I am pumped because it is way overdue. Let the growth continue…

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” right? I got a good helping of that this weekend when Verisign turned off our payment gateway from transactions without notice. Luckily the phone started ringing off the wall with customers determined to purchase or we might not have caught it. Turns out….my credit card that is billed for the gateway had expired and I failed to give them the new expiration date. The weekend is the worst time for this to happen because support is non-existent if you haven’t already paid a monthly contract of $100+/month. For the two years before this we haven’t experienced a single problem so we couldn’t justify the high priced service contract.

I lost a few thousand dollars and I am sure the nominal amount that Paypal lost isn’t enough to even get them out of bed. Sure, we aren’t Amazon but we don’t ask for much and always pay on time. We have given them well into the five-figure range of transactions over a two year period.

I just hope we never get so big that we can’t make a 5 minute courtesy call to help out solid everyday customers.

Lauren and I are still at the office on Friday night and it is currently 10:30p as of me writing. Google and the others hold overnight hack sessions where they build new features and such. Well, our version consists of buying about 10 new albums off of iTunes and knocking down two bottles of vino.

I prefer ours better. Here’s pics to prove it.

Take a sneak peek at my new Bliggy Bank on the right side of this blog below the Meta section. We are still testing, so it isn’t live, but we are very close. I have three donations so far - represented by the three little piglets. The messages sent with each donation can be seen by rolling over those piglet icons.

The widget will be free for use and can be used anywhere on the internet due to its integration with Paypal. My blog is powered by WordPress and it was very easy to implement. We are trying out the Blogger platform this weekend. More to come….sure would like some feedback though…

We headed out of Houston on Friday night and went to L’auberge Du Lac in Lake Charles, Louisiana for the weekend. Not long after getting there, Lauren lit them up for $1800 on the slot machines. We also brought the boat and spent all day Saturday wakeboarding in the back. Rooks met us out there and gave us all a lesson in what not to do on the wakeboard.

Click here for the pics.

We just moved into our new office last week and it is starting to feel good. I put the flat screen on the wall in the lounge area tonight and felt it was appropriate to pop in the e-Dreams DVD.

I wonder where Joseph Park is nowadays from the Kozmo.com lore. You should hear some of the inflated comments made on the documentary during the largest start-up failure ever. It is definitely humbling.

And for you punks that came to the blog to see pictures of yourselves wakeboarding from this weekend. You will have to wait until tomorrow…..

Our new PPC campaign is going really strong, in fact a little too strong. We have had to scale it back until we can get some more people in here to help out. As I have mentioned before, our PPC efforts have been solely focused on Google because we feel that if we can fine-tune our campaigns on the toughest/most expensive playing field, then the others should fall into place. Until we can get some help around, it looks like we are going to have to limit our growth. Good idea or bad idea?