Jason Murphy

Website Producer

I have recently (in the last 2 months) accepted a new position with a company in South Florida. How I got here is pretty unique. Since early January I had been consulting working a couple large projects, but I was still looking for something more stable. I had considered offered opportunities in Denver, L.A. and Phoenix. I even had a couple of individuals inquire if I was interested in Wisconsin, Philly or Boston. (The Wife said “NO!” to Wisconsin, but the other two we were unsure of). Never had I really considered relocating to Florida. It never was on my radar.  Obviously, that has since changed.

Growing up in the west, and living in six states west of the Mississippi before I turned 30, I had intended to settle down and raise my family somewhere in the west. I have extended family laced through every state in the Pacific and Mountain time zones, and we just love the climate and culture that comes with this rich western heritage. The eastern seaboard was so foreign to my wife and I that it might as well be a different country. This actually turned out to be one of the reasons we selected Florida as a place to move to. If we’re going to move, why not try something completely new? Between the two of us, we’ve “been there, done that” to almost every popular destination from Kansas City to the Pacific Ocean. Sure we’ll give up the mountains and dry climate, but we also gain oceans, beaches, moderate climates year round, and what is arguably a better education system for our kids (Nevada’s public schools need a ton of help). I’m a wannabe stormchaser (my years in Tornado Alley were, in a word, awesome), so I actually am excited about living in a hurricane zone. We will evacuate when told, but I’ll still enjoy watching the local weather coverage during hurricane season.

The work is the same. I’ll still be producing websites and driving traffic to them. But the lifestyle is dramatically different. Currently, I work in Florida during the week, and fly home to Vegas on the weekends. My routine travels have taught me a few life lessons:

1. Traveling can be a banal task. I used to love flying because it always brought the prospect of going someplace new. I’ve since become very jaded to jetset mindset. Spending 5 hours on a plane can be extremely stressful, and a waste of time. Especially when you are 6′4″ and 270 lbs. Who can read or write at leisure if you can’t even be comfortable? My tray table can’t even lower because my knees are holding it in place.
2. Giant airplanes are made for tiny people.
3. Red-eye flights are a life suck. Think about it: I leave at 11 pm on Sunday, arrive at 6 am on Monday. Minus the 3 hour time difference, that means I need to squeeze my nightly slumber into less than 4 hours. On a plane. In a seat made for little people. I sleep light and am half-dead the remainder of monday.
4. Subway, Target, Costco, and 7-11 are homes away from home. After living in all 4 time zones in the continental United States, I’ve learned this one over time. If I ever start feeling homesick, all I need to do is find a familiar place. With Costco and Target, in particular, my mind gets so wrapped up on how much I hate being in those stores and how fast I can get out of there, that I forget my global location is even relevant.
5. As much as I loathe Bank of America, having locations EVERYWHERE has proved helpful during the relocation.
6. Seatguru.com is a large man’s best friend. I’m so glad my employer, who’s also fairly tall, gave me that tip.
7. Finding new places to eat and trying out some of the local flavor can really be a great way to unwind and build a personal knowledge base of the local setting.

Luckily, my long distance commute will soon be over. I could have chosen to fly home every other week, but leaving a wife at home with a 6 year old commander of chaos and an adventurous 1 year old for a week at a time is cruel enough as it is. When I see her at the airport on Friday’s she collapses in my arms with a sigh of relief. I get daddy time with the kids for two days and she gets the reprieve. The frequent flying is challenging, but well worth the hassle.

Paul whats-his-face and the Y Combinator team (in my most sincere stalker/admirer voice: “Hiiiiiiii, I’m a huge fan! “) funded the newly launched TipJoy.com. Created by founders Abigail Kirigin and Ivan Kirigin, TipJoy’s concept is basically a tip jar for IOUs.

In the past, I’ve always found the concept of a tip jar for content creators and software developers kind of limited. And as a content creator (who’s also dabbled in software and mod development), everytime I put up a tip jar to collect donations I feel like a bum on the virtual corner of the internet street market. I may need to deal with my own demons, but the collection of such donations never felt guilt free.

As for the limitations of tip jars in the past, there needed to be a middle man to perform the transaction. The person sending and the person receiving the monetary “tip” both needed to have an account to transact the funds. Often through Paypal, and later through Amazon, these micropayments were rarely big enough to justify a transaction fee.

In the past I wrote about Billmonk, an IOU processor as opposed to a payment processor. The beauty of working with IOUs is the requirement for currency to be immediately available is eliminated. It serves as a record, and in many cases, IOUs in both directions of parties involved tend to cancel out past IOUs. (Or they continue to build up until one party needs to redeem his/her IOUs before continuing transactions). This model is very similar to the concept that TipJoy adapts. If you like something enough, you can leave a tip for the person that generated the content. It can be in any amount from 5 cents on up.

You do not need to have a positive balance to leave a tip. You can pay at a later date, or any tips you receive can be used to build up your balance to leave tips for other content creators. If you decide you want to cash you, you can use your positive balance for an Amazon gift card or donate it to charity.

Or you can do what I plan on doing: keep a positive balance to reward creators of great content with generous tips. Yes, this is a company that I really want to see succeed. They have the philosophy model that I can believe in. I’ve added their tip button to my site, and will add it on individual posts in the near future. If you ever come across any content of mine you like, feel free to donate a few cents here or there. My contributions will go to other authors who I feel have provided the net community with something of value. It’s my way of paying back a community I’ve become quite passionate about.

Ho ho ho. I felt a little extra “festive” over the weekend when I found this theme and had to run with it. Sure it will kill your firefox and the 30 tabs you have open because the snow effect is such a javascript resource hog. But look how it piles up in little snow mounds at the bottom of your screen. Who could resist such cute eye candy. Not me.