account went poof

This friday me and Allie (my girlriend) went to BestBuy at 2am with aspirations of getting some of the spectacular deals. The whole thing is pretty crazy, from the people you meet in line, to the mad dash everyone does in order to get their products! Basically I picked up the wrong lcd, so I didn’t get to dual up my 19 inch displays.. bumber.  I did get a surround sound system, and a lot of dvds. Allie got a digital picture frame, enough flash memory to take over a small country with, (and a couple other things for other people that we really cannot mention.)

In conclusion, Black Friday is good for the economy. Participate. Well, it is quite insaine, and if you like insanity, like getting up or staying up and leaving at 2 am just to get a few consumer electronics, then this landrush experience is for you. If not, then stay asleep and enjoy your day.

A critical aspect of getting your business moving is to focus on something your passionate about.  I am quite passionate about creating websites particularly.  The thing is, creating websites alone does not necessarily motivate me to constantly work on my sites, so I need some more focus and direction in my work.

I have decided to pick a subject and a mission and stick to it.  My revised mission changed from something like “to create long term value by building websites that have a steady positive cashflow” to something more meaningful to me. My new mission is closer to this: “to develop tools and services that will allow individuals to invest and build businesses with greater ability, knowledge, and confidence.”  Thats the mission, now the actual direction within that grenade is a secret.  Well, it is not decided yet, but secret just sounds cooler.  I have some ideas for software tools that might help people invest and/or become better business owners, but that actually is secret for now.

Then I have a seperate idea as to what I will do in the real estate arena.  They will be two seperate businesses, maybe not legally, but at least in my head.  I will still be maintaining my sites and running projects in ppc etc. that are not related to finance, but they are not my focus and will largely be in attempt to learn how my theories work in other niches.

I just read over at pfadvice how to Make money with Videos.  Basically there is a site called metacafe that does revenue sharing or something with its videos.  And there are several pretty simple videos up there that have earned over $1000.  Seems pretty successful of a site.

A lot of domainers just buy and sell domains and leave them on parking services. This can be quite profitable as the only things displayed on the sites are ads. However, it does not really add any long term sticky factor to the name. It does not create any buzz or motivate people to come back again.

The most intuitive use of a domain is to have a city name, and run a portal for that community. This will create a buzz and will probably get people returning for more information, provided you do have a useful site.

Creating a site that will engage users is not just an idea that will stick for sites with search traffic, but it is a strategy that would work for domain names.

Mike over at Retire Young and Wealthy has posted that he quit his job today.  Quiting a full time job is a big step into becoming financially free.

I have been reading his blog for a little over a year now.  Mike seems very competent online, and I will really be interested to see the type of progress that he acheives.  One of my favorite parts about his sites is that they are very focused towards building communities and useful sites.

I cannot really concentrate on work on election day. Not that I am OVERLY interested in this particular election. It is just very addicting to sit and wait for results and get caught up in it.

I wonder what kind of things will happen this time around. Pretty exciting!

Anyone who has been in the U.S. for the last month or two probably knows what I am talking about.  It is almost like a bunch of four year olds bought all the ad blocks and started wigging out on temper tantrums because they didn’t get to roll their window down in the car.  But worse.

The state of political campaigns is really troubling me.  Only talking about relevant issues of today is bad enough.  Then they have to belittle their opponent?  To me, a commercial paid by the other candidate is not a credible source of information.  If there really was a conspiracy of some sort, or anything crazy then maybe it should be put on the news and at least be reported on with as little bias as possible.

What if maybe the candidates talked about how they arrived at their decision about an issue?  What if somehow they talked about how their views were somehow shaped by a melding of their own ideology, and their constituent’s wishes and concerns?  That would be something wouldn’t it?  They might win the office.  Well probably not.  But at least I would vote for them.

It is a little bit harder to manage my time with my job and website work than I initially hoped.  Not so much with the actual amount of time, but with fitting working out, getting groceries, laundry, and cooking into my schedule.

Though finding time to work on sites was quite hard at the beginning, it has gotten much better over the last month.  By next month I guess it will be apparent if a long term work/site relationship is for me.

Last weekend I went to Myrtle Beach and spent Saturday on the beach with Allie. Quite a good time. Unfortunately I did not take any pictures or anything of that nature.

This weekend, Jon Crocker is coming and we will have a BBQ and some Tunes.

Next Weekend, well hopefully Ft. Lauderdale.

So when I got home today I found that my firewall’s hard drive decided to take a dive for the worst. What a way of saying welcome home!

So tonight I am re-installing freebsd from scratch on the new hard drive. Going to be running IP Filter on this sucker. (Again.) It wouldn’t be quite so bad, but it just takes this thing ages to compile a kernel. Its almost worth trying to setup distcc or something.