I’ve moved into Sparks II and I think I prefer this apartment’s layout and space to that of any other place where I’ve resided since coming back from Atlanta, considering the cost. It’s fairly cheap townhome-style living, meaning that the bedrooms are all located upstairs on the second floor with the main kitchen and living/dining area located downstairs. I enjoy the privacy afforded by such a design.

In other news, I’m planning on launching another site, this one with a focus on user-generated content. Stay tuned for more information.

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate;

I am the captain of my soul.

———-

I love this poem. It inspires and strengthens me. Finally, a quote from Elbert Hubbard:

“God will not look over you for medals, degrees, or diplomas, but for scars.”

Until next time!

What is friendrot? Friendrot is when you notice a gradual decline in your number of facebook friends. Now for many people, this isn’t a big deal, but I freely admit that I get paranoid and wonder WHO removed me from their friendlist. I typically will search my list of friends frantically to see if I can catch who’s missing, but I never seem to be able to figure out who it is. You’d think it’d be the people that you don’t really know and wonder why you have on your friend list, but NooOOoOo… that useless trash is content to remain, cluttering the view of the rest of your social network (until you delete them).

While I am aware that my glittering social commentary and magnetic personality will go largely unnoticed by the public as a whole, I was never aware that people would actually REMOVE me as a friend!

Many aspects of life are disturbing; being able to visibly observe a decline in your social influence is one of them.

The answer, of course, is to work like a madman to find more people that you know and add them to your friendlist in a frenzied attempt to counteract the diabolic decaying influence of friendrot.

Which is exactly what I’m doing.

It’s an interesting time to be me… between outrageous traffic tickets, the approaching launch of the book I co-authored with my parents, and the return to classes at BYU on the horizon (with the associated hassle of financial aid); it is safe to say that I am a little anxious.

Perhaps in part to my depression, my traditional response to anxiety has been to shut down and avoid thinking about it much. While I admit I’ve been doing a little of that lately, I think I’m doing a pretty good job at keeping a handle on things right now.

That’s all for now.

After discussing this briefly with my boss and fellow search engine marketer, In my opinion the changes of the internet are good for the talented author, as you can in theory remove the middleman (the publisher) from the equation.

There are different approaches to how a talented author could make money without a publisher:

1.) Writing free content which is backed by ads, in which case the primary revenue source would be advertising.

2.) Writing premium content which you charge users to buy, such as ebooks, site membership, and so forth.

3.) A combination of the above two, “freemium” content.

I don’t know what the future of traditional books is, but the enterprising author can, with a little creativity and ingenuity, conceivably make more money from the internet than they could through conventional book sales.

I’m waiting until I get the computer back before passing final judgment on the matter. If they can fix the keyboard and get it back to me in a speedy fashion, then it will be an accolade for Dell’s service. If the problem continues after I get it back…

Anyhow. That’s your update from the life of Greg Vandagriff for now.

In a nutshell: I love it. The only complaint I have is the time that it took for me to get it!

While I admit that I am fairly easy to please, I must say that I couldn’t have been happier with my purchase. It’s fast, quiet, and runs all of my applications easily. The cooling is more than adequate, I am able to go for long periods of time with the Vostro sitting comfortably on my lap and I have no complaint.

It’s only available in black, which may be a turnoff to some, but I happen to be quite fond of the color, so it’s a non-issue; after all, true excellence does not draw attention to itself.

I definitely got my money’s worth from this purchase; I can find nothing else in the current laptop market that would match the sheer value that I got from my hard-earned cash.

In short: Two thumbs up.

By far the most interesting portion of the book was delving into the economics of a Chicago crack gang; from the payroll to the board of directors to the ramifications of gang warfare, the entire chapter was one interesting read. Other interesting sections regarded debunking the numerous pseudo-explanations for the drop in crime in the mid-90’s, contrary to what experts were predicting

Overall, I’d say that this is a book worth reading.

I did take into account, however, the fact that my traffic started falling shortly after I changed the layout on my website. It turns out that this might have been, from the perspective of pure profits, a bad move. Not that changing the layout itself was a poor decision, I think everyone involved would find the new layout more usable than the old one, it was a combination of changing the layout without changing the sitemap that Google was accessing. After checking in with Google’s webmaster tools, I think I found the problem: Google was trying to crawl my page based on the old sitemap and as a result was finding hundreds of imaginary dead links. It generated over 1,000 crawl errors before I was able to submit a more up-to-date sitemap.

I think these crawl errors are the culprit for why my site suddenly is performing so poorly; Google must think that my site is one big puddle of linkrot! I can only hope that the damage to my site’s SERPs isn’t irreversible and that it will return to its former position in a few days. This assumes that the hit to my site’s traffic is, in fact, due to the sitemap crawl errors and that the two weren’t just coincidentally occurring at the same time.