TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

Yes, I’m alive!

Hi Everyone,

Yes, I’m still alive (if anyone notices or cares…). I’ve been extra lazy lately and have been just lounging around playing new computer games, watching lots of movies, eating, playing poker, and going out to dinners with the girlfriend. Hard life I say…

So I apologize for the lack of entries, but hopefully this one will make up for it. Are you ready!?:

PFO Redesign
New Computer pics soon
Maid
Mouse Problem
Taxes
CookingForums.net
Finished List/new list
MoVa Multiple Reviews
MoVa Skin

PFO Redesign

The new design of PokerForums.org is up. I had paid for the skin, and worked with the designer, as I do all people I hire, very closely, with very specific things I had wanted done. I often can be a pain for such hired help, as I know what I want, and I try to get as close as possible a result to what I had originally planned.

I’m very content with the final outcome of the design. I was going to pay him $700-$800 to also convert this into a ‘front page’ area, so as to replace vBadvanced with custom html. I decided to do this myself, and save the $700. It took me about 2 days, working many hours, and on the second day I refused to sleep until I had finished it all, and ended up going to bed at around 4am, exhausted, right after finishing the conversion. The result was a custom front end, without having to use vBadvanced, using the new template.

I even managed to implement something not commercially or freely available for vBulletin. I basically put together a very simple (after a bit of annoying code research) templating system together for the site, merging SSI with vB’s templating system. The entire site, both forum parts and front page parts, uses this system, and so updating the site to add an advertisement for example, only takes mere seconds, as I just upload the corresponding text file. The only difference between this and normal SSI is that this uses the vb templating system still 🙂

PFO is doing well, and has recently reached the 1-million-page-impressions-a-month milestone.

New Computer pics soon

Again, I’ve been slow and lazy lately so I haven’t had the opportunity to take pictures of my new desk with my new computer on it yet, but I should have that up within a day or two hopefully.

Maid

I’ve been thinking about hiring a maid. Yup! See, at first it sounds ludicrous, but I honestly believe that hiring a maid will make me more money. First off, hired cleaning is not expensive. I’m guessing just a little more than minimum wage. Let’s say $10 an hour, which sounds realistic. I’m thinking of 2 hours a day, twice a week.

I seem to spend a lot of time washing and drying dishes, cleaning my kitchen, doing laundry, and whatnot. And more often than not, I let these messes pile up and then clean them up gradually. As a result, my workspace (which is my apartment really) is cluttered and messy and it slows me down. Hiring a maid will not only save me time from having to clean my place and let me work on my sites, which will in turn profit much more than $10 an hour, it will also give me a clean environment, making me happier and more productive.

Plus, it’d just be really cool to be able to say I have a maid, and the look on my parent’s faces when I tell them would be worth it as well 😉

Mouse Problem

Please help! My new computer is great, but my mouse does a weird thing. It’s an optical mouse, not wireless, and on a brand new good jel pad. I’ve also tried it on other surfaces which doesn’t change anything. The computer is a fresh install of XP, and my mouse is fine, but every so often, maybe around every 4 minutes or so, the cursor ‘jumps’ to the edge or corner of the screen. Sometimes the top, sometimes the bottom or side.. this is extremely annoying. Especially when trying to play Quake 4.

If anyone can help me fix this, I’d be much oblidged…

Taxes

I was stressing over taxes last week so much that I was getting butterflies. Even though the tax season doesn’t really start for another month, I wanted to get it over with. The reason I was worrying was that since I’m self-employed, I don’t have my income tax automatically taken out each month. I also have to pay TWICE as much CPP since I’m both the employer and the employee. I have been, each month, putting money away into RRSP and money into an account I have for taxes, and I increment that each month, but due to OCD, I was just incrementing by $25 or $50 each month (I forget which), and since my revenue was rising so fast, it didn’t stay in tandum with the raise in pay I was getting.

Soo.. I only had $4,000 in my ‘tax fund’ ready for taxes, and some calculating by me and Ulchie, we expected I’d have to pay around $8,000 in income taxes, that’s after all my business expenses, so I was extremely worried.

But I decided to be brave, and went to my new accountant. IT WENT WELL! I’m glad I decided to continue to see accountants this year (as I did last) and not do it on my own, as it’s really priceless. Best money you can ever spend. Luckily, I had to pay $3,000 for some dental work, and due to a special new Canadian government ruling, I get to deduct a lot of that. Also, the $10,000 USD I spent on DomainForums.com is completely tax deductable. She is double checking right now, but believes domains aren’t marked as depreciative property yet (if anything, I observered, they should be apprecieative)… also, last year since I made so much less, my accountant that year had my ‘carry over’ my tuition fees since I didn’t need to use all of them to reduce my taxes, and so that helped reduce things too.

Anyhow, we only ran through rough numbers, as I gave her all my expected tax writeoffs and stuff, and so a lot of stuff was estimated and rounded, but things were ‘fairly’ accurate, and it came down to me only owing $50! HAHAHAH! Now, I expect that to be more, on my way home I realized a few calculation estimatation mistakes I made, but I’m really thinking it’d be $1000 in taxes absolute WORST case scenario, but more likely around $200-500, and that still leaves me with $3000 left over from my tax savings, which while I’d love to spend, I’d keep there for next year’s taxes.

So I’m to meet with her again once my bank sends me my RRSP history for the year, and am to go back to see her with that plus all the records and numbers for my tax writeoff stuff. Then I’ll see how much I owe.

I also asked her about incorporating, as it’s a great way to reduce taxes. She says I should wait until I hit a certain number, which I think I may just hit next tax year, so I may be incorporating next year. Merendi Networks LLC. Sounds neato, eh?

Anyhow, so yeah, I’m happy lately because I was so relieved I didn’t owe like 8k.

CookingForums.net

I bought CookingForums.net. $8, as usual 🙂 Going to buy a vB license for it. I love cooking… think of me as Iron Chef Chen Kenichi…

Finished List/new list

I finally finished my old list, and so here is my new todo list:

Taxes
————
Arrange/print out all receipts/accountant requested info
Phone Cathy regarding RRSP mail

Bookmark.com
————
Attempt to add to urchin
Contact ARIT again with type-in numbers

CookingForums.net
—————–
Add to apache
Create MySQL
Buy vbulletin license #127432341 😉

Merendi
——-
Add MMAForums
Add CookingForums
Add MovieForums
Upload new PFO image

Urchin
——
Add all new sites/remove old ones

BadmintonForums
———
Add Forums
Customize vB

MMAForums
———
Add Forums
Customize vB

CookingForums
———
Add Forums
Customize vB

MovieForums
———
Add Forums
Customize vB

MovieVault
———-
Add images to news
Update staff news message

PFO
—-
Send Newsletter
Request article from steve
Update advertising page (#2 on yahoo, etc., traffic)

MoVa Multiple Reviews

Zeeshan FINALLY finished the multiple reviews for MoVa.. we’ll see how this fares for the site. He was 5 months late, so I asked if I could pay him in 5 months since it was only fair, and he reluctantly agreed. I can pay it now, but must teach him a lesson!

It basically changes over the entire site’s programming to allow reviewers to submit multiple reviews of the same movie; so there are now ‘parent’ reviews and ‘children’ reviews, linked from the ‘parent’ review as a sub review. This was done to try to resolve a problem with all the reviewers on the site fighting to be the one to review certain movies.

MoVa Skin

I finally tracked down the skinner that I hired to integrate MoVa’s forum with the rest of the site, so it is not so seperate, and so then I can say ads are truely 100% sitewide. He had some health issues, and while he’s like 3 weeks late (Ugh, nobody can seem to get my projects done on time anymore…), I think he’s starting to recover now and hopefully he’ll have it done soon.

So there’s your updates everyone!