Last week was not a good week for me. My wife got sick on Wednesday so I had to take care of the three monsters that my wife calls our kids. Then my mother-in-law was hospitalized on Thursday so my wife had to leave town for a couple of days (both my wife and her mother are fine now). Finally on Sunday, the in-laws from out of state came to visit without any warning. Yes, it was nice to see them again, but like the other days, I was not able to work (I start drafting Monday posts on Sunday). Even worst for me was that I did not have a back-up plan.

I have a back-up plan when I know I can't work on a certain day, but no plans for unexpected work outages. This is a big problem for me because my main site (not this one) is a newsy site and it is the site that allows me to work at home instead of a soul-sucking corporation. Not having any news on a business day is like a newspaper not having any news. Its looks very unprofessional.

I need to put together an emergency back-up plan. What about you? Do you have an emergency back-up plan?

Darren over on ProBlogger is asking bloggers what they would do differently if they had to start over again. The title of my post says it all for me, "Blogging to Infinity and Beyond." No, I don't mean I would start a blog about Buzz Lightyear or about space or about numbers. To me, the phrase "blogging to infinity and beyond" is about having fun. That's what blogging should be about — having fun.

When I started blogging, I focused too much on making money instead of having fun. As a result, posting was work for me. It wasn't something I looked forward to doing. I use to post several times a week on this blog. Now its just once a week. However, now that I have gone through this little exercise, I know what I'm doing wrong and this is something that I can easily correct. I just need to let the kid in me out and see where that takes me.

One of the nice things about a personal blog is that it's relatively easy to start over (compare to a business blog or site). After all, I am the boss. Why limit the content of my blog to just one area when there's a whole world of things I can blog about? Why should blogging be work when it can be fun?

That's it. That's what I would do if I had to start my blog over. I would blog to infinity and beyond.

I got an email from Amazon today about their huge selection of Crocs. I've received emails from Amazon before, but this email caught my attention. First, the email states, "Based on your previous purchases in Apparel, we thought you might be interested in our huge selection of Crocs at great prices." Very odd because my wife and I have never purchased apparel from Amazon. We have purchased books, dvd's, and cd's from Amazon, but no clothes or shoes.

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I got an email from Internet Video Magazine announcing their free guides on how to post videos and movies to free online video hosting services like YouTube, OneTrueMedia, MySpace, ViralFlix, GoogleVideo and StreamLoad.

According to Mark Shapiro, Video Guru, people don't need to spend hundreds of dollars or use an expensive service to shoot, edit and post their online videos. All you need is a digital video camcorder, a computer with free video editing software, and a high speed Internet connection. Most computers already come with video editing software. Windows XP comes with MovieMaker and Apple computers come with iMovie. Both are very powerful and easy to master programs that make it possible for almost anyone to create personal movies that can be posted online.

Internet Video Magazine provides easy to understand how to guides for all aspects of web video – from how to shoot video, to how to edit and prepare it for the web by using free software, and to how to upload and post it. Internet Video Magazine includes a list of free or inexpensive sites for hosting the videos and movies.