General – Page 54 – Letter Never Sent

Software / Internet — Comments Off
30
May 05

Without one particular theme

Found some great stuff while surfing around this weekend.

Inspirational, courtesy of the wonderfully thematic Growabrain blog. How to Make a Million Dollars by Marshall Brain of HowStuffWorks: “There are two mentalities: Be an employee, or Hire employees” A must read.
Five Habits of Millionaires by Barbara Reinhold. “Michael LeBoeuf, author of The Millionaire in You, points out that to increase wealth, it’s essential to emulate millionaires who view money as something to save and invest, rather than income to spend. Many wealthy people live quite simply, he points out, choosing less pretentious homes than they could theoretically afford and opting for financial independence over material showmanship.” Warren Buffett still lives in the same small home in Omaha he bought long before he was a multi-billionaire.
Encrypt your “mailto” links with this handy form. It will prevent most spam spiders from pulling your email addresses from mailto links.
Godaddy’s Bob Parsons on his 16 rules for life: “1. Get and stay out of your comfort zone. I believe that not much happens of any significance when we’re in our comfort zone. I hear people say, “But I’m concerned about security.” My response to that is simple: “Security is for cadavers.”
RandText. Awesome free Perl script to include random bits in your webpages. I’m using it for the testimonials at my Duet Design page. Refresh to see it in action.

Software / Internet — Comments Off
30
May 05

Thought experiment

How long will it take this very cool large-scale marionette event in France (via Waxy.org posted this morning) to appear on Boing Boing?

Liberties — 1 Comment
26
May 05

Why is Homeland Security involved in shutting down bittorrent sites?

Can someone explain why the Department for Homeland Security is getting involved in busting “piracy” sites like the bittorrent site “elite torrents”? I can understand why the Justice Department is the enforcement body for copyright, but isn’t Homeland Security supposed to fight terrorism? I don’t understand why this hasn’t been a bigger issue. What does bittorrent have to do with terrorism? Did they need some positive news coverage of a big bust? Is it that difficult for Homeland Security to find terrorists in this country? Pirates need a lobby. That’s all there is to it. Let’s put all the money we saved from buying CD’s and create a Pro-Piracy Lobby. How much would it take? 25 million dollars? Bill Gates needs to get behind this. These types of busts represent one more ridiculous layer of bureaucratic police-state ballyhoo. I’m very appreciative of the libertarian point of view of small government since if you found some way to drain all the money away from government they’d be less likely to engage in unpopular and short-sighted enforcement regimes.

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General — Comments Off
26
May 05

Nice “Big Lebowski” reference

Gizmodo is rather “eh”, but today they actually made a nice “Big Lebowski” reference in one of their many posts. Check it.

General — 3 Comments
26
May 05

Yeah, that’s me

Today was pretty busy and I’m starting to put together a little routine. It goes like this:

Wake up around eight in the A.M.
Fold up bed
Check email
Take a shower and shave
Make iced tea
Work (stare at Outlook and try to remember everything that needs to be done)
Run by the post office

Later in the day, I met with a couple clients including Joyce’s church where I’m doing some pro bono work. I got three solid leads too, so it turned out to be a good day for business. When I got back home I ran by the apartment office to drop off some paperwork and noticed they were having a little bbq thing for the residents, so I got to scam some free food. I’m very curious to see how my dining out expenses will compare for this month versus last month. I’ve been trying very hard to eat all my meals at home even if it means doing a lot of cooking and washing dishes.

Film and motion pictures — Comments Off
24
May 05

My Revenge of the Sith Review

Jody and I went to see “Revenge of the Sith” today. RoTS was way better than any of the previous two movies, however it just makes you wish Lucas had his stuff together for the first two because they could have been a lot better. Now here come the bullet points:

The Good

Action is steady. This is number one reason it didn’t suck. The other two movies had too many slow points that were awful.
The special effects were awesome.
Nice conclusion. Everything is tied up, although what was the deal with the part about Qui Gon Jin?

The Bad

Bad dialogue. I could have come up with something more romantic and that’s quite a statement.
The emperor Palpatine / Darth Sidious makes the Dark Side look sissified. I still don’t get the Sith thing. Who are they? What’s with the weird names?
Jimmy Smits looks like a Ren-fest attendee.

Psychology — Comments Off
19
May 05

Personality Test

As I’ve mentioned before, my Myers-Briggs “personality type” shifted as I got older to ESTP. It is my contention that whatever your type you should like it since personality is a reflection of conscious decisions about how to think, feel, and behave. Here is some good information on my type from a statistical point of view:

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General — Comments Off
16
May 05

New Yorker – Revenge of the Sith review – “Break me a fucking give.”

Via. There are few things more fun to read than a good review of a bad movie. Anthony Lane writes a great review of the latest installment of Star Wars in the New Yorker. It makes me want to see it just to see how bad it will be. I laughed aloud at the following passage:

Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose,” he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you’d leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we’re here, what’s with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a fucking give.

Media — Comments Off
12
May 05

The Military Changes Their Sales Pitch

As has been widely reported, the military is having trouble meeting its recruitment and retention goals since launching offensive action in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is to be expected in our media-savvy and highly educated society. As people gain access to more information and a resistance to marketing-speak it becomes tougher to sell what amounts to, in the simplest of terms, an opportunity to get yourself killed. The message is that joining the military is an act of service to your country and that it’s the most patriotic thing you could do, but if you look around you realize it is much more complicated than that. When the most influential people in this country (even the past two presidents) avoid military service the impression is formed that it is far from desirable or wise.

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