As I was driving to work this morning, I just about lost it. On some lady’s lawn I saw a crappy car – it was a white Geo Metro with a mutilated front end, rust, and two front spares. As you might have noticed, mutilated front ends and rusty spares automatically qualify a crappy car to be posted on my site. Naturally, I had to stop and take some pictures, clearly risking my own well-being because the owner could jump out of the house window at any time and chase after me. I was also late for work.

The reason I know the owner was a lady is because when I was almost done taking these pictures, she ran out of the house and started chasing me. Thankfully, I was parked nearby, my car still idling. As I hopped in and floored it, I saw her hurl a piece of brick at my car, but I was already too far away and the brick fell short. Through the diesel smoke, in the rear view mirrow I saw her pull out a legal pad and a pen out of her robe and start writing something down, perhaps my licence plate number.

Too bad for her I swapped the plates before I left the house this morning. Good luck finding me, lady.

It’s dangerous work taking pictures of all these crappy cars. Risking my ass for your entertainment. You better recognize.

I’ve finally figured it out. It all coheres now. To make money off a website, you need to meet the following conditions:

1) Find a good niche;

2) Make frequent updates;

3) Be passionate about it.

That’s all, folks. Meet those three conditions, and your site will start to generate revenue in just a few short weeks. What makes me so qualified to talk about this? Well, a few of my side projects failed.

One was called Jacked Tunes, which was supposed to deal with plagiarism in music. Reason for failure – not enough updates. It seemed like a good niche at the time – find songs that blatantly rip off one another and post soundbites. However, after posting a few of the more obvious ones, I ran out of steam. I did not have enough traffic to build up following so that site visitors could update the content similar to how they do it on KissThisGuy, a site dealing with misheard lyrics.

Another site contained information about one of the towns in the area. The area businesses that didn’t have websites were supposed to pay me a few bucks for a subdomain or a slash-domain. Reason for failure – I wasn’t passionate enough about the project. It was boring trying to convince local businessmen that having a website is pretty essential. Flop city.

Yet another “floppy” project was supposed to generate a few percentage points from online sales off a local vendor’s web site. The vendor didn’t see immediate returns and cancelled the deal. I was trying to explain that he can just continue to do what he was doing, and I’ll promote the business online. I guess he was an immediate-result-oriented kind of guy.

So you see, enough of my projects failed to make me arrive at those three simple rules.

What made me write this post? Well, the project I’m very passionate about, 300SD.com, made its first $10.00 in ad revenue in just two weeks of its revamped existence (it used to be a Blogspot blog). Though this gravy train may not continue, I’m still very impressed considering the only ads I have is a little half-assed link bar at the top. Half of the ads don’t even show in Firefox (I’m working on it).

Here’s why I think this project has a future.

1) I’m very passionate about old Mercedes diesels. I just can’t get enough of them. I enjoy reading about them, repairing them, or just staring at them. I constantly look for topics to write about.

2) Through the site, I’ve found people who are equally as passionate. They return to the site several times a day, make intelligent comments, and have this warm fuzzy feeling that they are not alone in their love of old German diesels.

3) I have a great domain name. The vehicle model is 300SD, the domain is 300SD.com. Awesome.

I’m excited to say that the site is picking up steam thanks to the word of mouth and lots of search engine hits. Onto other ideas!

The title is a nod to National Condom Week.

I like my credit card a lot. I can safely say my credit card company has succeeded in building a solid relationship with my family and I.

First off, I haven’t paid a penny of interest on purchases. I did pay advance check fees (3%) and interest on those check amounts, but only because it was still three times cheaper than going to the bank. Case and point – I needed a grand to add to my heap of cash when I purchased my 300SD. The bank said, “well, we can tack that thousand dollars onto your wife’s existing car loan”, but that would mean paying $100 “new loan fee” and higher interest. Naturally, I told my bank to piss off and I wrote a check from my credit card account.

Secondly, I am a very disciplined fella when it comes to purchasing things. It helps that my wife’s the “spender” of the family, so I have leverage when I need something, like a new DVD-ROM from NewEgg. I buy things using temporary account numbers my credit card can issue whenever I need one, which practically eliminates potential fraud and overspending. The temp numbers expire and they have a pre-set spending limit.

Finally, I accumulate airline miles. I know that cashback bonuses can be nice and more appropriate, but my credit card company has a kick-ass reservation system, no blackouts, no airline or destination restrictions. For that reason, I try to funnel everything I possibly can through the card.

All these things are grand, but paying that bill is a different story, you might say. I’ve established a system of paying the credit card bill online in full biweekly on the same day one of the paychecks gets direct deposited to the bank. This approach has a budgeting function built-in, i.e. we know exactly what bills get paid during the first fort-night, and what purchases must be made during the second. The remainder of the paycheck gets funneled to EmigrantDirect. The second paycheck allows for more flexibility and is added to the credit card payment if unforeseen expenses came up, or remains deposited in the checking, then separated and partially sent to EmigrantDirect.

Needless to say, when the paper bill arrives in the mail, the balance has already been paid.

What’s your credit card story?

Recently I had to drop off a few things at a friend’s house. When I walked in, his girlfriend and he were cleaning the place. My friend was already taking out the vacuum to sweep the floor when he realized the dust collection bag was totally full. He asked his girlfriend whether they had any more vacuum bags, to which she answered that they didn’t. They did, however, have the bags from the old vacuum, but “you couldn’t use them because the hole was too small”. After my friend fiddled with the bag that didn’t fit, he threw it in the trash.

They were talking about the reinforced opening in the top part of the dust collection bag. The opening goes on the plastic nozzle inside the dust collection compartment of the vacuum.

If I didn’t have the exact same thing happen to me, I would have forgotten this mundane episode. In front of me I had a vacuum, a proper bag filled with crap, and a brand new bag that didn’t fit the nozzle. I was considering tossing the new bag and bagging (ha!) the vacuuming, but then I felt like an uninventive piece of crap. I proceeded to – get this, this is genius – make the opening in the bag larger by using scissors. The bag fit, I vacuumed, and my wife was happy (which is key).

I then pondered whether we all respect the idea of “intended use” too much. When the bag didn’t fit, the idea to cut a bigger opening came second, right after the idea to toss the bag out. Is that because we have both kinds of bags available for purchase? Do we “respect” these consumer goods to the point of not wanting to modify them? Really, one doesn’t even need that particual kind of bag, just a piece of cloth and some duct tape.

I think the notion of modifying your environment to fit your own needs, one of the notions that made human beings what they are today, is getting squashed under the notion that everything you need has already been invented, packaged, and marketed. Microwave filthy? Don’t buy the comerical cleaner “specifically formulated to clean your microwave”, boil up some water and lemon juice. Floors dirty? Screw the Swiffer that doesn’t even work, how about some PineSol, a rag, and a bent-over position? Car dirty? Tried a bucket and a garden hose? The list can go one forever.

I think we all can learn what our Great Depression-surviving grandparents have known all along. You can shape your environment to fit your needs, not spend scarce resources like time and money to seek out premade solutions to your little problems.

… things I’ve been seeing on the news lately don’t serve as a pleasant premonition to our future financial well-being.

As this part of my Firefox Toolbar demonstrates, I read a lot of news. I wish I could get my RSS feeds anywhere, anytime. I try to make up my own mind about the state of affairs in the world without too much of a reliance on some clearly biased networks. However, the words I would use to describe my feelings would not paint a very optimistic picture of the outlook that jigsawed recently. As a matter of fact, I dare anyone to put a positive spin on the list of events below.

• Driven by economic and religious catalysts, people in the “hot” and “unstable” regions of the world further entrench their haterd for you and I. Some of those folks happen to control sweet light crude that we’ve learned to love and depend on.
• The current administraton delegated the operations of six major US ports to a Saudi company. I’m not saying Saudis are terrorists. I’m just saying that we’re dealing with the least-monitored economic artery and a country run by a single family, named after that family, sitting on top of world’s largest oil reserves, and enjoying the presence of Islam’s two holiest cities (more).
• There is no motion in the marriage penalty situation. After my wife and I got married, we had to make sure we have enough withholdings to not be stuck with a tax liability. One of the paychecks went to hell; this year no refund, but no tax liability, either. For a bunch of folks who overzealously protect the institution of marriage by disallowing gay people to enter it, this administration surely doesn’t want to help out the youngen BY SIMPLY INCREASING THE STANDARD DEDUCTION FOR MARRIED FILED JOINTLY!!!
• Not enough is done to promote alternative sources of energy. And why should something get done? Our entire executive branch is budded up with folks with permanent ties to Big Energy (more). Is it so hard to create a tax break for those buying and selling biodiesel? Making biodiesel? Siphoning vegetable oil from restaurants and using it to partially fuel their Mercedes Benz 300SD’s?
• The newly-assembled conservative Supreme Court is ready to pounce on a woman’s right to choose. No immediate economic impact, just pisses off a lot of women.

Who cares about those issues, though. We got a war to fight, taxes to cut, goverment to reduce, fetuses to save. We’ve got Saudis to please, other planets to explore, budget deficit to expand [sarcasm alert].

You know that CareerBuilder commercial, “I’m sorry … It’s just that I work with monkeys …” ? I feel like that from the moment I leave my house to the moment I come back to it. Don’t you?