Double Journey

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.
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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.
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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.
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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 …
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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?
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Jenny gave me a book a few years ago called Good to Great by Jim Collins.  When she gave it to me she said, “I saw this on the shelf, and I just thought of you.”  It was one of the nicest compliments I ever got.

While the book is mainly how good companies become great companies, it has made me think about how I can personally make the jump from good to great.   I recognize, and am thankful, that I have a good life.  I’ve gotten to the point where I am in a great relationship, have awesome friends, a new job that excites me, lots of savings, and no debt.  It’s hard not to be happy in this situation, and I am. 

However, even though I’m happy, I’m rarely if ever content.   I have started reading a lot of similar blogs about personal finance and jobs.  While I really enjoy them as I think I can add a lot to them because of  my own personal experience, they are all focused on getting to where I am today.  How do I make it to the next step?  How do I go from good to great?  Where is the information on how to do this?

When Tyler talked about finding your niche on the blogosphere, it got me thinking where would I find my niche.  Certainly not in the “make money online” space or the personal finance space.  Those are pretty crowded areas.  What isn’t crowded is the space I’m looking for,  people who have found success but want to take the next step.  I know I’m not alone in this.  Rick is trying to get there with me (and while I have a good head start, I think he will beat me to the finish line) as are most of my friends.  Hopefully, as we go on this journey together, we can figure out just what it takes to go from good to great.
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As I was looking around my Adsense site, I noticed that there was now an option for a video option courtesy of YouTube. I have thus far only done a small adsense section in the lower right corner of my blog, but was curious to see what the Adsense/YouTube add would actually look like. So I'm putting the code here to see what it looks like. I'll post it up for a while, and share my thoughts on it after I see how it really works.

Update: Finally got this to work, but had to do a few things to make sure Javascript works in a Wordpress Post. It was surprisingly hard to figure out how to do this. So if anyone else wants to figure out how to make an adsense Video script work in wordpress you just have to do the following

1. Read this about Javascript and Wordpress. Specifically the section about Javascript in Post.
2. Download and install the text control plugin.
3. Set it so that the post is not formatted
4. Plugin the Script that YouTube gives you. Use the "code" section of the post.
5. Do not re-save the work as soon as you paste the code. Wordpress formats this for some reason, breaking the post.

Not a huge fan of this. Not sure how one would use it to integrate it into your site. Am I supposed to have a big section to the side to host this video? I also can't control the content on it at all so how do I know my readers would be interested in it? It's kind of big and obtrusive, unlike traditional adsense ads and the adsense area is kind of small in comparison to the video so not sure how well it will be as an advertising section. I don't see how I would use it on my site, but I'll search around and see if I can find anyone who actually does something creative or useful with this new ad format. Sphere: Related Content

After doing some serious thinking (didn’t I say I always think a lot after talking to my friend) I’ve decided to make a slight course adjustment. Like any journey, you find things on the way, and new obstacles are presented to you which will make you rethink your strategy. A little more than two weeks in, I’ve had both happen to me.

The first, and probably most significant thing, is that I’ve decided to take a new job in Los Angeles. While I’m very excited about the opportunity, it greatly affects my ability to execute on my strategy for multiple reasons. I had actually planned on taking some more time off from the working world. Partially to just take a break, partially to get this project up and running. I had been interviewing with a couple of companies without any real intention to take the job. I was doing it to keep my interviewing skills sharp. Ideally, I wouldn’t have even considered jobs until after the first of the year. But when the right job comes along, you have to take it, and it was too good of an opportunity to pass up.

Of course, that means I have a lot less time to come up with my strategy and to execute it. Active trading is out the window as there is no way I’ll be able to monitor stocks closely enough to get in and out of positions when I should while simultaneously starting a new job. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to put my money to work in the market, I just can’t take the same approach I would have.

There is more data to suggest this is the right course of action. Despite the appearance of inactivity with the money, I’ve actually been monitoring the market and testing a few of my strategies without putting my capital at risk. Most of my strategy would have been positive (which would be good considering how down the market has been in the last month) but it would not get me close to what I need to do. It was a short time frame, so that doesn’t mean too much, but at the same time I know I can’t do this with a full-time job on top of it.

Despite this, THE DOUBLE JOURNEY IS STILL ON. I’m not one to put out a goal and then stop before I accomplish it. I will still attempt to end up with $40,000 on Dec. 18th 2008. I’m just going to have to find a different way to do it. I’ll get it partially through the market, but it is going to be a much smaller focus than it would have been otherwise. This site will have a slight change in tone. I still want to keep it up, and I still plan on blogging regularly about my progress, but in between my ideas I will focus on some other topics that hopefully you will all find more interesting. I love finance, I love talking stocks, but in the end, it can be a dry read.

The secret to a great blog, and great writing in general, is to write about what you know. If you write about something you are passionate about, and you write it well, people will come read. I’m passionate about a few things. My relationships, money, technology, basketball, and of course my job. I think I’ll leave my girlfriends and friends out of it, since I’m not so sure I could tell people how I’ve been able to get so lucky in this department. Technology has been done in a lot of different places and I don’t think I could do better than Engadget or Gizmodo. We have already been over the money idea. Tyler already has a basketball blog and will tell you it’s hard to keep up. Besides, I might throw something at my screen if the Lakers keep losing and I’m writing about it. Since I just bought this computer, and I love the huge monitor I got with it, I want to avoid that situation.

That leaves me blogging about my job and my career. I actually end up talking to a lot of my friends about their job and I love to provide job advice. I’ve been relatively successful in this part of my life and feel I have a lot to offer in this area. Since I’m recently unemployed, and felt I had a pretty successful job search, I will start off with that and see where it goes. I think its a subject with a lot of interesting areas to explore from finding the right job, getting the offer, and dealing with headaches once you arrive. Since I and so many of my friends struggle with these issues on a daily basis, I think it would be at the very least, entertaining and informative.
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Most of the people reading this blog right now know who I am. But over time, that will probably change. So to those who don’t know me let me tell you a little something about myself.

I’m a twenty-nine year old, Asian-American, male. I live in Seattle but was born and raised in sunny Southern California. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Valencia, home of the orange and of course Magic Mountain. I ended up going to an Ivy League school, where I spent four years studying about supply-and-demand and how to traverse a binary tree. I ended up in NYC after college, working for a consulting firm, but decided it wasn’t for me (the city and the job) . So I packed it up and went back to Southern California.

I took a job as a programmer for a small little outfit. It was some of the best times of my life and I met lots of friends who I still have today (and are probably reading this blog). Unfortunately, that little project failed, and they laid off most of the company. I however remained behind, and even got a significant promotion to boot. I stayed on for several more years, and even though I was one of the last people hired on that original project, I was the very last person to leave (the second to last person beat me out by a couple of days).

One of the people I met at that company convinced me it was a good idea to go work at another small software company. I had some good experiences there and learned a lot. One of the things I learned was that I didn’t want to work there, and so I quit. I am now unemployed and working on this blog. I went from a six-figure salary, to this. Earning exactly ZERO. I have no real expertise to do what I’m trying to do here. I am nothing more than an amateur stock picker and a tech geek, so this is as new to me as it is to you.

That’s me in a nutshell. But if you want some more random information here it is:

• I have one brother and one sister, I’m the youngest.
• I am in a relationship of over two years with a girl I met on E-harmony (it works!)
• I love eating Sushi, even though I hated the thought of it until I was 24 years old.
• I have a cat which I found on my porch one night. I am very allergic to him.
• I love playing basketball, and am I devout Laker fan.
• I’m right handed, but can only palm a basketball with my left hand.

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Feeling kind of nauseous all day yesterday and today. Not sure why, perhaps a stomach flu, perhaps the thought of losing $20,000 is getting to me. So this post isn’t going to be too long.

Really quick, wanted to touch on what gave me this crazy idea. I have a friend, his name is Rick, and we worked together when I was employed by the Evil Empire. He produces a Free Photoshop alternative called Paint.NET. If you know Rick, you know he talks about it all the time. And one of the things he loves to talk about is how he can actually make money off a program he gives away for free or how he can actually increase the amount of money he can make by doing X, Y, or Z. Thanks to people like Google and Ad Sense, this has become a real viable alternative. And then there are people like John Chow, and a host of other people who make money off of just blogging. It’s crazy but it’s true.

So Rick likes to bug me to go start up my own website. I had been reluctant to go do it because I honestly did not have a lot of free time to work on it. But all that changed about a month ago when I decided to quit my job. Now I have too much free time so needed some sort of creative outlet. So about two weeks ago, I said what the hell. I didn’t want to just start some random blog, I wanted it to have a purpose and something that people might actually want to read about. So I came up with DoubleJourney. A nice simple idea that is easy to understand and hopefully interesting to follow.

Got to go rest right now. I’ve been trying to start some books I have on trading stocks, but haven’t felt up to actually reading any of them yet. Hopefully, with a little more rest, I can make some progress.
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