Long time no post, eh? Well, I’ve been working on a few projects to help me earn a location-independent income so I haven’t had as much time to update this bad boy as I’d like.

The troops were getting restless in the comments of the last post and I actually had to delete a few comments that crossed the line, which bring me to the age old question ” how do you avoid the crazies when you’re living in a van down by the river?” It almost seems rhetorical right?

I’m realizing that it’s not the 60’s anymore and that in 2007, 4 out of 5 people you meet on the road will either stab you or try to steal your bucket of KFC.

So aside from installing a gun rack (I don’t even own *a* gun, let alone many guns that would necessitate an entire rack), we have a few different options…

A taser. I would love to reenact “Don’t tase me bro” at every truckstop where people think it’s ok to make eye contact.

An eye patch. People are scared of pirates and usually avoid them - especially if they also appear to have scurvy. Starting tomorrow I’m not eating any more citrus.

A dog. We both love dogs, but I have allergies to them which might be a bad idea in such close quarters. Plus they poop.

Tattoos. Do you think anyone messes with you when you have a tatoo of MC Echer on your head. Fughetabbout it. “1. 2. 3. not it” Angela loses.

Wear a Shredder outfit. Pretty self-explanatory, this one.

Van alarm. This one is pretty much a given already, but I’d like to rig it for 2 settings: screaming banshee or Cher - depending on intruder type.

Then again, an eye-patch wearing Shredder next to a pooping dog with “Believe” blaring in the background might actually attract the crazies.

Now if you excuse me I have to go practice my nunchuck skills.

The goal: To get a late model Honda Odyssey into my garage so I can go all “Frankenstein” on it.

After doing some research and test driving vans with Flinstones-braking technology, I’ve decided that a Honda Odyssey would be the perfect minivan for this trip - mostly because:

• It goes up a hill
• Can sleep a 6 foot tall hobo +1 (I measured)
• Has somewhere between 30-40 airbags (not the circa-1993 kind that hits you like a brick in the face when someone taps your bumper).
• Looks about as cool as any minivan is allowed to look
• Has a cool storage compartment that can store a lot of Bananarama tapes
• The engine is not held together by duct tape
• 26 miles per gallon on the highway

Unfortunately these buggers cost 15-25K used. But realistically we’ll only need it for a few months to a year - so if we intend to sell it, we get a different version of the math.

The math behind the van

Going off Rob’s suggestion, we can look at the depreciation by looking at Kelley Blue Book prices.

A 2005 LX Honda Odyssey in Good condition and with 40,000 miles costs $17,795.
A 2004 LX Honda Odyssey in Good condition and with 60,000 miles costs $14,220.

So buying a van, putting 20,000 miles on it, and aging it for a year ends up costing about $3,575 in depreciation - and that’s on the high end. Realistically it would probably be quite a bit less.
So the next question is: If it will only cost a few thousand in the end (which we can probably make on the road), how can we get someone to put up $20,000, with the prospect of getting it all back?

To cover the cost of the van, living expenses, food, and various state-emblazoned gas station trinkets, we need to be able to make money, preferrably online.

So what are our options?

Here’s a brief list I came up with:

1. Begging - not a fan of this one as it requires trading diginity for cash. plus carting all those nickels around will weigh down the van and cost us more in gas (theoretically).
2. Affiliate marketing - the ole fashioned way to make money online. old as them (digital) hills. The shoemoney, john chow, and Darren Rowse way. I’m not sure what we could ask you to buy that you would actually want.
3. Goolge Adsense - we could paste Google adsense all over this website which might annoy the bejesus out of our readers but make several cents per click with “van grease” ads (or whatever would be the targeted market for a site like this).
4. Create an informational PDF and sell it - not sure if this would work. Possible titles could be “How to create an informational PDF and sell it” or “Little known ways to make money when you’re living in a van down by river” but that one would result in the classic “chicken before the egg” paradox.
5. Eat things into the shape of Jesus and sell them on eBay - did you know that people pay thousands of dollars for food that looks vaguely like their deity of choice? Strange but true. Here are my first attempts - the “Jesus toast classic” and “baby Jesus” - whichever you prefer. Any takers?
   
6. Run a lottery scam - We could spam a bunch of people telling them I’m King/His Highness/Minister Abdul Jafar III (the third or fourth lends an air of legitimacy to a name) and that they have just won/found out about/been recommended for a prize/lottery/inheritance worth millions/billions/trillions of dollars and all they need to do is send us a Honda Odyssey van to transport the gold/cash/IOU’s out of Kenya/Argentina/Canada.
7. Promote an MLM - A little less insidious than the lottery scam: we could plaster Avon or YTB Travel or MonaVie stickers all over the van and pressure people to join our down line. Everyone would hate us. Including ourselves.
8. Give psychic/psychiatric advice - we could charge 5 cents to 5 dollars to tell people about what will happen to them or listen to them whine about what has already happened to them.
   
9. Sell prints of our photos - this one is a bit more legitimate, but it’s tough to predict demand so it’s a bit of a wildcard.
10. Sell magazine subscriptions - would you like to buy 40 subscriptions of Vibe?
11. Sell Bumper stickers via Cafepress - how about a “WWJDIHLIAVDBTR?” bumper sticker? Two hundred “Schrute bucks” to the first person who figures out the acronym.
12. Become a motivational speaker - a tried and true method, according to the economists/SNL-comedy-sketch writers of our time.

What would you do to create an online income to help finance a lavish trip around the world? Or in this case around America (but to those of us who are as ethnocentric as me, it’s basically the same thing).

Photo credits: massdistraction, me, me, pbs

Maybe the title should read “why aren’t we flying around in jet packs yet?” but I’m cutting humanity some slack here. One of the major considerations for this trip is fuel cost - and I spent some time last night looking at electric vehicles and the current state of technology, which seems to have stalled some time ago.

It’s 2007 - where is my all-electric van? Or even a solar powered van. And yes, I say “van”, not a giant ultralightweight soapbox that can only transport a stuffed teddy bear down a hill.

Maybe I’ll rent “Who Killed the Electric Car?” to get some answers, but I fear it will make me into a crazy conspiracy theorist, pointy aluminum hat and all.

You can’t tell me that this is the best we can do:

That’s the Eliica. It looks like it was designed by Homer Simpson. Scratch that - it makes the Simpson mobile look like an Aston Martin.

Is that really the best we can do?

Yesterday Boing boing sent us some traffic, which we’re super excited about. Thanks to everyone for dropping by, commenting, and subscribing to the feed! If you’re down with the Facebook (it’s like MySpace but way less seizure-inducing), join our group.

We’ve gotten a barrel-load of awesome advice – everyone ranging from cynics to hippies gave us their 2 cents and well wishes – and lots of food for thought.

One suggestion was to get a greasecar – which sounds pretty cool - and I’ve actually considered it – but after doing some research it seems a bit impractical for our purposes. I wish we could run our car on children’s smiles or puppy tears or something just as magical, but it seems like the technology isn’t quite there yet. I am considering putting up some solar panels to power our various knickknacks and iCrap. But I’m a geek at heart so don’t worry, lots of things will be rigged and powered by other weird things.

Check out this horribly made video of me ripping my car apart to see if I could convert into some sort of living quarters:

(flickr photo credit: meganpru)