Saturday, February 19, 2011

Day 431

Why is gas going up in price again? I'm paying more than $3.00 a gallon now, and the Defender still takes regular. My favorite coffee beans are going up in price even faster than gasoline. I keep hearing on TV that inflation is under control, or that we don't even have an inflation problem. I don't get it. How can we not have any inflation when just about everything I use costs way more than it did a few years ago? Computers are just about the only thing that don't continually go up in price. It's not like we're really saving anything on computers though. They become obsolete and turn into door stops about every three years anyway, and you have to buy them all over again.

I'm more aware of what things cost on Saturdays. This is usually when I run my errands. I go to the grocery store. I go to the hardware store. I fill the tank up with gas. Everywhere I go, it seems like everything is more expensive than it used to be. This is not a good situation, especially when I'm actually charging less for my services than I was ten years ago.

There's no point in dwelling on this downward spiral though. I learned a long time ago that dwelling on negative things only makes them worse. I've just got to learn to use the cards I've been dealt a little more effectively. You can see why bloggers become so interested in turning their blogs into income producing properties. The potential is tantalizingly close. It's pretty clear now that the Internet has changed everything. What isn't quite so clear is how to put this transformational change to good use.

As a website designer, I am already making money from the Internet, but not any more than I used to make designing things that were printed on paper. The problem is that the Internet really wants to be free. Why pay for phone calls when you can use Skype for free. Why pay for information when there's Wikipedia. I'm certainly no better about this than anyone else. I've already canceled my iPad subscription to The Daily. Sure, it was cool, but it just didn't seem worth paying for after the complementary two week subscription ran out. When the first upgrade message appeaded on my iPad saying "please delete your existing copy of The Daily before installing upgrade" I took the opportunity to not install the new version at all. I wonder how many other people did exactly the same thing? I bet some programmer heads are going to roll over that little programming faux pas. You never ask someone to delete your product from their computer. They probably will.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day


  1. John- no kidding about figuring out the potential of the internet. My best advertiser on just declined to renew his ad (while he got an extra 6 months free during the time I've been hounding him to pay up) because he can't see that it does him any good. I've delivered about 90K targeted views of his ad over the past year (not counting the free 6 months), and he doesn't see a value? How can I fix this? I have no clue how to get local businesses to see the value of the internet. I often get "We don't do internet advertising."

  2. You ask why gasoline prices are going up. There are a couple of reasons. The first, of course, is simple greed on the part of the oil companies. The second is that even though demand is down in third world countries like the United States, it is going up in more civilized and more technologically advanced nations like India and China. As those countries continue to demand more gasoline and oil based products, the price of oil will continue to rise and we will pay the price.