Double Journey

When I was at Microsoft, I worked on the billing system for my product.  This was mostly an integration effort with another Microsoft team that specialized in payments.   One of things that I worked on was trying to resolve a lot of the problems that our customers had with giving us money.  For a myriad of reasons, we did not make it very easy for people to hand money to us.  Many of these problems were not ours but that of our partners.  You would think that something as simple as handing someone money would be easy but it is not and our customers would constantly get tripped up just trying to do this one simple thing.

Well, this just bit me in the ass.  I have another website that I use for personal reasons.  Microsoft was handing free domain names and free hosting when I was looking to get it so I signed up with them.  My needs were relatively modest so I was perfectly happy to let them handle it.  Well it is time for renewal and the free offer is up so they want me to start paying for the service.  I have no real issue with this so I tried to log in to figure out how much it would cost me to renew.

Well, I spent at least 15 minutes clicking every possible link but absolutely nowhere can I find information on how much it is going to cost me to renew this domain.  How stupid is that?  All I want is the price.  This is the most basic thing in any sales transaction.  Tell me the friggin’ price. But this piece of information is NOWHERE to be found.  For all I know, they could charge me a million dollars to do this renewal.

The saddest part of this is that this is what almost all of Microsoft’s online applications use to get paid.  Anyone have any thoughts on why Microsoft can’t put a successful online strategy together?  If you can’t get billing right, what the hell?

I did a stupid thing and deleted my last post.  But thanks to Google cache, I was able to recover that post in its entirety.  While I’m really glad I have the ability to recover from my own stupidity, makes me realize just how permanent the internet is.

Some of you may notice that my site looks a little off.  That is because I made the classic mistake of trying to clean up some stuff and deleting the folder that contained all my Wordpress theme info.   At first, I did not know what to do since I did not think I had the theme backed up anywhere.  Lucky for me, I am bad about cleaning up my desktop and found the original unaltered theme lying around.  Over the years, I have made several modifications to the theme to get it where I wanted it.  I have spent the last several minutes getting it close, but now am too tired to try and completely fix it.

But rather than try and fix up the theme, I am going to use this as an opportunity to pick another theme anyway and revamp the way this site looks.  When life gives you lemons …

I’ve spent the last year blogging about whatever happens to come across my mind that day.  I admit, it hasn’t been the most ordered way to go about things and I think I could use a nice kick in the pants when it comes to blogging.  To that end, I’m really going to try and focus this blog in the coming year and make sure I blog about the things that interest me (and my readers) on a more regular schedule.  To that end this is what I will attempt blog about:

Mondays: Mondays mean it is back to work, so expect me to talk about career advice and other things

Tuesdays: Probably one of my favorite topics, our government and the effect on our lives.

Wednesdays:  Economics.  It pervades so much of our lives, so I’ll discuss some sort of economic concept and how it effects us day to day.

Thursdays: What’s going on in the stock market and what I plan on doing about it

Fridays: Won’t write every Friday, but when I do, it will be about something completely random that has little if anything to do with any of the other topics

Saturdays: Taking a day off

Sunday: Something personal.

I will not strictly stick to the schedule, I may change my mind if something else catches my attention that day, but I will   Let me know what you think

I’ve had this blog a little bit over a year.  In that year, I will admit I haven’t done a heck of a lot to try and grow this site.  I would like to make the excuse that my new job has been much more demanding then I would have realized.  I could argue that I have done really well in my financial goals by putting my focus there rather than to focus on this site.  But in the end, it would just be excuses.  It would all be true and valid but I for one do not like it when people make excuses, so I will not be making them here today.

However, despite this lack of focus in building this site, I am somewhat impressed I have blogged as much as I have.  I have a little over 200 post for the year.  That’s no small feat and means I’m averaging about a post every week day.  I hope to do even better next year.  More on that to come.  I decided I would look back at what I wanted to accomplish with this website and see how far off I veered.

1. Double my $20,000 - I gave up on this one just a few month into the year.  I just didn’t have the time to do it and in reality, I’m sure I would have failed at it given how poorly the market performed.  I would have done better then the market, I probably would have even made money in the money I was trading, but I would not have gotten anywhere close to doubling the money, that is for sure.
2. Develop another source of Income - I did not get to this one either.  Sad really.  It was something I really really wanted to do.  I make a nominal amount through this site, but just barely enough to cover my yearly cost so nothing much to speak of here.
3. Watch my basket more carefully - This one I have actually done thanks in no small part to this website and the discipline it has made me have.  Still, I lost track of a stock or two and held on to a few I probably should not have.  But everyone had losers this year and I’m chalking this one up to the bad market.
4. Spend more money - This one was the crazy one.  Easy for some, hard for me.  I did loosen up the purse strings ever so slightly.  I bought myself a 50″ Plasma TV , a new Digital SLR camera, and a host of things for the apartment (including upgrading the apartment itself).  I even bought an engagement ring.    Admittedly the last one should not count as I would have done it regardless of my decision to spend more money or not but the first few are definitely a departure from me and my frugal ways.  All said, it was a lot of money for me.  Does it prevent my fiance from calling me frugal?  Nope.  She is probably right.  I still skimp and save probably more than I should given our income level.  But in the end, it always comes down to the fact that I rather save now and retire early later.  Then again, with the way our economy is going and the reaction of our government, they may make that impossible.

So all in all, not a very successful year from the blog perspective. It was a very successful year for so many other reasons.  I got the job under control now, where before I was miserable at times.  I got back to California and could not be happier with that move.  And of course, I got engaged!  I honestly could not ask for much more of a successful year.  Well, that is until we turn the calendar to 2009 …

I’ve done some deep thinking this weekend about a lot of different things.  One of the things I thought a lot about was this site.

I started this site out with the stated goal that I wanted to take my money and find some way to double it within a year.  As any regular reader has realized, this journey has been sidetracked for any number of reasons, most notable of which is that my situation in life has changed considerably in the five months since I started this journey.  Back then, I had all the time in the world as I was voluntarily unemployed and was rather enjoying it.  But being the workaholic that I am, I admit I was itching to get a new job and start on the next challenge.

That challenge came much sooner than I could have expected, and it flipped my world upside down causing me to move back to LA.  So here I am now, three months later, and barely made a dent in my Double Journey.  So what now?  Do I pretend that I can find some way to do this in the few months that I have left?  Do I just abandon the whole idea and move on?

Well, I can’t just quit.  And to be honest, I really do like blogging and  running this site.  I’ve learned a few things, even learned a few things that have helped me at work, and I plan to continue this site.  However, I probably need to refocus the site.  I need to come to grips with the fact that short of taking the money and betting on black, I’m not going to find a way to do this in the time frame I originally laid out.

So I will keep doing what I’ve been doing.  I’m going to continue to blog and I’m going to continue to find ways to try and make money.  I’m just not going to put on an artificial time line of a year to go do it.   Is it going to take me two years, five years, ten years?  I’m not sure.  For those who have come along with me so far, please continue to do so.  I will find some way to make this happen, and I could still use all the help and encouragement I could get.  I’m just not going to make it my main focus.  I’ve actually done well in terms of making money by not trying to make money.

All my life I’ve focused on working hard and doing a great job with the belief that money would take care of itself.  So far, it has.

Seems like adding reCaptcha didn’t really do much for me in regards to fighting comment spam.  Seems that most of the comment spam I get comes in the form of Trackbacks which reCaptcha can do nothing about.  Even after I put up reCaptcha I was still averaging over 100 spam comments a day.  Couple that with the fact that kirah complained that her comment got eaten and she didn’t even notice it, and my original fear proved correct.  I burdened my legitimate users without adding any real protection.

I will have to go another way to fight the spam.  I suppose I can just let Askimet do its job.  It catches most if not all of the trackback spam.  Just annoying that I have to sometimes sit through it and look to see if any legitimate comments got through.

In my last post, I openly wondered why I get so much comment spam.  It was amazing to me that a small site like mine could be the target of so much spam.  Thankfully, pyrochild left a comment and directed me to a wordpress plugin called reCaptcha.  I’m going to test drive it out for a few days and see how it is.  Hopefully my spam will go way down without annoying anyone who wants to leave a comment.  So please, by all means, tell me what you think.  If you have any issues with it, leave a comment.  Well, hopefully it doesn’t block you from leaving a comment

At first I was a little annoyed that the program ask you to solve two different words.  But then, after reading the site, I discover that one word is known, and is used to verify that you are indeed human.  The other one is used to help with digitizing old books.  So not only are you leaving a comment on my blog, but you are helping the world become more literate.  All the more reason to leave lots of comments.

No, you aren’t going crazy. Despite being only about four weeks in, I decided to go with a different look to the blog. I prefer the two side column look over the one column look I had before. Hopefully, this should be it when it comes to changing the look of the site overall. It actually took me all day to get it to look just the way I wanted even though changing a Word Press theme should be as simple as a mouse click. Maybe that doesn’t say very much about my intelligence …

One of the thing I find myself struggling with is how to appropriately budget time for this project. With a goal as nebulous as “make money by any and all means necessary” you can sink a lot of time into trying to make something work and at the same time feeling like you didn’t accomplish all that much. Despite the fact that I’m not working, and already have my next job lined up, I find that I feel very busy all the time because I’m thinking about this site. How can I get traffic up? Does my design look right? What should I write about next? Etc.

Lucky for me I am a program manager. We are used to dealing with ambiguity and hectic project schedules. But still I find, when you are doing something for yourself, people like myself will tend to overextend themselves. I am not going to try and budget my time better over the next few weeks. This is going to become absolutely critical as I start my new job and I don’t have all the time in the world to devote to this journey. So starting today, I’m only going to devote one or two hours during the week to this, two or three hours on the weekend. It will be focused work rather than the kind of helter-skelter approach I have taken so far. My primary focuses will be:

1. Drive traffic up - This includes features added to the website to do this as well as visiting other people’s blogs
2. Pick stocks -Since I won’t be trading as frequently, I don’t need to spend as much time poring over my stocks. Also, I have gotten most of what I need to learn to analyze charts down, just need to apply it now.
3. Writing - I’m going to concentrate most of my writing on the weekends, and then space out my post during the week.
4. Coming up with other money making ideas - Last but certainly not least. Will set aside at least one of my sessions per week to try and come up with something I haven’t tried yet.
5. Working on my website - It is for the most part set up now and the way I want it to be. Will work no more than once a week making improvements or tweaking the site from here on.

That’s my project plan, hopefully I can stick with it now. Do you have any ideas on how I should budget my time or things I should be focused on? How about you, have you found you are spending too much time on your website?