In case you didn’t know … I love books and movies about zombies.  I watch old zombie movies, new zombie movies, play an occasional zombie video game, listen to Rob Zombie … :)

So it’s no surprise I’ve read the Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks.  This book, and the SAS Survival Guide are two of my most favorite books (the MOST favorite book of all time still being 12 Chairs by Ilf and Petrov … although if you don’t read Russian, don’t even bother).

Max Brooks’ Zombie book has an amazing variety of methods of protecting yourself from the attacks of the living dead, as well as ways to kill them quickly and efficiently.  However, the true awesomeness is on the back cover of the book — and since I could not find it on the Internet, I am publishing the entire list:

TOP 10 LESSONS FOR SURVIVING A ZOMBIE ATTACK

1. Organize before they rise!
2. They feel no fear, why should you?
3. Use your head, cut off theirs.
4. Blades don’t need reloading.
5. Ideal protection = tight clothes, short hair.
6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it.
7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike.
8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert!
9. No place is safe, only safer.
10. The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.

I suppose another reason this appeals to me is because I grew up in the Eastern Europe in the 80′s … so you can pretty much replace the word “zombie” with the word “communism” and instantly relate to why I like all this.

The lessons of this list don’t have to apply in a post-apocalyptical world of Fallout 3 … they apply here and now.

1. Be prepared.
2. Don’t be easily intimidated.
3. Think before you act.
4. Keep things simple.
5. Protect yourself, your family, and your assets.
6. Seek the high ground, but physically and morally.
7. Stay mobile.
8. Pay attention to your surroundings.
9. Nothing lasts forever.
10. History repeats itself.

This is the real reason I love all this zombie shit — it reminds me to be focused, alert, and prepared.  Don’t believe my being prepared?

Here’s some pics — one day back in May I realized we didn’t have a pantry.  Well, we had one, but it was stocked with a few canned goods and mostly perishables.  I then decided to utilize the space under the stairs to jam pack it full of survival food that would last the two us at least a year.

How to be Poor Survival - Zombie Shelter

Here’s some soup — I know the most economical use of space would be to store canned chicken and dry pasta and then make your own soup, but that’s being almost “too ready” — at least with canned soup you lose a little space, but gain a lot in convenience.

How to be Poor Survival - Zombie Shelter Soup

This would not be long-term survival without SPAM — high fat, high calorie meat with a shelf life of 3 years, easy:

How to be Poor Survival - Zombie Shelter Spam

I picked up a bunch of rice and other grains (wheat, buckwheat).  They don’t go bad, and you can survive on them forever.

How to be Poor Survival - Zombie Shelter Grain

I put together a box of medical supplies — antibiotic ointment, gauze, alcohol, wet naps, etc.  Yes, tampons too.  Oh, I also picked up a sweet hand-cranked radio/flashlight.

How to be Poor Survival - Zombie Shelter Medkit

There you have it.  I don’t have to worry about zombies, but if anything like a hurricane, a flood, or job loss happens, we should be good for awhile.

UPDATED: A man arrested for wireless piggybacking

Ok, I’ll admit it, I’m totally in love with my new laptop. I know it’s not really that fancy (no BlueTooth, etc), but it’s been extremely liberating to take my work/play on the road. Nev, for instance, is taken with his tablet PC, but I’m pretty good with the keys and I’m against the smudge marks on the display =)

Shortly after getting the laptop, I installed a Wireless-B (cheaper, older) router in my place, thus enabling myself to roam freely. Of course, I threw a security key on the connection, however …

… apparently, there are people in town who don’t know how or don’t want to secure their routers. That top unsecured connection was snached up by my laptop while I was driving through town. I did not realize how many people actually live in wi-fi enabled households! It was a complete shocker to see how many people ran unsecured wi-fi!

So I surfed the net for a little bit while being parked next to a few houses, and bookmarked a few addresses with strongest signals on my Google Earth globe for future reference.

Then I did the first thing any IT person would do when (s)he sees an unsecured wi-fi network named linksys or netgear: open browser, punch in 192.168.1.1. When the login prompt came up, I punched in admin for login and password (or blank) for password.

Voila …

… I’m inside their router. I can do whatever the hell I want now, like knock out their Internet alltogether (by changing one digit in the DNS), or create a secured connection for one’s own hypothetical dirty deeds. Of course, their cable hookup would still work, and they could hook their computer up by bypassing the router and going straight to the cable modem. However, if it’s some computer-illiterate Joe Blow’s apartment, is he really going to find that router setup CD, reset the router by holding reset button for 5 seconds, and re-run setup? Yeah, right.

So perhaps he gets a flyer the next day saying something like, “Internet stopped working? A new superscary deadly credit card-stealing virus is going around!” and advertising a quick $29.99 fix … Too sleazy for your taste? It could happen …

The lesson here is this – always secure your wi-fi connection. It’s not that much more complicated to create a meaningful 10-digit key, though you must use hexadecimal base (numbers 0-9, letters A-F). The router wants to assign a complicated key, like A7C0BF96D4, but you can always make up your own by visiting Scrabble Dictionary and punching in ABCDEF into their word builder. Good key components abound – ACE, BAD, BADE, BEAD, BEEF, CAFE, DEB, DEAF, FAD, FADE, FACE … Why not secure your network with a cool, easy-to-remember and give-out-to-friends key like BADACEDEAD, or DECAFFCAFE?

How do you turn this runoff into a decent drink?

You filter it many times through your faucet charcoal filter. And by ‘many’ I mean about 50.

I built this little contraption out of a two-liter plastic bottle and three styrofoam plates. Of course, a container with an outflow hole the size of the diameter of the charcoal filter would be nice, but I didn’t have the luxury of looking around for parts – I needed to quickly turn Mohawk Rum into something drinkable.

I poured the liquor into the filter. The liquor collected around the filter in the top plate and seeped through the sides of the filter into the bottle.

Any leakage went into the bottom plate.

So did it work?

Oh yes. The nasty burning taste of ass is gone, and the liquor is very much smoother. Judging by its original taste, Mohawk people distil this rum out of street garbage, so I couldn’t turn it into a high-class rum. However, this method does work. Guys on Mythbusters ran their cheap liquor through a pitcher charcoal filter 6-7 times, but I went full 50.

Now I must retire to the living room and degustate.

I’ve been recently asked to take a look at a couple of servers at a friend’s friend’s small business. He seemed to be doing ok until I actually spoke with him.

It appeared the big thorn in his side was the IT, surprise, surprise. At first, VISA and MC decided that the merchants weren’t secure enough, so they instituted a mandatory software and hardware upgrade. Then the Point-of-Sale software people decided to do their own compliance upgrade, which would probably require upgrade of workstations AND the servers.

To make matters worse, the tech support on one of his software suites ended in May 2005. He’s about to do a major (forced) upgrade requiring extensive tech support. The helpdesk lady said it would be $500 to renew support up to May 2006, then another $500 from May 2006 to May 2007. Yeah, they do it in a retroactively-continious fashion.

Of course, everything would be an out-of-pocket expense for my friend. We’re taking several thousand, like, pushing ten grand. The problem just plopped on his lap, there, you’re out ten grand.

Thus, in the spirit of streamlining the IT, I walked around the location and took notes.

What surprised the most was not the crazy hodge-podge of random workstations homebrewed from all kinds of weird componenets, most stuck in PCI slots and attached to cases by bent paperclips. Neither it was the lack of personnel’s ambition to learn anything about these machines and how they operate. Neither it was a random DHCP router desperately handing out duplicate IPs while being stuck in a switch on the network with all static IPs (yeah, I know).

It was the utter and complete lack of backups. We’re talking, no one has a concept of backing up data.

My friend quickly understood that if his old AMD-K6 Point-of-Sale server blows a power supply and send the hard drive to hell, his business would literally stop. So I suggested getting an external SATA drive, a USB 2.0 enclosure, a copy of Acronis – a pretty good insurance policy for around $200.

He signed. I was just another IT guy trying to beat money out of him “for his own good”. Everywhere he looked, the evil IT folk was trying to shake money off him.

I thought about it, and agreed with my friend. Why is there a need to upgrade if everything is working beautifully? Why are these small business owners forced to pay for upgrades they don’t need?

On that discussion-stimulating note, I’m going to wrap up some quick affiliate marketing news and hit the sack.

• Basement Flooded site appears to be highly lucrative in terms of per-click revenue, not total revenue (yet). While my 300SD site is lucky to break $0.10 per click, the basement site can rake in a couple of bucks. It’s not indexed by Google yet.
• I wrote some php scripts for this site to display revenue. To show correct figures, I pull a couple of figures off AdSense and update them manually every day through FTP. Why? Keeps the site fresh as far as search crawlers are concerned.
• I decided to do an experiment. I will not promote my How To Be Metal site AT ALL (see? no link). I want to see how long it takes to build an audience with no promotion whatsoever by doing a post every 2-3 days.
• V for Vendetta is a very sweet movie. I happened to see it on an IMAX screen, so I was doubly blown away. You really have to go see it.
• You thought I was sleazy with my Basement site? You’re wrong. Check out this sleazeball.

Peace.

Last September, when this site had about three renegade visitors per day (two were probably robots), I paid people $1.00 to place a 40×40 ad on my site. In about four weeks I had all $13 spent after placing 16 ads. Thirteen dollars because because three guys declined the payment. That got me my first ever mention on Jeffrey’s Personal Finance Advice. I believe that stunt was in part responsible for building up my traffic, though, let’s face it, all of you come back just to check whether I saw any more crappy cars.

Since then, my site got hacked and I lost some of my files. I recently moved to my current WordPress platform and almost forgot the annoyances of robot spammers slapping crappy comments every three minutes onto my cracked-out, handwritten blog. However, I haven’t forgotten about the folks whose pixel ads I carried. My plans for those include resizing and placing them back on the site. Oh, and they should appear in random order with every refresh.

That got me thinking about the whole pixel ad schtick. We’ve all heard about the British kid’s brilliant idea of selling pixel ads – he’s made more money in a few months than most people will make in 20 years. I’ve tried to explain the concept to my barely-Internet-literate Ukrainian father, but he just gave up. “Million dolarov? Pixel ad? Kak eto tak?”

Of course, a good idea like that had to be imitated. There are over a hundred copycat sites that exist only to make money the pixel ad-selling way. Existing for other reasons, but still among the sites selling pixels is Nev’s Blog.

I like reading his posts because they are very real. They are dealing with things close to any pf blogger‘s heart – making and saving money, no bull. A while back he placed a pixel-ad rectangle on his site, and made a couple of grand from doing so (to date).

Clearly, it’s easy money, “anyone can do it” – you make a gray rectangle, turn it into an image map, and you’re done. Not so fast, Sparky. Nev is a hugely popular pf blogger enjoying mentions in our nation’s top publications, along with newspapers in such far away countries as Russia.

Still, it an interesting way to advertise, and, quite possibly, a profitable one, too. I took a closer look at his pixel ads just for my own research, and here’s what I found. Nev, I’m going to count your money now.

• In about 5 months he’s made around $2,000. I’m guessing he’s put in an hour and a half of labor, if that. He capitalized on the idea while it was still fresh, new, and exciting. He already had the traffic to sell those ads, otherwise they probably wouldn’t, uh, sell.
• After 5 months the ad rectangle is about 17% filled up (40 out of 240). If the pixels sell at the same rate, in about 2.5 years all ads will be sold, bringing in another $10,000 if the price of $50/ad remains the same.
• To put things into perspective, Nev is ranked about fifty-thousandth on Alexa, traffic-wise. I am about half-a-millionth. It would be at least ten times more difficult for me to sell ads on my site. Therefore, I would have been extatic if I sold one ad in 5 months.

Who are the people buying his ads? At the moment, the dozen sites advertising on Nev’s blog are:

• A small portal of gambling and “other” links;
• A mortgage-related site seemingly built by someone who knew about Jeffrey‘s satellite site idea;
• Two cash advance sites – one a homebrew cash advance site (a ~ tilda in the URL is not a good sign), another a more interactive cash advance site with a shady (non-https) appication process;
• Three blogs, one not updated for a year, one just plain goofy, one a pretty good read, but too impersonal and full of ads;
• A halfway decent resource about a precious metal, another satellite site;
• Two strictly gambling sites – a poker strategy resource and a gambling online resource;
• A meaningless link farm;
• A site dedicated to selling more pixel ads.

If I was Nev, I’d laugh my fanny off. I wouldn’t even care of those people did make cold hard cash from traffic generated by my ads. It just seems so … crazy … that Nev earned two thousand dollars by selling ads to guys whose sites, I’m sorry, have no real value.

The lesson I’ve learned and re-learned is that traffic is king. Speaking of traffic, you know which of the pf bloggers has the fattest flow? Coming up next … on HowToBePoor … dot com.