Feel Reality

Lil Wayne The Carter III

I purchased Lil Wayne’s much anticipated “The Carter III” album on it’s release date, Tuesday June 10th.  The album seems a bit thrown together which is probably a result of the leak and multiple delays of the release date. The tracks seem a bit disjointed and the message is at times unclear, but I guess that is part of Lil Wayne’s persona.  Outside of the well played radio hits, “A Milli” and “Lollipop” the album is a mix of quality producers and featured artists, which you would expect from the President of Ca$h Money Records. 

Lil Wayne goes a little beyond his usual surreal tone and borders on the edge of insanity. The “Shoot Me Down” record brings out Lil Wayne’s Jekyll and Hyde side; as he sheds light onto the recent self inflicted gun shot wound that had little press coverage outside of the online world.  He pleads for the man in the mirror to let him live to enjoy the high that his life is on.  This track probably wont see much mainstream radio play, but I think it has merit to be the best track on the CD. It is reminiscent of T.I. vs T.I.P. without the commercial undertone, it’s raw, unpredictable and real.

MTV online expected Lil Wayne’s the Carter III to break the 1 million record sales mark in the first week, besting Kanye’s record release of “Graduation”. The radio hits will keep coming and the album sales will certainly go multi platinum despite (or perhaps due in part to) “the leak”. 

Lil Wayne is smart enough to make this the last of this golden ticket “Carter Albums” (you cant best the trilogy).  Lil Wayne also eludes the fact that this could be his retirement tying “Mr. Carter”, which ironically features Jay-Z to “Dr. Carter” in which he plays the role of a mentor, his obvious position as the president of Ca$h Money Records.

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The Elusive G9 and the Impending S6 IS

I have had my heart set on the Canon G9 for quite some time now, but I don’t want to pay full retail ($499.99) at a chain store like Best Buy just to have it.  I have seen it as low as $429.00 (through Dell) and Amazon sold it for quite a while at $449.00.  I never pulled the trigger when I had the chance, but now I don’t regret it. 

I was about to succumb to the fact that I was going to have to pay full price for an electronic device, when I picked up the camera at Best Buy and looked through the view finder.  I always research gadgets to the point of exhaustion before I go out and buy them.  The tools of my trade (and I use that term loosely) are important to me and I’m very picky.  I thought the G9 was the best consumer / prosumer point and shoot camera out there until I actually held it in my hands. I had read on the internet that when you are zoomed out, the viewfinder was obstructed by the lens, but it wasn’t until I looked through it myself that I saw what a pain it was. Ridiculous! I realize the LCD screen is real time and that my old camera didn’t even have a view finder, but I wanted something half way between a dSLR and a typical point and shoot, and the G9 didn’t fulfill this promise.

I love Canon’s picture quality, but the build quality of their consumer and prosumer cameras has never seemed to reach that of a Nikon or Sony.  For example the 30D, 5D and 1D are all beautiful, but the rebel pails in comparison, it’s cheap, plasticy and poorly planned.

So now I guess I’m looking forward to the S6 IS. Hopefully Canon will give us (read me) a solid design in this model with image quality that is just as good if not better than it’s predecessor. 

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Making Money Online Isn’t Easy

First off, let me state that I still catch myself running from one buzz to the next trying to squeeze a profit out of the latest trend.  I don’t consume myself with this and I often give it a half assed effort, but I figure most things are worth a try.  I’m not telling you that you should abandon hope or give up on your quest to internet riches; I’m simply telling you the road will be harder than you initially anticipated.  Everyone wants to sell you on the idea that you can make money fast on the internet and that for a small initial investment you can turn huge profits. I will spare you the research and tell you that most of these clowns haven’t made a dime themselves, and the cash they do mint, comes from suckers looking for a quick fix. It’s like the old school classified ad trick, “Learn how to make money placing classified ads, send $10 to...” There are people out there doing it right and they are converting but it takes time, effort and (yikes) money to make it work. 

I guess you could say I took a fast track approach to making money online myself. I didn’t have a degree in Computer Science or Business before I started churning out websites. I learned HTML early on (circa 1993) and used that knowledge to give myself a voice.  It was a hobby for a long time before it became a profitable hobby.There are a lot of code monkeys writing HTML and spamming the interwebs with content, but 99.9% of all that content is useless. It literally took me a decade to determine that I wanted to pursue a career in this field.

I am not saying it will take you ten years to build your base and get started. In fact, I never really took it seriously, or invested much time until about five years ago… Consider the time line; we experienced a highly publicized boom and bust period where it always seemed too late or too risky to jump in. For a while the future looked dismal and the resiliency of the internet was questionable.

Over the past 5 years I have read countless marketing, online marketing, web development and coding books.  I have two book cases full of them. Sure, I read fiction now and then to calm the buzz, but in the interim I burned through more than the average college student’s tuition in web and business related nonfiction. I took classes to learn as I went along, I got the certifications that I thought were necessary, and I put the blood, sweat and tears into creating a portfolio of sites that were built upon the principles that I was establishing.  You will never have all of the information that you wished you had before you jump in, you have to have a good starting point and then learn as you go.

The bottom line is that it will take hard work to be successful online. In fact, the online world is so highly competitive that it will probably take more effort to churn a profit or make a living in this space then it does IRL (in real life). You have to learn how to differentiate whats real from what’s fake and investigate your sources. For everyone mentor there are a hundred cheap suit wearing, smiley faced ripoffs trying to extract cash from your pocket.  Some of those richie rich types do fake it until they make it, but you’re not going to learn anything from their e-book. 

If you want to make money online you need to build a strategy with a strong foundation, just as you do in any other venture. Again, the strategy doesn’t have to be fool proof, throw it out there and let people shoot holes.  Give it a shot and learn from your mistakes. There are always going to be one hit wonders and having one isn’t a bad place to start. Just don’t spend all your time looking for them.  Invest the time effort and money into building a solid foundation and you should succeed.

And for the record… I did eventually parlay those classes into a degree. I do believe your paper trail establishes credibility, but I haven’t forgotten that the ultimate paper trail in business is green. 

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It’s finally starting to hit home

You can’t wait around for the perfect time to make something happen.  I’ve always had this debilitating fear of trying new things, because I didn’t feel like I had all of my ducks in a row before I jumped. For the longest time I’ve felt that financial freedom is the answer to all of my problems. If I had the money to make things happen, they would. If I had a cushion to fall back on, I wouldn’t have to fear the jump.

My mind is constantly spinning w/ new ideas. I take action on the ones that I feel are the most compelling, but I’m always abandoning concepts in search of the next great thing. I guess this is closely related to idealistic concept of money as well, the end goal is never in sight. I’m always diverging, taking the fork in the road, because the grass is always greener. 

I think that is why I started this blog and never updated it (until now).  I didn’t like the design, but I didn’t want to put money into a hobby without a monetization plan. I didn’t want to cheapen my message by plastering banner ads all over the place just to make a buck or two.  If you are shoemoney or johnchow and your ads are bringing in $25-35k a month for you, then you should keep them.  But if you’re just some random dude posting messages on shoemoney and johnchow to bring attention to your low traffic adsense pit, you just don’t get it and you look like a cheap whore. A copy of a copy of a copy isn’t going to bring the same return that the original did. Do something original.  I don’t want to learn how to make money online from a guy making $3.00 a week in adsense revenue. I guess that is a topic in itself.

Now, for the first time, the unfinished pieces of my “big idea” are starting to take shape.  I guess you could say I have a loosely formed strategy. I don’t have a particular end goal in mind. But, I do have a better concept of the direction that I want to take things in. All of the disjointed ideas and misguided adventures are slowly molding into an idea that I can stand behind. Whether that idea later becomes a book, a business or just a new philosophy, I’m not sure. What I do know is; I have finally found something(s) to believe in.

I’m slowly becoming more comfortable w/ the idea that everything that I generate doesn’t have to be in final draft form. I don’t need to refine all of the edges before I let others in on my concepts. There are millions of people out there with less experience, less know how and less business intelligence making things happen, because they don’t know any better. Sometimes knowing what you are up against, can be a bad thing.

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The Reality of The Internet

The virtual world lives in a vacuum of dreams and potential that facilitate our real world view. On the web we are all authors, movie producers, photographers and ad execs thriving in obscurity, masquerading professionalism.  By now we have all “drank the koolaid” we know the lingo, we are dialed in.  A nation of circle backers, pencil inners and water cooler warriors; plopped down on our sofas, laptop in hand, desperately trying to escape the monotony. 

Some of us have made it big. We have discovered that little sliver of golden something, inside something, that makes us all tick. Why we congregate, what we assign value to, why we linger. Big things come and go quickly on the internet, they replicate, blowup and wash away.  We all try to be that voice, after the voice has spoken.  We carry the words of the great and dilute them until they no longer have that special ring to them, then we move on.  It seems so pale, so desolate, so… Real?  The social net; magnified, juiced up and flowing faster than we can observe.  You need to take a step back, look at the outside perspective. View the situation as a whole… What got us here? What is working.  How do I make it happen?  How do we avoid the crash? 

We now embark on a journey to taste the virtual and feel that it is in fact real.  This blog is about my view of the new world. The malleable online universe that all of us shape and mold as our own.

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