From a completely available domain name, to $350 a day in Amazon.com affiliate revenue, to negative $20 a day, this is the true story of FriendlyHippo.com.

It all started in 2005 when I tried to get serious about starting an e-commerce store using a drop shipper. I was an frequent visitor to woot.com and was very impressed with their success. In order to start my own store I would need a company to handle all the shipping and returns. I had done some half-hearted searches before for drop shippers but never with serious intentions. Turns out, finding a real drop shipper is very difficult.

Try searching for "dropshipper" on google or Yahoo! There are a lot of companies claiming to be drop shippers that are in fact total scams. I was all set to start using one in particular, called NetDropShipper.com, when I read some very bad reviews. People were claiming orders never arrived, or arrived damaged, or arrived damaged with the wrong item inside the package, etc. I have no idea if these claims are true, I didn't end up using that company. This website now appears to be just a parked domain.

It occurred to me that Amazon's affiliate program is almost the ultimate drop shipper. They certainly have a wide selection of products and a great reputation for shipping items well and all around great customer service. The only real difference is instead of charging customer credit cards directly, you let Amazon do it and your margin is determined by them. (They pay around 6 to 10 percent of the item's price.) First thing I needed: a name for my store.

It's rare that a new law gets inacted that really makes me feel like our government is working for us. All most every state now has a law requiring the credit agencies provide a way to place a "security freeze" on our credit files. This is a HUGE win in the fight against identity theft.

It used to be anyone with your name and social security number could sign up for a credit card in your name and wreak havoc on your life. And the only way to fight this was to sign up for a credit report monitoring service to catch bad people as soon as possible. Now, we can stop bad people from ever getting the credit card in our name in the first place.

BUT, the credit agencies don't really want you to do this. So they are complying with the new law, but aren't making it very easy for us. You have to mail in (that's right, U.S. post office mail not email) a bunch of information to three different agencies. And (it gets worse) two of those agencies require the letter be sent by certified mail. And (OMG more?) if you are married that means six letters in total, four by certified mail.

Might not sound like that much work but it will probably eliminate at least 90% of people. Will you be one of them?

I've never taken a vacation before. You might say my wife and I are workaholics. But my parents offered to pay for our room aboard the Royal Caribbean Mariner of the Seas for a seven day cruise from Los Angeles to Cabo San Lucas, to Mazatlán (my dad calls "Mazel Tov"), to Puerto Vallarta (my mom calls "Porto Valarda") and back to Los Angeles.

Leaving work behind is really difficult for me. I asked my boss if I should bring my laptop along, hoping he would say something like, "What? Are you crazy? This is your vacation! Just go, enjoy, relax, come back re-charged." Instead he said, "I can't imaging leaving work for a week, up to you."

I left the laptop at work, and had a no email, no computer, no television policy for the entire week. I'm glad I stuck to this policy. The best thing I got out of the week was allowing myself to live outside my normal bubble. My normal bubble is a world where facebook, and twitter are a really, really big deal. In Mazatlán, not so much.

If you've never done extra work before you might be confused at what the term "extra" even means. Almost every tv show and movie has an insatiable need for people to appear in the background of scenes. These people don't say any lines, they just make the scene look real. Without them it might look weird and empty, like a ghost town. They are the extra people. Either sitting in a restaurant pretending to eat, walking around a city street, or carrying fake important papers around office hallways.

I moved to Los Angeles from Pittsburgh in 1996 and couldn't wait to be a famous actor. I got a headshot and was starting to learn the ropes but fell into some classic traps. Somehow I had the impression that once I made it to Los Angeles, I would just start going to auditions and be this cool, poor, struggling actor guy. Life might suck but at least it would be interesting and every day I'd have a new audition and a chance to nail it and change my life.

Only, actually getting to the stage where you are going to auditions every day is like Los Angeles Actor level 8. I was still at level 1 when I saw the extra work flyer. See you don't just show up, put your name on the wannabe actor clipboard and get audtions. They real way to do it is to get a flexible hour non-career type job (read waiter), live in the right part of town (Studio City, NOT Santa Monica), get into a good acting class, and network with all your fellow actors. Eventually you'll find an agent, and eventually you'll start being sent on auditions.

In the summer of 1987 my brother and I wrote some awesome parodies of hit songs. David Lee Roth's Just Like Paradise became Bum with Lice:

This must be just like being a bum with lice
(Just like bums with lice)
And I don't wanna use a comb!

George Michele's Faith was Cake: