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Not.

Today I was reading this fellow, Steve Pavlina, who’s of interest to me because he claims to make great money off Google Adsense. I’m happy for him in a general way, but I do like to see folks following ideas that make sense to me, and a lot of new age stuff just doesn’t.

Anyway, what I happened across of Steve’s was his Million Dollar Experiment, which is an expriement in the Voodoo-like power of intention. This is something that Napoleon Hill would have understood quite well. Napoeleon Hill, you’ll recall, is the author of “Think and Grow Rich”.

Here’s a fairly consistent formula for success: tell people that acquiring wealth is easy, and they will pay you handsomely.

In a nutshell, the idea behind intention is, you make a decision with full faith and confidence, and this somehow causes the wonderful thing you decided on to happen in your life: in this case, a million bucks. As Napoleon Hill put it more concisely: “Think and grow rich.”

Let’s look at the results of Steve’s experiement. As of today Steve boasts the proud headline:

Total Manifested = $1,780,008.97
2725 Public Participants

Wow, $1.7 million, pretty impressive, right?

The first thing I wanted to know is: OK, how successful have these 2725 public participants been in attracting a million bucks into their lives? Let’s try some fourth grade math to see if we can solve this awesome intellectual riddle of our day: dividing, we learn that each participant has made$653.21 so far. Wow, that’s pretty good. Most people wouldn’t mind if you handed them a check for that amount. Of course, for a some professionals that’s a days work or less, and even if you’re unlucky enough to be working minimum wage, you should be able to make that much in about three weeks.

Now let’s see how that stacks up to the intention people had, which was to have a million dollars. Again with the fourth grade math: 653.21 / 1,000,000 equals .00065321. OK, maybe we need to get to seventh or ninth grade in our mathematics to know that we have to shift the decimal point two places to express that as a percentage, but let’s do that to see how successful people have been with this program, where 100% successful means everyone got a million bucks, and 0% successful means everyone got nothing. OK, the answer is:

Steve Pavlina’s program for attracting wealth into your life is 0.065321% successful. Isn’t that amazing? Be sure to contribute something to his web site. If you should happen to find yourself unlucky enough in life to trip and fall from a high place, you might try intending to fly. But I hope you’ll just watch your step.

Today I was thinking about The Words of My Perfect Teacher, the Patrul Rinpoche book I’ve been reading. It’s such a fun book, so attractive and bright. Yet at the same time, it’s one of the most “relgious” Buddhist books I’ve ever read.

Make no mistake, Buddhism is a religion. (Duh). But I come to it from an ex-Catholic, and (most recently) an atheist background.

So when I say that Patrul Rinpoche’s book is religious, yes, I suppose that is a criticism. There’s hellfire and brimstone there. Indeed, there are some of the best hellfire and brimstone descriptions that one is likely to read outside of perhaps Dante. And there’s plenty of emphasis on obedience and faith. Yet the book doesn’t put me off much. The whole religion doesn’t put me off much, which is a fine thing for an (ex?-) atheist to say.

It seems to me that Buddhism is a much better religiion for an atheist than some of the others that are kicking around, because its practical emphasis on the effects of karmic action doesn’t necessarily need multiple lifetimes to make sense. Buddhism stresses the natural wish of all beings to be happy, and the natural good effects that flow from compassion, kindness, and other forms of “right action”.

To be sure, the same good and evil problem crops up as elsewhere, and at that point you need some sleight of hand to explain how an evil guy can become rich, for example, or how a good person can lose a child: and by sleight of hand read “multiple lifetimes.” But if you take Buddhism and cut away the parts an atheist wouldn’t like, you’re still left with some tasty bits: an entire secular recipe for happiness.

I’m pleased to report that ParticleWave today became fully Internets 2.0 compliant. Flickr has more about this.

I thought this would also be a good time to do my post-mortem on my first three-week iteration of LeadReply, which you might call iterations 1.0, given our naming convention. Actually in looking over the Software Requirements Specification (SRS), it looks as though iteration 1.0 is not quite mortem yet, since there’s one feature missing — Realtor® notification. That should probably be what I tackle today and tomorrow, even though by rights it’s OK since Eudora’s handling it for now.

The main thing is that in iteration one, we combined an autoresponder with an automatic data entry system into a system that can grow into a full fledged contact manager or drip marketing system. The SQL Server database design is pretty complete — what gets tricky now is that we’re actually entering clients and leads into production, so modifications to the schema become a bit more involved from here on out. Fortunately most of the changes we need now are additional stored procedures, so dropping all / creating all should still work fine in that realm.

Iteration one was a good brush up / learning vehicle for more SQL and SQL Server stored procedures than we’d done in many a month, so from the project portfolio aspect it was a good success. I also got to bang out some good ADO.NET code in C Sharp — not rocket science, to be sure, but some HR guy is bound to expect that it is, so now I can say, “sure, I’ve done that”, since he’ll never be able to figure out that I could based on how similar it is to everything else in the universe.

It might be worth getting with IHomefinder or Moineau Designs or the like at this point to see if there’s any demand for an IDX lead parser and autoresponder, since that’s what we’ve got at the end of iteration 1.

All in all I think being where I am at this stage is pretty good given some of the distractions that came up this week such as some existing web site work and a bit of direct client work as well. The web site, LeadReply.com, is almost utterly nowhere yet — but that’s exactly where it’s supposed to be at this point, with most of the work on the lead parser and database.

Built into the SRS was that each iteration should have a go / no go decision about the next iteration. I’m leaning toward “go” at the moment but will formalize that into the SRS. If we go ahead, some priorities are:

• Write and test the campaign scheduler for sending out emails after the first “one-off” welcome email.
• Write a parameterizable opt-in form that can be included on third party sites (e.g. MY third Internets 2.0 enabled third party sites ).
• Write the corresponding one-click opt-out form, where the default result is “opted out”, but in case the user made a mistake, let them opt back in.

That’s a bit different focus than the first version of the SRS, so I should get this merged into that and do a bit more planning.

As always, what should the business be doing is the harder question than what should the software be doing.

In my last post, I hinted that ParticleWave has been about making money on the Internet all along.

As Gavin DeGraw summed it up, “I don’t want to be anything other than what I’ve been trying to be lately.” And I might add, whatever that is, the mind has a propensity to declare that that’s been what it’s been all along.

Meantime over on my Oakland Blog, I hit the zone this morning with a post about how much I love Walmart. You might also call that post, “Confessions of an Interloper” — but if you do that, you waste a perfectly good title.

You know us interlopers: We always wonder about what’s in the title tag. That’s how you get to be an interloper.

So how do you make money on the Internet? It’s simple, get yourself a domain, like ParticleWave, and then fool around with it in every moment of your spare time for a couple of years until you know something. Then go off in a totally different direction, i.e., real estate, and have a head-slapping moment when you realize that some other guy in the office is being paid to be an internet interloper. (Or internetloper, as one might say). Then realize, “Hey, you can make money on the Internets in Real Estate? Sweet! I’ll try that approach.”

Alternatively, you can stumble into some other way to do. If you do, that’s great. I hope I do, to. Actually, I don’t plan to stumble. I plan to learn, and to teach, and to succeed.

Why not. What else have I got going on?

I will say this, though. When I see some other articles about how easy and overnight it is, however, I want to cringe. For me, it’s been hundreds of hours of work, lots of false starts, hits and misses. Even now, I can’t say that my Internet revenue is such a big deal that I can afford to give up my “brick and mortar” activities. Not that I really use brick and mortar on anything, but that’s the idiom.

Looking in Wordpress on the self-imposed categories I can choose from, “Random Particles” makes perfect sense for this one. If I’ve understood what this post is about by the end of it, I’ll be happy, since at present I certainly don’t. It’s an attempt to pull some cohesiveness from multiple disparate mental threads, an imposition of some sort of order into what is essentially cohesive and chaotic.

On the one hand it’s about software battles. My LeadReply project is going well, suffering only from distractions like the one that prompted this post. But the spec that’s a scant three weeks old and it’s emphasis on providing the market some sort of .NET demonstration is already feeling outdated, like John Lockwood 1.0. But that’s the platform, after all, and if Ruby on Rails is as cool as touted, I can always take whatever year I put into LeadReply and redo it in a month if that’s what I feel like doing.

And in part it’s about the distractions from this project. I’m doing some major reworking of my Oakland site — and probably will do so here as well, to get it ready to “monetize” it. What a concept. One major ParticleWave thread from the beginning has been learning about making money on the Internet. Now that I’ve finally actually done that through some successful real estate sites, I envision being able to do more of it for some of my less productive “Internet Properties”.

In part it has nothing to do with any of this business of busy-ness, but about the wonderful Dharma of Patrul Rinpoche, who I’m reading now. One of the central truths that emerges from the book is the importance of meditating on impermanence. That is to say, neither ParticleWave nor my other sites are unlikely to survive into the next century, and it’s certain that _I_ won’t survive into the next century. Nor is it even guaranteed I’ll make it until five o’clock.

Some motivational cat — Richard Robbins? someone else? — posed the rhetorical question, “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” Buddhism a la Rinpoche stands the question on its head, yet with an even more liberating result: “What will you do now that you are certain to fail (die)?”

With the vastness of suffering and death, how can we be anything but kind?

Last Thursday, the manager on the contract I was working for called me in to his office to let me know he was paying a lot more for me to the contract firm I was working under than he thought he was.

This was a conversation that was destined to go poorly. In fact, it was pretty much downhill from the point where he told me he could get two programmers for what I was making.

And here I thought my rates were pretty reasonable, at market or at worst only about 10% above. And of course they were, but it turns out I was only making 52% of what the contract firm was billing for me.

I wonder what languages the two programmers who replace me will speak. Probably Elbonian.

Anyway, the upshot is that on Friday I decided that I wanted to work on LeadReply — my neglected pet project — for free more than I wanted a 25% pay cut. So that’s what I’m doing, and it’s well underway.

It’s an interesting project, in that it’s completely underfunded. I have scope to work on it for maybe two months, and certainly to do everything I want to do is four months or so of work at minimum.

Today I was working on the classes that will parse the leads when they come in. There’s no rocket science there, just a lot of looking at text emails of various types and pulling strings out. I was almost done the parsing code for most of the types I needed to handle on the first day, when it occurred to me that I was using something of a brute force approach, and needed to do some easy refactoring to make the code less fat and more maintainable.

I hated to bite the bullet and do this, since string parsing code is so ad hoc and yet so menial that it’s always little fun. But then I told myself something that was destined to be put on this blog. I thought, “You know, you might as well do this job right, since after all you’re not getting paid for it.”

That’s how I also do the jobs I’m paid for, of course — but in that case where’s the joke?