Matt Mauldin

• @rachaelbrucks just called me to task for not tweeting often enough #

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Here’s an excerpt from the local news that I had to share with you:

Fort Worth police tell NBCDFW that when the 71-year-old man saw the female deputy coming toward him he dropped the trimmer and ran into the house in the 9800 block of Watercress Drive.

The man came back outside in shorts, that were unzipped, and told the deputy he’d done yard work in the buff before and thought his yard was private enough that no one could see him.

The deputy pointed out that the problem was some privacy slats were missing from his chain-link fence and he lives across the street from a park and along a busy road.

That’s freakin hilarious.  It doesn’t stop there, though.  Here’s part of the actual police report:

Since CIT1 had the weedeater in front of him, Deputy Rowland did not observe CIT1’s genitalia; However, upon CIT1 observing Deputy Rowland he took off running toward the south door of his residence.  Upon CIT1 turning around to run Deputy Rowland observed CIT1’s buttocks.  Deputy Rowland yelled at CIT1 to stop.  However, CIT1 sat the weedeater down and ran into his home.  Deputy Rowland observed that CIT1 did not appear to lock the door as he simply opened the screen door and ran inside.  Deputy Rowland remained at the East Gate and yelled for CIT1 to come outside to speak to him.  In a few moments CIT1 exited the residence.  He had hurriedly put on a pair of tan shorts which were unzipped, revealing the fact that he was wearing no underwear.

OK, that’s awesome.  The police then had to check the man’s record to see if he was a sex offender.  It turned out negative, so the naked man received a Class C misdemeanor citation.

The Texas penal code 4201 A-10 states that a citation should be issued for exposing “his anus or genitals in a public place and (being) reckless about whether another may be present who will be offended or alarmed by his act.”

I’m still trying to find out what makes me laugh harder?  This story or the Texas “penal” code?

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• @graywolf what are the number links in your footer on wolf-howl.com? #
• @jonbcampos that means it's time for the ipod in reply to jonbcampos #

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• Steven Segal is a cop in real life, shown on TV: http://www.aetv.com/news/?id=391368 #

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I know, it’s been too long since I’ve posted.  But that’s only because I’ve been working my tail off (or hunting).  That’s right, I’ve started a new company to own some of my ecommerce shops, I’ve done a ton at my day job, I’ve been out of town for family reasons, and the spare time in between all of that has been daddy/husband time.  Oh well.

(And yes, I have to admin that dove season did open on September 1st and I was out for about 24 hours on a fishing/hunting trip.  But can you blame me?  I’m a Texas boy – fishing and hunting are almost like a requirement.)

Now it’s back to business…

I logged into my old Microsoft AdCenter account earlier today because I’ve seen some decent traffic coming from Bing.com lately.  In fact, over the last three months Bing has surpassed my Yahoo organic traffic on at least three different sites.  I haven’t used this old account for well over a year because I wasn’t able to generate jack crap worth of traffic for my niche.  That’s ok, it really doesn’t fit the Live.com demo.  But with Bing.com, the traffic was coming in organically and some of it was converting to sales.  Light bulb, people! Let’s get more traffic from Bing.com using PPC.  And what’s better than an old account that is already set up?

I log in and notice the account is on Credit Hold because my old card on file has been expired for months.  So I updated the card, and was notified that my new payment method needed to be assigned to my account before I could use it.  No prob.  I go to the account settings page and get a “payment method not in db” error or something.  Expected. I change the default billing and save. Done… but no change to the account.  I access the account settings and get the error again. ok, what can I do now?

After digging around a little more I called the customer service and found that my account is dormant and there is no way to reactivate it.  Well crap.  I have to open up an entire new account now.  But why was I able to access add new payment methods to a dormant account?  Who knows?  I was able to take Campaigns and Adgroups active (of course this didn’t show ads because the entire thing was on hold).  It’s a little weird.

It’s just a small setback at this point because I’ve got a good keyword list, ads, tracking URLs, whatever.  So I set up the account, everything is going great, say “ok” to the $5 charge, and BAM!!!! I get this:

Seriously?  I just signed up after not using these guys for well over a year and here’s my first experience.  Let’s hope once they get their errors in order I can generate some converting traffic or I’m out for another while.

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