Well it definitely looks like diving in the morning is canceled, probably all day tomorrow… We will have to play it by ear. But at least we got here before they stopped the planes. We were delayed by an hour for weather and travel for tomorrow looks iffy for anyone else who wants to fly in tomorrow. Here is how it looks at the moment…
It should pass us before it becomes a major storm. And then we will have clear skies the rest of the week…
I took Tuesdee on her first, first class flight. Fancy food and all that.
I feel like John Chow posting food pics, but here ya go.
![](http://www.johnhasson.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/m01a0215.jpg "Tuesdee\'s \\"Snack\\"")
Next stop, Little Cayman.
I have been using Sprint EVDO for almost a year now and I am very, very happy with the speed and coverage. I would love an iPhone. Infact I waited for the iPhone 3G to come out. Sadly it *still* does not do as much as my Sanyo M1 does. (but it is close)… then I read about battery life and other issues.. blah blah.. more or less the consensus is that the iPhone 3G is close but not there yet.
My solution? Get an iPod Touch and a battery powered personal evdo hotspot. Yep. If things go right I’ll be walking around with a nearly permanent hotspot in my pocket. I wonder if they have an affiliate program. If so I need to change my link 
.
So.. iPod Touch for $400 ish + $180ish for the evdo hotspot device. $500-$600 range. The biggest win is that I DONT HAVE TO SWITCH TO AT&T. I will have faster internet speeds then any 3G iPhone and it may save on battery life. (Not sure about that yet… off to do some research…) Turns out the router lasts about 2 hours but there are tricks (not very sophisticated) to extend it. The iPod Touch’s wifi usage battery life is only 3 hours anyways. So… hmmm… $550ish for a good 2 hours a day of highspeed on an iPod touch. The claim for the iphone 3g is 6 hours on wifi. I am not sure I believe that. Looks like I am still in a holding pattern on the whole iphone/internet tablet thing…. More to come I am sure.
@Nick - Thanks. I live in Utah.
@Wordpress SEO – Thanks for the advice, I did a bunch of research on hiring/managing teams and so on
@Dmitry Nosov – As far as the thoughts of Russan freelancers vs other places. I think it is the same as anywhere. It really seems to be hit or miss. Sometimes you get somebody great and sometimes you get somebody terrible.
@Benny - Look forward to seeing you at Affiliate Summit East. I’ll try not to say anything stupid in my presentation.. but no promises
@PPC Fool – Yep. Those are ron paul magnet signs. I keep them hidden in the garage though.
@Nate – Can’t take you under my wing at the moment, but if you are interested in an exclusive lead gen affiliate offer I can get you started with keywords, sample ads and places to buy traffic. Shoot me an email john[at]johnhasson.com.
After a lot of research, thought, self analysis and so on; I have decided that I am not going to be hiring in the near future. For now I’ll keep writing code and programs to help me do things faster. I did have an idea to throw together a quick series on how to automate complex website tasks (for free). No promises on that one though.
This will be kinda introspective (had to look that up to make sure I was using it right). Ok, so I have a bunch of internet projects. Some are successful and some are major flops. But I have a pretty decent system for going from idea to implementation to profit (or loss). At this point it is really just a matter of copying it over and over to scale things. [and no it isn't a huge secret. pick a niche, research, build, test, repeat until you have success (or fail) and move onto the next one].
This puts me in the spot of looking to hire. I have been watching and learning from others who outsource outside the US. There are horror stories and success stories. If I hire outside the US, I don’t have to worry about office space, extra taxes, employee benefits, extra taxes (did I say that one already? ). But it also means that I will have a significant amount of turnover (not too bad if I have everything documented rather well) but still something to deal with. As far as hiring in the US, I’ve thought of taking someone who is honest, smart and hardworking and just training them in the skills they will need. Trust and smartness are way more important then skills (you can learn what you need in this business).
Thats where I am at. Hire someone? Keep writing computer programs to do things for me? Hire someone to write my programs to do things for me (plus all the other cool stuff I do)? (Some things can’t be done automatically — but lots of repetitive things can) If I do hire someone, do I hire local, mid west us or foreign? Hire someone local who I can trust and teach them what they need to know (or pay for their training)? I don’t expect to have an answer right away, I am still mulling things over. Feel free to offer advice.
PS. I haven’t forgotten about that free PPC app. I work on it while I am flying in a plane (which only happens twice a week).
Seems that everyone is doing an office tour.
Amit has his new place in florida
Zac has a blog post showing lot of people’s offices…
Paul showed off his new house.
So… I can give into peer pressure. Here is my house/office:
We were riding back from dinner at a really fancy restaurant. Neil was about as impressed with the fancy food as I was. On the way back to the hotel in the H2 Limos provided by elite retreat somehow we got on the subject of AMEX cards. A few us us all had the Business Platinum card, but Neil was pressured into whipping out his black AMEX card. A few of us passed it around (it really is made of metal for those wondering). I took a quick look or two at it and then handed it back to him. Then I told him the number, the name and the expiration date. Neil took it all in stride and said yeah but you didn’t get the security code. Oh thats easy I said, lemme see the card again. We all laughed as Neil put the card back in his wallet, safe from my eyes.
Neil, not to worry, I have since forgotten the number..
My father is an adjunct professor there teaching business classes. I was telling him about my latest project (just launched into beta yesterday) as well as a bunch of other stuff that I do about making money online and just general business and marketing stuff that I do. During this conversation he asked me to come as a guest speaker for his class. I figured.. why not.
Then he tricked me into wearing a suit and tie.. at least I looked good. His class had around 10 people in it. I rambled on about PPC, researching your market, networking, funding sources, gave some ideas that I haven’t even started like a comparison site about products made by “green” companies, marketing spring break vacation to facebook users.
I started about how I made connections with people and how important it was to actually care about people. People can generally tell when you are just being nice to be nice vs actually caring about you. Then talked about how I found ideas and products that I could market online and so on. Somehow we got into funding. Venture Capitalists/Angel funding vs self funding. (I pick self funding when possible) Next we talked about very (and I mean very) basic concepts of Search Engine Marketing/PPC–buy low, sell high–basic. Then I talked about how I took the way I played MMO’s in the past and then I took those same concepts of find the best way to be successful at the game and applying them to my business life. Thus making work be the same as fun for me.
It may have seemed a bit dry, one kid was in the back talking to someone during about half of it. Everyone else seemed bored. It looked like just three people were actually listening. Did that give me a 30% conversion rate?
Whenever talking to people I wonder… Should you start with I make $XX,XXX a week/month to get their attention? Maybe I’ll do that in the future, but to me that always seemed to be a little too “look at me, how awesome I am” and I am not really trying to go for that right now.
That is about it. If I want to play a windows game, I just reboot into XP and am fine. Other then that I am in OSX/Parallels XP 100% of the time.
Hints for windows users
Command+Tab for switching apps
Command+~ for switching windows within the app
Ctrl+F4 for switching all windows within all apps (I am not making this one up)
But why not just use the fancy Expose window thingy? With 30 windows they are too small to really pick the one I want quickly.
