The SoapBoxers

Another month in the books – where do we stand?

Number of readers

Slow and steady wins the race, right?  We haven’t seen a monstrous explosion in traffic, but we are seeing slow growth in number of regular visitors.  If you have a friend who would like the site, have them swing by for a visit.  I’ll try to set a pitcher of lemonade and some chocolate chip cookies on the back porch.

Content

For the first time the blog featured at least one post on every single day of the month!  I missed a couple of days in April, but with the full team in place for May, we had 100% coverage.

We were able to stick much closer to the schedule than we had in past month.  Our goal is to stick as close to the schedule as possible, so that our loyal readers will know what to expect each day of the week.   Obviously, life will throw a monkey wrench into the plans from time to time.

We’ve rebranded The Soap Boxers as a “web magazine” as opposed to a “blog”.  What’s the difference?  Many blogs tend to be focused on a specific niche.  Clearly, this does not deascribe us, as our content covers a broad range of topics.  Nothing has actually changed in regards to the type of content we are delivering; we’re simply choosing to use a different term to describe ourselves.  Is it much ado about nothing?  Almost certainly.

We have been talking with a number of potential guest writers, from a variety of backgrounds.  Hopefully at least 1 or 2 of these folks will produce articles that will be ready in June.  I think they all have interesting stories to tell.

Site design

You may have noticed  a few minor changes to the sites as we try to improve the experience for our readers.  First, you might notice the “Browse The Archives” link at the top.  This links to a page that will show every article in the history of The Soap Boxers.

The “share” bar at the bottom of each article (right above the box that contains “categories” and “tags”) allows you to share articles with friends via email or by using a variety of social networking sites.  Previously, we were using a different method for this functionality, but we like the bar much better.  If you like one of the articles, share it with others!  If I’m ignoring a particular social networking site, let me know – I might be able to add it.

We live in an electronic world, and hopefully many of you refrain from printing most of the time.  However, when you do print articles, they will look much nicer than they have in the past.  Blogs typically look pretty lousy when printed, because of some of the gobbledygook that prints along with the main text.  I’ve worked to de-goobledygook things so that only the good stuff prints.

What’s next?

We’re excited about a giveaway what we’ll be doing at some point in the neat future – hopefully July.  We’re still keeping things under wraps, but if you like The Soap Boxers, you should enjoy the freebie.

We’re also actively soliciting ideas for Fiction Friday stories.  Leave a suggestion in the comments section (or drop me an email).  Bear in mind that I try to keep the stories around 800ish words, so a couple of sentences would be a sufficiently long suggestion.

Back On April 15, we  launched  a Stock Market contest (click link to see insights from the participants) in which a team of Goliaths (personal finance bloggers) were matched up against a team of Davids (people who were not personal finance bloggers).  At long last, we unveil the first monthly update.

At the end of the day on April 14th (the 104th day of the year), the Dow was at 7920.18.

At the end of the day on May 31 (the 151st day of the day), the Dow was at 8500.33

This is a gain of 580.15, or 12.34 points per day.  If we assume that the market will contain to gain at exactly the same rate throughout the rest of the year (yes, a ridiculous assumption), the Dow will be at 11,140.92 at the end of the year.

How do our contestants stack up?

I also invited visitors to play along at home.  Let’s see how they are doing.

Visitor Mike missed the  April 30 cutoff, but submitted a guess of 11,600 – a projected difference of just 459.08.

At this point, team Goliath seems to be off to a strong starts as the Dow has been fairly strong over the last 6 weeks.  There are still 7 long months ahead of us before the end of the year – a lot can change!  Check back each month for an update.

Per some good advice from Darren at Problogger, I am forming a focus group.  The focus group would essentially serve as a sounding board for ideas related to direction and content, as well as providing input on what they would like to see.  Here are a couple samples of the types of questions the focus group might see:

• Do children’s story such as “Bob The Turtle” provide entertainment value for the audience, or should they be excluded in the future?
• Would you like to see more or less political news?
• Are we providing enough content on international issues?  If not, what issues deserve more attention?

If you are one of the daily readers, consider joining the focus group.  You can respond or ignore question as you wish, so it should not take a large amount of your time.  I would like to get at least one person from outside the US to ensure that we are serving the international audience.  Perhaps my loyal reader in Belgium would be a good fit for this?  I’m looking for about a half dozen members at this point.

If you are interested in becoming a focus group member, send me an email at kosmo@ObservingCasually.com

In your email, tell me some basics about you – where you live and some basic demographic information (age, gender, occupation, interests).  You can be vague on the age, if you wish – I’m just want to make sure we have a reasonably diverse group (instead of having six 25 year old computer programmers from Salem, Oregon).

Even if you don’t want to be in the focus group, feel free to make comments on specific articles, either via the “comments” function, or by sending me an email.

thanks,

Kosmo

The Soap Boxers is taking a day off from article writing to observe Memorial Day.  Stop for a moment to think of – and thank – the brave soliders and sailors who have given up their lives for their country.

If you really NEED to read a TCO article today, delve into the “categories” (on the right side) or take a look at the Best of The Soap Boxers.

Kosmo turned 34 years young last Friday.  If you want to give him a birthday gift, give him the gift of a new visitor – simply send an email to a friend who might enjoy The Soap Boxers and urge them to pop in for a visit.

We will go back the the normal schedule tomorrow.

Recently, there have been some scientific studies suggesting that lack of sleep may shave some years off your life.  I have no concerns with the methods they used to reach their conclusions.  It is very likely that the data do indeed prove their hypothesis.

However, this brings me to a key question.  Are we simply trying to maximize the number of years that we remain on earth, or are we trying to maximize the amount of “living” we do?  I am going to take a look at our post college years.  Let’s assume this would span from age 22 to 82.  40 of the years will be in the workforce and 20 years will be in retirement.

In phase 1, we are going to be busy with work, family, and household chores.  If we sleep 9 hours, this might leave 2 hours for pure leisure during the  week and perhaps 7 hours on Saturday and Sunday, if we’re lucky.  That’s 24 leisure hours in a week, along with 63 sleep hours and 40 work hours.  The remaining 41 hours are spent eating, commuting, shopping, mowing lawn, paying bills, etc.  24 leisure hours X 52 weeks X 40 years = 49,920 leisure hours during our working years.

After retirement, we gain a bit more control over our lives, although advancing age eventually sneaks up and grabs your leisure time.  Let’s says that, on average, you can spend 8 hours per day on leisure activities during your retirement years.  That’s 56 hours per week.  56 X 52 weeks X 20 years = 58,240 leisure hours during our retirement years.

If we add  these two numbers, we get a total of 108,160 leisure hours during our post-collegiate years.  This is an average of 1803 leisure hours per years.  Let’s call this chunk of fun time a “leisure year”.

Now let’s assuming that we reduce our sleeping hours from 9 hours per night to 6.  We further assume that we do this with no short term impacts, just the long term impact of dying sooner.  This is likely to be a somewhat flawed assumption, but there are a lot of people who function at very high levels on 6 hours of sleep.

If we reduce sleep by 3 hours per day, we should increase leisure by the same amount.  3 hours X 7 days X 52 weeks X 60 years =   65,520 extra leisure hours, or 36 extra “leisure years”.  In essence, we gain the “fun part” of 36 extra years.

Would you trade a few years at the end of your life for 65,000 extra leisure hours spread out over your adult years?

Senators Charles Schumer and Mark Warner have announced that the FTC is close to filing a lawsuit against companies that use deceptive telemarketing techniques to sell extended car warranties.  Additionally, these companies are often in violation of the federal Do Not Call list.  I receive at least a few of these every year – interestingly, the representatives can never tell me what type of car I own.

I try not to get overly political in The Soap Boxers, but I ask you to contact your Senators and Representatives not only to voice your support for this lawsuit, but also to urge them to pass more stringent rules regarding telemarketing.  I have a couple of specific recommendations.  Feel free to suggest additional rules in the comments section.

A total ban on robo-calls and auto-dialing.  Many states already have bans on these computer-assisted techniques.  I would broaden this ban to include political calls.  If your message is important, hire a human to tell me about it and add some jobs.  If you can’t afford this, the your message really isn’t that important.

Impose stronger penalties for violations of the Do-Not-Call list.  Send some executives to prison.  Many telemarketers I speak to have no concerns about DNC violations, and a couple have feigned ignorance of it.  This must stop.

Traffic

Another month is in the books.  We surpassed 100 all-time posts, and there were 35 articles during the month of April.  We’re not getting a ton of traffic, but we do have a handful of regular visitors and a few others who drop by after seeing my comments in other folks’ blogs (notably LazyManAndMoney, ManVsDebt, FinancialNut, MasterYourCard, Purple Row, and SheInChina).  If you’re  a regular reader, leave a comment to introduce yourself.  I know who some of you are (howdy, Mandy and Mary), but I have no idea as to the indentity of others.  I’m intrigued by some of the regulars from other countries.  If you’re multi-lingual, it would be cool to see you introduce yourself in your first language and then provide a translation in English.

If you’re someone who dropped by from another blog, try us out for a week.  We don’t scratch a niche like most blogs, but have a mixture of topics during the week.  Be sure to check out Fiction Friday – I will post an original short story (written by me for this sole purpose) on Fridays.

Finances

It’s a good thing that I write for the pleasure of writing, instead of money.  Ad revenue for the month was $11.50 – or about 30 cents for each article we posted.  I won’t bother to calculate the hourly rate on that – needless to say, it’s rather low.  Hopefully traffic will pick up a bit in the coming months and cause upward movement on the financial side as well.  It would be nice to be able to buy a Pepsi or two with the ad revenue 🙂

Guest writers

I’ve had the pleasure of having a few guest writers during the month.  One of the guests became a staff writer for us (more about that later) and another is likely to have other articles appear on the site in the future.  I have actively pursued a few other people to write articles for the “a day in the life” series, which I personally enjoy reading.  I have received positive responses from several people, although I do not yet have any new segments in my hand.  I believe we’ll see a few of them in May, though.  I’m looking forward to a guest article that a fellow blogger is going to write.

The future

So, what does the future hold?  Well, it is likely that we will have at least one article on every single day from this point forward!  When I was the sole writer, it was sometimes difficult to write 7+ articles while balancing the blog with work and family life.  However, I am getting some help in this regard.  Johnny Goodman will be joining us as the weekly sports writer and Bob Inferapels will be writing a weekly entertainment column.  Note – although these are pen names, they do correspond to actual real people – they are not simply other factions of my mind.  The article’s byline will identify the author.

RSS and Twitter

Some of you have no doubt seen the  “subscribe via RSS” at the top left of the screen and wondered what on earth it is.  I won’t go into the technical details of RSS.  From a user perspective, RSS gives you a “one stop shop” to get updates for sites that are updated periodically (blogs, news sites, etc).  Think of this as a bulletin board – you tell people you want to know that they are doing (by subscribing to their RSS feed).  The next time you go to the bulletin board (RSS reader) you see all of the new articles.  Click on the subscribe via RSS link to get more information.  I’m not an RSS expert, but Google’s reader seem to do a good job.  If you follow several blogs, RSS is a great way to keep on top of them.

You can also get blog notifications on Twitter.  The Twitter updates will simply contain the title of the new article and a link to the article.  That is all.  No tweets about what I ate for breakfast or mini-rants about the moron who cut me off in traffic 🙁  Honestly, RSS is probably a better option for most people, but I decide to set up Twitter in case anyone wanted it.

Random factoid for the month

Baseball writer/analyst/god Bill James, who was largely responsible for a dramatic shift in the way that baseball players are analyzed, has a second passion – true crime.  This probably seems like an odd combination, but the weird thing is that I also have a deep interest in true crime.  If I am ever able to slip past Mr. James’ security staff (probably filled with ex Navy Seals and former CIA agents) and get a private chat with him, it will be nice to know that we can have a nice chat about serial killers if we run out of baseball topics.

Thanks, Luv, and Follow

I would like to thank everyone for their assistance with the blog.  This includes guest writers, staff writers, folks who write comments, the readers, folks who provide web hosting and technical assistance (Lazy Man), and people who have critiqued the blog for me (notably, Phil Ossifer).  We look forward to improving the reader experience in the future.  You can always email me at Kosmo@ObservingCasually.com with any questions or comments you might have.

In an effort to reward our commenters, we have implement the CommentLuv and Do-Follow plug-ins.  CommentLuv allows you to select a recent post from your own blog to be linked at the bottom of your comment.  This is why readers see link to the blogs of commenters such as Baker of ManVsDebt.

Do-Follow removes the “no-follow” tag that is typically affixed to links within the comment section of blogs.  The gist is that implementing “do-follow” will boost your your site’s Google ranking.  You don’t need to do anything to take advantage of this; it’s all under the hood, so to speak.

Neither of these plug-ins do anything for me (at least directly); I implemented them to reward the commenters who help make the blog more fun to read.

No direction

I have lived my entire life with no real sense of direction.  I don’t mean this is the figurative sense – I am happy with the way I set goals and achieve them.  Rather, I am being quite literal.  My ability to determine North, east, south, and west has always been horrible.  Most of the time, I’d be better off just guessing.  I always assumed that there were a lot of people like me, literally lost in the world.  When I was in my mid 20s, someone shared a revelation with me.  My problem with directions likely stemmed from an inability to mentally rotate images.  This was a stunning revelation.  Indeed, I had always struggled with IQ test questions that involved mentally rotating images.

I was also stunned to realize that most people have some abilities that appeared to me to be quite supernatural.  Most people can go to the second floor of a house, walk around, and automatically know what room is beneath them! In order for me to do this, I would need to look out a window and try to remember which of the downstairs windows had the same view.  Normal people also have the ability to automatically retrace a route that they have just driven, even if for the first time.  This is definitely not the case for me – I’ll have the refer back to the directions on the way back.

Coping

How do I cope with this affliction?  First of all, I don’t let it bother me psychologically.  I lived for 25 years as a pretty highly functioning human being before I realized that I had this problem, so there was really no reason to panic once I knew the cause of the problem.

I am a big fan of Mapquest.  Unless I am traveling a route that I have committed to memory, I have written directions.  I also make sure to have an atlas with me – a nice, big version.  I also rely on technology.  It is quite possible for me to get completely turned around and not know if I am going north or south (although this is very infrequent).  Our car has a compass on the rearview mirror.  This allows me to have certaintly about the direction and not second guess myself.  Also, we recently purchased a GPS navigator for the car, which means that I will always be able to find my way back to civilization.

What if you’re completely lost and have no idea where you are going?  Watch the traffic.  It will likely be heavier in one direction than the other.  Follow the heavier traffic and you should eventually find your way back to a town.

More about images

I also have a second problem that is very likely related to the first.  I have extreme difficulty remembering facial features.  If you ask me if various friends have blonde hair or blue eyes, it is unlikely that I will be able to give you consistently accurate answers.  I have no problem recognizing photos of people, but I am simply unable to pull back individual features based on names.

I always hear people talk about the huge differences in image quality between various different formats (DVD / Blu-Ray, standard vs. HD), etc.  Really, I don’t notice the differences.  It’s not that I have any difficulty seeing the images; it’s just that I don’t notice hugh differences in quality.  My guess is that I don’t see the gradations of color very well.

This wasn’t meant to be a downer of an article.  These issues have very little effect on my life.  I just happen to find them interesting.

Back in February, we experienced telemarketing from hell at the hands of TV Guide.  My friend at Lazy Man and Money took an interest, and I wrote another version for his readers – greatly expanding the audience of the story.

Incredibly, we received another call tonight.  Yep – 7:30 PM on a Sunday.  Apparently TV Guide does not have a way to flag people as alientated customers.

If you’re a TV Guide subscriber, take a look at your situation.  With the on screen guides for most cable and dish system, do your really need TV Guide any more?  Or does it just sit in your mail pile until it gets tossed into the recycle bin?  If you do decide to cancel, leave a comment.  I’d like to keep track 🙂

Some exciting things are around the corner.

I’ve approached a couple of folks to write periodic guest articles for the blog.  I don’t have have a firm schedule on how often these will appear, but I think they will add an interesting spice to the blog.  These guys are good writers, and I think you will enjoy their work.

I have also contacted several more people about writing “a day in the life” articles.  I have received some positive responses, so hopefully you will be seeing some interesting insights into other careers in the near future.