Perhaps I’m simply becoming more mellow in my old age. I like to think that I’m finally learning that I have a lot of growing to do in the Wisdom Department. Perhaps the real reason lies even deeper, buried in the depths of my subconscious to the point that only an expert psychiatrist can coax it out of its hiding place.

Or perhaps it’s because I installed this blog using Fantastico, many years ago, and haven’t updated it via the Fantastico interface since WordPress starting offering a convenient update link inside the admin panel — and I’m tired of getting automated notices to update my blog software from version 1.5.1 (current version is 3.2.1 and yes, I’m using it…).

But whatever the reason, I’m going to be totally deleting this blog. Soon.

This may be your last chance to read some of the “nuggets” (or “droppings”, depending on your perspective; if you hate what I write, I encourage you to “move on” and not waste your time hating any more) that I’ve posted here over the years.

Quite simply, I want to make this a personal blog — a “journal”, if I may be so bold as to say so. A place where I can talk about Whatever It Is That I Want To Talk About.

I’m also not satisfied with a lot of what’s here. I’m finally learning Who I Want To Be On The Internet, but the road to get to where I am today took some detours through some rather shady places that I’d just as soon forget.

Early Steps

When I first started with Internet Marketing (this was one of my first websites), I just followed the crowd. The Internet Marketing Crowd leaves a lot to be desired in many instances. Regardless, many of my early posts were of the “me, too!” hypey affiliate promotion types. They made some money but I’m embarrassed to read them now.

I then started “following” somebody who turned out to be a total psychopath. After dropping a couple thousand dollars with him for a year’s worth of coaching, he then proceeded to publicly humiliate a colleague and friend on his blog. I called him on it. He cut me off without a refund. May God be his judge; I’ve forgiven him (which is solely for my benefit; it was wasting MY time to hold a grudge).

But that kind of led me into a “ripoff behind every rock” phase where I was spending more time criticizing the work of others than I was in building my own business. Only recently have I realized the futility of this. I know what needs to be done and have a vision that it can be done, and by focusing on, and perfecting, the “right” way to do stuff, I can lead and serve in an industry that has a horrible reputation (which is a real shame because, done right, you can use Internet Marketing to really help others while personally prospering).

Starting To “Get It Right”

I then met up with some good people (my current favorite crowd hangs out at the Earn 1k A Day Membership Site) (affiliate link) and slowly began to realize that the business rules for an Internet Marketing business really weren’t any different than the rules for any other business. IMers like to SCREAM about how “everything has changed”. For a long time, I believed it. I no longer do.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin talks about this in his book, “Thou Shall Prosper”. Some things change, like technology, and we need to embrace this kind of change. Typewriters were everywhere 30 years ago, but just try to find one today! An essential business tool was wiped out by the computer, and those whose living depended on typewriters either adapted or found themselves out of work. So technology changes, and if your business depends on technology, it’s “adapt or die” as technology changes.

Other things are rock-solid and should never change, like your core values (yeah, I slipped a bit here for a while). Suffice it to say that I’ve gotten off the “product launch” bandwagon insofar as promoting others’ offers. Yes, this is going to hurt me; a lot of marketers are of the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” type and want you to promote their offer solely because they promoted yours. That’s fine if the product is high quality, overdelivers on value, and is a good fit for my audience, but I won’t promise it.

So the technology and marketing tactics will change as time marches on, but core values will never change (unless you have horrible core values and decide to change them for the better). I even followed some people in the personal development industry who I thought were good, but in the end, all they did were take some of my core values and dismiss them as “growth limiting”. After that, they proceeded to violate those values, not to promote growth, but simply so that they could go out and do whatever their selfish selves wanted to do — all in the name of “personal growth”, of course…

But as we live — and hopefully learn — we change. We adapt. And while I certainly hope that I’m not done growing and changing personally, I’ve come to the point where I’m really trying to align my personal core values with my online (and offline) business activities.

Where I’m Going (For Now)

I don’t just want “customers”; my goal is to create “friendships” that enable me to communicate and be in touch with those who choose to entrust me with their money and time. I’m still not 100% sure about how to do this via the Internet but I do have some ideas that I’ll be exploring in the months to come.

One other foundational value that does not change is profit. A business has to make money to survive; if you don’t agree with me, then go back 10-11 years and look at the .com bust. People thought that raising money was enough; those companies are long gone. The ones that survived were those that sought to turn a profit. Always has been this way, always will be.

So my offerings are going to focus on products that will help you develop systems that will either make you money or save you money. Computer security will help you save money and preserve your business. The rest — the “make money” type of stuff — is going to focus on systems which, if implemented properly, have the potential to make money.

I’m getting away from the “push button riches” and “this system made me a billion dollars in 2.7 weeks” type of stuff. It’s not realistic and a lot of it is designed to expertly extract money from your bank account — and nothing more. In most cases, the system either no longer works or would involve violating the terms of service of some other company — neither of which is something that I want to do, nor is it something that I want to promote to my audience.

For all these reasons (and many more), this blog has become a bit of an inconvenience. It’s like trying to swim with a cement overcoat; instead of going forward, it’s dragging me down.

So it’s going away just as soon as I get my new template ready.

And I’m pretty sure that I won’t be the only person who will be happy to see it go — and its replacement rise from the ashes.

P.S. — I may resurrect this post as the first post of my new blog. I need the reminder!

Dear PayDotCom Affilaite IntantCashHome,

Please stop using contact forms to spam me. You know, the ones used by hotels like Essence Suites, the Hampton Inn, etc. Plus all those other sites (like JodyHice.com).

And I’ll be contacting the PayDotCom people tomorrow, as well as whoever owns omnitipc. Oh, bet you didn’t know that it’s trivial to follow the redirect chain without actually visiting a website, did you?

Not to mention MSN. Oh, and your CAN-SPAM statement is plain wrong. We do not have an established business relationship and you are not allowed to send me messages. Looks like abuse@uce.gov gets added to the list. Hope you have $15k per message if the Feds decide to chase you. I’ll be the first in line to help them.

And oh, yes, I’m keeping every single message you send. About 20 so far; I’m sure there will be more by the time morning comes to my part of the world.

Where did you get my email address? Cody Moya (ta skręcona małpa, który myśli, że może sprzedać adresy e-mailowe)? Doesn’t matter; NOBODY has my permission to give away or sell my contact info. If they say they can in their website’s terms of service, they don’t get my business — PERIOD — so anybody who does either lied in their terms or never had them in the first place. Stay away from those people; they won’t take you where you want to be.

You are a spammer. I am going to enjoy doing everything I possibly can to get you terminated from PayDotCom and any other site I can possibly drag into this. A visit from the Feds would only be an added bonus.

And for those sites that are running “Tell A Friend” type forms that allow users to enter their own message — take down that form NOW. They are used and abused by spammers and make your company look bad.

P.S. — What the heck is “Intant”? Get FireFox; it has a built-in spell checker. No extra charge for that tip. You’re welcome.

Dear National Basketball Association (NBA),

Tonight is opening night for the NBA season. I went to your web site to watch some video clips.

An annoying political ad is playing between each clip I watch, and the ad is longer than the clip. So instead of enjoying the highlights of opening night, I get to watch the mundane drivel of somebody who would rather drag down someone else than do something positive to help the country.

I go to nba.com to catch up on what my favorite team is doing. I don’t go there to watch political attack ads.

So I won’t be back to your website until after the elections.

Just thought you might like to know.

Thanks,
Tom

P.S. — I have a blog on which I can express my opinion on such things. I suspect that there are at least a few thousand others who feel the same way but have no platform to express their opinion. So please: tell those who want to waste my bandwidth to annoy me with their petty, narrow-minded opinions to spend their money elsewhere. Besides, isn’t William Shatner making some rather clever ads nowadays?

Thanks goes to my new friend and almost neighbor for this one…

We don’t really watch much television (TV) in our house. When we moved to Colorado Springs a few months ago, we signed up for a Comcast bundle: telephone, cable TV, and Internet. We then decided to go with Vonage for telephone service because of their flat rate calling to most of the world, which made the phone line unnecessary. We also decided to dump the cable TV since we don’t watch it much and couldn’t really justify the expense. I might miss CNBC, but I can get a lot of the news from their web site — and if I really want to, I can stream it over the Internet for $10 a month (which I might do at some point in the future).

NOTE: Sorry, this isn’t a Comcast-bashing post. While I wasn’t happy with the quality of their signal and could never get their On Demand feature to work, I was treated extremely well when I had to contact their customer service (they even offer callback if you have to wait more than a couple of minutes — a VERY nice touch). The technicians they sent to our house were always polite and extremely competent. They also told me what equipment I had to turn back in when I dropped everything but Internet (their cable modem and set-top box) and where I had to turn it in (and the wait there was very short). I also appreciate the fact that their technician “agreed” that I understood something about networking when he added the MAC address of the new cable modem I had to buy to their list of authorized equipment (great security, by the way — and yes, they told me that I would have to buy my own cable modem when I asked them to downgrade my service). So no Comcast-bashing here; I’ve had no problems with them and have had good support experiences.

Of course, I mentioned a cable TV alternative, so here’s what I now have instead:

1. I purchased an indoor high definition antenna. I could have purchased an outdoor one and mounted it on the house for more money (about $150), but we live on the north edge of town and could put up the antenna facing south, right beside the television, so I didn’t see any point in doing that. It cost about $60.

2. Since I have older TV sets, I had to purchase a digital to analog converter for about $50.

3. I hooked up the antenna to the converter and the converter to the television, followed the very clear instructions that came with the converter to scan for channels, and instantly got several channels, including the Sunday night football game and our local ABC channel (we like “Extreme Makeover, Home Edition” — it’s a very encouraging show. It’s one of the few we watch).

4. I then turned off the converter (to put it in pass-through mode), then scanned for channels with the television. Much to my surprise, I picked up a few analog channels, including one in Spanish, one broadcasting religious programming, and a garbled but understandable home shopping channel.

5. I already had a PS3, so I signed up for Netflix’s streaming service (via the Internet) and can watch movies via my PS3 and Internet connection. That costs me $9.00 a month.

After the trial period for my Comcast “bundle”, I would have had to pay about $130 a month for all of the services. I now pay $60 for the Internet connection (I kept it because I had not had any problems, plus I wanted a big “pipe” for streaming the Netflix stuff and my Vonage). I do pay about $30 a month for Vonage and $9 a month for Netflix — let’s make it an even $40 for comparison.

All in all, I’m only really saving about $30 a month but I’m quite satisfied with what I have. $100 a month for everything is great (and is about what I was paying in Germany for a slower DSL connection).

You could always skip the Netflix connection and you may not need to be able to call a zillion foreign countries (like we do, since my mother-in-law lives in Poland), so you may be able to save even more money if you try something like this. You will have an initial expense to purchase the antenna (and converter box, if you have an older television set), but that will quickly pay for itself.

One last comment: You may suddenly find yourself with time on your hands should you decide to do this. If this is case, please use the time to invest in yourself, your education, and the people that are important to you.

And if you have any ideas for making this system better, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a comment!

I came to a sudden realization today. I am trying to chase so many unproductive “activities” that I’m starting to lose what really matters.

So I’m killing off most of my websites, canceling almost all of my information marketing memberships, and focusing on just two things.

One of them will be business protection and security (I consider the two to go together.

I’m not going to say what the other one is, at least not publicly.

Eventually I may once again work at selling information products online, but it will be a while.

With that in mind, I’m also going to close down most of my blogs (except for the two I mentioned above).

It should be fun and very rewarding.

Best regards,
Tom

Spaghetti.

Cream.

Bacon.

It’s called spaghetti carbonara. You can get it in almost any city in Europe.

Does ANYBODY in Colorado Springs make REAL spaghetti carbonara? Not chicken, not broccoli, not some concoction smothered with that nasty american chemical cheese…

If you do, please leave a comment with the name of your restaurant. Chances are pretty good that you’ll have me as a customer soon.

Thanks. And hopefully we won’t starve from lack of healthy, natural food in the meantime.

I’ll soon be moving to the States and am looking for somebody in Canada who is willing to sell and ship me the 110v version of the latest Vorwerk Thermomix (I think it’s the TM31).

Interested? Just visit my help desk at ProtectorSupport.com. I’ll be in touch…

P.S. — Yes, I know about the European measurements and all that; it’s not a problem. My wife is Polish and knows what it will do.

I like to use Notepad when I want to focus solely on typing. Later, when I need to format text, I then copy it into Open Office and do the stuff to make it pretty.

Here are three tricks I use with Notepad to make things a bit easier:

1. Create your own file extension and associate with Notepad. I noticed that the file extension “.nxq” isn’t really used by anybody else, so I started using it for all of my Notepad documents (you can get a pretty thorough list of file extensions that are in use at filext.com).

I then associated that file extension with Notepad. To do that, do this (in Vista — this should also work in XP; if it doesn’t, please leave a comment and I’ll try to figure out what works and update the post):

• Open Notepad.
• Type something in the document.
• Under the “File” menu, select “Save”.
• In the “File Name:” field, enter a file name — but use “.nxq” as the extension instead of “.txt” (i.e. “myfile.nxq” instead of “myfile.txt”.
• In the “Save as type:” field, use the drop-down control to select “All Files (*)” instead of “Text Documents (*.txt). If you skip this step, your file name will end up being something along the lines of “myfile.nxq.txt” and this trick won’t work.
• Click on the “Save” button. Be sure to remember the folder where you saved the document (or just plop it on your Desktop!).
• Close your document.
• Open Windows Explorer or My Computer and navigate to the folder where you saved your file.
• Double-click on your file. Windows will tell you that it cannot open the file and will ask you what you want to do. Select the “Select a program from a list of installed programs” radio button and click “OK”.
• With any luck, “Notepad” will either be in the list of “Recommended Programs” or “Other Programs”. If it is, just click on it once. If it is not, select the “Browse…” button, then click on the “Computer” label (under “Favorite Links”) and navigate to c:\Windows. Scroll down until you see “notepad.exe”, then double-click on it.
• Back at the “Open With” screen, ensure that the “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file” check box is filled. If you want, you can enter a brief description for the file (perhaps “Journal Files”), then click the “OK” button. Your file will open in Notepad if all went well.
• From now on, just double-click your file to open it in Notepad; you’ve made the association.

(NOTE FOR YOU WINDOWS PURISTS: Yes, there is a quicker way, but if I can create a procedure that keeps people out of Control Panel, the Registry, and Administrator mode, I’m all for it. This works and keeps people from mucking up the works too terribly much!)

Of course, this leaves the obvious question: WHY would I want to do this if .txt files open in Notepad anyway? Well, on my computer, they don’t… I’ve installed another text editor that opens .txt files (UltraEdit 32). While it’s a far better editor than Notepad, there are times when I want the “quick simplicity” of Notepad, and this trick gives me the choice of using a .txt extension and using UltraEdit 32 — or using the .nxq extension and using Notepad.

2. If you have a file open in Notepad and want to create a date / time stamp (convenient for journals or if you are doing timed work for a client), just put your cursor on a new line and hit the F5 key. You’ll get a line that looks something like this:

1:57 PM 2/11/2010

(I just hit F5 in my Notepad file, then copied and pasted this to my blog.)

3. Would you like for Notepad to automatically add a date / time stamp to a file whenever you open it? All you need to do is to go to the very top of any Notepad document and type the following on a line all by itself:

.LOG

(Be sure to use upper case letters!).

Then save and close your file (I also recommend hitting the “Enter” key a couple of times at the end of your file before you save it so that your date / time stamp ends up on a line all by itself when you next open it). A date / time stamp will be automatically entered at the end of your document the next time you open it with Notepad.

A few neat little Notepad tricks that took me a LOT longer to type than I envisioned…!

Do you know of any neat Notepad tricks? If so, would you take a moment to leave a comment and share it? I’ve heard that you can get line numbers to display in Notepad; if anybody knows how to do this, PLEASE leave a comment and let me know.

A quick and somewhat unusual request for today…

If you have a copy of “Are We Living in the End Times” (by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins) in Polish and would be willing to either give or sell it to me, could you please either leave a comment on this blog post with your contact information (I won’t approve the post, so nobody but me will see it) or contact me via my help desk at ProtectorSupport.com?

I have a copy of the book in English but would like to have a copy of the Polish translation, if it exists. I know that many of their other books have been translated into Polish (I have the Polish version of one of the books from the “Left Behind” series sitting on my desk as I type this) but can’t seem to find this one.

Any help you might be able to give would be greatly appreciated.

Like me, you’ve undoubtedly seen many articles that are attempting to not only label the first decade of the 21st Century (I like “The Oughts” the best) — they are trying to wrap up and summarize the decade.

There’s just one tiny little problem: The decade isn’t over yet. The first decade of the 21 century, like the 21st century itself, started on January 1, 2001 — which means that the first decade ends on December 31, 2010 and the new one begins on January 1, 2011.

Look at it this way: The first A.D. year wasn’t “0000″, it was “0001″. We start counting from one, not zero. So in order to have 10 years, you count from one to ten:

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10

Ten years, starting from “one”, not zero.

Same thing applies to a century; you count from 1 to 100 to get your century, so the new century starts in year 1, not year 0.

So we officially have to wait another year, which means, with any luck, I’ll be the only person doing “decade wrap-up” stories at the end of December 2010 and my predictions for the new decade will be the only “fresh” ones available, ensuring massive traffic to my website.

I can’t wait. Or I can wait. Or I HAVE to wait.

Whatever.

Have a great New Year — but remember, you have to wait another year before I can wish you a great New Decade…

I’ll be moving back to the States next year from Germany (hopefully), and as a part of that, I’ll be losing some of the incentives I get paid for living and working overseas. I was wondering what kind of effect this would have on my take home pay.

I set about to figure out all of my deductions: IRS publications, state tax sites… All of it was made simpler when I found this website:

http://www.paycheckcity.com/NetPayCalc/netpaycalculator.asp

You just plug in a few details and it will tell you how much federal, social security, Medicare, and state tax will be deducted from your pay. It’s only an estimate, of course, but it’s pretty close to what I got after almost an hour of manual calculations and “seems reasonable”.

I can get the cost of my other deductions (401(k), medical insurance, etc.) directly from my pay statement and subtract that off the figure that web page gave me.

Since I’ve been talking a bit about money lately I thought I’d talk about this handy tool and include a link to it. I can’t vouch totally for the site (I’ve only looked at it briefly) but it looks to be a fairly decent one.

Not only can you use this if you are moving from one state to another with the same company, but if you want to change jobs, this should give you a good idea of how much money you’ll actually be taking home if you change jobs.

Enjoy!

While doing some WordPress research, I visited the WordPress.com website. On the front page, a post was featured that basically said that naming a holiday after Christopher Columbus didn’t really make much sense. I agree with the author’s arguments.

I also don’t think it’s a good idea to just “complain”, so I’d like to propose that we give the holiday a new name: Iveta Day, in honor of my wife.

My wife’s birthday was yesterday (October 11). She did have a party, but instead of asking guests to bring her a present, she asked them to bring cash that she could donate to Operation Smile, a children’s charity treating facial deformities such as cleft lips and cleft palates all around the world. She got more than enough cash to help pay for one child to have the surgery (according to their web site, you can finance surgery for a child for as little as $240).

So let’s name it Iveta Day and celebrate it by giving to your favorite charity. If you don’t have cash, no problem; just find a local charity and volunteer your time. Instead of a holiday “honoring” the desire of greedy nobility to conquer new worlds, enslave their native people, and strip their lands of their wealth and natural resources, we would have the perfect opportunity to help those who truly need the help.

Plus we still get a day off.

And I’ll never have to buy another birthday present…?

The position has been filled. Same contract, same employer.

You’re awesome, CSC!

And “thanks” to everybody who supported my desire to stay with the team and who worked hard to make it possible.

An interesting thought occurred to me today and I’d like to share it with you. I am convinced that tithing — giving 10% of your income to promote the gospel (and not blindly giving to some denomination — and there’s much more to the gospel than being forgiven!) — is a good thing to do. But is there more to it than just that? I think there is.

There are 168 hours in a week. If you take 10% of the time you have in a week — which would be a tithe of your time — you would have 16.8 hours. That’s about the amount of time that an average person is awake every day (that leaves 7 hours and 12 minutes for sleep, which is close to what I personally do every night).

And doesn’t God want us to set aside one day a week to rest and worship? A Sabbath, a Holy Day? Call it what you want to call it, but it seems to me that observing a Sabbath every week is like tithing your time to God. And just like any other giving, God will bless you when you give this time to Him.

In my case, God almost “demands” that time once a week (it doesn’t always happen on Sunday for me due to my work schedule). The reward, though, is worth it, because I feel as if I accomplish more the other six days than I would if I worked seven straight days.

So how about it? Why not try giving a tithe of your time — a Sabbath, a Holy Day, whatever you want to call it — and see what God gives you in return? And if you try it and receive abundant blessings, would you please leave a comment and share your experience with others? Thanks!