Okay, here it is the tenth of the month, and I’ve only had four substantive posts this month and a couple of those are stretching to be counted among the four.

And here it is another day where I’d like to do a substantive post, but I’m drawing a blank. So, how about we revel in how people find this blog, whose subtitle I’m thinking of changing from “Believe. Act. Achieve!” to “Creative Insanity.”

Anyway, here are some of the keywords people used to find this blog in March…

facebook login - I’m thinking you’ll find it on Facebook…

creepy - I know you are but what am I?

my facebook login - May they moved it to Twitter…

teenagers nude - Hopefully, they’re just looking for nude 18 and 19 year olds.

women baking nude - They need to clarify whether they are looking for nude women baking food or nude women being baked, because there are websites for both of those, sadly.

woman hot - See, this one might be looking for one of those women being baked. Either that or this is a caveman thing. Fire bad. Woman catch on fire. Woman hot!

break filter then show nake women - Really not sure what they are looking for here. Did they break their aquarium filter then show it to naked women?

hollydale hospital - Don’t know why they don’t just ask Speedy…

where’s my facebook login - It wasn’t on Twitter? Try MySpace…

how do aphids feel when they are stroked by ants - They feel dirty, degraded and cheap.

fate nude - Fate nude? Nude fate? Eh? You know, maybe they think that everyone’s fate is to end up nude, but I’m pretty sure your skin will break down and decompose long before your clothes will. Unless you’re buried in some kind of eco-friendly clothing made of fibers that decompose naturally. Then again, if you’re going to go that far, maybe you ought to just have your naked body tossed in a hole or something. Plant a tree and it can grow from the nutrients in your body. You know there was a story once of two lovers who were buried next to each other and the trees roots made their way through their bodies and sort of formed the shape of their bodies. Don’t know if that was a true story. I think they claimed it was but you never know with these things. If it is true, could you say they had a nude fate? I’m assuming the tree’s roots didn’t make clothes. I don’t know. It was interesting anyway.

websites using similar illustration to j peterman - “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Alice.

skinny nude women - I’m guessing these searchers were otherwise finding too many nude women whose body shapes weren’t to their liking. I guess you have to be specific for your porn searches. Some people just don’t want any porn, evidently.

naked dirty women - I’m wondering how they’re defining “dirty”? Dirty as in “wild and crazy” or dirty as in covered with dirt? And, if the women are caked in mud, can they really be considered naked?

what are some dcr for your retro? - Um, what?

naked tiny girl - Apparently, “skinny” isn’t enough for some people. They want their naked women tiny. Oh, in this case they want a “girl.” Well, let’s hope they are looking for a naked tiny girl who is at least 18 years old.

old chalk holder - You see, not everyone that uses Google is a perv.

vintage dennison miniature bookshelf - Yeah, vintage rules!

grandma snooker - Wow. Apparently Grandma Snooker is pretty popular. #1 in Google!

weird things people search on google - Well, you’ve just seen a list of ‘em…

what wrong with my sentence - It needs a verb. Or, as you would say it: It a verb.

normal nude women - You see, you just can’t keep these porn searchers happy. Nude women just aren’t enough for them. They might be skinny or dirty or tiny or breaking filters and some people just don’t want to look at that stuff. They just want the normal nude women.

So, there you go. Maybe in a future post, we’ll look at what weird keywords people used to stumble across this blog this month.

The first thing here is that you need to be able to distinguish between two specific types of customers.

The first is the one that is specific about what he (or she) wants because he has envisioned something and that’s what he wants. He doesn’t want to listen to other ideas. He doesn’t want variation. He doesn’t want input. It doesn’t matter if his idea is bad, he wants what he wants and will be upset if you stray from that, even if it is presented as an alternative.

The second is the type that is specific what he (or she) wants because he couldn’t think of anything better or was selecting an option that was “good enough” as opposed to spending time or money trying to come up with something better.

Mind you, these are not the only types of customers, but these are the two that are applicable to this method.

With the first type of customer, there is really nothing you can do except to do things exactly as he wishes. The second type of customer is the one where you have an opportunity.

Here’s an example…

A recent customer wanted a certain product. He had sketched out what he wanted and it was a very basic thing. It was something that was good enough to do what he wanted to do.

So, I set it up that way. It looked fine. It looked professional. Still, it was very basic. But, I had another idea. So, I also set up my idea. In my opinion, I thought what I came up with looked better. But, it would cost 39% more to produce than the customer’s original request.

After both were set up, the customer was given a side by side comparison. The price for both options was also displayed. His eyes gravitated to my idea.

And, that’s what he went with. For him, the extra 39% was well worth it.

Note that both the customer’s request and my idea were implemented and shown to him. It was not a situation where the customer’s request was ignored and I went ahead and did what I thought would be best. No, here the customer received exactly what he requested plus an alternative, giving him the option to decide for himself which was the better of the two.

The thing is that sometimes people will ask for things, and ask for them to be done a certain way, but only because that was the only idea they had. Sometimes, they will ask for your creative input; other times they won’t, simply because they think their concept is “good enough” or because they think something else would be too expensive or take too long.

But, by giving them options, and not necessarily pushing them towards one but rather letting them see its value for itself, you can increase the value of the sale. They get something better than they original had in mind, and you earn more money than you would have if you had strictly implemented the customer’s original request.

So, it’s a win-win for both and that’s the best type of business deal.

Okay, time to get your opinions ready…

Need some help picking out a domain name to use for a site that hopefully some of you will be using.

Here are the choices:

A) mysitename.com

B) sitename.net

No, I’m not giving you the sitename just yet. I already have that picked out. And, since it is the same in both options, it’s not highly relevant to the poll.

Anyway, which would you find easier to remember and use? Mind you, you may bookmark it, but what happens when you need to type in the domain name? Are you more likely to remember A or B?

Thanks!

Seriously. Anything? Especially online?

I’ve seen comments lately (and long before lately too) from people that complain about things that really don’t have the slightest bit of anything to do with them. I’m not talking about any place specifically; I’m talking about a number of sites I visit online.

It’s like if I painted a room in my house green. It’s one thing to say that you prefer blue or that you would have painted it white with green accents. There’s no real issue if you want to express your opinion.

It’s if you want to complain, and bitterly complain, that I painted a room green because you think I should have painted it ochre. Or to complain that I painted the room at all because I should get new carpeting. Or whatever.

Especially if you’ve never been to my house, you haven’t loaned me money for the paint or paint brush and you’ve really had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with my house, my room or my painting of the room green.

It’s like there are people that live to complain about things.

The real problem is that this sort of attitude permeates our society. And the complainers are often the loudest voices while they are also often the most irrational. And then, if you complain about the complainers, you’re labeled no better than them.

Except the difference is that while their gripe was illegitimate because what you did had nothing to do with them, your gripe is perfectly legitimate because their complaining may be hurting you. But, now you’re the bad guy.

And that’s because the chronic complainers get the attention. They’ll write letters. They’ll annoy people. Then there will be people that will step up and lend legitimacy to the complainers by arguing that, though some of them may be extreme, it’s perfectly reasonable to argue that painting a room in ochre is a better choice than green because it brightens the place up better.

And that makes people happier, which makes them more productive, which makes things better for society.

And, studies released by the paint companies that sell ochre paint confirm those findings.

And then the politicians decide that no one should paint their rooms green and that they should be painted ochre.

And then soon all of us are painting our rooms ochre because of a few complainers that had nothing better to do than to complain about something that didn’t affect them at all to begin with.

Remember this post from quite a while back? “Something Few People Have Ever Seen”

Of course you don’t because each time I’ve mentioned it since, I get met with virtual blank stares. And, by “virtual blank stares” I mean, of course, a complete lack of comments. Anyway, your comments on that post were on this post.

As you may recall, I spent a good part of last year working on my eBook.

At some point after that, I started work on relaunching another one of my websites. I did a partial relaunch of the site at the beginning of last month. But, I am still continuing work on some of the features.

What I did is started to recycle some of my coding from the first post referenced above. As you may recall, that was a forum system, so I decided to borrow some of that code in order to create a better commenting system on the relaunched site. I tried opening it to comments a few years back, but it quickly became so full of spam I just tossed the whole comment system. Now, however, I will have a better commenting system that will require users to actually join as members of the site before they can leave a comment. Registrations will be manually done, so that should weed out a lot of spammers. Plus, I plan to have some other spam-thwarting mechanisms in place.

At any rate, I have been thinking of this new commenting schema as a “lite” version of that forum system I had started to build so long ago.

In the meantime, however, I started a new website in a completely different area, using some open source software. Well, that site died a painful death after a couple weeks. Somehow, it is completely messed up. There is a directory where you put any plugins for the system. Well, last week I think it was, the thing went down after I was modifying the theme. The end result is that, somehow, putting anything in the plugins directory results in the site not working at all. And, without plugins, the system is largely useless because the majority of the functionality you want is in the plugins.

So, I re-uploaded files, replacing basically everything on there, all to no avail. The conclusion I reached is that I would have to wipe the whole thing out and start anew. Which would be doable, except that it leaves me wondering how long before the new install would be toast, you know? It’s not like I was messing with the database when the thing went down. I was modifying CSS and changing some administrative settings. My feeling is that if the software is that flaky, I cannot rely on it for anything.

So, then I got to thinking, why don’t I just use my own stuff? Finish it up and use it instead of relying on someone else’s “solution”? Plus, I can code into it the features that I want and, since I am already (mostly) familiar with the code, it’s easier for me to modify my own stuff than meddle around with open source software and try to figure it out.

And that is what I have been working on. Plus, I’ve been adding features that I didn’t have way back when in order to bring it more into the modern age. On top of that, I’ve got some level of flexibility in the presentation of certain things so that you, as a user, will be better able to view things the way you want to view them. The version I am working on will have that only in a few key areas, but I may expand upon that in the future.

Right now, the focus is on finishing the basic functionality so that the “lite” version can be released on the site I’ve mentioned for use as a commenting solution. After that, I have two new sites in mind that would use a more full-featured version.

Anyway, I’ve got a couple things to do yet before calling it a day, so I better get to them.

Well, Google (again) no longer thinks highly of my blog.

In the past year, my PageRank has gone something like this:

PR3 -> PR2 -> PR0 -> PR2 -> PR0

By the way, why aren’t you using Bing?

Anyway, so I stand at 0 again.

In spite of this, traffic has been on the increase. December 2009 had a big jump in traffic over December 2008. January was down by a small amount and February was down by an even smaller amount. Then, March had a big surge in traffic over last year! So far, April’s daily traffic is on par with March and is an increase over last April.

I guess maybe Google doesn’t appreciate dancing monkeys, but people do!

And people matter more than Google.

Like most people, I hate spam. Most of it goes straight in the virtual junk bin. I do, however, skim through them to keep tabs on what kind of spam messages are making the rounds.

I’ll sometimes see people on forums warning about some “new” spam scams going around, and they’ll be things I recognize as having gone around before. They’re just “new” to some people. Or, there may be a slightly new spin on things. Still, if you do keep a skimming eye on these things, you can recognize spams and scams pretty easily.

At any rate, I received a spam just minutes ago. The subject was odd. It said “We are not familiar with you.” Okay, so if you are not familiar with me, why are you writing to me? Ordinarily, that would be enough to junk it. But, I don’t recall seeing such a subject line before, so I decided to see what it was they were trying to sell.

The body of the message has all the tell-tale signs of someone for whom English is a second language. In this case, however, that’s okay. The sender is purporting to be a single Russian woman looking for a husband. Lots of times, you’ll see something purportedly coming from a well-known company but with a message so poorly worded that it’s obvious (or should be) that the real company would never send out a message like that. But, in this particular case, it works. You would be more suspicious if “she” had written the message in perfect English.

One thing that this message does not do is claim that “she” found you through your online dating profile. If you don’t have any online dating profiles, you immediately recognize that as spam. Other variations are saying that “she” found you online through your web site or social networking site. This particular message gives no indication as to how “she” stumbled upon your address. And, if you are married, you would certainly know that your online profiles, especially on social networking sites, probably indicate that (otherwise, you may have some ’splaining to do to your spouse), so you can immediately recognize it as spam.

However, not mentioning how “she” found you and yet still saying that you sound like a “good man” is another cause for suspicion. How would “she” know anything about you? Where would she have found out? Why not mention where? The reason, of course, is because it is a bulk message sent to thousand if not hundreds of thousands of people. But, on an individual basis, when looking at the message, that should throw up some red flags.

Plus, if you are purporting to be a single Russian woman looking for a husband, you should perhaps make sure that the sender address uses a feminine rather than masculine name. In this particular case, the name could go either way. But, then the name “she” uses in the body of the eMail should match the sender name. The fact that the sender name and the name mentioned in the body of the message and the contact eMail “she” provided do not match one another is another huge clue that what you’ve received is spam.

Additionally, if you are purporting to be a single Russian woman looking for a husband, and you include a photo in your message, you should probably make sure that there is nothing resembling a wedding ring on the ring finger of your left hand.

If you’re not familiar with this type of spam, you may be wondering what the purpose is. Maybe you’re thinking “she” doesn’t know any better and just resorted to sending out a large number of messages to find the right guy.

Probably not.

From what I have read, the typical scam is that “she” will write back and forth with you, gaining your trust and trying to get you to fall in love with her and want to be with her and such. Sometimes, the person on the other end is a guy; sometimes, it may be a woman, possibly hired to do this “work.” Your potential “bride” is probably stringing along a few other guys along with you.

The objective is to get you to send money. “She” may need money for her mother’s operation. Or, maybe she’s struggling to pay rent. Maybe she needs money for an airplane ticket to come visit you. But, then her mother’s condition acts up, and she needs to stay with her, and can you send some more money so she can stay with her mother at the hospital and not go to work? And so on.

Until you run out of money (or come to your senses and figure out what’s going on) and then your little love affair will come to an abrupt end.

So, that’s why you need to be careful out there, especially when contacted by single Russian women with masculine names wearing wedding rings.

Look at all the butterflies!

Okay, so these are fake, but I did see a real one outside yesterday.

So, that means spring is in swing and summer is right around the corner!

Happy Warm Weather Days!

Oh, and you can read more about butterflies in “The Birth of the Butterflies.”

Oops, four minutes to write this post.

Four minutes to write it.

Four minutes to fit this in.

Four minutes to make it to the blog today.

Four minutes until Friday’s done.

Four minutes to slip this through, or my chances of doing 1000 daily posts in a row will have to start anew.

Three minutes to finish this.

Only three minutes to go.

I’d be able to type more out if I didn’t keep making typos because I’m trying to do this fast and correcting as I go.

Two minutes to go.

Better hit “Publish” now… NOW!

Sit down in a comfortable chair, because this will be the most insightful, intriguing and interesting blog post you have ever read on this blog or any other.

Ready?

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So, there you have it. Have a great April 1st, a.k.a, April Fool’s Day.