Saturday, April 26, 2008

* Would You Call Genghis Khan a Ruthless Warrior?

In the book "Genghis Khan or the Emperor of All Men" by Harold Lamb, Khan was described as such:
Eight hundred or so years ago, a man almost conquered the earth. He made himself master of half the known world and inspired humankind with a fear that lasted for generations. Genghis Khan, meaning universal ruler, was a man difficult to measure by ordinary standards. When he marched with his army, it was by degrees of latitude and longitude instead of miles; cities in his path were often obliterated and rivers diverted from their courses; deserts were populated with the fleeing and dying, and after he had passed, wolves and ravens were often the sole living things in a once populous area.
If you could stand face to face with Genghis Khan and call him a "Ruthless Warrior", do you think this would offend him? Probably not, since it is true and he would take great pride in his accomplishments.

Somehow my wife does not understand this concept when she tries to shame me into doing things by calling me "cheap". I have long since learned not to say "thank you" when she calls me "cheap".

However, there are downsides to being naturally and inherently frugal (I prefer frugal to cheap). I have been blogging since November/2007 and until last week had not spent a penny on by new-found hobby. I use Blogger for the blog, Media Max to host my files and Gmail for email; all of which are free. However there can be a dark side to frugal.

Last week I decided to go ahead and upgrade my domain to a custom domain (www.Dividends4Life.com). It was only $10, but I am still sorting out several issues including trying to get my ranking and ratings back. On Alexa my 3-month rank had reached about half a million and my one week rank was closing in on 100,000; now I am back over 9 million for a 3-month rank and 248k for a one-week rank. On Technorati I saw my authority go from the high 80's to 0. My Google page rank went from 3 to 0. Of course you have the normal feed issues and such.

Just as I was finally getting a handle on the domain issue, I got an email from Media Max that they are changing their name and domain and will not be transferring the "free" accounts. So I started scurrying around to manually move my account to their new domain. Curently, I am trying yet another free file hosting service. If you have clicked on one of my PDFs or spreadsheets over the last week you will have noticed it does not work quite as efficient as the old Media Max link. I will continue to sort through these issues. In the mean time, when you find a broke link, let me know and I will correct it.

My wife feeling somewhat smug looked at me and said, "I hope you have learned something from this!". When I replied, "I sure did. When you rely on free stuff you better have a good backup plan."

She just sighed and walked off. Go figure.


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