Jim Mohr Update 10-31-09

I know that my thousands of visitors have been wondering what I have been up to in the last week. Well, you may think I have been slacking, but there are a lot of things going on in webmaster world.

The first thing I have accomplished is, as of today, I have lost 18 pounds. I started a diet September 1, 2009. There were not really any health problems that sparked me to get with it other than my knee, which has been diagnosed as a "bone bruise". Maybe the weight loss will take a bit of stress off the knee. I started out at a portly 226.2, and just cutting out a few things like the Chinese Buffet and Pizza, in 2 months the weight has been slowly coming off. I am shooting for around 195, or at least less than 200 pounds.

Ok, enough with the fat stuff and on to webmaster land. The most fun thing of all I have been working on is opening an online T-shirt store at Spreadsirt.com. It is a free T-shirt designing website that lets anyone open an online apparel store. They have a set price for their merchandise, and you add a couple dollars markup profit that you get to keep. They do all the printing and shipping. I don't know if it will pan out to make any money, but I have always been a bit off-center, and this is a great way to display some of my half witted sarcastic humor. You can see my (caution; rated PG) online T-shirt store at http://doublex.spreadshirt.com/.

I was also offered a flat-fee referral bounty for sending people that want to build a free website to WebStarts.com. I cannot disclose the exact amount, but they used to pay just if someone upgraded from a free website to a paid site. The deal was I had to promote them a bit heavier from my website http://buildfree.org/, which is right now #5 in a Google search for "build a free website". All I can say is that after moving them up the referral list, it looks like it will pan out to be about $1000 a month! That will come in handy since Microsoft fired all it's referral affiliates in July of 2009. (that was like a $1500 a month pay cut!)

I have also updated the "Random Game Widget" to include over 400 games! Just when I had my system smoothed out BigFishGames, removed around 100 games from their online game library. I had to go through and remove the games manually from the script. Here it is again below;

I can track the traffic to the Random Game Widget, but it doesn't seem to have made a big difference in revenue. Sometimes that is how it is for webmaster ideas, you may spend a hundred hours doing something that seems brilliant. Then you may or may not see results. What I need is 100's of people to put the widget on their websites and blogs and it can hopefully pyramid into the positive. I built a page promoting the Random Game Widget HERE.

On the lighter side, I am updating the Ipod (and Dell Mp3 player) to include a few new songs. I like to burn a CD with my newest songs, then upload them to the computer again so I don't have to deal with monthly fees and licensing. I went through tat and all I have to say is Yahoo sucks!

Thanks to my brother Jerry, I have quite an eclectic music library and I added the following songs:

• "Hey There Delilah", and "1, 2, 3, 4" from the "Big Bad World" CD (Plain White T's)
• "(Stuck In) Indianapolis" from the "24 Hours A Day" CD (The Bottle Rockets) also worth noting on this CD is "When I Was Dumb", but I already had it.
• "Pretty (Ugly Before)" from the "Basement On The Hill" CD (Elliot Smith)
• "Lookin' For A Job" from the "The Devil You Know" CD (Todd Snider)
• "Around The Bend" from the "Fruit" CD (The Asteroids Galaxy Tour)
• "Losin' You" from the "Honey From The Tombs" CD (Amy Millan)
• "Too Much Love" from the "Best Of Bread" CD (Bread)
• "1959" and "I Wish I Could Have Been There" from the "Anthology" CD (John Anderson"
• "Nine Million Bicycles" from the "Piece By Piece" CD (Katie Melua)
• "Virginia, No One Can Warn You" from the "Bramble Rose" CD (Tift Merritt)
• "I'm Just A Girl" and "Don't Speak" from the "The Singles 1992-2003" (No Doubt)
• "Keep Your Hands To Yourself" and "Battleship Chains" from the "Georgia Satellites" CD (Georgia Satellites)

Some of these I had before with my Yahoo Music Subscription (did mention they suck?), but all of a sudden I couldn't log in, and the worthless tech support couldn't help. In 30 days all the the songs' licensing ran out and all the songs on my mp3 player quit playing.

Let's just say now "If you can stream it, you can record it"

Optical Illusion Photographs

Here are a few of my favorite optical illusion photos.

Chinese Fortune Cookie Fortune

We had Chinese takeout today and my wife's fortune cookie fortune read as follows:Am I missing something?

Extreme Trampoline Skills

Extreme trampoline skills

Loituma - Ievan Polkka

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Ron Mohr Named 2009 PBA Senior Tour Player of the Year.

It is finally official. Ron Mohr has been named the 2009 PBA Senior Tour Player of the Year! The announcement has been a long time coming, with everyone speculating that Ron Mohr would come out on top, but now it is in the books.

An article newly posted on PBA.com, features Ron and other award recipients. You can read it in it's entirety HERE.

----------------- taken from PBA.com ---------------------
Ron Mohr, a 53-year old second year Senior Tour member, won the PBA Jackson, Michigan Senior Open and PBA Dayton, Ohio Senior Open, kicking off the 2009 season with his first two titles in back-to-back weeks. Ron won his third title in the Senior Dick Weber Open in Lansing, Michigan, where he defeated four-time defending Senior Player of the Year Tom Baker, 232-175, in the title match.

In 12 Senior Tour events, Mohr cashed in all 12, advanced to match play 11 times and he had five top five finishes. Ron was runner-up in the 2009 Senior Tour earnings race to Wayne Webb by only $250 with his $41,600 total, and he led the full-time touring seniors in average at 223.14.

“I don’t know if it’s a surprise to get the news, but it’s still a shock,” Mohr said. “You hope things will turn out this way, but you never know. After my first year, I realized I could be competitive, but it’s a major step to win a title and then to win more than once is surreal. To go on to win Player of the Year is beyond anything a guy living in Alaska could ever imagine.

“I think it would be easy to accept this, say it has been a great year, and move on,” he added. “But I’m looking for ways to get better. Tom Baker won this honor four years in a row. I’m going to try to get better if I have any hope of doing something like that. And with Walter Ray (Williams Jr.) coming out on the Senior Tour in 2010, even for a few events, we’ll all have our work cut out for us next year.”
------------------ end PBA.com excerpt --------------------

So congratulations to Ron Mohr, and as I told him, it was a well deserved culmination of a year of hard work. Very competitive bowling, rigorous travel and being away from Linda for long stretches has finally paid off with a dream come true.

The Second Wave Of The Repression..

Yes I am coining a new term here; repression. We have no idea if we are going through (or went through) a recession or a depression, hence the term. It also fits because until we actually get a straight story from someone we can trust, we are holding back, afraid to let loose of our pocketbook filled with investment funds dying to get back into the market.

However that has really nothing to do with what I want to rant about today. I am concerned with the "second wave". The US was based on production jobs. We were the country of manual labor with a workforce that got things done. Then came Nafta, Safta and Afta all is said and done, we are in a heap of trouble.

What scares me is the unemployment figures. The statistics can be skewed to appear as we are coming out of our repression. There are still a buttload of people filing for unemployment every month, just a few less than last month? Is that a good sign? I have no idea, but I have noticed and experienced a trend in the workplace that is alarming.

The system used to be, in any career that involved long term manual labor, as you got older and got more years in at a job, you graduated to a job that was less labor intensive. You had gained the knowledge that made you the "teacher". You made sure things were done correctly, helped out with the hard labor when needed, but generally you ran the equipment, drove the truck or ran the forklift. You WERE the training program for the new hires, the young kids that could break their back earning their way to top of the hill.

With the latest breakdown of this system, layoffs cut deep into the workforce. For factories to stay open, or for municipalities to stay solvent, they had to cut deep into the employee pool. People with up to 10 - 15 years seniority were given notice, leaving a lot of old folk to carry the load. This has a 2 part repercussion that will lead to the second wave. Part 1 is that these old folk like me are pushing 50 and are having to do the work a 20 year old could be doing. I am not saying it cannot be done, but the employee roster is now cut in half, so there is a lot of slack that needs to be picked up. And with 10 or so years to go to make it to retirement, this causes a problem for the employer as well as the employee. The second wave begins with much of the remaining work force off work due to job injury making insurance costs higher and an even smaller work force.

This is not my biggest concern though. The second wave will also be the end of the workplace as we know it. Established in the 1930's in factories right here in the USA, the teacher / student relationship is dying. There was no better instructor on the floor than someone who has been doing the job, and doing it well. This was the best thing that ever happened for an employer. Most supervisors and department heads cannot do the job as well as a seasoned employee ,and to have the best teacher available, free of charge, is what kept the train on the tracks.

Except now there are no students. The tradition that my grandfather learned at the gas company, and the tradition that my dad learned at International Harvester, is dying with me. There is no one to pass on our knowledge to. This is the end result of the second wave...

Honor Thy Father....

The Law Gone Awry - Ephedrine as an illegal drug*

I just saw a news story about an elderly woman who was arrested in Indianapolis for buying too much cold medicine containing the ingredient ephedrine. She bought Mucinex-D when she and her husband came down with a cold. Then 3-4 days later, she bought a cold relief medicine for her daughter that did not live at home. She was then arrested a day or so later. The prosecutor said that "ignorance of the law is no excuse". Who would have thought that just buying 2 boxes of cold related pills would get you arrested in Indiana.

I understand that ephedrine is an ingredient in the illegal drug "meth" (Methamphetamine), and there have been some overdoses by football players taking too much on a sweltering hot day, but the law seems to have gone a bit overboard with it's no tolerance on ephedrine. The Chinese have been using ephedrine for 3000 years for respiratory relief for such ailments as asthma. As a matter of fact, here is a short history lesson of ephedrine taken from nodak.edu.

• About 3,000 B.C. ephedrine was first used medicinally by the Chinese for respiratory relief through Ephedra (Reodica, 2005).
• About 80 A.D. a Greek physician first documented the use of Ephedra (Reodica, 2005)
• 1887 Ephedrine was isolated for the first time from Ma-Huang (Reodica, 2005)
• 1930's Ephedrine's medicinal effects were discovered by Western Medicine (Reodica, 2005).
• 1954 Ephedrine was first available as an oral therapy for asthma (Bernardi, 2004).
• 1990's Ephedrine is promoted as weight loss supplement in Ma-Huang (Reodica, 2005).
• Mid-1990's FDA debates on the safety of ephedrine in herbal supplements and as a drug available OTC (Evidence of Safety and Effectiveness of Ephedra, 2003).
• 1994 Sales of Ephedrine now have to be recorded and kept for four years in regards to drug trafficking (Bernardi, 2004).
• 1999 FDA published a notice under the Controlled Substances Act proposing that ephedrine be classified as a Schedule IV compound according to its CNS effects, its dependence and abuse potential, and its therapeutic usefulness (Bernardi, 2004).
• 2001 National Football League bans Ephedra use after a number of deaths of young adults as a result of ephedrine-containing products (Reodica, 2005).
• 2002 Canadian government issues a warning against the use of Ephedra (Dangerous diet supplement still available, 2002).
• 2004 Dietary supplements containing Ephedra banned because of health concerns and adverse side effects (Ephedra Ban, 2004).

I suffer from a mild form of asthma and have been taking ephedrine pills for 20 years as a remedy for an asthma attack. It works much longer than primatene mist, and costs (or at least used to) way less. It is easier to carry, and is not subject to temperature extremes. Dosage of ephedrine pills can be adjusted by symptoms dictated.

My point is that people just need to use their common sense. But in the era of Obama bailout, I guess we can not be trusted to look out for ourselves. If 2 boxes of cold pills in one week is illegal, how much meth could a druggy make in one week with 2 boxes? And if we have to send the cops to the elderly lady's house, is it mandatory we arrest her "because of the law"? Can't we just make a note of it? Wait, let's stake out grandma's house and have a big sting operation!

My second point is according from the CDC, over 440,000 deaths a year are directly attributed to tobacco. But I could go and buy 10 cartons of Marlboro if I wanted.
Crap, if that's not enough, according to drugwarfacts.org, each year, use of Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs accounts for an estimated 7,600 deaths and 76,000 hospitalizations in the United States." (NSAIDs include aspirin, ibuprofen, naproxen.) But I can go buy a case of aspirin.

I am glad I have the US government looking out for me. That lady could be my neighbor...

*disclaimer - not responsible for some dumb@$$ overdosing on ephedrine because of this blog.