Derek Semmler dot com - money, motorcycles and cars (with a little bit of everything else)

It has been a long year of hard work for both of my kids in pursuing their passions, but they are each about to pursue the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

PONY Thunder

The passion that drives my oldest son is baseball and his pot of gold is the PONY baseball playoffs, which will begin this weekend. His team, modeled after the Trenton Thunder Minor League Baseball team, will be ranked as either the #2 or #3 seed depending on the outcome of the final game on Saturday.

Throughout the season, he has been a fixture behind the plate as one of the few kids that enjoy playing catcher. With a fair share of foul balls off of the mask and chest pad, and even an errant bat off of the elbow (ouch!), all of the hard work and pain is about to be forgotten as these kids enter the post-season.

As a dad, I have had the pleasure of numerous proud moments on the baseball field this season - including when he hit his first triple and throwing out two baserunners, one at third base and one at first that had taken a large lead.

But what I am most proud about is how he has worked hard on and off the field to improve his skills, supported his teammates throughout the season, and had fun.

Good luck in the playoffs Thunder!

Storm Dance Alliance

After trying baseball and coming away unimpressed, my youngest son found his passion in the dance studio as a member of the Storm Dance Alliance Hip-Hop Company. This coming week he will be in hot pursuit of his pot of gold in the form of the National Finals Dance Competition being held in the Wisconsin Dells.

The schedule has been grueling with more than a few 10-12 hour days at the dance studio and having to miss out on fun with his friends for extra practice sessions. All of the previous practices and competitions have provided the opportunity to fine-tune each dance in preparation for this moment, as he is now about to step out on the largest stage.

The dance studio has provided me just as many proud moments as a dad, whether it be his insanely long handstands or his latest trick of doing a headstand and pushing himself up into a handstand (go ahead and try it, it will humble you).

What makes me the most proud though is how he has overcome the fear of stepping out on a stage in front of hundreds of people to perform, ignoring the criticism from friends, and having fun doing something he loves.

Good luck at Nationals Storm!

The one bad thing…

As the kids embark on this journey to the pinnacle of their respective passion, the one bad thing is that the PONY playoffs and National Finals are scheduled for the exact same week.

That means a divided family between the baseball fields and the dance stage, so I am sure the text messages will be flying back and forth as we keep each other updated. Fortunately we both have nice new phones, otherwise we would have had to take a stab at winning Steve’s free iPhone 3GS contest (now how is that for a contest plug Steve?).

JB and G*Slick, I am extremely proud of you both!

(And no, we could not have planned it any better if we tried to have one son at Storm dance and the other on Thunder baseball. LoL!)

Wow, I cannot believe it has been roughly five months since I stepped away from the day to day activities of running multiple blogs. While I have been away, there has certainly been a lot that has transpired - some good and some not so good.

The Good

Before we get to the “not so good” things - I have always been one that prefers the good news before the bad - here are a few of the things that have been keeping me busy.

But I thought you weren’t blogging…

Even though I have been away from the daily posting, I have still been somewhat active behind the scenes with the Interweb. Some of you might recall that I had partnered up with a fellow blogger to work on a few sites; the arrangement that we have been working under is that I am responsible for the creation and maintenance of the blogs while she handles the day to day posting.

We redesigned her primary blog, GrowMap (with more design changes still to come), and have continued to work on our site dedicated to helping improve your golf game. In addition to all of that, I am working with a new client right now on a Typepad to WordPress migration - for anyone that has not done this before, Typepad is an absolute nightmare to migrate away from as they severely restrict the way that you can access your own data.

With my break from blogging, I had expected to see my blogs drop completely off the radar but there is still a healthy amount of traffic coming into each site and the earnings have not dropped off as much as I thought they would - more on that a little later.

Punching the time clock…

The day job has flourished as well in the absence of my blogging. Shortly before stepping away from the blogs, I had been transitioned out of my position as a software engineer into project management. As much as I miss writing code every day, I have learned to embrace this new challenge and my first few projects have all been successful.

It has not all been a bed of roses though, as the demands at the day job have resulted in some stretches of longer hours that have taken away from my time with the family; which is the reason that I was stepping away from the blogs in the first place. Things have been settling down lately and I continue to make strides as a project manager, something that has been noticed by management as well.

The wind in my face…

With the summer weather upon us - although some days I really question that - I have been out riding the Harley a good deal, and have a new enthusiast to share this with as my son is now old enough to ride with me.

Not only have I been riding more, I even have some new gear courtesy of Harley-Davidson. Through the power of the blog, I had been in touch with a representative from Harley-Davidson for a few months and just recently she sent me a note asking if I would like to try out a pair of their new sunglasses. So while I have been enjoying the wind in my face, I have been keeping it out of my eyes with a slick pair of shades. Expect to hear more about my thoughts on the gear in the near future.

Long live Derek…

It might not seem like such a big deal, but I have been getting much more sleep. In my previous life, I’d work all day at the day job and come home to spend a little time with my wife and kids before hunkering down with the blogs. On average, I was only getting about 3-4 hours of sleep each night.

Over these last few months, I have been getting approximately 7-8 hours of sleep each night and I feel so much better. Sure, I still have a few late nights but they are now the exception more than the norm.

In addition to getting more sleep, I had an opportunity - or maybe it was an order (see below) - to focus on my health. Not being a fan of the treadmill, I opted for an elliptical machine from Precor and have been logging mile after mile…and kind of enjoying it. I’ve still got a long road ahead of me but I like where this road is going.

The Bad

As I mentioned earlier, not everything has been good since taking a hiatus from the blog.

My head is about to explode…

In mid-February I had a bit of a health scare - there were two instances, just a few days apart, where I had excruciating pain in my head. Being the type of guy that never goes to the doctor, I tried to ignore it the first time it happened. When it happened again a few days later, I got myself into the doctor and they ordered a CT scan as there was concern that there may have been bleeding in my brain.

Talk about stress, nerves, and fear!

Fortunately, the CT scan did not show any cause for concern but the outcome of everything did reveal that my blood pressure and cholesterol were slightly elevated. Neither is high enough to require medication, but the doctor did suggest that I improve my eating habits and exercise more regularly; hence the new elliptical machine.

Poof, where did my blogs go…

How well are you backing up your blogs? I *thought* that I was doing a decent job of it until I had a reason to need those backups. When the server where my blogs are hosted had a few issues, I was told that everything would be restored from the backups taken by my host. There was only one problem - their backups were corrupt and the last good backup they had was from March of 2008.

It was like the last year of blogging never happened.

Fortunately, I had daily backups of the database for this blog archived in email so restoring this blog was a piece of cake. All of the new blogs that I had created since that time, well, I wasn’t quite as efficient with my backup strategy. It took me a few long days but I eventually had everything restored. Needless to say, I am now being much more structured with my backups.

Conspiracy theory or just bad luck…

Earlier I mentioned the fact that my blog earnings have not taken too much of a hit; however, there is one thing that did hurt my blog earnings - my AdSense account has been terminated!

While I was not earning record sums of money through AdSense, it did add nicely to the bottom line each month. As such, I would certainly not do anything that would jeapordize my account - or did I? For the conspiracy theorists in the crowd, I found it extremely ironic that my AdSense account was terminated just a few days after I canceled the AdWords campaigns that I was running for a few other initiatives.

Appealing the decision with Google did not prove to be useful, as they denied my appeal. Rather than worry about it, I simply changed gears and implemented ads from Chitika where I had previously been using AdSense. While the Chitika ads aren’t pulling in the same amount of money each month, I am slowly building that up as a replacement for AdSense.

Does this mean I am back?

So, am I officially back to blogging?

As much as I would like to tell you that I will be here posting every day, I know that I cannot commit to that. But rather than remain silent until I would be able to post daily, I wanted to dip my toe back into the water and tell you all that I have missed the interaction with everyone.

Now it is your turn…what is new with you?

It was two years ago that Derek published his first post here.

As I skimmed over the posts he has made here over the time, I am amazed on how much Derek has kept up his blog to what it is now, how far he has come. It gives me inspiration that maybe one day, maybe my blog will be the same way. It should give other new bloggers hope too, I hope it does.

Here is to the past two years and the future years to come!

Happy Birthday, Derek Semmler dot com!

Is customer service alive?

Let me clarify that…..is good, helpful customer service still alive?

Some say yes, while others may say no.

I am going to share with you a couple of stories on how Customer Service is dying and how it is still alive and kicking. 

Customer Service is Dead

In December 2007, I bought my husband a 2008 Chevy Corvette for Christmas. Dont ask me what type it is. I have no idea, I just let him pick it out. Well late January this year, one of his headlights went out. To make a long story short, we discovered that the light didnt go out.  The entire casing for the light was malfunctioning. The whole thing needed to be replaced. Since the vette is still under warranty, he put in a service ticket for the headlight casing to be replaced at the place where we bought it. We were told that the part would be here in about 2 weeks. 

Two weeks go by and no phone call. He call up customer service and was immediately put on hold for a long time. He got switched to different people. Come to find out the part was never ordered. Ok, thats fine. Mistakes happen. No big deal.

I make my husband call them after a week full well knowing that the part isnt going to be there but just to make sure the part was ordered. Guess what? It was not. I about flipped out. I asked to speak to upper management to complain. I was put on hold and switched around to different people. When I did speak to someone, not only were they unfriendly they were almost belittling me. Complaining did no good. You would think after buying such a car from them, they would care how their customers were treated. 

Btw, the vette was fixed today.

If you have a story about bad customer service, you might find this forum useful or funny…depending how you feel. You can submit your story to Customer Disservice. 

Customer Service is ALIIIIIIIIVE!!

I have an iPhone and I love it. I am addicted to it. When I am bored, I whip it out of my pocket and entertain myself. I have an app (application) on my phone called State Plate Hunt by Jeremie Weldin. You can find out info about it here (iTunes link) or here. Basically, you can keep track of what license plate you see while out on the road. Living in New Orleans, we get alot of out of towners. I have seen plates anywhere from Alaska to New York. I also went on a family vacation to Orlando and found tons more plates there too. I found all but 10 plates! It took me awhile to find all of them. I even found a few Canadian Provinces. I went to install the latest update for the app. Once the app installed, I went to launch it. When I did, I totally panicked. All of my plates were gone. The new update did not keep my old info. 

I immediately emailed the developer. I explained to him what had happened. I expected to get some sort of response in a few days or so. Wrong. I immediately got a response. He apologized and said he will look into it and let me know when he comes up with a fix. 

Yeah right. He is going to fix my problem? Pffftt. Whatever. 

Just a few days ago, I received an email from Jeremie saying that he fixed the problem and submitted the update to Apple and that it should be available within a week. Wow. Just wow. I emailed him on Sunday about my problem and received a fix on Tuesday. Now, talk about wonderful customer service. 

I wish more companies/people were more like this, more caring and doing more on follow-ups. Apparently, Victoria’s Secret is like this. Now that I got your attention, you can read about how they did a nationwide search for a pair of panties. 

I ask you, what has been your experience with customer service? Have you received bad service lately? What is your take on this topic? Or if you are a company, what are you doing to make sure you have decent customer service?

When I had told Derek that I wanted and was going to help him out, I had every intention of doing so. As my luck would have it, work and my personal life got extremely busy and I was left with little time for myself. Now things have smooth out (yay!) and life is back to normal. 

Last month on Derek Semmler dot com was pretty uneventful but that doesn’t mean that people didn’t stop taking an interest in what was going on over here! 

So here it is folks, The February 2009 edition of Where Did You Come From, Where Did You Go?

Top 10 Referring Sites

1. Geekologie
2. Courtney Tuttle
3. InlineSEO
4. Sparkplugging
5. Drew’s Marketing Minute
6. Molson in the Community
7. romandock dot com
8. Big Foot Web Marketing
9. Bloglines
10. Blog Blazers

Once again, Geekologie has taken the top spot for the month of February. Congrats! InlineSEO and Sparkplugging were neck and neck for 3 and 4th place. I would like to send a special shout-out to Nick from romandock dot com for beating me this past month, WTG! LOL One major thing I noticed about this past month is the new faces to the top 10 list. Drew’s Marketing Minute, Molson in the Community, and Big Foot Web Marketing to name a few. I checked out Drew’s Marketing Minute and i enjoyed his site. I especially enjoyed his encounter with a dog/marketing whisperer.

Top Ten Visited Posts

1. How To Record A Cellphone Conversation
2. Being A Better Husband
3. Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor
4. Pictures :: Aftermath of Exploding CD
5. Thesis Unveiled :: Threaded Web Redesign
6. Where Did You Come From, Where Did You Go :: January 2009
7. Can You Record A Cellphone Conversation?
   
8. 100 Push Up Challenge :: Join Me And Win
   
9. Pursue Your Passion, But At What Cost?
   
10. How To Add Affiliate Products From LinkShare

No surprise in seeing the cellphone conversation being top dog. It is pretty much the same list as last month but a bit jumbled up. 

Digging in Google Analytics, I discovered the pageviews and visits were slightly down from the previous months but not by much! So, yay for that! 

So in closing, I hope to bring more interesting post here. Now that I am back from vacation, you shall see more of me! But I will say that if you have any suggestions for posts and if you want to run it by me, please email me. Thanks!