I just recently started a new blog titled “My Quest to Make a Living as an Artist“. This will chronicle efforts to make a living as an artist using my two stlyes of art, surrealism and comic book superhero painting. This week a commission auction I had up on Ebay for a superhero painting was won by a repeat customer of mine. The funny thing is I haven’t shipped a commission painting I just finished for him yet. I am also working out details for commission for a guy in London who saw the auction on Ebay, but wanted something a little different. So I want to take this time to thank Ebay for their help in my quest. If you get a chance check out “My Quest to Make a Living as an Artist“.

Here it is and I know that it is a really big file (next time I’m going to reduce the audio recording quality). But please have a listen and let us know what you think. In this first podcast I talk about how I produced the fake poster for the Ewok Massacre.  To listen you can either download it or just click on play symbol below the images.

On Saturday, I recieved my first ever google adsense cheque for the princely sum of £59.18 (curse the strong pound and the weak dollar!). I recently posted on my blog a very important question: what the bloody hell should I do with it? I feel I should do something something more constructive than spending it on blackjack and hookers. I feel I should invest it. So, with that in mind, I’m throwing the question open to you all, who are probably no better at financial advising than yours truly:

What should I do with £59.18 from Google Adsense?

Comment on it either here or there.

Finally, I’m also running a competition on my blog to create a website visualisation gallery. Basically, draw a picture either on a PC or freehand of a website, and email me with a copy of the image, and your site, the image, and the site will be included in the gallery. You have 24 hours! See the example above for Digg.com

On his money-making mission, Mike has made plenty of insightful posts, and no exception was his recent observation on just how global the internet is. Good one, mate, and then when you highlighted my ban in China, it really got me thinking.

For the 65% of non English-speaking surfers out there, plus a couple of Chinese thought control police, if they do arrive at the door of The Pisstakers, I thought it would be easier for them to make sense of the nonsense, if the blog were available in several of the main languages of the world.

To date, I have been offering Babel Fish for readers of our tech blogs, but their translations seemed more comical than useful, so I went looking for other ideas on integrating machine translations into a blog. Voila! I found some cutting edge options, and some pretty flags.

Check out this post from Digital Inspiration for the whys and wherefores and some code. And this is where I got the code for the multi translation tool from Google in the side bar of the Pisstakers homepage.

You can’t beat a human translator, but unless your international visitors have a sexto-lingual friend nearby, a bit of code will serve its purpose to take most of the mystery out of your blog. As time goes on, the machines should improve their translations from comical to passable and we will become one truly global happy family of blog readers.

Having said that, do you think multi-lingual blogs serve a purpose, or is the content too culture specific and for instance, BAYB makes little sense to readers outside of English- speaking countries?

I have often heard of mothers teaching their infants sign language so that the baby has more power to communicate before he/she is able to speak. I always thought it was a great idea and wanted to try it out with my own children. Of course when I had my baby real life got in the way and since it was a necessity I didn’t try it out. Then my sister had a deaf baby. He was born a couple weeks after my baby but we didn’t find out he was deaf for a couple months. Now that she knows he is deaf and can only hear 80% with hearing aids she is teaching him sign language so I have finally started to teach my daughter a few things. First of all, since I don’t know sign language I have had to learn a little in order to pass it on to my daughter. The greatest website  for this is the ASL (American Sign Language) website because you pick the word you want to learn and it shows you a mini movie of how to make the sign. I have also learned some signs from my sister. I have used some of these signs for many months with my daughter but it has just recently been that she has started signing them back to me. She is very good at signing the word more, coincidentally because she always wants more food. She also will sign the word milk. We are currently working on Please and Thank You and names of various foods we eat. She picked up milk really fast so I think she will catch on to these other signs fairly quickly. I just have to get in the habit of using the signs when we are saying those words. It has been really fun and it has made meal times a lot less stressful since she has been able to tell us when she wants more of something. I would recommend mom’s to try this out with their children that are not yet able to speak. It is a wonderful way to communicate with your child!

I woke up this morning, pleased to find we received our first review in the blog competition from Esplanade. The review is nice, and sets a good tone for the competition.

After about 10 or so reviews, the competition will be closed and the voting will begin. The winners will receive 10$ for first and 5$ each for 2nd and 3rd. For more information you can check out the original post about the competition.

Our judges are Ed, Stefanie, Mike, Chris, Lee, and myself. So spread the competition about our little contest, I’ll link to you if you do! Thanks

Here is a blog promotion question, and it isn’t rhetorical, so please feel free to answer.

You have a spare $25 and want to increase awareness and generate some buzz over at the new topfunnies blog. It is not a question of making money right now, just kickstart some targetted traffic that is interested in videos and posts about the world’s best comedians.

You have to use the $25 by the end of the month. One idea was to offer $25 for the funniest comment. What would you spend it on for maximum effect?

It seems that the task of linking to directories always appear in the blogger’s TO DO list. PR4 and above sites are best. Reading through Mike’s weekly stats, he isn’t so convinced of their usefulness, at least as far as driving traffic to your site. I guess like all things, you have to weigh up where your time is best spent, and there can’t be any harm in allocating a few minutes a week to signing up to directories that Google at least deem worthy as a link.

Anyway, I came across 3 options/alternatives that you might want to check out. Swicki, Chainki and bla.st. I am not promising the earth, but they may just deliver something more than the normal 1 visitor a month!

Swicki is a cross between a search engine and an on-line encyclopedia (wiki). If you go to our swicki and search your blog name, a set of results will appear. Ignore them! Directly below the search box, use the link to input your own bio. This will then be logged on Swicki, and whenever anyone else on the internet uses Swicki to search for you , your custom description will appear with your search result! Quite nice.

Chainki is a wiki derivative of DMOZ, one of THE main directories on the internet. Chainki is collaborative and like Swicki, you can tap into it by inputting your own abbreviated details/tag line in a suitable category. Like all wikis, it can be re-edited by others.

And bla.st is a new business cards directory that if nothing else, is going to cause a stir for a while, so it is probably worth jumping in there. It is free to upload your “business card” either of your blog, or a promo or service. You can categorise your card to suit. By bidding cents per day you can push your card higher up the heirarchy and for $5 a day you can be number one on the whole site. We did a review of bla.st at The Pisstakers and were credited 3 cents a day, which currently puts us second under “humor”!