This week we have 2 guests from Australia visiting and working with us. For those of you familiar with SexyAds.com you’ll know Leanne, our affiliate manager, and Karen, one of the support staff. We’re going to have a marketing and promotion brainstorming session starting Monday morning. Think good thoughts that we’ll come up with some quirky and effective campaigns.

We want to continue to brand SexyAds as an adult fun place that’s not a porn site. Like a Cosmo for dating. Sexy, interesting and fun. Lots of dating sites with adult content, that frankly earn a lot more money than we do, put their emphasis more on the x-rated photos and pay per minute video chat with models. We’ve always tried to keep the site for adults who consider sex to be a big part of any relationship.

Today we played tourist and went to Paihia, the tourist mecca in the far north of the north island in New Zealand. We took a ferry to Russell and had fish and chips while sitting on the beach watching all the boats go by. Then we went shopping. What else do three women do when they’re out together?

I’ll be posting this week but mostly I’ll be helping them come up with a plan for success in 2008. Wish us luck!

An Australian man was having a coffee and croissants with butter and jam in a cafe when an American tourist, chewing gum, sat down next to him.

The Australian politely ignored the American, who, nevertheless started up a conversation.

The American snapped his gum and said, ‘You Australian folks eat the whole bread?’

The Australian frowned, annoyed with being bothered during his breakfast, and replied, ‘of course.’

The American blew a huge bubble. ‘We don’t. In the States, we only eat what’s inside. The crusts we collect in a container, recycle them, transform them into croissants and sell them to Australia.’

The American had a smirk on his face. The Australian listened in silence.

The American persisted, ‘D’ya eat jam with your bread?’ Sighing, the Australian replied, ‘of course.’

Cracking his gum between his teeth, the American said, ‘we don’t. In the States, we eat fresh fruit for breakfast, then we put all the peels, seeds and the leftovers in containers, recycle them, transform them into jam and sell it to Australia.

The Australian then asked, ‘Do you have sex in the States?’

The American smiled and said ‘Why of course we do.’ The Australian leaned closer to him and asked, ‘And what do you do with the condoms once you’ve used them?’

‘We throw them away, of course!’

Now it was the Australians turn to smile.

‘We don’t. In Australia, we put them in a container, recycle them, melt them down into chewing gum and sell them to the United States. Why do you think it’s called Wrigley’s?’

There I was, minding my own business, getting ready to make some blog posts and my site was offline. I have my own server that’s quite separate from the SexyAds.com group of servers because I live with a man who takes website security more seriously than his marriage vows and he hasn’t cheated yet. Sure enough, when hubby checked his mail there was an urgent email from our webhost saying that my server had been hacked and some stupid idiot was using it as an irc server. (No telling what else he or she was doing!)

So the webhost shut the server down to stop the hacker from doing his or her dirty deeds and that was ok with me. Once we found out how they got in (through a Mambo site for a local hockey club) we plugged the hole. Then we waited for the machine to come back online. And we waited. And we waited.

We waited nearly 7 hours and wrote about 8 emails. None of our emails were replied to until we said we’d look for a new host if that’s how their customer service was. I know it’s tough answering all the email they must get, but if we can answer most member emails within a few hours, so can they! They earn a lot more than we do! A company is only as good as the service you need when you need it most.

So let this be a warning for any of you with a Mambo site and you haven’t got the latest code on there. Idiots will get you too!

I was out shopping today and came across a guy in a black t-shirt. He was quite good looking, in that rugged, beard wearing way that I enjoy watching. A little while later, after I had lifted 4 40 litre bags of compost onto my cart and was trekking to the checkout, he’s right in front of me. On the back of his t-shirt is this…

If you’re in the woods and you say something and your wife doesn’t hear you, are you still wrong?

I cracked up. As we both got to the checkout I couldn’t resist asking the answer. He looked at me and smiled and said,

Luv, I’ve been wrong since the day I met her.

and then he began to laugh. I didn’t know quite what to say. I was hoping he was just teasing, but maybe he wasn’t. All I could think of was that if it was true and he was always wrong, why does he stay in that relationship?

Does “til death do us part” require us to put up with abuse? I don’t think so. Maybe that’s just a cop out for me but I don’t think we were born to be the subject for someone else to pick on.

Thoughts?