My Geek Notes

So, I’ve been playing around with blogging lately as a way to make money.

On my personal blog the other day, I decided to write an article about eliminating client phone calls and trimming time out of the day. The article included a review of a book I’ve read recently. “4-Hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferris.

It’s a great book and I’ve had a ton of success applying its principles which I explain in detail on the post on my site.

As an expiriment, I signed up for an Amazon Associates account, and linked the image of the book and the title to the corresponding title page at Amazon.com. Embedded in the link was my associate id, so on the chance that someone clicked through and made a purchase, I’d get a small commission.

Well, the truth of the matter is that I didn’t expect to make a cent. My blog isn’t read by many people - it’s brand new and at the time only had three posts.

Imagine my surprise when, today, I logged into my Amazon account to create a new link for another product (”The Picture of Dorian Grey” by Oscar Wilde) and found out that I’d made some money.

It turned out that 32 different people had clicked through on the link I’d provided and a whopping 3 of them bought the dadgum book.

If I sell just 4 more books, my commission goes up from 4 to 6%, and, here’s the best part - I can choose to get paid in Amazon gift certificates!

10 months ago, as my wife and newly-born son prepared for release from the hospital, I sat with them through several new-parent orientatons.

Apparently, you’re supposed to feed a baby on a schedule and if they haven’t pooped for a week, you’re supposed to call the pedatrician. Aside from the terror I experienced upon learning that a human being could actually go for a week with no new poop, I was overwhelmed by the strictly engineered regiment being perscribed to us.

All along, I’d thought that you just played with the baby. If it ever cried, you checked to see if it needed a diaper or if it was cold, and if it was neither of those things, you fed it because it must be hungry. Apparently, I was wrong.

We left the hospital and the clock started . . . “Honey, what time are we supposed to feed him? How much time is supposed to pass between each nap?” The panic set in.

Fortunately, we all survived the first week of his life. He pooped on schedule, slept on schedule, ate on schedule. Everything was much better than it had seemed.

I found a product online this morning, however, that would have helped tremendously with keeping to baby’s schedule. It’s called an ITZBEEN™ (pronounced “it’s been”- as in it’s been two hours since a diaper change). This thing was invented by a guy named Greg Sheldon, an engineer-turned-father who must’ve felt the same way I did when he had his first baby.

When Sheldon’s son was three months old, he decided to put his engineering career on hold to be more involved with the baby. Apparently, it wasn’t long before his inventive nature had him looking for ways to make the job of parenting a little easier.

Sheldon created a simple, cell phone size device with timers that allowed he and his wife to recall how long ago they changed a diaper, fed the baby, put the baby down to sleep, or gave the baby medication. Whenever they performed a task, like changing a diaper, they simply pressed the appropriate button; that timer would reset to zero and start counting up again.

Anyhow, he felt his timer was useful, so he filed for a patent and turned it into a real product. Now he’s got it in over 65 stores across the U.S., Canada, Australia, Panama, and the Internet.

Add the ITZBEEN™ to your list of baby gifts for first-time parents. They have no idea how much they need it.

Could it be that Joey Skaggs, prankster extrordinaire, is at it again? The media tease, responsible for fooling reporters each year with fake press releases touting New York City’s Annual April Fools’ Day Parade (now in its 22nd year) has outdone himself.

This week, Skaggs announced the launch of a new Web site, The Art of the Prank.

The site will reportedly feature “submissions from many known and not so known pranksters, artists, performers, activists and writers,” and is scheduled to launch on April 1, 2007.

If the site, located at www.pranks.com, is legitimate, it will “provide one stop shopping for anyone interested in mounting an insurrection, over-throwing a government, crashing a stock market, creating global chaos, growing hair, losing weight or keeping their horny dog satisfied. It will provide a sure way to get the federal government to tap your phone line . . .” Skaggs said in a PRWeb press release earlier this week.

The brilliance of the whole thing is that Skaggs has repeatedly lied to the media in the past. It will be impossible for respectable editors to take him seriously about such an undertaking.

Could this one be legitimate? Personally, I’d love to see something like this online, but my guess is that it’s not a real claim. I hope I’m wrong, though, because if I am, he’ll launch what would be destined to be a top-5,000 Internet destination and the media will have missed it.

It would be, without a doubt, the biggest reverse-marketing hoax of all time.