Who remembers our big trip up to Ft. Lauderdale to find the office for a replacement battery for Wallace’s hearing aid. That’s the wonderful thing about the Internet age, you can print a map to anywhere important. Only, it took us an hour to find that Beltone office fourteen miles away because for some reason, Wallace had no map. Here is a picture of a different Beltone sales and service location. It is beside the Aventura Hospital on Federal. Ha! Just four blocks from here.
Biggest news of the day is the database, now solidly back in the picture. We have a working prototype one stage away from going onto the Internet. Fred was clearly impressed, for he remembers the HTML version I worked on some years back. For clarity, I read all the manuals, but could not find any method of making all the separate pieces work together, nor anybody to ask. The new guy, Jack, has 22 years experience.Next in importance is (again) FireHow, I’m out of easy topics and got just one more published today. My total earnings is just 90 cents, but 10% of that came by today. I’ve developed a unique style already and will be watching for copycats. For instance, I normally propose a theory, then give directions or instructions. Last, I put in an entertaining or amusing paragraph at the end, thus encouraging people to read the entire article.
My goal is 200 articles, sheer speculation at this point. Bear in mind, at least part of my motive is to discover if money is to be made in this fashion. My articles are clearly better written than most but I doubt that is enough to drive people to reading them. In a technical glitch, the content cannot be cut and pasted in, meaning all composition is best done while logged on to the FireHow site. (Pasting word-processed data is incompatible with their text entry area.)
There is a counter to record the number of visits. My 21 or so articles have had 282 hits during my one week of operation. The most successful post to date is the old how to tell if the problem is your battery or your alternator. There is a “community” screen to see member profiles, and I notice the majority of hits occur when these people are logged on. I take this to mean a lot of my traffic could be other members checking out the new guy.
What is it with terrorists and subway stations? And why don’t the world’s politicians grow enough balls to say what everybody knows—these terrorists are Muslims. Listen, terrorists, if you want to hurt the economies of the west, target the income tax offices and credit bureaus. A navy ship sunk a pirate boat in the Seychilles. Said the Captain to some effect, that area has not had a decent government in 19 years. He failed to mention America hasn’t had one since 1963.
I’ve dug out my old records to refresh my memory on the working aspects of the database. It smacks of success if only because nobody would be dumb enough to copy it at the ridiculously low prices I charge. I am after 33 million customers paying $10 per month each. They would actually pay $120 per year. My cost of providing the service is far less, but I won’t say how much less. Put it this way: it will cost more to keep track of the payments than to operate the system. Pure genius, some would say.
The new club “Denny’s” (an unofficial name) on Washington and Dixie has a Friday slot open. I’m hesitating because of the difficulty of moving the PA system out of Jimbos and back every week for the bingo. However, I do have two spare towers with 12” speakers and midrangers. The covers are torn up by cat claws, but nothing a can of black paint won’t fix. Denny’s is an odd place, with a huge pillar in the center that blocks the view no matter where you stand.
If I can put together a Friday show, say a country jam, that is a better location than Jimbos. There are times at Jimbos the Friday night dart club plays past 9:00 PM, meaning I can’t play as loud as I would until the last game is over. For now, I’ll see what I can do about that second set of speakers. I don’t mind hauling around my Gigrack [PA amp], but 45 pound speakers slow me down.
Author's note 2015-04-01: In the end, the database did not get finished and the 200 articles did not get written, but became typical of non-starters in Florida. The database programmer would not proceed on spec, he insisted on knowing what I intended to put into the database. None of his beeswax. The site, FireHow, pays for quantity, not quality. I can't compete with people who spend all day churning out gargabe. And the club eventually got the sign painted, you'll here it referred to here as "Buddy's".
