Hi and welcome to my Squidoo homepage! My Squidoo name is Newtimes and I'm a college grad who spends half his time on the Mediterranean in sunny Valencia, Spain with the love of my life. I love the food, culture, history and nightlife here. When not in eastern Spain, I live in Virginia, in the US. My county is dominated by vast forests and untouched woodlands, so its a stark difference between the...

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Hi and welcome to my Squidoo homepage! My Squidoo name is Newtimes and I'm a college grad who spends half his time on the Mediterranean in sunny Valencia, Spain with the love of my life. I love the food, culture, history and nightlife here. When not in eastern Spain, I live in Virginia, in the US. My county is dominated by vast forests and untouched woodlands, so its a stark difference between the life here in Spain's 3rd largest city.

I love languages and music, always make friends with dogs, and de-stress by doing Tai Chi or playing my own compositions for piano. I'm getting pretty fluent in peninsular Spanish and speak rough Valencian but understand most of the "Setabense" dialect. Valencian is an ibero-romance language that looks and sounds an awful lot like Catalan, but is quite distinct according to native speakers here and which is mainly spoken in the outlying towns in the province of Valencia. I'm proud to be among the majority who understand a lot more than they speak.

I've spent 22+ years playing piano, 11 years teaching myself to compose, 12 years working in a stained glass workshop creating church and custom art glass windows at our family's workshop, and 5 years studying Yang Style Tai Chi Chuan. At home we're currently working on restoring a 200 year old window in a nearby church that is priceless. Its nerve wracking working with restoration projects that don't tolerate errors, but in the end, when you see it sitting in its rightful place in the sanctuary looking new and sunlight shines through the glass onto the pews in the many colors of the window, its definitely worth all the trouble.

I've been on Squidoo for a little less then a month and I have to admit that it's fun, addicting and comfortable making new lenses. I'm starting to get the hang of it, having recently published my second lens this week. Although I couldn't fill half an hour with my SEO knowledge and experience, I've happily watched my first lens climb up the lensrank to the second tier thanks to the kind and benevolent Squid Angels, traffic, and the topic's popularity.

I got into affiliate marketing last year as a last recourse to make money abroad in a global crisis. I'm unhappy to report that I've never earned a dime during my learning process. I think most of my lack of success trying various paid surveys/guru ebooks has been due to my inherent aversion to the writing style employed in writing "good ad copy", which to me reads like an infomercial (no offense intended - I'm not a published intellectual either and certainly wouldn't like to snub someone else's well earned success in an area in which I can't boast any personal success to date). After finding Squidoo I feel twice as confident that I can create a profitable online business, and Squidoo has really helped me to work on a lot of the most important skills I need to learn, such as building content rich, neat little web pages (lenses) full of Clearspring widgets, Squidutil gadgets, modules and free eye candy that converts into affiliate revenue (Allposters.com).

I love writing, and compose poetry from time to time, though it isn't my forte. I prefer music and plain verse. If I had another 4 years of college, I'd double major in marine biology and web design, since I need to learn to scuba to plan for all the awesome vacations trips I'm going to take, since I'm confident that this field really has good earning potential.

If I had a million dollars I'd first spend some time indulging my need to write and play music and then give what I don't need to someone who isn't worrying about turning a musical phrase - they're just trying not to die of a painful or life threatening disease that I don't have to worry about (such as dengue fever), or trying to eat!

I wish I'd invested more money in troubled banks at the turn of 2009 - I'd have a much larger advertising pool.

I love "Crime and Punishment" and my new yorkshire terrier "Vito Corleone", a three month old pup who resembles an animated teddy bear. I spend most of my day speaking Spanish, which is fairly odd given that I've only spoken American English for most of my life. The strangest part is how it changes how you group and describe information. It gives you a new perspective, a new understanding of reality. I continue to provide a never ending barrel of laughs for my soon-to-be Spanish inlaws, who find my odd turns of phrase or outright errors in contextual translation to be insanely funny. Imagine the endless shafts in "The Library of Babel" by Borges - this is how possible it is to endlessly entertain people by messing up their native language, either by mistake, or on purpose. One time, I swapped two very unswappable nouns in Valencian.

English: "All my friends are foreigners" (a fairly odd phrase if you don't happen to be desperate for a token phrase to tote around. My token basque phrase translates as "YOU buy the newspapers!")
Spanish: "Todos mis amigos son extranjeros"
Valencian: "Tots els meus amics son **extrangers**"
I swapped "extrangers" with "tarongers", the latter of which means "orange trees". So now its not uncommon to be asked how my pals in the orange grove are doing. Language mastery teaches you nearly unthinkable levels of humility.

If you like Borges, I translated "The Library of Babel" into English. Hit me up for a free translation in .doc or .txt if you can't find a comprehensible version and I'll be happy to shoot it to you via email or put it in a lens. I wasn't too impressed with the ones I've found online.

That's it in a nutshell. I'm just another fresh squid in search of improved writing, improved fundamentals of web design, and looking for a way to learn SEO for my own personal uses who enjoys learning languages, traveling, writing and composing music.

Thanks for visiting,
Newtimes