I never thought anything like this would happen.

Ever.

The last 10 or 15 years have been taken up with the normal life struggles of trying to survive while taking care of family members and paying the mortgage.

I was trying to make a buck like everyone else.

Then everything changed.

The short version of the story starts with a phone call from a lawyer.

His client wants to buy a domain name I owned.

We settle on the price of $200,000.

Next, my wife inherits a house which we sell for $1,100,000.

That’s “one point one million”.

Since it’s an inheritance, there is no tax on it.

We Spent Money.

We paid off debts, fix up the house, invest in some solid investments.

We bought a cabin in the mountains. This is officially part of “living the dream”.

We also bought a 1955 Chevy Bel Air, 2 door, Sport Coupe.

Tithing

We are Christians and believe in “tithing”, which is giving 10% of your income back to charity.

My choice was to pay for a “Sand Dam” and water well in Kenya.

This is a photo of the actual project that we paid for.

Those are the people that we impacted.

Please read about it and make your own donation. You can make any size donation.

I mean, this is literally saving lives and changing the world.

My wife loves donkeys, so her choice was to buy 40 donkeys through World Vision.

If you want to buy someone a chicken or a bunny, this is the place to do it.

Please click here and donate to World Vision.

Again, saving lives and changing the world.

How cool is that?

Oh, and we got a dog.

His name is Domino.

(Note the name tag.)

Coolest dog in the world.

Border Collie mix.

Adopted from a rescue.

What’s Next?

We have money left over.

Now, a million bucks isn’t what it used to be.

I can’t say that all of our money problems are over for the rest of our lives, but we should be fine for a for a few years at least.

My point in telling you all this is that I want you to believe me when I say:

I Don’t Need Your Money.

I have an opportunity that most people never get.

I can start a business and if I don’t make money, I don’t care.

Anything I do now, will be for free.

My immediate goal is to try stuff and see what works.

I love to teach and write and help people.

I haven’t been paying close attention to SEO for the last year, so I’ll get caught up on that.

The SEO world has changed a bunch in 2011 and I’ve been personally impacted by those changes.

(I’ll tell you that story later.)

I DO Need Your Help!

You can help me by telling me what you need.

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If you want to be more specific, please leave me a comment or send me an email through the contact form.

It’s about time to get this party started again and I need you to tell me how I can help you.

I’ll be sitting on the cabin porch, waiting.

Death threats

Recently, I received an email from a well known female blogger saying that she had received death threats.

She said there was a “Mean Site 1″ that talked to a “Mean Site 2″ and both of them threatened to kill her or do her harm.

She was targeted because trolls on the Internet don’t like successful women, she said. She quoted specific excerpts from the offending site, proving that they threatened to kill her.

This was horrible! I was outraged.

Background Check

Because of my deep cynicism and morbid curiosity, I wanted to check to see what these “Mean Sites” had actually written. It’s always good to double check what anyone says on the Internet.

After a quick search, I found the obvious “Mean Site 2″. They were, in fact, mean.

I read in amazement that this “Mean Site” was not actually threatening anything close to death.

The quotes that were used by the female blogger were taken so far out of context that they were meaningless.

The female blogger had lied. Big, obvious lies.

Sex! Murder! Money!

As I read more and more into the background of what happened, who said what, and who did what, I found the story of a possible affair, a husband leaving his wife and family, an actual premeditated murder by a hired killer that someone is serving time for, tax fraud, fake death threats, and money making scams that target defenseless women through deception on the Internet.

I was more shocked at the truth than I was at the original lie.

I will give you links to all of the offending, and offensive, sites and blog posts at the end so you can go read as much about it as you want.

Continue reading →

The best part of third grade is recess.

With this house deal about done, I’ll be taking a break from “Untangling The Web” for a while.

It will probably be two or three months before I get back into the groove of writing weekly blog posts.

Old Articles

I know you’ll miss me, but I’m sure you’ll be tough enough to make it through the night.

Maybe I’ll post links each week to old articles you may have missed.

Floating Ideas

I’ve got a lot of ideas floating around in my head.

I think the time away might allow them to blossom into great, new ways to help you make more money from your business.

I’d love to hear what you are thinking.

I want to know how I can best help you.

What is your biggest problem?

What is your biggest question?

What is your biggest need?

Please click here to send me an email and tell me.

My break is from writing, not from reading email.

Your ideas, mixed into my ideas, might make some pretty good soup.

See you in September.

I finally got my wife to create a FaceBook account. She stayed away for years.

Now, she checks it first thing every morning, before she gets out of bed.

It has nothing to do with age.

I’m 55. I’ve been building web sites for 15 years. I can hand code a complete web site from scratch if I wanted to, then configure the DNS, add the .htaccess rules, and write the SQL to input content to the database, which I created manually.

Fear and being lazy. No excuses.

It’s time to debunk the myth. You are not too old to use social media. Pretending that you are is the equivalent of blaming the recession for why you’ve been unemployed for two years. It’s an excuse and it’s a bad one at that.

Just because you’re not familiar with a new technology, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a benefit or that you shouldn’t pick it up. Learning and growing and mastering new skills is what we do as humans. It’s what we’ve always done.

You weren’t born knowing how to use language and form sentences, but you learned.
You didn’t know how to drive a car, but you learned.
You didn’t know how to type and/or use a computer, but you learned.
You learned by doing it and practicing it. You learned because it moved you forward. I’d hate to see where we’d be today if the cavemen wrote off fire as “shiny and useless”.

If you want to learn social media, you need to stop talking and start doing. Using your age as an excuse just sets you further and further behind the curve.

Read the entire article at:
http://outspokenmedia.com/social-media/too-old-for-social-media/