There's Something About Harry

It is Thursday night and I’m writing this article early.  Saturday, I’m flying to Las Vegas for my third Affiliate Summit.  I’m going to be a mentor this year helping at least one person officially and probably 2 other people unofficially navigate Affiliate Summit West for their first time.

Its not even half way through the month of January and frankly things have been a good bit nutty after the holidays.

From a financial perspective I’m racing to make ends meet coming out of the holidays and a short working month of December.  The month of January and February are both looking very good, but cash flow is not timed terribly well right now, so I’m doing everything on the cheap and as conservatively as possible this month.

Delta Maxed out my Amex

I’m also heading to a WordCamp in Boston next weekend, after Affiliate Summit.  I will be sitting in at a couple Genius Bar sessions helping to show people how to design WordPress themes from scratch for the first time.

I was trying to keep my trip cheap, so I went onto Delta.com to book my flight using the last of my frequent flyer miles on Delta ( I used to live in Atlanta and have been trying to get these things used up all year long).  Delta links my profile to my Amex and even when I pay for a flight entirely with skymiles, they secure the order with my Amex.

Well last Friday when I tried to book my order things went completely bonkers on the Delta site and without me pushing any buttons, the site automatically booked and confirmed a flight that I did not select, nor want.

Even worse it charged the order to my Amex with real money not frequent flyer miles and that maxed out my card!

I needed those funds on that card to book my hotel in Boston, so after the order I didn’t have a airline ticket and didn’t have the funds for a hotel! 

I called Delta immediately after and they said they had cancelled my order.  Five days later however, my card had not yet been credited and Delta.com couldn’t process my frequent flyer mile order with a maxed out Amex!

I called them up and they initially told me that I was shit out of luck, no refund.

I re-explained the problem and they relented and offered to give me a refund afterall.  But a day later it still hadn’t gone through.  So this time I called Amex and essentially disputed the charge.  But another day after the dispute and my card is still maxed out.

Its now about 36 hours before I head to Vegas and I have no idea if I’ll be able to get my trip to Boston fixed before I would have left next Friday.

CES Was a Wash This Year too

Every year I always say that I’m not going to go to CES next year.  This year ended up being that year for real.  But my friend Joe Klein and Michael Butler did make it and had a good time.  A new friend here in Charlotte Robert Enriquez (aka NC_SEO on Twitter) also went for the first time himself. 

All in all, I’m kind of glad I missed the show this year, even though I would have preferred to have made that choice and not be forced into it by circumstances.  Anyway it worked out as I have been getting a lot of website design work done for quite a few different customers. (more on that in a future post).

Dancing Last Weekend

Among other things I also had a chance to go out dancing with my wife Becky and some of her teacher friends.  I had a great time as I love to go dancing.  I could do that full time if I weren’t in my thirties. It wasn’t the best club I’ve ever been too, but it got the job done, we had fun and that’s a good thing. 

Broken Laptops and Replacement Cell Phones

My Palm Pre finally died last week and I had a replacement shipped to me by Sprint (I pay for insurance on my Pre).  This was my second Pre to die (I now have my third Palm Pre).  I think its a great phone, but they are not terribly durable.

Once I get back from Affiliate Summit, I’m going to by a spare battery for the phone as well, as the standard battery just doesn’t cut it.

The keyboards on both my laptops flaked out again.  I was able to rebuild my primary laptop keyboard, its less than a year old.  Its a Toshiba and I love the little thing, but it sucks that the keyboard died.

The other laptop is 4 years old and despite spending 3 hours trying I was not able to get the laptop going again.  In both cases, I think the plug for the keyboard on the Toshiba laptop motherboard is a bit defective and it basically causes the keys to seem to stop working. 

So now with my older larger laptop, I will always have to plugin a keyboard via USB to type anything.  I also feel like I am on borrowed time with my newer Toshiba laptop, so I will probably have to get ready to get a new one sometime soon.  I really hoped that I’d get at least 2 years out of this laptop, and am a little miffed that it didn’t even make it a year before becoming unreliable.

Dragon Riders of Pern Series

I’ve recently been listening (re-listening/re-reading) all of Anne Mcaffrey’s Dragon Riders of Pern novels.  I’ve read these more than a half dozen times and just enjoy the story.  This time I’m trying to read them in chronological story order.

I’m also reading Love is the Killer Application by Tim Sanders, which is a good book and I think I’m getting some useful information out of it.

The White Dragon, Harper Hall Series and All the Weyrs of Pern are my favorites.

Meetups and Conferences

I am over due scheduling a WordPress Meetup in Charlotte and will definitely do that no later than tomorrow.  Plus, I am now going to be scheduling the next Charlotte WordCamp picking up this responsibility from Jason Keath the founder of Social Fresh, who also ran the first Charlotte WordCamp.  I’m looking forward to this experience and even more so looking forward to giving people access to some great WordPress resources, information and a people!  I just learned this yesterday so you can be assured that I will have a lot more to talk about on this topic in coming days.

Frozen Lake

The lake is frozen, but I did just receive a new kerosene wick for my heater, so I am looking forward to getting back into my dockoffice, primarily so that I can do some video and audio work.  Outside of my dockoffice I have not found a good location to record video or audio.  Every where I work outside of my office is WAY TOO NOISY! 

So that’s what I have been up to, if you have caught up with me, please drop me a comment with a link or two to your own blog and let me know what you have been up to lately.  I’ve been fairly conversant with folks on Facebook, but haven’t been making the blog rounds as much as I would like, so give me a bread crumb (hyperlink) and let me catch up with you!

I am journeying from Atlanta to St Louis.

I’m working with Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 9, and I’m driving a Toyota Scion xB(sign on according to DNS 9 J ). I’m on Interstate 75 right now. I just picked up a Baconator (bacon Nader per DNS) from Wendy’s next to a long series of discount furniture stores , basically that’s a half pound double cheeseburger with seven slices of bacon on it. I probably will have to run all weekend just to work that off and I do know if I can ever loose the cholesterol.

My cousin Casey is getting married this weekend and I’m on my way up to St. Louis for the wedding. After the wedding I’m going head to Peoria Illinois where I’m on a recruiting mission to go out and recruit thousands of bloggers. Specifically I’m going to be going from college to college hoping to convince college students to consider working as a paid intern running their own businesses Pro bloggers.

It’s a great way for college students to figure out what they’re interested in. Many times people go to college and they end up choosing a major without really exploring if they’re interested in that major. I did it myself and changed my major three times starting with marketing and then changing to accounting and then changing to finance and then adding accounting back on as a double major.

People that write as bloggers have to explore a topic very thoroughly. It takes a great deal of passion to write about a subject on a daily or even a weekly basis.

So if college students especially freshmen, sophomores, or juniors (engineers per dns 9) take the time to blog about the topic that they’re thinking about majoring in, they might find out whether or not they really have the passion for that subject. It’s better to find that out as a freshman or sophomore than it is as a junior or senior but regardless it’s important to figure out in college where your passions lie before you go out into the real world. As long as you’re in college you still have an easy opportunity to change your major and possibly work in the field of your dreams.

I just finished my sandwich, and I think they named it wrong. That double pound cheeseburger had about as much cheese on it as it did half pound burger. I think they should have named it the super cheesy Baconator (bacon Nader – can’t train DNS9 and drive at the same time!). In fact I’m literally licking and scraping the excess cheese off the roof of my mouth and my teeth like a dog that has just been given a plate full of peanut butter.

I love cheese and this sandwich tastes great, but it’s kind of a new sense having so much cheese stuck to my mouth while I’m trying to narrate this short little article.