All weekend I looked forward to this morning. Monday morning, the morning I expected to receive my new Apple Macbook Air notebook. Guess what? I received the notebook, removed it from its extremely fancy packaging and found myself starring at the notorious Gray loading screen. The circle loading animation keeps spinning and spinning.. while nothing is happening. Now I’m reinstalling leopard on a brand-new freaking air!

THANKS APPLE!

It seems as though many bloggers find sponsored postings and compensated insertions bad. I could understand a blog being pretty annoying if every other post was a sponsored article; but what if that person was just making some extra money? That is exactly what I plan on doing.

I’ve never been one to really get too big into the monetization of my personal website; party because I did not want to fill the site up with advertisements or any text-link-ads. However, over time, I have slowly realized that this is not so bad after all. I can still maintain my pretty little design template while placing a few ads here and there.

First, I have been extremely busy the past few weeks; obviously. I know I promised to be updating the site more and I have failed you. However, I do have some interesting stories to explain. Last week, my good friend Scott decided to grace Tulsa with his presence, but it was short lived when he left early this morning to return to San Diego. Scott joined the marines a few months back and has been busy with his training, so seeing him has not been an option. During the week, Scott Nick, various other friends and myself got together for lunch, dinner and the occasional drunken stupor. I offered up my driving abilities to be the designated driver on more than one occasion — it felt extremely wonderful to know my friends were safe getting from bar to bar.

Usually, I am the first to jump in line at the bar and drink myself stupid. But over the past few weeks I have found myself drinking less and less; honestly finding the bar scene unappealing in many ways.

I have been pretty busy trying to stay on top of my studies as well. I forgot how much time is spent studying, writing papers, and performing medial home work assignments. I have to maintain a specific level of participation on the University’s distance learning platform as well; which I find a bit annoying. I am forced to have unintelligent conversations with people that act as though they cannot type a single statement without messing up. Most of the users seem to forget that our language even consists of spelling, punctuation, grammar and dictation. Its slightly annoying — honestly its a freaking mess. It more than pisses me off! I find myself wanting to throw empty coca-cola zero cans at my monitor while shouting hostile lyrics from a Disturbed album.

As a blog owner, I take a great deal of interest in monetization, especially advertising mediums such as: text ads, reviews and banners. However, I have just begun to receive a great deal of interest amongst other web property owners in advertising on my website, privately. During this time, I have paid close attention, more than usual, to the requests of these potential advertisers and always ask the question, “Why me?”

Usually, I get an educated and wonderfully worded response back to my question, these inquiries I take seriously. However, lately I have received an increasing number of fake advertisers inquiries. Now, I emphasize fake, because I don’t honestly know if these potential advertisers are pulling my leg or just magically and coincidentally disappearing from the face of the earth.

In the past week I have received three similar email messages. Each correspondence relates to my website because, each author says, “I have a great deal of interest in your website.” Well that is great, interest in my website, thanks! But why? They continue on to explain to me that they would like to pay for private text-link-ads on specific pages of website, however for this small amount of money I must agree that the links stay permanently.

Problems with this?

Why would anyone in their right freaking mind agree to permanent text-link-ads, without seeing the product, service or link prior to agreeing? Not only this, but who the hell would want a link to be permanent in the first place. Each of these individuals offered me sub $1000.00 for anywhere from 4 to 9 statements, each statement containing an average of 3 links!

I was a little in shock at first, now completely outraged because all three jumped ship when I asked to see the link statements prior to approval. Honestly, I was entertaining the idea, however, knowing I would never follow through with their agenda, not for that little of money.

Consider this post a mere vent, a disposal of my thoughts towards the topic of these so-called text-link-ads. However, I believe they’re a scam.. anyone else have any experience with them?

That’s right, today is the day! I’ve kept this baby under the hat for quite some time and today I am finally launching! I will be giving individuals rides to anywhere they want to visit in North America! I even pay for half the gas! You can find all the details and information over on the summerrideshare.com website. I have a live video streaming to the internet from the vehicle as well as GPS tracking. Doesn’t get much better eh?

Anyways, tell everyone you know, show some support and link love. I appreciate everyone’s enthusiasm and efforts to help my project be a success!

Go to Summer Ride Share’s Website!!

My site will be “updateless” for the next month..

First, I just read an article, Sponsored themes over at Weblog Tools Collection’s Blog and I found it very entertaining. I’ve noticed an increasing number of theme sponsors amongst the sitepoint marketplace crowd over the previous year as well. Overall, I find the idea of sponsoring a theme pretty interesting. However, put into perspective, make sure your sponsorship offer is worthy of the theme itself.

Tel Aviv, a city along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea becomes home for the first Hooters restaurant in the holy land of Israel. Reuters reported yesterday that Ofer Ahiraz owns the Hooters that will open this summer and torment the people of Tel Aviv.

As if we haven’t tormented the middle-east enough already, we’re going to place a Hooters there. Personally, I’m not a fan of hooters, because Nick and I found a chicken talon in our wings a few years back; haven’t been there since. For a Hooters to open in Israel is just.. wrong!

This service has been discussed heavily across the blogosphere for nearly too long. In fact, my good friend David signed up for an account, which means I am only two steps behind him. First, all I have to do is decide to get an account and second, actually sign up. However, as the title mentions, my mother did not raise no twitter, user! (Get it like quitter? I’m done.)

Every day I come into contact with a new blog or blogger. It is wonderful to see new websites and read the content that they hold, however, it is definitely annoying to be bombarded with advertisements and images. That is just a minor outline of things about blogs that annoy me. There are probably a hundred different situations I’ve come across where I’m saying to myself, “are you f-ing serious?” But I compiled a list of just a few things that really urk me.

1. Link love, it makes sense
2. Make your content accessible
3. Wow, thats alot of ads
4. Echos are getting old
5. Admins, stop being lazy
6. I know who I am
7. Stop filling forms out for me
8. Direct linking is stealing
9. Snap f$cking sucks!
10. So many images, dumb.

Yesterday evening I attended a Partylite, Tealight Candle Party. Let me tell you, I was definitely not capable of just chilling with my mouth closed and my wallet wide open. Essentially, I believe that everyone who attends these parties have identical thoughts running through their heads. Let me share my take..

More history..

First, I attended this party with Kimberly, who was invited by one of my relatives. She asked me to come along; as I did gladly. If nothing else, I could keep her company and try and protect her from the swarm of consultants that potentially could attack her and steal her money! During our drive to the location this party was going down at, I expressed my opinion on direct selling companies and consultants.