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Is there anybody out there?

 

 RR #69: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A quick update on my “new” kitchen – here are some before and after photos of the kitchen in my new house.  The blue could use another coat, but all in all I am happy with the result.  What you can’t see is that the baseboards were all this yucky antique white / yellow color, and now they are bright white.

Before

After

It is very sad for me to report that former Tonight Show and Star Search star Ed McMahon has passed away.   He most recently came back into the limelight due to his financial crisis, his home in danger of being foreclosed on.  He went on several of the Entertainment Tonight type shows pleading his case for housing reform to help others going through the same thing.

My Ed McMachon story takes place in 1997 or 1998, I was working for Universal New Media in Burbank at the time, and we were doing “Real Interviews” – typing  up interview questions as Ed McMahon answered them, and also broadcasting in Real Audio.

At the conclusion of the interview, Ed proclaimed, “I give Troy Rutter 4 stars with a bullet!”  Which was a great honor for me, since I always wanted to be on Star Search.   From that one hour long interview, I was able to glean that McMahon was a person of highest integrity, and just a nice person.

Thanks Ed, for the great memory!

Here is the official chat transcript, sadly the audio no longer works;

http://tinyurl.com/l2w2gh

It started out as a good idea.   In trying to keep up more on my car’s maintenance, I decided to actually check my tire pressure.   I went to Wal-Mart (I know.. I know) and bought a 99 cent tire pressure gauge, and then I noticed something that looked really, really cool: valve caps that automatically show if your tires are low.   Wow, those would be great!

I bought the valve caps, screwed them on, and all was good.

Or so I thought.

The next day I got up, checked tired pressure (good to go!) and took off for Des Moines, a mere 30 minute commute.  About 3 miles into my commute, I felt the car pulling a little to the left.   That’s weird, I thought.  So I overcompensated a little and almost lost complete control of the car.  Breathing heavily, I pulled over to the side of the road, then got out of the car to check my tires.

All four were flat.  Flat flat flat flat.

I called the service station, they came out and inflated all the tires, running out of air on the last one. (Hey Butch’s – I TOLD you all four were flat!) and I went on my way to work, after taking the valve caps off.  (I had a feeling).

I thought that was it, when I got off from work, walked to my car, and one of the tires was flat yet again.

Reading reviews of these tire pressure valve caps on the Internet show that many people have had the same result, and the manufacturers blame it on faulty valve stemps or bad installation.  I had neither, until after using the caps.

I ended up having to replace the valve stems for about $25 on two of the tires before they stopped leaking.  The experience still has me questioning whether my tires have enough air.   When the car jerks a little to the right or left, I keep thinking my tires are going flat.

If you are thinking about using tire pressure valve caps, think again.  A regular old tire gauge is a lot safer!

Merlyn is glad you and your fellow kitteh will find a new, safe home.

Sleep well.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMmwCMmgmkQ[/youtube]

I decided to take a little tour of the Commodore stuff I currently have. Audio quality is a result of TheFlip’s compression (grrrrr)

One of the rgeatest Adsense teachers out there, Joel Comm, says that in order to reach the “next level” of working with Adsense, you need a mentor.  Somebody who has had success with the program, and can lead you through the ups and downs of building your niche web sites and content-based web sites up and optimizing them for Adsense.

So, I am officially looking for an adsense mentor.

I have read all the books, tried all the programs (for creating VRE, niche sites, etc) and have all the practical knowledge on building web sites, but am missing “something” – I am looking for a mentor to help talk me through making it to the next level of Adsense earnings.

Precisely, I am looking for:

a) a 1-on-1 daily coach available for email and IM communication
b) Someone currently making more than $1,000/mo. in Adsense earnings
c) Someone who preferably has already mentored others into achieving the $1,000/mo or more target
d) Someone who wants a great testimonial if they can help me meet that goal

In return, I will give a great testimonial to the person who helps me meet my goal of $1,000/mo.   I will also “pay it forward” and pass on the knowledge to another, thus carrying on the tradition of the mentor relationship.

In addition, I will promise to donate 15% of my Adsense earnings each month to charitable causes in my community.

I have already asked Joel Comm himself, but I think he is too busy, and that may have been too ambitious.  If you are interested, or know somebody, please direct them to this post and comment to contact me.   Comments are always moderated, so only I will see it.

Won’t you be mine, would you be mine, won’t you be…. my Adsense Mentor?

As a 30 something, I remember back in college in the 1994-95 age when the Internet was fun.   I mean, REALLY fun.   One minute we had the same old small “web pages” that used form elements to link pages – which was a step up from the old gopher system, and somehow related to hypercard…   then bam!   All of a sudden we have this new way to put images onto web sites, then we could have background images… then our own domain name.   And it grew and grew.  There was always something exciting emerging, and it was fun to be a part of it.

From 1995-2001 I helped form the Internet.   I can say that with confidence and a bit of humility, but I know that somehow I had an effect on how the Internet grew – and then broke.   You see, during that time I made web pages and web sites because they were FUN.   Remember fun?

You like a certain band – put up a fan site for it.  A certain actor or actress?  I’ll do a page on them too.   TV show?  Movie?   I’ll do a web site for that too.   Hundreds of thousands of hours I spent making web sites just because I liked a particular subject.   And it was fun.

Then the dot com crash.  Suddenly, the web wasn’t fun anymore.  Oh sure, I had created web sites for the #1 online entertainment destination Warner Bros. such as Babylon 5, Third Watch, Drew Carey, Friends, Lois & Clark, La Femme Nikita, Rosie O’Donnell, and others.   But suddenly the landscape changed, and I lost that spark.

Until recently.

A few months ago I put up a fan site for a music group, well more of a show, and it currently ranks in Google higher than their official site so i get a good number of visitors a day without even doing anything.  A month or so ago I dared to put a few Google ads on it, and my earnings sky-rocketed.

It was something I enjoyed, and was a fun distraction from the sites I “have” to work on.

I resurrected a site I had started back in 1996, recoded it to css (it used tables at the time!) and it is again an OK site traffic wise, and I sprinkled a few ads in there which bring in a couple of dollars a day.

Over the past several years I have been reading ebooks after ebooks trying to find the right “pattern” for making money on the Internet via adsense.   Some say “write what you know” and some say “write what’s profitable” and some say “write a little about everything.”   After years of trying everything under the sun, I believe I have finally decided on the definitive answer:

You HAVE to write about what you enjoy or have an interest in.

Credit card consolidation or cancer lawsuits may have high click-through revenue, but you will never gain the trust of your visitors if you don’t have a sincere interest in the subject.

Now all I need is for my hero, Joel Comm, to suggest a real-live mentor for me to continue my adsense learning.   If I don’t hear from him soon, a singing gorilla telegram may just show up at his door.

From this moment on I will continue to do web sites that I need to do, but also will try and do more web sites that I “WANT” to do and that I will have fun doing.   Perhaps that is the magic I have been looking for.

Being an avid Cold Case viewer, I replay the familiar scene of a detetective removing a box of evidence from “unsolved” and carrying it out of the room over and over when I heard the news that the Adam Walsh case was finally considered closed in Hollywood, Florida.

Adam was abducted and killed in 1981, and was only a year younger than me at the time.  The following year, paperboy Johnny Gosch was upducted in Des Moines, and then in 1984 another paperboy, Eugene Martin disappeared.

Needless to say, it was a very stressful time to be a paper carrier in the the Des Moines area.   The only thing the Des Moines register could do at the time, however, was issue danger letters to its carriers letting them know what to do case they were approached, as well as issue metal whistles to each carrier to use in case they felt threatened or were approached.

As far as I know, nobody ever used the whistles for the situation they were designed for.

The abduction of Adam Walsh has led his father, John on a crusade that has captured hundreds of fugitives through the television show America’s Most Wanted.  In addition it has created numerous organizations and legislation to help find missing and explooited children around the world.   John Walsh definitely turned his familie’s personal tragedy into a better world.

I met John Walsh when he was a guest on the TV game show Pictionary that I was a writer on.  He was friendly and curteous and signed a photo that you see above.

Unfortunately, the accused murderer of Adam died in prison so the case can never be 100% proven against the man they say murdered the boy, but the evidence they do have, as well as several confessions, are enough for the Hollywood, Florida police department to definitively put the case to rest.

Although I don’t think John will ever rest from tracking down the people who prety in the innocent.

Technorati Tags: Adam Walsh, John Walsh, kidnapping, Johnny Gosch

I got the idea to finally start painting from two places.   First, I had been obsessing over the Bob Ross Master Art Set at hobby lobby for a while and the b) I saw that Colin Devroe (of Viddler) was blogging about his watercolor projects, most lately his owl painting.

That’s when it hit me.

I could blog about painting, even live-stream it.

So I bought over $100 in supplies and went to work.  I started the live stream, but forgot the audio.  So, you may have to wait a few minutes (about 3 minutes in) before the painting is even started.

Free TV : Ustream

So what did I learn from this process?  Several things.

1) Brush Cleaning Fluid is NOT paint thinner
2) To do the Bob Ross method you need at least two brushes of the same kind to even start
3) Oil paint smell takes me back to the old “paint by numbers” days
4) oil paint takes forever to dry
5) You have to watch the videos over and over to learn the right techniques
6) If you try to do too much cover-up, you will get a nice brown mud (trees on the left)
7) the wet-on-wet method is fun, but may not be for everyone Bob Ross really is an alien.  A nice alien, but an alien nonetheless
9) Painting is hard to do under any kind of time restraints… whether 1 hour or 10, you never have enough time
10) It really is fun!

im going to try the example painting one more time and then perhaps try something on my own… just some imaginary landscape.   I really like the Bob Ross style as used in wildlife too, so maybe I will try those someday.

What do you think?  Should I keep livestreaming these things?