I’ve been trying out Project Wonderful which is an ad placing service that I’ve seen on Akashik: Battle of Angels a nifty comic site that I check out daily. I’ve had it on my tarot reading site for almost a week now and thought I would try adding a few spots on this site to see what happens.

It seems to work well for placing ads, although I haven’t quite worked out a decent average for bids yet. I know the tarot site is a bit…narrow in it’s appeal, but perhaps the blog will be a bit more interesting to people. I like the way that the site is set up it’s easy to sign up and it’s very easy to customize. I haven’t tried out advertising yet. I’ll wait until I accrue a bit more funds in my account and then redistribute them.

There’s yet more drama with Livejournal. I’m not sure entirely what’s going on, and I don’t have the mental capacity to wade through page after page of hate comments and bickering to try and get the full story.

I know that LJ has been bought, or transferred to SUP a Russian company. There’s more paranoia and malingering with regards this because there’s been tons of issues in the past year because of random bannings on the part of SixApart (the parent company) and all the rest of it. I have primarily been using InsaneJournal and GreatestJournal for certain things, and was finally starting to transfer entries from LJ for archive purposes in earnest to IJ over the past couple of months, except that things stalled with all the moving that I’ve been doing.

I’m torn. I think it’s unfair that people are automatically assuming doom and gloom just because the new parent company is Russian, but I know what’s happened with other services I’ve used when they’ve switched servers and journals have disappeared and things like that. I imagine that I will move some of the archives to this blog as I have in the past, also. I’ve been disliking LJ for quite some time, partially due to java issues and partially due to the way things have been going on. I’m not going to pay them for their services any more that’s for sure. Whether I completely discard them remains to be seen. It’s entirely possible SUP will fix everything, but I’m not holding my breath. I continue to have many good friends who will continue to use LJ, no matter what, I imagine. At least I know that I can point them to my RSS feed here if they want to keep up with me.

Things didn’t quite go as planned yesterday. I’d intended to do some work but I really didn’t feel up to it. I was up until after midnight Sunday morning fixing or trying to fix things that were screwing up with various websites. My email is still on the fritz. I’m not sure what’s wrong. It looked as though it was some kind of issue in Thunderbird, the program I use, but I tried adding one of my accounts to Outlook Express to check on that and it still wouldn’t work. On the upside the email is NOT getting eaten, because I can still access it through webmail, but it’s a bit of a pain having to log in to the various different accounts manually when before they would just all download to one interface and divide themselves up so I could read them.

I was exhausted yesterday given the munchkin woke me up at about 7 a.m. and I’d had hardly any sleep. Mum and I went down into the city for punkybrunch and then tried to find a store that I wanted to check out but missed it completely. We spent some time at the mall, but I found that despite the four mimosas I had at brunch I really didn’t feel so great. I think it’s a combination of the stress recently, the lack of sleep. I had a headache for the rest of the night, and wound up going to bed not long after I put the munchkin to sleep because I just couldn’t concentrate to tackle the email issue, catch up on everything or anything like that. In the end I succumbed to things and took some Tylenol given it’s not like I have access to Botox for headaches and finally got to sleep.

I didn’t even get the Sunday Self Portrait posted that I intended to do done, so here that is. This is what someone looks like running on three, maybe four hours sleep after hosing a site.

But hey, good news for me, my email is back. My hosting tech support are so great! Turns out I triggered a firewall on top of everything else, go me! I shouldn’t try to input passwords while being all freaked out that half my sites are gone ;_;

Wow, well, in trying to fix my other site I broke it even more! Go me! I have had to issue an appeal to tech support at my host and there’s nothing more I can do at the moment until they take pity on me and fix it. They’re always exceptionally good about things like that so I’m not worried too much. Things are going to be down until Monday probably, though but it’s my own fault, and I’m on reading hiatus anyway, so I didn’t flag it as an emergency. They’re dealing with a massive .php upgrade at the moment as it is so they’re dealing with enough of their own.

Other than that it’s a crazy day. I found out that an image my friend and I had elected to use in her blog layout is actually copyright/commissioned for someone else I had tried to track down an original author but given the picture was all over MySpace I thought it was safe. A friend of a friend recognized the picture and pointed us in the right direction for the artist and in keeping with her rules the picture cannot be used in the manner it was being used, so I am going to take the layout down and make something else.

See how great my host is? I just got an email back from her in the middle of writing this saying she’s going to try and resurrect my poor dead site. Yay!

In other news I spent part of today helping Mum get back home. Here’s hoping that she gets some rest from her situation. She sure needs it, and I’m also looking at finally getting chapter 2 of PGSM: Out of Retirement up and getting my re-write of that sussed. I’ve narrowed down my choices for NaNoWriMo also. I’m either going to work on one of two stories I have outline and things for “Can’t Cry for Yesterday” or “Sanctity”, or I may just kinda ‘cop out’ and work some more on the story I wrote for NaNo last year.

Sheesh. I think I need to go sit in the recliner for a bit and eat the curry that is beeping at me from the microwave.

…or maybe I should say this space. I’m going to go for that pic-a-day bit, and figure I’ll move some of the media things that I occasionally talk about here over there too, video games, games, movies, television that sort of thing, writing may or may not wind up over there given I just moved it so I don’t really want to move it again.

I’m not sure I’m too happy with the header over there. It uses the same framework as this site for right now because I knew I could tweak it fairly easy, but I’ll probably find something else in a week or so and change it up more thoroughly.

Every once in a while I go through spurts where I want to change my name, by this I mean my domain name…well, that’s not strictly true I love have ami-chan.net but I get itches where I start thinking of domain names that I want to see if I could get. I’ll change my UNs on freeservers like GreatestJournal, there I have “ami-chan” as one of my names, but the content that I used to blog on there I’ve moved to Ami’s Journal (although that really has fallen by the wayside given I don’t do much with the fansite any more) and so using the fan-name didn’t seem appropriate.

Now I find myself wondering if the username I just registered there is available as a domain name and wondering about registering it. What would I do with it? That would be the huge question. I have other domains. I could just make subdomains, right?

I have had it rattling around about separating off some of the content that winds up on this blog into niches. Then I remind myself how well the “writing blog” went over and how it wound up getting merged back into here. I wonder though if I should separate off entertainment and gaming things, or if I should try my hand at a photo-a-day blog like several of my friends do, like DigiCass, or Footprints on Film, and Ben Spark. I certainly take enough pictures. I toss the ideas around and I wonder if anything will actually come of them. This is my major problem I’ll take on projects and they don’t get finished.

NaNoWriMo is fast approaching and that will be taking up a lot of my time come November so perhaps I should just hold off. But my New Year starts on October 31st, and renewal and new projects and things are consequently fresh on my mind.

I like to think that it’s not a secret that from time to time I get paid for blogging. I work now with about four different companies doing this, but Smorty is the newest one that I’ve joined up for.

I wish that I could earn all the money that I needed by doing things that I like. I wish that more could come in from the tarot side of things or from the hypnotherapy side of things, but with our housing situation and our family situation that’s not going to be the case. I supplement my husband’s income by looking at different sites and writing about them, reviewing their products or services and offering my opinions to those of you who are reading this site.

It’s not going to buy us a new house or fly us to Cabo, but it’s helped us out immensely since I started doing reviews in January. New sites pop up offering these services from time to time, some of them haven’t been so great, and others have a really wonderful way of offering their services. I like the way that Smorty operates. I’m having some great fun and have found out about some interesting things. Their interface is straight forward. I had no problems signing up and getting started as I’ve had with several other sites that I’ve worked through.

I’m looking forward to the new things that this is going to bring.

Today was another busy day between doing round robins to the mechanic because it was time for my husband’s car to have an oil change and he had to be in early because it was the city’s Homecoming Parade. When I got home I checked the mail to find a letter from KidCare. I was expecting it to be “send us more information, application will be canceled before you get chance,” as normally happens with applications related to the government.

To my surprise the letter informed me that my son has qualified for insurance coverage under their umbrella and if I send them $20 for the first monthly premium as soon as they receive it he will have insurance coverage.

I do still need to check and see what will go on with the bills that we’ll soon be getting from the air ambulance and the hospital. If he qualified for Medicaid itself they would have covered bills from the past three months but KidCare is different. I had reactivated the KidCare application a week or so before his accident and it’s taken them this long to process it. I was surprised they didn’t ask for confirmation of income and things again. I’m sure Medicaid will ask for them, and that application was only sent in a week ago so it’ll be a little while. Here’s hoping they bridge the difference. We’re barely being able to make the payments on the bill from my sleep study and hubbie’s E.R. visit. An ambulance ride from our old house to the local hospital is $550, so I dread to think what a chopper ride from here to Arnold Palmer is in comparison, but we’ll make it. If for some reason they don’t cover it I’m sure there are options.

If you saw a blip in layout earlier it’s because I have something I’m working on for Samhain. I have a layout style that I think would work, but I want to change the graphics around so they’re my own work. I found a very beautiful picture on an image search a while ago, however it’s not a piece I specifically commissioned. I tracked down the artist’s website and have written to her to see if I can get permission/rights to use the artwork. Has anyone else heard of Victoria Frances? I wish I spoke Spanish. Perhaps my question would be answered by the writing on her site but I can’t read it.
Fingers crossed that she says, “Yes,” I’m looking into other options if I don’t get permission.

Seeing as I’m finished with the article and I’ve been letting certain things slide here for a while….I’m going to attempt to upgrade WP tonight. All my other blogs are very current, but this is still on the first version that I installed so it needs to get fixed.

However I’m paranoid I may break things instead, so if the blog disappears or suddenly looks bizarre and broken you know what happens.

I had another gallery commission this past week which kept me busy when the munchkin wasn’t being hornary. As far as the munchkin goes I think we’re fully into the terrible twos now. He’ll throw tantrums, kick and scream, and go and try to destroy things if he’s not getting his way.

By comparison .php coding is a breeze. It’s all about perspective

So here’s the photo gallery that I did:

I’ve also finally got my butt in gear to do some buttons for my sites that I’ve been meaning to do:

So, there’s my PPP button, and then the email me button (I still need to do an email button for this site) and a PPP Direct button for my Livejournal. I also need to finish sorting out some things on the tarot site. I’ve redone the “price list” so that it’s donations, and various different readings open up for a person dependent on how much “silver” they give to me. I need to tweak a few things and see if they sound okay. I need to redo the hypnosis blurb and put it back up there so that it’s got as much information as the tarot section does.

I sincerely hope the munchkin gets out of the terrible twos stage quickly given he’s gotten into it early. I like my happy baby, I do not like this grouchy troll that likes to tip things over because he’s not getting to eat what he wants, or because he doesn’t want this sippy cup, he wants that sippy cup…it’s no fun, especially not as he’s taken to pinching me. Ouch! I’m one big bruise.