The one problem I have with this site is that the more it grows, the less I can write. My life is essentially an open book, but I try to respect the privacy of my friends. If one friend does something funny but slightly embarassing, I don’t write about it. But it’s not just my friends. My sister reads the site, so I don’t want to write about my dating life. The family of some friends read the site, so I don’t want to write about certain adventures that they don’t want their parents to know about. Further, if I write certain things, I worry that people will think that they’re intentional manpulations. I was working out the terms of my employment with a friend who I’m going to be working with soon. I didn’t write anything about it because I didn’t want him to think that I was trying to use the site as some passive aggressive method of negotiating.

All in all, I probably only write about 25% of what I’d like to write here. My friends in real life end up hearing way more funny stories than readers of this site - and I think that’s a shame.

In a way I think I should just write EVERYTHING. The first month could be a rough ride, but eventually people would get used to it and would probably stop being offended. Or maybe then my real life friends would become more reserved because they’d be concerned about what I might write.

I’ve thought about charging a monthly fee and manually checking every name who signed up, but it probably wouldn’t take long before someone I knew got a friend I didn’t know to open an account. Also, friends might become paranoid that I was writing about them because I wouldn’t let them see the hidden site.

I even considered starting a new blog somewhere with a fake name. Somehow people are able to tell when it’s me, though. I used to put a bunch of personal ads on Craigslist. Each one was a hail Mary - no real expectation of meeting someone great through it, but still worth the glimmer of hope it provided. I would write very different types of ads - funny ones, demanding ones, tame ones. Somehow people always knew that I had written them. They wouldn’t even question it.

“How’s your new ad going?”

They all claimed that it was obvious that it was me, even though I’d change my age and leave out any identifying characteristics.

The good news is that despite self censoring, I still have a lot of things to write about. I still wish that there was a good solution to the problem so that I could write about more of my stories.

A while back someone asked me what sites I like to visit. I forgot to answer, so I’ll write a post about it.
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Hey guys. I’m out of town until Monday. I thought I’d have good internet access, but I don’t. I’ll be writing up some posts (I have some great ones coming up), and I’ll post them all along with some pictures when I get back. Take a couple days to go outside and get away from the computer, but come back on Monday!

How cool is that? If you search for my first name, Tynan, this blog comes up fifth on google! I check where I rank on a bunch of keywords every once in a while, and this is the first time I’ve been on the first page. Hopefully soon I will be the first search result.

What’s strange is that MSN usually gives me really good rankings, but I’m on the second page for my name there.

Sorry… I was really trying to do it every day. I had a good story for today, but I don’t have the time to do it justice, so I’m going to delay it. Some quick points of interest :

I may be getting a “real” job. Not the kind of job boring peons get, but a really interesting one. We still have to work out the details, so I’ll write more if it happens.

I got pulled over today for not putting my headlights on. Oops. I didn’ thave my insurance card, so I got a ticket for that. It was actually expired, but they gave me a new policy card anyway for some reason, so I can mail that in and get out of the ticket. The best part? My car is super illegal at the moment. My registration and inspection are not only expired but not in my name. I never bothered to switch it over because I like my cali plates. This is the third time I’ve been pulled over in a year and they’ve never ticketed me for it. The last two times they noticed and had mercy on me.

Adjusting to normal sleep is weird. I feel like I don’t have nearly enough time now. I still have tons of stuff I want to do tonight and won’t. Also I’m sleeping 7 hours or so, so I’d say there’s an excellent chance I’m going back to polyphasic in a couple weeks.

I’m reading the book Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. It’s an incredibly fascinating book that I’m learning a lot from. It’s told mainly in the form of anecdotes, which make the most interesting type of reading. I’ll probably write more about it when I’m finished.

Ok, that’s it for now. Expect a mind blowing entry tomorrow.

Happy Saturday, everyone. I’ve got a million important yet totally boring things I have to do today, so I’m going to skip writing a long article. However, I have a few that I’ve been working on for next week that should be pretty good.

Right now I kinda write the blog on blind faith. I don’t really know exactly what people expect from the site - I just try to balance between useful advice, funny stories, and a bit of what’s going on in my life at the moment. My goal is for this to be the site you check every day, having no idea what you might be reading about next, but knowing that it will be interesting. But I’m curious - is there anything you’d like to see different around here? Is there a topic you wish I’d write about? Do you want more of any one type of post? Less? Is there anything about the site that’s really annoying (yeah, yeah… I put at Home button at the top)? If you have any suggestions, I’d really love to hear them either in the comments here or by e-mail.

The blog is becoming more and more successful in terms of traffic. I average about 3000 visitors per day if you include the huge spikes from the more popular stories. It seems like we have a good portion of the people who comment on the blog, which is what I personally think makes it really interesting. I’m really grateful for every person who reads and/or replies in the comments here. I read every comment, and I’m flattered that people take the time to post them.

I have a lot of really cool plans for this site to make it more unique and to get readers more involved, but I’m waiting to hit a certain level of traffic before implementing them. Thanks again for reading, and stay tuned for some cool articles this week…

My main computer broke. And I mean BROKE broke… like won’t turn on. Not like the last false alarm where I thought someone deleted my Funky Bowling ‘99 high score.

Anyway… working on getting another computer working and I’ll have a killer update for you later.

I’m actually kind of hesitant to post this here, because I hate it when people build up a blog with quality stuff and then start whoring it out by promoting their products. I guess this does promote my book, but I’m writing it because I feel great! Here’s the story:

A while back I decided to go nuts and start eating super healthy. It really made a huge difference for me and I wanted to get into web marketing because friends were making money in it, so I wrote a book. I thought the book came out great. It was short, but had everything in it that I wanted, so I figured that people would appreciate that it’s right to the point.

Months later, I make a little bit of money off it every month, but probably not enough that it’s actually worth the hassle. I get a good amount of people gushing about how it’s helped them, but I also get people returning it before trying it because it’s short. This really pisses me off because it WOULD work if they would just do it, but people want weird complicated books to make excuses about how hard it is to lose weight. But still, I refuse to pad it with filler, because I want people who are serious about losing weight to be able to do it without being insulted by a padded book.

Anyway… today I got an e-mail that made me really happy. Check it out :

Hi Dana (that’s my pen name),

I just want to send you this email and thank you for changing my life. I don’t know how I got to your website, but I am so glad that I did. Since starting your lifestyle change(I dont say the word diet anymore), I have lost 15 lbs in about 3.5 weeks. I also feel so amazing and happy. My skin is clearer, my hair looks amazing, and I get compliments every single day.

For all the people out looking at this website and thinking that it can’t really be true, it most certainly is. I am tried everything in order to lose weight…pills, low fat diets, high fat diets and they all left me wanting more and craving foods. This is the best purchase of my life and educates anybody on how your body handles food.

Dana, thank you for making this as simple as possible, showing ways to incorporate heathly eating into our busy lives,and giving every single person a chance at being beautiful inside and out.

Respectfully,

Amy

I don’t make much money, but when I get e-mails like that it makes it totally worth it. Also today I saw my friend Jessica. She’s an actress who caught a big break early, but was having trouble getting work recently. I gave her a copy of my book and now she looks great and just landed a national commercial. Obviously I can’t claim all the credit or anything, but I’m glad to have contributed to her success in whatever way I did. Go Jess!