For nearly my entire life (at least what I can remember of it), I’ve been going to school.  One week ago, I graduated from college with a degree in Electrical Engineering.  It is my intention to continue school (for a graduate degree), but for now, it is summer.  It is a somewhat weird feeling to be done.  I have learned a lot over the years and accomplished a lot, as well as failed a lot, but I know that this is just the beginning.

Currently, I am taking a small summer session course, and then Sophie comes to visit from England for 3 months.  Throughout the summer, I plan to begin developing my company, and also get outdoors and travel.  I’m excited.  I bought a motorcycle a few weeks back and have driven it around a bit.  It currently has a few issues I am working on fixing, but I plan to ride around on that in the near future.

So, that is where I am at.  I have some big plans in the future, and I am excited to begin a new phase of my life.  Stay tuned for some interesting posts I’ve been working on.

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Several years ago I had my main Facebook account suspended. It got suspended due to using iMacros to reproduce ads I believe, but not positive. I used to manually create hundreds of ads to only find out they were all denied for some BS reason.   Because of this, I used the iMacros Firefox extension to record all the ads I created.  When the ad got denied for some BS reason (even though the ad complied with their ToS), I would just play the macros and recreate all 50-100 ads in a matter of minutes without doing anything more than clicking the play button.  When my account originally got banned, I emailed them explaining the situation and they didn’t budge.  Anyways, the other day I decided to email their support asking to get it reinstated. After answering some questions, they activated it.

The issue I had though was they blocked all my credit cards and somehow my Paypal. Whenever I tried to add my Paypal, I would get forwarded to Paypal, and then get sent back to Facebook as if nothing had happened. Interesting that Facebook let me back in. I suspect that don’t mind about bulk creating ads anymore, as long as you don’t continue to submit the same ad over and over after it has been denied.

Anyways, after they activated it, I asked them about getting a funding source (I literally couldn’t add any sources, even CC’s I hadn’t used with them).  So I emailed them.  The next day, I get an email saying “your account has suspended due to a violation of our polices”.  So I sent them an email saying I was confused, as they had just reactivated it.  I get the following email the next morning:

Hi Patrick,

This problem should now be resolved.  Sorry for any inconvenience, and enjoy the site! Let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Ivan
Payment Operations
Facebook

So, now I have my old account back.  Based off how they let me in and then suspended it the following day to only let me back in a day later, I suspect their account operations is a bit messed up.  I’m excited to get back into advertising with Facebook, even though the cost of Facebook Ads has jumped 40% this year.

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How do you view your life and the world? Have you ever thought about it much?

I am nearing in on 1 month until I finish my undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering.  It is this time in most people’s lives that they begin to question what they want to do with the rest of their lives.  Do you continue school/education? Do you find a job? Do you take a break? Do you do something on your own?

It seems to be no one seems to question much other than what job they want to get and how much money they want to make.  Everyone I know is so focused on finding a job and graduating, and that is all they are focused on.  I ask why?  It seems we all (in the US) grow up with the idea that we will get a high salary job when we go to college and work hard.  Why? So we can lead a lifestyle that we please (and we see others doing it).  Without money, we’re very limited to do anything.  But how much money do we need such that we aren’t limited?

I find this time of my life very interesting.  While everyone I know is looking forward to graduating and getting a job, I am excited to do anything but that.  It is my last intention at the moment to go out and work for someone else.  I am at the point in my life where enjoyment is well beyond money.  I find it strange that almost everyone in society spends so much of their time to make money, and then they use that money to buy time (whether it is working extra hours to get the next Friday off, or work harder to retire sooner). I am the opposite.  I am willing to make just enough money to get by to maximize my enjoyment.  Alternatively, I can make money and maximize my enjoyment, but I wouldn’t sacrifice my enjoyment for money.  I think almost everyone gets caught up in this.  It seems almost every conversion I have these days is about how good of a job I will get when I graduate.  I’m not interested in that, and you shouldn’t be either.  You got throw aside all the bullshit distractions for a bit and think: you only have so long to live, do what you want with it.

Before I go out and work for someone else, I will try to start my own business.  Why not try?  Yeah, you need some capital before hand and that is why people start working first, but the mentality I see isn’t that.  People are so focused on getting out into the “real world” (I hate that term – it is misused and not representative) and making their own money.  I suspect people don’t mind working for another company since there is little risk on them.  If you start your own business, the risk is on you.  When I tell people that I plan to start my own business before I work for someone else, they are always surprised.  How do you know you can’t do it if you haven’t tried?  The minute I fail and go broke is the minute I will start working for someone else.  However, I don’t see happening.  The amount of money required to live a decent life is very little (relatively).  Something that pretty much sums it up is: ”if you don’t have big dreams and ambitions, you’ll end up working for someone who does”.  Everyone talks but very few follow through with their ambitions.

People always talk, but never act.  They always say how much of a dream it would be to travel the world, or to run their own company, or to be their own boss.  It isn’t a dream, do it.  Work. Work, and work more, for yourself.  Traveling the world and working is becoming more and more possible with the internet, and the potential is huge.  If you are willing to think for yourself and put hard work into it, you can certainly meet your ambitions.  I’m in the stage where I am trying to find out.  Time will tell whether I succeed or not.

People always talk about how fast time goes, or say something like, “oh you’re young, enjoy it because it goes by fast.”  Yeah, no kidding.  Why do people always talk about this but do nothing?  Time (or the way we perceive it) does go by fast, mainly because of all the distractions that we have.  Distractions aren’t bad, but enjoy them.  If you wake up every morning not wanting to spend your entire day working on something you’d rather not be doing, then in my opinion, you’re wasting your time.  Yeah, it may pay the bills, but is that all you’re out looking to do in life?  Everyone gets caught up in this lifestyle and before they know it they are 40, have a wife and kids, and regret not doing more when they were younger.

I just wish more people would think.  Perhaps I’m at a stage in my life where I overthink everything and question everything, but at the end of the day, it makes sense to do what I’m doing.  It seems everyone wants to do it, but ultimately very few do.  Our lifetime is really insignificant in the grand scheme of the world and time, so why not enjoy it to the fullest?  Don’t let money dictate your life.  Find a way to make it doing what you love.  Either make just enough to get by to maximize your enjoyment, or make so much they it becomes insignificant. Put doing what you love ahead of money.  Ask yourself, would you be doing what you were doing if you weren’t getting paid?  Why or why not?  What would you rather be doing?  Be realistic.

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Several months ago, my Google Adwords account stopped running.  I’ve had this account since 2005, but hadn’t started using it at all really until early 2009.  I wasn’t sure why I went from several million impressions a day to 0 overnight.  There was no notification in my email, nor in my account when I logged in.  So after a couple days of this, I sent the support an email.  I came to find out that they banned my account because of some URL’s that violated their policies.  They listed 3 URL’s, and I barely recognized any of them.  As of recent, I had 1 campaign running with 1 URL.  So I emailed them back asking about the URL’s and that I didn’t recognize them in my account.  They emailed me back saying that they were from xx and yy campaigns.  I looked and didn’t see them in my account, nor recognized them.  After about an hour of looking around and researching the issue, I found that they were URL’s from campaigns that I had deleted about 3 years prior.

So, here I am spending thousands a month with Google on 1 campaign, and they ban my account from a URL that I haven’t touched in 3 years, and I had even deleted the campaigns 3 years prior.  I was a bit pissed to say the least.  So I asked them what I needed to do to resolve the issue.  They said I needed to fix the quality of content on those domains, and then email them back when I have done so.  The problem was that I didn’t own those domains, and had no control over the content that was on them.  I was shocked that Google even asked me modify those pages, considering that the campaigns they were referring to were deleted 3 years prior.  I told them that I had deleted those campaigns 3 years prior, and I had no access to the files for those domains since I no longer owned them.  They responded with, “sorry, but there is nothing we can do unless you fix the landing page quality of domain1.com and domain2.com.  Also, just because a campaign is deleted doesn’t mean it isn’t part of your account.”  What the hell does that mean?  I deleted the campaign because I no longer wanted it, and 3 years later when Joe Blow owns the domain you expect me to control it?  Come on Google.  That is pathetic.  Not only that, they ban my account even though the only campaign I was running wasn’t even in question and was by far the biggest spender in my account history.

As much as I admire almost everything that Google does, there is no question that they made a mistake here.  I called them several times and told them that I am willing to do whatever I can within my control to resolve the issue.  Yet they still reply back with “sorry, there is nothing we can do”.  After I looking into this, it appears a lot of Adwords accounts have been banned lately.  While most are probably genuine bans, there is certainly some big mistakes that Google is making.  It is unfortunate. Google, you need to improve your account review process; it is pathetic.

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