TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

I go walking quite a bit, particularly of late, because my doctor has told me my cholesterol level is far too high. Frequently, when walking near busy roads, I experience incoherent screaming from car windows. This screaming is usually perpetrated by some young person, either male or female, traveling shotgun, with the sole purpose of startling yours truly, the pedestrian. Sometimes it even works (if you're someone who does this - works best if you're coming from behind. Shouting, coming from the opposite direction just makes you look clueless). The thing is, sometimes these people will actually yell something, which I presume to be witty, clever or biting that makes their companions in the car think they are way cool. Unfortunately all I hear is "duhwaahhhhhzeeeeeeeeee....". Doesn't matter what is yelled either. It's incomprehensible. If you're someone who screams from a car window, know this: I have no idea what you said. You're not cool if the perso...

Creative Artists is a blog by photographer, Emily (a.k.a. emele ), that features her pick of the art and photography that can be found on print-on-demand sites like Zazzle and Red Bubble . The blog is sorted into categories so you can go right to the kind of art and photography that appeals to you such as ummm... Cats . If you clicked the 'Cats' link then you'll see that my work was featured, which I appreciate so much I'm returning the favor with this post. It's easy for really good art and photography to get lost amongst the thousands of designs that typically appear on print-on-demand sites. If you'd like to narrow things down a bit then check out Emily's selections. You'll be glad you did.

If you're familiar with those online market research sites where you can win reward points for answering surveys, you'll know that many of them contain preliminary questions. Questions designed to screen out people who may not be in the target market for the research. In a recent survey I was screened out after one question: Which animal can you see? (take a look at the picture - I don't think it was a trick question?) Of the seven possible answers I chose 'Elephant'. I submitted my answer and clicked the button to continue to the next screen which informed me: Thank you for your participation in this survey. Unfortunately, we have spoken to enough people in your category. Please click on the >> button below to submit your answers. What the...?? Apparently enough people who can identify an elephant when they see one had taken this survey. I wonder if I would've been able to take the survey if I'd chosen one of the other answers such as 'hippo'...

Note: If you haven't read part 1 and part 2 of my series on Google's Adwords program then you should read those before continuing. So many options - techno-fear! My ad finally went live on Tuesday night (that's my ad on the right) and not only did I not have to take out a second mortgage (I don't even have a first mortgage... actually) but all my keyword choices were either lousy or pointless, or so I thought. I'm going to admit I was completely overwhelmed by the Adwords Campaign Management pages. It all literally made my head spin (and I'm used to all this technical stuff). It didn't help that I was trying to make sense of it all at the end of the day either. In the end I decided to just leave everything as it was for a day. If you decide to use Adwords I'd recommend you leave everything too for 24 hours after your first campaign goes live. The reason being, when I came back today my ad had been clicked seven times. Not earth shattering but better t...

Note: If you haven't read part 1 of my series on Google's Adwords program then click here . Cost, Pay-per-click and Payment options. Something that deterred me (and I'm sure many others) from using Adwords was the idea of pay-per-click . That is, every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay Google money. Google has the largest ad network bar none online which gives rise to the notion that millions of people will suddenly start clicking your ad and you'll be taking out a second mortgage on your house just to cover the debt. Thankfully this notion is unlikely, as evidenced by Dan's experience in his article, Advertising Your Artwork with Adwords But Not Getting Many Clicks? in which he received only 2 clicks (at a cost of five cents per click) on his ads in his first two week period. More importantly though, you can set a daily budget and set a specific time period your ads will run. For example, I signed up for Adwords and decided to follow Dan's lead, signing...

Are you an artist looking for someone who's tried Google's Adwords program to sell their art or promote their art web site? Well this article (or what looks like will be a series of articles) is for you. Before we go any further, if you're looking for a step through, blow by blow account of the Adwords process then I highly recommend Dan's series of five articles on his site, Empty Easel . I made a point of reading them first before starting my journey because I trust Dan's insight. He does a superb job of explaining everything and recounts his own experience of using Adwords to promote his site. However Dan's site isn't an 'artist' site as such. It's a collection of articles and resources all related to art and selling your art. This is where my experience can supplement what you read there. I'm an individual artist running an artists web site. I maintain a blog, sell my own art on ebay and I have a Cafepress shop. All common pursuits of m...

I recently received a question on one of my ebay auctions that was simply an observation about my name, TET . To quote the message in full (name withheld but if you wrote this you'll know): hi there, you should call yourself tET (i.e. from ET) Not TET.....the insignificant word "the" should be in lower case, thus, tET. (further, inbalance in artwork is good, adds interest....ie. the symmetry of TET is too much, should be tET) looks better...looks good. all the best ! For those of you that don't know how I came to be called The Extraordinary Tourist there's an explanation on my biography page which includes a nice video explanation too however this is a discussion on the merits and importance of the word the . Back to the message above. I understand the author's logic and it is very sound. Insignificant words like the, a, and, or etc. aren't usually abbreviated and are often even left out altogether, hence The is not as important as Extraordinary and To...