Archives for September 2005

Boisea trivittatis A.K.A Arch-Enemy

September 29, 2005 by

Boisea trivittatis, otherwise known as the insect scourge of my life. You probably know them as Box Elder Bugs.
BoxElders

Every spring and fall, these sorry S.O.B’s congregate on the south side of my house. I can’t walk outta the damn door on that side without 5 or 6 of the bastards lighting upon me. And they weasel their way into the house where you find them crawling all over the dishes and the furniture. Appearantly, they are fairly harmless since the larger of my dogs seems to eat about 2 a day when they are in season. Which seems to last about 2 months after it warms up in the spring and about 2 months when it starts to cool off in the fall.

Every day, at lunch and after work, I spend 15 minutes outside with my trusty spray bottle loaded with a squirt or so of dish soap and water and I spray the bastards where they lie. It’s funny actually, some people spend good money on pesticides to kill them. I buy a bottle of the cheapest dish soap Walmart has and spray em down. The stuff is nearly instant too. The bugs stop moving in less than 60 seconds then fall to the ground dead.

Read more on the Boisea Trivittatis and here.

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ET Land Here

September 28, 2005 by

LAJAS, Puerto Rico has a little bit of construction to do. The Mayor of this sleepy little town has agreed with a plan to build a landing strip for Extraterrestrials.

At this point I have to interject to ask: Don’t UFO’s hover? Yes? Then why do they need a landing strip? Why not a heliport like landing pad?

Reynaldo Rios, a local elementary school teacher who says he’s been communicating with alien visitors

This man teaches children in Puerto Rico?

Rios, a 39-year-old with a goatee and a shock of dark hair, won’t be ignored. With the blessing of a local government desperate for tourist dollars, he’s dedicated himself to building the UFO landing strip.

“I can’t say exactly when they will come, but I know it will happen,” Rios said. “I want to keep believing in my dreams.”

Again, This man teaches children in Puerto Rico?

The landing strip would be 80-feet (24-meters) long and have pyramids as control towers because aliens are attracted to the shape.

How bout a pyramid with a flat helipad on top? I still can’t get over the fact that this man teaches children.

The school teacher says he first encountered aliens at 13. He says white lights burst into his bedroom, entered his body and cured him of a back injury he had received during a basketball game.

Now it all makes sense… 🙂

Read the rest of this story.

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Ebay Adventures vol.3

September 28, 2005 by

So, many several months have passed since we began selling off all of my in-laws stuff and we still get surprises. A pair of old breyer horses sells within 15 minutes of being listed.

We have had to slow down on the garage sales as the weather is beginning to turn a little cold way up here, and the end of summer has been so damn busy for the both of us. We did find a few good items the other day though. My wife seems to have taken a liking to the one, so we’ll see if we sell it or not. If we don’t I think it would only be the second item that we have bought from a garage sale all year and not resold on Ebay. The first was a gas grill for $5, the second is a vintage Nintendo which of course had to come with her favorite game on it. Of course, the funny thing is that it came with several other games which I should be able to sell and recoup the price of the system at the very least, so I don’t have all that hard of a time keeping it.

We have decided that we are going to try and hit a few auctions this winter to see if the same potential exists there as it does at garage sales. I think that the competition for items may end up proving the profit margin too light, but you never know, so try it we will.

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Starting a business vol 4

September 27, 2005 by

In volume 3 we talked a little about building the website and finding a payment service. Lets take a look at getting a little publicity for the service and our first subscriber.

Seeing as none of the four partners had any experience with marketing whatsoever, the next bit was probably the hardest. It also remains the hardest part, but we’re learning as we go. As I have stated in one of the previous volumes, our budget has remained tight from the very beginning so it was of utmost importance to have whatever marketing course we took cost a minimal amount. Of course the first thing we started looking for is a way to publicise the company for free.

There are a few free news sites that can be posted to, so we posted a news release of sorts to those, and we began a viral marketing scheme. Anyone who has ever created a successful marketing plan will tell you that it does no good to spend a bunch of money if nobody knows your name afterwards. Of utmost importance is that you name is seen and recognized. We took care of the seen part as best we could with what we had. Every signature for email or forum that any of us have has the URL for distroofthemonth in it. Everytime we could suggest DOTM without spamming, we did. And in the end, we had moderate success with it.

Much like any other site like ours, we began looking into ways for the site to make more money for us to help us with early expenses. We added Adsense from Google. If you don’t know what that is, Google it. 🙂 We also started a Adwords campaign through Google shortly after and the Adsense seems to pay for the Adwords at this point. Of course with more traffic to our site, more clicks on the ads and more Adwords ads we can buy. It becomes cyclical. A self-sustaining, if inefficient, marketing campaign.

At this point we were several months into the project and had been live for about one. All four of us were beginning to wonder if we were going to become a massive failure. We had no problem generating hits for our site, however, we seemed to be having a problem parting those visitors from their money. It turns out we shouldn’t have worried, because within two months of going live we had our first subscriber and we haven’t looked back since(well, maybe a little).

At this point in this series, you have caught up with us. We are currently planning our first mailing to our subscribers on October 1st, 2005. The product is ordered, mailing is taking care of, and at the moment we’re just tying up the loose ends. When we’ve completed the first mailing, I’ll post something for vol 5.

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