Revenue Streams

I have been working as an employee since 1994 and also doing business at the same time since 1997. Business has been paying pretty well but not really the big bucks yet. Just enough to get through life. Then sometimes in an instant… these revenue streams pop into your head. They seem very promising. You feel very positive you will make it big. Earn big bucks. But then again… wasn’t this the exact same feeling I had when I just started my business? A computer shop that is now closed down. Full of enthusiasm and optimistic. Like nothing can go wrong, and everyone will love your product and service. You feel the urge to work every minute, knowing that every second counts.

I have been doing business since 1997, some businesses failed, and others went on. And some of those that I was very optimistic about in the past, were also the ones that died down, and the ones that continued to go on were the ones I least expected before hand, not until I was experiencing the work already.

I haven’t felt such enthusiasm and optimism in a very long time, since I always reserved these feelings in anticipation of the “anything can happen.” Things may go on right and things may fail. And by experience, things of such great feeling of enthusiasm and optimism don’t really work quite well I believe they supposed to be.

Ideas come and go, ideas come in a split second. And sometimes ideas just hit me, thinking of how great this idea is. Eversince the start of this year, business is doing good and revenue stream ideas keep pouring in. And I have never felt such enthusiasm and optimisim to work once again like there is a bright light at the end of the tunnel that I have always been travelling and finally, the light is really in sight. It is in proper range to reach.

But then again… maybe not. Well we will just have to see how it works out.

Blogger™ Byebye… Hello WordPress 2.0

Yes, I made the switch. Yes, I know this Kubrick theme is not unique and there are tons of blogs out there with the same theme since it is the current default theme in WordPress. I’ll improve on that later on, too busy to work on my themes right now. And if I had links to your sites, sorry… I will put them back soon. I just needed to work on other things first.

I have blog post since 2004 using Blogger, and WordPress 2.0 seemed to have no problem importing all my Bloggerâ„¢ postings. I had one problem though… I did a search on Googleâ„¢ for all of my blog pages in their database by searching site:blog.benjarriola.com and if you expand the search to show all pages, there were tons of pages that were giving Error 404’s (page not found).

Since Bloggerâ„¢ and WordPress had different kinds of permalinks. For example… the first error 404 i got was for this URL found in Google:

https://blog.benjarriola.com/2004/07/house-blessing-by-kuya-jef.html

and WordPress was doing it this way:

https://blog.benjarriola.com/2004/07/31/the-house-blessing-by-kuya-jef

In reality, the directories do not really exist since WordPress is doing a mod_rewrite for the URLs and it is simply checking the database for the post name: house-blessing-by-kuya-jef.html and if it cannot be found, then it displays an error 404 which is simply pulling the file 404.php, which is part of the default WordPress files.

So I was thinking all of these links in Google will do no where. So I decided to make the yds404-redirect. This file replaces your 404.php and also has another file 404-redirect.php what will parse the URL and search for the latest best-related title and forward to that page. This is not the best solution since a redirect 301 would be the best, but I did not want to mess with the .htaccess file. It still serves the purpose. And I just signed up for a Googleâ„¢ Sitemap using the WordPress plugin so i can tell Googleâ„¢ to update their database. I know this will take a long time, but at least, while it is not yet in effect, the yds404-redirect will do the trick.

For those that have the same problem in converting from Bloggerâ„¢ to WordPress and search engines have you linked and goes to an error 404 page, feel free to try out my yds404-redirect.

Changing Direction

After attenting the Internet Marketing Seminar by Sean Roach, it also changed the direction of how I will run my business marketing-wise. I just know my plan of action is to fix a lot of stuff on OmniDomain.net, then I will make my killer hosting plan that I will promote so well.

Hump Ahead

Working right now… listening to various music… and I decided to pay attention to the song Hump Ahead by Cueshe. And almost after every stanza, all I said in my head was p***ng *na. Cool tune, nice arrangement, pero p***ng *nang tragedy ang kwento. Not detailed, just in a few sentences… tapos paktay na. Labo. Pero sige. Ok pa din. Pero sana walang similar event na mangyari sa akin na ganun.

Incorporation

My business is currently not a corporation but another business entity. I do not sell good, but non-tangible services and the Internet has always been a companion in my business success.

After hearing Gary Sutton in Robert Kiyosaki’s Investor Workshop in LA whom the former is part of the Rich Dad Advisors who acts as Robert Kiyosaki’s legal advisor whose specialy is corporate law, has expressed the importance of having corporations as business entities for asset protection. Sharon Letcher, also a Rich Dad Advisor and CPA is Rich Dad’s Accountant. And one thing they stressed out is business is a team sport, and get your proper advisors. And some mistakes some people do is to get legal advice from their accountant, or get accounting advice from their lawyer. This is a big no and they said it is best to put them together if the situation calls it.

Last Christmas, I was in the Philippines and while I was at National Bookstore, I saw some Rich Dad Publications, and deicded that I wanted Gary Sutton’s Own Your Own Corporation. Just like the orginal Rich Dad, Poor Dad book, it flows in a way with stories, real life stories, cases while teaching the lessons, and not the boring approach of mostly denifitions then explaining later after all terms are defined. I found this book very very good. I gave me all the reasons why I would want to register a corporation and not any other business entity. And most of the reasons were from the point of view of a lawyer, Gary Sutton, from a legal perspective.

Two nights ago… I decided to attend a seminar by The Learning Annex in San Diego. I attended the How to Setup Your Own Corporation and the speaker was Mr. Jerry Dixon. Mr. Dixon was very, very knowledgeable in what he was discussing on very business entity, advantages and disadvantages. What can be done and what cannot be done, and what others do that is not good doing. I haven’t finished reading Gary Sutton’s book yet but I have read fairly a lot that I already knew some of the stuff being discussed. But the main difference in what Jerry Dixon was teaching, was he was teaching in the view of an accountant. So his focus were on cost, tax obligations, tax expemptions, federal, state and IRS fees, prices and frequency of payments. He also show to us each form and where to file them as well as give many tips on filing and precautions to make the process faster.

In short, Gary Sutton’s book and Jerry Dixon’s Seminar were very good. I feel happy with what I have learned the past week.

Now, my next step is to incorporate. 🙂

The Money Tree


My wife gave me a Money Tree for my business while I was in the Philippines last December.

The business scene in the Philippines is heavily influenced by Filipino-Chinese. Nearly all of the biggest companies are being run by the Filipino-Chinese. Many businesses from big corporations to the small sari-sari stores* has Chinese business good luck charms from the Chinese Feng Shui Bagua, the waving cat, the frog with a coin in it’s mouth and other good luck charms. These are said to be lucky if given to the business and not bought for the business.

The money tree I got was made of plastic in a gold shiny finish. I guess signifying gold itself. As instructed by Marcia, my wife, I placed rice, chocolates that are wrapped in gold foil, and some money inside of the vase of the money tree.

As I was putting this money tree together which is made of not finely cut platic, I needed to occassionally file down some parts of it to make them fit well into the holes of the trunk of the tree, when it came to the base of the trunk going into the the golden pot, it would not fit well it just cracked open a larger hole and the tree would not stand anymore.

I checked my toolbox to see what I could find useful to fix it up. I found a metal plate from an old PC casing with holes for motherboard ports. This came from my old casing which was good as trash since it had no other use.


The holes for the audio ports were good enough to tightly fit the plastic plug for the tree base and I just bent the plate to make it fit in well inside the cover of the golden pot. And it worked out well.


Thanks babe for the money tree and hope it does bring good fortune to the company.


*In the Philippines there are sari-sari stores everywhere. Almost every home is a block or less away from their the neighborhood sari-sari store. A micro-business where sari-sari means something like “all sorts of” or “different kinds of” signifying the store sells all sorts of stuff that are most of the time food groceries, snacks and other consumables.

Treo, no graffiti but their is a solution!

I had an old blog posting somewhere here about my Treo on what I liked and what I do not like.

The PalmOne Treo 600 has no Graffiti. Graffiti, aside from what it really means, this is also the name of the writing system software in most Palm PDAs. You learn how to write their way to digitally input real text that can be editable. It is somewhat like a character recognition software to converts what you write into real font letters but you have to follow their proper way of writing.

Being a Palm m100, Palm xeIII, Palm Zire 71 user… the graffiti system was into my way of writing already. For me, it was way faster than the on-screen keyboard or any type of keypad. When I got the PalmOne Treo 600, I was dissapointed they took out the Graffiti software from the whole system and it had a tiny qwerty keyboard instead. That sucked for me. I had my Treo for several months now and just adapted to the qwerty keyboard system.

But I decided to get MobileWrite 3.5, mobile handwriting recognition software. Finally I can run Graffiti again on a Treo! I found this in a promotial PalmGear mailing list I am a member of and decided to get Sudoku and Kakuro since I got addicted to playing Sudoku already.

What’s Wrong with Phenylpropanolamine and Paracetamol?

Where is Paracetamol?

When I was in the Philippines last December, I caught a fever, colds and cough. Commonly for anything related to fever and pain relief, Paracetamol is one of the generic drugs that would come to mind for the common Filipino since these are commonly found in the Phillipines. Some of the popular brands are Biogesicâ„¢ and Tempraâ„¢. I still remember old TV commercials of Biogesicâ„¢ promoting that Paracetamol is safe for pregnant women, people with heart ailments and asthma.

But here in the US, after a visit at the drug store… I went through each pain killer of the shelf and of course the most popular known is Aspirin which is like an everyday word. And this is Acetamenophen having one of the most popular brands as Tylenol. Another popular brand is Advil. But I noticed all of the off-the-shelf pain killers were either Acetamenophen or Ibuprofen. I wonder why there is no Paracetamol based pain killers in the US off-the-shelf drugs? Is it because of some policy the US Food and Drug Authority (FDA) that did not allow this but such ruledoes not exist in the policies of the Philippines’ Bureau of Food and Drugs (BFAD)? In extreme pain, in the Philippines you can also buy Mefanemic Acid pain killers like the popular Ponstan 250.

Phenylpropanolamine

I know Phenylpropanolamine has been banned in large doses since it is used in some rapid weight loss drugs and has several bad side-effects. But in small doses, it is used in medicines for the common colds in the Philippines. Nearly every cold tablet in the Philippines is Phenylpropanolamine, from Neozep to Decolgen, to Ornex to Dimetapp.

And here in the US, not a single cold tablet or syrup uses Phenylpropanolamine. All use Pseudoephedrine. I wonder if the US FDA does not allow to use Phenylpropanolamine even in small amounts why uses that is allowed by the Philippines’ BFAD.

I am a Chemist by profession, but I am not Pharmacist. Generic names are actually nicknames and are not the actual scientific compound names. In chemistry, standardization of naming conventions was done by International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and from the names of compounds, you already get to know what it is made of based on the name alone. Some compounds have very long names that pharmaceutical companies make nicknames of the compounds to make the name shorter. Phenylpropanolamine is a good IUPAC name since I know it is nothing but phenol, propanol and an amine group stuck together. Phenol is benzene with a hydroxy group attached to it and benzene is a known carcinogen. I know Phenylpropanolamine has many harmful effects in large doses, but so does anything in large doses. Menthol which is in a bunch of candies and ointments is harmful to some extent, and even the ordinary Luffa is said to be carcinogenic.

Well just wondering why…

Disclaimer

– I am not claiming to be an expert in the field of pharmacy.
– I am not stating which type of medicine is better than the other.
– I am not promoting any type of brand of medicine.
– I do not work for any pharmaceutical company.
– I am not a doctor nor pharmacist.
– You may not quote me for scientific or statistical facts. I am not even sure of the spellings I wrote. It is just how I remember them. Thus this is not a reliable source of factual data.
– All brands mentioned are trademarks of their respective owners.

I am just wondering why the predominant drug differs in the US and Philippines.