0

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.

It seems lately that whenever I comment on blogs lately, my comment ends up in the spam folder. I am going to try changing the email address I leave when I comment and hopefully maybe that fixes it. It’s a real pain especially since I am definitely not spam.

Tonight Krissy and I went to Wal-Mart to buy pillows. We’ve had the bed for two weeks and I think we’re finally getting used to it. I don’t know why she needed more pillows though, right now there’s seven pillows on the bed, we have two heads, why do we need seven pillows? Okay even still one goes to Bella so she can sleep in the window, but that’s still six pillows. I don’t understand. Sometimes women are just a mystery I have yet to crack I suppose.

I’ve added a lot more games to play in the arcade. You have to be a member to play them, but becoming a member is easy and free. It will also soon hold some very interesting benefits. Get involved in the forums and tell me what you would like to see. I have a lot coming, but it would be great if I had some more user feedback on the site.

I’ve had around 8 beers tonight. I’ve been wanting to blog for a while, but I haven’t had time. I had a ton of work to do this weekend, but I worked my ass off between Friday and yesterday and I managed to finish a good portion of it. I had so much to do that I had to turn away clients. Everyone who knows me, know that I don’t turn away clients, I put them on the to do list and get to them eventually. Right now I have two main clients. One of them is a set amount to do in the next few days, one of them it is a growing list each week. I’ve had to basically setup the entire server up for them and I still have a lot to do, like setting up an error log and a lot more security features.

Besides work, last weekend we rearranged the room a bit, so I had to go out and get a full tilt television arm. It seems pretty good, but I am still nervous of it falling. I am not so much worried about my ability to put it up, more so about the quality of the arm. I am afraid that it is going to bend and eventually break. Hopefully it won’t do that though, it was a pretty expensive piece from Best Buy, so I have a little faith it hold up under pressure.

The room still isn’t back in order, but I’ve been so busy and Kris got a promotion at work that we haven’t had time to fully put the room back to normal yet. I am hoping that this week I will be able to fully put the room back to normal and get the rest of the stuff that isn’t yet in the room, in its place.

As for Lep’s Lair, things are at a standstill. I have been trying to make the user system work on the subdomains, especially for what I have planned in the future, but right now I am having problems getting it to recognize the user stuff on the subdomains. I’ve even been holding off adding new games until I get the subdomains working because once they are working I can do more with the comments and recipes and whatnot. I guess for right now, until I come up with a solution for what I want to do, I am at a standstill with my site. It sucks because I want so many more things and be able to have people come and have special privileges depending on the section they are in. Hopefully I will be able to finish it up soon.

Kris and I finally went out and bought a new bed. It was delivered yesterday and so far all I’ve done is slept in it, I haven’t actually laid down and watched television in it yet. We’re going to be rearranging some stuff this weekend so tomorrow I am going to go out and find a full tilt LCD mount for our television.

The client rush has eased up a bit and I have more free time, but I am not utilizing it the way I’d like to. Instead of using it to find clients and whatnot, I kind of just sit here and not do anything for hours on end. I could be looking for new clients, or even just working on this site. I hope soon that I can go and get the proper paperwork to apply for Medicaid, I really need to get this ADD in order. I think tomorrow if I have a free moment (though I think it might be a heavy work load), I may try and add more games to the arcade and movie sections to some of the fanlistings.

Last night I did manage to redo the site runs/entertainment sections and combine them. I think this new format is much better. Apparently you guys do too, as my hits to that section have gone up a lot.

When I put up a member system a few months ago I wanted it to be custom so I could add things in as I wanted to. It’s not that I wouldn’t love to have Social Engine, because I believe Social Engine is the best script out there for a member’s system, but I don’t have $250 for a license, so I decided to write my own. Up until this point members could only write in the custom forum, and update their info. With this arcade script, users can now play games and set up tournaments to compete against their friends.

I should also point out that the arcade has a profile page. This is not the final profile page, once I create one, it will replace this. If you have any games that you’d like to see added, let me know and I will see what I can do. There are thousands of games I can get, this is just the beginning.

President Obama signed healthcare reform into law this afternoon. While it isn’t the best bill that we could have gotten, it is much better than we currently have. I know a lot of people are upset that it doesn’t include everything that Obama talked about when he was campaigning, such as giving everyone the same healthcare that he himself had as a Senator, but unfortunately there were people who stood in the way of change and for the most part those people are called Republicans. Unfortunately it seems that killing these people is illegal, so if you do not want them to mess up what you want and what you think your government should give you, then please vote them out of office.

Seriously though, by 2014 if you do not have medicaid or health insurance of some kind then you will be fined for it. I have been without health insurance for a few years now and I have to say it is a pain in the ass. I am hoping that since I have done my taxes this week and with this new health reform going into affect this year, then I can go ahead and get myself either medicaid or health insurance. There are some things that I’d like to take care of that I can’t without having insurance, like getting medicine for my ADD, going to the doctor when I am sick, and eventually when I can figure out how dental will change, finishing this root canal that was started a few years ago.

Before the bill was signed, Vice President Biden was caught saying that “this is a big fucking deal” and the news stations are really upset that the Vice President would put it like that, but really when you think about it, are there any words that sum it up better than “this is a big fucking deal”? I can’t think of any.

Networking and being affiliated with people is very important in life and in business and even when your just trying to run a website or business. Even just going into the city a few weeks ago I have a few more potential clients just from meeting them and talking to them for a bit. It’s just amazing how meeting with someone, or having a phone or email conversation can be so detrimental to your business or website.

On Myspace I have over 21,000 friends that I try and network with as much as I can. This comes in most useful when I run my girl and guy of the moments contest (hopefully a new one will be coming soon). I also have a few thousand followers on Twitter as well. With Twitter it is a different story though, I tend to get more work off of Twitter than anything dealing with my site or friendship wise, but that’s fine since we all need to work.

Now I am trying to get out there and actively affiliate with other sites. I just recently made an affiliation with MobsterAddz after doing some work for them. Now I am looking for affiliates for other parts of the site. If you want to affiliate with me on my blog, on my recipes site, Myspace Adder, Proxy, fanlistings, anything at all, let me know and maybe we can work out a link exchange or something.

I have been trying to get on a schedule. Schedule is a weird word, see I don’t have the typical job where I get up and go to work, I bid on jobs and if I get them it’s my income. I have that down pretty good, but sometimes I get a client in the night when I want to just work on personal stuff. This has happened for the passed few nights. I have no problem with helping them, since it is money coming in, but it kind of messes up my schedule to the point where when I wake up I don’t want to start bidding on jobs and doing anything with work. Of course to make money I don’t have that luxury, so I have to deal with it and do what I need to do.

When it comes to my blog it seems to be a whole other thing. I had set up a schedule a few weeks ago with blog topics that I wanted to talk about on certain days of that week, but as the days went by I wasn’t keeping to the schedule. How do you handle your blog schedule and sticking to the topics you want to talk to on certain days?

I think everyone looks up to someone and is inspired by someone else. Even if you never met them, their work can inspire you in your own. Even fellow bloggers out there have other bloggers that they look up to and wish they could be as good, or be as creative, or have as good of content as the one they admire. Yesterday I found out that one of my first inspirations on the internet died nearly two years ago. Megan Miller of megsplace and digitalreflex passed away on June 20th 2008.

I can’t say that I didn’t kind of know, but having an inkling and then finding out for sure are two totally different things. I hadn’t seen her on AIM in a while, but I can’t believe it’s been two years. Where does the time go? It doesn’t seem like that long ago that we were talking about me writing a better blog program than just her using text files. I think she will always be an inspiration to me. It’s weird when I think back to our conversations, over ten years ago she first told me what cable internet was (though it would be years until it was available in my area), and what AOL’s BYOIA was.

Goodbye Megan, I hope you continue to inspire people wherever you are.