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In case you’re not sure what moment I’m talking about, here’s the video (3 mins).

Don’t get me wrong – my bosses (they hate that term, btw) are not the stereotypical idiots that rise to the top of large companies over time; they’re smart, capable guys, but it’s still funny/ironic how communication can completely break down in even a very small organization. It’s also funny how secretly, little companies really want to be just like big companies. Why? Companies are made up of people. People want power. Hell, I want it too.

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For those of you that know me, I recently started a new full-time job after being primarily a contractor/consultant for over 7 years. About 1 week into it, it hit me that I made a terrible decision. Why? Mainly – Time. I hear you asking “what is he talking about?” It’s quite simple really. I was never consistently a full-time employed contractor. Sometimes I was part-time, sometimes, 3/4-time, sometimes even more than 40 hrs/week. While I’m always struggling for time enough to cut deeply into my To Do list, I haven’t been this strapped for that precious commodity in years. Trying to run a side business while working a full-time j-o-b is not easy. I have new-found admiration for all of those so-called ‘overnight successes’ who bootstrapped businesses while working a full-time gig. I simply never realized how important and valuable my time was. To know something academically isn’t the same as experiencing it.

But there’s more to my bad decision than just a lack of time. There is the fact that I don’t much care for what I do at my job any more, despite my being good at it. [Of course, I contend that I'm mostly good at it because of my experience, but that's another article.] It is just a job. It’s not my passion, not any more. I may have a problem in that area – I have too many interests and a short attention span. I want to do something new all the time. If you are my flabbergasted current employer who happens to be reading this, don’t worry, my sense of obligation and guilt will prevent me from ‘escaping’ any time soon.

I hear more (imaginary) readers asking all at once “But isn’t your own business just like your day job?” Well I could argue the nitty gritty details, but I won’t. What I will say is that there’s a magic word in that question: “own”, as in “my own business”. There’s something very satisfying about owning and running what you can consider to be yours. When you work for someone else, there’s a chance, possibly good, that you may be tossed out the door tomorrow. Not so with your own business. There’s also another factor – I haven’t succeeded at it yet. Success will be measured simply – can I live exclusively off of the profits of my business or not. If and when that happens, then I’ll have an opportunity to become tired of it, but until then there’s a challenge that I am yet to best.

Is there a lesson here? At least one. Kids, if you’re not the entrepreneurial type, then make sure you find something you enjoy doing. Spend copious time thinking about this. Spend time finding out if what you think you like, you really like. Here is another reason why school is important. Most things that people want to be in our technology-based society requires schooling in specific fields. You can’t get around that unless you want to be one of very few professions that don’t require a more in-depth education, and no one ever suffered from having ‘too much’ school. If school isn’t your thing, figure out how you’re learn what you need to know in order to be good at what you love.

Incidentally, I used the word “kids”, but I also meant it in the David Letterman sense. You’re never too old to start anew. It just depends on your circumstances and if your finances/obligations/mindset can take the hit that a career change usually involves.

Let me get back to the time factor for a minute. Have you ever considered why we have jobs? Isn’t it to give us the income so we can live comfortably? But shouldn’t we also have the time to enjoy those earnings. There’s that word again. If you work so much that at the end of the day you’re just too exhausted to enjoy the fruits of your labor, what’s the point? Oh yes, I know, I go home and work some more, but that’s because I refuse to be bound to a typical job for the rest of my life. I’ve made that commitment and I’m sticking to it (for now anyway).

One of the books I read recently that I thoroughly enjoyed, and provided me a lot of inspiration was Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek. Yes, some of my friends laughed at me when I told them the title. Admittedly, the title is a bit sensationalist, but after reading it, realized that it wasn’t a lie assuming you followed the author’s suggestions to a “T”. While I probably won’t follow Tim’s choice of lifestyle, the 1st third of the book was inspiration and who can put a price on inspiration?! Tim spouts the same argument I gave in the preceeding paragraph and then advocates that we try our best to live life while we have it, and not to wait for some half-baked retirement that happens when you turn 65 or some arbitrarily assigned age. I agree. If you’re interested in more of Tim’s ideas, but don’t want to splash $12 for the book, take a look at his website. But seriously, it’s $12 – just buy the book. By the way, let me say right here, that if I ever get to a 4-hr work week or even just the financial freedom to do it, that I will personally seek Tim out and take him to dinner!

I do wish I had figured this all out about 10 years ago, but like I said, it’s never too late to start. That’s it. Ironically, it’s back to work for me.

Not too long ago, Netbank was shut down by the Feds, and their main banking assets were acquired by ING Direct for a song. I was a loyal Netbank customer for about 10 years, and enjoyed it tremendously. While I became complacent with the (initially good) rates, and stopped looking for better deals, for the most part I got what I needed.

Netbank was probably the first online only banking entity to not only offer above average rates, but also free bill payment. One feature that I didn’t even knew existed when I signed up, but immediately loved, was the ability to write someone a check from within the website and have Netbank print out and mail the check. Free. When I told friends and family about this, they either didn’t believe me and/or were amazed that that existed, more so when I sent them a check!

Lots of banks now offer this feature, but my vague memory tells me that Netbank pioneered this. I’ve started the process of migrating my accounts to ING Direct, as they appear to have what I need for bill payment and have great interest rates, and I don’t really want to spend lots of time researching new banks.

BTW, for those of you wondering how this has affected, the short answer is not at all. My money was FDIC insured, and I think the Netbank site may have been down for less than a day while ING Direct did some tweaking in the background to get it all under their control, but other than that, everything still looks, feels and is the same for me and the rest of the Netbank customers. The only impending thing is that I get the distinct impression that ING is trying to phase out the Netbank services and bring us under their main umbrealla of services. Makes sense for them.

Thanks Netbank. It’s too bad you didn’t manage to stick around and benefit from the fruits of your pioneering work, but I was glad to be along for the ride.

About a month ago, we signed up for a new service called BlogRush for Gizmos for Geeks. BlogRush is essentially a networking tool where you earn credits based on how many times the widget is displayed on your site (i.e. pageviews) and in turn, links to current articles on your site are displayed in the widget on other similar blogs.

Since its launch, BlogRush has had tons of issues with spammer types signing up for the service to up their traffic, and so they decided to move from an automated sign up to a manual review process. We just got an e-mail saying that GfG was reviewed and that it did not meet any of their “Quality Review” criteria. I had to laugh; I may have even snorted. Reading through their list of 7 criteria, I found it rather ironic that we (our site) didn’t meet all of those requirements easily. I’ll post the “Quality Guidelines” below.

About the only thing that we could be faulted for is too much advertising on the site, but honestly, what blog out there isn’t trying to make some money, and how do you do it without advertising? We’re not blogging to drum up buzz for something else that we sell. Our blog is our product. But come on – we have 3 ads on the main page. Three, for Pete’s sake.

We found out about BlogRush from Shoemoney’s blog and guess how many distinct ads he has on his blog – 9 at least count. I’m not faulting Shoe at all. Actually, quite the opposite. God bless him for being able to stick that many ads on his site. If you told pretty much anyone that they could plaster their car with ads and never have to work again, do you think they’d stop to think about it for a minute? Hell no.

In case you’re wondering if we’re going to pursue BlogRush to get reinstated, the answer is nope. For our couple hundred thousand impressions, or whatever it was (since we can’t see our statistics any more), we did not get a single referral. Not one.

Guess what we’re going to do with our newly freed up page real estate? Yup, you got it – stick an ad there!

Read on for BlogRush’s admirable, but strangely enforced, list of Quality Guidelines.

BlogRush Quality Guidelines:

- The blog contains unique, quality content that provides opinions, insights, and/or recommended resources that provide value to readers of the blog. Articles, videos, public domain works, press releases, and content written by others are okay to be used on the blog, but the ratio of unique content should far outweigh content from other sources.

- The blog should be updated on a regular basis (at least several times a month) and should not just go a few months between posts.

- The blog should already contain at least 10-12 quality posts. New blogs with very little content will not be accepted.

- The blog’s primary contain must be in English. BlogRush is currently not available for non-English blogs.

- The blog should not contain an excessive amount of advertising and links and very little actual content. The focus of the blog should be quality content.

- The primary content of the blog should not be “scraped” content from other sources and/or script-generated pages for the sole purpose of search engine rank manipulation. The focus of the blog should be quality content.

- The blog’s content (or advertising) should not contain any of the following types of content: hate, anti-racial, terrorism, drug-related, hacking, phishing, fraud, pornographic, nudity, warez, gambling, copyright infringement, obscene or disgusting material of any kind, or anything considered illegal.

Click the image above to see the larger size of the game board at the end.

Here’s the post-mortem: 3 tiles left in the bag, I have [RUSHIS, blank] in my rack. Lots of words if I can turn that I into an E, and at least 1 place to play them. So I take a count of the Es on the board and decide to gamble.

I play the I in a 2-letter word, and pull. Got it! Got the E. My worthy opponent plays 3 tiles and empties the bag. I lay down ‘CRUSHES’ on the next turn. Game over right then and there. Yes, I intentionally chose ‘C’ for the blank tile. Hehe.

CRUSHES was worth 86 points, so you can see how far behind I was.

After reading this, all of the major symptoms fit what I fight with every day. Even when I manage to get myself to bed early and get 8 hours of so of sleep, waking up early in the morning is still a struggle, not to mention getting through the day. But when I go to bed, I wake up normally after 9 hours and feel fine.

There is an essay on Sleep Discrimination that essentially says that what ‘night people’ have to go through is tantamount to discrimination, and I can’t help but agree. I can’t count how many times I’ve expressed the same thoughts since college. Of course, once I started working, I realized that the way our screwed up little world works, it’ll be a long time before this is addressed in a significant way, yet alone accepted by most other people who can’t relate.

If you are one of us night owls and want more info, check out the Wikipedia link (above), and the DSPS Info website, both of which have numerous links to other information, including scientific research into the problem. There is even a mailing list if you’d like to discuss this with others just like you.

In a nutshell, this is what’s called an affiliate site. Amazon.com was really the company that pioneered the whole affiliate marketing thing. Nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find any online vendor that does not have an affiliate program. Oh yeah, so what’s an affiliate? Anyone out there on the Net that gets accepted to a vendor’s affiliate program can stick up links that go to the vendor’s site. If anyone clicks on those links and then buys something, then the affiliate (like me) gets a % of that sale.

Amazon.com has an extensive set of Web Services that allow affiliate to build sites that pull back data from them in real time, so what you see on our site is what you would see if you were on Amazon performing the same browsing or searching.

You lose nothing, Amazon doesn’t lose much, as they’re quite willing to have their affiliates push even more traffic to them, and we earn income to keep our biz running. It’s a win-win-win situation. How great is that?

So next time you’re thinking Amazon, think GfG instead. Now go bookmark and get shopping.

Yup, so we moved platforms, and did a little redesigning. It’s definitely faster now, and there are more of the standard blogging type niceties that people have come to expect. Let us know what you think. Now we can consider it plugged.

While I’m at it, we also quietly launched some related gadget blogs in the way of Gizmos for Babies and Gizmos for Kids. Yup, I’m not kidding. There’s a lot of gadgets out there in just those categories. Even I’m amazed at how many things there are for babies.

If this whole ‘making money on the Web’ thing starts to take off, perhaps we’ll start a blog on how we’ve done it/are doing it… Stay tuned.