Get a job - or not

Posted by stuart as ,

Mrs. Pipmypagerank gave me a bit of a fright the other day.

Have you given any thought as to what sort of job you’re going to look for once you’ve had your kidney transplant?

….she asked me

Hmmm, I’ve not worked for anone else in an employment type relationship for a couple of years now, since I left my last job in the printing industry. I do the odd bit of web development, but don’t really chase the work. There’s enough work to keep me ticking over, especially since I teamed up with a graphic designer who is passing on all of his web dev. work to me. This is nice, as the work “just appears”, meaning I don’t have to go chase it, and deal with different clients all the time.

I make a bit over US$100 a month from all my online crap. Certainly not enough to live on, and not really enough to motivate me to throw myself full-time into this kind of work. The pocket money is nice, but the variations too great, and there are too many things outside of my control to take the whole thing too seriously.

So what to do?

I could:

• Get a job (No thanks)
• Build my web development business (Not really that keen on this idea - I find the work rewarding but stressful)
• Buy another business (don’t have the capital)
• Start a business ( I like this idea)

Now a closer look at each of the above:

1. Get a job: Not having worked for anyone else for a couple of years, this is the least appealing of all the options. I’m too used to “being my own boss”, living to my own timetable, and spending lots of time with my kids. I’m reticent to give this all up.
2. Buiding the web development business: I’d rather not do this, I love building websites, I just hate maintaining and supporting them. If I could just build a website, FTP it to the server and forget about it, I’d consider this, but that’s an unrealistic expectation. I also find frustrating the lack of knowlege that the client has. They don’t seem to understand how much work is involved in the smallest of changes.
3. Buy another business: Capital is the big issue here. I just don’t want to re-mortgage me house to buy into someone else’s problems.
4. Start a business: I like this idea the most. I like the idea of building a business from scratch. I’d like to stay within areas I know and love. Something to do with technology. I’m looking at the idea of an imaging business at the moment. Something in the “Image transfer” area. I like the idea of buying a “heat transfer press” and an Epson sublimation ink setup, and printing custom t-shirts, mousemats, coffee mugs etc. This business has reasonably low entry costs (around $1,000), and could be marketed both locally and online.

Just thinking out loud. Anybody got any other ideas as to a reasonably low entry cost “real world” business?

Stupid bloody AdSense

Posted by stuart as

Somebody wanna tell me why I get roughly the same number of AdSense ad impressions a day (in the hundreds, not thousands), and one day I make ten cents, the next day $7.50?

Stupid bloody AdSense.

Who are you

Posted by stuart as ,

The irresistable words from the Who’s song which became the theme to a really crap TV show got me thinking about the readers of this little corner of the intarweb.According to thefeedburner stats down there on the right of this page, there are about fourty of you who subscribe to the RSS feed. Problem is, I know who about half a dozen of you are, but as for the rest of you, I have no clue.

So how about clicking on the link in the feed which brings you to the site itself, and leaving a comment?

Who are you?

Do you have a blog I should be reading?

“…….So tell me who are you?”

This post is brought to you by the letters V and M

Posted by stuart as

…..or the lack thereof…..

I toodled off to dialysis a week or so ago, it was a Saturday afternoon, and stinking hot here in little old Adelaide (110 plus)

Mrs. Pimpmypagerank dutifully put the 18 month old to bed for his afternoon sleep, and took the three year old into our bedroom with my shiny new laptop to have a lie down and watch a Wiggles DVD.

I received a phone call from a rather sheepish Mrs. Pimpmypagerank a couple of hours later to inform me that my pride and joy (the laptop, not the three year old) had been “broken”

Apparently, she who must be obeyed had fallen asleep on the bed, leaving the little terror to his own devices. As with any toddler, he had destruction on his mind, and the laptop as his target.

He decided that a kitchen fork was his tool of trade, and began merrily plucking the keys, mechanism and all, clean off the keyboard.

So now I have no V or M key. I need to place my fingertip in the spot where the key used to be, sometimes it works, sometimes not.

Kids - gotta love ‘em!

My favourite three posts.

Posted by stuart as ,

I thought I’d take a few minutes to tell you, dear reader, about my three favourite posts from the blogosphere.

These are posts that made me think, changed the way I think about something, or just tickled my funny bone.

It would be nice if this went viral, tell us what your three favourite posts are…

Now for mine:

The nothing ventured philosophy -  Tom has taken the time to let his readers know why he named his blog thus, and gives a great insight into what makes this aspiring AIS’er tick. This post is well worth the read if you want to take an in-depth look at why he does what he does, and how he plans to go about it.

Writing to be Rich - Empress is always a good read - honest to a fault, if you’re looking for a sugar-coated introduction to PPC and affiliate marketing, go look somewhere else. Empress has a way of getting into my head, and posting what I’m thinking, using a really cool “stream of consciousness” writing style. If you want to get an insight into the mind, frustrations, hopes and dreams of an online entreprenuer, read this post.

For Gods sake, get over yourself -  Yes I know, this is one of mine. It’s not here so much for the post itself, which is pretty lame, but the comments it generated suprised me a lot. This thread gives a good insight into what people were thinking about “payperpost” around the time of its launch. Well worth the time to read if you want to know how aggressive people (including myself, I’m ashamed to admit) can get if they really believe in something.

So what are your three favuorite posts from the blogosphere?