I'm pretty excited as I have three pretty big time bloggers ready to push the site when it is up and running.

I hate waiting, but it's currently the best thing to do.

Most Christians would agree that everything belongs to God anyway, but I think it's a head/heart thing.

I tend to hold onto things as "mine" and have a fear of telling God to do what he wills and I'll be ok with it.

It comes from putting the attributes of powerful men onto an all powerful God.

People in charge do things to prove their power because they're scared of losing it.

So I have this fear that if I release things in my life to God's control, he will exert his power in some way that isn't good just to prove he's in control.

Isn't it funny how silly the way we think sounds when it's put into words?

Everyone I know that holds onto things to tightly has ended up either being miserable in failing or being miserable in success.

I prayed Sunday night with a good friend that I would learn to trust God and allow him to give and take away as he sees fit.

He's got my best interest in mind after all right?

He tentatively went for the idea and said to put a shirt design and web design together and show it to him.

Well he gave a thumbs up to the shirt and a thumbs down to the site, so I tried again and dropped a couple hundred bucks for a buddy to design it for me.

This blogger liked the new site design... but decided he didn't like the overall idea so he squashed it.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that he said to come up with another shirt idea and he'll push it on his blog.

So Solo Tees is almost finished. The site is up and most of the functionality is there. And yes, I am changing the tag line. It's just a place holder for now.

I hoping to launch it this weekend then use some of my contacts to get the word out.

Stay tuned...

Be glad when the eight to fiver is just a "remember when..." in my life.

It is almost physically painful to mark posts as read that I haven't gotten around to reading. I just know the post that will change my life is in there somewhere.

That being said, I always have my top five or so blogs that I will stop what I am doing and make sure I read the new posts.

PC4media has recently gained one of those slots.

He is pimping and pushing his new product, Whizspark, to every blogger contact he has, and talking it up on his blog. It's a lot of fun to watch.

Ahhh I see his evil plan for starting a blog in a first place. Make nice with a lot of bloggers then ask for their help.

I feel used, but in a good way.

He's gonna help me plan and pimp Crooked Cog in '06.

Help each other, says he. Sounds good, says me.

My local church, Grace Evangelical Free, seems to have the highest concentration of entrepreneurial minded people then any other group of people I have been in. I think it's cause our church chooses to answer many of the inconsistencies that are ignored in other, ahem, Baptisty churches.

Two of my good buddies, Dan Portnoy and John Gauger, have started Intake Media and are focusing on the Dropcast, "a 30 minute bi-weekly podcast featuring popular culture – those who create it and those who discuss it." Download it. Listen to it. You won't believe it was put together in some dude's basement.

There is streamlining then there is taking shortcuts. Streamlining makes life easier. Shortcuts don't exist.

Why was I raised on a grace-veiled, works-based Christianity? And why do people think it's all about do's and dont's? I'm so bitter at the people that have caused this shift in the cultural view of what Christ came here to do.

I'm done.

The real point of the show is to bring retailers and manufacturers together, but then you have all the leeches like me show up to find a way to make a little cash somewhere in the cracks of the industry.

Carl and I will be touching down next Wednesday night and attending the show Thursday and Friday. I found a super cheap room a half mile from the convention center, so there will be a lot less walking then last year.

Here's my goals for the show:
1. Have more pictures on BlueCollarMTB.com then any other blog.
2. Get on people's contact list for new 29er stuff. I want TwentyNineInches.com to be THE 29er gossip site.
3. Get a lot out of the bike blogger meetup that's been put together on Thursday of the show.
4. Maintain many of the good relationships we have built the past year.
5. Make some new relationships.

How I plan to accomplish these goals:
1. The conference has wi-fi internet. Both Carl and I will be sportin' digital cameras with wireless laptops. I installed a new plugin on Blue Collar yesterday that's builds a picture gallery by pulling the pictures straight out of a directory on the web host.

   String these together and you have me and Carl running around taking as many pictures as we can then stopping and uploading them all straight to the website and they are automatically "posted". Does it get much more streamlined then that?



2. I have a list of almost all the companies that deal in 29ers and I will be hitting their booths and talking to their marketing people to get on their press release list. I'm FREE marketing and publicity... why don't people make bigger use of that??? That's a topic for another post...


3. Jon Maus has put together a meeting for all the bloggers that are gonna be at the conference. Don't know what attendance will be like, but it should be a good time no matter what.


4. I have booked up well over half my time at the conference with difference companies, along with having a long list of booths I need to hit when I can. It's so amazing this year to just meet with these people and maintain the relationship.


5. I have a few contacts I should be able to meet new people through. Also, I have set up some appointments with a few companies we haven't talked to much, so it'll be cool to talk up Blue Collar and Crooked Cog.

I'm very excited about this year's conference. Hope it meets my expectations.

Different crowd with different habits I guess. My blog is made up mostly of outbound links so I have trained my readers to read and click. While Jon's readers are used to getting original content that is easily discussed, along with the fact that a lot of them are also industry people.

This was one of the most refreshing and rewarding things I have done to further my Christian walk. From Friday night until Saturday afternoon my home was a small room at a Catholic retreat here in Lynchburg. Bare walls, plain furniture and stiff bedding. I spent my time reminding myself what Christ did for me on the cross and working my way through a couple hundred verses on adoration of God and personal forgiveness.

Along with the solitude we practiced the discipline of silence during the day on Saturday. Pretty awkward eating lunch with ten other people while not saying a word.

Both solitude and silence are disciplines many people in church history (including Christ) practiced to draw closer to God, however they have, unfortunately, been left behind by many of the modern day Protestants due to their withdrawal from anything that could be remotely deemed as Catholic.

Once the retreat was over I, of course, had to jump straight back in to me crazy life, however I still feel a calmness at my core that wasn't here last week.

My goal is to withdrawl to solitude at least once a month in order to keep focus and priorities straight.

I'm also helping Jon Maus out on a Portland Bike website/newswire. My plan currently is to take a page from Peter Caputa's book and do the whole thing in Wordpress. I'm pretty excited about this project as I actually get to test some of the limits of Wordpress and what it can do.

Besides that I'm just letting the new network grow some as I'm still looking for people to help me blog so I can get some new ones going. Tell your friends!

I think this is a brilliant move on his part. He already has a ton of contacts in the industry and as people start to see the light for the new age of marketing, he will have positioned himself as the expert in the field. I look for him to eventually get a windfall of business as a result of his evangilizing and blog.

What does this mean for Crooked Cog? Well it is currently, from what I know, the only bike blog network out there. Google 'mountain bike blog' and Blue Collar pops up first. So as the industry realizes the importance of blogs, I will be a front runner in their interest for advertising.

Apart from Crooked Cog, I let John know that I am interested in helping him out with Box and One. I am pretty good with web programming and I am pretty durn familiar with blogging and what it entails so maybe I could be some kind of consultant or something that could help out.

Don't know where all this is leading but I'm looking forward to finding out.

I've been selling ad space on the Business Opportunities weblog for a few months now and only gotten a few people to sign up. But two of the three seem to be companies that are already doing well while everyone else is content to just list their companies on websites where EVERYBODY ELSE is listed. Which means... they get drowned out. Does this make since at all? But it does follow the logic, the companies that are willing to try something new are the ones that are doing well.

So we have a couple bigger companies signed up to start their advertising in the next month and I am content waiting for them to get started so I can contact some more of the followers and show that the big dogs are doing it and so should they.

I'm trying to get another blog to join Crooked Cog. So far I own all of the blogs and I like it that way so I get to call all the shots, however I think this blog would be a great addition to the network and at some point I probably gotta loosen my control a bit in order to let it grow.

Still thinking of a solution to sell advertising on Blue Collar. I'm thinking of taking a page from the Craigslist Manifesto and sell posts on the blog (clearly marked as advertising of course). I like this idea so far as it won't hurt the look and flow of the site to much and I can offer them at a great price and, in my opinion, it will have a bigger effect then big flashing banners because of SEO and such. I'm still trying to figure out a payscale and how to balance it so I don't harm the site. I'd rather have no advertising and keep the site the same then add advertising that would turn off the readers.

I'm also still trying to figure out if I want to sell advertising on Blue Collar. And if I do, how am I going to implement it? I have a few ideas but I'm still working them out.