Things are actually starting to become steady for my income on websites which is nice. The last 3 days I’ve made $1.50 or more on my Yahoo ads, AdBrite is starting to increase as well to about $3 per week. I make a steady stream of $70/month from LinkWorth and $9 a month from TLA. Then on top of those steady streams that I do nothing for I also make about $300 a month from what I can grab off of the PPP network. So it’s not like a booming business or anything… but we’re keeping our heads above water, combine all this with the web page design work that I have been doing and we’re surviving after everything.

Still not making enough to expand with advertising, and really grow the business… but that will come later.

Many of my loyal readers know that a couple of years ago when I was working for Viacom the way that I got the job was because one of my friends was on the real world casting website. I went to the site and noticed that some of the top people were only at the top because the site had been hacked. The MTV people obviously hadn’t noticed the problem yet either. So I went to find out what the problem was, after hacking the website myself I made a video of it, emailed them and sent the video. Not long after they offered me a job in IT Security for all of their websites. That kind of hacking is what we call Ethical Hacking or #CEH, where a hacker breaks security of a network to help the company protect from real hacker threats. I’m not a Certified Ethical Hacker which is why I haven’t been able to get any other hacking jobs. But that is okay since I’ve been running my own websites now, I would still like to be certified by the EC-Council one day just for a little bit of job security (Pun intended). I know that most people think of a hacker as a bad thing, but we’re not all bad… of course if there weren’t the bad ones there wouldn’t be any reason for the good ones either.

The point of the game is to gather as much wealth as possible… much like any other online role playing game, this one has one fatal flaw however. You can never decrease in value, I understand that is to get all the trend hoppers on FB to pass the application along. It also means that the game will definitely be a hopped trend. I have no reason to stick around with the game. I currently make $150M per hour, the most I can lose is $100k per race lost to another player and they can’t get me below 20 health unless they put a bounty on my head. Now when I go down to 0 health I lose 6 points. It takes me 5,000 points per level… 6 doesn’t mean anything to me. So all I have to do is sit back and let money come in, once a month if that I can get on and nothing bad has happened I’ve just grown in wealth it is a fatal flaw on Zynga’s part that will require them to continue building new RPGs or continue to improve this one to keep people around. Of course if the game is trend hopped enough then they will continue to make enough money so why should they care?

Street Racing is a fairly good app, but lets face it when you’ve got $32B stored up there’s not much to do any longer except collect cars once a week when they get new ones… but once you reach your max 500 friends in game even that isn’t possible any longer.

My main source that I’m worried about for money is ArchmailleDesigns.com It’s my sterling silver jewelry website, and well I’d like to get the site into full swing again! I did the best I’ve ever done over the Holidays this year… thanks to some recent moves in the SERPs my site got just the traffic it needed to start making a little bit of money! Now I’ve also launched a new shopping cart with it, with features like an affiliate program, downloadable items, discount coupons, and much more! So with the combination of that, and an increase in variety and stock here coming up I think for the upcoming Valentines Day rush my site should be able to make a little bit of money!

I wasn’t terribly impressed with the Animatrix myself, but it is worth checking out if you don’t have to pay anything extra for it. It also wasn’t exactly what I expected… what I had always heard was that it was the story between stories… which isn’t 100% true, although it does tell some of the story between the stories, that’s not what it is. The Animatrix is nine short films in either CGI or Anime that tell nine mostly unrelated stories (though there are two that are in sequence) about things that have gone on since the matrix’s construction. When I saw the first one I kind of got excited and wanted to see what happened next, or prior to the situation rather. I was disappointed when that was all that there was. Most of the stories are fairly interesting but don’t tell enough of their own stories to really give you any idea of what is going on, much less enough information to be any sort of in between story. If you know enough about the three other Matrix movies you can pull together ideas of what might of happened for each story, but that’s about the best you get, you’re still guessing.

Not only that but planning for our wedding left us with little “us” time so I really had to do that for a while. Anyways, I’m back now! Should be around to blog like crazy about all sorts of stuff, and lots of gaming entries ya know? Now is the season for new games, since the Holidays are coming up they’ve been kicking out new games like crazy, so that’s what I’ll be getting into, all the gaming news I can dig up!

They’ve never successfully taken the market from Intel, because people are stupid, and even though they held the performance crown for years Intel still outsold them. Well now, Intel’s new i7 chip isn’t all what they had hoped it would be, so AMD can catch up performance wise again, let’s just hope it’s enough to surpass Intel, and hold that lead until Fusion comes out… because Fusion most certainly will be more powerful than anything Intel has to muster up… and it will be another three to five years before Intel copies them, and at that it will be much like the i7 in that it won’t be up to par performance wise yet. Of course Intel will just continue to throw money at it and eventually pass up AMD again, at which point AMD will have to innovate more, and Intel will have to copy more… it’s a vicious cycle… but one day AMD will surpass Intel in sales, and that day will be a good day.

I now am really waiting on the AMD Fusion platform. Apparently it’s been pushed back until 2011, so I’ll probably have to get a quad core in between now and then to keep my system running like it should. Or well the first real upgrade I’m going for is a RAID 5EE setup, so that first, and then by that time I might be able to get an affordable 6 core processor to work with… which will really keep me entertained until Fusion comes out. Once Fusion is out I won’t be jumping straight on that bandwagon either, it’ll take a few years of it being out for it to both mature, and also drop in price before I get right on board.

First off, I’ll pay someone to help me with ApplyMyWay.com already been looking at eLance for some freelancers that could help. Then I’ll put about $2,000 into an advertising budget, starting with P3 I’ll get about 45 people on the site from there to create surveys, then I’ll spend about $2.50 per post and get some people to their sites with StumbleUpon, then another $2.50 per survey to get people to the surveys. I’ll do a $120 4 week campaign on the IcanHasCheezburger.com network with their site GraphJam.com just to test that market, if it’s successful I’ll do other ICHC network sites. I don’t know all the stuff, but it’ll be about $2,000 for advertising, not paying over $1,000 to get the site running, $1,800 to pay off my credit card, $800 for RAID 5EE, and the rest goes into savings, or towards the wedding.

Alright, now, I’ve also been having some questions since my first article why I’m doing RAID 5EE instead of just regular RAID 5, what’s the difference, what’s the advantage, and what is the disadvantage? I’ll explain with 4 hard drives because that’s how I’ll be doing things, but you can do both with as little as 4 hdd’s. Raid 5 is an array where you have three hard drives running all the time: HDD 1 has information bits AB and parody, HDD 2 BC Parody, HDD 3 CA Parody, HDD 4 Storage offline no information stored. If any one of these three running hard drives crashes it is replaced by HDD 4 and the rest of the information is taken from the other HDD’s in the array to complete the array again. In a RAID 5EE array all 4 hard drives are running the whole time: HDD 1 ABC Parody Storage, HDD 2 BCD Parody Storage, HDD 3 CDA Parody Storage, HDD 4 DAB Parody Storage. Really the only difference is that instead of having a seperate “storage” drive which is what RAID 5 does the storage places is left blank on all drives and can then be shifted later. RAID 5EE is faster because you get information from 4 sources instead of 3, but it takes longer to rebuild an array if a drive fails, and it is more likely to have a second drive fail because more hard drives are on all the time. RAID 5 is safer because there is a drive that is turned off and therefore not taking any abuse, it is also faster to rebuild an array because the information does not have to be shifted around from multiple hard drives to rebuild the array it is simply dumped on the “storage” or offline drive.

I hope that helps the people who’ve asked me what RAID 5 vs. RAID 5EE will do for their computer. Personally this is going on my home computer, it is safer than running a single drive like I normally do so my information is protected, but ultimately I’m going for speed here! Not that I ever want a drive to fail, but I don’t trust RAID 0 enough to take that chance either. With a separate RAID controller that has a built in 500mhz processor for the hard drives, and 256MB of RAM I’m not too worried about the slow downs of write times for RAID 5 either, with a dual core processor, dedicated hard drive processor, 4 gigs of RAM, and 256MB dedicated to my Hard Drives… well… I can’t see that as being a bottleneck either. That is a concern of RAID 5 vs. RAID 0 but I think we’re good in this case.