Saucer

I attended the Social Media Palooza held at the convention center last Thursday and Today and run by Mike Muench from Leapfrog Interactive. It was a good seminar and myself and my client (who paid for my ticket thanks Sam!) learned some things I think. They really pushed Twitter. Funny cause I've been waiting for that to die. 5% of all twitter users doing 75% of the tweets. Doesn't sound like a good medium for marketing shrug but I'm open.

In the recording industry, all you need to do to promote yourself is to repeat your name over and over in your song until it sticks. And Saucer is no exception. I've been pushing the brand for about a year now and haven't gotten one random call saying they saw my company's site and wish to do business with me. It's all been through word of mouth. And that's ok for now. But at some point I need to think bigger in order to attract bigger abductees, I mean clients, aboard the ship. Fear not, X Files fans, there will be no loss of time or strange metal objects implanted. Just a good martini serving and a great in-flight movie. I'll even let you watch the jaw dropping amazement and pointing from down below on the ground. OK back to the fun. Have a safe Memorial day weekend all you not reading this.

I'm from Baltimore and we're still bitter about the Colts skipping town. So even though I think they'll win today I'm rooting for New Orleans.

I'm sure all the Saucer fans who check this site everyday (lol) have been so bummed there hasn't been a post in a while. I promise I'll try to stop by more often so that all two of you that read this will have something to read!

I almost fully convinced myself that I will actually finish my business plan and incorporate Saucer LLC. Thanks to some good folks out there I have been doing pretty steady freelance. Along with working at Dee's three to four days a week, doing all their advertising. I've really been enjoying working there. The owners are quite nice and I'm getting to do all manner of advertising for them including shooting and editing videos for their YouTube channel.

Working on a good computer is key. They bought me a new Mac Pro tower when I started and since then have upped it from 3 to 16 gigs of ram. Don't get me started on how amazing having that much ram is. Of course my 4 gig PC runs as fast, heh. We're planning on using a friend of mine to come in and shoot some Kentucky Derby hat making videos. In HD and all. And that, I hope, will inspire the owners to drop some coin on a new HD camera for me. I've been using my years old Sony Handycam for all the videos. It squeeks by in quality and sound. But it's happy to be out of the bag and being used, I assure you.

Alright. I need more coffee and have a new client meeting in a few hours. Saucer is off the ground and some day I'd much like to see it soaring. Zipping around commuter jets and giving the Air Force headaches. Who knows. Maybe one day I'll get to land. Step out wearing a green suit. And walk around in front of some rednecks making beep beep noises.

Good news. The saucer has fuel and can stay aloft for fairly long times. Life in Louisville is good.

Ah starting a business. Turning 16 years of creativity into a marketable package. Waiting 60 days for checks from freelance gigs. (Bills come due faster.) Trying to get paid with dollars instead of bartered goods like wine, tennis racquets and bicycle repairs. (Credit card companies take none of these.)

At least I have the support of my steadily-employed fiance whom I love very much.

My new goal is to walk the earth (ok the Highlands) and pass out business cards. Maybe. Who knows. I'll make some cash.

He's just too gooooood lookin' and he'll behead anyone that annoys you.

I've been a lot of things in my life. Baked doughnuts. Sold Christmas trees. Back when I was 21 and fresh out of college I needed some cash so I applied for a temp agency. At first I worked for the labor side, which lead me to herniating myself carrying a 50 foot bar down three flights of stairs. Ouch. After I recovered I worked for the office side. Filing. Typing. Answering phones. I can't remember how much I made, but it was better than flipping burgers or working retail (retail is the devil).

Now last week, unemployment all but expired, I went out and applied for a temp agency. It's funny how things have changed over the last 20 years. There aren't as many old-school business men who can't use a computer and are in need of a temp. So without any office jobs, the temp agency sent me to a company called TruGreen Chemlawn to attempt to upsell all their customers toward extra services that at some point they'd declined. My minimum requirement was 300 calls per day. $1000 in sales. And an above 15% close rate.

I did this for 7 days and made $9/hour. And orchestrated the destruction of many thousands of Japanese Beetle grubs. I guess, again, this is better than working retail (I'd rather turn tricks in a Afganistan brothel than work retail). And really, it wasn't so much about the money. It was partly about showing my parents and soon-to-be wife that I'll do almost whatever it takes to earn some cash. Prove my worth. Earn my keep. Justify my 20 years in school. And the best thing is that I met new people, and learned something. Which is a perk of doing any new kind of job. And it sharpened my selling skills, which I'll be needing soon as I go off and sell myself and my freelance powers.

Alright, time to get back to work. Peace to all, especially those in retail.

Well I got a working site for my yet-to-be-incorporated advertising agency up today. You can find it here. And since I linked this blog on that site, I suppose I should show up here from time to time and actually write something. Even I'm the only one who reads it after.

I sent my site link to my buddy and former writing partner Chuck today. He's out in LA interviewing, having somewhat recently moved from LA to Austin to Atlanta. I used to move every time I got a new job too. And that probably led to me hitting 40 sans wife or kids.

And so to prevent the scenario of me tossing a ball to my kid with an oxygen mask strapped to my face, I decided to allow love to happen. And chips fell where they did. Which placed me in Louisville, apparently for a while longer. There are only two choices for advertising people these days. Move and start all over or make the best of it. Well my lovely bride-to-be Tonja is gainfully employed in healthcare here, so we're making that work. Even if I'm not.

But the freelance seems to be somewhat available. And I can supplement that with office temp work or organ sales.

Anyway, peace to all who've read this. All zero of you.

I suppose I've gotten to the point that many new bloggers come to sooner than later. And that is whether or not anyone is actually reading the blog you had high hopes for. Hopes that it would grow to be some kind of internet phenomenon like Leeroy Jenkins.

At this point this blog writer sits and wonders if its worth entering this clever internet stuff into a blog that only he reads. So if you are reading this and cheering me on please leave a comment somewhere to know someone is out there. Thanks.

I just want to say thank you to the Florida bank CEO who by his generocity, stands miles above all the corrupt and greedy crooks who run our banking system. Read more here.

So today they announced that another 650,000 people applied for unemployment last week. That brings the total unemployed to 11 Million give or take. That's 11 Million Americans making 1/5th of their former salary. And also paying out hundreds if not well over a thousand dollars a month for Cobra health insurance. Insurance they used to get for maybe $80 a month.

Cobra is a scam. If your healthy, I would suggest right away trying to find an alternative means of insurance. Humana One was one my fiance's suggestion. She actually works at Humana but can't put me on her policy until this summer.

I applied for Humana One the other day. $160 a month for Medical and Dental insurance versus the $385 a month I've been spending to keep my insurance active seemed like a really good deal (You can be denied insurance by your next employer if you have a pre-existing condition and you let your coverage laps).

But of course a week later I found out I was denied based on having low HDL cholesterol (the good kind). So now I know how they can offer coverage so cheaply.. they simply don't insure anyone that could possibly collect. Maybe I'll move to Canada, eh?

I found this great eye chart on the net somewhere. I made a slight change to it because they had ROTF instead of ROFL.

This reminds me of a an incredible culture of computer nerds out there that eventually spilled over into mainstream society. I remember the early days of computer use well. My first computer was an TI-994A that I bought in 10th grade. At the time the industry was trying very hard to turn the old game consoles into computers. Intellivision tried it. But no one paid much cred to them.

After I was finished playing around with the TI it was years before I owned a PC again. Then, thanks to an Asian man living across the hall from me at my dorm, I got back into them (thanks Norm!). He had a Commodore Amiga 500 in his room. At the time (1988) it was a state of the art computer. Way ahead of what IBM and Mac had to offer. And by the summer of 1989 I was pushing that 1 meg of internal ram for all it was worth. This of course included quite a bit of gaming. And that lead me to start getting online to start downloading games.

It was certainly an odd feeling being online in the 80s. Very few people I knew even owned a home computer. And most of my friends considered me a nerd when I talked about the internet. I had an account on GEnie at first. GE had a room full of computers for their employees and at night, after everyone went home from work, all those computers sat around unused. They had a good idea in launching a paid service for people to use those computers after 5pm and that's what I did.

I became a warez boy. I can't claim hacker status because those were the guys actually cracking the protection on games and uploading them to the net. No, I just went to game copy parties and visited warez sites. The first time a sysop of a site broke in and chatted with me was truly an exciting experience.

Well that's enough about my geekness. Here is wikkipedia's definition of Leet.

Always fun to go back and see where we've come in video games. I was given my first, an Atari 2600 system at age 8 by my aunt. By high school I had moved on to Intellivision and enjoyed many hours playing this game:

If you're going to get arrested, what could be better than getting caught fondling two plastic honeys in a parking lot. I'm afraid to ask why the Reeses cups were close-by, melting in the Florida sun:

Floridian nabbed for public ménage a trois with plastic partners.