Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable.

For the first time since migrating to Wordpress over one year ago, I missed putting up a post yesterday. Up until then, I have been able to maintain a posting schedule on Beyond the Rhetoric of at least one article a day. It was an accomplishment that I was quite proud of, especially because I spend so much time blogging for others.

I look at yesterday with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I’m a little disappointed with myself. After all, the streak is broken and I could have taken advantage of the timestamp feature in Wordpress. I could have found a few minutes out of my day on Sunday to put up a post, but I didn’t. My excuse, if you want to call it that, is that I’m still feeling under the weather. (I plan on seeing the doctor in a couple of hours.) I figured that it was more important to have some rest and take care of myself, rather than force what would inevitably be a mediocre post.

The good news is that yesterday was a Sunday, so I didn’t have to deal with the issue of freelance writing and sick days. I plan on working in a limited capacity today, getting what I need to get done, sending out invoices, and that kind of thing, but I’m not going to overdo it.

I said that I reflect on yesterday with mixed emotions. The other side of the equation is that I proved to myself that the world wouldn’t come crashing down if I missed one day of blogging. One lesson that I tried to learn from The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss is that we tend to place too much importance on things that may not necessarily be all that important. The world doesn’t come crashing down if you miss a day of work. Most things are reversible. When you stop to consider the worst case scenario, it oftentimes isn’t all that bad.

So, with that, I’m going to keep on trucking with my day. I hope my doctor gives me some good antibiotics. This cough is really starting to bug me.

If you want a beefy boy, you have until Monday to do so.

Near the beginning of this month, I mentioned that Wally’s Burgers is closing at the end of March. That burger joint has been at the same location on Kingsway in Vancouver since 1962. Sure, the quality isn’t quite where it used to be, but it is a little sad to see it go.

You may have heard from Stephen Fung, Ed Lau, Leo Chiang and John Chow that the dot com crew took a break from our usual pho festivities to ingest a greasy Wally’s burger for the last time. We came, we saw, we conquered. Some of us may have even had a tear or two.

I’ve been meaning to piece together the video above for a couple of weeks now, but I just haven’t gotten around to it until now. If you’ve never had a burger at Wally’s, perhaps having a preference for foie gras burgers instead, then I recommend that you pay Wally’s Burgers a visit before they demolish the place. The sign says that the last day of operation will be this Monday, March 31st.

Yes, it’s the final countdown.

Last week, I wrote a post describing three reasons why it’s easier blogging for others. One of these reasons is that you are given a better sense of direction. When I am given a product to review for a website, it’s pretty obvious what I need to do. I need to test out the product and then write a comprehensive review, following the guidelines given to me by the client. That makes sense.

While some of you may already know where I do most of my freelance writing work, many of you may not be quite as familiar. To give you a better sense of what I do each day, I have decided to highlight a few articles that I have written in the last little while. As you can tell, I specialize mostly in technology, the Internet, and related industries, but I do expand beyond these realms from time to time.

Over at Mobile Magazine, I blog about mobile technology every weekday, producing anywhere between 8 and 15 articles a day. An example of a recent post would be this one about the Asus Eee PC 900. They say that this successor to the current Eee PC will have a touchscreen and a multi-touch trackpad.

I currently act as the site editor for two sections of LoveToKnow, including LoveToKnow Video Games. A group editor decides on the topics for each month. One of my most recent pieces was a review of the Wii Zapper. They have some rather specific SEO strategies in place at LTK and they seem to be working.

Every Tuesday on the BlueFur Blog, I discuss a new business topic, usually related to some of the questions and concerns that someone may have when opening a small business. Last week, I compared franchised and independent businesses, outlining some of the pros and cons of each.

If you are thinking about hiring a freelancer, you should definitely ask to look at their portfolio, paying particular attention to some of their most recent work. This will give you a better sense of what they can do for you.

You might remember my review of Be Kind Rewind earlier this month. In that movie, the characters played by Mos Def and Jack Black throw together “Sweded” versions of popular movies, including Rush Hour, Robocop, and Driving Miss Daisy. The film, although not the best in the world, has developed somewhat of a cult following.

As a result, YouTube is getting flooded with all sorts of amateur takes on “Sweded” movies, all of which have been inspired by Be Kind Rewind. I found a couple that did 300 or Lord of the Rings, but this one with Jurassic Park has to be one of the best. The fake dinosaurs are pretty awesome and I think it’s strangely funny that they just used regular people to depict the velociraptors. Naturally, you’ll need to have watched the original (real) Jurassic Park movie to get some of the gags.

I wonder if I could convince some people from dot com pho to get together so we can “Swede” a movie. I know that Ed Lau would be up for anything that had Arnold Schwarzenegger in it, just so that he blurt out quotes like “Get in the choppa!”, “Get down!”, and “Come with me if you want to live.” Come to think of it, I think Ed would have way more fun doing a Sweded version of The Fast and the Furious.

“Nooooooo….. Monica!!!!!!!!”

Then again, dot com Aliens vs. Predator would be a little ironic, seeing how Leo Chiang was actually in the real movie!

I get a lot of spam through my e-mail. This blog gets a fair bit of spam via the comments. Lately, though, I’ve been getting an alarming number of spam messages through the contact form and they all take on the same structure as the message you see above.

When it comes to spam emails and spam comments, it’s perfectly possible that these are completed by bots and not by real people. I can’t imagine these efforts working all that well with anyone who is the least bit web-savvy, but I guess they have to work (at least a little) for these people to put so much effort into telling me about Viagra and hot girls in my area. Because I use comment moderation on this blog, very few of these useless messages ever get publicly displayed.

On the flip side, I don’t think that it would be all that easy to get a spam bot to use the comment form, because it requires the filling out of a few fields, including an — ironically enough — anti-spam skill testing question. I’ve changed this question a couple times, and the result is still the same. Contact form spam still ends up in my mailbox and then I am forced to delete it. When you look at the structure of the spam message, it’s clear that they’re trying to make me click on a certain link, including both HTML and BBCode tags. They even go so far as to tell me that they’re Dr. Steve Jobs. Right. Like I should believe that.

Realistically, how many people do you think would actually click on those Viagra links inside a contact form spam message? Is it really worth the human effort to cut and paste that message into every contact form in the blogosphere?

Have you been hit the same phenomenon? I’d love to hear of any techniques that could reduce this problem while still keeping the lines of communication open with real blog readers.

I’ve been feeling a little under the weather these past few days, but it’s pretty hard for me to take a sick day. As much as I try to reduce my workload during this time, it’s inevitable that I have one last push at the end of the month to try to increase my income. I guess it’s a good thing that I work from home, because if I need to take a break for some apple juice, I can do that.

Anyways, seeing how it’s Wednesday, let’s get over that mid-week hump with some great freelance-geared posts from the blogosphere. Oh, and one post that has nothing to do with freelancing, but could prove to be one of the most awesome resources ever created on the Internet.

Kirsten Fischer from Freelance Switch had the opportunity to chat with The Anti 9-to-5 Guide author Michelle Goodman. In the interview, they discuss how to go about leaving the conventional job behind, what Michelle loves the most about writing and teaching, and what burned out freelancers should do to rev up their motivation.

Scott Young reminds us that when we set a goal, we should also consider the exit strategy. I’ve said before that goals are the bane of my existence, because I keep setting the bar higher and higher. At what point can you say you’re done? That’s why you need an exit strategy.

I find it somewhat ironic that Kathryn Vercillo thinks that typos don’t really matter, because she happens to be a professional writer. The most important thing is getting your point across in the clearest manner possible, but you have to remember the difference between a typo and an outright error. John Chow’s blog is full of errors, not typos.

Jennifer Mattern of All Freelance Writing recognizes both sides of the freelance coin. When you don’t have any work on your plate, you get stressed out about not being able to paying the bills. When you have too much work to do, you get stressed out about not being able to handle it. Don’t worry. Jennifer has some strategies to help you overcome freelance stress. I’ve never tried burning pine needles. That just seems weird to me.

Last but certainly not least, we have Darren Barefoot. The one thing you can say about Darren is that when he sets his mind to something, he gets it done. His latest accomplishment is the geo-locating of all Canucks pay-per-view bars and restaurants in Google Maps. This could prove to be the greatest resource for Vancouver Canucks fans ever!