The BASS CAST

Today was day one of our SEO class.  We have 4 students and they are all very good students.  The day went smoothly and a lot of learning went on.

Now I am posting and after this I am going to look over tomorrows material and then do a little more work on my new site.  It is not so much of a new site but a new desing still keeping the same red and black theme but using a CMS system for management.  I want to get away from WYSIWYG editors and be able to add some new technologies to the site.  I am also addign a few new features and it will be a much easier reading site.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Got up and needed to do a few things around the house before we left.  I got out the mower and did a quick job of the lawn.  After that I went in and got cleaned up and we hit the road.

The Cobra navigation said it would be 195 miles to the campground and we hit the road around 10:15.  We got a little lost when the GPS took us to the road that was a dead end but we ended up finding the site.  I put 215 miles on a tank full of gas and got pretty close to 11 MPG hauling the 5th wheel which is very good.

We set up camp and the wife went to town for supplies.  She got lost and then in the heavy Atlanta traffic she could no get over to the exit and had to make another circle.

After that I updated a few blogs for her with the new wordpress version and will update mine tomorrow.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

One thing about Travis is that he wants to sleep with you.  He is a jumping bean in bed and I end up kicked out usually or beat up by flailing arms and legs.  So I spent the evening in my chair working on the new ModX site and it was going pretty well things were flowing so I just kept plugging away.  About 4:00 I hit the sack and about 6:00 I had a small face looking at me saying"Poppy are you sleeping?"  So that meant it was time to get up.

It must have been a bad night for sleeping because no of us got enough and everyone was a little grouchy.  But we still made it through the morning wit the help of Sponge Bob.

After Travis headed back home I got out in the garage and filled my truck up and then filled the rest of my cans for our trip tomorrow.

We have a training class in Atlanta Tuesday through Thursday and instead of paying for a hotel room we are just taking the camper over the border to a camground that is 3 miles from the conference center.  So I hooked up the 5th wheel and checked all the tires and connections locked down the fuel cans and covered them up.

We are planning to head out about 10:00 tomorrow and I am going to hit the lawns and get all that out of the way to make it look good for the week.

I did get a message from one of the prospective sponsors telling me that they are going to be making decisions about the prostaff positions at the end of August. I am just going to keep at them until I get want Iam looking for.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Well I worked on the site until about 3:00 AM this morning, so I did not jump right out of bed.  I got up and had my daily dose of oatmeal and got ready to head to the lake.  Brian Travis was heading down from NC and I was just going to meet him and show him some deep stuff.  We started around mid lake on an island point and it had everything it needs there: deep water close by, structure on the break, bait in the area but no fish to be had.  Of course we were fishing fairly fast and if we would have slowed down we probably could have found a few.

The next spot was a woody hump.  I missed a pair of hits on the jig and do not know why.  We jumped around the lake and hit a few spots here and there.  I did manage to put a small keeper in the boat on a drop shot with a Cache Custom Lures finesse worm.  That was our only keeper of the day.  We hit a bunch of spots that had rocks and boulders with x-mas trees planted on them but no takers.  We ended up in a cut that has about 60 yards of trees planted in there that were pushed in by a dozer.  They are sitting in 8 to 12 feet of water with bait, bream and turtles everywhere but again no takers.

I think right now if I had to be a boater I would stay shallow with a shaky head, jig and frog.  Just cover as much water as possible and keep moving.

When I got back Travis was there to spend the night so that means all play and no work but I love it.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

This morning I went over to the Hardware because I needed to get a knob for the bathroom fixture, the wife wanted a bird feeder for her window in the office, I had to get gas and kerosene for the Biesel mix, and numbers for my boat.

I got home and added the last 3.5 gallons of kerosene to the mix and had about 46.32 gallons and it cost me $.71 a gallon.  How amazing is that.  To date I have made 101 gallons of Biesel that cost me $72.18 if I had to guy it from a station it would have cost me $428.76 saving me $356.  Right now, we are not traveling to much so I am not using too much fuel.

The worst problem I have is that I do not have any way to measure the fuel usage.  My pumps do not have a meter on them and I am not into pumping into cans and then dumping so I am just going to have to rough out the mileage on these fill ups.

I fixed the faucet in the tub real tough job there. And then went to put the numbers on the boat.  This actually took quite a while, it is hard to get the numbers straight andlooking good on round edges and surface.

After that I just went inside and started working on the new site.  I am really strting to grasp the way ModX works and how it relates to each other.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I zapped my test domain and started with a fresh install on ModX.  The install process is so easy and pretty much error proof.  After installing it I went into system configuration and tried to get the SEO/User friendly URLs working, but ran into a few issues.  Everything works great without the friendly urls but as soon as I try to do it I get a 500 error. So I have to work at it a little more.  No biggy I will get it some time.

That ended up being about as much time as I could spend on it.  We were going over to Laura's workplace to see about grabbing their cooking oil.  We went out to lunch and then came back to talk with the kitchen manager.  Everything was good to go and the oil is the cleanest I have ever seen.  I grabbed close to 51 gallons in total.  

We then stopped by Northern Tool to see about a fuel transfer tank and they did not have the one I needed in stock.  I have the short bed Ford with the 5th wheel hitch in the back so my options are kind of small.  I am not having any issues getting oil and the mixing process is simple but I have having an issue with hauling all I need.  I pretty much go through about 200 gallons a month when I'm fishing and with the wife getting a diesel also I have not figured out how to haul enough to keep going.

So we purchased 9-6 gallon cans and will start with these to try it out on the trip over to Atlanta for training.  I also had to grab a hand pump to be able to transfer from the holding tank to the vehicles (150.00).  

When I got home I unloaded my oil and started making a cover for the cans so no one gets to friendly with them.  I made a lock system for them and the cover took about 2 hours.  Then I started loading my cans up.  My transfer pump is supposed to be a 30 cycle and it was shutting off every 3 minutes on the nose so the process did not go very quickly.

After I emptied my drum I started transfering my new oil into the mixing tank and put 40 gallons in the vat and added everything but 3.5 gallons of kerosene that I was missing.  I will pick up more stuff tomorrow and finish the batch.

Now I am back in the house writing on my blog and getting ready to work on my ModX stuff again.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I did not have any where to go so I decided to knock out the rest of my e-book.  I sat down here and went to town. This e-book is 101 Bass Fishing Tips, I thought that this would help out a lot of people looking to add a few more fish to the boat.  I have been doing this for over 30 years and I have learned a bunch of tricks and a few other things.  So I just got in the boat and started looking through my tackle and jotting down things that I have learned about it.  

I am firm believer in learning as much as possible about what you are doing and fishing is no exception.  I read a ton of articles look over a lot of fishing sites get all the magazines just to learn something new.  This ebook is intended tp do the same thing.  I want the beginner to be able to get something out of it.  It could be something about knots or what kind of spinner bait to throw in a certain color of water.  All these things I have learned the hard way by putting ton of time on the water.

So I finished the tips looked them over one more time and saved it as my semi-final copy.  I then started to search for an e-book publishing software program.  There are so many out there and I have a bunch of them on my PC to try out.

I also sent a few more follow up emails to some prospects, but right now the timing is a little off.  The ICAST show is going on right now and a lot of the sponsors are at the show.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I had to get some more writing done today so that was first on the list.  I worked on my ebook for a while and then started doing some follow up items for some potential sponsors.  I made the one phone call I needed to do and then did 3 follow up emails for the sponsor list.

I am also trying out a new cms system to re-work my website.  I am looking at ModX and I really like its possibilities but I am having some issues wuth the learning curve.  I know it will just hit me one of these days and it will all be clear but right now I m struggling.

I did the wife's hair this evening and it turned out pretty good.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I spent the first part of the morning grabbing some more oil for my Biesel.  I stopped at the Flight Deck and picked up close to 30 gallons of oil.  My transfer system works pretty good and is clean.  The only part that is a pain is getting the filled 20 gallon drums back into the truck.  I got them back home and set them in the back of the garage to settle a little bit before mixing.

My agenda for the day consisted of doing a bunch of yard work.  Usually in the summer if you do not water the grass does not grow but we have been having a storm pretty much each day or so.  So the grass has been growing and needed mowing.  I mowed the back and front, got out the weed eater and trimmed up both lawns and then attached the blower and cleaned it all up.  

My next project was to trim up the neighbors trees.  There is a choke cherry tree next to the driveway up by the garage and it is spitting cherries every where.  So I got out the ladder, trimmers, clippers, pole saw and chain saw and went to town on those pesky little bombs.  Since I had all the stuff out I also trimmed all of the neighbors bushes next to my fence to make it look neater.

I did not feel like loading all those little branches into the truck so I hauled them to back and loaded up the burn barrel.  It may take a couple of days to get rid of all of it but that is no problem.

After that I went back and made up my Biesel.  Take a look at these numbers I made a total of 31.94 gallons of Biesel it cost me $22.61 to make it up.  With diesel at $4.89/gallon this would have cost me $136.36 so I saved $112.75.  And my truck is running perfectly.

With all this going on we decided to find the wife a new vehicle with a diesel engine.  We went to Carmax and found a Jeep Liberty with a 4 cyclinder diesel engine and pretty much bought it.  It will take a few days to get it transfered, and when it gets here we will test its pulling power and how it handles hauling the boat to see if it will work.  With Carmax you have 5 days to try out the vehicle make certain that it is the right one for you.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I usually never do this but I am going to dump the last three days into this one blog.  We got to have Travis for the last 3 days and he really keeps us busy.  But he is a blast, right now he is learning so much and it is fun to show him how to do things.  But we pretty much do not have any other life while he is here so we take advantage of it.

We started by going to the zoo one day and he enjoys the big gorilla and the giraffe.  The zoo trip is fun we make lots of noises and have tons of fun.  We also went to see Wall-e this weekend.  It's not a bad movie but it is not a good one for a 4 year old.  Even though it is a cartoon there is hardly any talking and most of the themes for the movie you have to understand by gestures.  So about half way through he had enough so the wife took him to the lobby and I finished watching the movie.

We played a lot on his tractor and had a lot of things to do inside.  I taught him how to button his pants and we are working on the shoe tying thing.  don't quite have that one down yet.

We played a lot of boats and trucks and did some sticker book fun.  Overall he was very good this weekend and now we are back to normal.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!