Updates and Stuff

Posted by Stephen on

December 10, 2006

I thought I’d just do a bit of housekeeping and update you folks on stuff that you may or may not want to know about. To start, I mentioned that I was going back to school to improve my writing and learn Mandarin. Both classes are finally done, and I learned quite a bit.

My writing course was taught by a successful independent writer by the name of Brian Payton. Brian has written for a number of publications such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Globe and Mail, and Canadian Geographic. Brian is currently promoting his new book “Shadow of the Bear – Travels in Vanishing Wilderness“. Since my background was never a writing one, I learned a lot from Brian’s lectures and the real world knowledge that he imparted. He’s given me a new found respect for print media and the inspiration to improve my craft. It was hard for me to believe that it was his very first time teaching.

My Mandarin class went both good and bad. I was the bad part. I never studied. When I studied, it consisted of me listening to the lesson on CD before class. By the end of the class however, I must have retained something because words all of a sudden began to mean something. After our final oral test, the teacher encouraged me to go to level two. She said that I had the confidence, but I need to practice more in order to retain it. I will be going back to school again in January for level two. Hopefully by the time COMPUTEX rolls around, I’ll be good enough to survive in Taiwan.

AGLOCO added a new feature that tells people what percentage of top users you are in. I nearly popped a plug seeing it say “You rank in the top 0.72% of all members”. This means that 99.28% of people aren’t doing as well as I am. Come on! Haven’t I scared you people away already?

My daily and often multiple daily updates have increased my blogs value to the point that Text Link Ads was able to sell a link on my site. They have me listed here. I’m only $40 bucks a month! That’s a bargain! However, they take 50% of the cut. That’s pretty high, but it’s free money so I’ll take that for now. Seven spots left folks. Better hurry!