Trying out yet another new plugin here in my neverending effort to bring the Internet down to its knees with the excessive amount of power hungry plugins I’m always adding to this blog, but, whatever, I like to live dangerously.

This one now allows me to inject songs and playlists into my posts on the fly, straight from Grooveshark.  Me liksey!  Me likesey lotsies!  I think I’ll kick it off with a little Foreigner. 

I wanna know what love IIiiIiIIIiiiiiiiissss!  I want YOOOOU to shoOooOOoOow meeeeEEEeeeeE!!!

Tags: Grooveshark, music, playlist, plugin, plugins, songs, wordpress
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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While I’ve been thinking about ways to get more traffic and links to my site here, something occurred to me: there was one particular way that I could have easily gotten a huge spike in traffic and finally put my blog on the map.

I could have gone to Massachusetts and volunteered for Scott Brown’s campaign. Seriously. A mad dash to Worcester just for the weekend would have put me in the middle of all the action and given me so much blogging fodder that people would have been hard pressed to ignore me then. Think of the possibilities: me blogging live while I meet and greet Brown supporters at rallies. Or posting photos of me shaking Scott Brown’s hand. And then photos of me flirting with his daughter Ayla Brown, begging for her phone number. And then photos and vids of Scott Brown punching my lights out after flirting with said daughter.

Oh, the possibilities…

I could have done it too, except ironically enough my money was already tied up in launching a marketing campaign. Um, whoops?

It was a missed opportunity, but I’m sure others will come along, especially as we get closer to the 2010 elections. I’m glad I had this revelation now though. In order to breathe life into my blog, I really do have to put myself out there, instead of waiting for the action to come to me. I even thought about going down to Haiti too, hitching a ride with Red Cross and just going down there to help out wherever I could. And then of course, I’d blog about the experience. And blog, and blog, and blog…

That’s been my objective for a while, to somehow bridge the desire to help others with my love for writing, but I had been so narrowly focused on trying to bring more traffic to my site that I had failed to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the traffic would take care of itself if I instead focused on writing and living life the way I’ve always wanted to. So I’m not self-employed just yet, but I can certainly ACT like I am.

Maybe instead of chasing the dream, I should be LIVING the dream, and the rest will fall into place. The battle is already won, the race already done, the future made, the foundation laid, and I need only claim the victory.

Tags: blog, blogging, campaign, election, epiphany, future, Haiti, life, living, marketing, marketing campaign, Massachusetts, revelation, Scott Brown, traffic, writing
Categories: Blog Fog, Politics and Poker
 
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Been reading up on miscellaneous income at the IRS due to having to report my blog earnings now, which skyrocketed to $3.34 last year (adjusted for inflation).

When I scanned the list of the different types of income, I noticed this:

They really expect people to confess to a crime, on their TAX RETURNS? Seriously?

Anyhoo, I’m wringing my hand over doing taxes this year since it marks the first time I have to report an income stream outside of my full-time job. I like keeping things simple, so simple in fact that for 10 years or more I’ve only had to file a 1040A using standard deduction to get my refund. It takes like 5 minutes to do my taxes, but then of course I have to do my NY state taxes too, which typically takes me 5 weeks. You think federal taxes are complex? Come live here. You’ll never complain about the feds again.

Evidently I have to report ALL my additional income (not just the ones I got a 1099 for), including the $5 lottery scratch-off I won as a Christmas present. Sure, I’ll get right on that. I’m just righteously anxious to fork over what little of my money I have left so the gubmint can continue to hand out welfare checks to crack addicts. You betcha!

Seriously though, it doesn’t look like it will be too bad this year. I just need to switch over to a 1040 and there’s a line on it where I can report miscellaneous income. Next year though will likely be a completely different story. I can’t even wrap my mind around it, but the day might come where I may have to incorporate my blog as a business, because it’s getting to be THAT profitable. Habitation of Justice, LLC?

By that time I’ll probably need a tax advisor or some dweebie expert to walk me through incorporation and doing my taxes, and just hope they’ll be reputable. All this business crap gives me a serious headache. I just wanna blog and whine about about my lack of a love life in peace, ya know?

Tags: blog, business, earnings, federal taxes, income, incorporation, irs, report, state taxes, tax return
Categories: Blog Fog, Comic Relief
 
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One of my resolutions for this year was to make a major marketing push to bring my blog out of it Grade C status and into the ever enviable elite circle of… Grade B bloggers.

Personally, I give my blog a B+.

The simple truth here can’t be avoided though. Just as you would in any other business, if you want to make a living and make money, you have to be willing to invest in it. Up to this point I’ve invested a significant amount of my time and effort to build this blog to where it is today, enjoying a dedicated and massive following of over five readers (four if you discount me) and being linked to by thousands of scammers and spam sites from all over the world. Yesiree, the work to establish my presence online has been nothing short of magical.

But while I’ve invested time and energy, I haven’t invested any money (other than hosting costs) into the project, and I think the time has finally come for me put down some serious coinage to really get things going here. I now have an advertising manager to help run my marketing campaign, and beginning next week I will invest over $800-$1000 upfront to help finally get some respectable traffic going for this blog, and also set aside a budget of at least $250 a month to maintain the campaign. Oh Mommy…

Ah well, that’s one advantage to being single at least. Otherwise that $1000 would have gone to buying pearls for the missus or milk for the baby. Instead I get to spend it all on meeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I admit it is a lot to invest (for a blog at least), but I need to try, and if it doesn’t work out I can at least say I did pretty much all I could to bring in the traffic I needed to either supplement my income, or replace it altogether. Otherwise I’ll always wonder how far I could have gotten if I had just been a little bit more risky and daring.

After all, fortune favors the brave. Or is it the reckless?

Tags: advertising, blog, blogger, campaign, marketing, marketing campaign, money, readers, resolutions
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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So I’ve been back at work since yesterday, and well, this sucks.

What’s weird is that I would come in, and after a few hours I would just feel completely drained, like something in the air was sucking the life force out of me. I’m not imagining it either, almost didn’t go on vacation in fact because I always felt drained. But I actually felt better and healthier too the moment I started my vacation, even on a diet of ice cream and ‘boigas’, that is of course, until I came home and started working again.

Maybe there’s something in the air here, some allergen that plays life force suckage on me. I don’t know.

But for the past 2 days I’ve been ignoring my job and instead been working up a to-do list of sorts so I can get better prepared for my next trip. Which includes getting a new GPS device.

So here’s where I’m at, which I’m sure will interest absolutely no one but me: I have to decide between getting a more traditional GPS device (from Garmin likely) or I can go a more nonconventional route by getting a GPS addon for my iPod Touch, then getting a navigation app from the Apple store (such as Navigon). I’d prefer this route because it would save on having to get yet another gadget, and since I take my iPod everywhere with me, I won’t have to worry about a GPS in the car attracting would be thieves who carry big lead pipes and have far too much time time on their hands.

Only trouble is, there’s only one GPS module on the market that I know of that’s available now, and it requires that your iPod be jailbroken, along with lots of other finagling in order to finally get it working right. Eventually there’s supposed to be two possible solutions coming out soon: one being a TomTom car dock that will have GPS built in, and another possible GPS module to be released in November by Dual Electronics. There’s no indication at all as to how well either of these will work, if they will at all. Assuming they did work though, then the only downside I see is the lack of bluetooth features that GPS devices sometimes have, so I can use my cell phone hands free while driving.

So I have the option of waiting to see how these future GPS modules will work on an iPod Touch, or getting a Garmin now. For Garmin I have been looking specifically at their nuvi 265WT and nuvi 765T models. Although… assuming the iPod solution doesn’t work out, I may go for a nuvi 500, a multifunction GPS that would allow me to participate in a beautiful thing called geocaching (which I’ll write about at length in a future post.)

Other than that, I’m planning to completely dump the built-in gallery on my blog this weekend, and integrate Flickr into it instead via a plugin. While on vacation, it occurred to me that Flickr provides a great way to upload videos and pictures from my cell phone on the fly, something I was trying to do on my own with mixed results (photos uploaded ok, but my first video upload garnered an epic FAIL.) If I can integrate Flickr into my blog without killing myself in the process, it would allow me to save tremendously on bandwidth and keep my photos centralized for easier management and viewing online. Please light a candle for me this weekend, so I can pull this off without losing my sanity in the process.

And of course, I do this all for you, my beloved audience, so that you may all share in the joys and wonders that is my life.

Tags: blog, flickr, gallery, gps, home, ipod touch, job, mobile, Photos, plugin, vacation, Videos
Categories: Blog Fog, In The Coal Mine
 
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I think people who live and breathe the news and politics 24/7 either have nerves of steels, or they got some problems.

There’s only so much I can take of the news before my eyes start to bleed over and I start seeing visions of angry looking leprechauns stealing my iPod and then setting my room on fire with dragon’s breath to assure their escape. Trust me, having these kinds of hallucinations is not a good place to be.

That’s why my blog will rarely be news oriented, but also because, well, it’s just so monotonous too. Oh the monotony of it all! Seriously, when you hit Drudge or anything else these days the news could always be summed up in three words: The world SUCKS. And I suspect that would pretty much cover the news for tomorrow too.

But without the news and politics, I don’t have the writing fodder that others take for granted for their politically charged blogs. So I have to find other sources of inspiration, which usually defaults to what’s been happening in my life lately.

Except that… my life could bore a snail to death. I just eat, sleep, wake up, yawn, go to work, then eat and sleep while I’m at work, then come home and eat and sleep some more. Even my dreams are boring, which for some odd reason lately has me doing exactly what I’ve been doing in real life: eat, sleep, work, sleep, eat, although not necessarily in that order.

I think I need a vacation. I’m obviously working too much.

I did however make a pact with myself, that I would blog at least 5 times a week (Monday to Friday) just so I could keep feeding the Google matrix with my fascinatingly witty repertoire. They say if you do this often and long enough the traffic will eventually come, and along with it, fame, money, babes, and lots of cupcakes (I’d settle for the cupcakes.) But because the mind is like a muscle too, writing on a regular basis would help improve the flow of thoughts as they travel from my bodaciously sexy brain to my smooth and delicate fingers. It also means though that I’m probably going to write some ridiculously stupid things on here, so you’ll have to forgive me if reading my content results in the loss of a few IQ points on your end.

Still, I need to write. I’m always letting my blog languish simply because I don’t have anything going in my life, but I feel determined to just keep at it until it becomes second nature to me, and I’m able to weave an epic, riveting story even out of something as mundane as picking at a hangnail.

So what do y’all think? Would you find yourself at the edge of your seats waiting to see what becomes of my hangnail?

Tags: blog, boring, content, delicate fingers, fodder, inspiration, monotony, news, real life, writing
Categories: Blog Fog, News Fit To Blog
 
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