Cow’s Life - Thinking Outside Of The Barn

This is my Halloween Costume take 3: Broncos jersey and snowboard outfit completed with my board. The only problem is that I am going to an Eagles Tailgate on Sunday instead of a Halloween party.

My pal Paco picked up two Eagles tailgate party tickets and asked me to join him. I am neither Broncos nor Eagles fan. I’d rather cheer for my hometown team Titans.

Well…what the heck! Are they really gonna squash me like a bug? It’ only a jersey…

Paco even posted a note on Eagles’ Fan Board:

“…she is not an enemy… she is just wearing A jersey to fit in…”

Response from the Eagles fans?

“She must be destroyed!!!”

Well.. I am going to try to survive the tailgate so I can finally watch my first live NFL game tomorrow afternoon. If you guys don’t see me posting in the next few days, call 911 and report the following emergency:

HELP! A Broncos snow bunny got squashed by bunch of Eagles.

A few minutes ago, I got a phone call from the Farmers Insurance agent who was assessing the damage of my car. (Here is the post about my car crash two days ago) First, he told me my car was a total loss. Then he said to me, “You know your seat belt won’t track back anymore. I thought I would be talking to you in a hospital. You are a very lucky lady.”Then he told me that the impact was so severe that most of the internal structures of my car were damaged. I don’t know cars at all, but after listening to a long list of the auto-part jargons, I was pretty scared. Axel was broken; front wheel was almost detached; suspension was smashed and another dozen internal parts were not repairable anymore.

Now I try to rewind and think back the moment when the impact had happened.I only remember that the seat belt was holding me so tight on the seat that I wasn’t really going anywhere even though the car was slamming back and forth for a few seconds. Before the agent hung up the phone, he said to me, “This Honda did what it was supposed to do to save your life. I am glad you were wearing the seat belt.”

Now, to be honest, I am in a much deeper shock than I was 2 days ago right after the accident. I didn’t realize this could be the accident to severely damage my physical well-being if not taking my life. And the only reason why I am still here typing this post is because I worn the seat belt. I know we all beat this topic to death. I saw plenty of people on TV showing us the consequences of not wearing one. But this is BLOODY REAL to me. And to all the people who are reading this post at this moment, WEAR YOUR SEAT BELT! And make sure your passengers are wearing seat belts too. You can save yours and other people’s lives.

I will go back to the body shop this Thursday to pick up my belongings and say good-bye to my Honda before they tear it apart. It’s sad … After all, the car has accompanied me for the last 2 years, moved me to Colorado, and gave a lot of people rides to the mountains after it arrived in Denver. As sad as I am right now, I am truly happy that I am not part of this “total loss”.

If you are watching the news about the Colorado’s snow storm and feel sorry for those who had their cars wrecked, then feel sorry for me ‘cause I am one of them. And this is my dead Honda in the picture.

I was on my way to Colorado Springs this morning and somehow I hit the black ice with 55 mph speed. I pretty much lost control and all the skills I acquired by playing “Need for Speed” and “Grand Turismo” didn’t help in the real world scenario. Although I managed to get over to the left shoulder, it was too narrow for my fat Honda. I was squeezed right between a truck and the guard rail. The car died instantaneously.

The collision stopped the sliding car and the seat belt literately saved me from slamming around. I smelled the gas. My driver side of the door was completely stuck. For a second, those car explosion and burning scenes were flashing through my head. Ironically, other than a slightly twisted neck, I was OK without a single scratch.

After a few minutes of sanity check, I dialed 911. The lady on the phone told me there were too many injured people who needed help so they couldn’t help me. She gave me a towing company number and hung up. “No cop?” I was scratching my head.

The truck driver whose car got all scratched up because of me stepped out and asked me if I were OK. Then he said to me, “I don’t have a driver’s license, so I have to run. “ He took off before I could even take down his license number. Wow, anything could happen in this world.

So, my victim ran away; 911 wouldn’t take my call; my car had no heat and I started to feel cold; I called towing company but couldn’t give them exact location so they told me to call back until I found out where I was (and how in the world was I supposed to do that? Walk on highway in storm??); nobody on the highway was checking on me (they all drove around me; what the hell???!!) and oops, my cell phone only had one bar left. What else could go wrong?

Ok, I admit that at that time, I started to cry like a girl until a highway patrol trooper stopped and knocked on my window. It was probably half an hour after I had the accident and the cars were starting to back up because of me. The cop took me to his car and started to look for a towing truck. I finally felt much better, warmer and safer. Thanks to my climbing buddy too who stayed on the phone with me for a while to offer a lot of options and advices.

I stayed with Officer Ernie (I only got his first name) for nearly two hours. He was on the radio, cell and computer to coordinate a towing truck but accidents happened everywhere this morning. The traffic was backed up miles in front us and my dead Honda was pretty much blocking half of the left lane. We simply couldn’t get one to come in until another trooper showed up to help to redirect the traffic.

On my way back to Denver, I counted 5 accidents with one truck completely flipped over. The tow truck driver told me I was one of the very few passengers he had in the last 3 days ‘cause “everybody ended up in the hospital”, he said. I could feel a chill went down my spine. Ok, buddy, you are not helping!

Ironically, the Honda body shop he took me to is right next to my usual climbing gym. After getting all the nasty paperwork done, I had about 2 hours before Hertz rental to deliver a car for me. Hmm… rather than sitting here waiting, I could go for a climb. So I did and I got my ass kicked badly. I, a solid 5.10 climber fell on a 5.8 route. Lesson learned? Never engage in extreme sports after a car crash. Durh.. what the hell was I thinking..

Well, I guess after a long nasty scary day, it wasn’t too bad after all because things could be a whole lot worse. At least I got to:

• sit in a cop’s car for the very first time and chat with a nice cop. Oh, I found out a supervisor like Officer Ernie can actually make $80,000.
• I didn’t get a ticket for reckless driving and my victim ran away so I didn’t have to pay for his damage.
• I got a snow day off!
• And most importantly, I am alive and all of my body parts are still at where they are supposed to be.

Tonight, I am sitting in my Denver apartment to chill out. Tomorrow morning, I am going to give the nasty highway another shot. This time, I am going to go 40 miles an hour if the snow condition isn’t improving. So wish me luck!!

Umm…I cheated…

1. I refreshed my visitor statistics sheets every 13 minutes, although it was a huge improvement from the usual 13 second interval
2. I didn’t post anything, but I wrote down 12 posting ideas
3. I was on quite a few forums and engaged in some discussions about the million dollar copycat topic. That probably explained why the entire world’s copycats were on my site in the last a few days.

So, the next time if I am going to take a blogger holiday for real, I better ditch my computer and hide myself in woods or on a beach with no connection whatsoever…

But … wait, then, I would be doing this:

Gosh, I am officially addicted to blogging. This stuff is worse than crack. Somebody help me!

Ever since I wrote the post about losing bet to the MillionDollarHomePage, I got spammed by the copycats every now and then. Some of them shamelessly claimed that it’s their idea. There are also some honest ones admitting the borrowed idea but proudly put out their own designs.

A lot of people are speculating whether these copycats are actually making any money. Or, are they getting any traffic at all to their sites? So to answer these questions, I put a list together with some stats information of each site.

You will be surprised that this list is actually pretty long.

Continue…

Update on Oct 2: I am surprised to see so many creators of the “copy-cats” here and I learned that many of them are honest people who are just trying to make a few bucks, buy some homes, pay off the debt and plant a few trees with a borrowed idea. I have then expanded the list to include the honest ones and listed the possible scammers so people don’t fall into their traps. Wish everyone (the honest ones) luck with the pixel business!

Million Dollar Homepage Stats Effects

For those of you who are curious if Alex’s Million Dollar Homepage is indeed bringing in lots and lots of traffic, the answer is yes and no. The numbers from my stats are actually quite close to the figures he measures. I got 170 extra visitors in the last 6 hours. So you can see that this is no Fark.com, but decent enough for any starter sites to gain some exposures. However, I think Alex is charging far more than any real estate developers in the whole world for his digital land. Thus, if you are looking for a spot to put Ads, I’d go somewhere else. But wait, somebody started to catalog the purchasers now. If enough people study the site, you may get thousands of links…Who knows…anything can happen on the Internet nowadays so go figure!

I banned the whole world

A crock came to my site and left his marketing link today. See the comments section of the “losing bet” post. That jerk stole other people’s ideas, designs, even text and shameless claimed that everything was his invention. I hate this kind of intellectual thefts. So, I tried to use my host server’s “Banning bad IP” function to ban this guy from coming to my site. The second I did it, I realized nobody could access the website including myself. Turns out.. my complicated site code conflicts with my hosting company’s functions. BANG! I banned the whole world from accessing Yuna’s Village. It took me an hour to find the line of code that says, “Deny all accesses from everywhere”. This is hilariously sad that I was trying to ban a bad guy but accidently hacked my own site.

If you missed the Webmaster story I : Revealing blog reader behaviors from the stats, go check it out.

When Alex Tew came up with a crazy idea to set up a homepage to sell a dollar for each pixel, I also came up with a crazy bet that it will take him 20 more days to make $12k. Here is my previous post about the bet. Alex also posted my bet on his site on Sept 11,2005.

I actually started out the bet with $120K. For God knows what reason, I sent Alex another email to strip off a zero at 3am :

Ok, 12K.. not 120K.. mis calculation.. my bad… that just make the bet whole lot easier for you… anyway.. Pixel on!

Instead of 20 days, he did it in a week!!! Whoa, I gotta be out of my mind making that bet. Did I drink too much margarita while I typed up that email to Alex for the bet?? Boy that zero made a huuuuuuge difference.. Whatever, I lost 3 days after I made the bet. So, here we go… money wired to England!

You can check Million Dollar Homepage to make sure I paid my promised money (give a few hours if you are reading this entry seconds after I post it). The question is, can you find my little tiny box on that site?

So, to honor Yuna’s Magarita-aftermath-actions, I setup a new category called “Out of my mind” to log every crazy thing I did , am doing and about to do. So check back often and leave a few comments to help me to maintain my sanity.

Now back to Alex! Don’t fail any classes in college pretty boy! Now I just bought you Econ 101, 102, 203, 204 books so you can make more money. Pixel on Alex!

The idea is to make one million dollar with just one webpage by selling pixels for one dollar per pixel (think a pixel as a tiny dot on the screen). And a screen is big enough to hold 1 million pixels. People can buy pixels to advise their sites or whatever. Think I am joking? Hell no! This idea works! And the person who has invented this idea and set up the webpage has already sold $5600 worth of pixels.

This person is 21 year old Alex Tew from England who wanted to make some money to pay for his college cost. He launched a site called “The Million Dollar Homepage” just about 2 weeks ago. He divided the homepage screen into 10,000 10×10 pixel blocks and tries to sell each block (100 pixels) for $100 each. Check it out, he’s already got quite a few buyers and his blog shows his daily progress of his pixel sales.

But I wonder if he can really sell his 1 million pixels? Or just 200K? It’s anyone’s guess so I am going to take a guess and place a bet.

I think he will sell close to 12K by end of Sept, 2005 based on my calculated guess. When he got picked up by some big sites like The Register and Digg.com, he sold around 2000 – 2500 pixels per day. I once had my glory day with Digg.com just 2 weeks ago and I know the traffic and the interests will slow down. I have so far 7000+ unique visitors (probably far less than what Alex has received) from digg.com and 5000 came in the first 3 days. Unless Alex keeps promoting his site through more big boys, or the word of mouth (like what I am doing now) really works towards his advantage, he’d be sitting duck pretty soon. We live in a very cruel world and people forget and move on to new things very fast. So, taking all these factors into considerations, I’d strip a zero from his current sales and predict 250 a day on average in the next 20 days. That brings the total figure to close to 12K by end of Sept.

Ok, just to make this more interesting, I am going to place a bet. If by Sept 30 midnight EST, Alex has managed to sell more than $12K pixels, I will buy 2 blocks of his pixels (now that’s $200 REAL money from Yuna’s pocket) and put yunasville.com on his Million Dollar Homepage. It’s going to be the most expensive and tiniest link I will ever buy if I do lose the bet. We will see what happens in 20 days. Any guesses here?

Regardless whether Alex sells 12K or 1000K, the fact that he managed to pull in close to $6000 in two weeks with just one idea and one website is already a huge success. It’s funny that just before I stumbled onto his site, I was reading Seth Goding’s old post about how small guys with big ideas can succeed. I seriously think that no matter how little resources we have and how insignificant we seem to be, we can pull something big if we dare to think big, or quirky in Alex’s case.

Gosh I love this Internet!!!