They used to rock
So, here goes. I really, really liked stonehaven dental, so much so that I actually paid out of pocket for my father’s emergency tooth removal for him (before he had dental insurance). I have referred several families there. [I'm going to start un referring them now]

Office Mixup
Well now my father has dental insurance (and the same name as me). Somehow they got our insurance mixed up (we pay all our dental work out of pocket, always have) and got his insurance on my file. It was a mistake, mistakes happen.

WTF?
Fast forward who knows how many months later, we all come in for checkups, etc. The bill was over $600 for the four of us. (I was expecting $200, maybe $300 or so). At one point during my examination I even asked how much something was going to cost because I am paying out of pocket. The lady said she didn’t know and that I should just get that information from the desk when I leave.

When we finally get out or start checking out, I am plenty annoyed that it is about twice what I was expecting to pay. It takes them a while to adjust things by about a hundred bucks (Xray’s are suddenly free). Turns out that they still have us as having insurance in their system. WTF?!

The lies
Here is the kicker, they said my wife told them we have insurance. (Completely untrue). In fact a few months ago my wife even called (when they mixed it up the first time) after her appointment to make sure they knew we pay out of pocket and don’t have dental insurance. This is when I am visibly upset. They are lying to me and my wife. That is when they pull us into a room with a door and repeat the same lie. At which point I try to stop them, she then tells me that she isn’t talking to me, she is talking to my wife. Ok… I think to myself. You can talk to your kids that way, even your subordinates, but not my wife, or me. So now they are lying to me, then they are rude about it when I call them out on it.

What really upset me
The thing that upsets me is *not* the extra hundred or so dollars I ended up paying. It is the lying and talking down to us.

Moral of the story
There are plenty of other dentists who have office staff that are not going to lie to you and talk down to you.

1. Firefox sucks on a Mac.
2. When the HFS+ file system decides to go screwy you can waste a day or two fixing it
3. I was spending lots of my time inside VMWare on my bootcamp partition.
4. I already have photoshop 6 for windows and don’t feel like spending a ton on CS3 for the Mac
5. Excel for the Mac blows compared to Excel on Windows.  (Try having really complex charts, and it slows to a crawl on the mac where the exact same spreadsheet does geat in Excel 2003)
6. Games.  Seriously.  Games.  (Not that I play that much, I don’t, but every now and then when you want to test something, rebooting into bootcamp just to try a game (or run photoshop w/o terrible slowness) is just a big pain)
7. I’ve tried Parallels and VMware Fusion. Neither one is awesome.  But they both get the job done, and you can use Visual Studio inside either just fine.
8. That STUPID suspend to crash bug that will NOT go away.

I am sure there is more.  So at this point I had 2 choices.  Sell the macbook pro and buy another laptop or just convert it to mostly XP.  I chose the latter.  So now I have a macbook pro running windows XP as my primary system.  The hardware is still awesome.  And now if I ever have a very rare instance where I need OSX I can just reboot into it… that is probably what I should have done in the first place.

Seems simple enough.

Made In China

Voter Access Card + Encoder

How these work is pretty basic.  The voter card has nothing on it but the district (so it knows which ballot to show them, and it also includes instructions on font size, or if the machine should talk to them, etc  — we program that in if they are blind, etc)

As a poll worker we keep a manual count of all the votes and check the counts at the end of the day (and mid day) to make sure the counts match.  If they don’t we have to stay there till we figure out WTF went wrong.  I learned all about cool provisional ballots and the laws and weird exceptions, like “curb-side” voting where they can’t get out of their car, due to age, etc.  Needless to say I think I’ll be busy election day.  6am -> done.  I always wanted to see how this part works, so this should be a good/fun experience.  I’ll be rotating through various positions, with no lunch break and no dinner break (they warned us about that) as well as helping to take down the voting machines (and probably help set them up).  So if your poll workers seem busy, it is cuz they are and they haven’t eaten much. 

Edit: They called me late afternoon yesterday.  Guess they were hard up for help…

Why you may be asking did I go to see this movie?  Quite simply: I have 3 daughters.

There were *maybe* 8 guys in there– and all but 3 of them were wearing homemade wildcats jerseys.  Yes.  Freaking *homemade* (and the wrong color) wildcats jerseys to coincide with the team’s jersey’s in the movie.  Every time the main guy character was on screen the girls went nuts, screams, ohhs, ahhs, etc.

As far as the plot and so on goes, it was predictable but turned out to be a fun movie.  I found myself laughing out loud a few times.  Strangely whenever I laughed the girls around me hushed really fast.  I guess nothing shuts up 300+ girls quicker then a loud male voice laughing in a move theater at *their* movie .

It was fun, I don’t feel less of a man for enjoying myself.

Whole movie in less then 2 min.

Greetings I have been trying to get into the PPC arena for about a year without much succes constantly getting google slapped and tried a few other PPC source with no real measure of performance can you help

I was kinda busy at the time, so I simply said

Do you have a specific question?

You know what. here is the whole thing, I am in a rush to take all my girls to see High School Musical 3 tonight.

Guest: Greetings I have been trying to get into the PPC arena for about a year without much succes constantly getting google slapped and tried a few other PPC source with no real measure of performance can you help
Me: Do you have a specific question?
Guest: what am i doing wrong or not doing (I know you have no info about me or my site at this time) but would you be willing to look at my site and give you opinion\
My Thoughts: No specific question really.
Me: usually i na case like yours it is not just one thing
Me: *in a
Me: google slaps = stop making crappy sites
Me: biggest thing you need
Me: is tracking
Guest: I’m sure but i have doing this for a year with little return I have bought books and endless searches on the net right now  i workwith click bank and already have a site and ads but not sure what else to try
Guest: what “googles” defination of a crappy site
My Thoughts: How can I tell him to “google it” nicely….
Me: that is something you should be able to find out foryourself
Me: by just looking through Adwords Help and FAQ
Me: if you can’t do that then PPC is not something you should be doing
Me: There is no “shortcut” or trick
Me: it is just a matter of hard work
Me: trying and failing a lot
Me: if you are going to ASW I’ll gladly spend a few min glancing @ your stuff to tell you if anything comes to mind
Guest: unfortunitly i’m not but i would be happy to forward my site and maybe an ad for your opinion
My Thoughts: Hmm.. do I really want to mess with this? Ah ha. I can use it as a sorta blog post/site review, that would be worth my time.
Me: can I useit in a blog post
Me: make it public, etc?
Guest: can i send it in an email
Me: I’ll post my reply as a new blog post
Me: that cool?
Guest: yeah that would be great
My Thoughts: Gotta make sure they know what they are getting into.
Me: and your ok with others seing the site and the ad
Me: *seing
My Thoughts: CURSES! I can’t spell crap.
Me: *sEeing
Guest: depends you how bad you rip my site /ad apart
Me: lol
Me: I’ll tell you what I tell everyone
Me: Don’t fall in love with your site or your keywords or youe campaigns
Guest: no really i don’t want to look like an ass even if i am one
Guest: ok i should be chating anyway i will email later today
Me: k
Me: tlak l8r

Guest what… no email from them.

I am glad to answer questions, etc. but something like “why am I not making any money” is way to general for a simple answer.  And don’t ask me stuff that you can find out if you just read AdWords FAQs.  However, in person at a conference when I am in a good mood, I’ll happily answer stuff like that. 

I had to ditch thinktank- just a bad weekend for me.  Wife’s birthday, father and step mom just moved in, lots of family stuff takes priority.  I hope I can do it next year.

I have found at least 3 people in my neighborhood that do Internet Marketing.  There is me and my PPC, a guy who is an emailer affiliate manager and another who is VP of Search Marketing for an unnamed company plus at least one affiliate.  All this right in my neighborhood.  Totally cool.

I have some cool stuff that I’ll be releasing in the future, but for now just updating things so you know I haven’t dropped off the planet.

They were awesome.  The owner (or one of the owners) of the place came down and met us there after hours; he did everything, the paperwork, xrays and consultation as well as pulling the tooth (when my Dad decided that was what he wanted to do.)  It was kinda funny watching them be certain which tooth to pull…  “Does this hurt?” followed by screams and involuntary spasms or a nope (depending on which tooth).  We were in and out in a little over an hour.

I kept the tooth.

Turns out it wasn’t free… but hey, I am already in line a $5 “donation” seemed like a worthy cause

How this relates to online marketing.

• “Free” or cheap offer that isn’t really free
• Pretty people to promote your product/service

What do you care, pics below:

This gives you an idea of what she wants me to watch her play.  Yeah I am an awesome dad But… I noticed something…

Yeah, that is right.  She is cleaning Horse poop in the stables as part of the game.  Seriously.. WTF?  What kind of game makes you clean Horse crap.  (Let alone any type of fecal matter)  I was busting out laughing and I still don’t think she gets why it is funny (to me).

So kids.  If you are really good, maybe one day your mom or dad will buy you a video game where you too can clean horse crap.