I’m wrapping up what has been a pretty good week all in all. All week, I’ve been working to provide free upgrades for my clients sites from last year. I haven’t hit them all yet, but I’ve hit most of them. Upgrading their WordPress installations and any plugins that are out of date. I’m doing this free, and not expecting anything for it. I mention it for other WP designers out there.

Consider, you could charge for this service, you could charge a maintenance type of contract even. You could also charge your clients an arm and a leg if their site gets hacked because they were running an out of date version of WordPress or using a plugin that has a security vulnerability in it.

All those situations however, hing upon the concept of your customers experiencing a problem and you fixing it. Ergo, they have to experience some level of pain, and then make the association of you with that pain, even if you are the cure.

I’m not big on codependence, creating it, fostering it etc. I am big on helping people, and helping them avoid pain and problems. So I’m helping my clients avoid this issue going forward.

Plus, honestly, it is a little self serving. Yes, I could make some decent money charging to clean up a hacked account, but that type of work is really a pain in the ass, not very fun, and every one involved (client, designer, hosting company and more) all go through the process reluctantly.

Who needs that type of hassle? That goes double during the holidays!

So happy holidays to everyone, and I hope you update your WordPress intallations and plugins too! The tighter your installation and security the safer the web is for everyone.

Travel and Conferences

I’ve been working on getting ready for January travel and conferences after the holidays. In this area, I’m really looking forward to my third Affiliate Summit. I’m covering the show again this winter, and something about this show gets me jazzed everytime it comes around.

It is not an easy nut to crack. Even though I’ve been covering, writing, even working in the affiliate world myself for several years now, there are a large number of disciplines to understand deeply. This is not a get rich over night scheme. It involves a large number of professionals that work on the web and have been honing their craft and skills and tools since the earliest days of the internet. When Yahoo! was still trying to figure out how to build a revenue component into their business plan, the affiliate marketing industry was already profitable.

This time around, I’m again going to be focusing on any tips I can pick up in understanding analytics and PPC management. I’m also going to be VERY focused on trying to find affiliate networks that provide products or services through their network that play well in the realm of content that has entertainment value. Anything from Blogs to podcasts to video casts to movies and tv shows online. I see a big future here for a number of reasons, and I’m looking for ways to make this work.

I will also keep my eye out for anyone that builds in better integration with WordPress or other CMS systems.

This will be my third show and I think as a blog marketer, WordPress CMS web designers, I could offer back some useful insights to this community as well. To this end, I’m hoping to discuss this more with Shawn Collins and Missy Ward. I haven’t gotten a good bead on how or where I might be able to give back to this industry that has taught me quite a bit already, but I think there is an opportunity there.

I’m also trying to figure out how to juggle in CES, Atlanta WordCamp, Boston WordCamp and Indiana Barcamp this next month.

Atlanta Wordcamp organizers sent me a request to send in a speaking proposal for that conference. They specifically asked for something, a topic, that hadn’t been used elsewhere before. So I took an extra few days to put something together, got it in by the deadline, then didn’t hear anything from them. I started seeing other speakers added to the list, covering some of the same exact topics I’ve heard them cover more than once elsewhere. (not saying there is anything wrong with that, but I kind of figured when Atlanta WordCamp asked for something unique they meant it. )

Guess that wasn’t really the case. lol

It looks like its going to be a good WordCamp if for no other reason than Scott from WordPress Pods is going to be presenting. I really hoped that he could have spoke at the Birmingham WordCamp but it didn’t happen. So I was glad to see him get on the docket for Atlanta.

Anyway, Atlanta WordCamp happens right at the same time that CES is taking place in Las Vegas. So I was looking at flying to Vegas, then taking the Red Eye back after the tweet up at the LV Hilton to make it to Atlanta WordCamp in time to speak.

That’s not necessary now as they lost my proposal in the pile, filled up the schedule with other great speakers, and decided they didn’t need me after all. That’s all fine and dandy. I was waiting on feedback on whether they needed me or not and got no response all week long.

So I finally was able to track down a Google voice number for one of the organizers (think there are a couple), and called. Nice guy, that I met in Birmingham (didn’t remember me lol even though he requested I send in a proposal in the first place ). So he told me that they didn’t have a spot for my topic (which is true, there are about 3-4 people presenting the same topic already, sans the tool that will enable people to actually walk out of the room with the ability to use the skill taught.

That’s all well and good, but when I went online to finally get my travel plans locked in stone, the airline rates have gone up by $400!

So essentially, submitting my speaking proposal, and then not backing out, and waiting for someone to follow up with me and confirm whether or not they really needed/wanted me to speak after they asked, just cost me $400.

Merry Christmas from WordCamp Atlanta!

Now, anyone that knows me, knows that I’m not rich or anything. I’ve got a home in Atlanta with an updside down mortgage. I’ve got other challenges stemming from my run in with the Chinese mafia when I used to be a corporate accountant for Motorola. I don’t really have $400 to spare, especially when I’m trying to do right by someone or some group.

I realize its the holidays. I realize December is a tough month. I realize that 99% of people that work in Social Media wouldn’t know how to return a phone call or follow up with someone in a meaningful (nonfollowfriday shout out) way unless you were threatening to decapitate Steve Jobs and put his head on a pike in the middle of the Microsoft Corporate Headquarter campus.

I know all that and my expectations are very very low. I’ve been working in this industry for 4 years now. Its par for the course.

But well, it is still annoying, especially when it takes money out of my bank account.

Sorry Bank of America, guess it took money out of your bank account too.

Fortunately, the week has been pretty good from a financial perspective.  I had done a fair job of bringing in new business this month, and before this happened, it looked like I would be going into the holidays with all pluses on my tick sheet.  So now I have a $400 set back, plus, not sure if I can make either the WordCamp in Atlanta nor CES! ($400 extra might blow my budget for that trip)  I could go to Atlanta WordCamp if I don’t go to CES, but now I’m a little annoyed, and there’s really no room for politics or bad attitudes at WordCamps. 

Its funny, over the years I’ve heard quite a few of the speakers that frequent WordCamps in the southeast, bitch moan and complain about the inherent politics that screws them out of grandeur.  Other than empathizing with friends, I never really paid it much attention.  I do my best to stay out of politics.  If someone wants my help, I’m there.  If they don’t, that’s cool too.  I’m pretty easy going.  So getting sucked in on this one, with the invite first, the stall second, and the blow off last even managed to get under my thick skin.

At least they weren’t threatening to kill me and my kids like the Chinese mafia in Buckhead were!  Some things in Atlanta are getting better I guess.

…..

deep breath, btw , this IS a blog, in the diary sense of blogs.  I write here to express myself and for therapy reasons these days.  Nice cleansing feeling of getting this crap off my chest.  After I hit publish, I won’t care about this any more.

OK, so its finally snowing here.  The kids were let out on a snow day 5 hours ago, when there was not any snow or rain in the sky.  (silly)

I’m going to get cleaned up then head over to a holiday party at some of our friends house.  My wife and kids are already there.  I’ve just been finishing a few things up before heading out.  Trying to put in something of a full day.

Its been over a week since I went out with my wife and what I thought at the time was her online boyfriend, whom she had met first in real life while we were out celebrating our wedding anniversary.

I’ve taken the last two days off from talking or writing about this topic.  When all of this first happened, I was definitely having a difficult time trying to understand, decipher, cope, be supportive, not get mad, not drop into a massive depression, etc. 

Ultimately, writing about it, helped me immensely.  I just didn’t have anyone else to turn to in order to dig through all the facts and information.  I didn’t have anyone else to talk to about what I was feeling or what I should be feeling, if it was even appropriate or not.

I wrote quite a bit, probably something close to 20,000 words.  If this were NaNoWriMo, I’d be two thirds done with a novel. 

• Things that completely Derail your Week: Server problems, Noisy Neighbors Construction and Your Wife’s boyfriend
• Recovering After the Date with My Wife’s Boyfriend
• Until Un-Happiness Do Us Part – The Perceived Risk of my Wife’s ‘Friend’
• Surprise! Your Wife Has Mail (from Him)
• How Do I Compete for my Wife’s Attention When He has as much Access to her as I do through Social Networks and Text Messages?

I was not writing for volume by any means. Just trying to get through things.  By the time I finished the fifth one, ergo my fifth day of therapy, my therapy was starting to hurt my wife. 

I did not want to turn this in to a zero sum game, where she hurts me, so I hurt her back.  I didn’t want to go out and find some other woman to turn things on my wife just to see how she would like it.  I did not want to harm her with my words either.  We have always had a difficult time talking about these things, which was why I wrote in the first place.

But early on, she started reading what I was writing (not always finishing for obviously long winded reasons) and she was starting to feel that my writing painted her too negatively, painted her actions too negatively, and she felt that this was putting her on the defensive.  Long story short, I don’t think Becky really thinks she did anything wrong.  She says she did not intend to hurt me.  She says that she didn’t realize that I didn’t know about her online relationship with Hobie.  Since I have never really gotten ‘jealous’ in the past, it was a surprise when all of this hurt me.

A New Kind of Jealousy

So in person, I am not the type of person that gets jealous.  Becky can flirt with someone all she likes and I will not really blink an eye.  I won’t really compete either.  If she wants to flirt she can, but I don’t play gladiator games with other guys to win her attention.  Its just not my way, never has been.  The lack of games like that is one of the reasons why I fell in love with Becky in the first place.

Years ago when I was single, I learned how to play those games.  I was very adept at it.  For the most part, I thought they were kind of stupid, and they usually torpedoed any chance at a better relationship with someone.  When I met Becky, we didn’t play any of those stupid games, and I think that is one of the reasons why our relationship lasted this long (16 years) already.

Fast forward to the present, and I don’t mind, never have if she flirts with another guy, but I’m not going to regress to the point where I have to play games to keep her love or attention.  I think she knows that and I think that when she flirts, she does so not to hook up with someone, not to fall in love with someone, she just does it because she likes the repartee’ or something.  I do too for that matter, and its something that is difficult to engage in with someone you’ve been married to for so long, because you know that just around the corner all flirting pretenses can evaporate in a minute or two.  With a stranger, the boundaries can remain up indefinitely.

But I’ve learned that I can be jealous of my wife when she has a constant and regular electronic relationship with another man via text messages, phone calls, chat messages, email and facebook.  I can be even more jealous when she doesn’t even let me know that this is going on.  It may not be in secret, it may not be hidden but its not in the light of day either.

Flirting in person, rarely lasts day after day, night after night for several weeks.  Meet a stranger in a club, bar, anywhere and you might have a few minutes, maybe time through out the evening to chat back and forth, but that is unlikely to turn into repeat sessions.

Meet a person online and you are connected, possibly forever.

They can see what you are thinking, what you are doing, who you are talking to, what you are talking about, they can see pictures of you regularly, your kids and family and more.

I do not live in an internet bubble by a long shot, but I don’t develop relationships like that with other people very often and can’t remember the last time I developed a relationship like that with another woman.

Talking and flirting electronically is essentially like passing love notes.  You may not be telling someone else that you love them like a third grader might, but passing messages back and forth with sexual overtones, double entendres, and other personal talk is essentially the stuff of love notes, maybe more at a high school level.

The electronics and the medium make it feel almost acceptable.  After all, if you can talk with your brother, your mother, your sister, your boss in that medium, then talking with a member of the opposite sex must be OK too.

If you aren’t sending dirty pictures back and forth, no phone sex or masturbation is involved, it must be all right?

Well, despite the fact that I am extremely , ummm, liberated, especially about what humans can or should be able to do, if you want to buy into the concept of monogamous relationships (which I think is stupid, but have agreed to for the happiness of Becky) then this type of activity is NOT ok. 

It seems to fall under the auspices of if you can’t do it in front of everyone else, then there must be a reason. 

If you think it would hurt your spouse, then maybe you should reconsider. 

If you think it would embarrass you or get you in trouble at work (sexual harassment or something) then maybe you should reconsider. 

If you think it would embarrass your or your family if it were done in front of them, maybe you should reconsider.

I do not think my wife was knowingly engaging in any activity meant to hurt me or destroy our relationship nor probably even build a physical relationship with Hobie. 

But I don’t think she thought through what she was doing either nor the repercussions.  That is partly because I’ve never been the jealous type before, and partly because the mediums of conversation are so easy and readily available to keep connections and conversations flowing.

She did end up hurting me because she didn’t make me aware of what she was doing with Hobie.  I wasn’t involved in the conversation.  I wasn’t privy to the conversation (not even in a voyeuristic manner).  She never really made that an option.

At one point, the height of my fear and angst, I toyed with hacking into her computer and trying to find out what she had been talking about with Hobie, but I backed away.  She might have been further down the rabbits hole than I realize, and I could be a fool, but if I had looked, it would have signaled the end of my trust of her and her trust of me. 

I would have gained everything in knowledge to lose everything in reality.

She tells me that she has backed away from her relationship with Hobie, telling him not to flirt with her and she says she is not flirting with him.  The communication has not stopped.  I can’t tell but hope it has decreased in quantity.  She’s been talking with him about his challenges dating another woman with the same name as my wife, counseling him basically.  I haven’t read these messages or conversations, but have heard second hand about them from her.

I’m more comfortable with this.  She could be pulling the wool over my eyes, but I don’t think she is.  If I’m wrong, well there’s nothing else I could do other than snoop on her in which case she might as well be lost to me anyway.  If I had to engage in an intervention to win her back or something, I’d probably consider it, but knowing her nature and her tendency to be extra stubborn when confronted I don’t think that would help.  I don’t even think she has mentioned this situation to other people in her family, even though they read my blog too.

Great Sex

The article before this one, I toyed with the notion about writing about what has essentially been great make up sex.  I backed off and instead wrote about some of the remaining aspects of things that were still troubling me. 

I should have written about sex.

Apparently, the last article really upset Becky quite a bit.  I think she was worried that no matter what she said or did, she couldn’t convince me that she wasn’t in love with Hobie and had no real intentions physically towards him.

But basically ever since this issue came up a little over a week ago, our sex life has been great.  In our relationship, sex has always been very good, and no matter what our issues were over the years, too much work, moving, school, trying to get pregnant, pregnant, weight problems, finances, health issues, moving again, Chinese mafia threatening to kill us, the sex has always been good and always something that we could both count on.

Since this situation arose, my wife has been off work mostly.  We’ve spent more time together over the last 9-10 days that we normally are, and we’ve been going at it like crazy.

I’m not going to go into all the lurid and fun details, but in addition to the writing, the sex has helped too.  Its possible for men and women to fake orgasms, but its not so easy to fake emotions, especially during the extended rounds of foreplay and sex that have kept us up late the last week.

Our sex life, wasn’t really lacking before this all happened.  It wasn’t slow and it wasn’t over done.  We’re probably slightly more active than the average couple in the US, having sex 2-3 times per week, some weeks more than that, never much less.  The trickiest thing about our sex life is our mis-matched work schedules, coming and going is our biggest problem, but once we meet up there is not much of an issue at all.

Becky is not frigid nor difficult to please.  I wouldn’t say she is ‘easy to please’ but she’s definitely not impossible to please either.  Some women have difficulty having orgasms, or can only have orgasms in a limited number of ways.  Becky is lucky compared to some women and can have orgasms in several different ways and combinations.  As her husband, that makes my life relatively easy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t try regardless. 

Over the last week, we’ve been putting in the extra effort so to speak, and its been a very very pleasant week, and I guess enough said about that.

Where to Go from Here?

I now know that I AM the Jealous type when it comes to some situations, especially secretive or non-transparent ones online.  That’s not something I knew 2 weeks ago.  Even though it has been painful, I do savor the opportunity to learn something new about myself.

I have learned some new things about Becky as well and that is a good thing too.

I do not know if she has grown as much during this event as I have.  I hope so, but I am not sure.  She’s still a little closed about a lot of this so its hard for me to tell.

I dislike the fact that we may have both just gone through the crucible and possibly only one of us benefited from surviving it.  I do want Becky to know that I do not mind if she has male friends online or off.  I do not care if she flirts with guys in person, especially if I’m there.

I do mind if she maintains a regular and constant online relationship in the form of multiple conversations each day electronically and that communication includes flirting dialog.  That does bother me and does make me jealous.  I do think that can result in feelings and later temptations that she might not want to resist.  I think if she keeps these private from me, then she is essentially opening the door to meet someone, fall in love or lust with them, have an affair and I would be completely blind sided.

As a guy, who is relatively nice, kind of tall, not too fat, and doesn’t look much like a troll, I have to be careful not to let myself get into situations where physical temptations, especially if alcohol is involved, might get the better of me and I would do something that would hurt Becky.  Its not happened yet, and that is largely because I am careful not to let it happen.

I think that Becky unwittingly walked into an area where the risk of something happening eventually was there.  She was confident for several reasons that she would have said no or shut it down, but I’m not as confident largely because I was not aware of what was going on, what did go on, or just how close she actually got with Hobie.  I’ll never know if I our relationship was on a razor’s edge of a cliff or if it was ten miles back from a rolling slope of a hill.

But I do want Becky to be more aware in the future of the danger and of what she now knows hurts me, something I didn’t even know 2 weeks ago.

I can’t handle going through this on a regular basis.  Its not something I’m going to get used to, grow into, or learn to accept.  If she develops an online relationship with a man, flirts with him in person, talks with him through out the day for days on end and doesn’t tell me about it, I’m going to be hurt, and I’m going to look at it in the future like she is trying to create an opportunity for something to split us up.

I do not think she will do that, but based on what I have learned about myself and our relationship, I can’t see any other way to view that type of thing in the future.  I do not think it is unreasonable.

I do think Becky loves me, and I doubt this will come up again, until some dumb ass techy nerd develops some social network that allows people to communicate by reading each other’s minds from a distance.

Then we are all either in trouble or on a fast track to a real free love society.

Would it trouble you if your wife starts getting email from another man?

Odds are she gets emails from other men every day, all day long, just like everyone else in the world. 

Its a little different however, when that email comes from a man that you have recently seen man handling your wife a bit . . .  hmmm maybe touchy/feely/patting/rubbing your wife might be a more apt description.

That was the surprise that I had to deal with last week, when I wrote ‘Things that completely Derail your Week: Server problems, Noisy Neighbors Construction and Your Wife’s boyfriend ‘.  I was having a great week, things were coming together, life was good. 

Then a brand new reality hit me between the eyes.  A reality that was there before, just out of my range of vision.

Becky, my wife of 16 years, had met another guy on our anniversary (Halloween).  I was there, sitting next to her.  We were all having a good time and I was happy for her, getting attention from other guys.

One of those guys Friended her on Facebook 3 days later.  I didn’t notice nor see it in her stream.

I don’t pick apart my wife’s Facebook stream and read every single thing she writes or that others write in it.  I’m interested, but the way Facebook works it just doesn’t show me everything, unless I go to her profile and look at her Wall every day.

So I missed that new friendship she created with a guy she had been heavily heavily flirting with a couple days before when we were out celebrating together, our monthly date night amplified by our anniversary, and the first time we’ve celebrated it alone since we had kids 11 years ago.

There is no real significance other than unfortunate timing that my wife picked up a guy on our anniversary I guess. I suspect there are some serious fucking taboos for a husband to pick up a girl while out with his wife on their anniversary, but I’m not sure if that goes both ways.  Maybe its a double standard, maybe its just a silly taboo in my own head, but for whatever reason, it did not bother my wife that night.  It did not bother me, that night either.

I did not expect that bond/phsyical relationship to go anywhere else at all afterwards.  So I was not worried nor concerned about losing Becky.

Ironically and BIG FAT DISCLAIMER HERE . . . SOMETHING Becky reminds me that I have failed to mention, that night on our anniversary, I did know about the flirting and groping.  I did not discourage it.  I was fine with it, even encouraged it, not in a goading sort of “Hey why don’t you go rub up against that guy so I can watch.” kind of way, but more in a “if you are having a good time flirting with the guy sitting next to you when I’m here and more fun when I’m in the bathroom, have fun.  Enjoy yourself.”

But we live in an extra connected super social world these days.  I should know, I work as a web designer, blogger and social media type.

I know the ins and outs of the business pretty well at this point, and I know social media pretty well as well.

So it shouldn’t have surprised me that a Facebook friend connection developed afterwards.  In general, in my business, many many people friend each other extremely casually, for almost no reason other than networking.

Personally, I’m not as cavalier with my Facebook friends.  I will connect with anyone on LinkedIn for business networking.  I will selectively follow people that carry on conversations on Twitter and allow anyone short of a spammer or stalker to follow me there.  But on Facebook, I try to limit my friends to people that I have met in person, know somewhat well and generally, like.

Those categories all fit for my wife and her new man friend.  They met in person, they got to know each other fairly well physically.  They had a good time together singing along to music all night, and a Facebook connection even by my crusty old standards was not terribly nuts.

I just never saw it coming.  I never saw it happen.

I don’t tell my wife every time I make a new Facebook friend.  I don’t tell my wife every time I add a new Facebook friend that is a woman.  I do tend to tell her if I have added a Facebook friend that I have slept with (decades ago before we got married and that list is pretty short).  She tends to mention that to me as well.

But this situation seemed different to me, still does.  I’m not saying it is or isn’t, just feels that way to me due to everything involved:

• Our Date Night adventure
• Our Anniversary
• The significance of our first anniversary away from the kids
• The fact that they met and had a lot of physical contact, then became friends. 
• Take that last item and add to it that she did not tell me that she was still talking with the guy, who I’m going to call ‘Hobie’ (that’s not his name, but is a code word that Becky will probably understand when she reads this.  I feel like I have to give him a name, and I do not want to use his real name.  I’m not convinced that he has any blame in this situation (its possible but I’m deferring judgment)
• Despite having my business card (and hers I think) Hobie, chose not to Friend me on Facebook.  I never expect gratitude, but if a guy lets another guy fondle his wife at a bar, you’d think the beneficiary could at least be civil after the fact and offer to be a friend, or mention, I had a good time hanging out with you and your wife the other night, hope things didn’t get too carried away and that we can be friends, so I’m sending you and your wife a Friend request. 
  • He didn’t do that, so in my mind even though she may not have been sneaking around, I think he was.
  • I think she did not see that he was sneaking around, but she should have because lets face it, guys tend to have sex on the brain.  Especially single guys, and especially single guys that have just spent the night fondling a woman that continues to talk with them on Facebook, Yahoo chat, Yahoo email, and on her work email. 

Whether Becky realizes or realized it or not, she was continuing to send out steady signals to Hobie that she was interested in him after a sexually charged introduction and encounter and unlike the night when we were out together and she was flirting with another guy in front of me, she was now sending off these follow up signals where I could not see.

I don’t think I’d mind this half as much if she had slept with him that night and I had known.  I probably would not have participated but knowing and giving my blessing as her husband would have made it ok in my book.

This doesn’t feel OK because it got hidden behind closed technological doors.

Helicopter Parents and Helicopter Spouses

A friend of mine shared this article from Time Magazine called “The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting”.  It is a very good article and as the parent of 3 kids, I completely relate with the article.  (The article also talks about Lenore Skenazy and her experience being dubbed by Google as one of the worst moms in the world or something.  I think she’s a great mom from what I’ve read myself.)

We’re not on the worst end of being helicopter parents, but due to the culture of so many families all operating at this over parenting level, our kids literally can not play with other kids outside in our neighborhood.  The other kids just do not come outside to play.  They only go where there are organized sporting events.

It is terrible. 

I was reading this article while I still had the situation with Becky and myself on the brain.  In particular, late last night, a casual comment she made on Facebook about going running with a friend (female) from work last night caught my attention.

Two people had pushed the ‘Like’ button on Facebook.  One of those people was Hobie.

I suddenly felt all the crap and bad shit all over again (at a smaller level).  This guy is in my wife’s life and he’s not really going away.  I do think my wife has the capacity to love, friend, help other people, not just me.  I’m not selfish for her attention, but the injury that I felt from some of the things listed above and more, are still fresh wounds.  So every time I see Hobie connect with Becky online or in the real world (see Recovering After the Date with My Wife’s Boyfriend ) it rips open part of that un-healed wound all over again. 

Yes it is scarring over and not as raw as it was originally, but its not fully healing each time either before its split open again.

I realized that one of the things that makes parents, ‘Helicopter Parents’ is that all this extra connectivity from cable news about molesters and child abductions, to mobile phones and text messages and emails with their kids and teachers, to web cams and much much more.  It all pounds us with this extra information about the perils and evils and dangers of life.

Our natural reaction, is to shield our kids behind us with our backs to the fire and fend off the danger.  That is just how we are wired.  The more danger that presents itself (electronically) the more we get our hackles up and try to fend off the perceived danger.

That’s what is partly happening with Hobie and Becky’s online relationship.

I’m seeing small snipits of their online relationship, things in her Facebook stream like them Friending each other early in November.

I went back and looked after the fact, she also friended 2-3 other guys this month.  I have no idea how many people I friended in the same time period nor how many may have been women.

I have seen snipits where she has talked with him back and forth in chat messages on her computer.  I’ve seen emails (subject/sender not body) that he sent her on her computer, when she left her screen open one afternoon for several hours.  Not exactly hiding from me, but seeing his name after I realized they had a relationship in emails bothered me.

As a guy that loves Becky and doesn’t want to lose her, I see a handful of danger signals

• Physical flirting >
• Turned to new online relationship >
• Grown into continued conversations and relationship >
• Resulting in invitation by him to her to go out again, oh and ok bring your husband too if you need a designated driver (btw Becky doesn’t remember passing on the invitation to me only to come as the designated driver, but she did want me to be the designated driver.  )
• And then following that night out (almost can stop calling it a date) they are still in contact

I have not asked Becky to stop talking with him.  She has stated that they are friends.  I would not be happy if she asked me to stop being friends with someone, and I will not ask it of her.  I have not asked her not to un-friend him on Facebook either.  Although last night in a week moment I seriously though of doing the extremely stupid and immature thing of changing my relationship status from ‘Married’ to ‘Its Complicated’.

I think those relationship status things are really stupid in general, but I felt like doing it (tired from night of work and emotionally disturbed from seeing his latest contact with her) . . . I felt like doing it to signal to her that I do see a problem in our relationship.

I have mentioned before that a bunch of this is my own issue.  Something I need to work through and get out of my system.  But we are a team, a couple, we love each other.  If something hurts me, its hurting us.  If something hurts her, it hurts me. 

Hobie’s relationship with my wife has hurt me. 

I wish it hadn’t.  I wish I wasn’t vulnerable like that.  I think if Becky and I had simply been dating or living together for 16 years, I might even be a little more equipped to deal with this, but that’s one of the problems with marriage.  It makes you believe falsely that your relationship with the person you love is safe, just because of some stupid promise and a document.

Relationships are never safe.  They have to be protected and worked at all the time.  I know this, because I’ve seen to many fail from lack of protection and work.  Or in too many other cases because the couple lost or never had the key to making the relationship work from go.  That fatal flaw in their relationship that ultimately breaks them apart.

Becky and I have a fatal flaw like that in our relationship.  We have built up these barriers to protect ourselves over the years, protect ourselves from each other, and that is the weakness in our relationship that opens the door for disaster.

It could have probably happened the opposite way as well. 

• Becky needs someone to lavish affection on her in front of other people.  She needs to be flirted with, and touched. 
• I need someone to have deep conversations with.  I need to have that love for their thoughts and mind rekindled all the time.
• Becky can’t talk with me in depth, if I’m not lavishing affection on her.
• I can’t lavish physical affection on her if she’s not talking with me in heart to heart conversations about what is important.

Our needs are caught in a catch 22 (she abhores the concept and the word ‘paradox’ and ironically I love it).

We have to do something about this weakness together I think.  We have to be aware that it is a weakness.

Superman can’t defend himself from kryptonite if he doesn’t know that kryptonite can hurt him.  Same goes for our relationship.

In this case, something came between us because she was not talking with me and I was not lavishing attention on her.

In many ways, I think we are safe because it happened this way.

If it had happened in reverse.  If I had met a girl in that bar that night and instead of touching her and fondling her, but had had this amazingly deep conversation with her that night, and then a few days later engaged in the act with that girl that Becky needs most ‘lavishing of physical attention’ but done that in a setting where Becky could not see and then Becky later found out.  I think Becky would have been extremely hurt, as I have been.

So the two of us have to be aware of this situation and problem so that we can work to not set ourselves up in a situation where we are superman walking into a kryptonite esspro shop needing a shot of caffeine and not realizing that it comes with a kick of kryptonic self destruction.

Its All in the Unveiling of the Bad News

When I was young, I read the book the Hobbit about 7 or 8 times.  I read the Lord of the Rings a few times as well, but the first book was my favorite.  There’s a short story that is part of that book where the group of elves and hobbit and maybe gandolf too have been traveling for days and they desperately need refuge for the night.  There is a character whose name might be Beoren or something.  He’s a half man half bear, looks like a man during the day and changes into a bear at night.  He’s a hermit, bear man too and doesn’t like large groups of people.

So there are like a dozen/maybe 14 people in the group and that is far too many, so they devise a plan where a person or two will go introduce themselves and then additional people will show up at intervals by twos.

The first two arrive, introduce themselves and start to tell their tale of adventure, and then they hint at the their friends (not present) and just as Beoren is asking about these friends, two more dwarves show up.  This repeats over and over until the entire band of travelers are present and Beoren has been able to accept them all a bit at a time.

In this situation with my Becky and Hobie, the situation was revealed to me in a fantastically terrible way.

I didn’t know about the new friendship after our anniversary celebration and my Becky meeting Hobie.  I didn’t know that the relationship was kindling into a friendship or anything.  Then suddenly I was hit with the existence of the relationship, the invitation that sounded as if it were designed for them to meet together again, and my bit role in that future meeting, followed by evidence on top of evidence in the cyber world that indicated that their relationship had grown over the previous 2-3 weeks, but none of that evidence was qualitative, ergo I couldn’t read the chat messages, the emails, the facebook chats or messages.  I had no grounding for how fast or serious things might have developed.  I didn’t know if there were cause for alarm in this situation or not.

But I did immediately realize that are relationship had a weakness, I wasn’t keeping Becky happy, and that our barriers could be used to split us apart.  That knowledge drove the fear of my first article, and I’ve been striving to keep up with putting a cap on that fear and moving forward in a positive way since.

I’m getting there.  Becky and I are getting there.  We are making progress, but I do desperately look forward to the day where the reminders of this situation stop piling up on top of me at all the wrong times, in all the wrong ways.  I say that after I just spent 2 hours writing this article, relatively short at around 3,000 words compared to some of the others.  If total word count indicates my passion on the topic, or my pain spilling over, I think I’m over the top of the bell curve of pain right now and on the downward slope. 

I hope its a slope and not one of those fucking long tails.  I need the long tail of pain like I need my wife to have a secret boyfriend. 

Addendum – About 4 paragraphs up or better, Becky and I talked on the phone several times as she was driving home.  It was one of the best conversations we have had on this topic yet, and might also be part of the reason why I was capable of slimming this article down a bit.  Thanks Becky, I know you are not trying to hurt me.

Love Brett

That’s an unfair headline, but I’m going with it for now until I think of something more appropriate.  Regardless, I am basically recovering from the date Friday night when I went out with my wife and her ‘boy friend’.

I wrote about this before hand a few days back

Things that completely Derail your Week: Server problems, Noisy Neighbors Construction and Your Wife’s boyfriend

Now, before I go any further, I need to say some things up front.  This site is called There’s Something about Harry.  I’m Harry, its a play on my middle name.  I started this site almost 4 years ago and the site has no purpose.  If you are reading this, all you are going to get is a little insight into my thoughts, a snapshot in time of my mind.

Years back, I created the site to practice some things with html and css.  Then soon after I used it to break writers block, going through a number of silly exercises to get my creative juices flowing.  Back then I was working as a new blogger, a ghost writer and a business developer.

Anyway, this site never had a purpose other than to be a support for me.  That is something that I appreciate a great deal more the last few days, as my site has turned into my therapist.

Time for Therapy

Deep Breathe, ok one more of those, Deep Breath

So after I wrote that last article a few things happened.  I wrote that article Thursday afternoon.  I was pretty sure I was not going to go out with my wife who had been invited by a guy she met on our anniversary when we went out to celebrate 16 years of marriage.  She’s a flirt in a physical way, and he flirted back heavily.

They exchanged contact information and developed a ‘friendship’ in the days and weeks that followed.  I didn’t know about the friendship until sometime around Tuesday night, which was about 3 weeks after the fact give or take a few days.

We had plans to go and see the New Moon premier after midnight Thursday night, Becky and a friend from work (female) and her friend/old boyfriend.

I wasn’t super thrilled about seeing the premier, but that was mostly because I’m not crazy about the twilight movies.  They are a little too teenage focused for me.

Twilight Series Spoiler alert

The books are fine enough, even though I get a little annoyed that

1. Edward takes too long to figure out that he should turn Bella into a vampire (3 books) sorry about the spoiler . .
2. Edward, a 109 year old male, doesn’t realize that he is capable of producing sperm, and that a girl could get pregnant from sperm

End of spoiler

But my wife loves the series, the books, the movies, the sound tracks, pretty much the whole works and she reads a lot of vampire books and series now as a result.

So we went, and I had a good time.  We stopped by a bar on the way.  I had two killian’s red beers before the movie and I enjoyed it.  The movie complex ran the movie in 9 different theaters and the place was packed.  The movie wasn’t quite as teeny bopper focused as Twilight.  The special effects were alright (the werewolves in the early scenes were a little goofy).  The romeo and juliet vibe between bella and edward is realized in a campy romantic way, and Jacob’s ability to steal a scene really showed its teeth in New Moon.  I almost got the sense that whenever there was a scene with Edward, the movie was going down hill and whenever a scene with Jacob showed up things were better.  But from an artistic perspective that’s kind of the point of the second book and probably done intentionally in the movie too.

Throughout the night, I made a couple joking comments via twitter, and all in all it was a decent night,but . . . I was dreading Friday night and the DATE.

To make things more complex, my wife was awaiting the results of her National Boards.  They were due sometime on Friday.  So the night out at How at the Moon in Charlotte, took on a new importance.  It was either going to be a celebration or a consolation for my wife depending on if she passed her boards or not.  She completed them last spring and it takes the board something like 6 months to tally up scores.  Rather ridiculous if you ask me, and I know a thing or two about board processes.  If you haven’t been through a medical board, or a military board, or an educational board, you might liken it to something like a CPA exam or sitting for the Bar exam.

Friday, we woke up late after being up late.  We got the kids on the bus for school and Becky dropped our youngest off at school.

Sometime in the mid morning she got her results back, and she did not pass all of her boards.  So she now has to redo/retake some of these.  This is a grueling process and a shit load of work.  Not to mention she (we) had to pay $4k out of pocket last year for her to take them.  Now we will have to pay another $1k to retest, and finances have not been great this year, nor last year.  We’re going to do it, but its not going to be easy.

She was pretty upset, and despite all of my issues with the DATE, I did everything I could to make her feel better.  We went out to eat, and went shopping at Kohls for something for her to wear to the DATE that night, then we went around to two of the schools picking up our daughters.

Got home, she took a nap and I picked up our son.

Sometime after that I think I wrote that article above.

She might have had another nap as well.  Stress and being out late, and me hemming and hawing about whether I would go or not, mostly me leaning towards not going at all, or possibly driving her there, dropping her off and picking her up after she was done and ready to leave so that she had a safe trip to and from without any cabs or opportunity to go home with her boyfriend. (I didn’t think that latter aspect was likely, but well, we’re all human.)

We did talk about things throughout the day a bit.  It was helping (me) to talk about it, but I didn’t get a chance to really express my feelings until I wrote the blog article.  When I did write it, that was my subjective perspective.  I’m not an objective writer, by choice.  I can write objectively with the best of them, but I see little value in objectivity, something I won’t go into in this article because it doesn’t relate.

People, friends and family, kept asking me if I was going and wishing me a good time.  I kept telling them, I’m not sure if I’m going or not.  They didn’t understand.  Got a lot of weird looks that day, but they didn’t know about my wife’s friend nor did they have the visuals of him groping her stuck in their head.

Ultimately, towards the last minute, I decided to go.  I had a lot of reasons for this, but primarily I wanted to BE THERE, I wanted to present myself as a candidate for my wife’s attentions.  I didn’t feel like this was fair, we’re married.  Now, I don’t believe in marriage for a lot of reasons, never have, never will (new fodder for the fire in this).  But for those that do believe in marriage (sorry about that flawed condition if you have it) people tend to think that if you are married you should not fall for someone else, you shouldn’t flirt with someone else, you shouldn’t make your spouse/significant other jealous, yada yada yada.

That’s all bullshit.  People are humans and we aren’t wired that way.  I know that, appreciate it, and live aware of it.  I don’t embrace the fact in a free love kind of way popular in the 60’s, but I know that things can happen.  That emotions and feelings can develop.

I mentioned in the article that I did not want to lose Becky.  I love Becky.  I didn’t want to compete for her, because that goes against my nature, against the few beliefs I have, but that night I chose to at least be there.

She needed my support for the boards, she needed a designated driver, and any other time, I would have loved to go and have a good time.

Before we left I had a shot of seagrams.  Becky drove, we picked up her girl friend and we headed to Charlotte.  I had a couple more beers before switching to diet coke and sobering up.  I just couldn’t face the night with the edge that was present in my head.  Plus, its a fucking dueling paino bar.  You almost can’t go there and deal with the place on a normal night without some alcohol. (The performers are good, and funny, but alcohol is part of the experience.)

We arrived and joined the table that the boyfriend had won, driving the invitation and my purpose as the DD.  He was sitting with another couple, some friends, 1 of which he worked with I think.  It was their first time at a piano bar, and I don’t think they were really into it(they were drinking, but probably not enough).  I couldn’t really make much contact with the boyfriend.  I figured if I did, I’d probably end up doing something I would regret.  That might have ranged anywhere from cracking a bunch of jokes, insulting him out right, belittling him in front of a crowd, throwing stuff, taking a cheap shot at him with my fist, starting a full blown fight, getting pissed at my wife and storming out, ditching her there, or who knows what else.

So I basically watched the band and sang along.  I put on a good face and held it together pretty well.

On the drive there, I got a tweet from someone that commented about the fact that I had mentioned in a tweet that I was heading out with my wife so she could be with her boyfriend.

@capitalfellow

@brettbum sounds more emasculating than dumb. #goodluckwiththat

I think he was responding to one of these messages, but I’m not sure which:

Some people would read that and feel a little embarrassed, others might even feel like it was a little insulting or described them as being less than . . . .something.

For me it actually kicked off a little bit of courage.  I’ve never bought into the whole masculinity crap.  I don’t fret about my masculinity.  I’m actually extremely confident in myself and don’t have to live up to some goofy stereotype. (like driving your wife to a date with her boyfriend is bad apparently).

OK, I need to set something a little straight.  I’m referring to the guy as boyfriend and the event as a date.  But in fairness, that is more me writing.  When I write, especially about my life, there are a lot of odd things that have happened to me over the years.  For example, I had a run in with organized criminals in china that were knocking off Motorola 2 way radios and selling them on the black market, these ended up as key parts used for IEDs in Iraq.  I became a whistleblower, they threatened to kill me.  My life is not uneventful.

To deal with shit like that (and this) I have to use words that help me summarize the experience in terms that others will understand quickly, otherwise, I’ll write or say 10,000 words explaining a fine point.  So when I call it a date, she wasn’t going out on a date just to be with this guy, but that’s the easiest way I can convey the event and the emotions in my head that I experienced then when I thought about the event.

My wife is not a bad person.  I don’t think she has cheated on me.  I don’t think she intended to hurt me.  ( I was hurt, but I don’t think the intent was there.) And she did need to go out and have a good time that night to lick her wounds from the results of the boards.

Anyway, for now, I’m going to keep referring to things this way.  I have to partly for my own peace of mind to help exorcise the daemons in my head.  I have to say the words enough so that they won’t have any power of me or my emotions any more, because right now they are tearing me up inside.

So anyway the comment actually helped me remember who I was a bit, and remember more importantly where I came from and how I came to be, and that gave me some strength to put it into perspective and when I got there, I didn’t just drop Becky off and come back later.  I went in and stayed until we left later, together.

Now, while we were there things weren’t all perfect.  I was having a mostly good time for the first few hours as long as I didn’t look the wrong way.  I opened up a tab, Becky and her friend had a shot, bought by a third couple that joined us late.

We sent in a lot of song requests, including one from me, Spirit in the Sky by Norman Greenbaum.  That song has a lot of history for me and symbolizes the energy I need to get through very very difficult personal situations.  I’ve turned to it in times of need many times over the years.  I haven’t had need of it in a few years.

I gave $5 to get that one played, normally I give $2 or $3.  The piano player saw it and gave me a look, like fat chance.  (they didn’t play Every day is Halloween, on Halloween when we were there for our anniversary), so I figured that I just lost $5.

But much later that evening they played it.  That helped quite a bit, but before we got there, I was writing up a later song request, when the other piano player turned the spot light on me (we were at a table close to the stage) and said that he’d have to get me up on stage because I was not singing along to the current song (I wasn’t even paying attention because I was writing a song request).  He made some joke about me being ‘too cool for school’ and the blazer I was wearing and told me to get my Nicholas Cage ass up on the stage.
I went and had to sing the chorus of Chuck Berry’s “My Ding Aling” in front of an audience, including my wife’s boyfriend.

I was a good sport, but holding that microphone at that point in time was a dangerous thing.  I was having a hard time singing, not because I was embarrassed about the song, but because, I thought about ripping into the boyfriend with the mic or explaining to the audience the situation that had brought me up on stage to be the subject of a ridiculous song.  I also thought about throwing the microphone at the guy, but doubted my aim given my high level of fury.  That and the spotlights in my eyes were messing with me a bit.

So I kind of sang, in a William “Bubba” Shatner kind of way.

That was not my last time on stage singing that night.

the next time was more comfortable for strange reasons.

The night went on, Becky had a great time, danced quite a bit (with the crowd of other women that were dancing in front of and on the stage).  She was having a good time, and I was happy for her.

Later that night, they brought a guy up on stage.  He’d just gotten back from Africa or Iraq (not sure which) where he had been serving with the military.  I think his first name was Jerry.  For some reason I got a feeling he was a Doctor, just had that look.  Before you know it they were calling out to have all veterans come up on stage.

I’m a veteran, I joined the army when the US was building up on the Kuwait border in the fall of 1990.  I started Basic, the day the war started.  I served during but not in the first Persian Gulf War.  I later supported the mission to Somalia and Haiti, I worked the Balkans desk in the early 90’s but never deployed.  I see myself as a veteran, but I see a big difference in veterans that have been deployed to a foreign country to fight and those that haven’t.  Normally, I don’t stand up for recognition during these types of things, but this time with the encouragement of Becky I found myself heading up on stage, where my Nicolas Cage ass joined with other veterans to sing Proud to be an American, a country song (not terribly fond of country music) which I learned to sing along to and drink copious amounts of beer when I was in the Army stationed in Texas years ago.

That felt better than singing My Ding aling in front of my wife’s boy friend.

As the night went on, I mostly held in there.  My wife sat across from me the entire night pretty much.  One of her beefs with me is that I don’t flirt with her in public, I don’t hang on her, tickle her, kiss/fondle her stuff like that.  Its mostly true.  Its not her, its me.  I try but it just doesn’t manifest, which is one of the things that drove her to flirt with the other guy weeks earlier, and knowing that I don’t give her what she wants in this way, I didn’t mind, then.

But I couldn’t quite do it Friday night either.  I was trying to keep a level head and not do something that would make me look like a complete asshole and might increase my wife’s sympathy for the other guy, like ridiculing him on stage, or throwing a beer bottle at his head.

Towards the end of the night, most of the people from our table’s party had left, including a woman that had come to be something of an almost date with my wife’s boyfriend.  She was uncomfortable all night long, I think they are mismatched, and that’s just me being honest.  Some strange lady at the bar that night even tried to set this girl up with her brother at a different table, taking her away from my wife’s boyfriend and his chances of possibly connecting with someone else (besides my wife).

I seriously felt bad for the guy for the way she was treating him.  I don’t dislike this guy (for the most part).  I see my issues or complaints here as a problem in my own head.  A personal emotional weakness that I didn’t know I had, or something new that has developed over 16 years of a ‘safe’ marriage relationship.

However, she eventually left kind of early, after playing text messaging games most of the night.  She did finally start to sing along after a couple Blue Moon beers at the very end for 20-30 minutes.

But when she left, the boyfriend was at one end of the group of tables separated by the rest of us by at least one chair.  My wife eventually moved chairs on the opposite side of the tables and sat next to him.  She was trying to flirt

This post continues Read the rest of this entry »

OK, I need to whine, bitch, moan and complain a little bit.  Please don’t read anything more into this than my airing my complaints, because that is all it is.  Sometimes you just need to exorcise the deamons from your head a bit and that’s what I’m doing right now. 

I would have done this yesterday, but I’ve been having server problems (one of the things I’m complaining about) so I couldn’t even blog about my troubles.

My week hasn’t exactly gone as planned this week.  It started on Monday.

I had outlined a number of video scripts that I needed to record this week for a new set of tutorials for designing wordpress themes that I have been working on for a while now.  I’ve been to a bunch of conferences now where I have given a bit of the intro (101 level) presentation on how to design a wordpress theme from scratch with no prior experience.

Its a great presentation, and I’ve helped a lot of people learn something useful, something they wanted to learn, and something that can make them money.

I always like teaching people how to fish. . . . well not so much fishing but teaching them how to make money so they can buy fish.

If you want me to speak at a conference, camp, or event that you are hosting, please get in touch with me through my company site at Softduit or via twitter, email, linkedin etc.  I’m not too hard to find, just google Brett Bumeter.

Complaint 1 – Noisy Neighbor

So I need to complain about my neighbor.  he’s a great guy, getting ready to take his band on tour in europe, and he’s been recovering from a house fire for the last year.  I’m not mad at him and don’t fault him for this, but it proved to be a problem for me this week. 

He’s had construction workers at his house all year since his house caught fire.  Tragic story(no one injured), and I feel for him, but this last Monday as he was finally moving back in, the construction workers were making a lot of noise and I couldn’t record my video and audio work.

Tuesday, I spent scoping out a coworking space in Charlotte, which I will probably sign up for just as soon as I get the membership agreement, which is a couple days late coming to me now, but no worries.  Seems like a good deal, and I’m looking forward to it.  I think I will scope out office space in Savannah next, but that’s another story.

Tuesday night I get home after perusing the new office and then hanging around for a tweetup afterwards.  My wife is in bed chatting on the computer with her boyfriend.  She met him on our 16th anniversary at Howl at the Moon in Charlotte when we went out to celebrate.

I’m not a jealous guy by a mile and a half, and didn’t mind when he flirted with her nor even when he started groping her.  She was enjoying the attention and having a good time.  Together we had a great time that night.  It was Halloween and just a fun night all in all.

But I wasn’t exactly expecting her to hit it off with the guy on a long term basis either.

Its about 3 weeks later and she talks with him regularly via chat and stuff.  I’m not real nosy, but I think she talks with him via email, messenger and she’s friends with him on Facebook.

He’s got my business card, so who knows maybe Mike’s even reading my this article right now.

Hi Mike

Anyway, I don’t mind my wife flirting with people.  Never have.  I kind of look at it from the perspective that I’m a relatively nice guy, decent husband, decent father, I don’t smoke, do drugs, beat anyone, haven’t been to jail etc.  Sex life is good, not too kinked up not too boring.  I want Becky to be happy, so if someday she decides that I’m not the guy anymore, well I want her to be happy and find the person that is the right person.

I’m not trying to push her away, don’t want to lose her, but I’m not going to stifle her either nor entrap her in a marriage just because.  I don’t see that as a good option for anyone.

So if she wants to chat with some guy she met at a club every day, well whatever.

If she wanted to go have an affair with the guy, I probably wouldn’t stop her there either.  I’d hope that she would come back, maybe sew some oats or something (its been 16 years, if she’s bored or needs something I’m not providing well I want her to be happy).  But I’d do that HOPING she would come back.

Maybe I’m vain to think that the grass IS greener on this side of the fence, but well, I do.  Always have, and if she doesn’t think so, she needs to tell me or find better pastures. ( again not trying to send her away).

But the flirting/groping turned what she calls a new friend type of relationship grates on my nerves a bit.

Complaint 2 – My Wife’s New Long Term Boy Friend

I look at it from the perspective that he met her with sex on the brain.  Drunken, flirty, groping situation and it definitely was not absent from their thoughts.  I don’t know how seriously she entertained the idea with having sex with him.  She speculated that he might be more interested in having sex with me.

I used to get that a lot from guys, ergo they wanting to have sex with me, but I’ve never found that right guy, and odds are I’m not going to.  I’m not looking and never have been.  I’m pretty much straight as an arrow, despite my propensity for disco.

Drunkenly, that night I lightly toyed with the notion of the three of us having a thing.  I don’t think my wife has ever slept with two guys at the same time, maybe she’d like that.  I don’t know.  If she asked, I’d probably oblige as long as I didn’t have to touch the other dude too much, preferably not at all. 

I don’t know if the other guy looks good or not, can’t judge guys looks, never really could.  I’d include his facebook picture or something, but don’t think that would be really fair.  I’m not complaining to harass him nor my wife, just need to air my thoughts and don’t really have someone that I can talk about this with on the phone or in person.

So I’m publishing it, I’m sure that’s a bad idea, but trying to salvage my sanity first.

So anyway, her talking with him via chat and email and stuff wouldn’t be probably all that annoying.  Its 2009, conversations online happen.  But this is where my complaint comes in . . .

He invited her to go back to Howl at the Moon this Friday, and bring me and some friends of hers.

So my complaint is that, I don’t really care if she talks with him, don’t care even if she sleeps with him (says she hasn’t and is not going to probably), but I don’t necessarily want to be there when he courts her, attempts to woo her away, and she asked me to go with following her invitation so that I could be the designated driver!

That last part kind of hits the nail on the head.  Not only does she want me to go out with her so she can be with her boy friend . . .

She calls him a close friend now because she has counseled him online in regards to some girl he’s been infatuated with for a long time and is finally going out with this Friday night, which to me sounds a bit like my wife in code or something.

. . . . so not only go out with her so she can be with her boyfriend and he can see my wife, but she wants me to drive so she can get drunk with him, and I can take her safely home.

I do want to see her get home safe.  For all I know this guy is a serial killer or something, and it is a long long way for a cab drive from Charlotte.

Add in to the mix she wants to take her friends from work with her, so not only will I be out with my wife and her boyfriend while they get drunk at the club they met at on our anniversary, but her friends will get to drink and wonder why I’m there letting my wife get drunk with her boyfriend at a club where they met on our anniversary. 

just a touch of public humiliation thrown in on top of letting my wife go on a date basically.

Well, it was until this week that I finally found a context to that Meat Loaf song that I have always hated and still do.

“I will do anything for love, but I won’t do that.”

I guess this is my thing that I just won’t do.  She’s upset because I don’t want to go.  She had fun the last time we went (mentioned that above) and says she wants to go and have fun with me there.

In her defense, I’m not great at public displays of affection.  Never have been, just not in my wiring, which is part of the reason I didn’t mind other guys (there were a couple others that night) showering attention on her.  I think its healthy for people to be adored a bit every now and then.  Furthermore, (feels weird to write a paragraph with furthermore in it about this topic, not really trying to make a federal case out of this ) I travel quite a bit these days for work.  I have to socialize and go to a lot of those cheesy social media parties in crazy places like Vegas.

I know that is not easy for her to cope with.  I’m not much of a flirt these days.  I used to be when I was single, but I got so tired of the games of flirting and picking people up . . . .well it was one of the reasons why I got married.  And that relates to my wife, because she didn’t play those games when we met or dated.  It was refreshing then.  Maybe more importantly, I don’t grope girls at the parties I go to, ask anyone (this is the internet and I’m sure there are lots of pictures and maybe video) its just not my style.  Anyway, my point is that I’m away a lot, meeting lots of people, men and women, and she doesn’t see that which is not easy for her.

One of the differences here is that I DID see her meet this guy, flirt with him and get groped for a couple hours.  So its difficult for me to now envision the two of them ‘just as friends’.  Its been a long time since I did grope someone other than Becky, and I can only think of one girl I groped that I didn’t have sex with (I was 17).  We are still very distant friends on facebook, but I have seen her since I was 17, and the odds of her inviting me to go out and party and then asking my wife to come along as the designated driver are just not going to happen.

So Wednesday morning, I woke up after watching my wife chat with this guy the night before and her receiving the invitation and then emailing it to me.  I had this hollow feeling in my gut from the minute I woke up.

I didn’t really think I’d lose her, but weirder things do happen to people.  I sure as hell didn’t want to contribute to losing her just because I lack that healthy dose of jealousy gene that most people have.

I couldn’t work at all that morning, ended up going back to bed for a couple hours, but could barely sleep, even though I hadn’t got much sleep the night before or all week for that matter.

Woke up that afternoon and tried to get it together for a customer meeting online, and just couldn’t do it.  Backed out of that meeting with a poor ‘DSL down excuse’ but how do you tell a customer you can meet with them because you are torn up over your wife’s boyfriend?

By the way, if you don’t know this about me by now, I should lay it out for you as I AM aware of it.  I have a tendency to be a little overly dramatic.  While I’m not exaggerating the events, I HOPE I am seeing something possible where HOPEFULLY nothing is possible.

My wife got home from work and I told her I didn’t want to go and wouldn’t likely go.  I told her if she wanted I would drive her, drop her off and pick her up.

I do want her to be safe, and seriously, it wouldn’t surprise me if this guy was a serial killer (we do seem to have one in Gastonia these days, again, 2nd girl’s body was just found, although I suspect it was drug related).

So I’d go so far as to take her and bring her home to make sure she is safe, but I don’t want to be there and watch, nor be in the situation, nor walk away with a re-enforced memory, good bad or otherwise.  I just want to do a memory dump on this situation basically.

I’m not demanding she stop emailing/chatting/facebook friend him or anything either.  If they are friends, great.  Whatever.  But I don’t want to be a part of possibly creating a situation where they have a greater chance to connect or something. 

IF there is a spark there, I’m not going to blow on it.

Hell, I’ve already agreed to go see New Moon with her tonight after midnight.  She’s a big fan of that book series and movies, over the top type of fan.  I think the books are decent enough, but the movies seem a little too teenage for my tastes.

So going to New Moon tonight and then out with her boyfriend tomorrow night is just too much.  I keep thinking maybe I could just let it go and go and have fun, but that’s the thing.  Given the situation, I don’t think I can have fun, even if I go and drink myself silly.  I don’t want to go somewhere, knowing the odds are good that I’ll sit there and sulk and be a brooding asshole, nice contrast to her new boyfriend who will likely be in a better mood. 

Seems likes like a recipe for disaster if not Jerry Springer.

Then on top of all of that, last night as I’m finally trying to get back on track and get caught up with the work that I was too depressed to deal with yesterday, my server crashes last night around 1 am.

Complaint 3 – My Server went down again

My server with inmotion hosting has been driving me nuts since July.  I’ve been with them for almost 4 years and have historically loved their service and support.

In July, they convinced me to upgrade from one server to a newer ‘faster’ server.  I’ve had nothing but problems ever since.  Almost everyother week, my server goes down and they threaten to cancel my prepaid account ($500 per year) because I’m using up to much CPU time.

I have a handful of sites that get very little traffic.  I have actually closed or moved half the accounts I had on my server before July because of this.

The server crash, completely torpedoed the last of my energy last night, so I went to bed hoping that it would be better enough in the morning.  Scrunched up in bed and tried to sleep, barely pulled that off.

Got up around 6:50 and the server is still down.  Got my daughter on her bus and then called tech support.  I got the impression they were just starting to look into it 6 hours later (I could be mistaken, but that was the impression the phone rep gave me who was interfacing with the higher level support reps, who used to field phone calls and now do not).

I’ve been through this with them before.  I figured, I can’t fix things with my wife right away, but maybe I can fix my fucking server at least.  So I started seriously looking into switching to Host Gator, which I’ve been scoping since this problem came up.

I’ve done a massive amount of optimization for performance on my sites over the last 5 months, and I had no issue  before the server upgrade.  I’m pretty sure its not me, its them, but their system provides almost no information about what is going on with my accounts on their server.

I’m completely in the dark with them. 

I had one last talk with them, indicated that I was going to move elsewhere and started to work on that.

Then I get a call from Marco at Inmotion.  He was doing some super heavy lifting on my server trying to reconfigure it and move my sites to a different machine where we could figure out what was going on.  His super hero efforts stopped me from switching, but I’m not sure if that’s good for either one of us just yet.

Many hours later, I think my sites are actually back up and working without the errors and things.  They’ve been up and down all after noon as he works his magic.

When I started writing this blog post 90 minutes ago, Something About Harry was still up.  Hopefully it still is because I’m getting ready to hit the publish button.  I feel better and I’m tired of bitching.

If you read this far, thanks for listening.  I have a lot of good luck and a tendency for surviving very odd situations, usually to my benefit.  I hope these complaints and the situations that caused them have a positive outcome.

I’m currently in the middle of testing out my new keyboard on my laptop.  My old keyboard built into my laptop, was very slightly buggy from day one.  The 9 and 0 (zero) key never worked terribly well, especially when they were pressed simultaneously, like when you might type a number like 909990909990999.

Well last week, the old keyboard just died.  I have never replaced a laptop keyboard before.

I’ve replaced batteries, RAM, hard drives, CD/DVD roms and such but never a keyboard.

So I tried to pull out the old one, initially to clean it, and in doing so the plastic bridge like plug thing that hold the keyboard wire attached to the mother board broke.

Can’t make ommeletes without breaking eggs

So I ordered a new keyboard online hoping that it would not only ‘work’ but would also come with the same attached plug affair that the old laptop had.

It didn’t have it. 

So I had to rig up a scotch tape bridge like device to wedge around the plug to make my shiny almost new (8 months old) $1300 laptop function again.

Guess what?

It works!

I’m typing on the new keyboard right now.  The new keyboard is not as slick and shiny as the old keyboard for some reason, but the 9 and 0 keys work splendidly!

This is all very important as I depend on my latpop for my living.  In fact, I’m a week behind on laptop stuff, so I’m going to hit publish now that I have tested the new keyboard and confirmed that it works, under fire.

Note to self, never follow an online tutorial for keyboard cleaning or removal ever again.

It is the Tuesday after IzeaFest.  I drove to and from IzeaFest with my family.  I’ve been planning this trip since March.  This was the first conference that I have ever combined with a family vacation.  I was somewhat inspired by Robert Scoble at BlogWorld (or maybe it was the final New Media Expo . . . ) in Vegas in 2008.  He brought his family, and I briefly met them at the Hilton.  I say briefly, because I spun around to say ‘Hi!’, was invited to dinner and rapidly declined.

I wasn’t snubbing Robert nor his family, but I had flu like symptoms coming on and I didn’t want to get any of them sick.  So I begged out of the dinner feeling like a schmuck, just a bit, and feeling ghoulish just a bit because I thought I might be missing a wee bit of a networking opportunity.  But hell, I’m not going to network with someone at the expense of getting them or their kids sick, so I didn’t feel bad about that for long.  Instead, I high tailed it out of blogWorld early, headed home on the Red Eye, and recooperated with a story of what could have been (bad).

So I traveled to IzeaFest after loading up the family vanster, a 1998 Dodge Grand Caravan with 168k miles on it.  We only use it for long distance trips, typically loaded down with Christmas presents on trips to Illinois to see my family.

We stopped first in Ridgeland, South Carolina, where my wife and I married in 1993.  Then the next morning we ventured into Savannah and walked around River Street with the kids.  My wife an I met there and lived there in the early 90’s and it always feels like going home, even though neither of us are originally from Savannah.

We then drove 5 hours down the road to Orlando.  We checked in at the Hilton Grand Vacations resort around 5 and by 7 pm, I was at the Renaissance waiting to get loaded on to 1 of 3 busses heading to Tampa for Howl O Scream at Busch Gardens.

I sat in front of Drew from @benspark (photo above left) and his wife and next to @Cramur who is a great guy I’ve known through Twitter for quite some time.  We talked about his new business venture in the Atlanta area.  He has set up something of a contractor concierge service.  Essentially, you sign up for the service and if you need something done on your home, they find the contractors for you.  They vet them, make sure they are licensed, they coordinate the calls etc.  No hassle, you just get someone reliable at your door to take care of your house if something breaks.

I think its a great idea, especially after my grandmother was first hit by a massive hail storm that took out her entire roof this spring and then just last week experienced extreme flooding in her basement damaging almost everything down there when a water main broke.

The insurance was great with the roof and terrible with the basement, but she and my parents had to handle managing all of the contractor calls, which was extremely time consuming.

Once we arrived at the park, most of us got instantly lost and separated (either that or I got ditched    ).

lol

One minute I was with a group of people and the next minute this group of vampires descended on me and I was singled out of the herd like a lame goat or something.  I guess when push comes to shove, you definitely count on a bunch of bloggers to watch your back, but I suppose someone was blogging about my eminent demise.

… vampires tend to take blurry pictures.

After I got away from those vamps, I proceeded to get really lost in the dark bowels of Busch Gardens.  At one point, I found myself walking in an endless loop of figure 8’s around a snack bar.  I wasn’t really hungry, just couldn’t find a way out of the loop.

Fortunately, on one of my loops, I came across @heatherinBC and @MurrayNewlands both friends from Affiliate Summit and great bloggers. 

I tagged along with them as we trekked through a haunted house, and then later with @MurrayNewlands and a few other bloggers from Market Leverage (Dina sp? James SP? and their camera person).  Their the ones doing the interview with some people from the park (right) after the same vampires that had me in their clutches decided that it was too dangerous from a marketing perspective to be interviewed by a couple bus loads of bloggers that the SeaWorld folks had hauled into their own park.  (little irony and lost opportunity there, but its all good).

A little later, we did wander by an area of the park where a couple elephants were eating in the dark.  For almost natural reasons, I found this to be the coolest part of the evening, as I’d never run across an elephant in the dark before, let alone eating in the dark.  That memory will probably stick with me longer than anything else from the night.

By the way, I took almost all of these pictures with my Palm Pre.  My new Kodak that I bought 10 months ago, died last month (after burning my thumb on it when it heated up during the first 3 months and Kodak wouldn’t replace the dangerous and defective camera, Kodak Sucks!)  This is not a review, just me pissed at Kodak for selling me a piece of junk that caused me physical harm and wasted my money.  Kodak has since been added to the list of companies that I will never again do business with.  That list started with AT&T who sucks even more.

My Palm Pre did OK as my primary and only camera, but its only a 3.0 megapixel camera.  It does best in good light, not so great in a Howl-O-Scream darkness . . .

Ultimately, it got late, and I feared I’d be turned into a pumpkin, so I headed back to catch the first bus back.  I was toast from the long drive and just needed some sleep.  The bus took off a little later than I expected and I ended up back in Orlando after midnight.  I hiked across an empty lot between the Renaissance and the Hilton Grand Vacation resort, and crashed.

Early the next morning I tried to get up to help with registration, but couldn’t get out the door that fast after the late night and travel the day before.  I ended up getting to the conference around 9 am instead of 8.

I was very impressed with SeaWorld’s conference facilities.  They didn’t serve any diet soda however, and even though one of the employees snuck me a diet pepsi (major gratitude as I am an addict) they didn’t know that there was a Diet Pepsi machine between the conference area and the main gate, which was about 100 meters away.  Would have given SeaWorld another $40 of my money that weekend if I had known that!

This is where I should have been at 8 am on Friday, helping Heather, Elizabeth and Ashley with registrations.

Unfortunately, I was just wiped and couldn’t get there that early.  I’d had a single beer the night before, and unlike the fine folks that convinced their bus driver to pull off the interstate to make a beer run at a convenience store, only later to puke it up and almost get in a fist fight, I stayed sober.

Below here, you might notice @waynesutton also from North Carolina, who also spoke at IzeaFest moderating what will probably be a famous panel someday called video gems, I believe.

What did I learn This last Weekend?

On the first day of the conference, I was thinking mostly about my own speaking session scheduled for just after lunch on Saturday.  I was distracted from the drive, and distracted by the lack of diet coke.  I wasn’t really on my game, and just couldn’t get into the sessions like I wanted to.

I was able to have some very good conversations with other attendees at the event.  So one of the things I learned is that if you can’t jam with the sessions for what ever reason, don’t feel guilty about spending your time talking to great people outside the conference hall.

I really had some good talks with people like John Raser, Murray Newlands, Warren Whitlock, John Andrews, and many more people.  From my perspective, these types of conversations are invaluable and I’d travel across the country to find and have them any day of the week.

That night (Friday night) I skipped the party at the IceBar and I’m positive that I missed a really good time. Then again if the flickr photos are anything to illuminate the way, I’m probably better off as I had to ride back to North Carolina with my wife…

I guess these are the original types of sponsored tweets . . . The Ice Bar Girls

Back to Business on Saturday

Myself and the other members of my panel on What Advertisers Want (Zena Weist, John Andrews, George Smith, and Joseph Jaffe) buckled down Friday night and had a 2-3 hour conversation about the topic of our panel.

I took notes while we were talking with my Sony device, so I was able to really focus on the conversation.  We were drinking beers while working, and unlike most conferences, I hadn’t spent much time in the days before building up my tolerance to be ready for the event.

I had been working ridiculous 21 hour days the days before the conference, so my reserves really were long long spent.

So by the end of our talk, they were ready for dinner and I was ready to head back to my room and get my questions as moderator of the panel ready.  However after the mile walk back to my room, plus the beer and the lack of any food since lunch, I was dead tired.  I ate a bear claw left over from River Street Sweets in Savannah, set my alarm for 5 am and went to bed around 9:30 that night.

I woke up about 2:30 am that night.  I went out on the veranda with my laptop, listened to my notes and proceeded to draft my introductions and questions.  I worked until about 5:30, took another nap for about 40 minutes, then got up with my wife to go to our Time Share Talk from Hilton.

You see, we got this great rate on our villa through Hilton, but it came with a catch.  We had to go receive a pitch for a time share from Hilton.  Now, we’ve never done that before, and we both thought it might be an interesting life experience.  As it turns out, I do think it could be a good fit for me, as I spend so much time in Vegas, but buying a time share in Orlando as opposed to Vegas did not make sense.

Spending my morning on Saturday listening to a time share speech when I wanted to be at the conference also did not make sense.  Yes we saved some cash, and we did need to save some cash, but in the end, I’d have done it differently.

In that regards, I did get the life lesson I was looking for. 

I got to the conference Saturday around 11:30, about an 1 before my panel.  After everyone broke for lunch, I went up to the podium and began getting set up for my panel doing sound checks with Trevor and rehearsing my questions and notes, meanwhile some of my friends helped with the sound check and had fun goofing off at the same time

I’m glad I did that, because an hour later when things actually kicked off, I had ZERO jitters.  Sometimes (not always but sometimes) I get butterflies when I talk, and its usually just a lack of familiarity with the microphone and my own voice coming out of it for the first time at a conference.  With even just a minute or two standing in front of everyone, I can usually get settled and be completely comfortable and that is what happened before our panel.

From my perspective, our panel was excellent!  I was extremely pleased with the way it went.  I felt like we got the audience engaged.  I polled the audience initially with a number of questions trying to get a sense of where the audience was.  I knew this was not a typical social media audience and it was not a typical Izea audience either.

Those polling questions really helped me get a feel for the audience and hopefully helped the panelists a bit as well.  Once the questions started flying, and the responses and conversation got going, we were off to the races.  About halfway through the questions, I didn’t need my notes any more.  The rehearsing and conversations from the night before kicked in and we were all able to flow well through the conversation.

Zena Weist and John Andrews from the What Advertisers Want Panel at IzeaFest

George Smith and Joseph Jaffe from the What Advertisers Want Panel at IzeaFest

Steve Hall, from Adrants, took this great picture of our panel, but I haven’t had a chance to ask him if it might be cool to share it here yet (and hadn’t seen it on flickr yet to grab the html code).  Steve’s a great guy and I wish I had half his eye as a photographer (ok that’s kind of morbid, but hopefully you understand what I mean, my pictures completely suck compared to his, in fact, I don’t think you can even call mine pictures after you have looked at his.)

Once the questions died down just a bit, I then opened up questions to the audience trying to target bloggers that needed their questions answered the most.  After all this panel was supposed to target What Advertisers wanted from bloggers so that Bloggers could better connect with Advertisers more effectively.

I offered bloggers that asked questions free Artisteer Software to help them design better blog themes and templates.  As an Izea advertiser myself, this WAS one of the things I wanted from bloggers!  I’ve done a great deal of advertising through Izea and nothing shows me that a blogger doesn’t care or isn’t aware enough to act than a blog that displays a generic looking Blogger or WordPress Theme or template.

We got some great questions from bloggers.  The last question came from a person who would later steal the show that day, Tommy Fishback.

Steve Jobs to be Replaced by Tommy Fishback in 2019

Now, I don’t know Tommy, hadn’t met him nor heard of him before this question.  I later learned that Tommy was approximately 13, maybe 12 years old.  I say that not because age matters, nor is it anything I typically care about at all, but for those people that do think that age matters, Tommy’s presence, maturity and intelligence were pretty amazing.

Tommy asked a great question, but later that day, he got up on stage and gave a great 5 minute presentation.

Now, IzeaFest was definitely not short on scandal.  The video gems panel went off with a bit of a rude hitch.  The panelists were both women and as they gave their presentation, the audience began to heckle them via twitter live stream.  As I listened to their responses, they truly did not sound very good.  It seemed like one of those interviews where every response isn’t right and seems to get worse.

I don’t know if the panelists completely realized how their interview seemed to be resonating poorly with the audience, many women in the audience were offended by their responses.  Many men were as well.  Despite the offense felt by the audience, the offense cast across twitter and the world seemed to be relatively rude to me.  I even got up to ask a question of the panelists trying to unlock a more reasonable response from them, but my attempt failed and in fact someone in the twitter stream made a snarky comment that I was hitting on them.

Don’t know the best way to summarize how this went, but basically the panelists sounded like they were saying the only way to become YouTube famous was to be cute girls.

That did not go over well with many people in the audience, feminist minded attendees like myself felt that this discredited many women and men for that matter.  Some female attendees seemed to be offended by the requirement of youth and cuteness as well.  Not all bloggers are young, cute females, just a fact ( I sure am not! )

I basically asked them with my question, if now that they had achieved more with their internet shows, if they might look to expand their business and hire more people to support their efforts.  I mentioned that Rocket Boom used to have the business model to hire a cute female spokes person for their tech shows 3 years ago, and maybe they could turn that business model around and hire their supporting staff for their show as opposed to being hired themselves.

This back fired on me on two levels:  First, one of the panelists apparently had worked for Rocket Boom and might still have a relationship with them,  Old business model apparently still thriving.  Second, my question was misinterpreted like I, as a middle aged guy, was looking to get hired by one of these young women, self described as ‘cute’.

Lesson Learned – If someone Self Destructs on Stage, the kindest thing you can do is to Just let them GET OFF STAGE as fast as possible! Once one of these things goes south, its just doomed to continue the misunderstanding.

Now, the next day, one of those panelists came back and attempted to heal the damage to her reputation.  Personally, I thought that took some real guts and tweeted that out.  It got quite a few retweets and I was glad to see that some of my fellow attendees also had some of the good stuff flowing through their veins.

Unfortunately, she followed Tommy Fishback, who even at 13 or so had so much damned charisma that her powerpoint presentation replete with long text written slides, just fell as flat as a freshman in a 101 speech class speaking about why its important to register to vote in congressional elections or something.  It was a cold speech, and even thought the content of the speech did help show that she did have some intelligence and substance her delivery followed by Tommy’s performance made for a bad contrast.

Other Cool Stuff

SeaWorld really put on a great conference with Izea.  It was a cobranded event and I think both companies really won.  SeaWorld is relatively new to social media and you could tell they are going through a learning phase.  They did a lot of things very well, but they could have rethought a few things:

• Like letting bloggers take more pictures or do video interviews at Busch Gardens
• SeaWorld put on a presentation on day 1 about their social media efforts.  This felt like what I advise all my clients to never do.  We were eating lunch and they were essentially giving us a marketing pitch, replete with some examples of ads.  I always tell my customers that a blog is like taking a client to lunch.  You don’t take a client to lunch and then hand them some marketing brochures and a press release and tell them to read it, you get to know them and talk to them.  I think they should have taken a page out of Liz Straus’ SobCon book and instead, set up a scenario of what they have done so far to the audience and then asked the audience to talk over the situations and see if there was a better way and then have a couple tables in the audience come up and talk about their suggestions for SeaWorld.  A dialogue with bloggers would have done wonders to engage people on many levels.
• SeaWorld did have a great little stunt with a Sea Lion (I think).  They tried to bring him up on stage, but he had a little stage fright and took off in the other direction.
• 

One of the cool people I met at this conference was John Raser, a pro golfer who is also a blogger.  John had apparently been growing his hair out to make a donation to Locks of Love and had his hair shaved at the end of IzeaFest.

John, also nominated me for coolest shoes at IzeaFest.  I was wearing my Vibram Five Finger Shoes and the shoes really were conversation starters with lots and lots of people.  They aren’t as cool as the new VFF’s coming out sometime this month (black leather made for hiking), but they got people talking.  I’m not shy when it comes to conversing with people, but I’m not always the best person to 1) introduce myself to a stranger and then 2) launch into that conversation.  The shoes definitely helped.

Towards the end of Saturday, I also met Michael Daoud, the man behind xShot, those great hand held monopod camera holders that have been enabling me to take better pictures (when my camera still lived) shooting over the heads of crowds, coming up and over from weird, but cool angles and getting great pictures of myself and anyone I might be standing next to.

Drew from The BenSpark introduced me to XShot’s last year at BlogWorld, but this was the first time I had a chance to meet and talk with Michael.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to talk with everyone, like my old friend Colleen, whom I’ve known since 2006 online and 2007 in person. I ran into her briefly at Howl-O-Scream right about the time I was racing back to catch an early bus. I almost bought a SeaWorld ticket off of her, but my goofy schedule made that impractical. That raised another lesson learned, don’t squander a chance to catch up with an old friend, just because you are racing to get on a bus. The dumb bus is probably not going to leave on time anyway!

Finally, after IzeaFest was over, I was ready to go out and play a little bit.  Saturday night’s event was a dueling piano bar called Howl At the Moon.  Everyone there was pretty tired, but ready to have a stress free good time as well.

I didn’t drink a lot as I had driven there in the vanster, but I had a great time hanging out with everyone and had some really good conversations with quite a few people that evening.  I didn’t take as many pictures as I should have, nor would have had I had a real camera, but I got a couple ‘good’ shots in that they captured some quick snaps of people that made the night fun and interesting, even if my camera quality didn’t due anyone justice visually.

Now, I’m still pondering what I’ve learned.  I was just at the Birmingham WordCamp and still soaking that in as well.  Next week I’m going to BlogWorld and speaking at WordCamp Las Vegas within BlogWorld.  I may not have a chance to really reflect until sometime after that.

But as I roamed through the blogosphere today, here are some things that other bloggers picked up on, and these sentiments do resonate with me as well.

Chris Heuer ~ In short, and putting it bluntly, the science of marketing has for too long been focused on manipulation, not value creation.

brettbum ~ I really like the emphasis Chris makes on value creation, I’d call this improving the quality of content or media or something, but its a different perspective and one I think I can relate to sincerely, just need to grok the perspective a little more.

Michael Quale ~ Panel discussion with @brettbum moderating. A marketing session for blogger’s. Guess what? A-listers are snobby! yeah no kidding?

brettbum ~ note toself, try to avoid the mister obvious conversations on a panel.  One of my concerns going into the panel was that I was the only advertiser on the stage that had advertised with Izea.  That said, I DID think that the perspective of the panelists was extremely important as they represented contact with major brands and campaigns that had not YET used Izea.  For Izea or bloggers in general to field future business deals with major brands, the panels perspective was invaluable.  I hope I helped bring just a little of that out. 

brettbum ~ Susan from the House of Blue reminded me that Kodak camera’s may not suck completely as she was able to mobile post with hers, while my regular blogging activities were not all that frequent, not counting my utterli posts.

Robin Eads ~ Don’t take on more than you can handle, learn how to say no

brettbum~ phwew! I wish I could say no easier and faster.  Too often I hem and haw when I really want to say no, then i sound like I’m complaining, when I really should just say no.!

Thomas Thorspecken ~ (speaking about Aaron Brazell’s keynote) He said some bloggers have a Rock-star mentality that attracts attention for a short span but a true influencer gets attention for the long term….  Someone who is an influencer is hungry all the time they always want to learn more.

brettbum ~ on one level this resonates a little, but I harbor a fear that it sounds good to me, because I am always hungry to learn more, but I’m not sure that truly makes a person an influencer.  This is one of those ’sounds good’ type of things for sure, but not so certain that there is REAL truth in the statement.  Or to put it differently, I’d like to believe this is true and not just something that gets past my Pander Blocker.

David Isley ~ This business is NOT complicated. The only secret there is is TAKING ACTION.

brettbum ~ I would tend to agree with this, and offer it as advice to anyone.  Actually, I offer it as advice to almost everyone.  That said, we do have to be careful, because there ARE (surprisingly maybe to some) a large number of people that get completely lost and baffled in the application of social media, even blogging.  I’ve seen thousands of people get mired down in details and problems that seem very simple, but they are still stuck and need help getting out.  Even though this seems simple, it doesn’t jive for everyone.  If I could figure out WHY it doesn’t work easily for everyone, well then, I’d be a guru for sure.

brettbum ~ I just liked this post from Greg from TellingDad

brettbum ~ In awe of Laurie from La Vie de Laurie, I think she even went to Disney too!  no idea where I could have found that kind of energy.

Technosailor himself ~ Transparency is absolutely essential, but transparency only makes it easier to see inside. You have to be transparent to sell services, business and trust. However, if the content of your character sucks, then transparency only ensures that the world will see it. Transparency solves no problems if you suck as a person or your product sucks because it just does. It may be better to worry about your DNA then worry about making sure the world can see it. Just saying.

brettbum ~ In general, I like the way Aaron (@technosailor ) puts this.  The comments about ‘being real’ strike a hollow chord in me.  Partly because of the verb ‘to be’, which is just non-sense, but I do agree that there has to be something inside.  Short of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, it is almost impossible for a blogger to be about nothing and still be a good blogger.  (probably why this blog here should have never been, and why my real passions take place elsewhere, this site is truly for my own personal relfections and I don’t really care if people read my ‘diary’ as I’m transparent to a fault.

Addendum – Yes this blog article needed an addendum like I need a hole in the head, but it just reminds me as I proof this article that I really need to redesign my own blog.  Its over a year since the last design and the blockquote css style is driving me nutty.

Hey everyone, I’ve been a little faded on this blog for the last month.  Frankly, the month has been a complete bear! (no excuse).  I need to catch up on a whole slew of things, and rather than publish 5 or 6 blog articles all at once, I’m going to roll them all together in one big fat medley of blogging fun that I used to call house cleaning or a chore when I was a kid.

Guess that’s maybe the wrong word as I don’t typically see or think of blogging as a chore.  But after the last month, its been difficult to stay focused on blogging.  It kind of started right after Affiliate Summit in early August.  I got back home, slept all night, woke up and found out that my twitter account was suspended ( @brettbum ).

Disclosure: I did use the new SponsoredTweets system around this time, but do not feel that it was the reason behind the suspension.  I only made 2 tweets with it (I don’t really get any offers on the system or I would use it more.  Probably doesn’t have anything to do with this article that I wrote either Social Media Douche Bags Agree, Its Cool to ‘Say’ Sponsored Tweets Suck – White Paper

Now, in general, I’m more of a Facebook person than a twitter person.  Facebook just suits me better for relationships with people.  Twitter is good for a number of things imho, especially conferences or events, but I’m a reluctant twitter person.  It probably comes across in my tweets a bit.

Anyway, it wasn’t the end of the world when my twitter account was suspended, just very annoying, mostly because it was suspended for NO REASON.  Its back up now after a full review, and I’ve never been told why it was suspended in the first place.

Whatever, sometimes the fail whale shows up on your screen and sometimes the fail whale comes up underneath of you, bites you on the ass and flips you around like a seal.

Did I mention I’m going to SeaWorld next month?

So I got my twitter account back up after it was down for almost two weeks.  I had to setup a new twitter account in the meant time @brettbumeter which was a nice additional account that I don’t really need.

But this isn’t about how stupid twitter can be.  The point is that this was kind of the beginning of my bad / goofy month. (Rant Continues)

I also started having issues with my VPS (virtual private server).  I pay about $50 per month for a virtually dedicated amount of server space.  I have about 39 websites on this server, 30 of them are mine, and the others are friends, family and a couple clients that have very small websites on my server as well.

Well, the damn thing was upgraded from an old machine to a new one in July, and since then the CPU has been running super super super hot.  My host, InmotionHosting whom I normally love, can’t give me any details as to what is causing it and keep telling me that I need to switch to a $200 per month plan. 

Can’t Afford it

Now, I know quite a bit about optimizing sites for server performance.  I’ve been up one side and down the other on my sites improving everything under the sun, robots.txt, cache plugins, db cache plugikns, widget cache plugins, and much much more, but the thing still runs hot, and my traffic is not substantial (if it were, then I could afford the upgrade).

What does a hot CPU have to do with a hill of beans, IzeaFest or Michael Jackson for that matter?

I’m getting there.  For those of you that know me, I’m not typically shy with words, nor do I use 2 words when 200 are readily available.

The thing is all this futzing with re-optimizing 39 sites has been a serious time distraction, typically when I don’t have any time.

Add to that, my friends at Bank of America, some of the nicest people to talk to on the phone when they are proceeding to bury your ass in the ground, decided that I would be much happier and financially stable if they raised my credit card rates (for no reason) from 5% to 30%.

Can’t Afford it

Now all year long, my business has been growing like crazy and I’ve been keeping up with Bank of America, but then August hit.  In August several of my regular customers experienced financial problems with their customers and the fire hose of income that I had been receiving turned into a trickle down effect of pennies.

So through August, I’ve been scrambling to find new/additional customers.  Looking back from September, I’ve done pretty well, but it takes time to find a new customer and turn them into a paying customer, and I’m just getting to that last part.

Along the way, I almost worked out a job with the Las Vegas Hilton.  Thought it had some good potential, and then the Hilton just never responded.    That was unfortunate both financially, but because I could have helped them a great deal, and now I’m watching them continue to struggle.

Been There Seen That Before

I have wrapped up a couple nice projects for friends of mine that I met at the Podcast Expo and later BlogWorlds.

We have the upgrade and consolidation of sites for Mike McAllen’s events and media company just about finished over at Grass Shack Events & Media.

Similarly, Paolo & Francesca Tosolini hired me to upgrade Francesca’s Interior Design Website at CreatingInteriors.com.

I really liked the way both projects turned out.  Both websites received some serious functional improvements and great design improvements as well. 

From a business perspective however, these were July projects and as things went, some of the back and forth exchanges of information necessary to complete the projects delayed them a bit (mostly vacation and travel situations between everyone involved).

So going into August, the projects were just being finished, and I couldn’t hold them up as shiny new examples of my work either to help land new projects. 

And don’t forget while I’m working on these projects my hosting company goes into fits every other week….

And the last IzeaFest Ticket Winner IS…..

That brings me to IzeaFest.  I ran a contest give away my last IzeaFest Ticket. The drawing was scheduled for September 3, but I’m just doing it now.  The entrance options were shut down on the third.  I’ve been backlogged as I chase down problems, respond to Bank of America which wants to bury me, and trying to chase down new business so that I can keep myself out of a Bank of America coffin.

Its no excuse for being late, but sometimes life happens.  It did for me, and well here is the winner !

The winner of the Final #Izeafest ticket is . . . . . . . Rob Babiak @pbandsdad www.lookwhatmomfound.com Congrats Rob!

Rob really went the extra mile in entering this contest.  He tweeted, he blogged, he asked questions, he even designed a WordPress Theme from scratch to earn 100 Entries in the contest and 1 of those entries from the Theme batch of 100, earned him the prize!

Rob already won a ticket, so we are re-running the drawing with existing entries – stay posted for a few minutes . .

Toni Snearly is the Follow Up Winner of the last IzeaFest Ticket!

You can follow Toni @ItsToni or read her blog at Cheapomcfrugalpants.com.

I’m moderating the Advertising Panel for What an Advertiser Wants at IzeaFest.  As I write this, I need to get a pre-interview questionaire out to the other advertisers, then set up a conference call with them so that we can kind of meet and greet on the phone.  I’ve reached out to them a few months back already, but only got a couple responses then.  So need to lock things down before the big event in October.  In reality, I’ve been preparing for this for a year already, Just need to put the finishing touches on it.

I actually prepaid for my own trip to IzeaFest back in March.  Its a good damned thing I did that too, because right now, I don’t have the spare money to travel thanks to BoA.  They felt that I could pay my bills and debt easier if they charged me an extra $1000 per month in interest, instead of paying down principle with that $1k or investing it in my business to grow the business, earn more and then pay them.

BoA is not my favorite group of people right now.  Its not all their fault by a long shot, but it is largely their fault.

WordCamp Birmingham A week from Today

Next Friday, I’m travelling(6 hour drive)  to Birmingham for the second time in my life to attend WordCamp Birmingham for the second time in my life. 

It was a great event last year with about 120 people.  They have over double that this year and will probably hit 250 – 300 people before they cap it off this coming Tuesday. If you haven’t registered, do so now.  They shut down registration on Tuesday to make sure that the t-shirt orders and meals will get ordered for the right number of people.

I’m speaking at this event again, but this year I’m covering how to get started in WordPress Theme Design.  I’ve been doing this all summer at a number of events including the Raleigh Durham WordCamp and Barcamp Chattanooga.  I’ve got a speaking request in for Las Vegas WordCamp at BlogWorld, but I hear that Jim and Rick at Blogworld are making the speaker decisions, and for whatever reason they never return my calls even though I’ve sent them lots of new business over the last couple years.  I don’t get that, but assume they are busy or something, too busy to respond.  They are always very enthusiastic and friendly when ever I see them at events, but as soon as the events are over, the wall of silence goes up. 

Save 20% NOW on BlogWorld and New Media Expo 2009 registration with the code "BWESEP20"

Guess that’s social media for you. 

Everyone is happy to exchange asinine 140 character messages back and forth with you, but try and have a real conversation (even when you are sending them money) and nothing, they don’t have time to much tweeting to do, or something.  I’m not singling out the Blogworld guys on this, it seems to be happening everywhere.  And hay, guess what, I’m behind on crap too!

Holy Shit Just Got an Amazing Comment on one of My Articles!

No idea what I was just talking about, but I just got an email notification about a comment on one of my articles (Michael Jackson segue (pronounced segway never wrote that word before)).

Here’s the quote

Deb, I can assure you, the songs are not trash. It was always policy at Motown to record a multitude of songs on any given artist. Just because these songs didn’t see the light of day back then has nothing to do with the quality of the material. One song I have listened to is an out and out SMASH.

WOW!

You may have no idea what that comment is about, so I’ll fill you in.  It was made by Russ Terrana.  Russ worked for Motown for over 20 years and was the recording engineer/mixer for everyone from Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Isaac Hayes, even Whitney Houston (different label) and much much more.

He’s mixed 37 platinum albums, 89 number 1 hits and over 300 songs that hit the top 100 billboard charts.

What the Hell is he Talking About?

Russ is talking about the LOST MICHAEL JACKSON SONGS DISCOVERED IN THE MOTOWN VAULTS OWNED BY UNIVERSAL.

Russ is mixing down these lost tapes and UMG (universal music group) is going to release these long lost songs in November.

NO ONE has ever heard these songs outside of the people that were in the studios with Michael Jackson back in the seventies! 

If Russ says there is a SMASH hit, There’s going to be a SMASH Michael Jackson Hit!

Guess what, you are reading it from the source and getting it from me first, because my friend Joe Klein and I broke this story.  Joe’s been friends with Russ for years and years and years.

So that kind of gets me around to the writing I’ve been doing the last couple weeks.  We published this great story Monday, but it has been buried in Google News a bit because of the Kanye West Jackass thing on the VMA’s.  Everyone is talking about Kanye West acting the ass, and they’ve missed the story about the discovery of NEW MICHAEL JACKSON HITS coming out in November. 

Guess that’s social media for you. 

That’s the thing about Social Media, it gets the buzz out about what the crowd is talking about, but if the crowd is talking about stupid shit, then the crowd misses the important or interesting stuff.

Is it OK to Blog About This?

That circles back actually to the last thing I wanted to talk about.  When we started looking at this Michael Jackson story, my friend Joe asked his friend Russ if it would be OK to blog about this project that Russ was working on, Mixing the original master recordings of Michael Jackson songs for a future release (imagine finding high quality lost recordings from Elvis at his prime 3 months after his death that had never been released!)

Now, Russ said yes, and Joe asked him again a couple more times.  Just wanted to make sure, because Russ and Joe are friends and the last thing Joe wanted to do was blog about something and maybe get Russ into a bad spot.

All seemed cool, but then we started hearing yesterday (4 days after the article was out in the world and on Google News) that UMG might not be so happy.  So we had some follow up articles that we were going to publish yesterday that we are now sitting on.

As a blogger, people usually just publish every damned thing and worry about the consequences later.  Maybe Joe and I are bad bloggers, but we didn’t want to do that type of thing.  Its no good screwing over a friend just to get some extra attention for your blog, even if that extra attention drives your traffic through the roof and maybe helps your profile increase so that you can earn a little more and fend off the Bank of America Nazi’s sending you robo-collection-calls (what’s up with that anyway?  I was a credit manager for years, and the idea of using robo calls for collections is the dumbest thing I’ve experienced this month, not counting the contractors that showed up at 1 am to work on my neighbors floor).

So if you are thinking about dropping a bombshell of an article, think twice about the collateral damage that might shake out.  We took every precaution, and even then there was some second guessing.  If I were TMZ (talked to them recently) or Matt Drudge (old school), the model would be to drop this story and damn the consequences.  But that’s not my style, and maybe that will improve my karma or maybe it will kill my credit, but at least I will sleep easy during the daylight.

Hi my name is Brett Bumeter, I’m a blogger, not a vampire, and I work late late at night.