NevBlog

Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

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What I Did Today Wednesday Jan. 16th 2007

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Exciting title no?

  • Woke up at 11:00am (I went to bed late last night)
  • Sent out HouseOfRave & BodyMonkey orders + handled existing customer issues.
  • Created a new section of Neon Signs to HouseOfRave. Added the section + all the products. Went faster than normal because everything in this section is priced the same.
  • Created the banner for the above Neon Signs page.
  • Created the copy, screenshots and other images for my upcoming sale of PalmReport.com.
  • Rode bike to gym. 4.6 Miles.
  • Rock climbed for one hour at rock gym + weights. My fingers and forearms are starting to get re-acclimated to the large stresses placed on them when climbing. I’m getting to the point where I can complete level 3 tracks decently well.
  • Rode bike back from gym. 4.6 Miles. Going back is was so much easier after a good workout gets you pumped.
  • I’ve started eating a whole lot more fruit recently. Today I ate 4 bananas, 8 clementines and 2 tomatos.
  • Read several chapters in the book I’m currently reading: ‘CIA, Inc. Espionage and the Craft of Business Intelligence’
  • Wrote out this list of things I did.
  • Timed everything I did.

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to keep time of the things I do so I can speed everything up and do more work. As the old saying goes, “Anything that is measured and watched, improves.” Actually, that’s from What Would Bob Do.

So about a week ago

so I could start timing all the little tasks I do. So whenever I start handling the HouseOfRave.com orders for the day, I start the clock and try to beat my estimated time.

One of the scary things about timing yourself is seeing how LITTLE work you actually do. Whenever I have a boring task to complete, it feels like an hour, but unless my $12 Wal-Mart stopwatch is wrong, it only took me 18 minutes. Instead of going downstairs to get a quick snack after the task, I’ll realize it only took a few minutes and keep working on something else.

On the flip side it also keeps me from spending too much time on something. For example as I was making the Disco Ball section banner for HouseOfRave I had to stop myself and just upload what I had as the clock started ticking past 10 then 15 minutes. I usually have fun doing those kinds of Photoshop tasks, but tinkering around with different backgrounds and fonts for an hour doesn’t increase productivity.

Of course there’s a bunch of stuff I don’t document here, but I like looking back to see what I was doing at a similar date the previous year. This at least gives me a little snapshot.

Never Having a Job, good or bad?

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Person: You’re your own boss? That’s awesome…it must be nice not to work for anyone.
Me: I guess so.

Since I’ve never had a real job it’s hard to say it’s nice since I don’t know the other side.

I suppose it’s nice I’ve never had a real job, but there’s a big problem: I’ve never learned the procedures and discipline you get by working for a company.

I’ve always contemplated taking on a job just for the experience, but this obviously takes away a lot of time from doing my own businesses. Perhaps I can find a fair medium where I can get the experience, but further advance my knowledge.

When I was in college and heavily active in a lot of financial clubs, a lot of big companies would try to hire the active people such as me…..they didn’t even care I was a government major instead of a business major. However these companies require you to be at the office at 8am or earlier and leave at 5pm or later. They also teach you relatively little about running your own company, or anything particularly interesting besides stock. Even then, general entry level positions at these companies keep you busy with all the boring work no one wants to do….this isn’t bad, but if you’re not learning from your surroundings whilst doing the grunt work, it doesn’t seem worth it. They ALSO don’t allow you to run businesses on the side. Seriously, the people at Morgan Stanley said they’d hire me, but I was absolutely not allowed to run businesses on the side. Obviously a deal breaker for me.

One of the places I ABSOLUTELY ADMIRE and want to be more involved in is the IC2 Institute and the Austin Technology Incubator. I won’t go into much detail, but these two organizations are divisions of the University of Texas and spin out some amazingly interesting companies and programs worldwide. I think these two organizations do some of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, but sadly hardly anyone knows about them except people in the entrepreneurial fields.

Being at one of these organizations, especially the Austin Technology Incubator would put me directly into a place filled with startup companies, investors, buyers seasoned industry experts and tons of accomplished and intelligent people.

I want to be around a place like that.

I’m thinking if I got some sort of small job or internship at one of these places, it would be immensely useful in helping me get the discipline and procedural training I want from a job, but allow me to run my own businesses at the same time. I would also be in a place swarming with ideas and innovation.

Ideally I would like to work or intern at one of these places for around 4 hours a day. A paid position would be fantastic, but I’d be willing to work for free, just don’t tell them that!

Nev in New York

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That’s right, I’ll be in Manhattan from Sept. 14th (Friday) till Sept. 19th (Wednesday).

I’m going mainly for fun, but would like to do a little networking if possible while there. Some people there I’d currently like to meet:

Tim Sykes – Started a hedge fund whilst in college and made a bundle in the stock market.

Dave Askaripour – Started MindPetals.com

Adam McFarland – Him and some partners own a company called Pure Adapt which owns a sports collectibles site, a car detailing site, an SEO division and several other sites which make up all their income.

If you’d like to meet up, contact me and I’m sure we can setup coffee or go for a drink! Also inform me if you know any cool events happening during those dates.

My Experiences With Being On Digg

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This past weekend NevBlog.com was on the Digg.com homepage. Several of my sites have had pages posted on the Digg homepage before, but this experience was definitely the most interactive!

*Digg.com is a social bookmarking site, and articles on the front page often get server-crushing traffic thrown their way.

My most fun experiences with being on Digg were this past one a few days ago, and the time my businesses HouseOfRave.com was on Digg and I made 320 orders in a day.

I briefly posted on this blog how if you search on Google Images the word “Facebook” my full profile comes up as the #1 result. This is partly a result of me owning FacebookProfile.com (which I just sold) and posting screenshots of Facebook. I also wrote how a Lebanese newspaper used this images in their article.

Well this article on Digg brought in thousands of visitors to that Facebook screenshot which includes my full name, old address and current cell phone number. The first day it was up, NevBlog.com unique visitors went from the 2,000 to 4,000 range to about 25,000 for the day. The next day it dropped to around 9,500 uniques. The third day was nearly normal traffic. However this was a medium sized Digg, reaching a peak of 700-something Diggs.

THE PHONE CALLS:
I generally get about one call per week from people Google Imaging the term Facebook and seeing my profile with all my information, but during my stint on Digg, I got about 50 phone calls from curious Diggers seeing if that number was real, in one day! All sorts of interesting zip codes, international codes and free online calls were placed to see if my phone number was real!

DIGG USERS SURPRISINGLY NICE:
Judging by the type of articles and stupid comments you usually see on Digg, you get the impression most users are bored teenagers (which is probably accurate). But of all the calls I got, for the most part it seems Diggers were more concerned for my privacy which was unexpected. Most of the people that called did so to simply notify me I was on Digg and that my phone number was available online. I would quickly explain the situation and that I knew my phone number was there, thank them and the conversation was over.

However I also got a few prank calls. These are most likely 13 year olds with not much to do. However it sounds like something I would do also, so I can’t complain, I thought the prank calls were rather funny (although sometimes the same people kept calling back which got annoying and lead me to believe these people sadly had NOTHING else to do).

DIGG TRAFFIC:
Usually when a site of mine ranks high on Digg it isn’t much of a problem. My experience with being on the front Digg homepage is this:

1st Day – 50,000 to 70,000 extra unique visits.
2nd Day – 15,000 to 30,000 extra unique visits.
3rd Day – 1,000 extra unique visits.
4th Day – Regular traffic.

Even when I browse through Digg, I generally look at the article, read it, then exit. Most likely I’ll never see that website again. This pretty much holds true to the traffic patterns I’ve experienced.

SERVER LOAD:
Digg generally delivers a server-crushing load of traffic to some sites, which is why many sites go down soon as they get on Digg. I have my own dedicated server, so it generally handles the job, but it DOES go down several times during a large Digg. Especially when the Digg involves a large screenshot image plus many other images. NevBlog is not an efficient website to say the least, so every page load of the site is quite a bandwidth hog.

When FacebookProfile.com was on Digg, it hurt my server more than NevBlog because it’s all database driven. The amount of SQL queries racked up quickly, and would overload the services on my server causing Apache outages. This sucks because I also have about 4 websites on my server that get high traffic and use up a lot of processing time, if some of these are not up, I cannot make money. This is why I specifically wanted to host BodyMonkey.com on a separate service, to hedge my losses if something goes wrong with my server.

BEING ON DIGG MAKE YOU MONEY? IT VARIES:
FacebookProfile.com got a lot of extra hits from Digg several times, but the advertising revenue only went up slightly. Digg users are used to quickly skipping through articles, and generally never click ads. I sure don’t.

But get this…right before Halloween 2006, HouseOfRave.com was on the front page of Digg and I got 320 orders in a 24 hour period from it!! That’s two months worth of orders in ONE DAY!! That’s also thousands of dollars in profit from one big Digg.

The Digg article linked the Glowing Hair Gel product on HouseOfRave, and subsequently tons of blogs started writing about that product also. Now if you Google the term “Glowing Hair Gel” I am firmly planted as the #1 spot. Ha, even if you Google the broad term “Hair Gel” in Google I am still #3!

It was a blessing and curse at the same time to get all these orders, because while I had just made several thousand dollars in profit from that one day, I was still manually processing orders at that time. With the method I was using, it took me two solid days of the most mundane work EVER. Basically copy/pasting information from hundreds of orders…over and over and over till each one was filled.

So it seems you can make loads of cash if a PRODUCT or SERVICE gets exposure on Digg, but pay-per-click doesn’t perform as well (at least in my experience).

I’ve actually never Dugg an article myself to get exposure, it just happens organically. If you try too hard to get on Digg, you most likely won’t.

Well anyways, that’s my experience with being on Digg!

Lebanese Newspaper

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One day a bunch of people from Lebanon tried adding me as a friend on Facebook. One of them notified me my full Facebook profile was published in a national newspaper over there!

If you go to Google Images and type in “Facebook” I am the first image to come up, so they used that image in the newspaper:

I’ve got no clue what that article says, but it’s pretty funny :-)
It reminds me of the article in the Russian Wallstreet Journal.

In case you’re wondering, since I own FacebookProfile.com (Which I’m currently selling) I published some screenshots of my Facebook, coincidentally they’ve reached the top of Google.

What’s interesting is since I published that fully un-edited screenshot of my profile I get about one phone call per week (usually from some bored teenager) who says, “Ummmmm….do you know your phone number is on Google?”

NevBlog Laboratories – Nevlab

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I always try out new programs, web widgets, technologies, Photoshop and Flash effects etc. and have no place to put them. To solve that I created a section of this site called NevLab.

This is like the think tank of a big company where people just tinker around with ideas, new products or processes all day in hopes of stumbling upon something new or useful later down the line.

It’ll be like my internet technology testing area and playground.

The lab is very rudimentary in it’s design and will remain so. It actually uses frames which I haven’t seen on a website since 1997. Since some of the lab creations will have scripts in the head/body tags or require specific page colors or plugins, frames are the best technology for the job. Using a content management system (aka Blog) would be a terrible option for NevLab.

The NevLab is officially open!

My Trip to China

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My trip to China went very well. The point of going was to educate myself about the place, because I knew absolutely nothing about it. In my lifetime it will be one of the largest consumer markets on the planet, so getting to know this place better couldn’t hurt.

I honestly packed my bags like I would be hardship backpacking through some 3rd world foreign land…I was WAY off.

I presumed from all the comparisons I hear on the news that China was like India, but it was in fact MUCH different.

I primarily went to Shanghai and Beijing which are NOT representative of most of China. It’s like coming to the United States, only going to New York City and presuming the whole U.S.A is like that.

LANGUAGE BARRIER
Here is why India gets all the international call centers instead of China: Very little English is spoken in China. We figured since we’re in Shanghai we would be able to get around very easily with only English…WRONG.

English was a very rare commodity, and when it was actually spoken, it was usually butchered. The Mandarin language is grammatically set up in a completely different way, so their English is sometimes very skewed….understandable….but skewed.

At a lot of restaurants we went to, they could not understand basic things like Coca-Cola, napkin, spoon, soy sauce etc.. If there were pictures on the menu, we would just point. Another tactic was taking picture of foods with my camera, then we would show the waiter and he would know “Ohh, they want dumplings”

FAMILIAR STUFF
Of course there were McDonald’s, KFC, Subway, Pizza hut etc. all over China. McDonalds was relatively the same type of food and menu, I hardly noticed any differences. In these chains you would usually find people who spoke good enough (not good…just good enough) English to get you through an order.

IMPRESSIONS OF SHANGHAI
Most of my time was spent in Shanghai where I stayed at youth hostels or hotels, both always being quite nice. To me Shanghai felt like a mix between NYC and San Francisco. Just the impression I got.

I really liked it with all it’s very modern buildings, most of which had crazy illuminated tops or some sort of full-building lighting feature.

Pollution was quite bad though, as in on a clear day you cannot see the sun. It didn’t feel the pollution on the street that much, but a quick glance upwards and you can see the thick smog shielding the sun. I only saw the sun peer out fully one morning, and by afternoon it was gone.
The weather however was extremely pleasant and very mild.

Check out this picture of a relatively bright day with a bad pollution index. You can see how blurred the buildings across the river are:

The night sky in Shanghai was always lit up near this area along the river called the Bund. Lots of large buildings line the river, including “The Pearl” radio tower which is the big space needle looking thing. It’s like the Chinese equivalent of the Statue of Liberty, except it lights up in funky colors and is like a big lightshow in the night time.

FAKE STUFF
As me and friends travelled we couldn’t help but stand out as foreigners, meaning we were magnets for the street sellers. In some of the more commercial and shopping areas we were constantly approached by people selling knock-off watches, bags…you name it.

And of course…I bought stuff. It was however time consuming to sift through the different sellers who had good quality stuff and bad quality. I bought some really nice fake watches:

Pictured are a Breitling, Emporio Armani, Mont Blanc, Luminor Marina and Omega knock-off watches I bought for between $10 and $15. They have tons of great rip offs, and if you find high quality ones they are damn near indistinguishable from the real thing by the average person.

I also bought stuff like fake brand name cuff links….I’m not even sure if Louis Vuitton has cuff links that look like this, but oh well :)
After bargaining you can get them for about $1.50/piece.

TRANSPORTATION
Getting around was actually pretty easy. The roads & highways were very modern, they drive on the left like in the U.S. and most of the cars were relatively modern too. I was surprised to find out their emissions standards are higher than in the U.S., and also found it odd that EVERY taxi was a Volkswagen Santana 3000. I also see why General Motors is focusing so heavily on China, there are Buicks everywhere. I hardly ever see Buicks cruising around in the U.S. anymore.

Cab rides were relatively cheap, I don’t think I ever paid more than $3 for a cab ride, and I’m almost sure they were jacking up my price from time to time.

One highlight of the trip was a 250+ MPH bullet train that takes you from the Pu Dong airport to Shanghai. It’s top speed was 431 KPH which translates into 267 Miles Per Hour! It was pretty amazing since I got out of the airport thinking this was a poor, 3rd world country. The train whizzes by all sorts of farm land, small cities and even by the freeways where you see cars travelling at a pitiful 60 mph as you blow past them like they’re standing still! The bullet train cuts the airport to Shanghai travel time from 1 1/2 hours to 8 minutes!!

As for NORMAL train rides, I took a 12 hour train ride from Shanghai to Beijing, the captiol of China. The train ride cost about $40 because I chose the highest class ride I could get. I figured it would be a pretty boring trip, but it was actually VERY nice. You get a good size compartment with 4 beds in it, and 4 people. You get two meals, comfortable beds with warm blankets, slippers, toothbrush, dining table and more. It was nice because I left at 7pm from Shanghai, messed around for a few hours on the train then slept a full 8 hours. When I woke up they served a breakfast and you’re ready to start your day at 7am in Beijing! I actually preferred this to travelling by plane.

IMPRESSIONS OF BEIJING
Beijing definitely gives you a reminder that China is still a communist country. I didn’t get that vibe at all in Shanghai. First stop in Beijing, the Great Wall of China!

We took a private taxi 1 1/2 hours each way to get there, total round trip cost: $35.

Most parts of the Great Wall of China have been degraded to ruble over the last 2,000 years, but there is a large section which has been restored for visitors. We went here to go see this stretch of wall.

I don’t know what else to say other than it’s a big freakin wall in the mountains. I think the main objective of going there was 1.) to say I went to the Great Wall of China and 2.) to take a bunch of pictures on the Great Wall of China.

Probably my favorite picture: Doing a handstand on the Great Wall of China!

Here’s a “Where’s Waldo” picture, except “Where’s Nev”

We spent some time at the Great Wall taking pictures and whatnot, they had all the usual souveigneers and junk like any tourist attraction. We left shortly afterwards in the same taxi we came in (Who fortunately did not drive away with all of our stuff) and headed back towards the middle of Beijing to see Tiananmen Square.

Tiananmen Square was just a big ass concrete square with a bunch of people walking around. Dotted through the square were communist police perched on boxes. Their postures were ramrod straight and they moved their heads side to side like robots. At the base of each box was two fire extinguishers. I’m not sure why they had fire extinguishers in the middle of a giant concrete square, and they didn’t look friendly enough to ask.

This attraction was more for historical significance than anything. Of course I felt like taking another handstand picture:

*Note: More might be added to this post later.

Finishing a Psych 309 Class

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Long story short with lots of important details left out:

1.) While in college I took a Psychology 309 class by correspondence so I could do it over the internet.

2.) I’ve always been pretty lazy about school.

3.) I have till March 22nd to finish the course (I leave for China on March 23rd and the class expires on the 30th or is marked as if I failed.

4.) I was almost done with the course when my computer crashed…no backups of the course work.

5.) I’ve got to re-do the whole thing in less than a month.

6.) I’ve been saying #5 for the last 4 months.

Each lesson has 2 parts, a computer-graded assignment and an essay for the instructor to grade. I have to finish the course much before the planned end date because something always goes wrong and a buffer zone is required.

Judging by my academic past, this kind of feat has never been pulled off (Oh yea, and I HAVE to make at least an 80 in the course). Each section of this class is really, really long and some of the questions are quite in-depth. So much for being a blowoff class like I initially thought. With everything else I have going on, this is going to be hard…..but possible if I focus on it.

In the top-right corner of this page I want to put a check-off list near my calendar to ensure I’m keeping pace with this schedule….but I’ll do that later because I’ve already spent 30 minutes making this post and TALKING about doing the coursework rather than just doing it.

Someone needs to call me up and bitch at me if the assignments aren’t on time….like a mean professor.

Phone Gone – Neville Happy

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My worst purchase ever is gone…and it took accidentally destroying it to happen.

Since I bought the phone in March 2006, I’ve paid Verizon Wireless $2,117 . This includes the phone, added features, overage charges, taxes, stupid fees and finally my cancellation charge for breaking the contract.

All that money for only 8 months of phone service.

In no particular order, here are the moves I’ve made in this process:

The interesting part is one day after I filed my insurance claim for a water damaged phone, the phone started working again! At this point I had already switched back to Catherine Zeta Jones and bought a regular $50 phone and a $50/month plan. The insurance company has already sent me a brand new phone, so I now have a brand new Treo 700P to sell and recoup some of the money paying for phone service.

Insurance fraud? Possibly….but not really.

I’ve definitely downgraded phones, and it’s not so bad. My new phone (Samsung t509s) makes calls and sends text messages, which is what a cell phone basically needs to do.

I do however feel a bit lost without the appointment feature on the old phone, and text messaging goes A LOT slower without a QWERTY keyboard!

-Nev