More proof that all I do is work…I’ve just released the Spanish version of the Condo Marketing International web site. I think I encoded all those pesky little accents properly, so it should look right in all browsers. There’s still some behind-the-scenes stuff to do in Spanish and I really should be preloading all those pictures… but the text is there and that’s enough for a Friday night.

Ok so it’s shameless plug time! In a big way too! I just released a new web site for my husband, Arturo Rivero, who is a representative at Residencial La Playa Cancun, the new beachfront real estate project north of Puerto Cancun. The web site is here:
Mexico Beachfront Real Estate.

Until now there has been very little information in English available about this project, but we went through all the marketing documentation and translated everything. You will find up-to-date pricing and availability linked down at the bottom in the footer area (as a printable PDF, and subject to change without notice). And there are lots of pictures and a full description of the project and the amenities that will be available.

Residencial La Playa will be a pretty sweet project when it’s done, with all 180 condos having terraces facing the Caribbean. And while I first thought it looked expensive, after seeing Bay View Grand and hearing the pricing there I think that Residencial La Playa is very reasonably priced for brand new Cancun beachfront real estate. And it’s much more convenient than Bay View Grand if you will be working in the downtown Cancun area.

The site still needs a few things. Namely the gallery page needs a description of each image and each image needs to be a link to a larger image, I’m just waiting for an IT guy to get me those bigger images (I’m always waiting for an IT guy to do something…). And I think there are some spots with awkward wording so I’ll be editing those too. Oh and I need to take a nice pic of hubby and put that up.

So if you know of anyone who’s looking for a beachfront condo in this area be sure to have them check out this site. And if you have any constructive criticism about the site I’m all ears.

Check out Miniature Earth, it’s a Flash movie that takes an interesting look at the world’s population. Sniffle, sniffle.

My first email address was with Compuserve, and I think I got it sometime back in 1993 or 1994. I’m pretty sure it was sometime before Jerry Garcia died (August 9, 2005) because I have a snapshot in my mind of what my life was like at that moment and I know I was using the web for communication by then.

Back then spam was pretty much unheard of. In fact, you were lucky if you got email because just not that many people had email addresses back then. I remember feeling fortunate that my close family members did have email in those days, since they did not live nearby.

Well things have changed. I now get close to 100 email messages a day.

And I now have more than 10 email addresses, most which I check every day. I have email addresses for work, for friends, for specific things I do and for specific companies I do business with.

For example, I have a PayPal account and I have an email address just so PayPal can send me email (I give it to no one else, ever). This way I can easily keep track of which emails that appear to be coming from PayPal have a chance of being real. PayPal client’s are the target of many scams designed to get them to divulge their login information (these are called Phishing scams, see below for more info), so I am wary of any emails I get from PayPal. I do something similar with my banks and credit card companies, I use email addresses that only they know, and I do not use those addresses for anything else.

One of the email addresses I have is for spam. I give it to almost every organization that I do business with. I give it to online vendors and environmental groups and to people I don’t know. I give it to anyone likely to sell my email address. And also to anyone who is vulnerable to having a disgruntled employee rip off their database and sell it. Basically if they HAVE a database of email addresses then I give them my spam email address.

And so far this scheme is working pretty well. I get virtually no spam to the email addresses that I use for my family, friends and my own work. And my spam account gets, I don’t know, some hundreds of spam messages a week, nearly all of which are caught and deleted automatically by a spam filter. And this way I am keeping close tabs on my banks as well.

More Reading on Phishing:
Wikipedia Definition of Phishing
Anti-Phishing Working Group

Can you tell I’ve been surfing today? Well, these links will pretty much date me precisely. First I found the online Etch-A-Sketch. As fun as it ever was, without all the shaking. Was it ever actually fun??

And here is the Muppets Debut song “Manamana”, I still remember the first time I saw it.

And here is the Muppet version of the Matrix, blissfully short and with Miss Piggy wearing shades.

Ok, so a couple of interesting tidbits have come my way today. First, I saw this great video of Keith Olbermann criticizing The Shrub, that moron currently residing in the Casa Blanca.

And then I happened upon this sample U.S. Citizenship Test. And, well, I just wonder whether old Georgie would actually pass this test himself?? Me thinks not.

Go Keith!

I don’t know if it’s all this tropical rain we’ve been having, or maybe there’s another bug going around, but the last couple of days have just sucked!

Today I’m pretty sure that the only thing that went right was that I found organic broccoli at Costco (imported from California). Imagine that! I used to buy only organic veggies back when I lived in a country where you could possibly consider enforcing something like a regulation regarding growing food. But now I take what I can get and I’m grateful for a $10 usd sack of frozen friggin’ broccoli.

Today really stank. First I just don’t feel well, low energy, almost a headache and grumpy. Then my kid couldn’t find a school uniform to wear, which meant we left much later than usual, which put us on that insane road to the airport at exactly 7 am. The suicide moment. So I’m cooking along in the right shoulder. But today everybody and their mother was using it as a breakdown lane! Can you imagine? The nerve of those people using the shoulder of the road as a shoulder and not a lane. This is Mexico, what do they think they are doing? Maybe I don’t feel well because of all the swerving I was doing.

So we braved the road at the ungodly hour. And I managed to get her there before the bell. And I turned around and came home only to realize that she’d forgotten the huge report she’d written last night on Rocky Mountain National Park (in Colorado, where we’re from). She had a big map, and a bunch of glossy photos of elk and bighorn sheep and coyotes and SNOWY PEAKS and GLACIAL LAKES. I swoon to think of that pristine wilderness, protected from greedy builders (living here in Cancun means you pretty much give up all notions of environmental conservation).

So I raced back down to the school with the report in hand. And, it being later, I had less traffic, in fact I made it there and back in half and hour, I didn’t even side-swipe anybody and I only cut one lady off and she only honked a little bit… But all this driving meant that I didn’t even get started trying, pathetically, to get any work done until like 9 am. And by then the tone for the day was already set. Concentration on anything was near impossible. I managed to do just a bit of graphic design (which if it didn’t require actual eyes I could do with my eyes closed, so to speak). And I also managed to write about 14 lines of css which, given that each each one is about 10 characters long, isn’t saying much.

And then mid-morning my Spanish teacher showed up so I could, once again, be formally reminded that all those other people in the world can learn more than one language but not ME! By the time she left I was pretty sure today was not my day. I was overcome with a headache and almost spaced going back to the school to the collect el kid (or I guess that would be la kid).

Now here’s the evil part. My favorite cat knocked over this cool glass I bought in Oregon when I was visiting Joyceee (it had a Boulder Beer logo on it). She broke it into like 14 gazillion pieces. And somehow I managed to cut the TOP of my foot open with the broken glass. I didn’t even notice, didn’t feel anything, but I nicked a vein and when I looked down I had filled, I mean filled, my shoe with blood. The cut goes down the length of the vein so it was really gushing. Fortunately a tight bandage seems to have caused it to knit back together and it’s no longer bleeding. And the thing gave me an excuse to put my feet up and forget about trying to actually get anything done today.

I’m running WordTracker queries today, all day. It’s such a drag, their server is slow and about every minute I have to stop and wait for another full minute. It’s hard to concentrate with all this stopping and starting.

For anyone who doesn’t know, WordTracker is a web site which queries the databases of the major search engines to tell you how many times someone has searched for a particular word or phrase. It also tells you something about the number of other web sites which use that phrase in their text, so you can learn about competition too.

I use WordTracker to get an understanding of what phrases and words are important for my client’s web sites to use and target. For example, right now I’m working on discovering how people search for hotels in this area. I’m also running searches related to real estate sales and rentals in this area. I’ve got about 5 clients who all need WordTracker studies done, so I’m just drowning in WordTracker today.

So, while I’ve been WAITING, I’ve been catching up on reading blogs and email. And I’ve been checking out some new web sites that a few different friends have put up recently to support their various enterprises.

Can I bitch? I really want to bitch! [By the way, I’m going over to WordTracker after every paragraph I write. I’ve got it running in a separate tab in my browser. I feel like I am schizophrenic.]

So my complaint is that these people, who I care about, go off and get someone else to do a free-to-cheap web site for them. And then they don’t even ask my opinion? Why don’t they even want any free advice? This sounds really conceited doesn’t it? Maybe I’m a self-righteous bitch, I think that might be it.

I know I’m not in the business of handing out free advice. But still, I care about whether these businesses do well. And when I look at the sites and I see that the sites they have will hold the business back…well, that bugs me. And when I can think of 10 simple things, in 10 seconds, that could improve the sites, well it’s hard to keep my big trap shut. And when I see that the users of those sites are not being taken into account I just get upset.

So now I’m schizophrenic and upset! I know, I know I should take a chill pill and go back to concentrating on not being able to concentrate!