discredit.org

I will ignore the one incident I had with UPS two years ago when a disgruntled UPS employee thought it would be funny to put a pubic hair on my new t-mobile sidekick because I raised hell over the phone about how there was a problem with my delivery.  Anyways, back to why the UPS Store is my friend.  My Mercedes ML320 is currently experiencing some problems and I am have one heck of a time finding a mechanic I feel comfortable with to take the care to.  In other words, lately I have been depending on friends for rides or when times really get tough my own two feet.  I recently had the honour of participating in a friendly swap on a great site called swaptree.com and found myself with a package ready to go prepaid and all, as I proceeded to hop into my car to travel to the nearest post office I realized that wouldn’t be a smart idea since the catalytic converter is cracked!  The nearest post office is a good 30 minute walk away, so that means it would most likely take me around 45 minutes to an hour to simply drop this package off.  I decided that I needed to find an alternative so I went ahead and called the ups store which is around 10 minutes away.  To my surprise I can actually drop my USPS packages off at the UPS store as long as its not a pricey item.  So there you have it, this is exactly why my newly found friend is the UPS store and I will now be able to drop off any of the inexpensive items that I may have to this wonderful store without having to walk to the end of the world and back!

I commend bido for being such a great site, with an original idea.  As with all original ideas, what is the idea truly worth if you aren’t able to market it?  Bido obviously does not have a problem with this!  To my surprise or my expectacy I was reading a thread today on namepros that caught my attention and what do I see in the google ads section of the post?  Ofcourse an ad for harps.net being on sale today.  This was interesting to me because I did not see any word about bido in the ad, so I decided to click on the ad and see what site was providing the auction platform for the domain name.  The bido site loaded providing you with a direct view of the auction.  I can see why this site is exteremely successful, they market each domain auction in an effective manner sparking the attention for domain pros and hobbyist alike.

I have a great deal of files!  Between the documents, photographs, music, and movies I find myself redownloading files that may already be on one of the media storage units I utilize.  Today is a great day because I actually found an opensource program that will actually take care of my file management needs.  It can literally scan all the files on a cd or mass storage unit and create a file index for you.  Once the index is created you can easily search for files to make sure you don’t download a duplicate.  This is the perfect program for me since I am always downloading a wide variety of media.  I am a music lover and this will help me organize my complete mp3 collection without a hassle.  I give two thumbs up to the makers of this program and can’t actually believe that it is free!

To find out more about this program feel free to visit the following site:

http://grbytes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5

Over the next few days I will be registering a string of [.info] domains.  I am regging these domains because they are cheap and will be using them in combination with a series of telephone numbers.  These telephone numbers will be setup to run on one Asterisk PBX system.  My goal with this is to run several of the services that I offer as different entities, making people feel that they are reaching a new company all together.  I will have the domains and websites printed on fliers and business cards.  These fliers and business cards will be passed out in local shopping centers, neighborhood communities and placed on cars.  I am testing out a new marketing plan which will allow me to promote all of the services I offer in the most simplistic manner possible.  Here are the list of services:

Computer Repair
Print Shop
Web Development

In reality these services are all divisions under one company name, but they are branded and marketed as seperate entities.  For instance, since I live in Ladera Heights, I have decided to brand the computer repair service as Ladera Tech Support.  The domains I have chosen for this brand is [laderatech.com].  If indeed this brand grows and requires its own company name it will be easy to setup the domain name to be the epicenter of the service, calling it Ladera Technologies or short Ladera Tech.  I’ve also thought ahead for some other names which go hand in hand with this one.  The other domains are [laderanet.com] and [ladera.info].  These names are important because I can utilize them to cross promote services offered by Ladera Tech Support.  One promotional product I will be using to cross promote Ladera Tech Support’s services is free LaderaNet email.  I will be hosting the free email product using Google Apps.  This makes sense to me as I will have no hardware to maintain.  The only work that will need to be done for this is to initially deploy the email address itself for the party that is interested.  This gives me a direct contact relationship with potential customers that I can then upsell to paid services.  Everything from computer repair to print services.  As my customer base grows I will continue to focus on the same region as Ladera Heights is a close knit area with a number of successful professionals living there.

In the next year or two, I plan on setting up a small voip division to service this area under a seperate brand.  I for one know that this will be sucessful because the larger voip companies do not provide solid customer support.  Lets face it, in these trying times people want to know that you care about there business regardless of how big or small it may be.  Some people might even want to see you face to face before they fork money over to you.  I for one believe that targetting a geographical area is the key to success for the present day and for the future.  Too many companies are blindly advertising there services on a global basis only caring about the amount of revenue being generated on a select day.  For me I actually care about the people being serviced and with the help of a few good domains and a solid open source application I will be able to create strong relationships by effectively servicing the area that I live in.

Best Regards,

Jason Thompson

PS:  I actually typed all of this before breakfast. LOL!

Just got back from Las Vegas.  Had a chance to stay four days at the Hooter’s Hotel for free.  I practically payed for the hotel room after loosing around $300 on blackjack and the wheel of fortune at the MGM Grand.  That brings me to a fun point.  Apparently we are in a recession, from the looks of Las Vegas last week there was no recession in sight!  People gambling freely, overheard one guy say he just lost $1200.  The Gambling Industry can definitely be considered as inelastic at times, although the Wynn Hotel did not have its appeal with an abundance of beautiful women as it used too.  Anyways, I’ve decided to turn this blog into my own personal blog, rather than just focusing in on domaining.  There’s alot more to me than just domaining and I feel its a perfect way for me to use this as an online diary of some sort.

Recently I’ve gotten back into the graphic design business.  My first client is a gospel music record company.  Here are a few logo concepts that I have been working on for them:

Expectancy Music Group Logo Concept 1

Expectancy Music Group Concept 2

Expectancy Music Group Logo Concept 3

I’m also working on a few logo concepts for a friend of mine as a favour for his entertainment company and a DJ he manages here in California.

DJ Dense Logo Concept 1

DJ Dense Logo Concept 2

I’ve had a great deal of time the last few days after getting back on vegas to work on a few designs.  Ironically this is not occuring out of the blue.  My car took a crap while heading to Vegas, the Mercedes 1999 ML320 has a cracked catalytic converter which Mercedes Benz says does not constitute for a real call.  To put it simply Mercedes has admitted to there being a problem with select VIN numbers of my car model but says that my particular car was not part of that catalytic converter recall.

Back to the designing I go!  For my friend’s company, New Breed Entertainment he wanted a new logo for his corporate image.  I designed the following:

New Breed Entertainment Logo Concept 1

I’ve been pretty productive, considering I am in the middle of launching a new computer tech support company here in the area that I live called Ladera Tech Support.  Unfortunately I will have to delay the launch a bit until I get my car fixed or decide to go ahead and utilize one of those offers that Volvo continues to send me.

I actually registered a geo domain for the area that I will be servicing for computer support:  LADERA.INFO

I live in an area called Ladera Heights and I am quite suprised that this domain was actually available to register.  As a promotion I will be providing free email services using another domain LADERANET.COM for residents within the region.  I am hoping that this will spark some interest in the support segment of the company.  I should have the final fliers done for this company soon, they will be simple and to the point creating more curiosity about the service I am offers more than anything else.