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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?

Well, it’s Saturday morning, and what better time to extend one’s programming skills. Get 2/3 of a night’s sleep on Friday night, and wake up before the sun to write some Transact SQL for the realcrm project I’m working on, and along the way go install and start using Subversion for Windows.

Now that was just a pleasure. Install the thing, restart 4NT, read for 10 to 20 minutes, and hey, I’m checking things out and committing and gosh knows what. The only thing remotely like a hickup was the error message that I needed to set $SVN_EDITOR, so I added that to my 4NT startup batch file and away I went. Just what I wanted, version control for use on my personal products that runs fine from the command line and costs what I wanted to pay for version control for my personal projects, i.e., nothing. Of course, if you must use a GUI instead of a command prompt, and if talk of 4NT has you scratching your head, then check out Tortoise SVN, which integrates SVN into Windows Exploder. But don’t ask me whether that part works or not.

[C:\] Real men use the command prompt.

</geek>

A bit later, I’m going to go into my realcrm project and Frozzle the Sub Space Winch. I’ve been thinking that it needed a good Frozzling — just been waiting to have a 32-bit left handed frozzler to do it.

Maybe I should have gone for 3/3 of a night’s sleep.

Well, I just found Bennet’s excellent Code Markup Plugin, and with it, I was able to pretty quickly fix the post about C Sharp Verbatim Strings.

I knew some smart guy would have written that, and sure enough, he did.

With very little extra work, I was able to get some cool formatting going.

Cool Formatting

using System;
using System.Text;

public class Hello
{

	public static void Main()
	{
	String verbatim =

@"This is a
verbatim string, and it can go
on and on, using ""quote"" characters
etc but everything else
is not escaped, like tab characters, \t
and so forth.";

	System.Console.Write(verbatim);
	}
}

Well, my copy of Visual Studio arrived, and it’s installing now. This should make hacking around in C sharp a bit more intuitive, and certainly it makes ASP.NET development a heck of a lot easier than it would have been otherwise. Looks like fourth of July weekend will be given over at least in part to some major hacking, if it isn’t Memorial Day by the time the installer finishes. The package also included an exam voucher for the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0—Application Development Foundation, which I was planning to take anyway. Pretty cool.

And heck, thinks are looking up. We’re on CD 2 already. Of course, I remember Borland C++ on 21 floppies…