2010

So this past week I was almost on my way to Miami. My friend Dave has a contract with some states regarding disaster services, especially those that affect animals and wildlife in the affected areas. Well apparently the oil spill in the Gulf is leaking into the ocean and ending up in the Florida Keys and in Miami. I would actually love to go, it’s good money, I’d be helping out with something that is huge, and it’s Miami, who wouldn’t want to be in Miami? Well unfortunately the trip was cancelled due to three potential hurricanes coming in, otherwise I would have been on my way down there yesterday and arriving today. I may still be going down, but right now it is up in the air as to when or if I will. Oh well now it gives me time to get the drug testing done.

In other Florida news (still going to Disney in September), we did some shopping for the trip. We now are the owners of a five piece luggage set that we picked up from Walmart. If I can earn more than enough money for the trip I may invest in a new iPod for the trip, but as it stands right now in August we will most likely upgrade our phones to Blackberries, so hopefully that will be able to hold enough music for the long train ride down to Disney.

I’ve spent the last hour or so unfollowing people on Twitter. When I was first on there I had a bad habit of following everyone back, unfortunately most of those I followed back were bots so my feed is filled with automated Tweets. I try and do this a little bit everyday, but I just felt I would attempt to get a huge chunk out today, but I don’t think I even cracked the surface. I have managed to unfollow over 50 people though and I am down to under 4246 people that I am following.

I am looking for reviewers for this site. If your interested let me know and I will create an account for you to post reviews. You’d get full credit, a link to your site on the review, and the review could be posted on your site as well. Let me know if you’re interested.

While I am waiting for Dreamhost to setup a subdomain so I can begin working on a new project for a client, I decided to upgrade a few things. First I was just going to upgrade some plugins in WordPress 2.9.2, but then I decided I would just upgrade to WordPress 3.0. What do I think of it? I think it feels exactly the same as 2.9.2 did. I know about the new features, but none of them seem to pop out at me just looking around the admin panel. It does look like most of the plugins I had installed do work with this update though, including my own ones, Character Count and Word Count.

I know I am behind on returning comments, I am hoping to rectify that soon though.

I am going to end this blog on a sadder note. One of the most beloved teachers at my high school passed away a few days ago. Now when I say that he was a beloved teacher I do not mean just for my class, I mean for the entire time he was at the school, back to when he started in the 1960’s. I was a tour guide at a high school reunion and students from the 60’s and 80’s asked if he was still teaching there. Even just on Facebook, when people started saying he died, almost immediately people wanted more information and was asking everyone that knew him if they knew what happened. Now that is a sign that he truly touched a lot of lives.

I personally was only in his class a few days due to a scheduling conflict, but I tried to keep him as a teacher and always wished I could have had him as a teacher. He taught history from a Native American perspective which I always thought sounded so different than anything every other US History class teaches. Honestly I think the most time I spent with him was on a trip to the Vietnam Memorial at the PNC Bank Arts Center and that’s pretty much all I can remember of it. Honestly I wish I could remember more of it, but I think I may be confusing it with a trip to a Holocaust museum.

Mr. Donahue joins an ever growing list of people from Collier High School who have died since I graduated in 2004. Rest in peace Mr. Donahue.

E3 is this week and more than Natal from Microsoft and Move from Sony, eyes seem to be more focused on 3D. Honestly I don’t like 3D. I watched Monsters Vs Aliens for about 10 minutes in 3D a few months back and it was a pain to get the glasses on over my glasses, and if you don’t want to watch in 3D you can’t because it’s all blurry. I think 3D is just a huge waste of time.

Unfortunately with Sony bringing 3D to the PS3 and Nintendo having 3D on the DS (I wouldn’t be surprised if they somehow got it on the Wii as well), Microsoft is sure to follow the hype soon as well. In any case I am looking forward to this week with the best conference that gaming has. I will of course be doing my wrapups of stuff, I probably won’t return comments until that is over though since I know a lot of people don’t want to comment on that stuff anyway.

I haven’t gotten my pagerank back yet, although I am thinking maybe I am a PR0 as the other sites I look at who got the Google Smackdown is a PR N/A, so I should maybe see if I can raise that to a 1, or something.

I spoke with a few people from Izea at TechCrunch Disrupt regarding their latest project and how I was part of the Google Smackdown that brought down my page rank a few years ago. Ever since then I’ve wanted to get my page rank back more than ever. A few days ago I no-followed all my links in my blogs and submitted my site for reconsideration.

Fast forward to today and I am still waiting to know anything. I really want to have my page rank back. If I get it back I think I will be more inclined to add more stuff and get my site out there more. I have a lot of ideas, but without a page rank it makes it look like my site is new, and I am tired of looking like that.

In Disney news we still need around $300 for the trip, but saved up for the trip itself is over $1000 and most if not all the money I bring in is going to the trip. Hopefully this is an epic trip.

So it looks like paying back the credit cards is on the back burner for now because we are taking a vacation to Disney World. I haven’t had a real vacation for years, so this is going to be pretty big for me, and for Kris and me in general. I put the deposit down today, hopefully they will send me a receipt soon so I know how to pay the rest of the money.

We will be there from September 13th to the 18th and we will probably be leaving New York either the 10th or 11th. We will be discussing it over dinner with our traveling companions, Alicia and Dave.

From this point until we get back it is just a matter of getting as much into the savings account as we can, and if that means working 17 hour days and taking on extra work to get as much as possible, then so be it. I already have picked up an extra client and I think I will look around Sprouter for entrepreneurs to see if I can find any that I can get a product up pretty fast for them. Of course while keeping all my old clients. Hopefully everything falls into place until we leave.

I went to TechCrunch Disrupt this week. It was the first time I actually attended a convention like this and I have to say I loved every minute of it. I am going to post some sites/companies that I saw and that really stuck out in my mind.

SpintheCam – It’s a social social network built around a random video chat. It was really great to see a refreshing idea come to social networks.

Brand-Yourself – Everyone wants to be someone, this site let’s you see how well you are doing at branding yourself online. This is becoming more important as job seekers are using Google as well as background checks for potential employees.

Sprouter – As a freelancer, sometimes it is hard to find work. Sprouter not only helps with that, but it is a place for entrepreneurs to go and get help from developers and other entrepreneurs.

Soluto – Frustrated with your PC like every other PC user out there? Soluto helps with that by connecting your computer to thousands of others who had the same problems, and tells you how to get rid of those problems.

Merel Technologies – For just over $3000 you too can have an equivalent of the Microsoft Surface. It works and it works well, my only gripe with something like this is that you cannot use a stylus, otherwise it would be perfect for using Photoshop with.

Those were probably the companies that stood out the most to me, but checking out companies wasn’t the best part about it, watching someone intentionally dig right into the big wigs at Comcast, Google, and AOL was pretty great as well. I also spoke to someone from Izea, mentioning that this site was part of the “Google Smackdown”, to which he responded “it is a flaw in their algorithm and I’ve told them that.” I honestly would have thought that Izea would have grown too big to care about its bloggers, but I am happy to say they haven’t. Thanks for proving me wrong Izea.

I didn’t realize it’s been so long since I last blogged. I’ve been extremely busy the last few weeks, TechCrunch Disrupt is on Monday and I have had to get everything setup for a client of mine who will be going. I will probably be there on Tuesday and Wednesday representing them, so that’s going to be cool. Hopefully it gets the site a lot of press, which of course means more money, hopefully.

I’ve been so busy that I have had to put my other clients, and this site on hold, hence why I haven’t blogged. I have to say though, after not writing for a few weeks, I have really missed it. I’ve been watching a lot of the A Night with Kevin Smith videos on YouTube and watching him makes me realize how much I miss writing. I am not talking about just on here, I mean in general.

Well I am off to do some of the work I’ve been putting off the last few weeks.

I don’t think I’ve actually written a story or an essay since my last english class and as much as I would love to have an ongoing story in some form on the site, the hardest part for me is the beginning. That’s not entirely true, I am pretty sure I could start a story with no problem, but what I’d want to do is either a comic or video story clip and that takes a lot more time, that I just don’t have at the moment. I’d love to one day write something that would be considered as great as Star Wars, Clerks, or LOST.

It’s no secret that I want to go back to school. I’ve often asked myself why I am not in school currently, I mean I work for myself and I could maintain fulltime status with school and do work on my off time, plus getting a degree and taking classes in business and marketing would help me with what I do now, so why not right? My best answer for the question is money. I was $5500 in debt not too long ago. That’s just with credit cards and my credit is really bad because I’ve had them for so long and have missed a few payments. I figure once I lower the balance on the cards, along with the monthly payments then I should be able to take out a student loan and any other loan I would need to go back to school.

Right now I am down to under $5000 in debt, but it will be back to being a little over $5000 with the interest payment this month. I know it isn’t a big difference, but $500 is a huge dent for me, considering some of these cards I have had since I was 18 years old. I am hoping to be down to $4500 by the end of this year, in fact if I can keep up working with the pace I am, not only will I be able to pay back an extra $500 to these cards, but possibly be more than half paying off the bed and getting Kristen’s cards paid off. The more that we can pay off together the more money we can have in the long run for vacations, and other fun things.

I am hoping though that come January Kristen will have her own car, mine will be in good enough shape for me to go back to school, and the bills minimum payments will be a lot lower than they are right now. Hopefully it all works out the way I want it to.

I’ve been getting a lot done lately, just today I managed to start and complete the new jokes section and I am working on a few other things at the moment. I’ve even been better managing my time with work so I can work on more personal projects. I think in the long run things are going to be better as far as time management goes.

Last weekend we did a lot of car switching just to be able to get a minivan to pick up a new gazebo. Tonight we started putting it together and it’s a lot bigger than anyone remembers it being in the store. I will hopefully have pictures once it’s put together, but we didn’t factor in we’re going to need a pretty big tool to get it complete, a ladder. Even though it says it’s only 8 feet tall, with the double roof that’s on there it’s easily 12-14 feet and a folding chair just isn’t going to cut it when it comes to getting up there.

Kris is going to be gone for a few days, she’s staying at her aunt’s so I am planning on using that time to play the Halo: Reach beta and catch up on some movies. The first movie I will be watching tomorrow is Avatar. Also tomorrow I plan on returning all comments from the last few entries and finding some more blogs to comment on.

Just a quick update, going to have a real update soon. I am looking for a new Girl of the Moment. If you think you are worthy, then apply. Also some random updates from around the site, you can upload/edit your avatar if your a member and the forum has a new editor. I’m off to play some Saints Row 2 right now, I am fried from work, need to relax before bed.