Archive for March 19th, 2009

As a general rule, I don’t like people who think they can “get rich quick.”  They annoy me.  This includes people who claim that they’ll be millionaires before their thirtieth birthday.  They generally claim that this isn’t a get-rich-quick mindset, since 30 years of age won’t come for, like, six months or more… but they still have that… je ne sais quois… that bloody cockiness in their stride that says “who needs a career?  I have a glib tongue and a plan, baby, a plan.”

Remember that fellow from the Beetle Baily comic strips?  Cosmo was his name.  Wikipedia describes him as “Camp Swampy’s sunglass-wearing resident ‘shady entrepreneur.’”

Yeah.

So this, of course, makes me a total hypocrite when I come up with a new plan (yeah, baby, a plan) for a business venture that is 100% guaranteed to earn fat profits.

Even though I only come up with good plans.

Until I realize the fatal flaw (which usually is the fact that expenses would far outweigh any possible income from the venture).

Like a few weeks ago, I had (in a brilliant flash of insight) an idea that enabled me to stop spam from being posted to this blog.

I had been getting at least a dozen spammed comments per day (pathetically low, I guess, compared to most blogs, but enough to seriously frustrate me).

I implemented my new anti-spam idea.

In the three or four weeks since, I’ve had about three spam messages posted.

Three.  When it should have been three hundred.

I thought I’d found the perfect product… a nearly 100% effective spam blocker (I don’t mean a spam filter, like Akismet… I mean a spam blocker, where the software never even sees the spam).

I was going to make thousands.  Hundreds of thousands.  Millions.

Until I realized that a WordPress plugin for this would effectively be open source (the code would be easily viewable by anyone who wanted to install the same blocker without paying me) and I’m not sure that any value would be added by any related services I could offer.

So unless someone wants to pay me to install a few lines of code in their WordPress theme…

$5,000,000?  $50,000?  $5?  (*psst… it works on other applications too, like forums and such!*)

…I guess it’s back to finding the venture capital for that Spanish-language movie theater I want to open in a local Hispanic-immigrant neighborhood.

(I’ll be rich!)