• a general reviews site (send us an e-mail if you’d like your blog reviewed!)
• a money management blog (written by yours truly, Mr. Money!)
• an aspiring model’s portfolio
• a science fiction story about our world (but not our world)
• a site for and by boston bicyclists

The reviews site should be live first, so send in those blogs or sites for review! Of course, if you subscribe to The 42nd Estate’s blog [or via e-mail] you can stay up to date on each site’s launch, though I’ll also mention it here.

We are you are us!

Now that I’ve upgraded to the pro flickr account, my photos section here will be updated much more frequently and has an additional 60 photos in it right now. To celebrate the occasion, let’s take a look at the last 3 pictures I uploaded to flickr. They’re all odd, funny, or cool signs from the Boston area.

1. Mardi Gras in Boston!



Saw this sign in Dorchester on a little side street on my way to the local Stop & Shop. That’s a really cool sign and seeing it so far north made it stick out brilliantly amongst the other tattered signs on the street.

2. Truth in Advertising at Stop & Shop

Speaking of Stop & Shop, this marker has a story all its own. In fact, I’m quite convinced my friends and I made it come into existence! A couple weeks ago, my friends Mike and Corey and myself were planning a little BBQ and went to the closest supermarket to get supplies. On our way to the storefront Corey and I started discussing how Stop & Shop food isn’t the best in the world, but at least it’s relatively cheap. As we get to the store’s sliding door, I spot this sign right out front:



Seriously, you cannot make this stuff up!

3. Remember Me Says the Bicycle



Saw this advertisement on the side of a bus stop on Commonwealth Avenue near Boston University. As my loyal readers already know I bought a bicycle a few months back and have been in love with cycling ever since. As many other Dorchester youths did when they were kids, I biked all over my neighborhood growing up so this advertisement hit a personal note, as I’m sure it does with many people who see it.

Don’t take it from the ad, take it from me, bicycling is wicked fun, is great exercise and is often quicker than driving (especially in the city) so if you haven’t ridden a bicycle recently, give it a shot!

Anyone have some funny signs they’ve seen out in the wild? If so, send me an e-mail and I’ll feature it in a future post!

Hello Mr. Barr, Green Party Candidate, Mr. Nader, Mr. Paul, and Mr. Kucinich,

I’ve watched some of the mainstream debates on TV but felt they were simply too slanted towards certain candidates and too moderated to truly be called a debate.

An event where you debate Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Bob Barr and the Green Party candidate would provide a truly rational and balanced discussion of how to best shape America going forward. The debate would also draw a lot of attention to 3rd party candidates and hopefully sway more Americans to avoid voting for the Democrats or Republicans.

I’m sending this short e-mail to all of you to gauge your interest in such a debate. If all parties are interested I will start an open-source non-profit organization to raise funds for, market and host the debate.

I truly feel such a debate could be the best in American history and hope you do too.

Regards,

Adam Pieniazek

If all these candidates are interested, I’ll try wicked hard to make it a reality as it’ll give underrepresented political candidates a fair, open, and public forum to discuss their stances and ideas.

What about you? What’s your take on this hypothetical debate? Who do you think would win?

So, if you’d like to help me, please subscribe to this blog. You can subscribe via e-mail or RSS/Atom. My promise to you is to write the best articles I can over the next 30 days and beyond. I am also considering having a contest of my own exclusively for my subscribers so sign up now to make sure you don’t miss out!

For the month of June this blog had:

• 329,576 hits
• 98,242 page-views
• 18,556 visits
• 13,707 unique visitors

The above list does not include 51,120 hits and 50,231 page-views from robots, crawlers, worms and other similar traffic sources. In other words, the above list is human only; that’s a lot of eyeballs! Here is the same information in a bar graph:

My highest trafficked day was June 18th with 43,827 page-views spread over 7,570 visits. Yup, that was the day I was listed on fark.com for this post about the similarity between John McCain and Colonel Tigh from Battlestar Galactica.

This blog is also syndicated via RSS to an average of twenty readers, with a high of 76 readers on June 18th. My facebook profile also pulls a short excerpt of each post and broadcasts it via RSS to my 397 friends.

The five most viewed posts on this blog for the month of June were:

1. Battlestar Politica – 9308 page-views
2. Casting Call for New Bruce Willis Film, The Surrogates – 739 page-views
3. Centralization vs. Decentralization – 655 page-views
4. Kevin Garnett a Celtic: We’re Baaaack! – 563 page-views
5. U.S. GAAP vs. International GAAP vs. Unified GAAP – 440 page-views

Finally, the five most used search keyphrases that brought visitors here were:

1. pieniazek
2. anova test
3. photo
4. ronald jenkees
5. finite population correction factor

If there are any other statistics anyone would like to see let me know and I’ll add them (if possible). Thanks to everyone for making June my best month yet! You all rock!

So the big grand prize winner is…

Sherry from sherry rambling! Congratulations!

Unfortunately, my screen capture of the the results from random.org glitched out on me and did not save so I cannot correctly award the runner up prizes, which were shout-outs to the contestants blogs via a link from this blog. As such, here are all of the contestants blogs:

• Blog2u Philippines
• The Nonsense Blog
• LiveWire News
• Google Adsense Videos
• TLE Travels the World
• Entrecard Contest

I will also be sending each of the above blogs a small sum (10-20) of Entrecard credits to make up for the error. Hopefully that is a good consolation prize!

Thanks to everyone for participating!

Right now I have 912 953 1,000 Entrecard credits in my account and will let the remaining ads run out before closing my account. There are two ways to enter this Entrecard credits contest. First, simply leave a comment below (make sure to fill in your e-mail address) and you will get one entry into the contest. Second, if you write a blog post about this contest with a link back to this post you will get ten entries (make sure to send me an e-mail or leave a comment pointing me to your blog post). The contest will run for one week, ending on July 2nd, 2008 at 11:59PM Boston, MA time.

At that time I will randomly choose one person to win all of my Entrecard credits! You, along with two runner ups, will also be mentioned in a winner’s blog post and receive a link back to your blogs.

Good luck to everyone!

Also, if you take a look to the right sidebar, underneath the RSS icon is this blog’s first sponsor, Radical Buy, a facebook application that hosts a marketplace where you can buy and sell any item. It’s competitive advantage is you can also set up a commission rate and allow other people to sell your item, or you can make money by selling other people’s items. Radical Buy is certainly a useful facebook tool, watch out for a more in-depth review next week.

During the month of April, 5,200 unique visitors traveled to this site and viewed nearly 49,000 pages. If you’re interested in becoming an official sponsor of Adam Pieniazek, please fill out this form. In addition to a 125×125 badge pointing to your site you’ll also receive a mention and an unbiased review in this blog.

Finally, Go Celtics! Great game last night!

The way the site works is a user submits any online coupons or promotional codes they find to the site. Then, the coupon is voted on by the community and the top discounts get put on the front page. You can also browse for savings by company or site name and check out existing deals and their vote rating. For instance, a few days ago I was buying up a ton of domain names (for reasons I’ll reveal sometime soon) and went looking for GoDaddy promotional codes. Thanks to the voting system on savings.com, I was able to quickly find codes that actually worked.

There are tons and tons of coupons on the site for all sorts of stores so if you’re doing any shopping check out savings.com. I’m now slightly wealthier thanks to savings.com, which I can’t say for facebook, digg, reddit, myspace, pownce, or any other social network site. If you liked this post, there’s good news for you as I’ll be launching a site revolving around money in the coming weeks. The site will publicize saving opportunities, saving tips, and historical information about money. I’ll post to this site when it’s live, but subscribe to my feed to ensure you’re up to date.

Score: 4/5

[Edit: Image removed but it was an ad for this guy.]

Is it the worst ad ever? All I know is I feel dirty now. Damn you contextual advertising, this post was not positive!