Brian Nelson

A little update to my little ranking experiment that had drifted to the back of my mind.

As of today 07/15/10, it seems that I rank #1 for searches for brian e nelson either with or without quotes and #16 for searches for brian nelson either with or without quotes. That is certainly some moving up, especially considering that I had forgotten all about this little project.

Maybe I’ll throw a little more effort at it here in the near future. In the meantime, I will fight the power or something.

Please enjoy this excerpt from my freelance writing blog as a way to fill out some content length here.

… A while back I looked into whether or not Elance was a legitimate way to find freelance writing gigs and came to the conclusion that while it might be fine for some people, that it  didn’t really fit within my freelance writing business at the time, although I am preparing to re-evaluate that. You can see my analysis is Elance worth it. You can also check out my is Guru.com worth it.

( I have a theory that the big G gives different power to links that are not capitalized in the way that article titles are. The idea is that a link in the text of an article suggests that the anchor text is more genuine than linking to a title. One way of differentiating  would be looking at how they are capitalized. )

An email about a new payment option caught my attention. It is a pre-paid MasterCard. I load up most charges to get big credit card rewards that I can redeem for travel or cashback, I’m not sure it is for me. The high-end rewards in the Capital One rewards catalog, for example, are no cheap.

I am always on the lookout for new developments or advancements in the freelance writing world, though, so I looked into it a little bit further to see if it was worth it or a scam.

Elance Pre-Paid MasterCard Payment Option

Getting paid for work at Elance is pretty much like getting paid for writing anywhere else. You and the client work out an arrangement and then, ideally, you both hold up your end of the agreement. An online writing gig website like Elance typically has a high percentage of users that will want to pay freelancers electronically via PayPal.

If you decide to play by the apparent “rules” and setup a business account, you can expect to be nickel and dimed to death by all manner of PayPal fees that the company apparently feels most businesses won’t mind since they get similarly dinged on credit card transactions and have built the cost into their pricing model. Also, transactions that come in foreign currency can have some hefty charges levied onto them.

…

For the longest time I have had a single criteria for joining a religion: That I one day (during this lifetime) be rewarded for my devotion with the ability to choke people from across the room using nothing but my will (ala Darth Vader). Today, I add a new criteria to that list.

Learn about Citibank rewards credit cards.

The right religious belief system for me will include not just the ability to choke those who deserve it (based solely on my own judgment of their worthiness), but also an undeniable belief that some (many) inanimate objects are actually evil spirits that lay motionless for long periods of time (centuries if necessary) in order to spring forth and cause injury of some form to people. Whether it be making way more noise than they ever have before in order to wake a sleeping baby, or whether it is a slight movement in order to cause someone to trip, bang their elbow, or otherwise be given pain, these objects are evil and must be dealt with.

To that end, my new religion will provide not only confirmation of what we all already know deep down in the heart of our soul if we will only listen, but also a way to fight back. That is, this greatest religion in the history of mankind will offer a way to retaliate against those objects who parlay their evil into my pain. Whatever the method may be, it will allow an equal amount of pain caused to me to be inflicted upon the responsible object, plus a small markup for the purposes of vengeance and for teaching other objects that this human is not worth the trouble.

If your religion offers these two things, please attempt to convert me at once.

(Note: Belief systems that offer only vague myths and whispers of such powers need not apply. I was born at night, but I wasn’t born last night.)