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 350): Too Much Choice, Not Enough Wins

It was a nice day out, so we got out of the house with no particular plan in mind. We went to look at a Prius because we wanted to get it crossed off my list, but the dealer had sold out of them and was quoting the sticker price as reasonable. He also said that he was sure that gas would be at $6 per gallon in a few months. Hooray for car dealers.

We decided to switch gears and try to pick out some furniture, but we couldn’t find anything that we agreed on. It was a pretty uneventful walk through a furniture store, although I did get caught by a salesperson when I was fiddling around with the buttons on a recliner and then had to explain that I didn’t want help, I just can’t help playing with buttons and switches when they seem harmless.

Because we had so little success, we decided to switch gears again and try to pick out paint. After an hour in the paint store, we now have 423 shades of blue, 237 shades of red, and 136 shades of green at our apartment to decide on. This is the problem with America. It will take me a week to sift through various shades of blue, but I can only choose two people to lead the country who are essentially cut from the same sociopathic mold. There is too much choice where it doesn’t matter and too little where it should.

We went to dinner at our local dinner haunt, and when we got home, I kicked up Sketchup to try to get an idea of what paint would look like. It was then that I realized that not only have I designed a house that is incapable of hosting a decent media room, but my sectional is probably not going to fit unless we decide to use it as a bed.

My pen certainly didn’t run dry making marks in the win column. To take my mind off of all the decisions that were still unmade, I decided to learn “I pity the fools” in sign language. I can’t imagine it being useful, but I think it’s fun to learn useless things in other languages as long as they don’t involve past or future tenses.

Monday (Day 351): Lost to History

I forgot to take my notebook with me when I drove to the North Shore to look at a piece of granite, and completely forgot to record anything about the day. All I remember is that I drove an hour and a half for a two minute look at a piece of granite and thought that something was going wrong with my car because the High On Fire disc I bought plays a low thundering tone for the first minute of the disc.

Tuesday (Day 352): Writing

I wrote all day long and cranked three posts out the door. That’s pretty good for me.

Wednesday (Day 353): CD Reviews and A Self Evaluation

I spent a good portion of the day writing Shotgun CD reviews. Considering how short the reviews tend to be, I spend more time than you’d expect on them. When I got tired of reviewing others, I decided to review myself and get my resume updated. Whether I’ll need it or not, I think that sitting down at least once a year to figure out what I’ve accomplished is important to knowing where I’m going.

How do I explain the last year to a prospective employer? It’s not like I’ve been drinking Mai Tai’s and playing X-Box with my homies, but explaining that you pro-blogged for a year is a little difficult. So what have I done? Well, I’ve written over 300 posts, three wordpress plugins, and designed a house remodel. I’ve become fairly proficient with the GIMP, Inkscape, and Sketchup, and PHP.

I increased my traffic from about 4,000 unique visitors a month to 15,000 a month, and in some months, I’ve pulled down 200,000 visitors. That may not be much when it comes to the big boys of web, but considering that there are only about 10,000 people in my town, and 88,000 in the where I grew up, I chalked that sucker up as a big, fat accomplishment, even if it is based on persistence and luck. I threw in a few other accomplishments and packed my resume away, hoping that I wouldn’t have to resort to using it.

Thursday (Day 354): Traffic Explosions and (Not) Pro Wrestlers

When I finally got #1GF! off to work, I told her to remember that no matter what goes on at that company of hers, she’s not a worker: She’s just playing the role of one. I forget to tell her sometimes, and I think she needs to hear that she’s way more than her company gives her credit for. We all do. You included. There’s no need to define your life and self by how you make your money.

Once #1GF! was off, I checked my stats. I’ve been getting about 2,000 unique visitors a day over the last month thanks to StumbleUpon, and I’ve been waiting for the surge to end, because, well, they always do. I was shocked to see that I had gotten over 18,000 unique visitors on Wednesday because my beard quest had somehow made it to the front page of reddit. That’s more users in one day than I typically get in a month. I immediately called #1GF! and told her what was going on. She was as shocked as I was.

When I got off the phone, I went through all of the people that were linking to me and tried to get in touch with each of them through a comment or e-mail to thank them for the links because when the traffic surge is over, it’s nice to be left with a few new cool people to converse with. A link is like people reaching out to you, so why not reach back? I’ve met some awesome people this way like N0ia, Keidra, M-Shel, Viv, Sarah, Mo, Johnny (nsfw), and more.

At night, I answered a request for an interview from The Australia Daily Telegraph’s Blog, fixed a firewall problem that was blocking up my DVR software, updated my beard quest with new pictures from 2008, sent the model number of my old glasses to a reader who was looking to buy a pair (yep. It’s true. I had to dig them out of the glasses drawer that people with glasses tend to have.), and felt awesomely like a piece of meat when a Reddit user left a comment that simply stated, “I’d hit it.” I also found a video of the guy that I saw at Newcomb Farms in Life of Riley Week 48 who I thought might be a professional wrestler.

“You’ll never believe who I found!” I said right before showing #1GF! this video. The guy who we thought must be a famous wrestler or actor is actually a stained glass artist named Jim Anderson who runs Anderson Glass Arts in Boston. Tell me that if someone gave you Jim Anderson’s picture and 100 guesses at his profession if “kick ass professional wrestler” and “famous actor” wouldn’t be on your list.

Friday (Day 355): Traffic Explosion II: Electric Boogaloo

I checked my stats, fully expecting that my traffic would have peaked, but clapped my hands over my eyes when I saw that over 32,000 visitors had shown up on Thursday. I immediately called #1GF!, who had the nearly the same reaction I did, saying little more than “WHAT??” I spent the morning answering e-mails and trying to thank all the people who were linking to me.

I really wish that I could give some advice to people on how to get a crazy amount of traffic, but I’ve pushed the publish button on a ton of posts that I was sure would be popular that are still sitting, dusty in my archives, and stared at the screen wondering what was special about the ones that absolutely caught fire. Although there are people who will tell you differently, I think the odds of predicting mass behavior is as good as predicting which slot machine is going to pay out.

There are a lot of pro-bloggers out there with a lot of advice on how to write popular posts, but I see the nature of what’s popular as being very random. To me, the only way to write a popular post is to write a hundred posts that I like, rub a rabbit’s foot, and then write another hundred. One or two will eventually (and thankfully) gain some popularity no matter if I follow typical pro-blogger advice or not. I don’t think that’s it’s writing skill or shrewd marketing, but merely increasing the odds by consistently publishing post after post whether you think people are reading or not. If one becomes popular, enjoy the temporary popularity while remembering that popularity is always temporary.

I’m embarrassed to say it, but at the end of the day, my eyes were tired and I felt like I needed a nap. #1GF! and I went over to the house to check on the building progress, and to the layman’s eye, it didn’t look like much had actually been done. Considering that the house is supposed to be complete in a week, I was a little aggravated. #1GF! reminded me of my virtual popularity and suggested that we go out to dinner.

We went to dinner at a local restaurant that had gotten a new hostess who was so pretty, cheerful, fashionable, and well-formed, that I asked #1GF! why she would be working at a restaurant. When she asked me what I thought she should be doing, I said something like, “I don’t know, palling around with a rich guy or something.” That was probably sexist, but #1GF! gave a laugh like I was her private little idiot, and a waitress came over and complimented her on her shirt bringing out her eyes.

I thought that was nice, so after the waitress left, I tried to say something like “She has no idea how pretty you are because the light is so bad in here”. Because I’m socially retarded, I said something like, “Your eyes look way prettier outside or with other shirts. Do you think that lady was gay for you or something? Because you are taken.” It’s a good thing that #1GF! is nice and knows what I mean even when it’s not exactly what I say.

On the way home from dinner we saw a rainbow, which never fully materialized, and instead of turning on the TV, I grabbed an old sci-fi book that I probably bought ten years ago for a quarter, and didn’t make it 3 pages before I was asleep.

Saturday (Day 356): No More Bandwidth

At 3 AM, I was woken up to the sound of some crazy jingling from my phone. I don’t know the tones of text messaging, because I’m too old to “get” texting. It seems so much faster to call than spend the time typing “r u ok? lol omg wtf brb l8r” on the tiny numbers on my phone. The text message was from a friend who was traveling in Spain and using text to return a call I made to him because international cell rates are ridonkulous.

Note: If you’re having a nice breakfast in some Spanish hacienda and you want to text me about what delicious churros y chocolate they have, please remember that the world is marked off into time zones, and there six of them between your Spanish hotel and my American apartment. 9 AM Barcelona time = 3 AM Eastern Standard Time. lol? brb? n00b?

As soon as I got up, I sent my first text messages ever to my friend in Spain at a quarter a pop. It took me 5 minutes to type half a sentence, and after a couple of bucks, I still didn’t get the point. When you stop getting the point of new technology, naps and shawls aren’t far behind.

When I finished omg brb’ing, I went to see if the traffic rush had peaked, and found that my traffic was at zero because my site had been shut down for going over my bandwidth limit. I opened three tickets, and left a bunch of messages with my host begging them to bring the site back up, but no one got back to me. As if she was dealing with a grenade, #1GF! asked if I minded if she went to the post office while I worked on the problem. That was around the time that I was leaving a message with my host’s parent company in the hopes that there might be someone available there who could forward the message.

I agreed that #1GF! should go do her thing, because having her wait around with me was a waste of her time. Eventually, I gave up and with the thought that getting shut down for having too much traffic is a pretty awesome thing to happen and my fault for not paying attention to my bandwidth limits.

When #1GF! got home, I apologized that she had to live with an insane person and we went out to pick tile for our bathroom. Because we have trouble agreeing on styles, we were pretty happy when we agreed on a pattern based on a crazy idea that I had. My Dad called just as we were finishing up, so we dropped by to help him out with some PC issues.

We stayed at my parents for a while and then grabbed some dinner at a local q-tip magnet (big portions / low prices) called Grumpy Whites. Afterward, we called Maccoosh to see what she was up to. I left a crank message at her photography business claiming to be an old guy who needed some tasteful nudes, but in the age of cell phones and caller ID, a crank call just isn’t as effective as it used to be. Within a few minutes, I left another claiming to need some photos of my son, Mr. Bojangles in several of his outfits, maybe surrounded by his chew toys, and maybe near a tree.

By the time I was gearing up for another, Macoosh called back looking for something Memorial Day like to do, such as mini golf. We drove to her house and hung out for a bit, and by the time we got to the mini golf place, they were closing and the kid wouldn’t let us in. Instead, we went to a farm to stand around in the parking lot talking and eating ice cream. The only interesting things that I can remember there were a Smoky and the Bandit Trans Am, and a mother telling her young son, “Oh stop. There is no such thing as a heart freeze.”

We headed back to Macosh‘s place and hung around there for a bit before heading home.

What I Learned

• I learned “I pity the fools” in sign language.
• Answering a lot of e-mail comments and links is tiring, but awesome.
• Jim Anderson is an experienced stained glass artist, not a kick ass wrestler or actor.
• omg Txting is $$$ and slo.
• There are engineers who can figure out how to build nuclear submarines and sharks with lasers on their heads, but give them a passport and the concept of time zones becomes elusive.
• Getting shut down for too much traffic is the most awesome crappy thing that can happen to a site.
• Check your bandwidth limits if you are getting a ridonkulous amount of traffic
• There is no such thing as a heart freeze.
• The smell of old books makes me feel young.
• #1GF! and I have extremely different tastes

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Posted in Life of Riley