Thanks Benny!

You may have noticed the addition of a bit of text over to the right.  I call it "The Little Box of Big Thanks".

A few weeks ago, I received an email from PayPal that I had received a bit of money.  Attached was the following note:

As they say back in 1965, "You are a Steely Eyed Missile Man" (maybe they said that, maybe they said it in Apollo 13 and I've always wanted an excuse to use it). Either way, great job! 

Truly, whoever this Ben was, he was a word smith, a scholar, a gentleman, a redditor, and probably as handsome and charming as yours truly.  I'm not just saying that because he paid me.  Although I have to admit that the money did make the difference between a "thanks for writing me" email and what you're reading now.  It works much the same way that when a woman says that you're cute: it makes a difference if it's your mother or someone you just picked up in a bar (if it's both, I suggest counselling).

I wanted to find some way to thank Ben for his generosity, so I offered to post a public thank you on the blog and a link to his site as a sponsor.  It turns out that he doesn't have a website that needs flogging, but asked if he could substitute his girlfriend's site.

Holy crap, the woman is talented.

Now, I'm not a big fashion mogul.  My lovely wife doesn't dress me, but she chooses my clothes.  But Dara Dot Designs is really impressive.  So now, my site and hers shall be forever more linked together.  Or at least, I'm linked to hers.  I really don't know how well a blognostifier banner would fit into the ouvre (that's right, I used ouvre in my blog) of her web presence.

Since my overhead is pretty low in bringing you some laughs, I decided to dedicate the next four months of the site to Ben's generosity and Dara's excellent website and talent.  That's when Ben hit me with a "we can also set up a promocode for her site, for people that direct to it from you".

And THAT'S how I knew I was making the transition from plain ol' Snowblower Ad Internet Fame into the real world of regular Internet Fame.  A real, honest to goodness business, run by real people not out of the back of a truck was offering me a chance to put a promocode for you, my blognostifans, to get a discount!  And it's for a business that has nothing to do with snowblowers!

To get your discount, use the code: SNOWBLOWER

Yeah, I did that.

One word of warning - despite the name of her website, I could find no dot designs anywhere.  Maybe she'll do something on commission, if you really need a dot designed for you. Don't ask me though.  There are a lot of dots on this page, but I didn't design any of them.  Here's another one, for free.

Jason gets a shout out too, on account of the awesome t shirts that he sent me.  And, for anyone that may have missed it the first time around, he also let me swim in his pool when we were growing up.  That means a lot to a guy without a pool on a hot summer day.  Especially teenage guys.  Because having a pool meant that at ANY moment, hot chicks might want to stop by for a swim and hang out with us and we'd have a party and then we'd have girlfriends who would be in bikinis.  How rad would that have been, eh?

Getting back to my new friend Ben (I can call him that because I'm the one writing this, so I'm allowed to make up whatever kind of relationship I want to - don't tell my lovely wife about my secret relationship with Veronica Mars), it turns out he has other talents, too.  I'm not saying that the site may be up for a total redesign soon, but I will write it.  And I did.  Just there.

Also, my lovely wife is very well aware of my secret relationship with Veronica Mars.  She's so sassy!

I'm working on something else too that I think is kind of neat.  It may be a one off, and it's going to be very amateurish, but I did it all by myself so that counts for something too.  I'm just trying to figure out how to make it work.

In media related news, if you missed my interview on As It Happens on CBC last night, you can hear it here.  Just fast forward to about the 16:45 mark.  I'm on after the gay penguins.  Never thought I'd say that.

I may be appearing on Canada AM on CTV this Friday, December 16, 2011.  Again, so long as a cute box of kittens that resemble The Beatles don't appear on the Internet, I should be on sometime around 8:40 AM AST or ADT (which part of it are we in now?), so set your PVR's!  And, yes, I do recognize that I am only talking to my family when I say that. But maybe, just maybe, somewhere out there my first stalker is being born.  Exciting!

Finally - I just discovered that Kijiji has added me to the official Kijiji Blog under the Awesomesauce tag, WITH a screenshot of the original ad.  Huzzah!  Thanks for finding it a new home Kijiji!