Project 30

I've decided to start my own project 30. A project 30 is were you add or subtract something from your life or try to lose certain number of pounds in 30 days. My first project 30 is going to be "Read 50 pages of a book everyday for 30 days". This may sound simple, but I never read on weekends and I only read about 30 pages in English class which isn't every day. Then I'm going to move on to hard ones like:

• 30 days with no TV
• 30 days with no Facebook.
• Sleep 10 - 11 hours a day.

This was inspired by Matt Cutts when he talked on TED:

OPINION: Your safe from phone hacking in New Zealand.

This post in response to: Phone hacking: Are you safe?

The New Zealand Herald recently posted a article claiming the some phones in New Zealand were hackable. This was in the sense that you could hear the voice mails of a some mobile phones just by using skype . For my generation where it is all about texting people don't even call much let alone leave voice mails. If I call someone and they don't pick up, I close the call and send them a text and/or an email. My friends do the same for me.


The last time I got a voice mail was ages ago and from my parents and that was a one off occasion. My entire close family don't use voice mail much if at all so if any of our phones were hacked for voice mail, they couldn't get anything anyway. Secondly we don't leave important information on voice mail when we do use it. It is usually a simple "Call me when you can." or "Can you get some milk on the way home?". Hacking our family wouldn't be very fun. We also all have pin numbers on our phones.


I know this article my completely outrageous to some of you because your family and friends might use voice mail but this is what I have grown up to.

The State Of The New Zealand Daily Deals Industry

I hope I don't get to boring to fast in this post but I find the amount of daily deal websites out there amazing. There are over 24 daily deal sites in New Zealand alone and there is simply too much competition. To give an idea of how many logos that is, well here you go:


Just recently 1-day deals shut down. 1-day offered 3 deals over a 24 hour period to the entire country. They shut down because 'because the company doesn't see vouchers as a viable long term business model for both the 1-day business and for the suppliers/vendors.' -- Vooxy.co.nz

If you watch tv in New Zealand you would have surely heard the annoying Yazoom ads. Five years ago there were a few sites like these around but no one went to them. Now they have to advertise to get people to come. And you can see why. Yazoom has the worst sites design out of all of them and the most annoying ads as well. While the deals may be awesome and 'life changing' for others, being a 13 year and going on these sites only to find offers about laser hair removal and wine boxes and tastings isn't very exciting.

In fact I can't think of much worse than 5 billion emails clogging up my inbox every day on to show me deals I don't want. In the long run the businesses that give them selves up to these deals companies are hit hard.
The deal companies say it is a great way to drive traffic to your business, and it is. But sometimes it can be a disaster and there are far to many people coming in the door and not enough tables, chairs, food, plates. Some businesses just aren't prepared for some many people.

I also doubt the profit that these businesses make, a 65% saving is huge and that might be eating into their profits hurting the financial stability of the business.

Of course there are good things about Daily Deal Websites like for instance 70% savings on products and services. I just don't thing New Zealand has the population to keep 24 websites going with full time employees.

Sources:
http://www.voxy.co.nz/business/leading-daily-deal-site-closes-its-voucher-business/1861/92466
http://www.onedaydeals.co.nz/daily-deal-site-rankings-nz.html

Hover Coupon Codes

Hey Guys.
Recently hover.com gave me coupon codes to give out. They save you 10% on any order and all you have to do is enter the coupon code 'TArmstrong' and you save!

I currently use hover as my domain name registrar for TimArmstrong.Me and it was like $5 (US).
Any way here is what you can get:

Hover make it really simple to buy and set up a domain name and has really easy to use settings and controls. You can also buy custom email addresses with your domain name.

Just remember the code 'TArmstrong'

First Omnom

QR Code for this website.

This is my first blog post on this new blog as you can probably tell. I decided to start a new blog which didn't focus so much on me but life in general and my outlook on it. As boring as this sounds I hope if you read a few more posts you will gain some sense of failure of fulfilment.

While making this new blog I decide to change the design from a very interesting creative one, to a very boring and grey one. Because at least with this design, you can actually read the text. The one thing I do leave behind however is my readers from my other blog who stayed with me. I leave my many page views and stats behind as try out this new, improved blog.