Dhivael/Anne’s Hyperactive Blog

I’m getting really, really tired of this now. Once again, I have a bad cold or the flu or something to that effect.

This is somewhere around the third or fourth time, at least, that I have been sick this year. Usually, I get one minor cold or maybe one bad flu bug… But then I’m all better.

I swear, it’s like my immune system went on vacation and decided to rent out the place to any germs that wanted to wander in. I really hope that my being sick doesn’t last for too much longer… it’s already lasted for quite long enough.

I just got my first article published on Associated Content, cool. So what did I write about? How to Make Polymer Clay Jewelry. I’m going to have to write more articles for them, as soon as I can figure out what to write about. I can blog all day, but when it comes to writing for Associated Content… My mind just sort of hits a brick wall.

Thanks to a short tutorial and help from a friend, I managed to not only get AWStats working… I managed to also import the last year’s worth of site stats.

It’s funny how last year at this time, my stats were pretty pathetic. I got less than 10MB of bandwidth in a month with not even 20 visitors in a month. Now I’m getting around 20 visitors a day. Not a huge number, but not too shabby either.

It is definitely interesting to look at all the refering sites. I swear, every search bot on the ‘net has visited my site at one time or another. That’s pretty cool. Usually, one only sees Google, Yahoo, MSN and Alexa. I’ve had 29 different robots or spiders visiting my site since February 1st. Granted, some of these are spam, but a lot aren’t. Googlebot has hit my site over 1,200 times this month; Yahoo, over 800.

Definitely not bad at all.

I just need… more stuff!

PayPerPost isn’t the only way to make money online and Writing for Profit is a blog that explains easily how to start getting paid to write.

Normally, this isn’t something I would bother to blog about. However, I only just now got around to eating my fortune cookie. One side has the usual drab fortune and ‘lucky numbers’, the other has that ‘learn Chinese’ thing going on.

The fortune cookie said:

Delicious: Hao-chi

Since I’m actually at the computer, I decided to try to find out if the cookie was even remotely telling the truth. Being lazy at first, I go to Google Translation. Normally, I don’t trust Google Translation entirely but I figured that if it showed the same chars then at least there was some connection. Searching both Chinese traditional and simplified returned the same result: (pronounced mei wèi), a composite of ‘beautiful’ + ‘food’ according to my FireFox Chinese dictionary extension (DictCN – I knew having all these extensions was going to come in handy!). Or, yes, ‘delicious’ when taken together.

But the results clearly did not match what was on my cookie! I was talking to a friend online about this and they, being not so lazy as I, went to Mandarin Tools to search. They report back that not only does ‘mei wèi’ mean delicious, there is a ‘hao chi’ that means delicious. But it has the characters . Well, at least they got the pronunciation correct. But what do the Chinese characters mean!?

At this point, I’m not so lazy and go looking for how to search by character. But, not having much of an idea how to look up characters by stroke, I don’t get too far. I describe the actual characters to my friend at this point and they point out that it sounds like the characters for ‘can’ (as in I can do this) + ‘mouth’ and guess that perhaps it means ‘edible’. I search Mandarin Tools again and… Yes! It is ‘can’ and it is ‘mouth’. But the characters are not pronounced ‘hao chi’, they are pronounced ‘ke kou’. The composite together turns out not to be ‘edible’ but ‘tasty’.

In the end, I would have to give my fortune cookie a grade of C+. It got the right pronunciation for ‘delicious’. Plus, the characters ‘ke kou’ could mean ‘delicious’, I suppose. But the pronunciation and the characters don’t go together and that’s where it gets major points off.

Lesson of the day: if you want to learn Chinese, never trust a fortune cookie.

Getting a cell phone can be a hassle. You not only have to go to the store where your carrier sells phones, but then you also have to decide what you want – with a salesperson breathing down your neck and telling you how you should get the most expensive phone. Probably because he or she gets a bigger sales commission for the more expensive phones.

Fortunately, now there is another option. You can buy your cell phone online, much easier than you can in the store. You can easily compare features and pick out the phone that is perfect for you. Pick out something you like, like a Verizon cell phone, pickk the exact plan you want and the cell phone ships right to your door. FREE. What’s better than free?

A lot of the phones themselves are free as well, depending on which carrier and plan you want. At Wirefly, the deals change often but right now you can get free Verizon RAZR phones. No rebates required. With a free phone and free shipping, what are you waiting for? If you keep waiting, the cell phone is not going to get here any faster. Go get your new cell phone today! You know you want one. At least go take a peek at what’s offered. Peeks are free as well.

I know I should not, but I am so tempted to go buy more .info domains from GoDaddy. At $1 each… well…

Some people collect cars, some people collect dolls. I collect domain names. The only thing stopping me right now is I can’t think of any good names that my brother might like. I’ve been trying to get him hooked up on PPP for awhile now and he’s just now realizing exactly how much he could make from blogging. But he should have a domain name or two.

Hopefully, GoDaddy will still have the sale going later tonight. Maybe I’ll get my mom a couple domains, too. I dunno.