NevBlog

Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

Archives for 2005

New Place On The Lake

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School is out till the 31st of August, meaning I have about two weeks to concentrate on business projects big and small. It’s time to stop spending time on school and start dedicating full days to business projects.

I’ve also moved out of my old apartment……

…..and moved into a bigger, 2-storey apartment on the lake. I’m less than half a mile from the freeway, and I still get great views like this from my balcony:

So far I plan on spending $0.00 on furniture. Our living room is already stocked, and I’m not too picky about what’s in my room. I’m an awful decorator anyway.

I’m hoping to score a free mattress somewhere around Austin, so I’ve been cruising CraigsList quite often. I might eventually take a trip to WalMart or Fry’s for a small computer desk, but for now I’m going to play it cheap.

The lake is a 10 second walk out my door, and I met my new neighbors, these gooses and ducks!

The move hasn’t been bad so far. One of my roommates has a hookup for free moving trucks, so we’ve spent literally nothing the entire time.

New Casio Exilim EX-S500 – Orange

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This will be the 3rd generation of Casio Exilim cameras I own. I love these cameras. Everything about them is good, and each subsequent model far surpasses the previous.

This was my old camera which recently broke after an 8 foot fall: The Casio Exilim EX-S3:

Here is my new toy, the Casio Exilim EX-S500 – Orange:

The camera takes great pictures, I’ve only had it for a short time, but here are some sample pics I took today. I’ve reduced the picture sizes to 1000px.

My FAVORITE feature however is the unlimited video capture. This thing is basically a video camera! It takes video camera quality movies, I keep it only on “normal” video resolution and it still looks amazing. I’ve included some sample videos I took today. The squirrel video was edited and converted to .wmv format. The in-car video was taken at normal video quality, and posted as taken by the camera.

The Exilims all have an extremely high “Wow” factor when you see them….more than any other gadget I’ve owned. This will be the 4th camera I’ve gone through. The Coolpix was immediately sold on Ebay when the Exilim first came out. My first Exilim was given away for free to a good friend, the 2nd Exilim served me well but is broken, and now I have a new, shiny orange camera.

I bought it on Ebay using “Buy It Now” for $393. That includes shipping, insurance and a 3-year warranty….not bad at all. The orange color will be available in the United States later this month.

Pulling The Plug

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I’m finally closing the book on the 2nd Bottled Water Experiment where I attempted to get a homeless guy to sell water on Riverside Drive while I was off doing other things.

I can make all the Excel charts I want showing how much profit should be made etc, but it just didn’t work out like that in real life.

I’ve learned a few things from this experience:

  • Working with a homeless guy proved a bit difficult due to a lack of communication, which is much needed for coordinating.
  • Ice proved to be the most expensive, yet shortest lasting commodity.
  • You need A LOT of ice to keep 100+ bottles of water cold in 103 degree weather. Dry ice would probably be better.
  • The amount of work required to pull this off was not worth the money. There were a lot more logistical problems than I first imagined.

The 1st Bottled Water Experiment showed that selling water by yourself can easily bring in a healthy profit, but delegating the work in this case did not.

Since the 1st and 2nd water experiments, I’ve setup Barry with water about 7 times. There are lots of problems which arise, especially schedule conflicts and weather. Weekdays are also surprisingly slow days for selling water, even if it’s hot. Tougher vagrancy laws now in effect also hamper the selling.

Funny thing is, whenever I approach a homeless person to see if they’re interested in selling bottled water, they ALL smile and say, “Ohh…so YOU’RE the bottled water guy!”
I’ve become a quasi-celebrity in the Austin homeless community!

Since this never materialized into a real money-maker, I see no need to further pursue it. I strongly believe it CAN be a money-maker, but with my ever-changing schedule and mounting work load, it’s not for me. At least I learned something new!

Burning Man vs. Nev

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A business I started in high school and still have, (House Of Rave .com) focuses on light-up stuff. Over the years I’ve found that patrons of the Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert like buying light-up stuff from the site because it gets extremely dark at night in the desert.

Naturally, I made a section geared towards these Burning Man patrons to help them find the most popular items for the event. The people who run Burning Man didn’t appreciate that.

Their lawyers, Gross & Belsky have already threatened me with legal action. Here is the PDF file they sent me via email:

*Update: The PDF file was taken down by request. I have replaced the .pdf file with a small snapshot of the original letter.

They demand I remove the words “Burning Man” and “Black Rock” from House Of Rave.
As much as I hate to admit it, they DO have legal jurisdiction over the commercialization of the “Burning Man” name….HOWEVER, how can they stop me from using “Black Rock Desert” as a keyword? Of course they can stop me from using “Black Rock City” (A temporary city created by Black Rock, LLC), but isn’t the Black Rock Desert simply a desert in Nevada? Oh well.

I did some research and read: The Federal Trademark Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1051 et seq, California’s Unfair Competition Law, California’s Business & Professions Code § 17200, and the False Advertising Law, and California’s Business & Professions Code § 17500.

While I found a couple of “maybe” loopholes here and there, they have me beat. I’ve got to pick my battles wisely, and there isn’t enough money at stake here to fight back. So I no longer have words “Burning Man” or “Black Rock City” mentioned anywhere on House Of Rave .com.

Also, just for giggles, I snuck a peak at who Gross & Belsky have represented. It appears they have been lawyers for: O.J. Simpson (Not the murder trial), Gianni Versace, Supercuts Inc. and THE REPUBLIC OF CUBA!! They should have just invited me over to California and we could have settled this over a couple of Cohiba’s!

Oye Ve.
-Nev

rave videos

Camera & Stock

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As previously mentioned, my camera died after a skydive from about 7 feet onto a concrete floor. I’ve dropped it many times in the past with no problem, but this proved a little much for it. It works sometimes, but barely.

So here’s saying goodbye to my old camera, it had a great run:

The best part about breaking something is you get to buy a new one! So I jumped on Ebay and bought this Casio Exilim EX-S500. It’s a great camera, and comes in a LOUD ORANGE COLOR, and I love loud things.

It cost me a cool $393…that includes shipping, shipping insurance and a 3-year warranty (Which would have been really useful with my broken camera right now).

On another note….
While I don’t keep up with the stock market all that frequently anymore, it seems everything has been doing really well lately. My current holdings are as follows:

I’m in these stocks for the long run, so I’m not selling anything.

It’s Friday, so it’s once again time to party!
-Nev

Random Updates

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Random update:

My camera is dead….sort of. After a recent fall from about 6 or 7 feet onto concrete, it’s acting VERY weird.
One day the camera will not even turn on.
The next day, it might take garbled pictures like this:

The next day, it will work perfectly and take normal pictures:

The next day, it might decide to take regular pictures with heavy distortion over it:

I’ve got no more warranty and might be forced to Ebay this otherwise great condition Casio Exilim EX-S3.

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As a lesson in controlling myself, last week I decided not to eat anything for 2 days. Only water. It’s not difficult to give up chocolate or coffee etc….but to give up a basic requirement of life requires a bit more self control. Instinct gets involved and tells you to eat.

I tried it out, and caved after exactly 24 hours. My stomach started doing all the thinking, and it endlessly searched for reasons to break the experiment. Unfortunately, I found one: a two hour rock climbing and free-bouldering session the next day….something you want SOME energy for!

I didn’t learn much from this failed attempt, other than I get really hungry after 24 hours.

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The Herb Kelleher experiment is already going well. Previously I was ranked #47 on Google for the keyword Herb Kelleher, now I am around #15.

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To further improve my knowledge, I am starting to learn about databases. There are all sorts of free MySQL tutorials over the web, so I have already started doing them with my spare time.
If you know the ins and outs of databases, you can integrate them with existing shopping cart software to do some pretty amazing things. You can also create customized solutions for businesses in need of automation.

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I mentioned I had a new bussines venture underway a little while back. I’ve registered two domains, and I’m slowly creating content for the first site.

I have been trying out all sorts of different software to get the site to act the way I want. Hopefully the database experience might help….or else I will hire a student with database experience to do it for me. The business should be online innnnn…….a month?

I took a picture with my camera of a formal business plan I drew out so you can see what the business is:

:-)
-Nev

Google Experiment 2 – Herb Kelleher

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Over the years I’ve become pretty good at search engine optimization.

I proved this in my last google experiment where I successfully dominated the keyword “Starbucks Liquor.” To get where I am, I continously do Google Experiments…just to stay up-to-date.

The challenge is to get ranked high on common and saught-after keywords such as “Business”. I’ve become an expert at ranking #1 in less common keywords, thanks to this I’ve never had to pay for advertising on some of my businesses. That has always been a HUGE money saver.

To further hone my knowledge of how Google works, I am doing another experiment. For some reason I want to pick on Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines. I met the guy as seen here:

I detailed how I met him in this post about a corporate governance conference.

My goal for this experiment is to see if NevBlog can place #1 when someone Googles in the keyword “Herb Kelleher” or “Founder of Southwest Airlines“

I’ll be timing this experiment, and hopefully I will learn something new along the way.
-Nev

Study Posters Business Idea

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I came up with a new business idea while talking to a law school student. I got excited about the idea, but then realized I have entirely too much on my plate to pursue it.

Well, to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit, I’ll give it away:

Study Posters. The domain StudyPosters.com is even available to the first person who goes to GoDaddy.com and spends $9 on it……

…..Talking to a law school friend studying for her bar exam, she showed me an elaborate flow chart she made containing much of the necessary information needed for the exam. The chart was about half the size of a large poster board, and packed to the brim with tiny, neatly sorted, color-coded handwriting.

I thought to myself: “How cool would it be to computerize that flowchart, and make a giant poster of it??” You could sell these posters to law school students, or better yet, SCHOOLS or TEST PREPERATION CENTERS. Students could put them in their rooms and see them every morning and every night….perhaps like this:

Law school students spend $2,000 – $5,000 on preparation courses, and having a giant poster of some critical information to view each morning and night would be a GOLDEN idea.

They have these posters for medical memorization already, but they can also be applied for:
–Law school students taking Bar exam
–Prospective law school students taking LSAT
–Students taking medical MCAT
–High school students taking SAT/ACT etc.
–Sell posters with Javascript commands for programmers
–Common Spanish verbs for Spanish students
–Common math equations for calculus students
–Specialty professions and beyond.

…..just go wild with possibilities. The cool part is, all this information you will put on the posters is free…but you might want to pay someone who specializes in the field to give you input on what would be useful to themselves and their colleauges.

I think the big money in this idea would be selling large quantities to schools, colleges, test preparation centers and companies. Thanks to the internet however, individual sales can be extremely profitable.

Hopefully someone runs with this idea. It would be a great 1st business.
Good Luck!
-Nev

Staying Organized

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I have a lot on my plate right now, and managing time has been getting a bit difficult. Since I am frequent user of my tablet PC, it’s the perfect place to keep my to-do list.

Here is what my computer desktop currently looks like:

I made a wallpaper (download it) with a “Today” section and “This Week” section and used it in conjunction with AT Notes, a very efficient and free program that lets you put “Sticky Notes” on your desktop (The program was brought to my attention from TheKirkReport).
I’ve been using this system for a week or so, and it has been very effective so far.

I know what must be done everyday, but managing my time is difficult for me. To solve this problem, I bought this little egg timer.

Now I can set one hour for reading school work, the next hour for business, then another hour of school work etc.
Once the bell rings, I move onto the next thing on my agenda. The timer works well at work.

I also bought this big dry erase board to keep track of business projects. This way I can see the most important tasks on my agenda in one place. I hung it above my desk.

Hopefully this will make it slightly easier to manage my time between business stuff and school.

-Nev