I definitely want to pick up American Pie this year for Christmas.  I think I am going to go with the downloaded version this time so that I can keep a handful of funny videos on my laptop for when I am travelling.

I get really annoyed at hotels watching just 30 channels of nothing on, when I am so used to watching 200 channels of nothing on.

I have not seen The Benchwarmers yet, but something about the movie seems just slightly immature enough for me to laugh at it. Sometimes I just need to dismiss reality a bit, let my guard down and let out some uncontrolled guffaws,

I do not think the world would be as happy of a place if no one had pets and too many times the people that care for our pets go without recognition.

So I just wanted to take a few minutes to thank all the veterinarians and pet hospitals and groups that help keep our pets healthy and happy which helps to keep us happy.

More and more we are finding that animals including our pets have more intelligence and greater abilities at communication than has ever been imagined. It only makes practical and ethical sense for us to help these sentient beings just a little bit more.

Included in this is the need for us to choose our veterinarians carefully. I was just reading about los angeles veterinary needs and requirements and learned that less than one fifth of veterinary hospitals voluntarily submit to on-site evaluations by the American Animal Hospital Association. As I see it, we need to support the veterinarians more so that they can build up strong enough businesses to advance the cause more.

Apparently the war in Iraq is really getting under the nerves of everyone in Hollywood.  Driving people to drink and spout off at the mouth in an uncontrolled fashion, some spouting off without the influence of alcohol at all.

First there was Mel Gibson tearing into police for pulling him over for drunk driving when he was drunk.  A belligerent drunk driver is nothing new for police, but he is a celebrity and was slurring Jewish people in a rant blaming them for the war in Iraq.  Since he has created a high profile as a Christian advocate and works in an industry founded by many famous people of Jewish decent there was a lot of fodder for people to talk about.  He made the rounds apologizing, reminded everyone that he was an alcoholic and sought treatment.

Then Michael Richards (aka Kramer from Seinfeld) went off the deep end when some guests interrupted is comedy routine and started spouting off racial epithets and worse while a different audience member caught the entire episode on their video capable cell phone.  Just as in the Gibson situation Richards immediately started apologizing left and right.

Now Danny Devito has gone on The View after a late night of alcohol consumption with George Clooney and went on a rant too.  His rant was devoid of racial slurs, but packed in a number of not made for TV slurs against the President.

So who is going to be up next in the Hollywood meltdown and will alcohol be the culprit again?

When I was a kid and later as a teenager, I was very much into martial arts.  I collected throwing knives, stars, staffs, swords, num-chucks and a lot more. 

I made a lot of my own stuff and collected even more.  I studied full contact kickboxing for a long time and found that practicing and honing my skills with martial arts equipment to be an excellent way to focus and harness my energy.

These days I'm getting a bit older, my son is starting to collect swords himself. I have studied Tai Chi a bit and have been thinking about taking TaeQando.

I still have a heavy bag that I work out with these days, but I miss the training with others working to perfect movements and technique.

I think this might help me re-target some of the focus that I developed way back then. It served me very well and could be very useful today in my business and consulting life.

I have really gotten sucked into the Heroes series.  Its a very good show, but its extremely short on content.

I sincerely wish the show had been made for cable, SciFi or HBO or something.  Its a great story line, plot and entangled web, but I swear the show is only about 20 minutes long, surrounded by 40 minutes of commercials.  I don't miss a show, but I always watch it on TiVo as there's just to much static in between.

I don't TiVo my way through all shows, but a few like this one are definitely more ad than content.

Greatest American Hero

I must be going through a Hero phase as I've been watching Smallville all summer, now Heroes and I've also been catching up on an old show from the 80's that I liked as a kid.  Called the Greatest American Hero.

The show ran for just a few seasons and featured a high school teacher and an FBI agent that came together in the desert at just the moment when aliens were landing to give them a super hero suit.

The bumbling pair lost the instructions to the super suit however and the plot line of all the episodes progress as they continue to attempt to try and save the day, while learning how to make the suit, fly, stop bullets, turn invisible and give the wearer telekinetic powers.

Its a great show with just a tinge of cold war era plot lines on occasion.  One of the season two episodes I caught gave some real clarity into why the aliens never returned to provide the instructions.

It would seem that a different dynamic duo had received a similar suit 40 years earlier and had the instructions and were ultimately corrupted by all the power.  So it would appear the aliens actually wanted the instructions to get lost so that this pair would have to learn the lessons of super suit power the hard way.

I came across a service that I heard about a long time ago, but never had a chance to follow up on.  Many months maybe even a few years later, I finally got around to looking into a company called Ebates. 

Ebates is a unique online service that provides consumers with an interesting method of reaping additional rebates.  In the online world many websites receive part of their funding by referring visitors to a shopping site.  The visitor that is referred may purchase something from that site and upon the purchase if the retail site can identify the referring source through cookies, they may pay an affiliate commission to the website.

Ebates has established a system where they provide coupons to their members.  They simply provide a portion of the affiliate commission to the shopper in the form of a rebate.  Its real simple.  Affiliate commissions have been around since before the internet was invented.  The technology just makes it easier to track and provide access to the masses.

I have been deep into my laptop today, writing for a new freelance writing service and testing things out overall.

I like the concept of the service as they have a combination written, audio, and video content monetization platform.  Plus, its not a review site where you write about the topics they hand you from sponsors, instead they are looking for unique content written about anything that you find interesting.

The downside is that the articles don't get published on your site, you get paid up front and then they market your writing to the highest bidder where ever that might be.

So its a good way to get more exposure for my writing and for my name and I do get the benefit of promoting my writing profile which includes links back to my website and two of my blogs.

For anyone interested on investigating the service, you can find out more with my personal invitation.  I've only written my first article for them today, and have no earned any money yet nor been paid in actual cash. 

So I am not endorsing them yet, but will keep my readers that are interested in such things up on the situation and how it develops.  On a similar front, I continue to get some great comedy ideas from my forum discussions at MyLot where they pay you to talk.  (such a silly notion, but very fun if you go in with the right attitude.  No one is getting rich there, but I can always use a brain storm session to best advantage!)

Here's a very cool idea for a Christmas present.  Get someone a WallHog.

What's a WallHog its a seven foot tall by a little over four foot wide graphic printed up from a digital photo.

You can create something for a friend, boyfriend, girlfriend, kids, teen agers, or even for dorm rooms.

Wallhogs are pretty simple, you can upload a picture, they'll strip out the background, and print it up.  There's no glue or sloppiness in the installation so you don't have to worry about ruining a wall that you do or do not own.  These typically are not posters, but posters are available.  These have a 10 year indoor expected durability and are scratch and water resistant, even fade resistant to UV rays.

here's an example

Moving or changing dorm rooms, they come down fast without screwing things up so your landlord won't put you through the wall.  They can be put back up multiple times (as many as five)

The prices start out at $25 and go up to just under $80 depending on just how big you want to go!

Personally, I'd go for something crazy.

My son however would probably get a kick out of this as well though.

 My wife is great with photography so this might even be something she'd be interested in for her hobby business or even her classroom decorations.  Regardless its a cool idea, a cool service and relatively pretty darn cheap for custom art work that you control for your own place!

For those of you that may have lost site of some of my other writing. You can find me at ComedySoapBox in addition to my writing here at There's Something About Harry.

Recently, I have been letting my humor take me down a number of stream of conciousness ladders and trap doors.  The comedy world has been getting a real awakening first from the elections and most recently from Michael Richards melt down on stage live in front of cameras.  His comments are terrible, but it has created a dialogue across the country and that may be the only silver lining from the comments he made.

At the end of the day as long as we are all still talking it shows that we care, when we fall into ambivalence then our American relationship will have ended in a very messy divorce.

I am very impressed with the performance of real estate in my home state of Illinois.  I have lived in some hot real estate markets over the last fifteen years from California to Boston to South Florida and Atlanta.  Things are still booming in some of those markets but interest only mortgages have taken their toll on markets like California's.

I visited Illinois over the recent holidays and I can see the real estate movement there starting to hit with a targeted precision that has been refined in some of the other markets I mentioned.  They are filling in the farm land rapidly with some great developments.

After reading a recent report on Aurora Real Estate, I'm becoming more and more convinced that real estate in Illinois is going to take off.  The safe money is in the immediate burbs around Chicago, but I suspect that those burbs are going to grow down to Peoria and Bloomington and Champagne and Springfield and connect with the burbs moving Northward from St Louis.

It is a very good time to invest in real estate in this particular market.  Things may be tanking in California but California does not drive real estate markets in the Midwest, especially markets supported by Chicago and St Louis, which make especially comforting hedges.

After hitting the road for the holidays and taking my podcasting gear with me, I am back and working on getting caught up with a number of things including my Podcasting work.

My goal is to have the show up and functional by December 1, which is 2 days away!

So I have a lot of work to do to bring that off.  For those of you that only know me from this blog, I am actually trying to bring up 3 different podcasts on 3 different blogs all at the same time.  Hey there's nothing like a challenge right!

Plus, I am trying to launch an entirely new web service site (podcast included) and get a great deal done in the contracting area so that it can be a merry Christmas and so I can fund these additional business ventures.  There is a lot to do and just soo much time, but I promise I will get this thing running!

My sister-in-law or my brother's wife is pregnant.  They are expecting a little boy or girl sometime late in April and I am excited for them. 

This will be their first child and they are definitely ready.  They have worked very hard for this baby and are in the midst of doing some remodeling on their home to make room, taking the nesting notion to another level entirely.

Now my sister-in-law has been spending a great deal of time hitting up garage sales in her area and saving a lot of money.  This is great, but its making it a little tricky for everyone to get her some great baby stuff as she is covering the essentials.

I did some looking around and found a place called Corner Stork Baby Gifts that provides a unique collection of Baby Gift Baskets.

Since we do not know if they are going to have a boy or a girl yet, I have picked out my favorite gifts for each pending my wife's approval.

For a baby boy gift, I'd pick the Silver Helicopter.  Its kind of simple but looks like it would last and be one of those mementos that might get passed along. (below) 

For a baby girl gift, I'd probably pick the Silver plated bear cup.  I had a little tin cup win I was a kid, that kind of sticks out in my memory and maybe this would stick out as well for my niece.

Corner Stork has many other unique baby gifts like the golf cart rocking horse.  Then there are those creative baby gift baskets that attracted me in the first place, because some people just go get everything for themselves right away and it becomes a little tricky to join in the fun.

Now all I have to do is sit back and wait and find out what the baby is going to end up being, who knows maybe they'll even end up with twins!

Earlier I mentioned how I had been fortunate enough to have a person buy my breakfast at Waffle House and how I utilized that opportunity to explain to my son a little bit about the concept of Passing Along Some Good Karma.

Well my good fortune continued later on today.  I took my son to his dentist appointment, which went very fast.  I had an appointment scheduled for several hours later, but they were able to take me at the same time as my son.

I am going to get my teeth whitened and needed to get impressions of my teeth made.

We did the impressions, and the dentist who is a little new for the office realized that my x-rays were out of date.  She didn't want to have me put the whitener on my teeth if I had any cavities and so opted to provide a full exam on the spot.  I had X-rays taken and a quick check.

I had a failing filling with a slight cavity and another cavity in one of my molars.  I take care of my teeth, but I do have some fillings from my early teen years that seem to attract cavities.

The cavities being in the rear wouldn't impact the whitener and so we proceeded with that and made plans for taking care of the fillings later in December.

Now normally, learning that you have 2 cavities would not be considered fortunate, but the dentist's office gave me a break on the exam and chose not to charge me for the X-rays!  That probably saved me about $75 personally and my insurance company about $125.

That was fortunate indeed!  I bought a lottery ticket, and if I win a substantial amount, I'm going to buy breakfast for everyone in that Waffle House someday!

Thanksgiving is past and Christmas is barreling around the corner.  You can make a last minute gift pretty easily these days, but a little forethought can go a long ways. 

There's a great little website that offers flowers and gift baskets online, but the flowers aren't your typical call an 800 number to send flowers to the hospital type of arrangements.  These are a much better looking and some are even down right artistic.  I learned about www.dotflowers.com from a recent press release.  They offer flowers and gift baskets that are terrific. 

You should check them out, I even like their web design and web template very sleek modern and extremely effective.

This morning I took my wife to work and then took my son to the dentist.  On the way to the dentist my son and I stopped at a local Waffle House for breakfast. 

We had a good, slightly greasy, but typical Waffle House Breakfast.  As I was finishing my food, the waitresses waived over to me and told me that a gentleman, who had sat at the counter had paid for our breakfast anonymously before leaving.

I thought that was pretty cool.  We left a nice healthy tip for the waitresses (there were two, one in training), and left for the dentist appointment.

On the way home, I explained to my son several concepts and theories including the idea of karma, and the general idea of 'passing on good fortune or luck' or the idea that 'one good turn deserves another'.  All in all it was a great way to start the day, good breakfast, time with my son, and an anonymous unexpected gift.

I told my son that we'd have to stay on the look out for the right opportunity to pay for someone else's meal someday soon.  I explained that since it had cheered us up, it might do the same for someone else if we continued to pass on this good will!

Many times its important for us to share and discuss our experiences as we go through a mental healing process.  Sometimes we learn a thing or two about ourselves just from the discussion.  This effect is supplement even more when the discussion is focused with a group that has had similar experiences allowing us to relate together better and share some notes.

With this concept in mind a website is hoping to Help others by sharing 1 piece of health wisdom at OrganizedWisdom.com. The idea is simple, sign up and share some wisdom about what you have learned and connect with others that have shared their wisdom. The accumulation of experience and the wisdom from the experience helps the entire group to gain more understanding,perspective and even insight into what they might expect next. Its a terrific idea and great way to bring people together to share.

We received the MRI results finally for Mya and the results were good.  The doctors did not find any developmental issues with her brain so that's one more thing we can rule out now.

She has been making some great progress lately.  Its still slow and methodical but it is progress.  She's pulling up on things more effectively and even starting to cruise a couple steps on furniture.  She'll be 18 months old in a couple weeks and she's about 4 months past the stage where late walkers typically have already started to walk on their own, but we'll take progress every step of the way.

Our next big milestone for her is in January now(bumped out one month.)  She needs to complete her development and learn to walk in the next 7-8 weeks if we are going to be able to avoid the nastier tests.  We're working with her all the time, so hopefully it will pay off.

I wanted to thank all my family, friends, and readers that offered all the great support for Mya.  We really do appreciate it, and hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday!

In just a few more minutes it will officially be Thanksgiving Day for my readers here in the Americas!  On Thanksgiving many people will cook a ham or a turkey along with a feast of a number of other items from potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes, corn, green beans, cranberries, stuffing, and too many other vegetables to name.  And then there are the pies too!

The Turkey production is a big deal and its probably only eclipsed in effort required by a pig roast.  There is an easier way to handle a Turkey at thanksgiving that doesn't require cooking the bird for 5-6 hours or more.  You could order a whole Hickory Smoked Turkey, pre-cooked, just warm and serve!  Now wouldn't that be a great way to enjoy the holiday.

These great turkeys are available from America's #1 Gift Basket Website. They specialize in all types of gift baskets, candies and other goodies, but you shouldn't get too sidetracked by the candy. They also offer precooked Ham's and Turkeys!

You might want to get a gift basket or two sent to friends or family or even to some of your best customers., but don't neglect yourself. After a hard year of toil and labor consider giving yourself the gift of a pre-cooked smoked bird, ready to eat.

Now we're talking holiday good cheer!

We drove up to Illinois for the holidays last night. We left our place around 5:30 (we live on the north west side of atlanta) and we made it to the northeast side of Atlanta by about 7:30. That trip can be done in 45 minutes, but not very often these days.

I drove all night, and the family slept. I was listening to Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, which I've been putting off because I read a lot of the original Illuminatus books many many years ago, and his stuff seems like a sequel to me. But it was good for a road trip.

We didn't have any real problems with the drive, and then we got into Illinois, my home state. Illinois and Iowa and several other northern states have employed the use of movable rotating speed bumps on their interstate system. Their purpose is not to slow anyone down, just to keep you on your toes, or maybe I should say keep you on your does.

These speed bumps are popularly referred to elsewhere as 'Deer.' I was driving along side a semi trailer, passing it at about 70 miles per hour. I was in the left lane and right in the middle of a lane a speed bump of a deer suddenly appears in front of me in my lane.

Fortunately the speedbump was not upright, these are referred to as 'soon to be dead deer'. This speed bump had graduated from the soon to be dead deer status to the ever more practical status of temporary speed bump. I had just enough time to swerve a little bit and miss the main portion of the deers body, but I still ran over a very large portion of it. It was an extremely loud hit shaking the entire van and waking everyone up.

I pulled over to make sure we hadn't blow an tire or created a bubble in the tire, checking it with a flashlight. No holes or bumps but lots of speed bump paint.

So we got back on the road and drove the rest of the way to Peoria, making it here in reasonable time. I slept this morning and got up and went jogging and slowly recovering my bearing from the all night drive.

Hope everyone has a happy and safe holiday if you celebrate anything this week!

Jones Soda Company out of Seattle this year has continued with their yearly tradition since 2003 of offering to the world various different types of flavored soda.

This years addition to the soda palletes of dozens, is Green Pea flavored soda.  It is hoped that the new Pea flavored soda will compliment their line of sodas which includes broccoli casserole, coron on the cob, turkey and gravy, sweet potato and antacid flavor.  They have also created fish taco and salmon flavored soda.

Peter van Stolk is the Chief Exec at Jones Soday and he refuses to touch the stuff.  He was quoted by the AP recently as saying "Fish taco was just nasty and we tried curried chicken.  That was just wrong."

A couple more days and the preparation for the feast will commence.  The refrigerators and freezers around the country are filling up with last minute buys only to be emptied sometime on Thursday.

Microwaves have been around since shortly after I was born, and so I've grown up with them for the most part.  I still can't cook an egg right in one of them, but I don't like eggs anyway.

The technology is getting simpler to use, but its also starting to combine with other technologies.  Did you know that you can get a microwave oven with a grill built in it these days?  I bet George Foreman doesn't like that idea, kind of pops him right in the pocket book.

 We're probably going to move next summer and that means typically starting over again with most of our appliances as we've designed our current kitchen with everything mostly built in to the walls.  So as I'm visiting my relatives this week for Turkey Day I'm going to be scoping out the possibilities of what you can do with a microwave and figure out more about what we're going to need.  Maybe I'll even grill up some cranberries!

I've been watching Comic Relief 2006 tonight.  Its the first time I've seen Comic Relief in probably 10 years.  I'm not sure if there has even been a comic relief in the last 10 years, maybe I've missed it.

I'm watching Whoopi Goldberg talking about her inability not to wet her pants when she sneezes.  She's wearing a diaper (on the outside of her clothing) and sneezing like a fool.

She's also extremely tongue tied and flubbing lines left and right while Billy Crystal and Robin Williams just go off on a complete impromptu tangent.

Finally, she gives up with her lines and just does an impromptu introduction and surprise!  Its funny and sincere. 

I never really understood the secret of counting cards until I came across some tips the other day in a magazine.

Here's the general idea if you are playing black jack you start counting in your head by beginning with Zero.

As cards are flopped by everyone at the table, you assign a positive or negative value to the card.

ten's or face card each receive a negative one

any card from 2 through the number six gets a plus one.

As you go through the deck if the count goes negative then more high cards have been dealt. If the number go positive, then there are more high cards left to be dealt.

This can then help you assess your bets and the odds of brining in the cards you are looking for.

Now in Vegas if you count card, the house is going to figure it out by watching you with the eye in the sky, especially if you go at it as a newbie.

However, you can practice this playing online poker. You can go to VegasPokerPro and find a number of great online poker sites. You can check out their Freeroll or you can play some FreePoker without spending real money, its just plain fun.

VegasPokerPro has a great Poker Forum for discussions with other players and some great Poker Pro Blogs.

My personal preference for Texas hold em' is Party Poker, which you can sign up for at VegasPokerPro for free. You can find a number of other great tips and strategies at VegasPokerPro also. They have a great directory of blogs on poker in case that's not enough information as well!

I started a thread on MyLot (thread)asking people for names that they would never name a child.

I was hoping to get some great (bad) names so that I could use them in one of my books.

here's a list of the names I have so far

1. Anna
2. Birtha/Bertha
3. Beulah/Beula
4. Bleu Berry
5. Apple
6. Hitler
7. Judas
8. Rain
9. Cam/Campbell
10. Tina (person had a bad experience with a Tina and ruined it for future generations)
11. Harry (they didn't know about my blog  LOL!)
12. Damien
13. ProudLove
14. Rainy Showers
15. Basturd (mis-spelled on purpose for MyLot)
16. Porgy
17. Diogo
18. Sue (for boys)
19. Car Names - toyota,hyundai,honda,bmw,kia pride
20. Christina
21. Damian
22. Lucifer
23. Chester
24. Boney M
25. Amen Re
26. Eastern European names that are written in a way that makes them sound Western
27. Cärolain
28. Kätlin pro Cathleen
29. Flower Potts
30. Tii Oot
31. Zephaniah
32. Hezekiah
33. Faith
34. Hope
35. Mercy

That's the list so far but off to a good start.

I already have the names of Winston and nEarl for a pair of brothers going into my next chapeter due out on this blog soon!

You may have heard of optimizing a website for search engines, but have you ever heard of optimizing your Credit Card with a Search Engine?

Well that is exactly what you can do with the Credit Cards Search Engine.com.

You can look for cards based on interest rates, or categories like balance transfer options, cash back cards, rewards cards, gas credits and more.

I meet and talk to a lot of people in several forums.  As a blogger its a great way to meet people and get exposure for your website.  Its also a great place to get ideas to write about whether its news of the day, or something funny, or current events or anything.

The internet being what it is a place for people to come together to play and make money at the same time, I've always been struck by the fact that I often provide some very solid advice and help to people on these boards for free.  Sometimes I'll republish a more developed version of my thoughts in a board on my actual blog, but often times my efforts go unrewarded.

Until I found MyLot!

MyLot pays your to contribute your thoughts, ideas, discussions, pictures and to get people talking in General.  Their business model pays members based on how much they discuss, the quality of their responses, and the pictures they upload. 

I was a little tentative (as I always am with get paid to do this that or the other on the internet schemes) so I ventured by to try it out Friday night.  I started two discussions, made 14 responses on various topics, and uploaded 1 picture relating to a topic.  I spent about 10 minutes getting the account setup and reading the newbie faq's.  I spent another 10 minutes learning the system (I was drinking beers and going a little slow with lots of interruptions.).  I spent maybe a total of 5-10 minutes with the actual discussions.

I earned 33 cents which is paid via PayPal as these models often do.

Now, I normally write and respond a lot more in a discussion board than I did that night, but I wanted to get a sense of things.  I earned on average about 2 cents per post with a word count of approximately 15-30 words.

Not getting rich fast on this, but it was a very good source of writing topics, which helped me generate several blog posts this weekend.  Plus, its one of those things where you can talk in one group for free or you can talk in another and earn money for it.

I'll continue to play along there and see how it goes and keep you posted!

Last week was a very chaotic week.  I enjoy a little chaos when I have the time and energy to savor it.  However, when I have things to do and especially when I'm behind on the things I should do, chaos can be a real thorn in my side.

Regardless, I've been getting back on track and fighting off some of the chaos around the edges. 

Soccer is Over!

My son's soccer season is over.  He loves the hell out of soccer and we enjoy seeing him have fun, but this season has been a long one.  It was literally extended and it was pretty tough too.  He probably improved more than he has in any other season, but it was one of those very difficult improvements to behold as a parent.  But today he had a tournament (2 games) and now its over.  The family has Saturdays free again, and no practice on Thursdays.  We really needed the break.

 Zoe Coming Down with Something

Its that time of the year when one of the kids is sick almost every week.  This weeks winner seems to be Zoe and she'll probably get to make a weekend trip to the doctor tomorrow.  She was feeling fine early in the day and got some good playground time in between soccer games.

Mya has us Stressed

We still don't have any word from Mya's MRI results.  So the drag out of not knowing is wearing on us a good bit.  She was pretty active today and mostly in good health so that is great.  Here she is pulling up on something.  I hope she walks soon!

Mic Stand is here

I've been doing a lot more recording work.  Working on an audio book and also working on some of my own writing.  Mostly just trying to get lots of time talking and editing.  I haven't done any work yet with editing music or intros or sound effects in yet.  I need to do that soon.  I have gotten a good deal of initial experience inserting animation, slide shows and a little video.  The video has been hit or miss.  I worked on a video for PPP, and it had to be a minute or better.  My smart card on my camera stopped right at 60 seconds, so I thought I was in good shape.  I uploaded it to YouTube and YouTube lost 3 seconds somehow, and so the video was rejected by PPP.  I tried to edit it to insert an intro and an ending.  I had successfully done this on another video, but not on a re-edit.

I fooled with it for about an hour and couldn't get the sound and video to re-synch back up and had to abandon it until I learn a little more.  Hopefully, I can figure it out soon!

So today, I finally got around to swinging by the music store.  I picked up a desktop microphone stand.  You can kind of see it in this picture, or at least part of it.  The thing is I was kind of stressed tonight(explain why in a second) and when I saw this picture, I started paying too much attention to the 'character lines' around my eyes.  I'm not one to worry too much about how I look or anything.  I'm happy with the way I look, I keep myself in shape and try to take care of me, but I have enough to do without stressing over my looks.  So every now and then, something about me will change over time, but I won't notice it right away.  So apparently I'm getting some lines or bags or whatever around my eyes.  Maybe its not enough sleep or something or maybe I need to do more jaw exercises to tighten up my flabby jowls.  :)  Whatever, no big deal, I was just catching up with myself.

The Empire of the Bills Strikes Back

I've been super busy with a couple important projects the last couple weeks and the bills have been stacking up.  I normally pay them (online) as soon as they come in, but they weren't due or anything and I just didn't have the time. 

So I start plodding through the stack, which is far too respectable in size, and I finish entering all the bills into the system.  I feel better for knocking something off the list.  I fill out a survey with one of the merchants I work with and walk outside to drop it in the mail box where I discover a box full of mail.

Of course, there's a bill in there and so now I have to crank up the old laptop(where we keep the bill system) and plug that one in too.  Then I move on to the next thing on the list, tracking down the daycare receipts to submit for the dependent care reimbursement (pain in the butt) account so that we can save 15-30% on our taxes for that amount.  Its worth the savings but is always a pain.

I don't find the receipt nor the form I'm looking for, and I'm putting away and filling other papers from bills, to the kids school work, to you name it out of this big mountain of crap that's piled up on the island in our kitchen. 

Then I see it.  There are two bills that got shuffled into the wrong stack and they are about half way down.  I suffer a gut roll and see that one is 5 days over due(student loan) and one is due tonight(credit card).  I hate paying bills late, especially when I have the money.  :)  These two slipped by somehow and that just aggravates me all the more.

So I crank up the old computer one more time.  I pay the credit card. I try to call the company about the late student loan, but they aren't open on Saturdays so I add that to the list of things I have to do on Monday.

Vitamins and Free Radicals

So I finish the bills and I'm tidying up some loose ends.  I take my vitamins (multi-vitamin, B12, and Ginko Biloba, plus a baby aspirin to keep my hear in tip top shape - last night I had 2 beers so I rotate on aspirin and beer).

I head down stairs and that's when I upload pictures from the day and notice my eye bags.  Then I start thinking, 'OK, Brett, you are going to live forever, but you don't want to end up looking like the crypt keeper or whatever that skeletons name was.

So then I start looking around to see what the latest marvels of modern bio science might have to offer.

I pick up on the topic of Free Radicals and how they basically attack your cells trying to tear them apart and steal your electrons, which sounds vaguely familiar from Advanced Chemistry in high school, but that's almost 17 years ago so its a little vague and I was never good at integrating Chemistry and Biology.

So I come across this stuff called Proleva with the L tilted funny in the logo and I start figuring out that this stuff is supposed to donate electrons to create some sort of barrier around your cells.

So this Proleva is a supplement made from fruit extracts like grape seeds, green tea, various berries and a few other items.  Basically one of the anti-oxidant cocktails with a electron donor kicker.

So I start thinking, OK maybe now is the time when you should start figuring out just how to execute this plan to live longer.  I can't just expect modern science to hurry up and figure out a way to clone me a new body yet, after all I don't even have Michael J Fox's money and that's not even enough to help him.

Proleva costs about $60 a month or you can go for the value option and get it for $260 for 6 months, which doesn't seem to be too much to live forever. 

I mean just how much would you pay to push yourself in the longevity direction?  

Don't get me wrong taking Proleva isn't going to make me live forever, but with proper diet and exercise, and other vitamins and a lower stressed life, and maybe if I take up Yoga again (met a really pissed off Yoga instructor this week, who seems to be pretty funny over at Comedy SoapBox), well then maybe I can preserve my carcass long enough in the manner to which I've become accustomed to enjoying my carcass such that when modern science does find the additional fruit extracts necessary to keep my ticker ticking like an atomic clock, well then I'll be ready.

Warning to my readers.  I'm writing this to help rid myself of stress.  That may or may not be good for your own stress levels.

So if you enjoy the soap opera, then continue, but I do not want to transfer my stress, just need to air it out a bit.

The week has been filled with several little setbacks.  It started out great.  We wrapped up the new business plan for the collaboration project for a team of people working out of New York and the Northern East Coast.  The plan is together and now its just about stacking blocks and connecting the dots.

Shortly after the plan came together, the distractions started to kick in and they weren't terrible, but they were rather relentless.  Monday, I took my son to the dentist and that's not a big deal, but I worked late on the plan the night before and didn't get a lot of sleep for his rescheduled 9am appointment.

That then transfered over to some writing assignments that got hosed for technical reasons.  No big deal either as I have writing assignments coming out of my ears, but I did finish a couple that won't be utilized and I really do not like to waste the effort.

Wednesday and Thursday saw my son home early from school around 12:30 or so as there parent teacher conferences.  I had to pick the girls up on Wednesday form day care as my wife is a teacher and she had conferences those days and on Wednesday they ran late.  My wife caught a ride home with a fellow teacher, and they stopped at our house for a beer after the conferences were over, so I didn't get right back to work.

I made some progress late that night learning some new things to do in Flash, and got paid for it no less, but a simpler video project that I did came in right at the minimum length.  However when it was played back over YouTube it shaved 3 seconds off the video, and I've been having trouble all day doing the video editing to get an additional 10 seconds put back on the video.  My computer just isn't made for compiling video!

A business deal with one of my clients is almost wrapped up this week.  I'm looking forward to redirecting some energy now that it is over, but it finished 6 weeks ahead of schedule.  So now I'm working on filling in the time and replacing the billable hours.

I got a great leed early in the week, but that will be on hold probably until after the holidays.  Oh and we've been stressing over the baby's progress.  No word yet on the MRI results, and on top of everything else she had an asthma attack or something last night for the first time ever, so no sleep last night.

So today I went jogging with my son, Corbin. I hadn't been jogging for almost 2 weeks now, due to bad weather.  So we took it slow and ran about 2 miles, then walked the dog.

While we were walking the dog, we met the neighborhood burglars.  They were breaking into a house, and we walked right by them while they were at it.  We got just around the corner and out of their site and I called 911.  I was put on hold right away waiting for an operator, and finally got the 911 operator on the line and took for ever to get the information to her.  They promised to send a car out, but never saw it.  When we turned around to go back, no robbers in sight.  We must have scared them off and now they will be around to robb another day.

Silly little stuff all of it.

Next up focus on my flash training, writing, and the initial web design for the NY project.

No one ever insinuated that it was hard to transform into a catfish. 

I learned how to do it with only about 2 hours worth of practice.

Now I'll admit that I had a little help from the Flash Fairy. I have neglected my flash course for the last couple weeks and so this was actually harder than it should have been.

I just received a few of these pictures in a viral email.  I usually never pass these things along, but I do sometimes share them on my blog.

There are several of them and I am not posting all of them today, sometimes I bank them for future days when I feel like I am running a little low on inspiration.  Sometimes I save them for those days when my blog is feeling especially devoid of videos or images.  This is not really one of those days, but I have been sitting on them for a couple days now and the longer I sit on them the less likely I will be to remember to post them at all so here you go!

OK, so there's a new search engine that is supposed to launch sometime soon called Megaglobe.

You can go there now and submit your own website or blog to be listed or indexed by Megaglobe, but you can not search there yet.  So I took a minute to prod megaglobe along, afterall there's no need to sit on the fence.

I'm frankly getting a little tired of some of the search options out there.  We haven't really seen anything that shook up search significantly since Google divorced itself from Yahoo!

I want some more options, I want a little change.

We Want Megaglobe

So I put together this little video to spur megaglobe on just a bit, this was recorded around midnight or so and yours truly could use a little sleep which may or may not be apparent in the video, but even more than sleep, I'd really like some more options!

I'm not religious, let me state that up front.  I do not believe in religion.  I have my reasons and my reasons are based on my life experiences and the proof that has passed before my eyes.

I do understand the role that religion can plan in the lives of some people and this can be positive.  Overall, I do not believe that religion plays a positive role overall as religions are inherently exclusive of other religions and even the very few that are not, are excluded by the rest.  So despite the potential for social good, its my view that religions do more harm than good.

Disclaimer aside I do study and pay attention to religions.  I ran across an interesting article today talking about preachers that are turning to the internet to download sermons.  Now, this seems rather practical as people turn to the internet to download wisdom and knowledge and insights all the time.  A sermon seems like a natural fit.  Its not like a college student downloading a term paper, we're talking about a sermon that is going to be spoken.  Sure its possible that someone may copyright their sermon, but how many people are going to show up at church on Sunday, listen to a sermon, recognize it as copyrighted material and turn their preacher into the Christian equivalent of the RIAA?

That doesn't seem likely to me.  But I am a writer among other things.  I was struck with the notion that I could probably write sermons.  Yes me a non-believer.  I've studied many many different religions and read many of the teachings of these religions.

I could probably write a very rousing sermon and hawk the thing on the internet.  I wouldn't even really have to sell it, just make it available for easy copying on a website and run a bunch of Adsense ads on it and monetize the sermon.  Now, I know there are lots of preachers and evangelists out there that rob their flock blind morning, noon, day and night and 8 ways to Sunday.  They're believers apparently making a fast buck on religion.  Is it any different for a non-believer to do the same thing without actually stealing anything from the flock itself?  Just passing along a moral message.  I mean lets face it, there are a lot of sick twisted and morally repugnant religious leaders out there.

Would the flock be better served by some sick twisted meth amphetamine, gay bashing preacher that's having a drug induced love affair with a gay prostitute or a normal sober guy from Suburbia with a wife and kids that has studied extensively and knows a thing or two about writing?

Maybe I need to ask myself, "What would Jesus do?"

Maybe I need to ask myself, "Is this what Jesus did?"  maybe this is how Jesus started out and before you know it a dozen or so sick twisted lotus flower eating gay bashing disciples involved in affairs with gay prostitutes started making a buck off of him and robbing the flock of all their fish?

You have probably seen the ABC show Extreme Home Makeover with Ty Pennington.  Its a very good show even if it is heavily laced with the touchy feely Disney vibe. 

One of the things that makes the show so good is that each home makeover is very very good and very dramatic.

I've done a lot of remodelling on my homes over the years and it always seems like I end up having to move as soon as I finish the home.  I'm not a home flipper or anything, it just takes a number of years to get the house right and work usually pushes us to move by the time we are getting settled. 

To be honest, I'm running out of steam for doing the wor

k myself and so I found this site offering a chance to win a home makeover . 

Now I'm not going to hog something like this all to myself to increase my own odds of winning an extreme makeover.  To be honest my house is almost done, and I won't be moving for another year so I don't really need it yet (I wonder if it could be delayed for 9 months . . . . :)

But some of my readers might be interested in this, so if you are interested in winning $50,000 for a Extreme Home Makeover check it out and maybe you can send me some before and after shots if you get it!

I kind of approached Wednesday with a midweek slow down.  I've had a number of different meetings and things this week that are family related and its nipping into my work.  I do not mind, but it means that I have to do even more at night to stay on top of things.

Monday, I had to take my son into the dentist.  Today I had to take my wife to work and watch the kids by myself this evening.  Tomorrow, my wife and I have to meet with my son's teacher for Parent Teacher conferences.

None of these events take a great deal of time nor are they a real big distraction.  The work complication is more in the setup and take down time involved.  Mostly I can launch into my work on a laptop about any where that I have a wireless connection.  Plus, I can record voice notes in my voice recorder and rapidly convert the dictation to something useful when I get back to the computer.  But all the coming and going during the middle of the day does break up my routine and does make it a little tough to keep things moving along quickly and efficiently.

I'm pretty far behind on my writing this week, decrease in writing compared to last week of about 40 fewer articles and its only Wednesday.  I'm also behind on my web development projects and my to do list, which I had worked down to about a dozen things over the weekend (from 30) has inflated back up into the low twenties again.

What I really need is a good mobile laptop solution.  I used to do a great deal of work with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 and I may take a fresh look at putting that on a table device so that I can dictate some of my writing while I drive!  Let's see them come up with a state law against that!

I have two daughters and a very crafty wife, actually my wife has a Bachelor's in Fine Arts, so calling her crafty is a bit of an understatement.

My family has started collecting beads.  We have what I would refer to as every possible color or manifestation of a bead possible.  However my wife and daughter definitely disagree.  I don't completely understand it, however they love to string beads and make various types of jewelry.

I shouldn't be too surprised.  My wife made my wedding ring after all. 

Well, I've got a little surprise for them, because even I was able to find some beads that they don't have already!

Gilbert & Frech Jewelry, Gems and Beads have some very nice and very amazing beads and jewels available at their bead store.  I look forward to seeing their surprise when they get some Apple Green Turquoise Nuggets in their stockings for Christmas!

A woman posted posted an article on the Memorial Bracelets Blog site that caught my attention. She talked about how she wore a memorial bracelet for Police Officer Moira Smith who died on September 11, 2001. Officer Smith was the only Police Officer from NY that died that day and the poster, a female, wanted to show that a woman could do a man's job.

I served in the military for four years.  I started Basic Training on the day that the ground war started in Iraq in 1991.  The 'War' was over by the time I got out of Basic, but all through Basic Training we were led to believe the war was going horribly and that we would all be sent to perish soon.  For many years this deceit seemed funny to me, but these days its a sad irony, as the war that really was not completely finished is now taking so many soldiers lives.

I wanted to write about this article because I had the good fortune to served, stateside, with an officer that served in combat in Iraq during the first war.  She had testified in front of Congress on her experiences and on the capability of women to perform the job effectively in battle.  I served with some great men and women in the military and I have no doubt that a person's sex or sexuality has little to do with their ability to complete a mission or get the job done.

I'd encourage more people to consider stopping in at  Memorial Bracelets and pause and consider the people that have given their lives for the United States and the Constitution that brings us together.  For those of us here at home, its our job to insure that they have a country worth fighting for and a country to come home to soon.

I made significant strides today completing the first draft of my Business Plan for my Comedy Collaboration website.  I had previously selected a name and secured the domain a month back.

I've been getting an increasing number of requests and emails and PM's from comedians interested in participating in the project.  I've specifically received some great feedback from one comedian that basically said, "We will come if there's something in it for us!"

I had some great things in there already, but I went back to the business plan and made sure there was something great in there for the comedians, and boy is there.  Next up, I need to tighten up some of the numbers in the models and start scoping out the site design requirements.  Most of scope is covered in the Business Plan, and since I map everything in MindManager(I'm a trainer too) it will all translate nicely into the actual specifications document.

Before I get to the specification document, I need to do just a little bit more technical investigation into some new coding requirements that have come up.  The algorithm has become slightly more complex as I worked to make sure the pay off to the other comedians was up front and hard hitting.  Adjusting the algorithm is easy, getting it coded into the overall site is going to take some hard work, but there are many models of this system at there already in different applications.

Very eager to keep this ball rolling!

I've been focusing a lot lately on learning to sell things online in many different mediums.  I've set up a Cafe Press site, an Amazon store, a web hosted store powered with my own shopping cart, stores powered by PayPal, and most recently a Shopster store. 

Next on my to do list is to learn how to leverage my ability to sell products on Ebay.  Rob Frechette has an Ebay ebook which discusses among other things, how he started selling items on Ebay and moved into selling a high volume of items on Ebay.  He's up to 50k in items per month, and even has a full time employee now.

I've worked professionally with Ebay specialist companies in the past.  I've worked with companies that utilize derivatives traders from the CBOT to come in and manage Ebay trading strategies.  I'm no where near that level by a long shot.  I have the accounting back ground to account for the stock options correctly, and I have the financial background to put together a stock options trading strategy too, but I don't have the experience to apply that to Ebay and that is what intrigues me about the topic.  How to fill that void. . .

I worked about half the day today working on my Podcasting techniques.  I started by recording a chapter from a book that I have read several times.

I had previously recorded a lot of my own work and found the results to be better than I expected.  However, when I recorded someone else's work (this was for my personal recording and not something I will ever publish, just doing it for the practice), I found it to be much more difficult.

1. I did not know the words as well, even though I've read the book several times.
2. The words did not read aloud as easily as some of my own words had(partly because my words had been cherry picked from writing that was more suitable for recording)
3. I found it difficult to get into a good rhythm and to place the proper emphasis on words and phrases.
4. Editing took about twice as long as it has typically taken for me with my own work.

But I learned oh so much more than I had yet.  I found several flaws in my style and tone and emphasis that only showed evidence of existing when I was less suited for the work.  I found that after practicing with additional chapters I was able to improve greatly.

Then when I went back to my own work the results were much much better.  I suspect its kind of like learning to fly in a simulator and trying to compare that to flying a real plane only to go back and fly the simulator some more after getting some real world experience.  When I was a kid, I always wondered why my dad was so good at Pole Position at the arcade.  I didn't really learn why until after I learned to drive and went back to play driving games at the arcade.  The real life skill teaches you so much more!

When I signed up to work with PayPerPost back in July, I was a bit skeptical.  The idea of writing sponsored articles for cash sounded a little too good to be true.

I've mentioned before that I didn't go all out at the beginning.  I waited until I got paid.

These days I'm getting paid in dividends from working with PayPerPost.  PayPerPost specializes in blog marketing to advertisers looking to sponsor articles.  Its a relatively new industry with very little competition.  Here's the great part about it, aside from the fact that I've made over a thousand dollars from the service so far.

The great part about it is that I'm getting first exposure to some great products, services, companies, and information about what's happening on the internet.  Lots of companies will cry about their inability to penetrate through to anyone or to ever get any good press.  They don't have a friend in the media world, or just can't get a break.

The companies that work through PayPerPost get a break into the blogosphere.  They get access to thousands of blogs around the world.  They get a number of other benefits that help their business on the internet as well.

As a blogger, I get information.  The information and connections I've made with companies working with PayPerPost have enabled me to build better blogs, write better articles, promote my own websites and blogs better and more.  I was introduced to one company after writing about them with PayPerPost.  I signed up for the companies free service.  On my web site Best of Viral Videos I now get 10% of my new visitors from that company and the services I was introduced to by PPP.

I received an email today out of the blue from a company that is a long time partner (sometimes customer and sometimes supplier).  They had read my article about a new software and service company and wanted to learn how they could combine some of their services and software with that company.

We're now working on building a video seminar to demonstrate the capability and spread the knowledge of the capability around the internet.  It benefits my partner, it benefits the new software service company and it benefits my readers and my readership.

Now, I'll be honest, PayPerPost is a new company.  They are going through many growing pains and changing and evolving almost every day.  As is the case with any start up its usually a two steps forward one step back approach, but they are trying.

Many critics have talked about the potential for PayPerPost advertisers to take advantage of bloggers by paying for reviews.  This isn't really the case.  Bloggers pick and choose what works for them and write accordingly.  There's no better way to exercise democracy than in a free market where votes are recorded in dollars. 

I've also heard complaints that bloggers own writing efforts will be harmed by taking on too many sponsors.  I've found this to be a misconception as well.  If anything, having a regular round of sponsors increases most bloggers motivation to blog more effectively.  More blogs are treating their blogs like businesses focused on pleasing their customers, the readers.  Without the readers the sponsors would not be interested in the blogs.

The money plays a huge part in allotting a bloggers priorities a little bit more to writing more, writing better, and writing more effectively.  My readership has grown since I started writing for PPP.  Much of this growth has come from Google searches.  I produce more content because I am more motivated to produce content.  The more content I have available the more people that find me, and this in turn is translating into an increase in subscribers as well.

I've heard PPP criticized for exposing their bloggers to advertisers that are themselves offering up services or sites that are MFA's or spammy or many other things.  I know from first hand experience that PayPerPost vigorously screens their advertisers for anything that might detract from their name or potentially harm their bloggers or even lead to something that is a scam.  Advertisers need to come to the table with a complete plan of how they wish to take their campaign to the blog market and if its up to speed, PayPerPost will approve it.  They do everything in their power to protect bloggers, the web, and their company image.  This selectivity should serve to maintain the brand staying power and the effectiveness of this new medium of blog marketing.

Britney Spears is not having a very good month.  She recently notified K-fed that she wanted a divorce via a text-message and was then surprised to recieve his divorce paperwork requesting custody of the kids and $20m US aprox.

K-fed may not have much going for him, but in some bizarre twist of fait, he apparently owns the copyright to a sex tape he made of he and Britney having sex on their honey moon and he's threatening to release the tape to a notorious Arizona firm that pays big dollars to get celebrity sex tapes, such as the Hilton tapes.

It even appears that a 19 second clip was released onto an adult video site as an opening salvo in the divorce.  She recently lost a lawsuit where she attempted to quash a sex tape only to be further embarassed by the judge that ruled that her reputation was built on her sexuality and expression of sexuality and therefore the sex tape could not injure her reputation further.  I would have to say that was a pretty cold judgement and I have no opinion on whether or not its accurate.

Maybe next time Britney goes on a fling, marries some guy, creates a sex tape, has two kids and decides she wants a divorce, she'll be a little more diplomatic. . .

The last thing most IT groups ever want to have to do is quickly do a rollback in a system to an older version after a newer version has crashed and burned.  With that in mind, I find it rather ironic that Wal-Mart a company known for its exceptionally competent IT systems, uses a marketing strategy that pitches the 'Rollback.'

How did the marketing team steal that from the IT guys?

Was there a big turf war in Bensonville?

Maybe a poor unpopular schmuck of a marketing guy got stuck with the IT guys during the annual Christmas party and had to listen to all the complaints about Wal-mart System Rollbacks and being the creative person he was decided to make the connection to Rolling back prices.

Maybe this is how it went

IT Guy1, "So we had to roll the entire system back, the prices were all out of wack and the data went haywire.  We had to take the entire system down and do a cold boot, Sam Walton probably was rolling in his grave."

IT Girl 2, "Yeah I couldn't believe how screwed up that implementation was.  We worked to get all those new prices integrated for weeks, tested, reviewed, and re-tested.  And then that fool head of Logistics Systems pushes in his pet project for RLS and doesn't bother to get it approved or alligned with the update."

IT Guy 1, "It was pretty bad that morning, when those prices went out, some customers over paid.  We figured out later that customers must have over paid to a total of $19 million, before we did the rollback."

Marketing Guy, "So you're saying you rollbacked the prices and the customers saved money?"

IT Girl2, "Who are you?"

Marketing Guy, "I'm Jim Sales from the creative department in advertising."

IT Girl2, "How come you got stuck in this side of the convention center for the Christmas party?"

Marketing Guy, "Something screwed up with my badge, someone in IT probably had their wires crossed again.  Those people are always screwing something up.  What do you do?"

IT Girl2, "I . , We both work in IT"

Marketing Guy, "Well, I need to go get a drink, this 'Working in a goldmine song their playing is giving me a headache" 

After working for years in the belly of the beast of corporate structures working endlessly to help those same 'beasts' get to the source of problems, it never ceases to amaze me how many companies still try and get by without a solid system or means of measuring their success or failure.

Many companies still choose to fly blind.  There was a large amount of IT money spent in the run up to the internet bubble that resulted in a number of companies getting off of their archaic main frame systems and moving to a more flexible environment.  The thing is many of the middle managers have not yet realized that they are now empowered and even expected to figure out what is going on with or without the assistance of a staff of IT programmers.  The years when you could draft requirements for the IT staff to program you a new solution or rapidly disappearing.  More and more middle management is expected to learn the technical skills necessary to pull this information out of increasingly easier to use systems.

I read a release from Acorn Systems describing their consulting methodology that applies corporate performance management techniques to help the team adapt and learn how to use the systems necessary to succeed.  They help companies build or rebuild a  solid foundation and outline concrete and measurable goals and metrics.  This can and does often involve the entire business, supply chain, sales force or customer support group depending on the scope of the project. 

Acorn offers a Enterprise Profit System that includes a next generation Activity Based Costing system.  Such systems used to make accountants like myself drool, however the truth is these same systems can be used by anyone in the organization that can learn to speak the language of business, money and data warehouses.  These same tools will wipe out many of the low level accounting and analysis positions that historically have churned the same report over and over again, passing it up the chain for further churning and analysis and consolidation.  These systems can provide answers in real time that previously took a month or better to determine when handled in manual spreadsheets.

This new breed of systems is going to drastically reshape the corporate environment and lay waste to the expectation set of what is acceptable and unacceptable productivity.

I'm sitting here tonight at about 5 till midnight and I'm working on getting a jump start for the week.

Tomorrow morning I have to drive my wife to work and come home to take my son to the Dentist in the morning at 9 and then off to school after his appointment.

So from a business perspective, I'm going to need to make up a little time.  I'm working on some of my organization for the week and I've been going through my to do list that piled up last week.  For several reasons, I watched my task list last week pile up from 4 items past due to 30 items.

Once things get behind it doesn't take long for things to really get behind.  So I've been working the task list down step by step.

I set up some new Software products on my website at Softduit earlier, something I've been meaning to do since Monday.

Right now these are the skeleton pages and I've got more work to do, but the content and reviews are the easy part or at least the part that can be rapidly built and something I can do when travelling if I have to.

Here's a list of the pages that I setup tonight, all titles from Nuance, and I've used the hell out of their software over the years.  :)

More Great Software Titles

I have a good deal of work to do reconfiguring drop down menus on my site there, but I'm working to get my titles caught up and the pages built out.  For me that makes it easier to map out the pages and figure out the optimum menu structure, and just make the menus.

Well for now, I'm working on pushing out content in anticipation of tomorrow.  I'm working at a pace of writing about 20-30 articles a day across various different websites.  These are articles that vary in length from 100-350 words each with 225 about the average.

That's about 4-7,000 words a day.  :)  No biggy that since I type fast, but keeping my brain focused on the topics and pulling all that detail out of my cerebral cortex, while I read the wall street journal, surf the internet, watch the news and listen to a CD all day is good exercise for keeping me young and my brain flexible.

Telescopes have played a profound part on the history of the world. Galileo was tried by the Catholic church during an inquisition and found guilty. He had developed and written many theories and treatises on the movement of 'heavenly bodies' that went counter to the dogma of the era.

Yet today many people take the dogma of astronomy without investigating it for themselves and looking at things with their own eyes.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that looking through a telescope will prove Galileo right or wrong, but I think its important not to neglect the understanding that he and many scientists had to fight for hundreds of years ago, before there was such a thing known as science.

Fortunately for those of us in the modern era, there are some exceptionally fantastic telescopes available. We no longer have to hand craft the lenses ourselves. We may have a lot to learn through direct experience about the stars, but fortunately the technology has been advanced upon by some fantastic companies around the world.

If you want to learn more about the stars and how to get the best out of modern telescopic technologies, there's probably no better all around place to start than Optics Planet.

They carry telescopes from some of the best brands including Celestrontelescopes, Meade, Bushnell, Tasco, Swarovski, Leica and more.

Optics planet offers some excellent information that can help you find the right optical device for you or your family or even your schools science team or club.

They have a very in depth How to Buy a Telescope FAQ section that can walk you through a number of the complexities.  The buying experience should not exhaust the energy that you want to put into understanding the physics of the objects you are studying or even the equipment that you are studying those objects with.

Gliding through the layers.  Moving as one, we slide we glide we spread, we contract.

We separate from the Goodness and settle to the sandy gritty depth, settling in for a rest, absorbing the warmth from the brightness above us.

Now, We are floating through the cosmos, one with out group.  No currents, no layers, no warmth no cold, just together.  As a mass we fold the potential realities together until we have organized the reality we shall choose to recover.  Recovering a reality is essential to remaining as one and moving forward together.  We know that any species that fails to recover a reality will be split, broken from itself and forced to exist.  They will loose contact with their destiny lost in the depths of their physical mind, trapped in the biological processes of ego and self interest.

We feel it, sense it, know it before we see it as a group.  We reach out with our selves with our essence and we begin to seize and fold.  We have parsed thousands of realities together for thousands upon thousands of millennia, passing in and out of multiple biological vessels as the possible realities are assessed.

We have arrived at the reality.  We have folded the reality.  We can now begin to merge our disembodied reality with our physical reality and begin the ascension of our group.  Our physical world has not witnessed an ascension in almost two and a half million years.  We were not ready then, we must not make the same mistakes that were made by the collective of that era.

Our reality requires that we wipe the blight of that era from our physical presence.  The blight of that former era disconnected from the cosmos and has suffered mightily ever since.  We must end their misery and initiate the end of suffering for the rest of our world's beings.

He may not be much to look at nude and draped in an American flag, but if a comedy CD isn't really there to look at now is it?

Regardless, you can take a quick second to win a free CD at the Ralphie May CD give away

so you can count this as the There's Something About Harry's Freebie of the Day post.

No credit cards or anything, just a mailing address and email address gets you an entry. I entered myself to confirm the site works. If I win, I'll hold a random drawing of my own and mail the CD to the randomly selected person from the list of people that comment on this article!

Don't leave your address in my comments though,just an email address and we'll make arrangements off line . . . Assuming I win :)

I did a little more work on my store today.  I was trying to focus on stocking the store at least with some of the things that we are anticipating purchasing for our own family this holiday season.

I find this to be a practical step forward for a couple reasons.

1. Right away at a minimum I can purchase products at a better price than I can find it at almost any place on the web.
2. I get first hand experience for the processes and experience that my customers receive and so this gives me the opportunity to 'check in' on things from time to time to make sure everything is working.
3. My kids and family fall within a typical profile for much of the country and many of my prospective customers.  Not everything we'll be interested in will work for everyone else, but some of it will so it gives me a good place to start.
4. You have to start somewhere, and so I might as well start with the sure thing.

Next up, I'm going to provide a comparison shopping section on my Softduit website that will contrast the Shopping.Softduit.com site with prices from Amazon.

This will be a good way to convert some of my Softduit traffic to my new store and it will help to build links and more business.  Best of all it will provide a good customer service as the prices I'll be comparing will be live prices from Amazon, so the customers can figure it out on the spot if I have a better deal for them.

I did some additional categorization and generally lowered several price sets on key areas.  I need to do some more work to develop the categories more, but its a start.

When I was getting out of the military, I was working three jobs.  Still technically in the military but on leave, working for H and R Block preparing taxes and working in the shipping area of a candy store that shipped lots of holiday gift baskets.

My wife worked for the same candy store and over the years we routinely send a lot of our Christmas gifts to people outside of our family in the form of Gift Baskets.  These types of gifts are not to expensive and usually provide something that the entire family or office can enjoy.

Not to mention many people recycle the baskets and use them to pack up gifts of their own later on saving wrapping materials and wasting a little less, but probably more importantly giving things a bit of a personal touch.

My wife and I went back and forth this morning trying to figure out the best way to travel up to Illinois.  We've got 3 kids and a dog and flying just isn't terribly practical for us.

Its about a 12 hour drive, which is long but not impossible on a 5 day weekend.

We've mostly settled on the idea of renting a van (saving our own van the miles and wear and tear of driving north).  We went back and forth on a luxury conversion van versus a Dodge Grand Caravan extended like the one we have.  It looks like we're opting for the latter, which will save us about $150.  We would have gone with the conversion van, but couldn't find one that was all that much bigger inside than the minivan so it just didn't seem to make sense to spend the extra money not to mention gas and getting blown around in the wind to top it all off.

The dog will be a little less comfortable, but she usually sleeps most of the way anyway.  Now we just have to finalize the call and book the thing before they run out of vans.  We are trying to confirm the existence of a DVD player in the van before we put plastic down.  :)

I have a kitchen project that needs to end, and end right away!

We began re-construction on our kitchen in early 2003. We made the biggest changes last spring, when we knocked out a wall, built a 5x6 island with a cook top stove and refinished the walls and many other things.

We haven't finished the floor yet and we need to get this bad boy done by Christmas. We have the money to do the project, but not the time.

We initially wanted to go with ceramic tile, but that will require resurfacing the sub floor with luan. We've been thinking about going with a laminate floor as that floats on top of a rolled padding and would require luan.

Luan does cost, but its more an issue of the time involved rather than the cost.

So as we asses the laminate flooring pros and cons the deciding issue is more about how long it will take to install versus anything else.


We had thought a great deal about going with a cherry wood or dark wood color at one time, but maybe we should look more into the potnetial laminate possibilities with laminate ceramic tile so that we can still get the effect we had envisioned, yet still benefit from the ease of installation and reduce time requirements for the project.

Yesterday my son had a make up soccer game postponed from a rain out.

The forecast in the morning called for a late afternoon thunderstorm right around game time.

By mid day the forecast had cleared up and no thunderstorms were supposed to come.

Twenty five minutes before the game it started sprinkling and the temperature dropped about 10 degrees.  There's a phone number for the soccer field and when we called it, the games were still on so we headed out to the field.

My wife kept the girls in the van and went to the drug store, while Corbin and I went to the game.  He started warming up and I went to line up with the huddling groupg of parents.

As the game started the rain started to pick up a little bit.  I tried to take a few pictures of the game, Corbin was doing pretty good even had a great fake while he was dribbling the ball up the field.  My pictures were all a bit shaky from the cold.

I had forgotten both my phone and Corbin's water bottle in the van, so we were both kind of stuck.  My wife made it back  about ten minutes before half time so I went back to the van got the water but no phone lying around.

By half time the rain was coming down and the kids were soaked.  The coaches agreed to play for ten minutes more after half time, but the parents revolted and a group of the parents hiked across the field to tell the coaches that it would be over now.  They ended up compromising for another 5 minutes, this entire negotiation being kind of funny.

So the game wrapped up, and we all pretty much packed up and bolted out of there.  The season has been a little rough around the edges and this was a strange way to end it.

I offered up a freebie earlier this evening and now I wanted to push out another good deal tip in case I don't make it online tomorrow because I think I might be involved in some home improvement projects working on tile in the bathroom.

With that in mind I wanted to throw out a this Home Depot Coupon Site from CouponChief.

CouponChief provides coupon codes in one location for lots of great stores online and offline.

Knowing where the coupon codes are is always a good thing, so book mark this page so that you can find it when you need it so that you don't get lost in the search engine jungle some night right before you checkout when they ask, do you have a coupon code, like well you could save money if you have one, but pay top dollar if you don't.

When that situation hits, just pop over here to harry's place and find the link to CouponChief.  :)

I've been hatching a viral idea for about 6 weeks now.  It came to me in California and is not a computer virus or anything malicious.

Its a creative processing idea, a way to bring small groups of people together from long distances to collaborate on a creative project.

I had been waiting on some technical equipment to come in this week that I will need to launch this new concept and I received it, tested it and it ran beautifully.

At the same time, I've recently identified a terrific group of people to help me build it and field the concept.  I'm being a little cagey about the whole thing right now so that it doesn't get copied, but I'm going to drop a few clues from time to time until the launch gets here.

The sooner the better!

Well its Saturday night and for those readers of mine out there that were thinking of a freebie, I have a nice easy freebie for you.

here's the link to Vimo

All you have to do is rate your doctor at Vimo and you'll get a code for five (5) free songs to download from emusic.com.  Just normal MP3 files so they'll play on any normal MP3 player or an iPod.

Don't worry you do not have to sign your life away, give a blood test, provide a credit card number, recite the alphabet by punching letters on the keyboard with four pencils taped together and stuck in your left nostril, nope all you have to do is complete a simple rating on your doctor, which allows Vimo to acquire some stats about doctors so that later on people shopping for a doc can get a better idea of who they are signing up with and that makes a lot of sense especially if you have ever moved or had to rapidly change health plans and didn't recognize any of the doctors on the list.  At least you can read some reviews on them and find out if they sound like a good fit.

I've been a father for 8 years now, but with three kids you might say that I have been parenting for 14 years.

Over the course of these compounded fourteen years, I've engaged in a practice that is a blight on the environment and something that the Bush Administrations EPA has chosen to completely ignore, and its a good thing.  If I were caught I'd probably be subjected to a massive penalty.

Use see I've been engaged in dumping a toxic waste straight into the local sewer system.  I've dumped umpteen hundred barrells of the stuff over the last fourteen years.

The offending substance is mostly odorless and mostly clear, but tastes very sweet, not that I'd ever taste the stuff, Its Toxic!

It's Capri Sun.  My kids never can seem to manage to finish drinking one of the little buggery packets of Capri Sun.  If you just throw them into the trash, the weight of the trash compacting on the juice sack will squirt juice into your trash, which will always rip when you pick it up and then you'll have the toxic substance on your dress clothes or kitchen floor or even the dog.

so you have to grip the damn thing in your fist, leaving the evil spike of a straw in the container, like a heroin needle you squirt the thing towards the drain of your sink and begin to pollute the water system.

It doesn't make me happy, in fact its a pet peeve, but I have no better solution and just want the damn things to go away. . . .

For anyone that blogs you should become aware that Google plays a key role in providing you visitors.

People can find your blog through natural search engine searches in many ways.  We often think that if we just type something and a person on the internet performs a search on say a pair of words that just happen to be on our website that we might show up in the results from Google.

The truth is that Google hires the best mathematicians from around the world to build complex formulas to determine if your keywords are the right keywords to refer their searcher.  For this they look for a number of factors.  Page Rank used to play a large role in Google's analysis of link popularity for returning successful search results.

Google saw many SEO specialists sprout up that rapidly learned how to best their system and so Google has evolved into new metrics including a new term referred to as Latent Symantec Indexing (LSI) which is a process that looks at the incoming links to your website and reviews the content on the page they came from and the header or title of the page at that location.  If the referring page with the link has content similar to your own content then it increases the value of your pages importance for potential search engine results.

Blogs are an excellent source for this type of contextual referral service and as such a new business model has emerged to capitalize or harness the power of bloggers to help refine and zero in on the right pages using services like Blogitive.com.

My daughter has tubes in her ears, but has been complaining a bit about a sore ear for a couple days.

When we checked it today it looked a little gross.  We were already planning on taking her in to get her first hair cut at the beauty parlor. 

So my wife left me with Corbin and the baby, and took her for the style session and headed to the doctor after that.

Of course, Zoe had an ear infection although it was kind of lite since the tubes were draining crap out of her ears, so she only had to get ear drops instead of the heavy duty antibiotics.

By the time Becky got home, the baby was taking a nap and Corbin and I had finished the yard and were inside putting together a podcast session.

Corbin thought that was pretty cool, we kind of browsed through the oddly enough slide show on yahoo commenting on things like, why does that guy have ten rattle snakes in his mouth?

Zoe got home and showed off her new doo and was quite cute and prowd of it.

She had seven inches taken off the back and now its all one length.

My son and I went out and cleaned up the yard today.  Its been a little neglected for a couple weeks.  Hey ran the leaf blower, and I raked and picked up piles of leaves and pine straw.

We reuse the leaves and pine straw in the back yard as mulch in the dog pin or fenced in area for the dog that is little too big for a pin.

Its kind of handy as we have kind of a au-naturale section of the yard where the pine straw makes a decent bedding and lots and lots of trees, which I'm told that dogs like.

After we got all the leaves picked up then I mowed the grass.  Hopefully that will be the last time I have to mow the grass until spring.  I probably could have let it go, but that will make it harder to rake leaves and pine needles next week!

Here's the end result . . .

NetResults is a newly launched website.  They have structured a collaborative writing internet marketing blog.  They are reaching out to gather together writers from areas covering Web 2.0, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and general internet marketing topics.

If you are interested in writing on occassion with NetResults or occassionaly submit an article to them for posting they can be reached by email from their website (thumbnail feature on the right).

I was very interested in their second article (not counting the initial press release of their launch).  They talk about a grid server system from Temple working on the Elastic Cloud solution for networking  multiple computers together to share computing power.

I am not a network guy myself but have always been fascinated with the concept of networking even just the computers in my own home together to get more processing power when I need it when I'm rendering something with a lot of graphics or crunching several million data lines in a database.

I got my podcasting equipment unpacked and started reading through the user manual.

Its written in Greek unfortunately.  I do not speak any Greek and thus it's all Greek to me at this point.

Actually, its Anglicized Greek, meaning its actually written in English but in such dry technical speak gobbly gook(gobbly gook doesn't yet exist in WikiPedia so if you are hoping to get famous for creating a word in the Wikipedia lexicon now may be your big chance!) english that it's still all greek to me.

Well, I'm plugging it all up together and just trying to use my general techie nature to figure my way through.  I figure if I can wire up a tactical satellite and interface it to a secured intelligence analysis system in the middle of the desert wiring a mixer board to my IBM laptop should be a walk in the park.

I ran to Sam's Club for a few things and was planning picking up one of those way to big to eat pizza's there.

Plan

Go in, order Pizza, shop for some stuff, check out, pick up pizza go home.

But I get there after going through what turned out to be a ridiculous amount of Friday evening traffic.

Walk in to Sam's Club with my daughter Zoe.  Head to the Pizza counter and see a line of 20 people.

I look up and see a number.  Call this number to order a pizza.

So being the gadget carrying super nerd that I am, I reach down and grab my trusty Treo 600 the 1960's finned cadillac of smart phones.

By this time I'm pushing a cart calling after my daughter to keep up and dialing the Sam's Club that I'm standing inside.  I get through and tell the operator I want to order a Pizza.  Mental note, 'it feels stupid calling Sam's Club to order a Pizza!'

I start cruising through the aisles picking up the things on my list, 'Ah crap, the list is in my trusty Treo 600 and I'm on hold now and can't see the list,' as I was saying I'm cruising through the aisles picking up things off the remnants of my mental list.

• Diapers
• buffalo wings
• lazanga
• baby wipes
• pull ups
• baby tomatos
• chips
• gold fish
• chicken fetuccini alfredo
• milk
• dish washer detergent

Boom I get kicked off of hold, no surprise there.  So I call my wife, and we decide on ordering a pizza the old fashioned way.  We debate over Pizza Hut and Papa Johns and since my wife's making the call we go with Papa Johns.

I head home with Zoe and she's cracking me up the whole way.  She's very funny for a four year old.

I get home and get the news that the pizza won't get here for another hour, oh well.

Five minutes later the door bell rings and there's the Pizza.  Grab a quick pen sign the receipt - $3 tip instead of $2 since it was so damned fast and take the boxes inside smelling of supremen pizza.

I'm not a supreme pizza person.  I'm a all the meats pizza.

As it turns out, Becky was trying to get a Sausage Sensation pizza, but the Sausage Sensation pizza isn't really a 'meat lover's pizza'  It's more of a supreme pizza with sweet sausage slices on it. 

Not really my thing so I end up eating some peperoni pizza and bread sticks.

Foiled again. . .

OK, so I just got done posting about trying to convince my relatives to do Thanksgiving in Orlando, and what do I see coming across my mail box?

I get this article offering up discounts on Disney World Tickets  .  Now is that a coincidence or what!

Maybe there's a little magic floating north with the jetstream from the kingdom under the sun afterall?

I guess my next question to answer is whether or not they allow people to smoke in Disney World these days.  I don't smoke myself, but my parents and brother do. (even though my brother younger than me by two and a half years had a heart attack this spring, he's still having trouble quitting.)

I think if they don't allow it, it will be good for the family, but I won't be able to tell them that.  If any of my readers happen to know the answer to this one, please chime in

Do they allow smoking in Disney World?

and

Which one of the Seven Dwarves was named Smokey?

My wife helped me setup certain parts of my store and if you read the last article, you know that she is the master photographer in the family.

So some of the first products that went into the store were cameras.  Now there's a little bit of a geneaology angle here.  You see my name is Brett and my middle name is Harold -> ergo Harry.  :)

I was named after my grandfather Harold and in the 1950's after he got out of the service where he served as an air reconaissance photographer, he set up a camera sales and repair store, called Harold's Camera.

So its kind of ironical or something that 50 years later I would sell cameras.  Its not the only thing on the store, my preference is for the comedy DVDs but hey.

Any hooo, I reorganized the Camera section to categorize things by brand and by Mega pixels.  I've got some good buys on these cameras as I confirmed by looking on Amazon, so I'm a little proud of my efforts so far.

If you are interested, I would be glad to help you with your own online store.  You can set one up quickly and the rates start at $29.99 per month giving you full ecommerce capability.  You can take your first order in 30 minutes after setting things up, and choose from 700,000 products to stock your store.  I've set up this page to help anyone interested in the concept.  I'm working on featuring the people that set up a store on several of my blogs.  So make sure you let me know if you start your own store today!

I wanted to take a few minutes today to show my appreciation to my readers and share this deal I found through Shutterfly.

Shutterfly is offering 12 free 4x8 photo cards.  here's an example of what they look like

Now, my wife is the master photographer in the family and anyone that's seen my blog snapshots knows that I'm not in her league.  Personally, I'd probably only be able to send out about 12 holiday cards before I got distracted, but I know there's lots of you out there that get your cards ready, way in advance sometimes even get them sent by Thanksgiving. 

I do aspire to be that together with my holiday planning someday, but other aspects of life just continue to get in the way.  Each unto their own.

Anyway here's a great deal if you are interested.  I believe they have a separate promotion that's also available to get 15 free prints also.  Take em all while they are there!

I'm heading up to Illinois for the Thanksgiving holidays and we are going to rent a van for the trip.

Every year we tell ourselves that we are not going to travel north in the winter time basically because we are a couple of northerners turned into wimps.

One of these years we are going to have to stick up for ourselves and try and convince the family to venture south for Thanksgiving.  Maybe we can even talk them into a Orlando vacation.  I just read this and it gets me a little home sick for Florida.  You've got Disney World and Sea World and Discovery Cover and Bush Gardens and you name it. 

The last time we headed down that way we stayed at a Ron Jovi hotel, more like a condominum with three attaching suites.  That was back when I used to live in Boca Raton.  Well I guess its time to start digging my parka out of the attic . . .  :(

I think Martha has been a little charged up after getting out of the clink.  Some might even say that she is acting a little catty these days.

Maybe she is or maybe she isn't but I will have to admit I am not much of a Martha Stewart fan and no matter how much she crawls around on the floor purring and crap, it is not going to make me stand up and yeowl.

I wander what she is trying to get out of this one.  Maybe a scrathing post of potpouri?? 

I kind of always picture her as the cats cradle type myself.

I shared a few slides from the deer that got loose in Target.  I'm not a deer hunter, but my brother hunts and my wife's family runs a lodge called their house this time of year so deer hunting isn't foreign to me.

I'm a decent shot, but saved my ammunition when I was in the military.  I don't subsist off of dear so don't go killing more to fill up the freezer.  I am not against it just not my bag right now.

But it looks Like Bambi's got a brand new bag, feedbag that is.  Check out this shot!

My wife got the Christmas bug early this year.  It came the day after Halloween.

Personally, I'm a bah humberger until at least the week before Thanksgiving.  I kind of look at it like you have to work real hard to deserve a break at Christmas and kind of finish out the year good.  When I go running I run at a good clip for the majority of the distance and I then use every last bit of energy I have to sprint the final bit to the end.  Same thing for the year and then its a lot easier for me to let loose and have a good time during the holidays.

My dog is like that too.  She sleeps all day at a pretty good clip and when nighttime gets here, she sleeps really really hard.

So my wife is buying lots of Christmas decorations from someone at work that had a Christmas shop go out of business  and I think Uh No its gonna be one of those years!

Anyway more to the point, I meant to talk about a friend of mine that had a grey cat when I was a kid.  The cat got sick, and started chewing on but not eating Poinsettias and those things apparently are kind of poisonous.  The cat didn't actually swallow the flowers, but did get very sick had to go to the vet and all.

Personally, I like plants in the house, even though I can't keep them alive, and I do like the ruby red of Poinsettias around Christmas when I Buy Christmas Flowers, but we've got toddlers and a dog so we have to keep them up high, which means that they get even less water and attention than we give our other dying plants.

Lesson Learned

Don't let the kids or animals eat Poinsettias, keep them up high and don't forget to water them!

When I was at the Podcast convention in Ontario in September I had both the good fortune to meet Larry Florman aka Brother Love and see him perform.

He puts on a great performance and I have no doubt that I'll be hearing him on the radio before the end of the year.

If you want to catch his show and happen to be in the New York Area

Make some time to get out and go to Slate Plus on November 20th.

In the meantime checkout BrotherLoves website at BrotherLoveRocks!

Brother Love Live at SLATE PLUS
54 West 21st Street
New York City
Monday, November 20th
Brother Love -Live at 7:45pm
Kick-off at 8:30pm

Open bar from 7pm to 8pm
Free pool 9pm till close

Proceeds go to Living Beyond Belief
www.livingbeyondbelief.org

I grew up in the Peoria Illinois area.  Peoria is a river town and in the early 1800's it was thought that it would be the major metropolis of Illinois, Chicago was not much to speak of back then.

Well Peoria didn't end up being Chicago but the river definitely shapes the culture there in the summer time.  I grew up boating, water skiing and swimming in the silty Illinois river water.  Its not much to look at but its definitely a fun time.

Every fourth of July every one up and down the river heads down the river in their boats and anchors around the waterfront to watch the fireworks over the water.

Flotillas of ski boats, pontoons, fishing boats and even a few sail boats will tie up together and establish a great big floating party on the river.

Run out of a drink or to and just climb from boat to boat until you can find a beer.  Get too hot, just grab a life jacket and hop into the water and float around for a while.  The Illinois has a bit of a current so its not to practical to swim without a life jacket, but in the summer time at night with fireworks and music going you can still have a good time.

These days I'm living in Atlanta but looking to move to Lake Wylie, which is essentially a slightly dammed up river.  There isn't hardly any current ther at all.  You can bet that once we get moved and situated I won't waste much time hitting the boat classifieds.  We're angling for a house on the lake so I'm going to need something to park in the dock lift afterall.

There are several different fireworks shows and lots of places to tie up but on any given Saturday everyone heads for 'the Shallows' a sandy area where boats can anchor and most people can wade around in water that is shoulder deep.  There's a couple barges that serve burgers and dogs and someone always has a beer.

A Buck suffering from distress and  several falls on the slippery tile floors of a Target Store is contemplating potential legal recourse against the company.

Deer Lawsuits on the Rise

The deer recently visited a local Target looking for some packets of scent for a  Holiday festival and suffered repeated falls in the Target Store.  Many deer are considered disabled as they have hooves, a hard and large overgrowth of a single finger nail blackened by thickness that completely encases a deers hands and feet creating a walking gate that is very similar to walking on stilts.

The deer has made several public comments braying the company for not designing stores that would better serve other disabled personages with a deer hoove deformity.

PayPerPost has thrown out the challenge to write about who on the staff we would like to take to dinner sometime.  As many of you know PayPerPost helps bloggers get sponsors for their blogs so that they can get paid to blog.

I've had opportunity this last week to get to know Peter a little better and know he's a pretty busy guy.  He seems like he needs a bit of a relaxing dinner so I'd like to take him to Emiril's.  Emeril's is one of those extra special restaurants that is actually an event for the spirit as well for the palette. 

Emeril's takes customer service to a level that comes close to perfection.  Patrons go for the experience and the experience often lasts at least an hour or two.  When you dine at Emeril's you are catered to by a team of people and everything is choreographed and timed perfectly.

Its difficult to say what I'd eat there.  I've eaten at Emeril's about a dozen times or more as I used to work upstairs from the restaurant in Buckhead.  Its difficult because Emeril's is constantly changing their menu, so its rather difficult to actually get the same dish more than a couple times.

Their Duck is superb and their barbecued shrimp on grits is enough to make you drool, which is not something you would want to do in Emeril's but you can be sure that if you do drool that a team of people will be at your elbow with an extra napkin specially design for damping at the corners of your lips to mop up spittle.

Peter's in Orlando and I'm in Atlanta and both cities have an Emeril's so I'm not picky.  I'd try either one.

We're trying to find ways to motivate my 15 month old daughter to climb and exercise and build up the muscle strength to walk.

Developmentally she is a behind in her development.  She has been undergoing physical therapy since March, and we are constantly looking for new and creative ways to inspire her to get more exercise.

Today, we were doing some light home improvement on the stairs and we had some left over carpet.  My wife was inspired with the idea of building a cat house like jungle him for my daughter Mya.

Here are the rough scriblings for the idea so that you can get the idea:

The general idea is provide something that is just a little padded, provides pleanty of traction and is baby height and very easy to pull up on with lots of things to grab and scoot around, climb through and so forth.

Not sure that we'll be patenting cathouses for babies anytime soon and even if we did, I'm sure we'd trademark it with a different name!

All right you know it and I know it.  You are a fanatic for free stuff.

Well my friend, I'd like to thank you for reading my blog and share with you some free stuff.  Well if you are a true fanatic for freebies you can get your free on at

OK this is obvious

:)  FreebieFanatic.com!

They have everything from free things for computers, or books, or babies.  There's free Halloween stuff.  There's games and a number of things.  Sign up for fantasy football and win prizes.

Now for you hardcore fanatics they even have affordable 'Free Car Wallpaper.'  With the popularity of Cars and Wallpaper these days, its really hard to find car wallpaper that's free.

Some Marriage counselors are advising people to fess up to their spouses about their attraction to people outside of the relationship as a means of being open and honest and displacing some of the angst of not talking about it.

Here's the idea

Let's say you develop a work place attraction to a co-worker. You go home and tell your wife, 'Honey, I've been feeling a little attracted to Julie at work. I have even had a few fantasies about having an affair with her.'

So in a perfect world your wife is supposed to sit down with you and discuss it, and if the perfect world persists, having unloaded this off of your chest you'll be less likely to act on your impulses and you will develop a deeper level of trust with your wife.

It sounds nice and fluffy and could work for some relationships, possibly even my own, but I can't help but envision a few alternate scenarios.

"You what!? You Sack of (expletive Deletive)! Don't get near me, have you been having these fantasies while you're with me? oooooh !"

Or

At the Christmas party later in the year, introducing your wife to Julie

"Oh, so you're Julie, I've heard all about you! Did you know that my husband was having fantasies about you three months ago when you two were working on that project? Yeah, he's such a lecher watch out for him. What? Oh, no I didn't realize that you worked in HR. hmmm"

Well here's what the experts say according to the WSJ

To Guard against damage from affairs, experts suggest couples:

• Acknowledge the risk of an affair occurring
• Discuss circumstances that might pose a risk
• Agree to talk about temptations before acting
• Disclose any affairs promptly
• Agree not to counterattack if a spouse strays
• Learn to ask, give and receive forgiveness

What do you think, would this really work????

There's Something About Scrubs .

No I'm not talking about the show Scrubs.

I'm talking about Medical scrubs that sometimes go in and out of popular culture style. 

If you are thinking about getting ahead of a fad, or if you are in the medical profession or just want a Halloween costumer for next year.  You can look no further than Scrubsgallery.com!

They have scrubs in stock by all sizes, colors, styles, fabrics and more. 

They have a very large selection of scrubs with print designs (over 800 styles when I searched today) and designs in the print.  They've got about everything except for sexy nurse costumes.  If you are looking for that type of thing, you might need to look somewhere else, but they do have lab coats so if you swing towards the authoritarian side of thins . . .

My good friend Jeanne Noll of future fame and fortune as a Stand up Comedian has launched a new business venture and she's done a fantastic job.

She's established Rosie's Place.

Its a  great little store that offers a great selection of Books for children, Baby items, some great gift ideas for the holidays and more.

She's done a great job with the design and product selection and placement.  Do check out what she's done with the place.  She's really built up a great business.  If you are in the New Jersey or NYC area you should also keep your eyes peeled for one of her upcoming shows!

If you have not yet tried Voice Over Internet Phone (VOIP) service yet, then you are in a good position to try it with a plan that will give you the first six months free.

ViaTalk is a company out of Upstate New York offering Internet Phone Service at residential rates that are less than $16 a month. My local phone company and cable company have both made countless pitches at me to try 'digital' phone service, which is essentially the same thing.

Their services typically start out at $25 a month, and I have to pick up their super duper Gold Plated Platinum Anniversary Plan with so many bells and whistles that my bill rapidly gets ratcheted up to $125 a month. I don't need all that.

For $16 a month I get what used to be considered a full service plan by my local phone company until they found ways to slice and dice and double the price with ala carte options.

If you try ViaTalk you can call any where in the US or Canada free for the first 6 months. They also offer up business packages. So if you run your own business from home or have a home office for telecommuting, there is absolutely no need to go pay $90 in setup fees to have an additional line run and then pay the monthly service on top of it. Just set up a VOIP system through your broadband router or computer and you can be off and running, even with very affordable rates on international calls(we're talking pennies a minute!)

My brother-in-law just moved to Australia and we keep up with him on the VOIP line. You really can't beat it when it comes to price and add-ons like voice mail, conference lines, caller ID and more.

We took my infant daughter in today for an MRI at Children's Hospital of Atlanta.  My father-in-law came last night to watch our other children as we had to be at the hospital at 7am.

He travelled about 3 hours to watch the kids.  Got our son fed and off to school, fed our daughter Zoe.

Then Zoe and Grandpa got to work putting in new carpet on our stairway. 

We got home from the hospital and Mya did just fine.  Grandpa and Zoe were taking a quick work break on the back of Grandpa's Truck.

Not to long after that the stairs had new carpet and they look great. 

(I haven't dug up a before picture yet, but picture twenty year old yellowing fuzzy carpet that's a little loose and a bit stained from too much foot traffic up from the garage. )  Its a huge improvement!

PokerSavvy can provide you with access to some great poker resources.  They can even get you discounts into major casinos or just give you a review.

The Online Poker industry is going through a lot of changes, but the demand is still there and this is a great resource for Online Poker information especially Texas Hold em. 

I only hit the casinos once a year, but I get that itch around December to play a bit and that's when I start thinking to myself nows the time to learn a little more.  I'm not going on the WSOP tour anytime soon, but poker is a lot more fun when you know what you are doing and you can only manage that by learning a little.  Check out this article on Online Poker tournaments

WordPress staged an ugly little lock down of bloggers today.  Bloggers that make money from their 'free' WordPress hosted accounts are breaking their terms of Service. 

Every now and then WordPress gets their dander up over this and will go in and provide their users with a short notice and then delete their account from the database.

Since they are hosting it, I guess you get what you don't pay for but it does seem rather mean of WordPress.  Afterall what does it really matter if someone is earning a few bucks from their blog?

1. I guess Wordpress doesn't want the freeloaders on the db or servers.  If you are on WordPress and making money and haven't been caught.
2. You should make an immediate backup of your blog.
3. You should start making contingency plans of where to move your blog should WordPress lock you out.

Now's probably as good of a time as any to find a domain host and get setup fresh.  You can still use WordPress software on your own domain and host and then you will never have to worry about big brother WordPress deleting all of your hard work.

I have a golfing disability.  Its commonly referred to as the slice.  My golfing disability is not one that comes from a physical or mental impairment for myself.  Instead it manifests in anyone that might be standing to the right of me as I swing a golf club and strike a golf ball.

When I go to a driving range, I have to stand at the far right hand side of the range.  If I do not, I will hit people with a fast moving golf ball slicing down the range.

I didn't always have this problem, it manifested about 8-9 years ago.  I hadn't played much golf for several years before that, while I was in my early twenties and in the military.  Before that I had enjoyed playing golf. 

For the last 8 years or so I couldn't play for fear of a lawsuit.

Cure for my Disability

I'm hoping that a revolutionary (or is it evolutionary) new type of golf club can cure my slice.

Its called an Ebalon offset driver.  It has a surface that is perfectly aligned with the handle just as in a tennis racket.

This allows a golfer to drive the ball straight and the club itself can also add several dozen yards to your swing as well.  The extra yardage is fine for your average person that wants to add 50 yards to their game.  I just don't want to maim anyone.  If you want to see the driver in action here is a video I originally found on Google's YouTube.

Last week I was deep into programming and creative work.  Putting in my normal 100 hour work week, but saving a little time by not shaving.

This usually drives me nuts as my skin gets irritated a bit.  Well, finally it gets annoying enough that I can't stand to sleep on my own face at night, so I wake up this morning and start shaving.

My razor has is getting a bit long in the beard, and is due to be replaced.  Its a good razor just a couple years old and the battery is not what it used to be.  To get a new razor means a trip to Wally world and that's only one step away from the deepest level of hell, otherwise known as Chuck-E-Cheese's restaraunt.

So I start shaving this morning but I need a plan.  My razor won't cut through a full beard in one wack.  So I carve out a gotee.

Its a temporary thing until I can get the razor charged back up by tomorrow, but something that I go through about twice a year when I start feeling lazy about shaving.

Maybe with a little luck I can hold out on a visit to the second level of hell too!

What do you get when you cross a Bull and an Onion . . .?

You get a bad joke!

Seriously, for those of you that are very troubled by the Democrats victory in the house last night, now may be a good time to invest some of your money in gold bullion.

The Monex Deposit Company (MDC) recently provided a release detailing the benefits of investing in Gold coins or Ingots.  Most currencies these days are floated on open exchanges and are no longer pegged to a gold standard.  This means that you can protect your wealth from catastrophic world events by stowing a little away in a precious metal investment.

The modern system of currency trading is very efficient and truly does make the world of money go around, but thousands of years of history have also shown that gold is a valuable asset to sit on when times are rough.

Michael Jackson is coming out of seclusion to perform Thriller at the World Music Awards where he will recieve a Diamond Award for selling more than 100 million albums.

Jackson has been treking around Bahrain and Ireland lately and is former spouse and the mother of his children is fighting to get custody of the kids.

Jackson hasn't performed in London for almost 9 years.  He's pushing 50 at 48 years old.  Off the Wall and Thriller are probably two of my favorite albums by Jackson, but he does seem to be crazy these days.

Of course I could be wrong, maybe he's right and he's not crazy and he's been maligned all these years for being famous.

Or maybe I'm a Rhino Zebra.

All right let's whip em out and hold a contest.  Who has the bigger . . . .

TV Screen.

I bring home a projector from work on occasion and watch TV on my wall.  The projector sits behind my couch and behind me so there is no equipment or anything distracting.  Just this great big massive image right in my living room.

I haven't been to the movies in ages.  I've got my own home theatre whenever I want.  The resolution is spectacular, this isn't one of those old dim quirky projectors that gets left in a conference room for decades at a time with a bulb replacement every leap year.

This is DLP technology with super bright screen and terrific resolution.

What's the drawback?

Well if you happen to watch a show on cable or something that flashes some nudity, you might wind up with a four foot image of a bresticle so large that every neighbor down the street can see it and know it for what it is through your windows.

It used to be with projectors that you'd have to shut the shades to dim the room.  The bigger issue is getting a an indecency citation for watching the Super Bowl.

This is an article for my readers that are both readers and bloggers or even for my readers that are thinking about blogging.

You can  Make Money Online blogging by occassionaly writing sponsored articles from Blogitive.

Blogitive is a service that helps to connect Bloggers with individual sponsors looking to advertise on a single blog article.  They are  looking for reviews and write ups about their press releases and they look for the benefits of links from a blog talking about their service back to their own website.

If you have a qualifying blog(s), sign up is relatively simple, set up a user name and account, enter your blog info (url, description, and name and wait for approval.   

 All you have to do is login to the Blogitive System and check for offers to come in.  They receive offers from advertisers all day or night.  Sometimes they come in one by one and sometimes all together.

You get paid by PayPal and receive $5 per article that you write for them.  It probably won't replace your day job, but could put some extra spending money in your pocket.  There are some bloggers that make almost a thousand dollars a week with Blogitive, so if you are a serious fast typing blogger this could be very good for you!

What is the world coming to when a 22 year old woman can't go into a nice saloon, climb up on the bar, and shake-it-like-Shakira without falling and hurting herself?

Its a sad state of things that saloon owners can't keep their bars up to dancing conditions.  The history of dancing on bar tops goes back hundreds if not thousands of years.  There is a long written and verbal history that details the continually evolving practice of Bar Top Maintenance for dancing.

Many biblical scholars have recently found evidence to indicate that not only was Marry Magdalene featured in the Portrait of the Last Supper, but that the table was actually a low Roman styled bar.  Magdalene is often thought to have been a prostitute, but in fact she was a professional bar dancer, which is how she met Jesus, who was known to frequent many a bar during a thirty year bought with alcoholism.

Many people credit Magdalene with saving The Savior from himself with an irrestible twitch of the hips and lift of the wrists and hands laden with finger cymbols.

Regardless, even two thousand years ago everyone knew how important it was to keep a dry stable dancing bar in good working order.  I think  it is a sign of the times and of our country reflecting a decision point that we must make as a nation.

Should we continue to subject our saloon patronesses to unsafe bar top dancing environments and face the downfall of society?

Or shall we get a fresh bar towel and dry the damn thing off every now and then?

Scott Ott writes some great satyre over at Scrappleface.  This afternoon he's got a great little article worth checking out.  His most recent article I think correctly lays out that President Bush will probably not send Laura Bush packing despite any requests from the new Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco.

I think Scott missed a little obvious fodder.  If he had taken the time to interview Laura, and if Bush had been drunk enough to ask, they might have both found out that Laura would have had no qualms inviting Pelosi to the White House for a political mena a troi.  Everyone knows that the White House gets a little drafty this time of year, and a little extra body heat might make for an extra Merry Christmas.  Besides a little sexual scandal would sure take the publics mind off the problems in Iraq.

We can't forgeth that they are all politicians and in the same bed already with the lobbyists.  This election has succeeded in getting rid of some of the more blatantly corrupt politicians.

We should not forget that the term corrupt politician is redundant.  We have only taken out the 'blatant' aspect and replaced the varies political seats with the lesser of two evils, less blatantly corrupt.

I will be the first to admit that I don't think about plastic surgery for breast implants very often.  Don't get me wrong I get reminded of it all the time, but my wife doesn't really need it and so it doesn't come up much. 

I do have a friend that runs a bar in Texas and he tells me that he thinks about it every time he gets a massage in Austin, but he's a single guy and owns a bar at that so I can't say I'm to surprised there.

I have had cosmetic surgery in the past.  I had lasik surgery which technically counts as cosmetic as it removes the need to wear glasses, but that seems borderline to me.  It corrects a defect in my eyes as I see it, and I suppose some people look at plastic surgery in a similar way.  Too much cellulite, correct the defect in your body, not comfortable with your breast size, correct the defect in your body and get comfortable fast.

The truth of the matter is that I do think I may need to consider a hair transplant someday.  My hair has been thinning a bit more in the last few years, and for me, my personal image of myself is being forcibly changed.

I don't necessarily care about it so much, but I do have a preference for having hair on my head.

Now a hair transplant is a lot more expensive than lasik is but maybe by the time I need it more definitely that won't be much of an issue. 

Of course, as is the case for a lot of guys that start to loose hair on top, we start to get more hair everywhere else, so I'm also constantly bouncing around the idea of laser hair removal.  I even did a time cost analysis on the benefits of laser hair removal from my face (if that were possible) and how much money I would save from not having to spend 5 minutes shaving every morning for the rest of my life. 

This was inspired by the concept of all the time I was spending not having to monkey with contact lenses every day.

If I live another 50 years, that's roughly 51 days that I would save at 5 minutes a shot.  What would you do with an extra 51 days added to your life at the rate of 5 minutes a day?  Or for that matter, everyone always talks about the fact that there's not enough time in the day.  What would you do if you personally had a 24 h and 5 minute day. 

1. Sleep an extra five minutes?
2. Have a morning fling?  :)
3. Do a little more work?
4. Spend time with the family?
5. meditate, exercise, eat breakfast?

I don't know what I would do, but I like the concept of having the option.

The reality following this election is that even if the Democrats take power, we still have a group of people taking power.

Coming out of the revolutions of the US and France and many other countries, Power to the People used to be the mantra.

These days we fight over which party should get the power, but we are all very aware that we succumbed to being ruled and I say ruled not governed by the power of the parties.

Voting out the incumbents this political season is step one. Voting out the incumbents every political season is step two. Only with a continually power exchanging system can the corruption be fended off.

Playing Texas Hold em' online has captured a lot of interest all around the world.  Fortunately, in the United States we have a terrific government that has decided that your average Joe is not smart enough to gamble online without going broke, when there are so many respectable gambling establishment all around the United States paying very large lobbying bills to that same government to help them understand the Average Joe's problems.

Its a protectionistic cycle, but the reality remains playing Hold em' is a lot of fun, very challenging and a great way to exercise your brain.

One thing that is true is that playing online is very different than playing in person. 

PokerDIY - Connecting Poker Player for Live Games is a service like MySpace that allows people looking for live poker games after the recent legislation to connect with other poker players in their area to establish local home grown games.  You can play with a group of other players in person, and still get the diversity of playing with many different people.

So my daughter dragged me out of the house today to walk up the street and go vote. 

We walked about a mile up the road, it was kind of a wet drizzly day in Georgia, which normally means lots of traffic accidents and poor turn out.

However, according to all the incoming feedback, the turnout is very strong around here and the traffic accidents even stronger.

People may vote here, but they sure can't drive here!

Now we didn't see any Republican led Gay bashing get out the vote campaigns around here, but campaigning was at an all time high.

Later in the afternoon, after I had already voted, I received a friendly automated phone call from a Republican candidate who wanted to make sure they informed me that the Democrats were pulling any number of shenanigans around the state and Atlanta and that it was very important for me to get out and vote. 

Which I had and in his case, I voted against him!

I voted against every incumbent on the ticket, even the non contested races received a write in vote of 'No Incumbent'.  The 9 page ballot on our Diebold systems took a long time to work through finger typing on a scree "No Incumbent' over and over again.

I also voted against all the property tax breaks slated for everyone that was looking for a property tax break.  I pay my property taxes just fine and don't get any breaks and didn't see why anyone else should get a special deal.  If the current rule isn't good then it should be fixed for everyone.  We're supposed to be equal after all right?

I lived in Savannah Georgia for about three years and some of my favorite memories are from Tybee Island.(usually on or in the water) I just went back to Tybee for a week long vacation in early June and it was fantastic.

Every time we go to Tybee (which is about every year) we keep telling ourselves this is going to be the year that we buy a place here. Its a small island community with great beeches.

You can walk the whole island or ride a bike or anything in a short amount of time. Whenever we are there, we usually spend part of the trip walking the island and looking at houses, and as soon as we get back, we hop online and do the same thing and one of the best sites for it is Tybee Island Real Estate.

Here's a picture of the Key Lime House, our rental cottage this year. Sometimes I think that if I can't live there, I should buy a couple rental cottages and let myself stay there several times a year.

I definitely look forward to going back and with any luck and a lot of successful blogging maybe this will be the year that I buy a place there!

This has been a great week for business. I've had two different events occur this week that have helped me to focus in on where I'm going with things and really get on track.

As a result I'm flying again with the various Podcasting work I'm doing. I'm catching up on My Flash training and that's moving along well.

My web marketing efforts are hitting in a very high gear, and best of all, I'm writing a lot.

That's the part that gives me the best satisfaction when I'm working from home. Its only topped by the up close and personal work that I get to do when I travel and get to meet the people that I've been working with long distance. I'm heading on a scouting trip for some talent one of my shows during the Thanksgiving break and I'm anxious to get that kicked off. Separately I'm trying to get more pushed into gear with my tech articles. I've been writing a series of articles covering Broken Technologies to kind of run with the CNN theme of Broken Government and Broken borders , etc.

There's a lot of technology that has serious potential but continually fails to deliver. I've been covering it from the perspective of how it could be righted and in some cases outing what appears to be a failure but deep inside is actually manipulation by the companies trying to benefit from the perception of a problem in order to justify pumping up prices or resetting a product channel or something. The real fun is digging in and tracking on this theme!

Greener is an unsigned rock band that had a million people download their song Christmas Song. Now two years later they are donating a portion of the proceeds of from their song to the LIFEbeat charity which helps spread the word about preventing Aids and HIV.

You can checkout Greener's Christmas Song at their website, listen to it streamed, download it yourself in both the regular and the acoustic version or even request to put the song on your MySpace account.

Last week I set up my own online store and I'm pretty excited about my new project.

It didn't take much work at all to setup.  The service that I signed up with covers the customer service, provides a product catalog of over 700,000 products, takes care of credit card payments and shipping.

All I have to do is pick the products, determine the pricing levels and I'm in business and ready to start promoting it.

My plans are to offer good deals from my store on occassion providing killer deals on things to my reader of my blog and future listeners of my podcast.  :)

In the meantime, I'll be promoting products through various providers like Froogle, Yahoo! Shopping and Ebay.

For my bloging friends that are interested in this type of cross promotion, I've got more information on my Softduit site.  Learn How to Setup a fully stocked Online Store for yourself!

Right now I'm spending a  gretat deal of time taking the free courses that are included in the service that help you to customize the store, the website and learn how to promote it better.  This won't help me get rich quick or anything, but I think it will help build out additional aspects of my web related activities and help me to keep doing what I love!

ZoPA is an online peer-to-peer Investment and Loan service.  ZoPA stands for Zone of Possible Agreement and allows people lend or borrow from other people in the system.

In a way it shares some characteristics often exhibited by a buying club, but it truly delivers much more than that.  A bank's primary function is to serve as a middle man in a two part transaction. 

Part one brings a person to the bank with money they wish to keep safely and keep safely away from inflation.  The Bank as the middle man takes the money, holds it safe, and pays interest to the depositor.

The bank in a separate transaction then loans money to borrowers or sometimes invests money in businesses or other opportunities.  These loans and investments returns a premium on the investment, which the bank as a business, uses to cover its overhead, pay its own owners and to cover the expense of depositors interest.

That is a terrific business model and has stood the test of time for a couple hundred years now.  The Internet has broken down many barriers in banking and now Zopa offers a new barrier that might be broken down.  As Zopa allows essentially an online investment to be made by one person in a borrower or business seeking funds.  The online system allows the borrower and the depositor/lender to deal directly with each other.

Since there is no banking overhead to pay and no bank owner profits to be gleamed, the two parties to the transaction (borrower and lender) can get a better deal.

Example

depositor deposits money and receives 5% interest per annum

Bank Loans money and charges 10% interest per annum

Bank pockets 5% interest on the loan of which 50% goes to overhead and 50% is profits.

Zopa example

depositor goes through Zopa to identify a borrower provides funds and receives a return of 6.5% interest per annum and pays Zopa 0.5% on the total amount yearly

Borrower pays 6.5% instead of 10% and pays a one time fee on the amount borrowed of 0.5%

Zopa receives a .5% fee on the amount of the loan from the borrower and charges the lender a .5% service fee.

Zopa also makes money by providing loan insurance to lenders if desired.  Members to this Zopa group must have a confirmable identify, a verifiable credit history, a good track record paying debt and a minimum annual income.  They can not have maxed out credit cards, high levels of unsecured debts, a poor debt history and a habit of lying on application forms.

Well, it was on back order today, but I finally received my Tapco Mix.100 Ultra-Compact 10-Channel Mixer.

I can't wait to get moving again on my Podcasting Projects.  Tomorrow morning I start assembling my Podcasting Studio, and I'm looking forward to producing some much higher quality shows than I have been able to achieve with my simple voice recorder built into my Treo 600. 

To date, I'm running Podcast Station for the software, I've got 2 dynamic microphones with cables, and an average stand.  I just added the mixer.  I do need to upgrade my sound card eventually, but that's going to have to wait until another day, possibly another computer.

SpeedTV is holding a marathon of Pinks on November 23.  Pinks is a drag race reality tv show.  Owners of hot rods sign over a bill of sale on their car, if they lose the race the Bill of Sale allows Pinks to take their car and give it to the winner. 

Racers are selected off the street to appear on this reality TV show.  They go head to head in a best 3 out of 5 racing competition.  They don't get paid for being on the show and if they loose, their car is gone.  Some of these cars are even selling on eBay.

Check out these Drag Racing Clips of the show to get a feel for what's going on

this post sponsored by Speedtv.com

So after getting my fill of pre-election run downs this morning, I needed a break. 

I searched around a bit and found one of those, "I bet I could make a website that does that, but I never do" websites. 

Basically, the site takes a static picture, adds a buble pop up over a couple characters in the picture and provides a text input box where you fill in the caption.

Seems like it wouldn't be too hard to figure out sometime, so I might research it a bit this week to see if I can pick it apart and put it back together again.

I don't have twins, but it was definitely something that my wife and I discussed at length when we were trying to get pregnant the first couple of times.  Hope you enjoy, it can't be much worse than politics!

Ok, So I'm going to try something new, this month to continue to stretch my writing capabilities.

I'm going to attempt to write a novel in 30 days (well OK, 26 days since I signed up 4 days in)

I'm doing this through NanoWrimo.org's non-profit sponsorship. Maybe this will be what I need to keep pushing myself forward with my writing!

I write for a half dozen blogs, and in July I started blogging with PayPerPost. 

I started kind of slow in July and wrote maybe 20 different posts for them.  They gave me the topic, I wrote up the topic however I wanted and PayPerPost sent me money via PayPal. 

Now I'll admit, I went slow in July waiting for that first payment to come.  But when I started getting PayPal Payment emails everyday, my incentive to write for PPP and for myself increased dramatically.

Since July now I've written over 150 posts with PPP.  That's out of about 500 posts that I've made for all my blogs. 

I've been paid $888.97 so far and have earned an additional $240.12, which should be coming via PayPal soon.  That's a total of $1,129.09 for writing a few thousand words in my spare time.

Plus, I've picked up a lot of great readers like you along the way!

I've found that the more motivated I am to write the more I write and the better I write.  Nobody really wants to read someone every day droll on about how miserable they are.

So I spend a few minutes every day making some extra bucks and that gets me charged.  Its like taking a smoke break and having a good conversation with friends and getting a $10 bill for your time, except you don't have the cigarette and smoke.  :)

I just wanted to take a minute to say thanks to the great people at Trailfire!

They sent me a free t-shirt today after I filled out a survey for them a while back.

I've promoted my Best of Viral Video site with their Web 2.0 technology and its brought me a nice chunk of visitors in desperate need of a good laugh!

Here's an example of their technology at work.  This is like a guided tour through my video site, walking you through the site from the best videos on down.

 All you have to do is look for the Post-it looking pop up and click on the next arrow pointing to the right!

PPP is sponsoring a wedding in Vegas on November 18, and everyone on the forums is voting to see who will win the wedding trip.

The winner gets married in Vegas and gets a $1000 in cash!

I'm voting for Michael and Julie (aka Jules).

Julie gives me great advice on the forum and knows how to program in PERL!

I've tried to pick up PERL a few times, but regularly got distracted. 

The winners will get a night in a Premium Vegas Hotel (my recommendation is the Bellagio) plus the license and ceremony are coverd.

The whole PayPerPost Wedding will be video taped and streamed on the internet naturally. 

The best way to keep your mind young is to keep learning.  Just like my body cramps up and starts feeling decrepit if I don't get some exercise on a regular basis, your mind will cramp up and start to lose substance, atrophied even if you don't constantly challenge it and exercise your brain.

I'm reading and hearing a lot of people in the news talking about the US being way behind in comparison to other countries on a number of fronts.  People get shoved down and disenfranchised out of the political system on purpose.  If they don't know what's going on and don't feel like they get a benefit out of voting, then they don't vote.

There's a referendum on the ballots in Arizona to give everyone a million dollar lottery entry when they vote.  Its to encourage people to turn out and vote.

Critics though say that this will basically encourage Stupid people to vote.  I say, that this encourages people to promote more education.

If the people and lobbyists and power brokers have an incentive to promote higher education then they will.  More people will seek out education after high school even after their bachelor's degree programs.  The country will start to advance and people won't get shoved down as much on average.

You don't have to wait for the politicians to invite you back into the system.  All you have to do is invest a little time, money and energy in yourself.  Skip that trip to Wal-mart and spend a hundred bucks on making yourself smarter.  There are many programs for lots of different subjects in schools all around the country that can get you a degree, another degree, a master's degree or even new technical skills or certifications so that you can get that promotion or better job.

There's no time like the present, but if you are in Arizona vote for that lottery incentive so that the elitists will have the incentive to work towards educating the masses even more!

I've been racing all week working on a new venture for my business.  I've been working to put together an entire advertising program around multiple websites that I've been building.

I've been doing all of this to support a new customer and partner.

I needed to get things done last night or more precisely before 9am this morning.  I already knew that I'd be up most of the night, but my son has soccer practice on Thursday nights, my wife is a teacher and has to do her grading on Thursdays and we have two other daughters 4 and 1 that are very demanding on any day of the week.

So I took my son to practice in the minivan, I sat outside the soccer field in the van with my TV tray propped in between the drivers seat and the baby's car seat. My laptop cranked up and I was working all through practice.

I really thought about taking the TV tray and a chair to the sidelines to be closer to the action, but I'm sure the other soccer parents would have thought that extra weird, and I didn't have time to explain.

The picture is a little blurry.  I didn't want to use the flash, because I'm sitting in the back of the van, and there are people in the cars next to me.  I didn't want them to get weird ideas about what I was doing in the back of my van with my camera at the soccer field.  I need that misconception like I need a hole in the head!  lol

OK, I'm a forum junky!  I admit it.  I'm involved in several dozen forums and hit each of them every week, usually several times a day.

I've been working with a number of different partners, one of them PayPerPost, and I have to give them kudos for getting the most bang for the buck out of their forums.

The PayPerPost forums open up discussions between the bloggers and the advertisers at PayPerPost.

The forums help keep everyone motivated and informed and spur a great deal of development and improvement.

It is definitely keeping the PPP team busy working on new projects, upgrades, process improvements and keeping up with the issues of the day.

If you are looking to try out PPP, check out their forums and get a feel for the issues of the day or even ask some questions.  You can sign up for the forums without having to sign up for an account with PPP.  If you do sign up for PPP drop my email address as a reference and I'll get $5  ;0  brettbum at yahoo dot   com.