A walk down amnesia lane

My mom recently found an old box of photos. She then decided to go out and buy a scanner and then proceed to fill my email inbox with some photos of me as a youngster. So, I figured I’d set myself up for some ridicule and share them with you. I have intentionally left out the photo of me dressed up as a girl for halloween. I was far too pretty and don’t think I need THAT much ridicule. A guy’s ego can only take so much, you know….

(click any of the thumbnails for a larger pic)

This is me at about 5-6 months visiting Sandy Claws.
Ok, let’s all say it together…. “aaahhhhhhhhhhhh” (I’m about 13 months old here)
No wonder I’m so scared. Look at that evil freakin’ bunny! Damn!
I can’t tell if I had something in my mouth or if I was blowing a kiss at the camera… Either way, I’m damn cute.
This is one of the MANY home made halloween costumes I had growing up. My mom ruled.
This was taken at my grandparents’ house. I spent countless hours in that pool growing up.
Looks like Christmas in ‘78 was a good year! I’m sitting on a bike, wearing a football helmet and holding a “Mr. Quarterback”. In the background is a big ‘ol stack of loot. Sweet!
Apparently I was a popular kid. Here I am chatting up one of the many hot young females who took up all my time… Oh, pay no attention to the Miss Piggy doll next to me. I’m sure that wasn’t mine…
Not only am I THE MAN for riding the bull, but this was one of the first signs of my geekness… If you could zoom in on the shoes, you’d be able to check out my rad Vans that have Pac-Man down the sides. Ya, you know me, I’m an O.G. (original geek)
This is me chillin’ at Disneyland. Yes, I look pissed off. Oh, and please tell me that round mirrored glasses were cool at one time… please?

Lots of projects

I’ve been pretty busy as of late. I’ve been working on projects with one goal in mind. Build sites that can run in a “low maintainance” type way. For example, ArticleHawk.com is a site with approximately 50,000 articles in roughly 150 categories. With that much content, the articles will start getting crawled by search engine spiders, then they’ll start getting listed and hit by visitors searching for all sorts of things. Throw in some Google Adsense and if things go well, we have a little profit center without having to micro-manage the site.

You may have seen my site pixeltrafficwatcher.com which is still growing every day. The pixel advertising industry continues to stay active though I’m seeing a definite decline in traffic. But, new sites continue to pop up each and every day. I wrote an eBook called “Free Advertising on 100 Million Pixel Sites” that is available over at FreePixelAdvertising.info. It’s a list of all the pixel sites that offer free pixel advertising space. If you want an easy way to get some traffic to your site, you may want to check it out. I’m including free updates with the purchase of the ebook so as new pixel sites show up, I’ll add ‘em to the list and republish the eBook. So, not at all a bad deal for $6.95
A couple of the other sites I’ve put together lately are: urlgraveyard.com for domain registrations and geektrade.com which is a search engine for ClickBank…

Drive some traffic, sit back and wait… Let’s see what happens.

Mystery Men. Absolute classic!

Mystery MenI have no idea why, but the first time we saw Mystery Men, we thought it was OK. Well, it was on sale the other day at Target so we went ahead and picked it up. We hadn’t seen it since it first came out 5 or 6 years ago. When we watched it the other night we laughed throughout the entire movie. We drew comparison to the movie Galaxy Quest which, when we saw it the first time, we thought it was just OK, but it is now one of our favorite movies. There are so many one-liners & tounge-in-cheek references it kept us laughing the entire time.

If you aren’t familiar with the premise of the movie, they are a group of wanna-be superheros who have to come to the aide of Captain Amazing (played by Greg Kinear) when he gets taken hostage by the bad guy. They have no real super powers but all have some quirky talent that they use to help save the day.
Paul Ruebens (AKA Pee Wee Herman) as The Spleen is F’n hilarious. The way he talks is a riot. Hank Azaria who does half the voices on The Simpsons also has a pretty amusing accent as well. Ben Stiller.. well, add “Mr. Furious” to the list of great characters he’s played.

If you haven’t seen it, check it out. You may need to watch it 2 or 3 times to get the full enjoyment out of it, but it’ll be worth it.

Thanks, Sis!

My sister is the Queen of Coupons. No, really, check her site out over at queenofcoupons.net. It’s a fairly new site that I helped her set up where she gives tips on how to use couponing in your day-to-day fast paced life. She also lets people in on hot tips she finds. We had been talking about it for quite a while and her concern was that much of the information she’ll end up providing is available other places on the internet. My response to her… So What!?!? Everybody writes a little different. Everybody writes from a unique angle. She’s a mother of 3, busy, busy, busy person and yet she finds time to save more money than anybody I know when it comes to shopping. Not just grocery shopping. No no! She saves on everything she buys. If she pays full price for something, she doesn’t enjoy it nearly as much. That may sound odd, but ya know what, it’s smart and I wish I had the same tenacity she has for it. I’m far too much of an “instant gratification” kind of guy.

Well, one of the things she turned me on to is restaurant.com. They offer coupons that you can purchase and then print right from their site. Search for places to eat in your area and then buy a coupon. It’s an awesome way to try out new places and minimize the cost. Or, if you frequent a place that restaurant.com features, save 40-60% each time you eat there. It’s not rocket science and it takes only a minute. So, Thanks, Sis! I purchased a coupon for RoadRunners. Hopefully we can use it this week.

Next, I’ll need to teach her how to post to her website directly from her cell phone. She can give updates on products hot off the presses while walking down the aisles. Sounds like instant gratification to me. ;)

ahhhh. a weekend away.

I took the day off on Friday so Chris and I could go out to Mesquite. We got up fairly early on Friday, played in a poker tournament in the morning and then headed out of town. We got to Mesquite around 2:00 pm and tried to check in to our room at the Oasis Resort/Casino. Our rooms weren’t ready so we played in the casino for an hour. At 3:00pm, our rooms were still not ready. Since we had reservations at 4:00pm for a massage, we decided to go to the spa and hang out for the last hour before our treatment. After our massage we hung out in the heated mineral pool which was very relaxing. Since we were starting to get hungry we decided to check in to our room, get dressed and head on out.
The casino has an excellent pizza place built in to their sportsbook. Technically speaking, the pizza place was there first, but who’s counting. Sadly, they had removed the dart boards so we didn’t hang out there nearly as long as we would have. We shared a great pizza and then hit the casino. We played all evening and in to the early part of the morning and winning a little along the way.

On Saturday, we had reservations at Charmain’s. It’s a “fancy” steak house inside the Oasis. The prime rib I had was cooked perfectly. We both enjoyed our meals and promptly hit the casinos after we were finished. We played until 2:00 am Sunday morning before hiting the sack. We got up and headed home fairly early on Sunday and that was the end of that.

It was great t get away. I sure hope we get the chance to do that again soon.

Guest writing gig

Jason is at it again. He’s taking part in an SEO contest and has put together a site over at OnlineCasinoJunky.com. You’ll have to go there to find out more about the contest. He was telling me about it but the specifics are lost on me and I wouldn’t want to give out false info… Ok, I don’t care about the false info… it’s just too much to type and I’m a lazy bastard…

Anyway, given the nature of the site and given my love for that silly game of poker, he asked if I’d write a couple articles for him. So, if you’d like to read some of my poker writing, head on over to OCJ and check it out. I’m writing under the very secritive name “Vegas Geek”. I’m certain you’d have never figured that out on your own. My first article is called “Don’t try to bluff the unbluffable!” It’s a sad tale of giving away all your chips in a tournament… It’s a lesson I hope I’ve learned enough to stop doing…

Catch ya on the flip side, yo.

Online shopping whore

I’m such an online shopping whore. I don’t know if it’s just because I like having boxes arrive in the mail and getting the joy of opening them like it’s Christmas morning all year round or what. I’m also a big fan of the convenience. If I want electronics, I typically go to Best Buy, if they don’t have exactly what I’m looking for I get bent out of shape and I absolutely HATE driving all over town to look for stuff. If it’s not at Best Buy or the mall, I don’t think I need it that bad… Unless, of course, I can find it online. That’s a whole new ballgame then!

I’ll usually start off by going to PriceRunner.com, finding out who has the best price for what I’m after. If you’ve never used pricerunner.com before, you have to check it out. Next I make sure they have the item IN STOCK! Man, nothing pisses me off more than having to wait after I paid for something for it to be shipped to the store so it can be shipped to me. When I click the “order now” button, I want some dude to walk over, put my item in a box and personally walk it to Fed Ex!

After purchasing the digital picture frame, I’m on a temporary hold from buying more toys… It won’t be long, I’m sure. I was eyeballing this cool game over at ThinkGeek. Hmmm. I wonder how much I have saved up in my paypal account…

Digital Photo Madness

Digital Photo FrameFor the past month or two I’ve felt the completely irrational need to buy one of these digital picture frames. From what I had seen about them they looked pretty cool. Drop a couple dozen photos on a memory card, pop it in the back of the frame, hit the power button and blam-o! You’ve got a slideshow. Drop some MP3s on the card as well and now you have a slideshow with a soundtrack. To me, the idea just sounded cool. The price? Well, that sorta kept me from running out and getting one.

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago. My Paypal account was looking fairly healthy after selling a few ads on one of my sites. So, in order to calm my OCD/ADHD, I went ahead and bought the frame. It arrived on Friday and I have to tell you, I was absolutely blown away. The screen is big and bright. The photos look amazing. It’s simple as all hell to set up and use. The remote lets you fast forward, rewind pause both your photos or music. It’s really is better than I expected. Oh, forgot to mention you can purchase different faceplates for the screen to match your decor.
There is a newer version of this frame that has Wi-Fi built in. Set up the frame with it’s own email address and you can email it photos that will automatically be added to your slideshow. You should probably keep that email address private or else you’ll likely get surprised with midget porn sent to you from your comedic buddies. My office doesn’t have a wi-fi connection available so I didn’t bother dropping the extra $60. But, if I ever get one for home, you can bet I’ll spring for it.
I’m thinking this would make an awesome gift for grandparents. Just load up new memory cards and drop them in the mail. They’ll be cooing over the new photos in an instant.