Back in Riverside, Daily Update

Hello Readers,

I am back in riverside to continue with my winter course. It was a relatively easy flight from Oakland to Ontario. Spent much of the day cleaning up and catching up with friends. I am working on several updates for the site.

It is 5 in the morning here, and I am still awake, even after getting 5 hours of sleep last night. As mentioned before, I am experimenting on Polyphasic sleep schedule. I figured if I don't sleep this night, but take two naps tomorrow in the afternoon and in the evening, I should be able to stay up all night tomorrow also and continue the same schedule.

But the problem is if I can get through this night and be alert till tomorrow afternoon. My eyes are feeling very drowsy and I can see a considerable drop in my creativity. Therefore I will cut this blog entry short and do other non-complex thoughts.

Once again thank you very much for reading my blog.

Surf

Interesting Find

Hello Readers,

I was surfing the blogs and came upon this interesting post. I don't have time to post an official blog as to what happened today, so I am posting this instead.

"There is a game known as ‘6 Degrees of Separation’ (from Kevin Bacon - no relation to the best of my knowledge). The way the game works is to try to connect 2 famous people via 6 associations. We have been watching the blogsphere for the last year or so and believe that nearly all blogging homeschoolers will hear about important news items, etc. within 3 days of the first mention in a HS blog.

This experiment will work as follows:

1- If this is the first blog in which you have seen this post and you would like to contribute to the experiment, copy the entire post and post it in your blog.

2- Modify the post to add a link to your blog which displays the appropriate degree you are from the original in the following list:

{original, first degree, second degree, third degree, fourth degree, fifth degree, sixth degree}

That way, visitors can directly see the chain of communication that ended with this post in your blog.

3- Leave a comment in the blog where you first viewed this post indicating that your blog is among the next degree.

4- If you are a homeschooler or are interested in/considering homeschooling and either do not have a blog, would prefer not to blog this or the sixth degree is already taken, you can still contribute to this experiment by leaving a comment in the blog where you first read it.

5- After 3 days report back how many people read, commented and blogged based on your post to the blog where you first read this. (They only report this blog would receive is from the degree below and this blog will report the total from below and comments here to the degree above.) To illustrate how this would work let’s suppose that in this imaginary example every blog has approximately the same number of readers and that each blog entry for each degree ends up with exactly the same number of comments.

Let’s say that each blog would receive 2 comments where the experiment was posted and 2 comments from non-bloggers. This would produce the following:

original: 2 + 2 = 4
first: ( 2 * 2 ) + 2 = 6
second: ( 2 * 4 ) + 2 = 10
third: ( 2 * 8 ) + 2 = 18
fourth: ( 2 * 16 ) + 2 = 34
fifth: ( 2 * 32 ) + 2 = 66
sixth: ( 2 * 64 ) + 2 = 130

That totals 268. If you change the number of experiment posts to 3, the result is ( 5 + 11 + 29 + 83 + 245 + 731 + 2189 = ) 3293. Consider what the number would be when we average about 60 readers a day. (Welcome to math 101) Let’s allow a week for the reporting to roll back through the earlier degrees."

Surf

Haloscan

Hello Readers,

I came upon a useful and common tool among bloggers, traceback. Upon googling, came upon a very easy to use site, Haloscan, which automatically installed my traceback tool for me.

I didn't know it could be this easy and best of all it is free.

So Haloscan, thank you very much for providing this service.

Surf

SG Pro Dilemma Resolved

After much thought and consideration of various options, I have decided to continue as a reseller with SG Pro. As described in my other post SG Pro Dilemma, I was trouble decided if I should continue any longer with SG Pro or not. I still don't have a reliable source of income to market SG Pro, nor do I know if the software will make it big, but I certainly have hopes.

I have taken a job as a forum poster, posting at $0.08, to pay for the professional website designer. I hope to raise about $50 (625 posts), within the next week, which means I am going to posting quite often at the forum.

I have also decided to startup other projects in order to raise money for SG Pro. Watch out this space for more details to come.

Surf

Blog: Money making machine?

January 2, 2005 6.07 pm

I have been surfing the blogging network the past two days and I have found lot of blogs with adsense attached to them. There is even a link under "Template" section, that enables me to add adsense to this blog. Not that it is any of my business, but I find it a bit disturbing. I have no problem with blogs with ads on the side, the blogs whose main goal is not to make money, but to convey the blogger thoughts and ideas to the reader.

But I have a very big problem with spamming blogs which have advertisement between every two lines and that falsely advertise services. If you ask me, these blogs should be removed immediately. In my opinion, blogs are not the way to make money, which is why I still haven't added adsense or any kind of ad to this blog so far. Blogs are simply a unformal way to convey your thoughts.

Surf

Polyphasic sleep failure

Jan o2, 2006 5.16 pm

First attempt at polyphasic sleep experiment seemed to have failed. I was feeling too sleepy and hit the sheets last night at about 3 am in the morning. I plan to try again today by taking a small nap at about 6 or 9 pm. The odds are that I will a sleep wave and doze off for about 30 minutes, if I am lucky. I will keep my readers posted about further improvements.

Surf

StartGuard Dilemma

Jan 02, 1.58 am

When I first decided to become involved with SG Pro, I was taking summer school at UCR. I was very excited about the project, especially since it was my first business project and I thought it had the potential to become big. It has been over six months since then, and I have made very little progress with SG Pro. I have been very busy with college (not studying, but slacking mostly), and kind of lost interest with SG. Now that I am in vacation and have nothing else to do, I decided to start back work with SG Pro. I had full confidence that I would sell at least 10 copies before couple of months, which is quite good considering I don't even have a site up.

This time I wanted to be disciplined in my work, so I wrote myself a partial business plan, dividing the project into plans. First part of that was to verbally resign agreement with the owner of SG Pro (I am just a reseller, he is the brains behind the project. I was supposed to be the marketing expert, but things changed and I was forced to become an affiliate/reseller.) First part was completed the very day I wrote the business plan. Second part was to survey the field and find out if SG Pro would be successful. This is where the trouble began.

As always I got lazy and the project slowed, but that is not main problem. My cousins from TX just left after spending 10 days of their vacation with us. We had quite lot of fun. Now that they are gone, I will be able to fully concentrate on SG Pro, solving the first problem. But the second problem is much problematic and difficult to solve.

The thing is that I am having second thoughts about the project. The problem is not that I am not confident in the software, I still believe it has the potential to reach big, but that I not confident I have the resources to make it big. When I started this project, I relied on the owner for the resources to market the software. Now that I am an affiliate, I am on my own. As any other college student, I am broke. So the dilemma is whether to continue with SG Pro project or not. One solution to the problem is slowly building up the website and using free resources to gain sales, which would be reinvested. In time this cycle would slowly build up the company.

But that is going to take a lot of time and effort and there is always a possibility that the project might fail, wasting the time and effort which could have been better spent. Once I get some sales for SG Pro, the rest should be relatively easy. I could invest that money in driving more traffic to the site, which hopefully means more sales. It is all about traffic and persuasion. If I can get a decent amount of targeted traffic to the site and if the site content is enough to show the customer the need of the product, the software would become a success. I think the first part is going to be more challenging than the second part, since I believe I can persuade the visitor to buy the site.

Only way I can get the amount of site that is required is through advertising, which would only be possible if I have resources, which I don't have. Therefore I am forced to decide if I should continue with this project or not. One other alternative is to raise money via another source and invest that in SG Pro. But in order for that to work, I need an alternative, which is amazingly tough to find. I have been thinking very much about this. Now that I am only polyphasic sleep patter (see previous post, click here), I have lot of time to think about this. But I am not sure if it will do any good, because one, I am getting very tired and any decision made in this state generally isn't as good as one not made in this state and second, I need second hand opinion on this matter and the person I am looking for is probably sleeping, so I am stuck with 2GB of songs and my pc.

I am not sure what to post next, so I think this will be last post of the night. Tomorrow should be an interesting day, considering I am required to have a talk with my parents about my school and future and I am on polyphasic sleep pattern.

Surf

Polyphasic sleep

Jan 01, 2005

Hello Readers,

Couple of days ago I ventured about into a site called GlenRhodes when searching for polyphasic sleep, which is sleeping less by cutting out on non-rem sleep. I have had lot of trouble with sleep, everyday I struggle to go to sleep early and wake up early. This site seems to hold answer to my sleep problems.

The basic idea behind polyphasic sleep is that we tend to spend lot of time in non-rem sleep (70 minutes of 90 minutes sleep cycle). We can cut down on this time by sleeping less, therefore forcing ourselves to go faster into REM sleep. Most people on polyphasic sleep take naps throughout the day, to keep themselves fresh and just as alert as the person who had 8 hours of sleep.

Although I like sleeping, I have decided to try out this method of sleeping. My plan is to force myself to be awake all night today and to take small naps whenever I feel sleepy or groggy. If everything goes as planned, I should be able to sustain without 8 hour sleep, and feel alert throughout the day.

One problem with this method will be my parents, who will certainly try to force me to go back to old sleep routine. But the main problem will be waking up after one sleep cycle. Theoretically after the REM sleep, I should be able to wake up, before going into another sleep cycle, but I am very much skeptic If I can.

My plan for tomorrow is to complete one sleep cycle after my meal in the afternoon, and another at either 6 pm or 9 pm (I feel especially sleepy at these times). If I miss both these times, then I will be forced to stay awake till 1 or 2 am. Going to sleep after 9 means I will have go back to normal sleep schedule, because I doubt very much that I will be able to wake up after I go to sleep at 1 am.

If everything goes as per planned, I should be able to stay up all night tomorrow also and continue the same routine. I am very much worried about the short-term and long-term effects of polyphasic sleep. I read somewhere that you should drink lots of apple/orange juice while on polyphasic sleep, so I have stockpiled lot of orange juice. I hope there is are no bizarre or dangerous aftereffects.

The main purpose of this polyphasic sleep experiment is to get lot of work done in this time. If I am not able to remain as alert of yesterday (today I am feeling a bit sleepy), then I am afraid I am going to have to stop this experiment. I think I should remain considerably alert since I feel very refreshed after naps. Also my nap schedule may not be long enough, and I might be forced to squeeze another nap in my daily routine. As of now one thing is certain, If I go to sleep after 9pm, I will not wake up before my 8 or even 9 hours of sleep is complete.

I think I have rambled on enough about polyphasic sleep, so I will end this blog entry now. Next entry will be about my SG Pro dilemma I am facing.

Surf

Happy New Year

In the excitment of creating a blog and planning out 2006, I forgot to wish my non-existant readers a Happy New Year. Therefore Wish you a Happy and Prosperous New Year to people who are going to vist this site and read this message.

Surf

Plan for 2006

As I have stated in my opening post, one of the main reasons I have started this blog is so that I can say to others what I my plans are and therefore compelling me to complete them. In the previous years I have set many goals, but have failed miserably at the beginning stages itself, therefore in a move to rectify my previous year mistakes, I started this blog.

School wise, this year I certainly hope to do better than last year. I haven't been concentrating fully on studies, therefore my grades have dropped to rock bottom. This is just my first quarter and I have failed out of two subjects already, one on purpose, another unwillingly. Main reason for my failure is the lack of interest in Biology major. This has shown me that my true interest is in business. I am fully confident in my abilities, so getting a 4.0 next quater shouldn't be too much of a problem, especially since I should be taking business, but convincing that to my parents is certainly going to be.

I am certainly hoping this year would be very good for my business, SG Pro. I intend to spend most, if not all of my free time in making this petty unknown anti-spyware into the industry's top selling brand. It is certainly not going to be easy, but I am willing to spend the time and effort to make that happen. At best it is going to take at least 5 years for my plans to come through. I am hoping I am at least able to get a good website up and some sales before the first quater of 2006. The problem behind this is that I am bankrupt. I have no money to spend on marketting SG Pro. While on pondering with the issue of how to raise money for SG Pro, I came up with a brand new idea for a website, which is what my next post is going to be about.

In the matter of family affairs, this should be the year I show to my parents I can stand on my own two feet and not depend on them. To be honest, I am very lazy and depend on my parents to do everything for me. I certainly hope to get rid of the quality. As for my companion, I still haven't found her. If you out there, please come knocking to my dorm door in UCR. Well actually don't, it is more fun when I put effort into it.

Thats my grand plan for 2006. Should be a fun year, considering everything will go my way, which it won't. I am certainly positive something will go wrong, which will enable me to either prevail or fail. Calm seas never made a sailor out of anyone, so I expect rough seas and look forward to them.

Surf

First Blog

Hello Readers,

First of all I would like to thank you for reading my blog. There are millions of blogs and many more being created everyday, but you have taken the time to visit mine, one of millions, which means my blog is incredibly good or you are incredibly bored. I am guessing it is the latter, but thank you nevertheless. As you can probably see, this is my first blog post. I titled it My 2006 happenings, because first I created it at 2.48 am on January 1st, 2006, but mainly since it is going to follow my day to day happenings in the year of 2006.

Before I go any further, I would like to state the purpose for writing this blog, which is to keep myself in line. I have many plans in my mind for 2006, most of which I probably won't put into effect unless I find a way to force myself to do it. What better way to do it other than to announce to the public my plans, that way I will be held accountable to my words.

I do not wish to reveal much information about my past life, one because I can never live there again, but mainly because I wish the readers to get a fresh impression of me. My life as far as reader is concerned begins on January 1st, 2006, 2.55 am. I do wish to reveal some information about myself, I am a freshmen at University of California, Riverside, recently turned 18, and very much interest in becoming a businessman.

I have started my own mini-company. I have not decided a name for my company yet. Currently I am working on a project with 'StartGuardPro.' I have signed up to be a reseller with the StartGuard Pro. Watch out this space more details to come.

Now that I have introduced me, I would like to know a bit about you. Therefore feel free to introduce yourself through email (surfup223@gmail.com) or comments. I would certainly like to know who reads my postings.