All I Can Say is "Ouch"

I didn’t mean this to be a rant about all things google, but what research project does not begin there? I’ve used health.google for my personal records, but as a resource it is awesome as well. There was a new interface at images.google as well. Just when you thought their offering was perfect, it gets better. Anyway, I have a toothache. The bad news is it’s Periodontitis. The good news is also that it’s Periodontitis. I went to the dentist expecting the drill and left with floss. I’m not the only one with lousy dental hygiene and TMJ. But, I’ll save a ton of dough if the floss stops the bone loss. My wallet is one of my best teachers…

If you look close, you'll see my ad on my own page!

My Cancer Treatment Information site actually makes money from advertising. Then again, it was built in 1996 and online ever since with huge traffic and links to it from all over the world. For new sites, like the one above, there is no traffic so it is impossible to earn ad income. In the month of June, I was able to drive traffic to the site with the following results: 35 Clicks, 656 Page impressions and an Estimated earnings of $24.91 (sweet!) What this doesn’t account for is the $173.25 I paid to bring that traffic. I bought ads so I could sell climbing walls. I got one email and no clients, then stopped the campaign after losing money. July’s stats? 10 pages and 0 clicks = $0 earnings.

There is more to this than meets the eye...

You can tell a lot about me from this picture. At first glance, it’s torrent post of Wayne County & The Electric Chairs reprint of their Blatantly Offenzive EP. Not so unusual to those who know me. Downright shocking to those who don’t.  Observant types would see “Upped by deeg” and know that it was my alter-ego (the name is the pronunciation of my initials) was at play. deeg has been around as long as I have been online, which is pretty much when the internet was born. Point two: That is the Google Chrome browser. If you aren’t using it, you are a dinosaur. See the tab for cooliris? That’s one of my latest gak projects. Here’s another and yet another. Another tech wonder is in the download tab. Ask me about running torrent files sometime… You will be sure to see my eyes light up.

My Site is the One on the Right

I finally redesigned one of my sites that was put up in 1996. It used to move product, but now it drives traffic due to high search relevancy. It didn’t help that someone stole my code and cloned my site (!) Go ahead, compare my page to theirs. Now, check the redesign. Nice. Special shout-out to Bare Bones for allowing the replacement of code blocks through whole folders of files using their BBEdit tool. I had to move to a new server because my old one got bought (again) by some crap company. Big hassle, but a good thing. Check out my new product launch. Saphira is on the East Coast, so I gaked a mobile phone blog for her. She also has this one.

This is some pretty serious business...

My life has been pretty serious as of late. The whole parenthood and head of household thing has taken on a new flavor as I come into my own. Still, the person I was is who I am and some stuff remains a family value to be passed to my kids. A big one is the D.I.Y. (do it yourself) ethic and aesthetic. It’s sooo punk! Thus, we packed it uptown to see The Runaways, the year’s best movie by far. (Avatar? Feh!) There was some big league teenstar power pulling us in. Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie was more than perfect. Same with Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett. Jailbait! Stella Maeve (Emma Boardman on Gossip Girl!) was cute as Sandy West, but the show-stealer was Michael Shannon (Cecil B. DeMented!) as Kim Fowley. That’s who I want to be when I grow up! Therein lies the contradiction…

Things don't get much better than this...

I had the intense pleasure of attending a Bris Milah at my shul this morning and found it to be a very moving experience. For those who can’t feel the significance of the mitzvah, it could appear to be quite barbaric and cruel. But for us “insiders,” it is the sort of thing that brings tears of joy. While circumcision is common in hospital births these days and nary raises an eyebrow, making a big deal of it as Jews do takes a bit of understanding. We have learned in the last few parshaot about the Covenant of Avraham and what it means to us today. It is a crucial element of our cultural identity and something we celebrate with feasting, singing and words of Torah. I personally had a bris at age 34 (ouch!), which is a long story that I’d be more than happy to tell you, so I can attest to its importance.

This movie just about sums it up...

I’ve been pretty lazy about blogging, and everything else, this week. After taking the whole summer off for a projects blitz, it is WAY hard to get my head into business. Granted, I have run out of other stuff to do and money is finally getting tight. My “job” is to call life insurance agents and help them submit applications. What that entails is being hung up on most of the time. Being is sales is harsh, but way better that kissing the ass of some tool in order to get a paycheck and help someone else get rich. My last gig was deeply corporate, what I said I would never do. I don’t miss it even a little. So now, rather than being motivated by the risk of being fired (I always get fired) the risk is losing everything.  Guess it’s time to make some calls.

I want to be Tevye when I grow up.

I took the kids to hear the Shofar at Beth Jacob and it was meaningful to us all on different levels. I was moved to tears when an old-timer read the Haftorah. His pronunciation was straight out of Anatevka and reminded me of how we have survived countless plagues and enemies since the beginning of time. I cried even harder when, much later in the service, I spotted the old-timer way up in the front stooped over four books he had spread out on his own little wall in the corner. There is nothing that I want more in life for myself than that. I’ve always been a crybaby anyway. (I just bawled my eyes out watching Little Chavela dance away from the Fiddler). Saphira felt some importance related to her first Yom Tov as a Bat Mitzvah, but I felt bad about not preparing her better for the intensity and duration of orthodoxy. Caleb was reverent as well, but wasted no time slipping out when I said go. New Year. New Job. I went to my first meeting as “Brokerage Manager” with my bro’s company and met the other principals. I trollied there and hit Attempt to Raise Hell on the way back. Yesterday, an agent gave me a couple cases to work on. One of ‘em could earn a couple grand for me if it closes. So yeah, life is good. Baruch Hashem.

This appeared in our garage last week...

I was incredibly unmotivated all summer to do anything that resembled “work” but I never worked so hard. I sweated four inches off my waist with plain ol’ hard labor. It’s done now and all is great. We’ve been moving Caleb into my room. I found a good full-size mattress down the street and swapped my huge bed out to the garage to use as a crash pad. My clothes are in the house still, but much of my hardware, library and collections have moved into my new space. We upgraded our AirPort Extreme network to 802.11n and got new network cards for the PC’s (of course, the Macs worked fine) so we are smokin’ wireless! A cool thing is that the new router shares a USB drive accross the network, so we have a media server for our 800 gig TV show archive. One thing that sucks: summer is over.

It took all summer to take this picture.

I’ve said it before, but this has truly been the best summer of my life. To have the means to just chill with the kids every frickin’ day was just impossibly cool. I mean, is that not every parents fantasy? I am the luckist man alive. We did a massive house renovation starting with clearing out all the junk (sigh…) and doing a deep scrub before new paint. Especially cool was the attention to trim and molding in an accent color (am I truly gay?) applied with careful masking. The last step was this cut-rate furniture we scored on El Cajon Boulevard. Now we can lay around without smelling cat piss.

I rarely do a second paragraph, but this is worthy. I met with my dad in his office today (old-school scary) and discussed his markets. He said that this was his best month ever. (keep in mind, that is one of the markets I’m entering as well)  Tonight I was working building my list (salesman) and had the “The Million Dollar Idea.” Man… How many times in a person’s life do people get one and just let it go. Way more than the people who act and actually get the million dollars. Mine is so easy. My cold-call question is, “What is your biggest problem?” I’ve been saying the answer all summer in entrepreneurial mode. “I can help with that!” The puzzle piece was supplied by my brother. He said I am like Yenta the matchmaker. Bam! And so it is.