In this day and age, it should be easy for any merchant to provide useful shipping information to their customers. Unfortunately, the company I ordered replacement checks from is stuck in 1986, and doesn’t have a clue!

I ordered new checks on October 14th, because my bank merged with another bank, and they felt the need to change my account number (the one I’ve had for 12+ years!).. They gave me a dozen or so checks, and once those ran out, i was forced to buy more. (Too bad, I still had 150 unused checks with the old account number!)

Anyway, I ordered checks from the same company I’ve used for years now, and I get an e-mail stating: Expect your checks to arrive 5 to 10 business days after the order has been processed.

Here’s where the fun begins. The next day, I get notification that my order is being printed. Then 9 DAYS LATER, I get notification that my order has shipped. It’s now October 23rd! And here’s where things get crazy. This e-mail says: If you ordered checks via regular delivery, expect to receive your checks in 2 to 3 weeks..

Excuse me?! My first e-mail quotes me 5-10 business days after “processing”, and now 2 weeks later, I’m being told I might have to wait another few weeks??

Guess what people? Most people order checks when they are about to run out of them. I can’t afford to wait nearly a month to get my new checks!

What a joke, I think they’re just trying to get people to pay for expedited shipping (at ridiculous rates).. The only problem I see with that is that if I had chosen 2-day delivery, I still wouldn’t have received them until October 27th, since they don’t start the clock until the checks have been printed.

I’m hoping that the checks arrive soon, as I don’t feel like making a trip to the bank to get some temporary checks.

There’s no rhyme or reason why it’s updating on some of our sites (including this one), but on others it just hangs at the “downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8.5.zip” part. A quick search of the Wordpress support forums shows other people having similar issues, and getting the typical run-around from the moderators.

It’s frustrating, to say the least. This latest update is a “security hardening” release, but I have a feeling that with the number of complaints in the support forum, a version 2.8.6 can’t be too far behind.

Having been focused on another project for the past 3-months, I came back to our site with a fresh perspective! This was actually a good thing, as it allowed me to see room for improvement that I had previously overlooked. So my developer and I have been cranking out changes on the backend that “should” have a significant impact on our rankings. 30K+ pages have been affected by these changes, so it’s going to take time for the search engines to update everything, but we’re hoping to see incremental improvements in the coming weeks.

It’s been EXCITING, and I’m thrilled to see what happens next. Stay tuned!

We’ve all heard the stories about redesign projects gone wrong, where IT changed the link structure for all of their product pages, but they neglected to mention it to the SEO/marketing team. Months go by, and their rankings start to sink. Why? Because all of their valuable backlinks are now invalid!

But that’s not the only risk you run. Our e-commerce site runs a custom CMS that was developed in-house, and something as “simple” as a redesign project usually requires a bunch of recoding on the backend as well. (My webmaster hates me, but that’s the price we pay for customizability)

Apparently during our latest update, one of the backend changes mucked something up, and we only just discovered it today.. (3+ months later) In the meantime, 28K pages have been deindexed from Google as a result of this bug!

Google Webmaster Tools is a godsend, as I wouldn’t have realized the problem if not for the large number of Crawl Errors that popped up on my dashboard. A bunch of testing brought to light the issue, and now my guys are working to fix this problem ASAP.

Fun.

Since I quit my full-time job back in 2005, I put on 35 pounds! I sit in front of a computer all day, only getting up to eat lunch and use the bathroom. No more trips to the gym each morning, no more walking around the office socializing with other co-workers.

You need to break up the routine, and I’ve found the perfect distraction! It’s the Nintendo Wii!

I’ve had my Wii since February 2008, and at first I had a ton of fun with it. But I got busy, and the Wii was soon forgotten. The Wii Fit got me interested in the Wii again, but after damaging a tendon in my foot, I couldn’t use it anymore. Mario Kart got me playing it again, but then life got in the way.

But I’m done with excuses. Now I set aside an hour for lunch. I eat some food, and then power up the Wii. Sometimes I do boxing. Other times it’s tennis. Today I might bowl a few games. Whatever the case, it gets me away from the computer, gives me some fun, and I’m actually getting a little exercise in there as well. (If you don’t believe me, try boxing for 10-15 minutes, and tell me you’re not breaking a sweat!)

Now that Nintendo has dropped the price from $249.99 to $199.99, it’s the perfect time to pick one up if you haven’t already. Be sure to buy an extra controller, as the Wii really shines when you’re playing against someone else!

Buy your Nintendo Wii today!

I had an amazingly productive week, so there wasn’t much “catch-up” work to do. So I decided to watch a bunch of movies that had been collecting dust, and start the new Dan Brown book that I bought last week.

Movies I’ve enjoyed: Death Sentence, Road Trip: Beer Pong, Hooking Up, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

Movies I’ve hated: Stripper Academy (The T&A couldn’t even make up for the horrible storyline!)

I know, I’ve got odd tastes when it comes to movies.. Next up is Welcome Home Roskoe Jenkins!

As for the book, it’ll probably have to wait until my cruise next month, as I’ve still got a few things I want to do before the wife comes back..

A combination of banner blindness (an overload of advertisements have caused us to just tune them out completely) and software that automatically blocks ads (AdBlock, etc) have rendered this market dead.

Website takeovers are becoming more and more popular, though it seems like it’s mainly movies that are utilizing this medium. But today, I experienced a completely new type of advertisement, that made me stop what I was doing in my tracks.

Pandora is now placing advertisements between songs! So you’re 10 songs into a playlist, and all of a sudden you hear a 30-second an ad for PF Changs or Ford. The background changes to match, but if you’re like me, it’s minimized while I work. But this is great! It’s short, I’m hearing it repeatedly over an 8-hour listening period, and the message is drilled into me (whether I like it or not).

Kudos to Pandora for coming up with an out-of-the-box advertising model, and I hope them all the success in the world. Just another reason they rock!

After spending 5+ hours on Friday night doing “busy work”, I realized that it’s a terrible use of my time as well. So I’m on the hunt for an unpaid intern.

If you’re a motivated indivudual who wants to learn everything I have to offer (12+ years of Internet Marketing knowledge, multiple startup companies, etc), and are willing to put in the work, then we should talk! As one of my former employees said, “I’ve learned more from you than I did during my MBA studies..” (And that’s exactly why I decided NOT to go for my MBA back in 2005)

If you’re interested, contact me using the “Contact” link above. Thanks!

Macaroni Grill – Why did you change the recipe for your Meatball Sandwich? It was great, and now it SUCKS! (The chips aren’t good now either..)

Why are there so many bad drivers on the road today? Lax drivers tests? People talking on their phones or texting? I just don’t get it, everytime I leave the house, I have to deal with bad drivers.

Obama calls Kanye West a jackass! The ONLY issue that I agree with him about.

Twitter spam is out of control.. Hoping the new TOS has some affect on things, but not holding my breath.

I wish Facebook would get rid of Applications altogether. They serve no purpose and just annoy me..

Why is MySpace so buggy all of a sudden? From background issues to URL issues.. And support is non-existant. WTF?