us at dinner that I was going to share here, but I came out looking terrible so decided against it.

I have always wanted to start a Bed and Breakfast site, but after I tried unsuccessfully to start a vacation rental site I gave up on the BnB niche idea.

I got to meet Peter Askew at the PubCon in Vegas and really enjoyed talking and drinking beers with him. I told him about my blog’s readership and stats and I think that got Peter interested in starting one for his niche.

I was happy to see he started a BnB Blog this past week. I have subscribed to his blog feed since he is very good with domains so I hope he writes a little about that.

I have been using Outlook for as long as I can remember. About two months ago I deleted a trial version of MS Office 2007 because I was using Office 2003 and after I did that I had tons of issues with Office.

I tried everything to fix it and sent hours on forums trying to figure out what was going on. I usually can fix computer issues like this because I am very persistent, but this one frustrated the hell out of me.

Well today I threw in the towel and loaded Thunderbird (free) and it’s add-on for the calendar. It took a few hours to configure everything the way I like it and I gotta say it works just as nice as Outlook. I think I have tested everything.

Only one draw back and it is a major one, I can’t sync everything to my Treo.

One very cool add-on is the Text Complete. So when I get an email with the same question I alway get - “Do you have any rentals in my town” - with one click I add a simple canned response. Nice!