My Dear Hard Drive

I just saw a great episode of “More Than Enough Rope” on the telly. The spotlight was on the Young Australian of the Year 2007 Tania Major, who is speaking for the aborigine communities in Australia. The aborigine culture is the oldest culture in the world, and somehow they ended up in Australia, who knows how or when, but they did. Or, who knows, maybe we ended up in the rest of the world instead. Be it as it may, the fact remains that their culture is remarkable in the history of mankind, and it is sad what the arrival of the white people did to it.

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Judging by the name of the blog, you know how much hard drives mean to me. This one was special, as it contained ALL the original photos from year 2004 and some from before that, and tons and tons of different things. I am quite pissed off. No warning, no nothing, suddenly everything just got corrupted, just like that… So I don’t think it’s a hard ware problem, but some windows error… I am hoping I can recover them by some means, but who knows about these things?!

I was just going to get some photos to use on my new Zazzle account, but everything just died under my mouse. Very irritating to say the least. I’m going to see now if I can restore some files, but where do I even save them if I can, I ask you… 200 gigabytes!

(Or at least the queen, mind me.)

The thing with me is, that I really don’t like to loose. And loosing, from my point of view is not being the absolute best. And absolute best isn’t absolute best if you have to work for it. Get my dilemma? Intellectually I know that it is ridiculous to think this way, but this is how I feel. Fortunately I have few areas that I’m not that obsessive about. Like web design. I’m good at it, but I know there are people who are amazing at it, and I’m fine with it. That is because I started doing that without any expectation that I would be ANY good at it, I just wanted to have a website. However, the better I get at it, the less I want to work, you see, if I start making expectations of any kind, I have to perform, and if I can’t do it after all that hard work (quickly) I’ll feel like a failure.

I have an attention span of a 3-year old on things that don’t matter to me. When I am completely into it, I can spend hours on end on one thing, but after a good nights sleep I might wake up with totally different thing in mind. And I’ve never been diagnosed to have ADHD or anything, so I don’t have an excuse.

My life is an artists work shop full of unfinished projects with lots of potential.

Australia is a fantastic place for dogs - at least if you compare it to Finland, where we came from. One of the advantages is an easy access to butchers scraps, that make excellent and inexpensive dog food. Quite surprisingly, not all people know what excellent food it is! I mentioned “barfing” to a veterinarian, who looked at me with wide open eyes and said she’d never heard of such diet, and a shop keeper asked what we were planning to cook of lamb neck that we got. She said a lot of customers buy them for dogs, but she could not phantom her dog, a German Shepard of all things, to eat raw meat! We told her that raw meat and bones is excellent food, and cooking only makes the bones splinter and create a danger of cutting holes in their intestines, but raw stuff is just the way the nature intended.

BARF comes from words bones and raw food, but as simple as it sounds, there is a whole science behind it. However, it can sound more complicated than what it is - after all, unlike what you think, a piece of meat probably contains more nutrients than any processed dog food you can find on the market shells. (Sometimes when I forget to go to the butchers, I do buy a can of dog food, but cans only. Dry food is mainly useless.)

One thing that clearly tells you how much of the food your dog actually uses, is the size of his poop. I can tell you that the difference between the size of dry food poop to a beef poop is MASSIVE. Most of the dry food comes back literally untouched.

I’m far from expert at this myself yet, but I am convinced that if you have a butcher near by, you should take advantage of his services and ask for some off cuts and scraps for your dogs. Some even give them away, but the others take a dollar or two for them. And it is all usable. (So if you’re tight with money, and you don’t have a dog, there’s a tip for you. Some of the pieces the butchers throw away, look absolutely lip smacking good.) Like my husband said: “A dog never misses out in Australia.” :p

If you want to know more, please check out this FAQ for beginners for example.

There are two types of sites that make a good money through adverts like GoogleAdSense; Boring ones that have good subject lines, and hugely popular ones that people go to when they are bored. The thing is, the only time you really pay attention to ads is when you have absolutely nothing better to do. It is very unlikely that someone would actually read what is said in the add and go “Hey I have to check that out!” When that happens, it’s usually a situation when a person is disappointed with the content she or he has been provided on the site the add is displayed and wants to see something different this time.

Sometimes however, users of a very good site that they absolutely love, will just click through the links to offer something back to the site owner, but that happens when they remember to. If the site is so good, they most likely won’t remember to click on ads, as they have other things to do there - they might also plan to do it later, but forget.

I have a site like this with 135 visitors a day. I have some loyal visitors, that return daily to discuss a collectors item we all take interest in. The rest of the 135 are visitors that I don’t know if they return daily as they don’t discuss, but some of them might read things daily, and judging by the even amount of daily visitors they are mostly the same people. This site is the best performing site, simply because of the user base, but with the rather modest click through rate of 0,08, while the most lame site I’ve got has a click through rate of 0.48%! Almost every second visitor clicks on an add, because there’s nothing there! (That would be great, but there’s not much traffic either, because there’s nothing there…) Anyway, talking straight money, let’s just say that after 2 years of running the adds I haven’t made enough to get paid, as Google has the payment limit of 100 dollars. I have, however made more than half of it, so I don’t want to stop running the adds either, or I would loose over 50 dollars. *sigh*

I wish I had an idea on how to actually make money with your website you have invested so much time on, but I don’t know. Maybe selling T-shirts with your logo on it would do, but that is just another thing you should add to your list of things to do, while you’re already flooded with the maintenance of your site. But if you would have time and a large fan base, maybe?