I received a call earlier this week from a Best Buy automated phone system informing me that I’ll be receiving a $50 gift card due to my purchase of the now-dead HD-DVD player.

I purchased the Xbox 360 external HD-DVD player the day it came out from one of my local Best Buy stores. I rarely watched movies on it (I’m more of a fan of watching movies on my DVR) so it merely collected dust until I sold it to a nearby Gamestop for $50 or so. Now that I know I’m going to get a gift card for “losing out” to Blu-Ray, suffice to say I couldn’t care less what the end result was from the High-Def war (read: a “war” between two companies that will be forgotten five years from now when the next version war sparks).

Will I make a smart purchase or buy something that I’ll end up regret purchasing in a month’s time? Likely the latter, but I’m glad it won’t be coming out of my bank account this time.

This is one of the reasons why I’m glad to join customer programs such as Best Buy’s Reward Zone and the like. When a company feels compelled to reimburse their customers when a product sours (read: never), they have the necessary contact information and you’re usually first in place. The last time that I can remember this happening was when I was given the $100 in-store credit from my early iPhone purchase after their price reduction.

I’m not sure if this is a growing trend amongst retailers, however I’m glad to be apart of it when it happens.

I just fixed my server’s incorrect date/time within a minute or two via the command line thanks to a helpdesk message found here.

It’s great to fix something on your server using an easy to follow tutorial and get the exact results you’re looking for. Now, if only I could find something like this to setup personal business email for my server, I’d be substantially happier than a simple date/time fix.

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Found a great post regarding the internals of facebook by a blog entitled Scalable web architectures. Interesting, indeed.

I can’t pinpoint why I like their header so much, but I’m just stunned every time I see it. The level of quality is extremely high for such a popular site. Most news sites try to dumb down their designs so people focus primarily on their content; MSNBC has been going against the grain and I hope it pays off for them.

Another great site that knows how to do their header’s properly: MTV.com.

It seems that lots of great design ideas come from domains that start with M. Perhaps that is something to pay attention to? Unlikely.

All you really need to create something that will take down a beast is a talented entrepreneur, a smart guy or two on your team, and enough horsepower to keep your stake in the competition alive.

What I’m talking about, specifically, is taking a competitor, someone the size of Facebook or IMDB, down to their knees by providing more privacy and more ability to interact with their friends in innovative ways. When I mean a smart guy or two, or more specifically in my case, are people who know how to control highly dynamic and efficient database manageability, as well as another server optomization guy. With the skills that I have as a PHP developer and service builder, a team like that could easily, given the space for rapid growth early on (server bandwidth, processing power, storage), one could take on a giant like Facebook within months.

The only problem that is in my way at this moment is the lack of ability to devote my entire attention to such a project, as I’m focusing on building up income again. I wonder, however, if I were born into a family with tremendous wealth, would I have the ability, nay the desire to go after something like this? I wouldn’t think so, and for that I am the most thankful. I am able to prove myself when some cannot. Since I’ve been given the ability to do such a thing, I believe I’m going to chase it as hard as possible.

In the mean time, for inspiration on my goal, I’ve been reading an eBook that I purchased a few days ago, called Inside Facebook. The story is about the first senior engineer to land into the then tiny Thefacebook, watch it prosper to over many, many millions of pageviews a day, who he runs into in the process, and suggestions for things to take into account when starting your own startup. Very inspirational for someone in my shoes. I would’ve died to work there when he did and to watch something explode wildly with popularity. I haven’t gotten to the part as to why he eventually left within little over a year, if that even is in the book. I’m about 25 pages in and I’m already throughly enjoying it. I’d recommend it to anyone looking to start any kind of large goal such as Facebook or the like, or if you’d just like to hear what it’s like to work in the starting stages of a prosperous company.

Anyway, back to my original statement regarding taking them down within a few months. I absolutely know something like that couldn’t realistically happen within a few months, but that’s always been in the back of my mind. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that I have most of the skills available to take on such a challenge and at least present a viable candidate to take on a big guy.

When everything seems to fail, continue pushing until prosperity, and continue pushing even further.

Providing for one’s self and one’s family has been done successfully countless times - I am merely trying to find my own route to such success.

Ignore the negative thoughts and comments from both the outside and from within; push until you can’t push anymore, and push even harder to achieve success.

A few posts ago I mentioned how I’ve been getting into 4chan lately (for better or worse), and a thread sparked something in me. Someone posted (stupidly) how much money is in their wallet, and a thousand posts later, the thread is littered with 10-20 people posting cash laid out across their desk. Where they get said cash isn’t of interest to me but the simple fact that they have it is what inspires me.

Is it odd that I don’t necessarily worry how they made the money? I think I have the sources and ability to make it, but the desire and energy put forth is what I need to work on.

If you hadn’t noticed, I’m not too concerned with social habits of not talking about money. It’s in nearly every part of one’s day and it should be talked about. The post is more of a thought provoking message than a well constructed post - a collection of thoughts to get them out of my head and be able to come back to them later (most of my posts are like that).

I’m considering using my skills as a spidering/scraping expert to take it into more of a maintstream approach and offer my skills to my scripting company, Blast Scripts.

BlastScripts has been an inside company from the get go of DevBlast, my umbrella company. BlastScripts will eventually be a script depot for me to upload programs and other libraries of PHP code and others to purchase and/or download them for free, keep track of updates, etc.

Anyway, back to the idea of consultation of scraping. I’ve always been an avid scraper. There is nothing that I enjoy more than scraping a site of it’s contents. The process is always different, entertaining, and enjoyable. There is always something new around the corner to work against. The regular expressions that I have to come up with off the top of my head prove to work flawlessly (most of the time) and that is a reward in my thinking.

The only thing holding me back from providing such a service is the legality of such a service. Is it legal to provide a program that completely defaces a website and steals most/all of their content? Is content something that is copyright in general? I have no qualms with providing my clients with the ability toscrape any given site, but whether or not scraping is prohibited is beyond my stretch of legal knowhow.

I’ve got several sites already live and public, more so than I have before and it feels great. I have several venues to exploit and it’s my job to figure out a way to interlink them and profit even further.

I recently purchased a few books on C#, C++ and C# with .Net to build windows applications, something that I’ve always wanted to pursue but never put forth the effort/energy to learn. The possibilities are endless with the knowledge that I could obtain with the books that I’ve purchased, and I’ve got to keep that in the back of my mind when I come along the normal speed bumps that come in the road to knowledge.

Other than that, I’m going to continue pushing content sites  as that seems to be my skillset in this point of the game. Simply pushing large amounts of content will eventually work, won’t it? I’m hoping so.

I’m always happy to get client work, at least when I’m in need of money. However, naturally when I make money, I have an immediate need of said earned cash and it just ruins the good energy of making money.

I hate that everything in my life is about numbers and the bottom line, but when things get tough, that’s how I do it I guess. At least I worry about my future instead of my peers, those who work at remedial jobs and earn $350 a week doing nothing productive. At least I can know enough about myself that I can go out and make a living off the things that I’ve learned on my own (without schooling) and keep on the grind until I’m comfortable again. And, in that, I feel very safe about my well being. Now, if I were put into a situation where others relied on my ability to provide for them, I’m not sure if I could rely on that (at a security sake), which is why I’m trying to build up my assets and plan for the overall future.

I’ve got to keep pushing and pushing. With enough force, everything breaks. This drought will subside and I’ll be back in business.  Thankfully I’ve got a thousand ideas to pursue and all of them lead to my ability to take over each entire niche with my skills and background.

The skills that me and my friends have - you can’t teach that in school or a university - and that is something that I hold very important to me.