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RSSLife of Riley Week 23
The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.
Sunday (Day 154):
Sat around the apartment watching movies and planning renovations on our new house.
Monday (Day 155):
Had a nutty because my traffic spiked through the roof thanks to submitting my beard page to Stumbleupon. I typically don’t stumble my own stuff, but I thought it would be fun since it was November Beard Club was starting and all.
Tuesday (Day 156):
Had a double nutty because my traffic was still rising. I started to get bad reviews, which I took as a good sign because if people are hating, then popularity is on the rise. Haters are funny, but not haha funny.
Had a lot of trouble writing because I had a day that I couldn’t seem to fill with a post. I also found that my posts weren’t in the order that I would’ve liked for the week, but I ran out of time.
Wednesday (Day 157):
Spent a portion of the day talking to Mykel over at FineTune about how the new FineTune recommendation system works.
Quit Text Link Ads after making a mere $10 in a couple of months. All the bad press that they’re getting lately made it not worth the effort for me. Instead, I added my affiliate ads back to see if I can make any money with them.
Finished up my last post for the week and started working on a model of our new house that I built through Google Sketchup, an easy to use, free (as in beer) application for 3D modeling. I had done something similar years ago when my house burned down, and I think that modeling your house can be really useful if you want to plan out renovations. Plus, it’s really cool to be able to walk through the walls of your virtual house like spooky god man. Muah ha ha ha.
Thursday (Day 158):
Made a sale for McAfee, which was exciting. The commission was more than I made in months from Text Link Ads, and I felt good about it because it’s a product that I both use and trust.
Worked on some beard related posts that I may or may not be cooking up.
Got a call that our mortgage is all set except for the home insurance, which was quoted at triple what we expected. The figure didn’t include flood insurance, so I told the guy I’d have to do some comparison shopping.
Worked on my virtual house some more before giving up for the day. Google Sketchup is pretty fun.
Friday (Day 159):
Showed #1GF! my Sketchup efforts and printed her out a copy. Tried to get insurance for my house but found out that getting insurance on the Massachusetts coast is really expensive. If your on the coast, insurance costs more. You’d think that’s because of flood, but flood insurance is separate from home insurance. How can being near the ocean be more of a danger if damage caused by the water in the ocean is not included? Do insurance companies still believe in Godzilla or something?
As if the insurance issues weren’t bad enough, I got threatened with a lawsuit by a guy who suggested that I used a thumbnail of one of his Flickr photos in my Secret Lives of Stormtroopers post. Even though every thumbnail in the post linked to the original Flickr photos, the guy wanted to send me invoices for months of “licensing fees”. Considering that there have been a couple of high profile court cases that protect thumbnails under the fair use doctrine, I don’t appreciate the attempted bullying and don’t want to link to anyone who doesn’t want the link. What’s funny is that this was the first time that anyone complained about a link from me and threatened to sue me.
I spent the rest of the day getting next weeks writing done. I made it through Wednesday before running out of time.
Saturday (Day 160):
Made #1GF! an absolutely horrid breakfast because I don’t think that I followed the recipe correctly. There was definitely a conversion problem between the fresh spices that the recipe called for and the canned spices that I had on hand. The sauce that was supposed to cover her eggs had the consistency of a sugar daddy, which I really hope wasn’t right.
Then we spent most of the day planning house renovations before going to see American Gangster at the movies. There were no seats left, so #1GF! and I sat in the back next to a really smelly guy. We sat there for about five minutes before opting to move to the third row. It wasn’t optimal, but the air was clean.
American Gangster did a good job of providing a balanced view of the gangster by showing the people the drug trade stand upon, but I expected more because of all the hype surrounding it. Even though it was two and a half hours long, it felt like I was watching the abridged version. They seemed to span a lot of time without a lot of depth, so there were long periods of nothing followed by quick bursts of action.
There were no shortage of big name stars in the movie, but I’m starting to think that some of them are one dimensional actors. Denzel Washington is always good for an action movie, but like Samuel L. Jackson, he delivers his dialog and acts exactly the same in every movie. It’s getting almost comical. Cuba Gooding Jr. played his character as if he were in Jerry McGuire II. Is it worth seeing? It’s no Goodfellas, and not really worth $10 a ticket. I would suggest putting it into your Netflix queue and giving it a watch when if makes it to DVD.
As a side note, I recognized Common and RZA in the movie, and neither did a bad job. Since Wu Tang didn’t arrive until 20 years after the movie was set, I thought it was funny that they panned by RZA’s Wu-Tang Clan tattoo slowly enough that even I picked up on it.
What I learned
- Movie prices are insane.
- Some people will try to bully you. And the only way to deal with a bully is to stand up to them.
- The sooner you learn to ignore the haters, the easier things become.
- Stumbleupon is really good for quality traffic generation. It generated more visitors in a week than I have gotten in my best months.
- Text Link Ads does not work for me at this point.
- Google Sketchup is functional, but a little frustrating.
- Massachusetts insurance is insane. If damage from the ocean is not covered by home owner’s insurance, why should the insurance be more expensive for being near it?
November 12th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
I understand photographers getting upset over the use of their photos when it’s a business and for commercial purposes, but one blog post that happens to have that photo in it - not to mention it was linked to the ORIGINAL photo - that’s just something stupid to get mad about.
He probably got more hits from your post than he would have on his own anyway.
Good luck on the insurance thing. It sounds pretty ridiculous to me.
November 13th, 2007 at 12:34 am
I always enjoy coming to your website and learning new things. Google sketchup. I didn’t even know it existed. But after reading about you using it to model your new home it reminded me of something. About 5 years ago I had one of my most intense memorable dreams ever. It was in a house. But the house wasn’t the subject of the dream. It was the family that was in the house. Turns out I didn’t really care about the family in the house, though they were close to me at one time. I woke up thinking about how cool that house was. I think I am going to use the app to created from scratch. Your weekend was much better than mine. I went to a texas hold’em tournament on Saturday, and had a date on Sunday. Date was just so-so.
Hope your week goes well.