The other two already announced contests are:

1. The Easiest $42 You’ll Ever Make

This contest is super easy. All you have to do is comment on the linked post (remember to leave your e-mail so we can contact you if you win – no spam, ever, we promise). That’s it. No linking, tweeting or any other -ing required. Just write a simple comment on that post and you’re automatically entered to win $42, sent via paypal. The contest ends on April 8th at noon (EST) so hurry up and write a comment!

2. Win a Pair of Boston Celtics Playoff Tickets

As The 42nd Estate is based in Boston, Massachusetts, we’re obviously big fans of the Boston sports teams (heck, we even have a sports blog focused on Boston sports). Two of our members are also season ticket holders for the world champion Boston Celtics and we decided to giveaway our first pair of playoff tickets!

To enter, become our fan on The 42nd Estate’s facebook® page. As soon as the playoff scenario for the Celtics is set in stone, we’ll pick one fan at random and award them a pair of playoff tickets to either the first or second home playoff game.

There you have it, two super easy to enter contests and another prize to come that will be given out via twitter.

EDIT: The Twitter contest is now live. A free portable iPhone charger! Retweet this tweet to enter. Contest ends Monday, April 6, 2009 at 5PM.

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!

Yesterday, we went to the Celtics game against the Pistons, my mom’s first Celtics game. She was a hoopster herself back in her school days in Poland so she really enjoyed seeing us whoop up on the Pistons. In fact, she’s already made me promise to take her to a few games next season!

Here’s a few more reasons my mom is awesome:

• She’s strong. Being raised in communist Poland and raising me all by herself has instilled a toughness in my mom that I constantly admire.
• She’s smart. My mom bought our house when she first came over to America and now it’s 100% paid off and belongs 100% to our family. One of the smartest investments in America is to buy and own property, and her house is in a great part of Boston, not too close to the city but not too far with many conveniences like the MBTA and supermarkets and other necessities all within walking distance. Her decision to buy this house was a great one and her ability to pay it off so quickly shows her great perseverance and dedication.
• She’s proud. She believes in herself and won’t accept negativity from others. It results in some stubborn situations sometimes but I’m glad she’s instilled the same pride in me.
• She speaks multiple languages. She speaks English and Polish very well and can also speak Russian. Her ability to learn languages was passed onto me as I can speak English, Polish, Spanish and know some Latin.
• She’s caring. My mom is not greedy and when times were booming here in the U.S. during my childhood she would always send packages to our family in Poland to help them out. Even now she donates to organizations and is never concerned about money even though we are by no means wealthy. That sense of there being more important things in life than money has helped me realize that it does not matter if I’m rich or poor as long as I’m happy and proud. It’s incredible how valuable that lesson is.

I could go on and on about how awesome my mom is but I think many of my readers feel the same way about their moms, so I won’t bore all of you with the details.

Happy Birthday mom! You rock!

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

I’ve got nothing substantive to add, just wanted to vent.