David Pitlyuk

Last Friday I had an opportunity to go to the Washington Capitals vs. Buffalo Sabers hockey game at the Verizon Center in Washington DC.  I’m always up for going to a professional sports game, but this one was a bit better because they were tickets for the luxury box!  I went with a few friends, as well as a few people that I didn’t know.

For those that have never been in a luxury box at a professional sports game, it’s a great experience.  You have a great view of the game, the room is usually pretty nice with free food and free drinks, plasmas on the wall, a private bathroom, etc.  Our room had a ton of wings, hot dogs, cookies, cakes, gummy bears, jelly beans, chips, nuts, beer, wine, etc.  Take a look at the pics:

Here is the hallway for the Lexus suite level:

 Here’s  a view of room looking towards the stadium:

Here’s the kitchen side of the room:

Here’s the other side of the room, the bathroom is on the left, and there is a closer straight ahead:

Here’s a view of the game from our 3rd level suite:

Here’s a random picture of Allie and Bethany.  You’ll notice nobody left in the stadium, the game was over, and we decided to keep drinking for a bit

I’ve been to a luxury box game before (At the Baltimore Orioles for a baseball game), and it was a pretty similar experience.  If you’ve ever been in one, how did it compare?

For anybody that reads my blog, you’ll know that I’m a huge car guy. That’s why I was excited to see Autoblog’s 2007 Gift Guide. The only thing in the guide that really caught my eye was an awesome looking carbon fiber wallet.

I love the look of carbon fiber, and the mixture between it and leather looks really nice as a wallet in my opinion.  I think I’ll be picking one up for myself

A couple weeks ago I picked up a 99′ Honda Accord coupe as a new beater car. Now a couple weeks later, I’ve also picked up another motorcycle, a 2002 Honda CBR600 F4i. My first bike was a 1998 Honda CBR600 F3. It was a great starter bike, but it was time to move up a bit.

Utilizing my “Drive a Dodge Viper for Free” methodology, I managed to buy the original CBR600 F3, drive it for a year and a half, and sell it for more than I paid for it. Pretty much all of my insurance, tax, and gas was over the past 1.5 years was made in bike profit, allowing me to have a 100% free bike for that time period. You can’t beat that!

While the old and new pictures look pretty similar, there are some major improvements on the F4i that makes the upgrade well worthy:

1. An updated look, mainly rear and front end makes the bike look more current of todays time. The F4i’s updated front end looks 10x better than the F3 in my opinion.
2. The i in F4i stands for fuel injection. The F3 is carburated. This makes the shifting much smoother, among many other improvements.
3. It’s a lot faster!
4. The bike is much lighter and smaller, that makes the handling a night and day difference. I feel much more comfortable turning on the F4i.
5. The rear compartment on the F4i opens with the key, so I can actually store little things in there. Not a huge deal, but a big convenience factor for me.
6. The gauges are digital now.

The only aftermarket part the bike has is a Jardine exhaust, which sounds great. Check out the video (Note: It sounds much louder in person):

There were a couple of issues with the bike, which ended up costing me about $250 to fix, but it’s basically as good as new now:

1. The brake lever was bent
   1. New lever ordered: $27
2. The guy I bought it from did a burnout unfortunately right before he sold it. Because of this, it needed a new rear tire
   1. New rear tire: $135 + $35 to mount/balance
3. A few bolts were missing from the windscreen (previous owner must have had aftermarket windscreen).
   1. 3 new bolts: $3.50
4. The air plastic air duct cover has a small crack in it
   1. New panel: $29
5. One of the handlebar weights was broken
   1. New weight + bolt: $12.50

Shipping was free. It was pretty minor stuff, and it’s part of getting the good deal to make the cost of the bike over time minimized as much as possible.

I’ve updated my progression of vehicles post with the new bike, make sure to check out all of the vehicles I’ve owned since being able to drive.

Here’s a few pics of the bike before I made all the above fixes:

Here’s a picture of all my vehicles currently (Sold the other bike last weekend):

I’ve modified my original “Progression of Vehicles” post to be one that I will update as I add or change any vehicles in my fleet. Last week I purchased my 9th vehicle (in my 8 years of driving). I would have blogged about it sooner, but I didn’t have a chance to wash it up until this past weekend.

It’s nothing special, but there’s a purpose to getting it. I bought a 99′ Honda Accord 4-cylinder coupe with 114k miles:

So you might be thinking…Dave, you’ve got a Viper and a G35 Coupe, in your garage, what’s with this? Well, I consider it a beater car for the fleet! In reality, it’s more of an interim car. My G35 has about 55k miles on it, and the warranty lasts through 60k miles. The Viper has been for sale (Although I haven’t really tried to sell it too hard yet).

Getting the Accord allows me to sell both the G35 and Viper at the same time, while having a reliable, fairly cheap car I can drive interim. I think I got a pretty good deal on the Accord utilizing my “Drive a Viper for free” methodology.

So I’m trying to figure out what I’ll be doing about car stuff, and I have a few options:

1. Keep the Viper, and sell the Infiniti.  Not sure what I would get to replace the Infiniti though…maybe rock the Accord for a while.
2. Sell both the Viper and Infiniti, buy a 2005 black C6 Corvette, and keep the Accord as a beater car.  I love the new C6 Vette body style, and it would allow me to retain all the power I have in the Viper, but be a lot more practical.  I would essentially try and daily drive the Vette, but I’d have the Accord for rainy days and what not.  This way I almost always have my sports car fix :)  I would get it in black, completely black it out, and get a loud exhaust…it would be pretty mean looking.  The main concern with this option is property tax will be really high, I think it would work out to be about $1,200/year for just the Vette.
3. I could sell both the Viper and Infiniti and buy one overall nice car.  I was thinking something like an BMW M3, BMW 5-Series, or maybe even the new G37 Coupe.  Property tax on this option will likely be pretty hefty, so something I have to put into consideration (Damn VA!!!).

I think those are my current options, I’m still unsure of what I should or want to do.  If you have any car suggestions, I’m all ears…just post your comment!  In the meantime my current fleet is the following:

1. 1994 Dodge Viper RT/10
2. 2004 Infiniti G35 Coupe
3. 1999 Honda Accord Coupe V4
4. 1998 Honda CBR600 F3 (Might also be changing this one up shortly)

Traffic

I mentioned last month that I would change my posting schedule to something less frequent, and I knew this would have an impact on traffic and RSS subscribers for the blog. The stats this month definitely show this as a fact. This month I brought in 6,342 unique visitors and 8,528 pageviews, about a 25% drop from the previous month. I know what I need do to increase these numbers drastically, but in reality I’m not too concerned about it. This is a personal blog, and I consider a personal journal that I can look back on for myself. I do like to provide content and information that can help other entrepreneurs, and I will continue to write what I can when I can. I have a lot of pending stuff that I want to write which I think will be pretty successful and interesting to all of you, so be on the lookout!

Looking at the charts, we can see one spike for the day that I wrote my article on improving Google Analytics. The article made its rounds and brought in a decent amount of traffic.

Monetization

Last month I mentioned that I had something unique and unexpected that brought in some revenue for the blog. I had a request for a company that wanted to purchase the rights to an image in order to use it as a backdrop for a trade show booth. I totally did not expect anything like that, and I ended up selling the rights for $300. It may have been the easiest $300 I’ve ever made. On top of that, I did my first private ad sale (and you’ll see more of that in November), for a big increase in revenue:

Text Link Ads: $2.72
Kontera: $4.70
AdSense: $7.65
Private Ad Sales: $25
Image Licensing: $300

Total: $340.07

Since October, I’ve actually pulled Kontera off the site again. I just don’t feel like it’s the right timing to have it running for right now. I obviously don’t expect to pull numbers like this again for November because I don’t think image licensing will be very common, but I did just get a not too shabby private ad sale.

If you’ve looked over time, you may have noticed that AdSense revenue has dropped significantly. I think this is partly due to the timing, but also because a big percentage of my traffic has been coming from Google Images, and I don’t expect much of that to convert into ad clicks. If I want to really increase AdSense revenue (and traffic while I’m at it), it will take writing some very good content that can get circulated around the web, to bring in some good relevant traffic.

RSS Subscribers

Last month I hit a peak number of subscribers, but I also mentioned that I thought my numbers would come down because of my new posting schedule. This seems to be the case, but I hope it’s pretty much leveled off now. It seems to average between 90-100 subscribers, which isn’t too shabby in my opinion.

Search Engine Goodness

Last month my search engine traffic took a huge hit and decreased by 19%. This month was even worse, with a 23% drop to 1,745 unique visitors. This was mostly due to Google, with a 25% drop in traffic from them alone.

Lets take a look and see which keywords were used most to find my blog last month:

1. blog title ideas
2. e92 m3
3. best corporate websites
4. www.davidpitlyck.com
5. virginia mansions
6. best blog designs
7. mansions in virginia
8. atlantic city pitlyuk
9. chima tysons corner
10. chima tysons

Nothing too exciting going on in this list.

Popular Pages/Content

Here was the most popular content in September:

1. April (Month)
2. How Google Analytics Can Be Dramatically Improved
3. Hot Import Nights 2007, Washington DC Pictures
4. David Pitlyuk (Homepage)
5. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: A-G
6. New Virginia Civil Fee For Traffic Tickets Is Nuts
7. Off Topic (Category)
8. A Raunchy Dora The Explorer
9. An Electric Yamaha R1 Motorcycle
10. Tech Sector Corporate Web Designs: Best Of The Best

A few new comers to the list from the archived posts list. It’s interesting which ones randomly increase in traffic again out of nowhere.

Top Referrals

Here’s a list of the top referrals that do not include search engines:

1. StumbleUpon
2. Smashing Magazine
3. Nevblog
4. Digg
5. Facebook
6. Naver
7. Ducati-Riders.de
8. Sphinn (Thanks Derek!)
   
9. CSS Globe
10. Bildirgec.org

Not too long ago Wordpress released their 2.3 version of their blogging software. This update brought a few new goodies, including tagging capabilities. I wanted to ensure there were no issues upgrading so I waited it out a little bit. Now, a 2.3.1 version was released that includes over 20 security/bug fixes. That’s just what I wanted, and I felt now was a good time to upgrade finally

You may have noticed the blog down for a few minutes earlier today. Upgrading was being done, and now I’m up on the latest and greatest Wordpress version. Everything migrated over smoothly, and I recommend upgrading yours if you haven’t done so.

Update: As I posted this, I of course got a database error!  A quick search in the community and I found out that my Google Sitemaps Generator plugin (Version 2.7.1) was not compatible, and needed to be upgraded to the 3.0 version.  I quickly did that, and everything seems to work great!

Our full-time head tech for Tri Megatech, Brian sent over a picture of the box UPS dropped off…and I couldn’t help but just laugh:

I realize that UPS put the plant on top of the plastic bag to try and stop the rain from penetrating the box, but first impression looks like he was hiding it under the plant lol!  Unfortunately the slight effort did not work too well, the box was soaked:

Luckily, the contents were dry, but it’s pretty ridiculous that it was left outside like this.  We don’t want to have a bad relationship with our UPS guy, so we’re not going to complain, especially because the contents were ok.  Consider it a first and second strike.

Do you have any funny/horrendous similar stories with packages that were delivered to you?

Back in May Google released a major redesign to it’s Analytics software. I think the new version is a big improvement, and I love a lot of the new functionalities. When it first came out, one of my main gripes was that you couldn’t click through to external referral sources. This was fixed about a month after release. Now I’ve had much time to play around with Google Analytics, and I have one more major gripe about it. I don’t like how you can really only look at data on a daily basis. For example, if I look at the past year of data for pageviews on this blog, my chart looks like this:

In this instance, I want the option to see my data in a month to month comparison. The way it is done now, I can essentially see the data in a day-to-day format. We can see here that there is one huge disadvantage to looking at the past years data in the daily format. In April I had a huge spike in traffic, and it’s a big enough spike that the chart is pretty much useless to look at…Especially with the thick line that is used. Luckily, if I really needed the data in the format I want, Google allows you to export it, which I can then import into Excel and run the reports I really need. It shouldn’t be this way though. I feel like Google can make some fairly simple adjustments to make this much nicer:

1. They can allow adjustment of the thickness of the line in the chart. The thicker line is great when looking at a chart for the past months data, but any sort of spike can cause the chart to be unreadable.
2. They can allow for zooming capabilities. Maybe I only want to x-axis to have a smaller range because I know about the spikes.
3. They can add a few shortcuts like they use in Google Finance for common timeframes, and adjust the chart style accordingly. In Google Finance a 1 day financial chart looks this (Note: I’m using the stock charts for Adobe (ADBE) as an example):

Google offers their “zoom” shortcuts on the top left of the cart:

When you change the chart to 1 month for example, the chart zooms out, but also smooths out the lines:

On top of smoothing out the lines, it also changed the y-axis to daily vs. hourly. Changing the zoom to 1-year does the same thing, but the y-axis changes to monthly. It makes for a much cleaner and readable chart. As a side note, Adobe has been doing great over the past month, glad I picked up some stock back at 38!

Given that information, daily data over the course of a long period of time can be useful, so Google shouldn’t get rid of it…but they should add more options. Another feature from Google Finance that I like is the way that the timeline functionality works:

I really like how it’s available underneath the chart for easy access at any time. Google Analytics has a timeline feature as well, but it’s more of a pain to use when the idea behind it is for quick data viewing. To utilize the timelie feature in Analytics you have to expand down the date tab, click the tab for timeline, and then move the box to the date range you want. On top of that, it only shows you about 3 months at a time, so if you want to use it to see the past year of data, you have to scroll it over for 9 months of data…it’s just a pain.

I think if Google can do a mixture of Google Finance and Google Analytics to re-do their Analytics chart system, they could dramatically improve the interface and usability of Analytics. Don’t get me wrong, Google Analytics is an awesome tool, but I think these improvements can make it so much better.

Do you find this frustrating you just as much? Are there any other major improvements that you think Google can do?  If you feel the frustrations like I do, please Digg this article so that more people will know and Google can do something about it.

Traffic

I started this blog in March, and overall I’ve definitely seen a good amount of daily traffic growth. September was no different with a 13.4% increase in uniques and a 8.7% increase in pageviews. Earlier in the month I decided to change my posting schedule to something a little less frequent, so I knew that this would more then likely affect traffic in a negative way. I think when the new design launches, this posting schedule will work better. I hope to have that launched by the end of the month.

We can see a big spike in the beginning of the month, this was from some coverage on my Transparent Screens Effect article from Pollycoke. It’s always interesting to see how a post will get picked up by somebody, even though I wrote it back in April.

Monetization

There were three sources of advertising this month:

Text Link Ads: $2.13
Kontera: $10.12
AdSense: $11.85

Total: $24.09

This is more than half as much as I made last month, but October is already much higher due to a very unexpected profit. I’ll talk about it in next months report!

RSS Subscribers

Last month I peaked at RSS subscribers, and this month I peaked again (111). I have noticed and expected the numbers to drop slightly due to me posting less, but it seems to have leveled off around the mid-high 90’s. This is ok, and I think it may slightly drop further before starting to slowly grow again.

Search Engine Goodness

This month search engine traffic decreased by 19% to 2,280 unique visitors. Let’s see how traffic from each top engine differed from last month:

Google: -18.10%
Yahoo: +10.10%
MSN: -47.13%
AOL: -40.26%

Google provides the largest number of search engine traffic by far, so the 18% drop was a good 500 unique visitors that I had lost over the previous month.

Lets take a look and see which keywords were used most to find my blog last month:

1. e92 m3
2. best blog designs
3. blog title ideas
4. magento
5. mansions in virginia
6. virginia mansions
7. mercedes blk
8. internet boardroom
9. atlantic city
10. blog post ideas

I’m surprised that all this time e92 m3 as a keyword has been up there as a top keyword…bringing in close to 300 unique visitors alone.
Popular Pages/Content

Here was the most popular content in September:

1. April (Month)
2. Transparent Screens Effect
3. Dining At Chima Brazillian BBQ Steakhouse In Tysons Corner
4. David Pitlyuk (Homepage)
5. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: A-G
6. Hot Import Nights 2007, Washington DC Pictures
7. The Next Multi-BILLION Dollar Idea
8. Internet Comments In A Real Life Boardroom
9. New Virginia Civil Fee For Traffic Tickets Is Nuts
10. Cars (Category)

A couple of these pages like Dining at Chima and The Next Multi-BILLION Dollar Idea were brought up due to being Stumbled.

Top Referrals

Here’s a list of the top referrals that do not include search engines:

1. StumbleUpon
2. PollyCoke
   
3. G35 Driver
4. Problogger
5. Nevblog
6. Naver
7. My350Z
8. Magento
9. YoungGoGetter
10. MySpace Blog

Last weekend I went out to dinner at a restaurant by the name of Chima (pronounced she-ma). It’s a Brazilian steakhouse, if you’ve ever had this style before it’s a very unique dining experience. Each person gets a small disc, one side is black, while the other side is orange. There are 12 different meats that are being served by Gauchos (Brazilian cowboys), and as long as your disc is flipped on the orange side they will come to you and offer you meat.

Here’s a list of the different type of meats they offer (on top of a buffet salad bar):

• Top sirloin
• Leg of lamb
• Filet mignon
• Parmesan crused pork loin
• Sirloin
• Rack of lamb
• Flank steak
• Chicken wrapped in hardwoods smoked bacon
• Beef ribs
• Pork sausages
• Salmon
• Sword fish
• Shrimp

The meat is all very high quality, and tastes very good. You can eat an unlimited amount, here’s my first plate:

The restaurant has a very modern theme, which I love. I wish I took more pictures, but to get an idea, I took one of the glass they have in the middle of the room with I believe Cirque Del Sol projected on it. Since it’s frosted glass, it displays on both sides for a very cool effect:

There are a variety of different restaurants in this area that offer the same style of dining. The ones I can think of are Malibu Grill, Fogo De Chao, and Texas De Brazil. From what I’ve heard Chima and Fogo De Chao are the top notch versions of the restaurants (With Fogo De Chao being the best). Our dinner was about $50 a head, our total bill with 5 people was around $400 as we all got deserts and drinks as well. It was definitely worth the experience, and the food was excellent, especially if you like meat.

Here’s a picture of a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder parked outside of the restaurant to give you an idea of the type of customers that eat here: