Some Knowledge

It rained last night.  It’s raining this morning.  It will probably rain for the next two months.  I’m an optomist.  We will get a few days of blue skies and sun, but overall, it will be cloudy and rain.  That is just the weather in Michigan.

I did a bit of outside work this morning.  I moved the tractor and the truck in the barn so I could get the door closed.  I am not really into writing much this morning.  I just thought I’d stop by to check stats and leave a short message.  My message is that it’s raining.  Someday I will look back on this and smile.

Once again I post something without a proper subject.  I don’t much care to write about anything in particular.  I am just typing to listen to the keys click.  I suppose I should find a purpose in blogging.  I suppose I could get more popular if I actually wrote about something.  I just do not feel like being productive today.

I went to the library yesterday and looked through every book in the business section.  I got a college textbook on business and another book on being a renegade.  How interesting.  I am learning about business, and I don’t even have to pay tuition.  Wow, the library.  Free repository of all kinds of knowledge.

That’s all for here today.  I am off to find some way to kill time on the net before I start studying.  Maybe I will find out about tropical islands.  I need some motivation to get going on my business studies.  Someday I will make it in this world.  Until then, I will have endless things to read and study.

I checked Tim Ferris’ book The 4-Hour Work Week out of the library yesterday afternoon.  I spent some time yesterday and today reading this book.  It seemed like an interesting book.  It had a lot to say about business and setting up operations to sell stuff to make money.  It also talked a lot about how to spend money.  In fact, after reading the whole thing, I would have to say that this book is more about how to spend money than how to make money.

One of the things Ferris talks about in this book is how to hire other people to do work and how to make your business take care of itself.  This was very interesting.  I’m not sure any of this will help me in my quest for wealth.  It might be good advice to get rid of people in your business who cause problems and not deal with troublesome customers, but shouldn’t that be obvious?  Some of the things this guy talks about seem pretty shady, like using autoresponders to avoid communicating with people.  If you don’t want email, don’t check it.  If you don’t want to talk to people on the phone, get rid of it.  Communication is there to transfer information among different people so they can get what they want, not to annoy you.  If you are annoyed by people communicating with you, maybe you are in the wrong business.

Ferris seems to put a lot of emphasis on traveling the world.  That’s fine, if you want to throw all your cash away on visiting places you could find out about in books or by other means.  One of my life goals is not to become a permanent tourist.  I skipped over most of the chapter on travel.  I don’t need other people trying to tell me how to spend the money I don’t have yet.  Perhaps he was including this as an advertisement for the travel industry.  There were enough references to places I could spend money in that chapter to make a millionaire broke.

Overall, this book was a good read and was entertaining.  It didn’t really show me anything new, but it was written in a very readable style.  I’m glad I found this book at the library and did not have to fork over $20 for it from the book store.  I got some information and ideas from reading this, so it was not a waste of time.

I have been reading up on how to do podcasting from a blog.  From what I gathered, you need a third party file hosting site to post your mp3 files.  Then you post a link to the file hosting site and you are set to go, at least with WordPress here.  I do notice that they have a little musical symbol for adding audio files to a blog post, as well as videos and graphics and other media.  I just looked at this button, and the only files WordPress will host are the standard graphics files like .jpg and .gif, etc. so you will need to set something up with a file hosting site to post audio on a blog.

This is not really such a big deal.  There are lots of free file hosting sites around.  Filefreak.com is one where you get a gig of storage and 250 megs a day of bandwidth.  Of course, they seem to show a bit of advertising, but they have to pay for their servers somehow, and free is a good price for file hosting.

I may set something up later so I can post podcasts to this blog.  I don’t notice a lot of podcasts listed on WordPress here.  It would help me cut down on some of the typing, which I am not really good at, and perhaps make for a more interesting blog.  The only thing I have noticed that you have to look out for with podcasting is the chipmunk effect, where the flash player doesn’t play the mp3 at the right speed.  This can be avoided by recording at some multiple of 11.025 khz when you are making your mp3 file.

Mp3 files are easy to make.  You download a free application off CNET or something and hook up your microphone, then you are two clicks away from recording anything you want.  I have experimented with recording files of various stuff, and it is a no-brainer operation.  The only tricky part about posting stuff to a blog is setting up the file hosting account and getting the application for playing the file directly from your blog, which I think WordPress does for you, as well as putting the file on an RSS feed.

I might not get around to posting audio files for a while, if ever, but the technology is available and relatively easy to use.  It only takes some poking around Google to find what you need to set up your own Internet radio broadcast.  Gone are the days of building a pirate transmitter and running from the FCC.  If you want to have your own show, hook up some technology and run with it.  This is the modern world.

I have noticed some really poor quality writing online in the last couple days.  I’ve read two ebooks that had some interesting information in them, but were barely literate.  I guess this is one of the problems on the net.  When anyone can post anything, there is no quality control.

I spent years in school trying to learn how to write.  Most people don’t have all kinds of time and money to throw away on writing classes.  Still, most of what I know about writing I learned in grade and high school.  You also pick up a lot by reading decent literature.  Writing that has been published in a book goes through editing and proofreading, so it is not as likely to be in broken English as something you might find on a blog.

I don’t see how people can justify selling ebooks that are so poorly-written they are more confusing than informative.  I don’t see how these people can make any money trying to sell books that are illiterate.  I guess it takes all kinds.  There is no standards committee approving everything that ends up on a server.  I guess I should be glad about that.  I would get called lots of times for not having a theme to what I write.  They would disallow me for writing blog posts without a proper subject.  When anyone can publish just about anything online, there are going to be issues with quality.

It snowed yesterday.  Not a lot of snow, but enough to cover the ground.  It is very cold outside and white.  It’s like being in Antarctica or something, with nothing but ice to look at out the windows.  Perhaps the sun is losing power.  Perhaps the earth is going to freeze up into a ball of ice.  Perhaps I like to exaggerate.

I read some blogs about cars today.  There is a whole blogging service where you can get a free blog about cars.  All these blogs are pretty dull.  The posts all show a new car that the blogger obviously pulled off another site, then there is a short story about how great this new car is and wouldn’t it be nice to go out and buy one?  This is nothing but advertising new cars.  Funny thing was, I didn’t see any advertising posted on these blogs.  It seems a lot of them were posted and maintained by various car dealers.  Perhaps this is a new way to sell cars.  Start a blog and post your sales pitch.

I have thought about blogging about cars.  There are several posts on this blog about various cars that get some consistant traffic.  It might be something to think about.  I would need to get a plaid suit so I can become a car salesman.  Wait, I could sell new cars, not used ones.  Anyway, I would be more interested in a blog about tricking out cars with performance parts.  Maybe some kind of tuner car blog.  Maybe a muscle car blog.  Maybe I will just post endless pictures of my own cars.  Maybe I will get some plastic model cars and take pictures of them and make a model car blog.  Plastic car models are pretty cheap.

Anyway, I am just posting some ideas I have for things to blog about today on all my blogs.  It might be better than searching for ways to make money online.  I looked up “how to get rich” on Google this afternoon.  Once again the same old sponsored links came up.  I think I have cost these hucksters hundreds of dollars by now by clicking on their ppc advertisements.  I think it’s funny.  Google probably has me listed as a person who clicks on advertisements without buying anything by now.  Maybe they don’t charge their advertisers when I click on their dumb ads.  Who cares?  What I’m trying to say is I see the same websites put up lots of different ads on Google for basically the same thing, trying to get money from people who are looking for ways to make money online.

I wonder how much assembled plastic models go for on Ebay.  Maybe I should look into this.  Model kits are cheap.  If I could sell them as art, I might get thousands for just one cheap kit.  It would be a better idea than giving money to Donald Trump so he can teach me how to get rich investing in real estate.  People are losing their shirts in real estate these days.  That’s the whole cause of this stupid credit crisis.  Invest in real estate?  Why not just take all your money and burn it in the barbecue out in the back yard?  At least you could cook a burger on the flames, which is more than you’ll get throwing your money away on a housing market where values continue to drop.

I am off now to do some serious research on the resale value of plastic models.  Maybe I will start my collection tomorrow.  It would probably pay more than writing endless boring blog posts, which pays nothing but is ever so much fun to do.  Have fun blog readers.  My blog empire might become nothing more than the marketing division of my plastic model empire.

A clipper is on the way here for tomorrow.  It is supposed to bring 3-5 inches of snow.  Winter is not over yet.  I think I am going to hide in the house and keep the curtains drawn.  On the other hand, maybe I should get out my skis and enjoy the frozen mess.

The sun is out this morning, and the sky is blue, but it is very cold.  I should be used to this kind of weather after 47 years in Michigan.  It is like this for half the year.  Maybe I should start playing the lottery and hope I hit the jackpot.  Then I could move down to a tropical island and probably end up dead in a hurricane.  At least we do not get those kinds of storms here, though there are occasionally tornadoes.

So today, I think I am going to read.  I finished reading Catherine Seda’s book How to Win Sales and Influence Spiders yesterday.  I was glad I got this short book from the library and did not have to pay $25 for this information.  It is a very interesting book about making money on the Internet, but does not try to sell things like seminars and ebooks and get rich quick schemes.  I learned a few things from reading this book, like how to find hidden web pages on a site by reading the robots.txt file that excludes search bots from certain pages of a site.  How interesting.

I think I am going to go check on my Myspace page to see if anyone has visited there today.  I have other blogs to take care of and post.  One of these days I am going to figure out this Internet business thing.  At least I did not lose millions investing in any dot com losers.  My blogs are enough to keep me busy for a while.  I will check back later when I get some kind of clue on what to write about.

I was reading a popular blog yesterday.  Engadget gets lots of page views.  They have scads of posts every day.  Every blog post comes with a picture and lots of links.  They write in a moronic, flippant tone, and say nothing but the obvious about their subject.  Every post is filled with the meaningless letters and numbers of product designations.  Every post is about something that is just coming out or that will be released soon or that is in some way new.

I guess if you want to be in the news business, you should do some research and find out about things that are new.  Of course, there are other ways to become popular.  You can be entertaining.  You can attempt to be funny.  You can post pictures of funny animals.  You can tell jokes about some culturally benign group of people.  You can tell lies about celebrities.  You can troll around the web looking for interesting pictures and post these on your blog.  There are many ways to get people’s attention.

Of course, you could always try to write something useful.  You could try to inform people of something you know that would make their lives easier or better in some way.  You could gather little-known facts from the far corners of the world and write a clear and informative article that would enlighten people.  Then you could do some promotion so that people know where to find the useful stuff you wrote.

It was supposed to snow here today.  Instead, it rained.  I am not sad about this.  I was not planning on going skiing.  In a way, I like the cold rain.  It drains away and does not pile up on the ground and cars.

I really do not know what to write on this blog any more.  I used to write about things that seemed to be interesting to people.  Now, I write about the weather.  Maybe I should become a meteorologist.  I don’t really think I would be good at that job.  I can’t be dramatic enough to make the weather interesting to people who are used to watching tragedy on the news.

So, it is warm today and the snow is rain.  I have to go out later and do some running around.  Hopefully the rain will not turn back into snow, though it might.  When summer comes I will forget about this time of ice.  When the grass grows and the flowers bloom, the dreary landscape of winter will be nothing but a faded memory.

After lunch today I went to the library.  I got some old comedy DVDs to watch.  I went upstairs to the nonfiction department and looked for books.  I used the computer catalog to find where they had the books on writing.  Then I wandered over to the proper shelf by following the numbers of the Dewey Decimal System clearly posted on the end of the stacks.

I found a whole lot of books on writing.  I found they had some books that I’ve already read.  If I knew these books were at the library, I could have saved myself some cash just by checking them out.  I looked over the books and found one on mythic structure in fiction that I have seen promoted on the web.  Then I finished looking over the writing books and went to find the business section.

In the business section I found a lot of books on doing business on the web.  I looked over a few of these books.  I found two books on how to manage troublesome employees who keep blogs.  I was not interested in those books.  It’s still a free country.  If you have a blog, write whatever you want as long as nobody can sue you for it.  I found a lot of books on web marketing.  I found one very nice short book on how to increase your web popularity that had all kinds of non-technical information on Internet business.  So, I had two books and four movies to check out.  All for free.  Libraries are cool.

I spent most of the afternoon reading.  I enjoy reading.  If you want to write useful stuff, you should spend a lot of time reading interesting books.  If you feed a lot of good language into your brain through your eyes, your brain is bound to spit out some halfway decent words when you go to write.  If you spend all day watching drivel on TV, you are not improving your chances for writing decent articles.

One of these days I am going to get around to finding a theme for this blog.  Right now, it’s a handy place to post stuff I write.  As far as my writing being a business, right now it’s not.  Still, there are always possibilities for the future.  Millions of people have blogs.  I am just one person in a sea of writers all posting their thoughts on the winds of the net, waiting for the day that people pay attention.