Patrick Says

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you know I’ve tried to monetize this baby numerous times. All these attempts have met with zero to mild success, at best. Some of them have been downright useless.

One of the first companies I worked with was PayPerPost. The early system they employed had some pros and cons. The system paid fairly well, but getting the assignments was difficult, especially once the spammers started signing up in droves. The assignment system was based on, well, luck. Imagine a field with 50,000 people all standing in it. Every hour, someone climbs a ladder and drops a $5 bill into the crowd at a different location. Everyone scrambles madly for the money.

That was pretty much it.

Eventually, I left and moved on to other things like AdSense, Amazon affiliate programs, et cetera. None of those panned out well at all. I have found some success with another paid blogging company that nets a decent amount, but not enough to be substantial.

Recently, however, PayPerPost has unveiled a new model that is in the alpha stages, appropriately titled PayPerPost v4.0. It’s a system where you place your blog in their system and advertisers seek you out and make offers. No tracking cookies, no analytics program requirements…just an even exchange of advertising and payment.

I’ve signed up, and if you’re interested, you can go to their blog and sign up to get an alpha code as well. I think it may be worth getting onboard for. Certainly, it can’t hurt since you really don’t have to do anything until you get an actual offer.

The one thing I do dig about this program is that disclosure is important. For example, PayperPost is compensating me for this post. Disclosure is important because without it, your honesty can become cloudy.

So, there you go…

Have I mentioned how much I hate this house?

Last night, it rained. Around our house, there are side beds constructed with landscaping timbers. They predate our arrival to this house and I’m guessing they are very old. One side has been having ‘issues’. It’s on the radar to get fixed this spring, but apparently, it wasn’t happy with the schedule and decided to collapse last night.

Help. Seriously…I need some friggin’ help. The electric company was out here a month ago putting something in the ground down our street. They tore up everyone’s yards and then put crappy grass seed where the best part of my yard (with the zoysia grass) was. Now there’s a sinkhole.

I hate this. I am ‘that house’ on the block who doesn’t keep up their yard like everyone else. It’s not that I don’t care. I just don’t have the time like some of the yard spaz neighbors around here do.

I hate this house. If you have any idea how to level out a yard, pretty please with sugar on top, help me out here.

Today’s post title comes from the Blue Oyster Cult hit of the same name. Sadly, this song has lost a tiny bit of its power because of the SNL skit. It’s a great skit, but I hear that damn cowbell every single time now.

Today was Skippy’s fifth birthday party. It was a good time for everyone. He got some great toys and he loves to play with other kids. I will say they just don’t make toys like they used to. The General Grievous gun stopped working.

Six. Hours. After. Opening. Wow.

So, not only does it not work, but the paint on it is probably poisonous. Toy makers should just package live scorpions with the toys. It’d be a quicker death than the eventful lead poisoning they’ll get someday.

Originally, I was a Facebook hater. I thought it was very elitist and everyone there was a snob. I was probably right, but then they let everybody in and like the sheep I am, I followed.

So, I’ve been digging it. Facebook is like crack. You get sucked in and before you know it, you’re selling your VCR to get more ‘Lunch Money’ to feed the starving kids.

But beyond the games and activities, Facebook creates this strange salad of people for you. A couple weeks back, I was stumbling around my Facebook friend’s friends looking for people I know. This must not be uncommon because you can scan the friends of someone you aren’t even ‘friends’ with.

Anyway, one of my fellow Guild members had a friend who bore a striking resemblance and the same first name as my grade school crush. Lo and behold, it was her. It literally blew my mind.

It took me back to grade school. I was so head over heels in love with this girl. Bear in mind, I was like thirteen, so really I had no idea what love actually was. But I was smitten back in the day.

She was my square dance partner. To this day, I have NO EARTHLY IDEA why the Saint Louis Public Schools made us square dance. I really hope they still do it. Maybe it humbles the kids. Who knows.

Anyway, so we started a dialogue. So, I’ve got this childhood friend. Then you add in the high school friends. Really, these are the people you ‘did time’ with through those rocky, formative teen years. And they’re in the salad.

Then you add in your regular, in-the-now friends. You throw in some co-workers. Some people from assignments you had around the world. Your current family members. And you get this weird salad of people from like, every part of your life, and they are all watching you now. It’s like living through your retrospective.

It blows my mind.

So, this one time, at an event for work, someone left a portable CD player and headphones behind. We cleaned up and took the player back to the office to see if whoever had lost might call back the next week to get it.

In the player was a Nickelback CD. I thought I’d check to make sure the player actually worked. I pressed play and listened, but it just kept playing the same track over and over and over…but then I remembered that every Nickelback track sounds exactly the same.