Life, Love, Paulio

Blog Has Moved

2011-11-09T20:38:00.004-07:00

My blog has moved. Please visit and bookmark the new blog --http://paulio10.wordpress.com/

2011-08-10T21:16:00.003-07:00

Needing some entertainment, I just went back and reread all of the Twitter posts that I favorited. I was laughing so hard! I forgot many of the ones I thought were hilarious, or at least genius of some kind, during the past year. It's amazing what some people can do in only 140 characters.

My favorites from the bunch --

For Internet SEO / marketing people:

From danpalmer -
How many SEO experts does it take to change a light bulb, lightbulb, light, bulb, lamp, lighting, switch, sex, xxx, hardcore? #nerdjokes

For Software / Database developers:

From sastier:
"A SQL query walks into a bar. He approaches two tables and says, Mind if I join you?"

Funny in General:

From lonelysandwich:
Now that I'm off the road and into a clean pair of pants, can someone tell me why it's legal to use screeching tires sound fx on the radio?

You can read 'em too - hope you find them as funny as I did.

http://twitter.com/#!/paulio10/favorites

2011-04-07T22:55:00.003-07:00

Creativity of People Today

I was reading the news today on some of my favorite news sites, and it struck me - the world is still in its infancy, regarding creativity. Every human being has the potential to create amazing, uniquely creative works of art, to make things that cheer up and inspire everyone around them. And yet, not ONE SINGLE article in ANY news source I could find had any descriptions of such things for the past 3 days!

I read news.google.com, which is a very non-partisan, non-biased view on news articles - it robotically chooses articles from other news providers based on popularity of its readership. I read cnn.com, which has a good amount of bias, but also covers all the major news from USA point of view anyway. I even read a couple "good news" web sites [1], [2] that focuses on only good news (nothing horrific or depressing - what a concept). And I read my favorite, the Wikipedia Current Events page which is the most unbiased news headlines I have ever seen (GOOD!) but has been mostly death and destruction this week.

This really got me thinking today. One of two things is happening. Either there is nobody anywhere doing great things in this world, creating inspirational artwork, helping people in some area in some way - or the news is completely letting us down by missing it. Which is it?

I think it's a little of both. Humanity is still struggling to find its way to "address the minimum needs of the people" in the shortest time possible, leaving the rest of their time and energy to do great things in this world. Instead, our societies all seem geared towards wasting our time, wasting our energy, wasting our money, over and over and over again - getting us involved in convoluted, complicated, difficult things that can't easily be mastered; making life even harder than it really has to be.

There are some people in our world that are minimalists. They buck the trend of society by never buying a home, only renting. Never renting a house, but only a small place with 2-3 roommates to reduce the cost. Selling their car or just not replacing it when it expires. They get rid of as much stuff as they can, so when it's time to move, they can get up and leave very easily; they possess only a few boxes of junk, a few clothes, and a laptop to schlep around with them.

This minimalist idea is fascinating to me. I don't live that way; quite the opposite most of the time. But there's something to it. Not buying into all the advertising for the "next must-have thing", in every avenue of life. Buying only what you need, not everything you desire. Making what you have last as long as possible, and then, finding a way to make it last even longer.

And in a way, these minimalists - their very existence flying in the face of all the advertising and peer-pressure around them - are being creative. The life they lead, created by themselves, is an kind of creative expression - the result of their strong intention to lead the way they want to, based on a force inside of themselves (certainly not from any external impetus).

That's not the creativity I'm looking for - but it's something to consider.

What I want to see is people having time to create great works of art in their particular fields, an expression coming from within themselves. They have to have enough time to relax and calm themselves once in a while, to center themselves and focus on their inner-greatness, and see what blossoms. It has well been observed that the greatest works of art come from those who have a spiritual connection, and use it for great inspiration and creativity. Such works have a rare energy that uplifts those who view it, or hear it, or interact with it.

But when do we ever have time to do this? A whole bunch of things must line up properly to do it. You have to know it's possible, that you, personally, can do it. You must understand why it would be so great to do that, and then make the time in your busy life to do it. You have to realize the importance, to you and to everyone around you, and make it a priority. It doesn't have to take a lot of time, just some time, to start with.

I think a great society is one that has the ability to hold back the floodgates of wastefulness, long enough for the people to be creative, for measurable periods of time. The measure of the greatness of a society is in how much time it makes available to its people for creativity - all the people, across the board.

A wise man once said, people should have a vacation 1 day a week to really get away from their lives and be a spiritual being. But that's not enough. They also need to do that 1 week a month, 1 month a year, and 1 year every 12 years! Boy, I don't know about you, but my boss wouldn't let me off work for all that much time!

And thus, our society has been measured.

2010-11-01T21:09:00.002-07:00

Family Camping Last July

We went camping at KOA in San Diego this summer, as we have for many summers in a row - over the 4th of July. For us, camping means renting a small wood "kabin" at the KOA which has 2 rooms and electricity, and that's about it. The campground has central bathrooms and showers, and a central outdoor kitchen/cooking area, which is nice.

This year I forgot to bring the power cables. Soon after arriving, I went to buy some new ones at Walmart. I bought two power strips (one with a really long cable on it), and one of those wall-plate-cover-blocks that has 6 outlets in it and a light telling you the surge protection is active, which I installed over the back room's power outlet on the wall. I ended up with cables all over. The front room's power outlet has the long cord going up and over the front door frame, to power the stuff on the other side of the room: a 3-foot-tall refrigerator we brought with us, and our favorite coffee maker. The shorter power strip is also plugged into the front room's outlet to power smaller devices we brought with us.

The front power-strip has these things plugged into it:

Nintendo DS recharging cable
Kayla's Kindle recharging cable
Clinton's cell phone recharger
Kayla's cell phone recharger
normally we'd have a front porch light plugged in here, too, but we forgot to bring it this year.

The rear power-block has these things plugged into it:

string of lights that serve as night-lights, strung along the floor between our 2 rooms
Paul's laptop recharging
Sherri's laptop recharging
power cord recharging the inflatable mattress inflator's battery, since it's an off-line style hookup where you can't inflate your mattress when the battery is dead, EVEN WHEN IT'S PLUGGED IN (you have to let it fully charge)
battery recharger for the digital camera, because we took a lot of pictures
my cell-phone recharger cable because it's a smart phone which needs recharging every night.

Now, one of the power strips has its plugs rotated 90 degrees, to help for people who have wall-warts that take up a lot of room. And, symmetrically, half of our wall-warts are the new kind that are rotated 90 degrees to help people who have the old non-rotated power stripts. Put them together, and yes, that's right, THE PROBLEM STILL EXISTS! Rotating everything 90 degrees cancels out the whole idea! With a little creative thinking we were able to get most of our electronics plugged in when we needed it.

But what are we going to do when Sherri's phone needs recharging? We'll probably have to unplug my laptop during the day and charge her phone then; I can recharge my laptop during the night; or vice-versa.

This is a good example of the many struggles we overcame while roughing it, camping, this year.

I really don't know how the early settlers managed it.

2010-10-31T19:15:00.009-07:00

MPEG - a Blight Against Video Quality

Watching music videos tonight, I realized something: MPEG video encoding is a crime against quality.

Back when bandwidths were small and expensive, MPEG made near-full-speed video possible. Without severe compression, we wouldn't of had digital cable until years later. But this amazing technology comes with a serious cost.

MPEG compression removes most of the data, and sacrifices some of the video quality to do it. The higher the compression rate, the less data you end up with (less to transmit or store), but the worse the quality gets. To my knowledge, there is no MPEG compression that doesn't lose at least some of the quality. "Some" quality loss that your eye doesn't really notice, is fine. But MPEG has some serious drawbacks, it screws up when the entire screen is changing a whole lot, quickly - like during explosions in an action movie.

I'm not going to explain about Key frames and all that - there's plenty of web sites where you can learn how MPEG transmits the full frame of video only once in a while, sending "what has changed on the screen since the last frame" most of the time.

I'm just going to say that MPEG is so wrong for many reasons.

In the old days, with analog TV, you could flip through channels very quickly. A high-quality VCR could "tune" from one channel to the next in about 1/10th of a second. This was awesome - you could flip through channels and tell very quickly whether you wanted to watch a channel or not. Experienced TV viewers could tell in an instant what was an ad and what was a show; it's a finely-honed skill. But with MPEG compression, this is no longer possible! MPEG only transmits a key frame about once a second, or less. So, when you tune into a new channel, you've jumped right in the middle of "this changed, that changed, and on the next frame, this changed, that changed"; your tuner has no idea what it's talking about until the next Key frame goes by! Visually, you see: nothing. Black screen. For up to a second, sometimes longer. Then the picture appears. It's really irritating!

What I'm saying is, no matter how fast your computer/HDTV/Bluray/Tivo/Roku/Google TV/Digital TV Tuner/cell phone gets, it will NEVER be faster at tuning. Never. Not with MPEG, anyway. It's not a "hardware is slow" issue - it is a design flaw in the MPEG compression itself.

Suppose you turned on CNN Headline News, and the title along the bottom says "Dow Jones average", and the news anchor person is saying "it went up 5 points just now... now it went down 3 points... now it went up 13 points... now it went down 6 points..." And you wonder, what is the Dow right now? Nothing on the screen is telling the exact number. You're getting second-by-second updates about the number, but you don't know what the number actually is. You don't know, because you didn't hear what the price was when they started reciting the changes in price; plus, you missed some of the changes in price they said earlier. Now imagine that once every hour they'll actually tell you the exact price - "it's 11524 right now", then they continue reciting all of it's ups and downs. Since you heard the last real price, you have a chance of tracking the number during the next hour - by adding and subtracting the intermediate numbers they tell you, from that top-of-the-hour number of 11524.

That's sort of how MPEG works. If you miss the top-of-the-hour number, you gotta wait an hour to hear it again; you can't tell anything useful until then. For MPEG it's about once a second, which is a long time in video-land. It's irritating when you're tuning channels.

And nobody complains about it. They just live with it. This pisses me off! There are technological things that could be changed to fix this problem. One fix would be to change the MPEG compression to transmit Key frames more frequently. Yes, this would take up more bandwidth per channel - and it's WORTH IT for quality improvement - but if nobody complains, it won't be done. Why should media companies change their ways, if people put up with what they have today?

Another possible trick would be to use multiple tuners, 2 or 3. When you're on channel 15, say, it's already tuned in channel 16 and 17, and is waiting for the Key frame to go by. If you suddenly change to channel 16, the channel 16 tuner actually saw the keyframe go by at some point during the last second - so it can show you the video image INSTANTLY. The old channel 15 tuner now can become the channel 18 tuner (so your box is tuned to channels 16, 17, 18, and you are viewing 16). This solves the problem so long as you don't try to flip channels faster than 3 per second. Not great, but somewhat better than today. But what if the person changes channels down, instead of up? Maybe you need 1-2 extra tuners in that direction, too. 5+ tuners? That's a lot of extra hardware, and extra cost, to work around a software problem! And what if the person jumps to a new channel that's not in sequence? You didn't have that channel tuned, so we're back to the full second-plus delay again. Maybe you need a tuner on EVERY channel? That's not a practical solution for your hardware to do. Frustrating.

The Key-frames-not-sent-often-enough problem hurts you, the viewer, in other ways, too. The most action-packed scenes in a movie are often RUINED by MPEG encoding. When everything is flashing on the whole screen and changing quickly - explosion with parts flying everywhere, there's no way MPEG can handle it - it has to transmit Key frames for nearly every frame, which is too much data, so the number of frames per second drops dramatically - sometimes to 2 frames per second! This most important part of an action movie is now ruined, reduced to a slow-moving slideshow of fireballs - ruining the height of excitement, and reminding you of uncle Jethro's neverending slideshow of last year's family wiener roast. Just think. All the trouble and expense Hollywood put into making this one-shot-only scene, and they can't even record it on DVD properly for their customers to see. Incredible.

Sometimes the tree outside my house partially blocks the digital TV dish in my back yard, so some of the digital data gets lost. If the lost data happened to be some of the changing-frames, I only notice a little blurriness of the picture and it goes away quickly. But if a Key frame got damaged or lost, look out! The entire screen freaks out with wild colors and crazy blockiness, for at least 1-2 seconds of time! Lot's of green, usually, which is strange. Anyway, it looks horrible, like the person on the screen was stuck in mud, and it's sticking to them as they move around; then just as suddenly, it's all clear and working again. The 1-2 second weirdness was because the change-frames were describing changes, but my TV had the wrong Key frame data to compare it against. The screen cleared up when the following Key frame came through undamaged. I always know it's time to trim the tree when this happens.

The MPEG standard was designed and chosen back when dialup Internet was standard, and digital video was a tiny rectangle on a computer screen only. Today, all this has changed. If you "only" have 1Mbps Internet, that's considered slow. Half the web pages now have video advertisements playing alongside your normal content. And a wide variety streaming movies and clips play easily from a variety of sites like YouTube and Netflix. We have more bandwidth now. Our computers are 8X faster, now, and have Terabyte hard drives in them for local storage. I think we can handle updating the way we use MPEG to use a little more data, and improve quality dramatically at the same time.

Boy it's a good thing people don't complain enough, or somebody might actually have to fix this blight. Sometimes I wish we could return to the speed and simplicity of the "good old days" of analog television.

tl;dr: MPEG sux. TV channels should use more bandwidth to give us QUALITY video for a change. TV's moving to the Internet anyway; everything is. Just do it already.

2010-10-23T13:39:00.004-07:00

Governmental Spending Transparency

I think its time the government opened up its books for the public to see, in a way that isn't completely confusing and complicated. Its time that people have the ability to see the cost-impact of those things they directly voted for, as well as for decisions being made by their elected officials. (For the purposes of this article, I'm going to refer to the United States of America where I live; other countries should be able to do something similar).

If done right, this will solve many problems:

people feel like the government is wasting lots of money on unknown things; less hatred of government organizations and incorrect feelings of governmental incompetence.
people have no idea the relative size of costs within the government: is $5 million spent on something a lot of money, or not much money at all? If it's a lot, I want to study it and stop them if it's not the best usage of that money. If it's nothing, I want to ignore it and find something bigger to focus on.
more ordinary people can become involved in a rudamentary understanding of what our government is accomplishing.
TV media could not create outright lies about what our government is doing, how our taxpayers money is being spent. They couldn't get away with it anymore.
TV media would not be able to take biased sides like they do today, to deceive people in two extreme ways (liberal and conservative). Media bias would be eliminated by true data access - it will be clear to everyone where they're doctoring the truth; they will not continue their deceptive ways.
people are asked to vote, today, on Propositions allocating large dollar amounts for various purposes. How can people vote yes or no on issues without a clear understanding of all the related spending today?
the biggest chunks of money must to go the best, right and proper use, in our country. Start fixing the big things first, and work your way down to smaller things. How can we do this today, without a clear understanding of how much is spent where and when? With a proper database, peer pressure (by public viewing of expenditures in a clear form) can solve the problem.

Example: should I vote "yes" to spend money fixing a dam that broke on a river? I can't vote yes or no with a clear conscience until I know some other answers: What other dams are still generating electricity? What other non-dam electricity are we generating? Is it enough? What percentagedid we lose by this dam's outage? What is the effect of this loss? What is the cost of voting no on this issue within 1 year, 5 years, 10 years? How much is the demand for electricity increasing, such that maybe we need the dam next year, but we don't quite need it this year? Is the money to be spent fixing this dam going to be paid back within 1 year of dam operation? 5 years? 10 years? What other states in our country have had dams break recently, and what did they do, fix it (or not)? What was the consequence of their decision? Does the population believe that was the right decision, now that some time has passed?

Simply quoting the exact confusing wording of the proposed law, and listing biased-arguments "for" the proposition, and biased arguments "against" the proposition - that is not enough information to properly vote! With enough proper information, very often a bill will pass with an overwhelming majority for, or against, it - because everyone can clearly see through the smoke, and knows the reality of what is really going on, in a balanced way.

Should I encourage the schools to spend more money on lunches for students? I would, if that's the worst problem the school has. I would NOT if there are more serious problems preventing students from learning, such as a lack of teachers, rooms, safety, or when there are no books in the classroom! Problems are all relative, and the decision can only be made in relation to other related problems. Where is all the other information I need to properly vote on this? If I have to scrounge it all myself, spending hours and hours researching and calling officials during normal business hours - who has time to do that? And, every voting tax payer needs to do this! Without an easy-to-use centralized database, the right thing cannot happen.

The tax paying people have a right to know clearly what is going on in our government, and to a limited degree they can find out today. But the information is not collected in a central location, and there is no way to navigate the data easily. There's way too much disorganization and over-detail in some areas, with insufficient detail in other areas.

Proper data studies can lead to knowledge about how our tax money is being spent today, and this knowledge ultimately leads to the right use of money in the future. If a government agency is wasting money and I can't discover that because the information they're providing is too convoluted, incomplete and confusing, then the waste continues. If they have to provide all their spending in a clear chart for me to read, breaking everything down from large to small in a hierarchical tree of spending that I can easily navigate, I will see where they're wasting money, and I can call them on it - and work with them to reduce the waste.

There is always some waste in any system; I want to feel confident that we're keeping it at a minimum.

Shine the light anew, and the cockroaches will flee the area.

Data Visualization - A Good Solution

One way to make this information available is to show the first level breakdown of where our tax dollars go - how much goes to which overarching organizations within the country, during the past year or so. 5 or 6 top level bullets, with money that adds up to the total taken in by the IRS for that time period. It should be obvious that the numbers add up, and what the levels mean.

From there, the tax payer should be able to drill down - click on one organization to "open it"and see where all of its money is going, within its categories. Similarly, each category can be "opened" to see all the sub-categories of monetary expenditure. At each level, a clear English description should be given of what the money was spent on. If it can't be expressed clearly and simply, it should not have been spent in the first place. Again, the numbers all add up in this area, to the total in the level above.

The data should also have the ability for anybody to attach comments, at any level, to any piece of data or organization - a threaded discussion. Government officials post here to clarify any confusion or answer questions from tax payers about certain parts of the spending for that year. This meta-data would help future visitors to that part of the database, to reduce the number of redundant questions and confusion a specific piece of data could cause.

All data from all organizations needs to be regularly collected and fed to a central "public Internet server," and made available via a hierarchical viewer, as well as pure data feeds in a variety of formats: CSV (Excel), RSS (subscription), XML data dump, perhaps OData, and other formats that make sense. This can be automated, so it doesn't take much human work to keep the data flowing month after month, year after year.

Conclusion

It's time for our government to stop pretending incompetence, to stop staying behind the times. Computers are cheap and ubiquitous, as are databases and file systems with massive redundancy. The same for large-scale Internet access.

At any time any tax payer could access this database, and see where money really is being spent - what things are really being accomplished. This is when creativity kicks in - if we're doing X, why aren't we also doing Y? Are we spending too much/too little on Z? Why is organization A spending money on the same thing as organization B? Maybe it's right, or wrong; people can find out, contact those organizations, learn something, and update the comments in the database.

The direction of our country should be steerable by the people, at least to a certain extent. How can you do that when you can't tell what is actually being done, and how much money is spent each year doing it?

tl;dr

We need a Government database of spending, in tree-form, for us to play with.

I wanna explore, hate and love, what I find in it.

2010-10-19T20:12:00.003-07:00

Best Humanitarian Use of Military Equipment

I laughed when I read this article. Someone figured out how to use old bomber airplanes to plant an unbelievable number of trees in one day. Check this out --

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/10/old-military-planes-drop-900000-tree-bombs-day.php

I hope they really do it. We've worried for so long about deforestation in many areas, it's awesome to think that treeless areas could be repaired at a rate of 3000 square miles per year, that's 1 billion trees in a year!

2010-08-14T21:21:00.003-07:00

Twin Towers 9/11 Replacement - Mosque

The idea of creating a Mosque on the grounds of the old Twin Towers in Manhattan is sheer genius. Let me explain why.

Our country, the United States of America, has reached a level of greatness by doing what we know to be right, not what the popular view would lead a person to do. It is that Independence, among many other things, which leads to our country's greatness.

The United States of America does not condone terrorism. In fact, we feel just the opposite. We believe in friendship, caring, brotherhood. We believe in families, neighborhoods, friends, a nice work environment, public expressions of creativity. When others are trying to create fear, we try to heal. When others try to divide, we try to unite. United we stand. Terrorism? We believe in the exact opposite, and we put our money where our mouth is - both figuratively, and literally.

Terrorists WANT you to react against them, to try to blow them up and attack them. Waste your time and money and energy by expressing your fear! Get involved with the terrorists! Talk about it, fight them! That's exactly what they want us to do. Which is why that is exactly the opposite of what we must do to defeat them.

What is the most powerful signal you could possibly send to a bunch of terrorists who hate America? Obama and others have figured it out. You send them brotherhood, and love. We as a nation do not hate moslems. We hate the microscopic branch of humanity who are terrorists, misrepresenting themselves as moslems.

Now, I'm not moslem - I've never been in a mosque. But I'm sure their religion includes some very uplifting, inspiring values and beliefs, with high goals for self-improvement and right relations, if the followers take the religion seriously. At its root, the moslem religion has the same goals as any other great religion in America or anywhere else - treat people properly, because through cooperation you can accomplish more, and quickly; battling and tearing down you accomplish less, more slowly.

There are powerful energies humanity can use to fight fear. Research it, study it. The knowledge is out there. Greatfulness is a powerful combatant to fear. Compassion for fellow human beings is another one.

The United States of America is going to defeat the terrorists using the most powerful, direct method available - by showing compassion and honor towards the purity and greatness that exists all around the terrorists, in their own home countries. We will honor the moslem religion by building a mosque at the 9/11 site.

Maybe then these other countries (who have mostly good people, as America does) will realize America is a lot more advanced - a lot more real - than they originally thought.

2009-11-11T21:16:00.007-07:00

The Healing Arts

There are a number of areas of healing in our modern world today, two primary ones being Medical Doctor and Psychiatrist. Think about what these two types of doctors do:

Medical Doctor - heals the physical body
Psychiatrist - heals the "mind"

I put "mind" in quotes because there's something missing here. Human beings have 3 distinct parts to them, not just two.

Three Parts of the Human Being

physical body
emotions/feelings
mind

You could also say that humans have a spirit or soul, too. I didn't include that on my list because I know there's some debate in our society as to the existence of that; and because the healing arts don't directly affect that part of a person, they mostly treat the "tangible" parts of us, the parts that accumulate wear and tear during our lives. Besides, I don't think anybody would argue they don't have a physical body, or emotions, or a mind.

What? How are Emotions different from Mind? That's a good question.

Emotions are Different from Mind

It's easy to mistake Emotions for Mind, but these two things are truly separate. You can prove this to yourself - notice how sometimes they want two totally different things! For example, think about the last time you were in love. It was hard to concentrate on work or school, wasn't it? Your heart kept remembering the person you're so fond of. You kept imagining what they look like, what they would say, how they would say it; what romantic thing you would say in return, how they feel, their delicious perfume, etc. At the same time, you were supposed to finish your paper on Deforestation in East Timor, or some such thing. It took you 5 times longer than normal to finish it, because you kept wandering into daydream mode! Or, you kept forgetting your assignment at work, or left out an important part you normally wouldn't do, or left a vital tool behind which you never did before; that sort of thing.

How about a common theme we've seen in movies: a married man/woman attracted to someone else they aren't married to? That's a clear conflict between emotions and mind. Feelings are strong for this other person, but the mind knows it's a bad idea to do anything about it.

Look - if there can be a conflict of two opposing views, then the thing is divided, it's not a single whole item. Like, you have a viewpoint on some topic of discussion, but your friend has a different viewpoint. You and your friend are clearly different people - the proof is that you have different viewpoints! If your feelings can take an opposite, conflicting side from your thoughts (mind), then those two things are different. They're separate.

Mental People and Emotional People

Once you fully absorb this idea, something will likely hit you as it did me - I realized I have mentally-polarized people in my life, and emotionally-polarized people. I know, everybody has both - what I mean is that some people naturally react emotionally, or mentally. If you can identify which "style" of person everyone in your life is, and react to them in the same way, you'll be amazed at the results! You'll connect to people you don't normally connect to. Emotional people, and mental people. Everybody has all of the above, but, in most cases, each person prefers (and is most comfortable with) only one. When I talk to certain computer programmers at work, I focus on mental concepts; data structures, algorithms, the right way to do things - and they love it. In my personal life, most people around me need me to relate by feelings first. One trick is to listen to how they speak: if they say "I think we should ...", they may be mentally oriented. If they say "I feel we should ..." they may be emotionally oriented. It's not guaranteed, but it's often correct in my experience. Another way to tell, if they are mostly negative in everything they say, often that is a mentally oriented person. The mind, for whatever reason, tends to be separative and elitist in its behavior. Having said that, I'd like to also say: most people relate primarily with other people with emotions. If you can be an emotional person around them, you're more likely to be popular with them, understood by them.

I can understand people mistaking emotions for mind. We haven't clearly identified emotions in our society, we focus mostly on the body and the mind. In school what did you do? You exercised in P.E. ( body), and you learned lots of things (mind). You took notes (physical) to remind you of facts and formulas (mind). You went to football games (body), and took tests and exams (mind). Our society doesn't clearly define the concept of emotions, although they're all around us, and just as important as body and mind.

It's even easier to mistake emotions for mind when the two work together - you hate somebody, and your mind can think of 10 reasons why you're right to hate them. You love somebody else, and your mind comes up with 10 reasons why they're so lovable. Emotions and mind often feed into each other like this.

Emotions Around Us

Many things around us involve emotions, in both positive and negative ways. A heated argument with another person involves your emotions - that's what makes it different than a true debate. In a debate, you can participate by arguing either one side or another, without getting emotionally involved - focusing on the facts, proofs and disproofs, etc. In fact, a good debater can take up a viewpoint different from what they actually believe, and argue it fully and completely, as if they really believed it! Emotions only get in the way, in a debate. An argument is a totally different thing! An argument is primarily emotion, secondarily mind. Have you ever been in an argument where the other person proved you wrong, clearly? What happened then? Did you relax and smile and say, "oh yeah, you're right, I realize that now." No! You probably got even madder, and stuck to your belief even stronger, whether you could still argue it or not! I'm not saying arguments are bad or good. I'm just saying that's clearly an emotional response, not a mental response. Have you ever seen somebody so steamed, they couldn't argue anymore? That's such a strong emotional response, it blotted out their mind from operating properly! I'm sure they wanted to argue and prove the other person wrong, but they could not - their emotions were too strong.

Examples of Physical, Emotional, Mental

For any given experience you can think of, there's usually a Physical component, an Emotional component, and a Mental component. Thinking about this in your own life can help you realize the distinction.

Example scenario: a person cuts in front of you in line at the grocery store.

Physical body says: they bumped my cart a little bit, it's at an angle; that's OK, I can correct it with a little pressure from my arms, there, I got it lined up again - very quickly, too.

Emotional body says: Rargh! who are they to do that to me! I was next, they took my spot! That's just wrong!! Did they not see me here? I feel small now. Did they intentionally want to hurt my feelings? Because they did; maybe it was on purpose! They're mean!

Mental body says: you can't get away with that! If I let this go, they'll just do it again and again! I'm not a pushover, and now I have to do something to prove it - to myself, and to them. I'm going to be late getting home by an extra 5 minutes, now. I was already in line for 5 minutes, that's 10 minutes waiting in line, plus they have a lot of items, that's another couple minutes. They probably brought their checkbook too. They better not talk to the cashier very much, and slow me down.

Then, interactions between body, emotions, and mind can happen. For example:
Mind - let me look at their face, see if recognize them.
Emotions - yeah, I want to see if I can tell their motives.
Body - (snaps eyes up and over to focus on their face)
Mind - they look dangerous, I better not say anything! Look at those lines in their face, I think they're a bad person, I think everybody who looks like that is a bad person.
Emotions - that's what a bad person looks like? OK I'll remember that. All people looking like that are bad & dangerous. Avoid talking to people who look kind of like that. Don't trust people looking like that. The orange vest and raggedy jeans they're wearing is part of bad and dangerous. The faint smell of cigarettes on their breath is bad and dangerous. Got it.
Mind - I just want to get out of here, but I'm stuck waiting in line. This always happens to me.

Who Treats Emotions

So if Doctors treat the body and Psychologist's treat the mind, then who treats emotions & feelings? Well, in a way, Psychologists do, to a limited degree. They often deal with the realm of "how that made you feel". However, in my opinion, they haven't learned the science very well yet. I say that because Psychologists are not able to heal emotional issues very fast. If someone has emotional issues, often it takes decades to get over them, going the Psychologist route. (And in the mean time the patient is accumulating a whole bunch more, just from the trials and tribulations of their life!)

In the past, visiting a psych was all you could do. For $100-200 per hour. Now there's alternatives such as TAT and EFT, two amazing emotional processes that can help a person get over many kinds of debilitating stresses and hangups in just a few days or weeks. The best part is, you can learn how to do it yourself! For free! Although, for serious issues, it's extremely useful to go to an experienced practitioner for guidance.

Identifying Emotional Issues

Society still doesn't have a good way of identifying all emotional issues. We don't understand that some things which look physical, are actually emotional in origin, such as food allergies. Most food allergies are emotional issues, not physical - even though the reaction appears 100% physical. I know this from personal experience, let me tell you. I was allergic to more foods that not, as a child. I had really bad asthma back then, and wound up in the hospital for multi-day stays a dozen times a year, at least, for most of my child-hood. (It must have been pretty tough on my parents, now that I think about it.)

One of my biggest food allergies was Wheat - I could not eat any kind of bread or pastry, nor even flour tortillas (but not corn tortillas - those are 100% corn which I could eat). Even cornbread is about half-wheat, so I was allergic to it. If offered a slice of apple pie, I'd eat just the filling, leaving the crust. Most other pies and cakes were totally out, for me - eating one piece would cause me about 18 hours of painful wheezing and loss of sleep, and exhaustion. At a fast-food restaurant I would order a hamburger, then eat the meat and vegetables, throwing away the two buns - yeah, it was like an involuntary protein diet! I was continuously underweight until about age 30.

My parents tried everything to heal these allergies when I was a kid. Allergy shots every week for many years did absolutely nothing for me. Allopathic and homeopathic treatments of every kind; special breathing exercises to strengthen my lungs; no luck. It wasn't until I was 30 years old that I was able to cure this allergy on my own. The cure? Accepting all people in the world as my friends, brothers, equals. Being OK with mixing in society, going to parties, not hiding out living alone. Talking to strangers. Not hating the mass of humanity, with all its limitations - instead seeing the beauty in all people, and truly accepting them in my heart. At least I think that's what did it - I was taking Ballroom Dance lessons at the time, and this was a natural attitude-extension of that, and I was cured. Don't be separate from humanity, even when your mind can think of a dozen reasons why people as a whole are "stupid". Of course everybody is stupid at one time or another, including you and me. It's human nature. Don't dwell and judge on that quality. Instead, understand everybody wants to be better and do better. Be optimimistic about humanity. Imagine future greatness for every single person you can see, when you go to the grocery store. Each and every one of them has a heart, no matter what their current look or attitude is. Truly except that for yourself, and you won't be allergic to wheat anymore, in my opinion. Now, that's not to say that everyone who hates people in general is going to have an allergy to wheat - for some reason it doesn't always work that way around.

The other big food allergy I got over (which no doctor could heal me of) was my Beans allergy. I cured that at age 42, by myself. I used TAT (Tapas Acupuncture Technique) to get over it. It took 2 days to fix it - I had been suffering with it for 40 years.

I'm not sure if you understand how bad my beans allergy was. The smell and thought of beans repulsed me. Eating just a few beans would cause my lips to swell up almost immediately, my throat to "close" (get itchy, and make it hard to swallow); my skin would start breaking out in hives (big welts) all over my body. The lips and throat thing would go away in a couple hours; the hives would stay for a couple of days. It also damaged my overall digestive energy; it cost more energy to digest a meal like that than I gained by eating it. I would often say "I'm never eating again!" after an experience like that. For 40 years.

I figured out later that I had a deep-seated painful experience related to eating beans when I was a small child. I was forced to eat them when I didn't want to by my parents, and I cried and cried. I remember it now; I didn't remember it for a long time. Following the TAT process helped me remember it, and when I treated that memory with the TAT process I could feel a shift in my energy field of my body - it's hard to explain, kind of like how you can feel a shivver down your spine, but this was a pleasant and less-intrusive feeling. Kind of like a glowing feeling that I didn't have before.

What other kind of "uncurable illness" do we have in our society today, which looks like a physical or mental illness, but which is actually emotional? What if those are easy to cure with emotional healing, such as with TAT or EFT? The inventor of EFT, Gary Craig, says "try it on everything" - which I also believe. It may not work. But more times than not, it does. For any science in its infancy, you have to "test the edges" and see where it takes you.

Observations

Many things in our society harms us emotionally, and as such, can have devastating effects physically and mentally. Wars, violence against fellow human beings, is a big problem. Dwelling on those things (via the news, computer games, etc.) can cause all kinds of "seemingly unrelated issues". My advice: don't do it. Don't get caught up in the bullshit fed to you by boatloads from the news. You don't need to know about the person murdered in a small town 3000 miles away from your home. It's unnecessary, it just harms you, lessens your happiness a little bit. Hearing it diminishes your belief in humanity, your willingness to see other people as your equals, as your friends. It's completely unbalanced. Try to find a way to have a balanced view.

Summary

So: a painful childhood experience, whether remembered or not, can implant a wrong belief in your emotional system, causing bodily rejection of something that's harmless as if it was dangerous. Your system is just trying to look out for you as best it can! Once you're an adult and over the specific issue, it's time to let it go. But how do we do that? How do we even identify it, how do we clean it once it's identified? Do we have the tools? How are we supposed to learn this stuff? The science behind EFT and TAT is still in its infancy. It really works, whether we understand how or not. But who is teaching this stuff in our schools? It's time everybody learned how to heal themselves of many "uncurable issues" like I did, and get help for the bigger things haunting them to this day.

I can still hear my doctor telling my mom when I was 10 years old, "his asthma may go away when he reaches puberty," which turned out to be untrue. I had to take medicine for my asthma twice a day every day since age 2, until age 33 - when I used EFT to get "more over it". Now I don't take any medicine at all. However, once in a while it flares up still, especially if I have a cold or flu; I still have an old inhaler which I use when that happens - maybe once or twice a year or so. EFT has given me a great release from the daily pain of asthma, not to mention the monthly cost of buying the medicines for it. So I guess the "free PDF file" I downloaded from emofree.com once upon a time has saved me a good amount of money and pain over the past few years.

I feel there is a giant cloud surrounding our world, filled with ugly thoughts and feelings. It's time to stop feeding that cloud, and to clean and disperse it. Do what you can - start cleaning yourself first. Don't accept thoughts and feelings into your system that harm you! Just stop it, and see what benefits you earn after just a few weeks. And go to www.tat.net and www.emofree.com for details on TAT and EFT and heal something in yourself that no practitioner in your life can, today.

I really believe you can do it.

2009-08-04T21:15:00.004-07:00

My friends and I just launched a new site to help people find unique and funny gifts, at http://www.uniquegiftstoday.com/
Our thought is to collect the best items we find on the net, and make them available for sale on this site at a discount from the full retail price.
Oh I know, you can find discounts for everything these days, but I think we provide a distinctive human factor in finding good gifts for men and women.

2009-04-17T18:53:00.003-07:00

My Memory

I wanted to talk about how we remember things. A lot of people have studied how memory works, there've been some discoveries about long-term versus short-term memory, and how it's an exponential curve; if you study something again before you've forgotten too much of it, it's more entrenched in your memory, it will last somewhat longer now; you'll need to re-study it at a longer interval to retain it, then a longer interval still; and so forth, if you want to retain it forever. A man developed a piece of software called SuperMemo, which understands this principle. You put information into it which you want to learn, and it knows to remind you at those proper intervals, to keep it fresh in your mind. The problem is, with all the information we want to keep track of in our lives, you'd have to keep studying constantly; never missing any study-sessions, because that would throw off your study-timing.

There's another factor to memory that I've never heard anybody discuss, and that's Joy.

When you are reading something with a deep sense of joy, you automatically retain it longer. With a high-enough level of joy, seeing something once can help you retain it forever.

I was reminded about this today when I found a web site listing all the Eamon adventures from the old Apple II days, around 1979-1980. I had so much fun learning to program back then, playing all the games I could get my hands on, and the greatest adventure game at the time was the Eamon series. My friends and I would play for hours, trying to explore and conquer the various adventures. And there were many - I'm sure I had at least a dozen different ones. The Eamon series was what I would consider the first open source project, long before the term "open source" ever existed - anyone who wanted could look at the code, and build their own adventures.

When I stumbled over this web site listing the Eamon adventures, their list had about 300 titles on it - way more than I remember. Reading those names, it hit me - the name of the Eamon adventure I created! "Birds Paradise" I called it. I searched the list, but my adventure wasn't there. I google-searched for "eamon birds paradise", but no luck - no results. Even though I gave out copies of my Eamon adventure to a couple of my friends, evidently it didn't make it far enough to be listed on these sites. And I got rid of all my old Apple II diskettes a long time ago.

But then I realized - I hadn't thought about Eamon adventures or anything related to them for at least the past 15 years. So how did I instantly remember the phrase "Bird's Paradise"? How could I have, without "refreshing" that memory every few years or so? My brain's exposure to that phrase was many-daily-occurrences when I was young, then a 15-20 year span of never thinking about it once. That breaks the "exponential pattern" that psychologists have been talking about recently.

Upon reading all those adventure names, every single name I recognized brought back a huge swell of joy in my heart, and a couple of them made me laugh. Those were such happy times in my life, I was in middle school and later highschool, with lots of free time to play with computers, practice typing, saving my valuable files onto floppy diskettes, talking to my friends about the things I learned, the games I played, etc.

So I realize now - a super-high level of joy can implant memories so strongly, they don't need to be refreshed to be retained. The joy I felt reading those adventure names brought the phrase "Bird's Paradise" back into my mind in a single second.

I'm sure there are many factors to memory, and we're learning more about it all the time.
Just remember - joy is a powerful factor in memory. I hope somebody studies this some day.

Book Review: Success by Torkom Saraydarian

2009-04-10T16:47:00.001-07:00

This is my review of the book "Success" by Torkom Saraydarian. This title is actually a small booklet that is a summary of the full book by the same author, "Dynamics of Success". I wanted to read this booklet first to see if I would like to read the full book. My conclusion is, yes, I would.

In Success, the author talks about true success - when you are successful both materially and non-materially (spiritually, socially, family, etc.) Sometimes people mistakenly think that having lots of money will solve all their problems. Having money certainly solves many problems, but being rich does not necessarily make you happy. True success is a balance between material success and non-material success - the best thing is to increase both of them in your life at the same time.

Now the author also talks at length about a third factor, which is the one I was most interested in: hindrances and obstacles that block a person from being successful. This booklet discusses many of those hindrances within us, which qualities and skills we need to overcome those hindrances, and some practical ways to acquire those skills.

This little booklet is an excellent outline of what it takes to achieve success in all aspects of life. Distilled knowledge like this is timeless. However I felt this booklet was a little terse, a little bit too short. I understand the book it was derived from, Dynamics of Success, goes into far more detail and has loads more stories from the author's life, which are as entertaining as they are educational. I already received my copy of the bigger book and want to read it next.

Overall, I'd have to say I felt uplifted and inspired by Success. It left me realizing that the knowledge of how to live a happy and successful life is out there, it's a known quantity. It's possible. It's worth learning about and working towards.

Torkom Saraydarian wrote over 100 books on a wide array of subjects before his passing in 1997. The back page mentions that not all of his books have been published yet - new books are printed each year.

These books are printed and distributed by the TSG Foundation at www.tsg-publishing.org. They've set up a fund to raise money to publish the remaining manuscripts. They also have an email based newsletter that's worth signing up for.

Check it out - they have books on sex & family, leadership, joy and healing, critical thinking, creativity, visualization, even a book called Hiawatha and the Great Peace. It's worth a look.

Experience - My Stuck Day

2009-04-04T11:00:00.001-07:00

Once in a while I have a day that doesn't go right, not at all, from beginning to end. It doesn't happen very often, but happened again a few days ago. I felt like my head was "under water" all day long, and I basically got nothing done at work all day. I can't explain it, really, but everything goes wrong that can possibly go wrong, and I just have to sigh and commit myself to "getting thru the day". Thankfully, the next day, things were completely back to normal.

Here's just one strange thing I experienced during my Stuck Day.

I needed to change the PIN number on the debit card I have with a credit union. So I drove to the credit union and walked in. Amazingly, there was no line of people to wait behind; it looked like I was the only person in the whole place, aside from the 3 tellers - a rare start.

I handed the teller my card and told her what I wanted to do. She took the card, typed some things into her terminal, and asked me to type my new PIN number on the separate keypad she has on the table. I did, and she looked strangely at her computer, then asked me to type it again, so I did. She typed something else and said, "it's not working, try it again," which I did; she said "the keypad's not working." So she had to hand me her full keyboard so I could type the 4 digits of my new PIN. And, of course, the system makes the customer type it twice for verification, so she had to take back her keyboard, advance to the next form field (I imagine - I couldn't see her screen), then hand the keyboard back to me so I could type it a second time, which I did.

"There," she said, and ran my card thru a card-device (which evidently reprograms the card with my new PIN #). She said I needed to sign a piece of paper related to this transaction, but her printer was out of paper or something so she had to get up, walk to the far back end of the room behind me, open a locked door, go in and fetch the printout, close and lock the door, bring it back, and hand it to me - I signed it.

Happy with my reprogrammed card, I thanked her, and left the building. When I got to my car I thought, "while I'm here I should test it out." There's an ATM right outside the front door embedded in the building, so I went over to it and put my card in, typed my PIN #, and selected the "show account balance" option. It told me my PIN # was incorrect and printed out a little printout telling me so, and spit my card out.

That's weird, I thought, maybe I typed it wrong. I tried it again. Same result - error message, printed piece of paper, card ejected back to me. "Glad I didn't just drive away," I thought, knowing how technology fails us way more often than it should. I went back inside, but my teller was nowhere to be seen. Another customer was already at the counter of the only remaining teller, now that it was close to lunch time, so I waited in line.

After a few minutes my same teller came out of a side office and said, "is anything wrong?" I told her my card didn't work with the new pin #. "That's odd," she said, logged into her computer, and took my card from me.

She asked the teller next to her about it - yes, she's following the right procedure. So she did the whole thing again - hand keyboard to me, take it back, hand keyboard, take back, walk over to closed door behind me, go in, get piece of paper, bring it back, I signed it. "Try it again," she said, so I went outside and tried it at the ATM again.

I pushed my card into the ATM and entered my new PIN #. This time it said something different. "Pin number incorrect. Your card is being held due to security reasons." Oh yea, this was the third failed attempt to use my card in a row, so the system wants to confiscate my card!

Except for one thing -- after the third piece of paper with an error message on it was ejected from the ATM, so was my card! It returned my card, even though it thought it was keeping my card! Sheesh. As a programmer, bugs like that are so frustrating for me, even when they're someone else's bugs. Especially when they're someone else's bugs - because that means there's nothing I can do to fix them.

So I took my card back inside. The girl looked at me with trepidation; I walked up and said, "it's still not working."

This time she got on the phone and called a manager or someone at another office. I didn't understand the conversation, but something about having to log into some service first, that she hadn't logged in to. She laughed, and told the teller next to her - she was locked out of the PIN changing service because she hadn't authenticated herself with the system, and now it was ignoring her, with no visible error message whatsoever!

Now, I have to stop here for a moment. As a programmer I understand about security; you don't always want detailed error messages spelling out the tiniest details of what was wrong, because if there's a hacker trying to do something they shouldn't, those error messages will only help them do their wrong deed. But, as a programmer, I know that when something is wrong, you HAVE to explain to the person that there IS an error, and what their next step is - which could be "call your manager/central office/whoever and report error 12345", or something like that. Error numbers are a good way to obfuscate specific issues in such a way that a hacker is not likely to know how to decipher them. This falls into the category of, "be nice to your legitimate employees so they can get their work done, but keep things confusing for intruders." Apparently the programmers of this system chose not to do that.

The manager or whoever it was at the other end of the phone apparently reset something for her and told her to try again.

Sigh.

She types on the keyboard, hands it to me, I type my PIN, she takes it back, hands it to me, I type my PIN again, she scans the card, goes to the locked room, gets the piece of paper, locks the door, brings it back, I sign it, I go back outside to try it.

Put card into ATM. Type new PIN #. Same error message. Same piece of paper. Card is ejected once again (without telling me it's confiscated). I go back inside.

Poor teller, I guess she's having as bad a day as I am! 45 minutes has gone by, at least, at this point; good thing there's only been 3-4 customers besides me during this whole thing.

She calls someone different on the phone, and talks for a while. I hear her say, "issue a new card?" and she finishes her conversation.

"We're going to issue you a new card," she says, and begins doing that. While I'm wondering how that's going to work, she does whatever you do to create a whole new debit card with my name & account & everything on it. I enter my PIN number once again, twice, and she fetches the actual new debit card and hands it to me. (I had no idea they can create them on the fly like that in just minutes).

I thank her for all the work she's been doing to help me today, she's been so positive and friendly, and I've tried to be as well. I've learned that the most important time to stay encouraging and friendly is when you're the customer, and the employee is struggling for any reason to help you. The ONLY way you're going to get the results you want at that point is to not piss them off and be all mean to them. I just tell myself, "what if I were in her position right now? I'd be praying that this customer isn't an asshole. Therefore, I won't be an asshole. I can choose to be, or not be, either way. Today, no." Because I'm just that good. :)

I walk out of the building, over to the ATM once again, and try my card again. Voila! It worked! The printout shows my account balance! That couldn't have happened if my PIN number didn't work. So I guess the system to change PIN #s is different than the one that creates new cards with initial PIN #s. But who knows.

I peeked my head back in the building. She was with another customer but her head snapped my direction - I gave her the thumbs up, and shouted "thanks again!!" and she smiled.

This was the least-crazy experience of my day.

2009-01-25T10:01:00.003-07:00

New Year's Resolutions

Now is about the time that most people start forgetting and giving up on their New Year's resolutions. I say, get out your list and let's refresh your motivation to get them done!

Hopefully you wrote down your resolutions. If not, get out a paper and pencil and write them down. Put it someplace you can check on it about once a month.

The important thing is, train yourself not to feel bad about the parts you haven't completed. Remember, you have a whole year to get them done! Take the first one from the list and write down the very next step you need to do to accomplish it. Do the same for the second one, third one, etc. These "next steps" must be simple, achievable actions you can take in a reasonable amount of time, say in 1 hour, or 1 day. For example, let's say your Resolutions are:

Lose 20 pounds
Stop complaining and being irritable
Make $100 from a passive income web site

None of those 3 are actions, specifically, that you can do. Let's figure out the very next action you can do on each of these:

exercise for 20 minutes with that new dancercise DVD I got for Christmas
catch myself the next time I complain about something, try to stop it in time.
write down that web site idea (from my head), research keyword demand & competition.

About exercise - you probably need to repeat it over and over, so scheduling a regular time of the week for it is a good idea. Maybe "exercise 20 minutes every Tuesday at 6PM" is a better next-step. Write it on your calendar, and make sure you really do it when it's time. Getting started is the hardest; once you've done it 4-5 Tuesday's in a row, your body will get used to the pattern and not complain so much. If you use an electronic calendar like the one in Outlook or Google Calendar, make it a "recurring" appointment.

About complaining - you trained yourself to complain and be irritated, originally. That means you can unlearn it as well. But it's work. The first few times you'll realize you just complained for the last 10 minutes and it's too late. But at least you remembered afterwards. Keep trying. You'll do the same thing 4-5 times in a row, and it will feel like you're not getting anywhere. Do Not Give Up! Soon you will catch yourself right at the end of a complaint-session, and you'll want to keep complaining because it feels right to you. Try to just stop it right then. Don't open your mouth or say another word for at least a minute. And stay conscious - don't let it start again 1 minute from now. Keep trying. Very soon you'll be able to stop it near the beginning, and soon after that, you'll catch yourself right when you were about to open your mouth - before it happens. It takes many tries to get to that point. What should you say, instead of complaining? Nothing. Your mind will be in complaint-mode, the best thing is to say nothing for a minute or two until your brain un-tangles and you can say something different without irritation.

About web sites - there are plenty of good ideas out there. Building the site is not the hard part; getting enough people to come to it and buy something is the important part. Because of that, research is vital before you even get started. For the same amount of work (building the web site) you can make lots of money, a little money, or no money at all. Which do you really want? Research is how you can predict this - you want to know how many people are searching for that thing, and how many other web sites (your competition) are trying to meet the same demand. Once you like what you see it's time to reserve the domain, pay for hosting and get started.

What Next?

That's fine for this week; but what about next? Next week, go back to your Resolutions list and write the new next-steps for each one again. You'll feel a sense of accomplishment already, because you began each one; you've made some progress; now it's time for the next step. Each week, or each month, go back to your list. Where are we at on each item? What's the next step? This is a highly effective way to complete any project - in your life, or at work.

The important thing is NEVER give up and NEVER feel bad about not accomplishing something. Don't think that you "failed": you just haven't done it yet. If you think you "failed", then you're giving yourself permission to stop working on it - that may relieve a little tension right now, but makes you feel the pain of failure for years to come. "not having done it yet" leaves the window open for future success. Think about it: If you didn't learn to ride a bike when you were 6, maybe you're going to learn it when you're 7. Or 8. Or 20. Or 30.

It's never too late.

Parts of Me

2008-12-21T13:09:00.001-07:00

I have a body, but I am not my body.
I know this because sometimes my body desires or does things I don't want.
How could we be one and the same, if there's conflict? Conflict requires two separate elements to oppose each other.

I have emotions/feelings, but I am not my emotions.
I know this because sometimes my feelings do things that hurt me, and are not in my best interest.
How could we be one and the same, if there's conflict? My mom used to say, "it takes two to tango".

I have a mind, but I am not my mind.
I know this because sometimes my mind is filled with thoughts that hurt me or distract me; that are not in my best interest.
My mind tells me how separate, how different, how much better I am from other people. But my heart says it's a lie.

My body, my emotions, my mind are my closest friends. We are inseparable. Since I can feel their pain and I can't get away from them, I guess I should do my best to keep them healthy and happy, but guide them to make the best choices and take the best actions. Sometimes that includes NON-action; like not dwelling on a painful or self-defeating thought; not letting someone else's words hurt my feelings; not exercising beyond my capacity.

My body, emotions, and mind hate me when I abuse them. I can feel it. If I yell at myself silently and say "you're so stupid," my mind says, "I'll show you ... I'll actually act stupid... so there!" I understand it; I'd probably do the same if I were in that situation. Nowadays, I try never to say those bad things that nobody can hear me say. What a relief.

My body, emotions, and mind think that they have limits, and remind me about them all the time. It's my job to push those limits, and show them they're more powerful than they think. One time my right arm "couldn't reach that next handhold" when I was at the rock gym. It said "don't even try, you can't do it." I was exhausted, but I forced myself to try anyway. I was actually able to grab that handhold! Surprise!

My body, emotions, and mind really like me when I take care of them. I can feel it. They're more cooperative when I have something new & unknown I must do. I need all 3 of them working right to be completely successful in the things I do in my life. If they trust me and do what I ask of them, together we can accomplish anything. I have a bigger vision than they do of what we're trying to accomplish in my life. I'm the boss, and they're still learning. I'm lucky, because they enjoy learning, most of the time.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently.

2008-11-08T16:55:00.004-07:00

Send Physical Greeting Cards from the Web, at Last!

It's such a pain to mail someone a real greeting card - we hardly ever do it anymore.
Yet, I have to say, I love getting a personal greeting card in the mail! Don't you?

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a web site you could enter people's names and addresses,
browse through funny cards from a huge list of pictures, and type a personal message?
Then, somebody else would print it with the words in your actual handwriting, stuff it, stamp it, and mail it for you?

Well guess what - they finally did it. There's a service you can sign up with to send real greeting cards in the postal mail, all from a web site! It's called SendOutCards, and it's a lot of fun.

If you want to be able to make people smile when they get your greeting card in the mail, I recommend this site: www.paulscards.com
When you sign up for a free trial, you can send up to 3 cards including postage for no cost.
Send a card to a loved one, then send one to yourself and see how cool it is to get one in the mail.

My family's sending all our holiday cards this way next month - between my wife and I, we have over 100 people to send cards to. Unbelievably, each card is cheaper than buying grocery store cards. So it's easier, quicker, and cheaper. What's not to like?

Once you log in, you have a contact manager that stores all the names and addresses of people you send cards to. I had to type in all my friends and family this time; I won't have to next year. I also entered the birthdays I knew of - the system will notify me about their birthday a week or so before, so I can send them a card on time. This is sweet, because its so easy to forget to send birthday cards when it comes around again. I won't look like a doofus for forgetting someone's birthday ever again.

Anyway, you should check it out. SendOutCards is also a multi-level business, so you can become a distributor and make money by recruiting other people to join up. If you do it right, you can make a good income from it. But you don't have to - you can sign up for a Retail or Wholesale account (wholesale gets better pricing on cards).

The holidays are coming up fast. Check it out.

2008-10-17T04:05:00.003-07:00

To Cure Cancer, Find the Cause of Cancer, the Origin

There is a new theory going around that I think has some merit, about the cause of cancer (the illness). Sometimes if you know the cause of something in your own life, you can find ways to deal with it or even fix it.

The theory states that the root of cancer is a highly painful emotionally charged experience that happened to the person in the past. The painful event happened, and some time later the person is suddenly diagnosed with cancer. Not every time, mind you, but apparently sometimes. For example, in the news recently there was an article about a woman whose husband was in the army and died in Iraq (or was crippled; I didn't read it fully). Some time after that, she came down with cancer, and her whole family just felt so sorry for her. If this theory is true, then it's obvious to me what "experience" the woman went through that caused her cancer!

So let's see now. If an emotional trauma is the origin of the cancer, then what could possibly cure it, or at least alleviate it? Why Emotional Freedom Techniques, of course! This is an amazing area I have been playing around with myself recently. I cured my own 40-year-old food allergies (blogged about here), and have nearly cured my Asthma now - for the first time in my entire life, I don't have to take medicine for it every day. I haven't had to take a puff of Advair for about 3 months, and I can't even remember where my Albuterol inhaler is (I used to carry it around in my pocket everywhere, in case I had an attack). I discovered that food allergies and Asthma are both emotionally rooted, not physically rooted. This is why medical doctors haven't cured them yet.

I highly doubt they're going to develop a physical medicine that can cure an emotional problem any time soon!

But when I read that emotional freedom techniques like TAT (www.tatlife.net) and EFT (www.emofree.com) can help with the emotional sides of Cancer, I thought, "oh yea, that makes sense, Cancer is such an emotional issue for the victim and their family, I can see how these exercises could relieve the emotional pain for everyone involved, while the person is treated and eventually dies." But then I read more about it. They're actually proposing that TAT and EFT could completely cure the Cancer!

Well, that bowled me over. I could hardly believe it. My wife has a friend who's bed-ridden and dying of cancer right now. Her children have been sent away to live with another family member (sister, I think?); she doesn't have much time left in this world. Had I known about this a year ago, we might have been able to help her.

I mean, think about it. How emotionally tormenting would it be to hear the news that you have cancer? Emotional shocks hurt your immune system, making the cancer even stronger. But TAT and EFT are two emotional exercise systems which might, possibly, cure Cancer?

I say, don't believe it until you see it. If you have cancer, isn't trying one-more-thing worth it? Aren't you willing to try anything to stop it? If someone close to you has cancer, wouldn't you want to recommend something that could save their life? Especially when there's no needles, no drugs, and no cost whatsoever? TAT and EFT are completely free. Go over to the web sites and download the instructions right now! I did, and I'm glad I did.

I'm currently using EFT to rid myself of some hangups I have related to calling customers on the phone and negotiating money deals. I run my own business and I am my own salesman, so it's important to get over ridiculous issues like that. EFT has improved my live tremendously, and my family has benefitted a lot from what I've done for myself with EFT.

I'm going to tell my various cancer-involved friends to try TAT or EFT. I mean, who wouldn't try it? And, if it works, let the doctors think they miraculously cured you. Maybe it will puzzle them, and inspire them to find a cure for Cancer.

2008-09-28T10:44:00.001-07:00

Discounts on Popular Shopping Sites

To save even more money on sites like Amazon.com and Overstock.com, I found this coupon search site http://coupons.moneyjibe.com/

There's a lot of other good info about personal finance, saving and making money at that site: http://www.moneyjibe.com/

Check it out.

2008-08-29T19:10:00.000-07:00

The Real Reason Flies are Hard to Swat

Just read this scientific article on why flies are hard to swat:

http://www.physorg.com/news139142949.html

That's all nice and good, but they're on the wrong track. As scientists, they're analyzing the mechanics of flies and fly swatters to a microscopic degree, completely missing the basic truth about flies. The truth which, if they only realized it, would enable them to swat flies nearly every time, over and over again, with little difficulty. I know because after I figured this out I was immediately able to swat flies in my back yard without missing, at least 9 out of 10 times. And I can still do it today.

My Fly Swatting Story

About 2 summers ago we had a dog which would poop all over the back yard. Our 12 year old son had the responsibility for cleaning it up, but if mom and dad didn't keep on him about it, sometimes an entire week's worth would be out there - a field of landmines for anyone walking around the yard. What's worse, our big outdoor trash can needed to be washed out pretty badly; let's just say, that summer we had lots and lots of flies in the back yard, and it was my "duty" to swat them before visitors came over to our house.

I'd get out there with my trusty bent-up wire fly swatter, running back and forth across the porch in the heat, trying to catch those little suckers when they landed on anything. I was missing a lot, hitting maybe 1 fly for every 15 swings, and getting really frustrated. They'd taunt me, landing on my forehead or my swatter arm sometimes just to piss me off.

Then I did something funny; I went to swat a fly, I began the motion, but something happened and I didn't move my arm (I think my elbow locked or something, it happens sometimes). The swatter didn't go anywhere near the fly this time, yet - the fly immediately flew away!

I had to think about that for a while. What just happened? No part of me or the swatter went within 3 feet of the fly, yet he took off as if the swatter just landed next to him!

My Discovery

A few days later I figured it out. Flies can feel emotions that creatures around them emit, just like any other animal! Flies are just really small animals. They're tiny, so their reaction times and movement are quicker, but they still have all the basic traits of animals. Larger animals like dogs and cats can sense when you are happy, sad, angry - from many feet away - and react based on that. Flies are no different. And, if your life depended on fleeing from a huge creature that's about to kill you, wouldn't you use your senses to know when to fly away too?

The Test

During the next few days' worth of fly-swatting, I watched myself: sure enough, I could feel myself emit a pulse of emotion right at the moment of swinging the swatter at a fly. Now, it wouldn't happen if I "pretended to swing", or "tried to hit NEXT to the fly"... I couldn't psyche myself out. I had to really be trying to hit a fly, and I would feel this quick pulse of emotion coming from me right as I committed to the swing!

What if I could suppress that emotional pulse?

I practiced and practiced. Man, it was hard to control that pulse. I tried thinking of something else while swatting. I tried doing math in my head while swatting. I tried staring at the paint that needed touching up on the wall while swatting. The problem was, I wasn't looking at the fly, so I couldn't really see what I was doing. Was I was missing, was the fly still flying away before the swatter got there? Etc.

I realized I just had to make my arm be an automaton - a robot arm. My arm must move when I command it, and all other parts of me must stay calm, cool, collected. No thought. No feeling. Just 1 movement of 1 arm, and nothing else.

I practiced and practiced. Finally I was able to do it once only. With more practice I could do it about 1 out of 10 times - but every time I could feel myself doing it right, I would hit a fly!

It was tiring. It took a few days of trying, getting mad, jumping up and down on my fly swatter, and trying again the next day. Thankfully we had no end of flies at that time - I could easily swat 40 a day and still have another 40 flying around the next day. I practiced and practiced, and finally got good at it.

Now, I can do it almost every time, as long as I'm focused on "nothing" while swatting. The fly won't move, because it won't sense the danger.

Learn About You

This is one of those "I learned something about myself" experiences. I learned that a lot of things we do every day have a complex combination of elements to them that we don't see. Elements of our physical, emotional and mental selves, all mixed together. Some of the parts are lightning-fast; most of the time we don't even sense them.

Can you think certain thoughts without feeling the related emotion, without changing the features on your face? That's called a poker-face, in some circles. Can you feel an emotion without moving a muscle? Can you make a movement without requiring a burst of emotion or thought? These are good things to practice.

I learned that it's possible to move without letting my emotion give away my movement. I learned to swing my arm at a focused location without sending out a "ping" of emotion right beforehand. I had no idea it was even possible.

It's like juggling: it sounds easy until you try it; after trying it, you're convinced it's impossible; after lots of practice you can do it almost without thinking about it. Teaching myself to juggle helped me learn how to drop things on the floor without the related emotional self-abuse that was part of my family heritage growing up (but I'll save that story for another blog post).

Our Back Yard Today

We have a different dog now, and the kids are older, so their chores get done more reliably now, and I cleaned out that trash can. We don't have the fly problem anymore - I haven't seen more than 2 or 3 flies in the back yard all summer.

But hand me that swatter and back up a bit - I still can take 'em down if I need to!

2008-08-01T18:51:00.002-07:00

I found some YouTube videos of a very wise man.
Here he speaks about what real freedom is (2 parts).
This is worth a look.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWjFsVKogr0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q3rn6RsjHk

Technorati Tags: freedom, video, real freedom

My videos - Creative Expression

2008-07-29T22:12:00.001-07:00

One of these days I'm gonna have to improve my studio for video, and record some of the ideas I have for music videos.

I have some music I totally love playing again and again, I think I could do it justice with my own video. I set up my video camera tonite and recorded about 30 mins of video of me just goofing around to songs I like. It's fascinating to see what movements and expressions look totally cool, and what looks lame. What looks intense, and what looks poser. I want to train myself to express only the cool movements the way a dancer does. Then with a green-screen backdrop and proper lighting, I could achieve my goals.
And I do have some awesome ideas.

Songs I Think I Could Do Justice

Good Charlotte - I Just Want to Live

Linkin Park - In The End
Linkin Park - My December
Linkin Park - One Step Closer
Linkin Park - Somewhere I Belong
Alien Ant Farm - Movies
Alien Ant Farm - Attitude
Assemblage 23 - Complacent
Smashmouth - Satellite
Smashmouth - Then The Morning Comes
Smashmouth - Walking On The Sun
Stabbing Westward - Save Yourself
Stabbing Westward - So Far Away
SR71 - Fame
Garbage - Untouchable

My vocal range actually matches the lead singers of Smashmouth and Alien Ant Farm really well; I love singing songs by those guys in the car when I'm driving. However, my videos would NOT have my voice, hell no - I'm way more of a dancer than a singer. My videos would have the original song, as is, with my visuals on top of it.

Songs I Love but Could Never Sing

Sneakerpimps - Low Place Like Home
Sneakerpimps - Spin Spin Sugar
Sneakerpimps - Post-Modern Sleaze
Sneakerpimps - Roll On
Madonna - Human Nature
Madonna - Vogue
Veruca Salt - Volcano Girls
Kill Hannah - Crazy Angel
Sophie Ellis Bextor - Get Over You
Sophie Ellis Bextor - Lover
Telepopmusik - Breathe
Portishead - Glory Box
Switchblade Symphony - Dissolved Girl
Barenaked Ladies - Another Postcard
Garbage - Push It
Garbage - A Stroke Of Luck
Garbage - Fix Me Now
Garbage - Milk

Hopefully someday (soon) I'll be able to upgrade my studio to record awesome videos, and mix them the way I want to, and post them on qik or youtube. I've been wanting to do this for a long time.

People Who Like Your Music, Near You

2008-07-24T22:19:00.001-07:00

I stumbled over Finetune.com (a really awesome music discovery site ala Last.fm and Pandora.com) which, when I typed in the band name "Garbage", and after playing one of their songs, it decided to play for me Dissolved Girl by Massive Attack (Mezzanine album).

Boy I hadn't heard that song in such a long time - and it was totally the right song for me in that moment! I don't know what it is, but sometimes I just need to hear a song that fits something deep inside of me; Triphop music often does that for me these days. Now I want to buy the album (I used to have it a long time ago, I think I lost it somehow; I can't find my mp3's of it anywhere).

As extremely happy as that song made me, listening to it with chills down my spine, I can't help feel bad (yet again) that nobody I know appreciates the music I like! Look. I'm a male, in my 40's, married, with 2 teenagers. My wife doesn't like Triphop music at all. My kids are too young to really get it. Most of my guy friends only like metal or rock or alternative, "radio" music as I call it. Nobody appreciates strong-female-lyrics music like I do. Nobody enjoys No Doubt, Garbage, Kelly Ali, Sneakerpimps (Becoming X), Portishead, Olive, Kill Hannah, that sort of thing. I believe I've asked everyone I know.

And yet, I know there's people all over the Internet who deeply understand these songs the way I do. I just don't know who they are - I don't want to be emotionally relating to some 16-year-old; that would be creepy. And I can't physically meet the person if they're in a far-off place or too young.

What I'm trying to say is - how do I find the people who like the music I like, near me?

There are so many social networking systems today, but most of them try to eliminate the borders and distance as a limitation. I'm all for that - don't get me wrong. But sometimes it would be nice for a bunch of adults with a common musical interest to meet for a couple hours at someone's house (with a good stereo system!) to listen to music they like together.

Meet up with Common Music Friends

For example, let's say I like Triphop and Alternative. I should be able to find a dozen people within 25 miles of me who like Triphop; and a similar set of 25 (different) people who like Alternative. Maybe all of us Triphop-25-mile-radius people talk together some how, and decide to meet at "John's" house for a couple beers and some great music! While listening we can talk about the deeper aspects of the songs, performers, bands, era, movies that used the songs, etc. That would be really cool.

And, maybe set up a completely different meeting with the dozen-different-people who like Alternative music. Perhaps some of the same people would be at both groups; perhaps not. Perhaps 1 or 2 songs/bands the group plays are ones I don't particularly care for; most of the songs will be ones I like though, so I don't care.

Solution - Location Based Social Networks

A whole slew of new social networking systems are coming out that are location-based in one way or another. Without going too much into it, check out this article: http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/brightkite/

I'm going to give Britekite a try. I know a lot of these location-based social network sites have failed. I will know a good one when I see it. Hope I see it soon.

A New Toy

2008-07-16T16:16:00.001-07:00

I just got a new toy to play with!

My friend Randy gave me a 1U rackmount PC - an older computer system he didn't want anymore. Except, it doesn't just have 1 PC in it... it has 2! Two completely separate motherboards, power supplies, memory, cpu, network/video/mouse/keyboard ports, everything.

Both machines are identical - AMD Athlon 1.2GHz with 1.5GB RAM (maxed out), with a small hard disk (1 each). He was running Win2000 on both of them. But I know the real potential of these boxes: Linux web servers! Windows has way too much overhead, especially with each next release that comes out. It makes you think you need faster and faster machines, older ones have to be discarded. But with Linux, you can install just the parts you need with nothing else; bloat cannot happen on Linux because of this. I can install just what it takes to have a web server and/or mail server and/or database server, then I can create virtual hosts, user accounts, remote-access, etc, all I want.

Randy says the box has overheating issues. I opened the box and checked it out, they only have 4 tiny 1.5" fans to move air thru the whole double-pc-system. The design causes the front mobo to overheat the rear mobo; I think I found a way to add 2 or 3 little 1.5" fans to fix it. And there's a couple other basic maintenance things to do on it (power cable breaking; needs bigger hd's)

People don't realize that a low-end home-pc for single-user use needs to be way beefier than a low-end web server with 2 dozen web sites on it. Drawing YouTube videos with audio is fairly large demand; opening 10 apps at the same time takes a lot of memory. Because of that, people's old discarded Windows PCs can actually be re-used as Linux-based web servers, if you know what you're doing.

The only downside is, once you have 5 or 6 of these low-end linux boxes running, you're drawing a lot of power (and generating a lot of heat) - more than if you just broke down and built a brand new server for $2000 that has the capacity of all of those systems combined, with far less power requirement and heat generation.

I love fixing up old computers and giving them a new purpose, allowing them to be useful again. It's fun.

Update on GOM player

2008-07-16T10:02:00.001-07:00

In an earlier post I mentioned I was switching my PC music players from Winamp to GOM player. Well, GOM player is not far enough along in its development for me to use it on a daily basis.

I have 3 issues with GOM player today: a bug in mp3 decoding, and a bug in sound-driver-playing, and buffering.

Some of my music (actually, a large portion of it) plays fine in Winamp, but flickers badly in GOM player. What I mean is, a little chunk of audio is skipped (like 1/10th of a second's worth), so the song "speeds up" by 1/10th of a second, which sounds horrible to the ear; it messes up the beat of the music, especially if you're trying to sing to it or follow it in your mind while listening to it.

I know there's a ton of different mp3 encoders that can generate mp3 files in a wide variety of ways, including CBR versus VBR differences; Winamp just seems to handle them all perfectly, today.

There's some bug in how GOM player talks to my sound driver, in a way I've never seen before. Let's say I load up an m3u file (which is a list of many mp3 songs to play, in the order to play them). GOM player plays the first song. Then, it switches to the second song, and begins "playing" it - except no sound is coming out of my speakers! I can see the little thumb/bar moving horizontally, showing that the music is "playing" from GOM's point of view, but I can't hear a thing.

If I grab the little thumb and drag it ANYWHERE (including right to the spot it was just at), the sound immediately resumes playing through the speakers! So, I have to baby-sit every song - grabbing the thumb and dragging it back to the beginning OF EVERY SONG, to get that next song to play. Frustrating.

The last issue is that GOM player isn't buffering up enough decoded music ahead of the play-point. I know this because when I start launching apps and opening windows, even IE windows, the music cuts out for fractions of a second, then resumes. The music gets choppy like that, over and over, until the CPU is back to "idle", then the music plays continuously again. Winamp never did that. I assume it's a buffering issue; perhaps Winamp is multithreaded, with one thread doing playback, and another doing decoding; the decoder must run fast enough to be ahead of the playback by a wide margin, for times when CPU becomes scarce. Then the playback can read its data from the buffered-up audio, play it, and not hiccup.

Really intelligent software will even do internal "low-water-mark" measurements to see how well the buffer size is working; if it ever runs out of buffer entirely between decoding and playback, it tweaks an internal setting so it remembers to keep a larger buffer next time! That way it can prevent hiccups in the future by learning about how this particular machine works.

Yes, I'm running this on a machine with not quite enough memory (512MB Windows XP; it's the max this poor box can have). But if Winamp can do it, I would like to think GOM player can, with the proper programming.

So, I guess I don't have a good music player after all.

Yes I've tried VLC media player, which is awesome for movies, but has a sucky user interface in my opinion. You can't display a playlist of upcoming songs you've queued up, such as when you open a m3u file which VLC player does understand just fine.

I'm going to look around some more.

The Future of Internet Video

2008-07-12T22:05:00.001-07:00

Some interesting events have happened in the past few days and weeks that are making me think about the future.

Event #1: Senator John Culberson's Qik Videos

We have an actual senator who carries around his Nokia N85 and video tapes a lot of what he does today, twittering constantly throughout the day, updating anyone who is interested about bills, people, votes, etc.

Except "video tape" is the wrong phrase. Let me see, what's a better way to say it? How does "live streaming video that shows up instantly on your screen" sound? Yes, he's using the Qik service to do that (www.qik.com), as are a surprising number of other people (non senators), such as Scoble and others.

With Qik, you (the viewer) can type messages in a chat window which the Senator can see, such as questions for the individual he happens to be interviewing! You have a voice in politics, in a sense, directly inside the happenings and events of what's really going on there. I've seen senator Culberson on many occasions repeat a question someone typed on the chat window, to the person he's interviewing. How awesome is that?

Senator Culberson spends a good amount of time explaining his technology to all the politicos around him who had to hire interns to handle their own email. I seriously hope they don't squelch this type of communication. I have learned a lot from the few weeks of watching the senator's postings on Twitter, and watching his videos. I've learned that a lot of the conspiracy inclinations people have are wrong; there's a real explanation behind something that sounds like a conspiracy at first.

I am totally for this technology.

Event #2: Twit Live 24 Hour iPhone 3G Vigil

Leo Laporte, foremost podcast entrepreneur and videocaster just had a 24-hour long live video session, on the day of the iPhone 3G release from Apple. He interviewed a wide range of popular knowledgable computer people in the industry, as well as regular folks who just bought their iPhones in various parts of the world including Canada and Australia. He fielded phone calls from anyone who wanted to call in and talk. He took bathroom breaks. His daughter came in to hang out for a while, then left.

He learned all kinds of useful iPhone information, together with us, his viewers, such as how to take a screen-snapshot with the new edition of the software available for all iPhones (hold the main button in and press the top button; the screen will flash; now go look in your pictures for the snapshot).

Watching his show was mesmerising. I had work to do but I couldn't stop. I left it running in a window while I worked on Friday, I probably watched about 3 hours of it in various doses at a time throughout the day; listening to it when I couldn't see it (as my active windows covered his video cast).

I worked on an emergency project until 11PM then watched some more. Sometime around midnight I had to go to bed; I forgot and left it running all nite.

What the Future will be like

I am imagining a cool future where everyone has their own 24 hour video display of themselves and all the cool things they're seeing. They're sharing it with all their friends, anywhere in the world, all of the time.

Yes you can turn it off or walk away from it when you want to; but don't you want to share awesome things you see or hear or discover with your friends? Especially if you go to the zoo, the park, a new city, on vacation, etc.

Cameras are really small and light now, and getting cheaper and better practically every month. I imagine we'll have some way of automatically holding a camera that can show our face, and another one pointing in the direction of what we're actually seeing. It seems stupid to have something strapped to your head; I think it can be done without going that far. Perhaps some technology like that used in the Matrix 3 movie, virtual-camera technology, which can reproduce a view in a place where no camera can possibly be (such as right in front of your face pointing directly at you). If it can be done in 2003 for millions of dollars, then of course it will be doable in the year 2012 for $19.95!

Perhaps we'll have a standard for "3 camera view" (1 pointed at us, 1 at what we're seeing, 1 directly behind us). By having all video viewers displaying these 3 images in a standard location and size in relation to each other all the time, it will become natural to comprehend the person's surroundings and view in your mind, by simply watching their video. It's like looking in a rear-view mirror in a car: it didn't make sense when you first learned to drive, but now you can tell where vehicles are all around you, you naturally know, when you drive down the road today. Your body adapted to the little rectangle of different-picture that is your rear-view mirror, and your mind converts it to the knowledge of cars slowly passing on the left, falling behind you on the right, coming up quickly behind you because you're in the fast lane not going fast enough, etc.

All these tiny video cameras need a computer of some sort to manage everything, and broadcast the composite video stream to the Internet, live. Perhaps in the future computers will be woven into the fabric of our clothes - how light weight and easy will that be to carry around with us. Perhaps ultralight solar cells, also in the fabric, will be the power source to these ultra-low-power devices.

Your computer will have a video-viewer application with live video streaming of everyone in your family, your friends, anyone who "friended" you. Your retired parents and college professors can see what your up to (ok, well, perhaps there should be some limits).

Crime Drops to Zero

Imagine what will happen if most people in society have this kind of equipment. This is more powerful than any handgun! Nobody can take advantage of you, lie to you, cheat you and deny it later; you have it all on video, and your close friends all witnessed it. It was recorded someplace for posterity, and can be replayed in a court of law at any time. "Do you remember the face of the man who robbed you?" No, I was scared; but I have it on video right here. "But the thief stole your video equipment!" "yes, but it was streaming live to the Internet; all my friends had a copy 10 milliseconds after it happened." Regarding the disappearance of that person last week; let's go back and watch the past 48 hours of video they recorded to see where they were last. Nice.

I think about these things a lot, and I am excited to see actual accomplishments being taken in our world that match what I know we'll have in the future.

All that having been said... I be jonezin for a Nokia N95 and an iPhone 3G, I need both. :)

Winamp Sucks Now

2008-07-12T11:41:00.001-07:00

My favorite music player for Windows, Winamp, sucks now. AOL has completely ruined it.

What Happened?

Ever since AOL bought Winamp, they've been slowly ruining it. They redesigned the layout to be totally cluttered - they decided where everything should go, and it's all welded in place in 1 big window. I don't want that. I want separate windowlets that I can resize and drag around in the position I want, let them snap in place. The way Winamp used to be.

Winamp is totally bloated now. On my low-memory workstation that I use for day-to-day things like music, news and twitter, Winamp now takes more than 30 seconds to launch. Oh, the window draws in about 5 seconds; but it's completely locked up for god-knows-why, for the remaining 25 or more seconds! It's ridiculous.

I double-clicked the title bar while playing a video, and BAM! It made the window so huge, it was literally 6 inches below the bottom and right sides of the screen! Nobody caught this bug? Double-clicking again did not reverse it: it minimized the screen to just a title-bar at the top of the screen, same width as before (6 inches off right side of screen). This is stupid. It took me 10 minutes to figure out there's no menu choice to fix the damage, I had to re-size from the upper-right corner of the window (after dragging it to the left a long way), to a smaller size, then drag the window back up and onto the screen again.

The behavior of the new features of Winamp don't feel like the old features - which leads me to believe the programming team has been replaced, and new people are working on it now. Code strangers. These newbies probably don't fully understand the code base or the reasons why things were done the way they were done in the past. They don't see the vision; they don't feel the same needs; they aren't working towards the same goals. This is purely conjecture on my part, of course, but having been a software developer since age 13, I know how to read between the lines. I think I'm right about this.

It's Time For Something New

So now I am going to switch music players. I've heard GOM player is a good one, I just installed it a couple days ago. Though it's focus is video, it can play MP3's just fine. I dragged and dropped an "m3u" file into GOM and it loaded all the songs perfectly - that's good. I don't think it can do ripping, though, so I'll have to find another good quick-loading ripper. GOM player is fairly new, it hasn't had time to get bloated and over-feature-laden. Everything it has works right, and it has new features that other players like VLC player don't have (like predictive file loading).

Music is really important to me. Music I like really energizes and uplifts me, I can work harder and longer and have way more fun doing so. Music I don't like really hurts me.

Music As Medicine

Music is a medicine for me - if I'm stressing out about certain things, I have specific music that heals my emotions related to that pain. Difficulty with my aging dad, feeling insecure and small after visiting him? Linkin Park heals that quite well!

When I was single, problems with dating and women would be fixed somewhat by strong, sexy female vocalists - Garbage (Shirley Manson) is my all-time favorite; good trip-hop like Sneakerpimps (the early years with Kelly Ali); Morcheeba; No Doubt; Pink; Madonna.

Good Programming Music?

Programming and music is an interesting topic. There's 2 completely different things that programmers do - designing and coding. For designing, your brain is fervently trying to create a new design: how data shuld be stored, how it should interact, how a screen should look, how to simplify what you already have. This is difficult work. For design work like this, I work best in absolute silence. Leave me alone; no phones, no music, no people; I don't exist, only the problems to be solved exist, and I'm completely focused on that and lose track of time.

Coding is completely different. Coding is the equivalent of "automatic pilot" for me. I know the plan in front of me of what needs to be done, since it's already designed. I just need to implement the design. Make it happen in program code, the way I want it to. It's easy, in a sense, after 20+ years I have it down to a science. I'm only limited by how fast I can type, and I can type extremely fast. For coding, I totally thrive with music. But it has to be energy music - Greenday, Alien Ant Farm, techno (Crystal Method, U2's Pop album, Run Lola Run soundtrack), Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sum 41, Assemblage 23, Psykosonik, Hednoize.

Music Has a Powerful Effect

Music has a powerful effect on my emotions, as well as my mind.

Programming does not involve the emotions at all - too much programming is very unbalanced, I've figured that out, because my poor emotions needs a life too. Family, wife/girlfriend, cats, dogs ... these all help a person's emotional self. Going out in nature and seeing beauty helps. Going to a play or opera, one that you connect with and uplifts you, can really help. Getting out and talking to a close friend can really help.

I know that as a human being I have 3 parts: my physical body (it needs exercise and good food and water); my emotions (needs love, connection with other people); and my mind (needs to solve problems and figure things out, think positive thoughts). And that's not including my spirit or soul, which also needs to be fed (helping others, planning my future success in life, love of God or nature, praying or meditating, making a connection with something higher inside of me).

Conclusion

I love how PCs can hold pretty much every song on every album in my music collection. That means my laptop can carry all my "medicine" wherever I go.

I guess everything in life has its beginnings and endings.
Farewell, my old Winamp, I'm going to miss you.

No More Bruises with Stop Bruise

2008-07-08T00:56:00.001-07:00

I found a cool new product called No Bruise: http://www.stopbruises.com/

The idea is, if you just bashed a part of your body (whacked your elbow on the door,
banged your shin on the coffee table, stubbed your toe, etc), and you're sure
it's gonna bruise, you can prevent it by wiping this product on the damaged area
as soon as possible. If you get to it fast enough, you won't get a bruise,
and it won't hurt nearly as much as it would otherwise.

Sounds crazy - but it really worked for me.

This thing comes as a box containing a bunch of little medicated pads in thin foil envelopes. Sort of like those towelette packets at the fried-chicken place, only sturdier;
and they smell way different.

It's some kind of all-natural remedy. The box says it can "reduce and prevent potential
swelling and discoloration of the skin." I found this to be true; I whacked my wrist
on a door knob really hard a couple days ago, and automatically grabbed it with
my other hand. I could feel a bump forming. As a software developer,
my hands are fairly important to me for typing.

Then I remembered I had just gotten a box of this No Bruise stuff about
2 weeks before, on a friend's recommendation.

I immediately ran and got the box from the cabinet, opened 1 envelope and
wiped the pad on the damaged area. It actually felt better right away, but I wanted
to see what would happen later. I'm sure I hit it hard enough to cause a bruise.

Sure enough, the next day it was still a little bump; no new swelling, and no
discoloration whatsoever! It still hurt a little when I touched it, but not nearly
as much as it did the day before. I could fully use my hand when typing that day.

Anyway, try it for yourself and see. The thing is, you gotta have
some of this on hand right when you hurt yourself for it to work.
If the bruise has already formed, it's too late.

I haven't seen this product in any stores yet; if they're smart, they'll sell it
at grocery stores, sporting good stores, and Walmart.

I think No Bruise is going to be popular; anything that can stop bruises completely
should be made available to everyone - sports enthusiasts, especially.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Bank of America - Unending Problems

2008-07-07T15:08:00.001-07:00

Bank of America - Unending Problems

I don't like to write negative stuff and bring my readers down, but sometimes when my outrage is too high, I have to get it off my chest. I believe this post is in the public interest, so I decided to publish it. It's about my experiences with the worst bank I have ever used, Bank of America.

Many years ago I opened my very first business banking account for the very first small-business I ever held. I chose to use Bank of America, at the time they had a nice deal for small business accounts (I forget the details). I was happy to open a personal savings, personal checking, and business checking account with them.

I mean, a bank is a bank, right? They assign you an account number, which you use to identify your account with their bank. You can deposit money in and withdraw money out of your account, with that number.

You get a bunch of printed checks - you can fill one out, sign it, and hand it to someone as payment; when they take it to any bank, they can transfer the money from your account to theirs. You also get a debit-card, with which you can perform credit-card transactions to pay people, or debit-transactions to withdraw money. All banks and credit-unions are the same in this respect.

Every month, the bank mails you a statement of all activity that went on with your account. This helps you balance your checkbook, keep track of deposits and withdrawls, and verify there's no fraud going on - every withdrawl listed is something you expected.

All fine and dandy. Until the month after I moved.

Then the Problems Began

I moved, so I had a new street address. I went to the bank and gave my new address to the overly cheerful BofA teller. She joyfully typed it into the computer. But at the end of the month, I didn't get my statement in the mail.

This is weird, especially considering I forwarded my mail at the post office from the old address to the new one, and I had already been receiving some mail that had been redirected from the old address to my new place.

When I went to the bank to ask about it, a different (but equally ecstaticly overjoyed) teller said it had been mailed, she didn't know why I didn't get it in the mail. "Would you like a copy of the statement right now?" she smilingly asked. I said Yes. "Should I deduct the $8.00 fee from your account?" WHAT? $8 to print a 1-page statement for my tiny business that's not profitable yet? Yep, for business banking that is the cost (price accurate as of the time this occurred, probably 12 years ago). OK, whatever, I paid it because I just wanted my statement.

I had her re-enter my new address, which she was completely happy to do.

Next month - no statement.

Each time I'd ask at the bank, I got lots of excuses about time-delays updating the database, and assurances that it was fixed now.

Each month my statement didn't come.

Each month I went to the bank in person, and spent $8 to get my statement printed out.

I checked with the post office again, nothing wrong at their end.

This went on for about 4 months. I made phone calls to various departments at the bank, all to no avail. Everybody either told me "it looks like the right address is already in the computer," or "it will take 30-60 days for the change to take affect."

Now, I am a programmer and database designer by trade. You can't tell me it will take 30 days for data to be updated in a database. What the hell kind of database takes that long?!?

Oh sure, maybe there are multiple databases tied together, far, far apart. Using standard networking technologies today, why would that take more than 30 seconds to copy data between servers located around the world? From what I understand, banks don't use the Internet to transfer data internally, they use direct-connect lines that are even faster than the Internet.

Let's look at it another way. When I opened my account, I gave them my address only once. It went into the first database just fine. It was distributed to all the other databases that needed it in less than 30 days. I know this because I received my very first statement in the mail within 30 days of opening the account! So why should it take more than 30 days to re-distribute my new address to the same servers using the same distribution method? How can that be?!?

I wasn't receiving the statements, which means it was not being sent to either the old or new address, from what I can tell. How is that? If postal mail is stamped "do not forward," which many banks do, that's their feedback-loop to know when the address they have for a customer is no longer the best one. This way they can obtain the new address. Maybe BofA uses that technique; I don't know. If they do, they should have received the bounced statement, corrected their database, and re-sent the statement to the new address. That would result in a delay, from my viewpoint, but I would eventually have received it.

Let's suppose they do it wrong, and correcting the database does not result in re-sending the statement. I would have "lost" the first statement, then received the very next month's statement at my new address. I would then have only missed 1 statement, not 4 in a row.

Shouldn't a bank have the best technology available, to provide the best service to their customers? Don't banks value the accuracy of data, don't they want to keep it current? Don't banks MAKE MONEY based on accurate data, being a financial business and all? Can't they spend a little of that money upgrading their computers to perform properly for however many accounts they have in however many states they exist in, in the United States? If my home Linux-server-and-database, which costs less than $1000 to build, can exchange data quickly with other systems in under 1 minute, why can't a big bank mainframe do it?

That Was the End of That

After about 4 months of paying $8 for a replacement statement, I couldn't take it any longer. I went into BofA and closed all my accounts there. I moved everything to a new upstart bank named Compass Bank which promised Free Checking, even for business accounts. That was new and amazing at the time; since then most banks have adopted this policy, but Compass started it all. I do not work for Compass, I'm just a happy customer of theirs. And I'm sure there's other banks equally good out there today.

Fast Forward To Today

Why am I writing about painful old banking memories right now? Because the were all stirred up by my visit to BofA today.

I didn't want to visit BofA today, but I had to. I needed to send some money to someone I know who has an account there. The fastest way to transfer money between banks is NOT electronic (strangely enough). It's faster to drive to bank #1 and withdraw cash, then drive to bank #2 and deposit the cash. I won't write any more about how completely stupid this is in the year 2008 - that I have to physically visit both banks to perform a high-speed money transfer - I'll save that for another day.

So, after withdrawing some money from the first bank, I drive over to BofA and walk straight over to the little writing table with deposit slips on it. There isn't just 1 kind of deposit slip, oh no. There's 2 kinds: one for local deposits, and one for out of state deposits. What? I have to know what state they're in? I have their account number and the routing number, that should be all I need.

I start filling in the out-of-state deposit slip, because I know the person lives in Texas.
There's little boxes for nearly every state in the USA - separate box for each state - I'm supposed to mark what state they're in. This section literally uses up the upper 1/4 of the form.

I fill in the account number, person's name and the date, but don't get any further.

The teller lady at the front isn't helping anyone at the moment so she calls me over, which ordinarily would be annoying (if I knew what I was doing, I'd want to be left alone until I finished writing my deposit slip). So I went over to her counter and gave her the money to deposit, and the deposit slip, as she's smiling a big smile at me.

"What state was the account created in?" she asks me cheerfully after glancing at the form.

"I have no idea what state the account was created in. It's not my account. I'm trying to deposit money in someone else's account. The person lives in Texas," I reply.

She types on the computer and puts a mark in the "Georgia" box on the form (which I would never have guessed), and says, "what's the birthday of the person on the account?" What? What's their birthday? How am I supposed to know that?

I tell her, "I don't know, July something. I shouldn't have to know their birthday to put money in their account."

I imagine she was asking that for verification reasons, to make sure I didn't give her the wrong account number. It's easy to mis-read or mis-write numbers - we don't want the money going in the wrong account! But isn't the full name of the person enough verification? I wrote their full name on the deposit slip. This person's name is so unique, there surely is nobody else in the entire USA with the same name; nor, possibly, in the world.

I say to her, "I have the routing number and the account number. That should be enough to uniquely identify the right account." She says, "we're not doing a wire transfer, so I don't need the routing number." I say, "OK, so the account number is all you need to deposit this money."

"That and the state they created the account in," she adds. "See here, at the top of the deposit slip, you can check the box of which state the account was created in... unless your friend doesn't want you to know that," and she puts away the deposit slip.

At this point, just as she's handing me my deposit receipt, I can't take it any longer.

"Look," I say, "you just told me the account number is all you need." "Yes," she says, "we can look up the state for you from the account number." I say, "no other bank I've ever used has ever asked me what state the account is created in, nor should they ever have to. They never ask me the birthday of the person holding the account. The account number has all the info you need. Please tell your management to stop asking people what state the account was created in, because you don't need to ask that question. Do not make your customers do more work than they have to. If you can look it up, then you should always look it up, and stop asking. Please tell your manager to print new deposit slips that don't have little boxes for every state in the union on the top; it's completely unnecessary and confusing and frustrating for your customers."

"OK, thanks," she said, with a worried look on her face, at which time I turned and walked out.

I've been around long enough to know how businesses work. She'll probably gossip to her coworkers about that weird customer, to relieve the pain she felt from our conversation. I never intend to cause pain for anyone, in my life; but sometimes its unavoidable. There's probably a 10% chance she'll actually mention my suggestions to her boss. There's absolutely no chance that her boss will do anything about it, or if s/he does, there's no chance their higher-ups will actually listen and respond. I know this bank will never change their deposit slips, at least, not as a result of my efforts today. Only if a VP high up the chain makes it a new policy corporate-wide, will the deposit slips change.

My Conclusion

BofA has serious issues (many of them) which cause their customers lots of pain and agony. Their policy of how they deal with this has always been "be more friendly and smiley," rather than actually fixing the problems. This makes me doubly-angry when I detect it. And I always sense it with this bank. Why fix the problems when you can just sweet-talk your customers more? After all, PR is more important than quality, right? At least, in my experience, this has been BofA's underlying policy for the past 15 years, at all branches I have ever visited in Arizona - and it really pisses me off.

Do you use Bank of America? You're welcome to, if you want. I'm sure many people have had acceptable experiences with it, or the bank wouldn't exist today.

But I'm sticking to my promise: I will never hold any BofA account again for as long as I live. They don't deserve my money ever again.

OK, I feel better now.

2008-06-12T15:44:00.006-07:00

Strange Car Tire Day

Tuesday was a very strange day. I dropped one of our cars off at the shop for new tires. Originally they thought it would take 20 minutes, so I planned on waiting for it, but by the time I got there at 2PM they estimated a 2 hour wait, so I walked home. It's about 2 miles, which isn't too bad.

On my way home I reached the major street intersection between the car shop and my house, and noticed thousands of nails in the road, this weird kind with a blue plastic ring on each one, causing most of them to stand with the point facing straight up! It was a nightmare of tire-popping evilness covering perhaps a 30 square foot diameter from the empty cardboard box that must have fallen out of the back of some contractor's pickup truck. This mess covered about a lane and a half of this 3-lane-each-way road.

As the only pedestrian in sight, I felt a special duty to help pick these things up. I would NEVER want to drive my car over such as mess; how could your tires not pick up at least 3 or 4 of those? How long had this been here, with people driving over it? (It looked fairly recent to me).

There was no way I could pick all these up in my hands and throw them to the side of the road; it would take an hour or more. Looking around quickly I spotted one of those home-made signs on a wooden stake, "make money fast, with realestate!" or something. These signs are everywhere, and technically they're illegal, but nobody ever does anything about it.

I grabbed the sign and yanked it out of the ground - looks like a good shovel to me!

So I started shovelling mounds of these nails as fast as I could, in between sets of traffic trying to drive by; waving oncoming traffic in my lane over to the next lane, so they wouldn't run over them any longer.

It took about 3 light-changes to get the vast majority of the nails scooped onto the side of the road. Of course, some of the nails (pointing down) had been driven into the asphalt, and wouldn't shovel very well. I kept scooping at them with my makeshift shovel, but a few just wouldn't budge.

I kept hoping a police car would stop and help out, they're usually good for things like this, but none ever came by. From the 110 degree heat, I was feeling weak and a little sun-stroked (this happens quickly in Phoenix AZ), so I figured what I had done was good enough; there couldn't be more than 5 or 6 of these damn little things in the street anymore. I stumbled through the intersection over to the nearby Bashas to get a bottle of water and an iced coffee.

After that I walked home.

Now it's 4PM. I call the car shop, but since one of their employees just quit earlier that day, they're a little back-logged, our car had just gone up on the rack for the tire change. "Should be done in 20 minutes," the guy assured me, which I knew meant 45 minutes. You know how that works.

But I had a problem - I needed to be somewhere at 4:30, and it will take 10 mins to get there, and my wife and I only had 1 car left at home. She agreed to be dropped off at the shop and wait for our other car to be finished. So I dropped her off, and went to my appointment. Everything worked out - or so it seemed.

The next morning I go out to the garage for something, and notice one of the front tires of our brand-new-tire-car seemed a bit low. "That's odd, maybe they didn't seat the tire properly," I thought. I had instructed them to put the 2 new tires on the front of the car.

Then I looked at the top of the low tire, and what did I see --

There was a nail plunged cleanly straight into the tire; the blue plastic ring was flush with the outside tread.

Yes, my wife had driven back the same way I had walked, through the "evil nails intersection", and somehow picked up one of those nails, even though I had scooped every one I could out of the way, two and a half hours earlier!

What are the odds of that?

The only good news is, they guys at the shop screwed up and put the new tires on the back of the car, not the front. The nail had punctured one of our old tires. That was a relief to hear, that we didn't puncture a brand new tire 2 hours after purchasing it; the bad news of course, it cost a little money to get the puncture fixed on a non-warranty tire.

So, I guess you could say I picked up 1000 nails out of the road, that day; but my wife - she picked up the last one.

2008-04-11T15:26:00.008-07:00

The Best Mailing List Manager

I've been using an email Autoresponder for some time now, which is the most awesome mailing list management system I've ever seen. It has all the features I've always wanted and more. It's web-based and very easy to use.

It's the Aweber Autoresponder System. Once you subscribe, you can set up as many different mailing lists (autoresponders) as you want. My favorite feature is the ability to schedule emails to go out at aspecific time and day in the future! I can "queue up" a bunch of messages and have them sent one-per-week if I want. I can log in at any time and edit the ones that haven't gone out yet, see when my "queue" is going to run out, and schedule new ones.
I put a link on my web site to encourage people to join the list - and I can send a link in email, to people I know who would enjoy the lists.

You can compose messages in graphical-format or text-format on the web site, or you can do what I do - compose them with your own system (a macro-to-HTML language I invented, in my case), and then cut-n-paste the HTML right into the message window. I put both HTML and text in my messages, for people with older mail-readers - in case they can't receive rich media messages (or choose not to).

Anyway, it's a great system - if you've ever considered maintaining a mailing list of highly-qualified individuals for your business, you should check out Aweber.

You don't have to commit right away - sign up for their free demo first:

AWeber Demo

Read More about Unlimited Autoresponders

2008-03-23T13:40:00.004-07:00

My son found a really fun game that's free on the Internet - Disney's Pirates Online (www.piratesonline.com). It follows roughly the story line of Pirates of the Carribbean, the movie trilogy. My family's been playing it for 3 days now, it's so much fun.

You can create an account for free, and play the story line, up to a certain point.
You have to download and install an application, which talks over the Internet to the game. The installation takes a while, but downloading all the basic data for the islands and seas and characters takes a REALLY LONG time, the first time you start playing. I'd say from beginning install to actually being able to run around in the game for the first time, it probably took 20 minutes or more.

You start out a beginner pirate, and have to perform various tasks for various people around the town you start in, and are awarded various things including a pistol. You learn how to sail a ship (you start with a sloop), and can fight the Navy ships on the high seas.

There are many things that makes this game so much fun. First, you are free to wander anywhere in the world, or over the seas, to various islands like Tortuga, Port Royal, and many others. Other players cannot directly hurt you, so there's none of the "kill the noob" attitude in this game. If you die, you end up "in jail", and have to kick your way out. You don't lose the stuff you're carrying when you die, and there's no limit to how many times you can die.

Second, this is a MMORPG - you can see many other real players running around doing things too. You can become "friends" with them, and if they accept, then you can:
* whisper to them (private chat)
* teleport to them, anywhere in the world
* join their "crew" - sail on their ship with them.

When you're sailing in a ship, there are different roles that you can play. On the basic sloop, you can steer the ship, or man the left or right cannons. (If you're all alone, you'll want to sail the ship - you can still fire broadside cannons left and right). But the best thing is when you have 2 other "crewmates" on your ship - you can steer, and they can fire the extra cannons left and right, to terrorize the Navy sea ships!

Not only can you blast away at the enemy, you can even board them (by firing grappling hooks at them once you've weakened their ship to a certain point), and battle on board their ship with swords - if you defeat them, you swing on ropes back to your own ship, and theirs sinks. You get lots of booty from their ship that way.

The more you practice with sword, gun, and cannon, the better your skill level becomes, over time. You do more damage, and can focus your skill building on whichever skills you want, within that type. There are combination attacks, which you can become good at with practice.

All the ships and people in the game have their names printed above their heads, and colors are used to indicate extra information. Enemy NPCs have their skill level displayed overhead too, so you can avoid ones that would completely kick your butt if you attacked them. Enemy ships show what kind of ship they are, and their origin (Navy, East India Trading Co, or other players). The font size is smaller the further away they are - Disney did a really good job with how this all works.

There are enough people playing this game that there are many servers now - after logging in, you should choose the same server as your friends, so you can see them in the game. A server is simply a computer that's up 24 hours a day, on a high-speed Internet connection. One server computer, and the Internet connection it's on, can only handle so many players at one time. Besides, your computer has limits, too, of how many players you can practically track and display on the screen; more than a certain number and it will start lagging really bad.

Which brings me to some of the downsides if this exciting game. Lag, being the biggest one. If you're using wireless, make sure you have a strong connection, and that the connection is not broken from time to time - that completely kicks you out of the game, which is frustrating, especially if you're in the middle of a battle on the high-seas with your crew - you person disappears, and they have to make due without you until you can get back online!

There are a number of bugs in this fairly new game, however all the bugs I've seen are fairly harmless. There are some out of control flames, that appear randomly in different spots on one of the islands. Sometimes you see them burning in the middle of the sandy beach, or partly out in the ocean. Other times they're in the center of a building, on a table in the pub, etc.! Luckily the flames don't harm you or anything, they're just there looking strangely out of place.

Another bug is really an interaction between Windows and the game controls. One of the most important controls is SPACEBAR, which is how you open doors, search crates, dig in the ground, kick the bars of your jail cell, etc. If you ever press SPACEBAR 5 times in a row, Windows thinks you're trying to invoke Handicapped Mode, and temporarily suspends your full-screen game to tell you that you've just turned on this special mode! You have to click "cancel" to go back to the game.

Once in a while the executable application of the game will crash, and kick you back out to Windows, completely exiting the game. This rarely happens on my laptop, but always seems to happen on my wife's machine about every 15 mins or so. We're both running WinXP.

But overall, the game is totally worth playing. It really sucks you in, and when you start hitting the limits of the storyline for free players, it makes you want to pay for the full version of the game. You cannot upgrade to better ships until you pay for the game. You also can't have certain special weapons (and even voodoo), until you pay for the game. With a sloop you can only have 3 people on board - my family has 4 members, and this causes us to want to upgrade, just so we can get a better ship that can fit all 4 of us on the high seas. We'll probably subscribe 1 or 2 of us pretty soon.

The music and sound effects really set the mood, too, and aren't at all irritating with repetition like many other games I won't mention.

If you enjoyed any of the Pirates of the Carribbean movies at all, for any reason, I highly recommend downloading and playing this game. My whole family is playing it this weekend. It's a blast.

2008-03-21T10:01:00.000-07:00

My father-in-law's Hyundai Elantra's headlights were pointing down too low, and he asked me to adjust them when he was visiting our house last night.

My father-in-law came to visit us last night. He mentioned his Hyundai Elantra's headlights were pointing down too low, and he asked if I could adjust them for him. So I got the manual out of his glove compartment and found the section on headlight adjusting.

The instructions say to look for a hole in the top of the radiator-area near each light, you can supposedly put a phillips screwdriver in there and twist to adjust the vertical alignment of the headlight. I tried it, but it wouldn't work. So I shined a flashlight down in the hole, and I could see what they were doing.

There's a little gear-like thing that's supposed to mesh with the phillips screwdriver prongs, so that when you twist, it rolls the gear, which adjusts the headlight. Well, it doesn't work. I tried a variety of bigger and smaller phillips screwdrivers, no luck. I even tried a very thin standard screwdriver, trying to "flick the teeth" of the gear down in there, that didn't work either.

I have adjusted headlights in other cars before, and the way you usually do it is go in behind the headlight (as if you're going to change the bulb), and look for some kind of thing to twist as an adjustment. So I looked down in back of where I had been trying to adjust the headlights, and there it was! The normal headlight adjustment!

It's recessed somewhat, so you have to use a thin-standard screwdriver on it. You can completely bypass that whole weird gear-thingy, and directly adjust the thing which raises and lowers the angle of the headlight.

The one on the right-side is harder to access because the battery's over there, and there's a plastic cover covering the whole area. The little plastic connectors holding that cover in place simply pop off, when you pull up on the cover, so you can re-attach them again when you're finished. (It feels like a cheap design, one of the plastic connectors broke off when I did this, so be careful).

The rest of the instructions were somewhat accurate, about trying to adjust the height of the projected light to the same height as the lights are physically installed on the car itself. I could not understand their instructions for horizontal alignment, but it already looked good to me, so I left that alone.

2008-02-08T23:48:00.000-07:00

Wrapping Presents - When the Paper is Too Small

Here's a trick most people don't know about. What can you do when you're wrapping a rectangular present with the last scrap of wrapping paper, which is (of course) too small?

Here's the trick: rotate the object you're wrapping and try folding the paper diagonally. This makes better use of the wrapping paper (less waste - less paper overlapping other paper), so it often works.

Voila!

2007-11-30T13:46:00.001-07:00

Getting Over My Allergies

Since the age of 2 I've had a number of food allergies, including being allergic to beans. All kinds of beans. If I ate some beans (with or without knowing it), my throat would swell up and feel scratchy and very uncomfortable; I would get a weird pressure in my esophagus and stomach, and feel itchy all over - for many hours, usually for the rest of the day. I would feel drained of energy; like with an illness; often accompanied by a faster heart-rate.

No doctors of any kind have ever been able to make an impact on my food allergies. My parents tried everything when I was a child, and as an adult, I had pretty much given up on finding a cure for it.

Until 3 weeks ago.

Something in me just felt like it was the END of my beans allergy. I'd had enough, I was sick of it, and now I was going to fix it once and for all. It was just a very strong feeling I had, like a strong motivation to do something, without knowing what specifically to do.

So I started searching on the Internet: beans allergy, food allergy, allergy cure, allergy healing, nuts allergy, peanut allergy... and I found plenty of articles talking about people with the same problems I have, and also many medical lectures about all the specific details of what your body goes thru when you have an allergy. Medical researchers are really good at labeling things, without actually being capable of fixing them. I skipped thru all of that crap and kept looking.

And then I found it. Some guy's blog describing his experience with EXACTLY about the type of allergies I had, to beans and nuts. It sounded like his were slightly worse than mine though, which was good. He nearly died from eating a peanut; I have been close to calling 911 from eating peanuts, but wasn't necessarily close to dying. (Peanut allergies can be more extreme than most people would imagine).

Then he explained what he did to cure his allergy! He did it himself, with some exercises called "TAT" that he learned about on the web! I couldn't believe it - someone found a solution? One that's completely free, that you can do yourself?!? It sounded WAY too good to be true. He wasn't trying to sell me anything on his web page, which told me I was on to something. At the end of his article he pointed to a web site called TAT Life.

I went to the TAT Life web site. The instructions were right there, a free PDF file to download and print out. It seemed simple. It seemed crazy. You hold your fingers on your head in a certain way, think of certain things, say some other things, and that's it. 10 minutes, tops. It couldn't work, could it? Something in me was excited about this and wanted to try it, even though my brain was saying "no way".

Then I noticed something fascinating in the instructions. The very first thing you should work on (if you haven't done TAT before) is the sentence "TAT is too easy to work or be of any value." I thought that was really cool - a system that understands where I'm coming from, and even integrates that into the program? I was ready to give it a try.

So I sat on the side of my bed with the doors and windows closed, I wasn't about to let anyone see me do this. I went thru the exercises with my printout on my lap. I could recall a time when I was a child that my parents forced me to eat a nut when I didn't want to, I was screaming and crying. I didn't dwell on the event, just tried to see it remotely from a distance, to that little child so long ago. The exercise really felt good, inside of me, while I was doing it. I even felt elated afterwards. But I wasn't about to try eating any beans any time soon. The web site mentioned it's a good idea to drink extra water when doing these exercises, so I did. Living in Arizona you have to force yourself to drink extra water anyway; it's so dry, and hot in the summer time.

About 2 days later I decided to do the exercise again, focusing on Beans. I did everything the same way as before. Same feeling of elation afterwards.

Then about a week later my wife made some chili. She always puts beans in it. She and our kids can eat beans just fine, I'm the only one with a problem. She usually puts aside some of it right before adding the beans, just for me. I told her not to do that, just make it with beans, because I think I don't have an allergy anymore. She looked at me funny, but I could tell somehow that I didn't feel reviled by the sight or thought of beans anymore.

At dinner time, I took a couple bites, man was it delicious. My wife, watching me carefully, said sarcastically, "I'll go get the Benadryl." I ate some other foods on my plate for a few minutes waiting for any reaction - but there wasn't any! I finished my entire bowl of chili - it was unbelivably delicious, I had never tasted anything like it before. No reaction whatsoever.

I was cured!

Well, I've eaten a lot of beans since then. Green beans are wonderful. I found out I don't like refried beans very much, but black-beans are pretty good.

Think about this now: 40 years worth of beans allergy - gone after 2 treatments.
No doctor could cure me - I had to cure myself.

I'd like to mention, though, after all that I was still allergic to Sesame Seeds and Peanuts.
I had to do 2 other treatments specifically focused on Sesame Seeds to cure myself of that allergy (apparently rooted in a different painful experience than beans). And I am still working on the Peanuts one.

I'm serious about all this. This really is my experience, it's almost too good to be true.

If you have any allergies that you are sick of living with, check out TAT - I highly recommend it. http://www.tatlife.net/
After all, at no cost, what do you have to lose?

2007-04-17T01:30:00.000-07:00

Finding good music on the Internet is very important to me. I don't want to discuss what's good/bad, because that wouldn't make any sense - everybody has their own idea of what "good music" means, and that meaning can change for you as your mood changes, as the years go by. I know it has for me. Music can be a kind of healing medicine for your emotions when you need it. It can be a driving force when you have to get work done. It can be a way to calm down and relax after a hectic day in the life of you.

Finding Good Music on the Internet

Here's how I find music that I like on the Internet.

First, I try to listen to music that I've never heard before. But I don't just randomly play whatever I hear about; there's way too much crap out there to find anything that way. If someone recommends a group or a song, I will check it out, but that's not usually the best avenue for discovering music I like.

The best way right now is Pandora, http://www.pandora.com/
Pandora rocks. It's a sophisticated music comparison database - you start by entering the name of a band or a song, and it "discovers" more music similar to what you chose.
You can have many "channels", each based off of a different type of music.
Then, as each song plays, you can tell Pandora "thumbs up" if you like it or "thumbs down" if you don't like it. If you choose "thumbs down", it immediately skips to the next song.

Pandora has special licensing deals with major labels all over the place, to stream high-quality complete songs over the Internet without charging you for it. It's pretty amazing. The only problem is you cannot choose the order which the songs come out; and you're limited to how many times you can skip a song; it will block you if you overuse that feature.

You can create channels for: Evanescence, Ricky Martin, and Linkin Park, and fine-tune Pandora's understanding of what kind of songs you like/dislike over time. Then, anytime you feel like some spanish/salsa music, your Ricky Martin channel is right there. Later when you're really upset about something unfair in your life, Linkin Park-like songs are waiting for you.

The most important part: When Pandora plays a song for you that you really like, write down the group name and album name (or at least, song name). After you have 4-5 of these, go to the next step.

Another good way is by playing music you like in your favorite music player (I use Winamp on my Windows XP PC), with Last.fm hooked up to it. It's a free download, and is very cool. It's a "scrobbling" application, which simply means that it watches what you listen to, and sends the info to a database on the Internet. It's collecting statistics on what you listen to. After you've listened to enough songs, you can have it recommend other music to you that you haven't heard, but might like - based on what other people in the world seem to be listening to! You can also ask what's the most popular music being played to day, according to their database. It's fascinating to see the differences compared to what plays on the radio, sometimes.

Again, if you find something new that sounds really good to you, write it down - band name and album/song name.

Finding More of What You Found

You'll want to hear all the songs on the albums you've found, and other albums by the same group you found. This way you can get a better feel for what kind of music the group creates, which you may not realize from just 1 or 2 songs.

Go to Amazon.com and choose "Popular Music" from the search menu, and enter the band or song or album. If it find multiple albums, click on 1 album to start with (usually the first one).

Scroll down quite a ways until you see the list of tracks on the album. Most of the time there are links next to them, you can click on to hear the tracks. Use the Amazon Music Sampler column, because it can play the songs in a browser window, and skip thru them all automatically. You can listen to the whole album this way (about 10-15 seconds per track). If you hate the song that's playing, click the next one right away - no reason to waste your time on bad music.

If you hate the album, skip to another one - either choose one from the 4 choices at the bottom of the Music Sampler window (use the arrows to find even more albums) or go back to your main Amazon window, hit Back button, and try a different album.

Amazon also has "people who bought this album also bought" other albums. Check those out too, for variations on the one you just heard.

Wandering the Musical Landscape

You're doing a kind of search for what you like, eliminating anything that you don't like. It's a kind of wandering of the musical landscape, always heading towards the bigger and brighter flowers, away from the smaller, duller ones.

If all the leads dry up and you're out of choices, make Amazon display the next album on your list, and listen to that - or go back to Pandora again for more ideas.

And then, all of a sudden, it will hit you from out of nowhere - that one album from that one group you've never heard of, that just blows you away. You can't believe how good it is! You may be the only one who thinks so, but that's OK! It totally rocks. This happens to me about once every few years. Something just clicks, and you know you're gonna like every song on the album. You have to play it again - and again.

For me the last 3 groups I found like that are:

Garbage
Evanescence
Kill Hannah

See what I mean? If you just checked those out, you may not even like them - and that's fine. You have to find what music stops you dead-in-your-tracks.

Acquiring the Good Music

If you like good sound, you won't be buying your music on Apple Itunes - the compression is too low, resulting in poor quality sound. You want to acquire the CD itself, for any music you found, and rip the tracks into your computer (at whatever compression ratio you like), so you get the best quality sound.

Notice I said "acquire the CD", not "buy the CD". Of course you want to own it, but you may not have to "buy" it. One of the cheapest ways to find good music is on music trading sites like Barter Bee http://www.barterbee.com/ or LaLa http://www.lala.com/

If you want to buy it but save a lot of money, consider buying a used CD on Amazon.com or Ebay.com. Or, if you want it brand-new, Amazon will be happy to oblige (and give you a discount usually). All of these methods result in delay, though; it will take days before your cool new music arrives in the mail.

If you're OK with paying full retail price (which I am not OK with), you can just drive down to your local music store and pick it up there - if they carry the album. Instant gratification.

Extracting the Music

Once I get the CD in the mail, I rip it into my computer using Winamp. I use Winamp so much that I went ahead and paid for a license - this opens up full speed ripping, which (today) can be extremely fast. No reason to lock up your computer for more than about 3-5 minutes per CD, anymore. I don't rip with Itunes, because I want unencumbered mp3 files. I usually rip at 256Kbps, because anything less than that is irritatingly not-good-enough for me anymore. My ears can hear the difference.

After ripping the CD, I put it somewhere safe in a closet or something - that's my emergency "backup". If I need a CD for my car stereo, I will burn a fresh CD from the mp3 files on my computer and leave it in my car. Now if my CD's are stolen from my car (it can happen), they only got a bunch of burned CD's - nothing really lost, since my originals (and mp3s) are safe at home.

This way I have my favorite music in my car and on my computer/ipod. This seems to work well for me, and I've been using this basic technique for a couple of years now.

So - how do you find new music?

2007-04-16T09:22:00.000-07:00

My business has changed as of late last year. It's now Fastech Web Solutions, a web site design and development company here in the east valley of Phoenix Arizona (Mesa, Gilbert, Chandler, Tempe, Ahwatukee).

I design and build custom web sites for small to medium sized companies. Anybody needing a web site or not entirely happy with their current web site, can use my help.

I also create advertisement campaigns around existing web sites, to attract more customers from the Internet to their business. Even if you're a service organization and not selling things directly on the Internet, this can help you. Because your potential customers are on the Internet, doing searches for service providers near them. They will find your ad, and a certain percentage of them will click on it and discover you, be impressed with what they find, and call or email you to engage your services, if I set things up properly.

I can also build internal database applications within a larger company, such as an inventory tracking system, or multi-user information logging system. You won't see these kinds of apps on my Samples web page (http://www.fastechWS.com/samples/) because you don't have access to them - they're only available internally to the companies I build them for.

I am good at creating administrative areas for key employees to control the content of the web site I build for them. If you have pictures or information that regularly changes, like news & events, products, etc., you'll want to manage that stuff yourself without going thru me all the time to make changes. For a little extra work up-front, I can build a very easy-to-use interface, password protected (with SSL security) for you, or whomever you nominate, to control the content on your web site.

I love building web sites. Give me a call if you want a free estimate - I just need to ask a few questions about what your needs are - I find that every project is different. If nothing else, you'll learn about the capabilities your future web site could have, and a guesstimate of what it will cost to build.

You don't have to live in Arizona, either - thanks to the global connectedness of the Internet, I can build web sites for anyone in the world. My only limitation today is that I can only speak English.

Paul Balyoz
Fastech Web Solutions
480-895-6688
(Outside Arizona 1-866-464-6688)
paul@fastechWS.com

2007-04-16T08:56:00.000-07:00

The Internet breaks down barriers. I used to have a barrier in my life, which was this:

I cannot seem to find a reliable source of ground coffee that tastes good!
No matter which brand I buy in the grocery store, it's all bad.
It doesn't matter if it's a steadfast brand I remember my mom buying when I was growing up, or something with "crystals" (whatever the heck that is), or some coffee hand-picked by a one-eyed, peg-legged man who's been at it for the last 122 years in peru or guatemala or egypt or some place. The price doesn't matter, the brand doesn't matter, the roasted-ness doesn't matter - it's all much worse than the coffee most restaurants serve today.

Starb**ks used to have the best coffee in the universe, when they first opened. Once they became a multimegacorp, their coffee began sucking too. Why, I asked; why?

So how do good restaurants have good coffee? Only the Internet had the answer.

I saw a Google ad on some web site taunting me about knowing the secret to best tasting coffee - which led me to the CoffeeFool web site: http://www.coffeefool.com.

I ordered 2 types of coffee, which, surprisingly, cost no more than purchasing similar-sized packages from my local grocery store (except I had to pay for shipping).

On their web site you can specify what kind of "grind" you want - I just went with "drip", since I have a plain coffee maker. Their web site is easy to use, very clean and neat and informative.

And, wow! Good coffee man. You gotta taste this stuff if you're sick of bitter coffee you can hardly choke down. I highly recommend Coffee Fool for all your coffee needs.

So, for me, another barrier has fallen - the barrier between me getting good tasting coffee, and restaurants getting good coffee. I can now do it just as well as they can - and not through my grocery store.

And no, I am not paid by them in any way - I just like to write about stuff I like on my blog.

2006-12-21T19:39:00.000-07:00

I just found a new album that I totally love, by a band called Kill Hannah.
I love music with strong female lead, powerful lyrics, overwhelming electronic sound, great editing & mixing. Kill Hannah fills this bill completely.

How would I describe this band?
Think of: Hole, the way they could have been. Courtney Love just cannot sing. The lead singer of Kill Hannah sounds amazingly like Courtney, but with vocal control, great pitch and timing. This makes the music that much more powerful and energizing.

The album I have is Believer. There are 2 songs on there I have to listen to over and over again (don't you love it when you find a CD like that?): "Lips Like Morphine" and "Crazy Angel".
Hearing a female vocalist singing "I want a girl with lips like morphine / knock me out every time they touch me" is beyond intense.

I hate bands where the lead singer's voice is out of control. Courtney Love is not the only one like that; Shakira is equally terrible. Shakira can really shake it, but her voice drives me insane, I can't stand it.

If you like power female techno/pop bands like I do, check out two of my other favorites. The first you've surely heard of - Evanescence.

My all time favorite band is one you may not have heard of - Garbage. Shirley Manson can even whisper, and it's powerful. Their latest album is not that great; you have to listen to the first 3 albums: Garbage, Version 2.0, and Beautiful Garbage.

2006-09-26T21:36:00.000-07:00

Dancing.

It's fun to watch people dance. Everyone has different ways of dancing. Dance is like a person's fingerprint: no two people are alike.

To me, dance is an expression of energy. One's body and emotions work together to direct flows of different kinds of energy in visually intriguing ways.

You can't keep your eyes off of a really good dancer - they attract and hold your attention. They evoke something from you that you can't find anywhere else.

I know some people think that dance is only sexual. It certainly can be. But that's not all it can be; there's much more. Dance can inspire and uplift the viewer, they can feel it in their heart. And the viewer energizes the dancer. There's a 2-way flow of energy between performer and audience, a kind of cyclical hurricane of energy that can build and build, seemingly endlessly.

Dancing just feels great, too, way more than any other form of "exercise" I have ever experienced. Once you get past the fear of performing in front of others (if you have that), it's such a great release. Dancing can make you feel like you're on top of the world, like you can do anything in this world that you set your mind to. Probably because it's true.

Why don't we feel that way all the time? I am not sure. I think if anything inspires you as much as dance inspires me, you need to do that thing regularly; whatever it is. We all need an energy adjustment from time to time - and we each have to figure out what it is that does that for us. We're all different, yet have many common things in our psyche and personalities. For me, dancing is a fix-all, so long as I can just let go of my petty problems and issues and feel the flow of movement and energy.

I think that the more humanity learns to dance in different and interesting ways, the more depth of understanding we'll have about our world, our reason for being, our future, and about each other. Dancing is beyond an "international language", it surpasses all language, connecting to something in us that's deeper and stronger than any language. You can't see it on television; all the lowest quality dancers can be found there. You need to see dancers with real talent. Michael Jackson had great dance talent in his time. Usher has it, you can tell from many of his dance videos. But overall, top ballroom and latin / salsa dancers have it. To see the good ones, you've got to go to a professional dance competition or showcase and watch the professionals dance.

Perhaps if the leaders of the world practiced dancing, separately and then together, they would be able to find more common ground on the topics that "really matter", instead of always being at war with each other. They could add their energies together, instead of subtracting from each other. (They were supposed to learn to cooperate in Kindergarten; what the hell happened with that, anyway?)

2006-09-17T14:35:00.000-07:00

My wife asked me to do something, which I believe is the funniest thing I've ever been asked:

"Honey, don't forget to turn the basketball hoop so the dog doesn't fall in the pool again."

In order to understand this, you have to know what our back yard looks like.
We have an in-ground pool with a short basketball hoop on a pole plugged into a hole in the cement edge at one end of the pool, so you can swing it 360 degrees around. It's usually pointing away from the pool so people can walk by, but when you want to play pool-basketball you swing it back around to face the pool again.

The basketball hoop was pointing to the side at an angle. Our little dog Heide walks around the pool often times.

The day before, Heide fell into the pool right near the hoop and nearly drowned.
We think it was because she bumped into it, or maybe she was being chased by a cat or a bee or something. (She's a small, not-very-brave doggy, but she's a sweetheart).

It's just that my wife's question sounded so mechanical, like the instructions to a Flash game or something...

Your goal: turn the basketball hoops to get all the evil dogs to fall into the pool.

Coming to a flash game archive near you.

2006-08-09T15:42:00.000-07:00

I'm really excited about my new job. I recently left my old one, and now I am part of Fastech Learning Center, which teaches many programming languages quickly and in a practical, hands-on way. I'm starting to teach Perl and Unix courses, with more to come in the future (PHP, MySQL, HTML/DHTML, Javascript and CSS, since I know those already).

This is a fun place to be - I was getting tired of working for the multi-mega corporation where I would never get to see the other parts of the business. As an engineer I never really got to see much related to finance, marketing, or even manufacturing of the things I helped design. I was really getting curious about those aspects of business.

I am really happy with my work now. Teaching is probably the most fun job I have ever had, next to software design. In my new job I get to do both - software development helps me stay up to date with the latest technologies like Web 2.0, AJAX, playing around with the Distributed Object Model (DOM), etc.

It's so much fun to see people learning something new from me, and being successful at using it.

2006-04-21T13:29:00.000-07:00

Well, I was right. XM satellite radio is 64Kbps [wikipedia], and Sirius uses about 96Kbps. Excerpt from a Sirius receiver product page [electronicexpress]:

Beyond the reception issue,
the only other major drawback is sound quality, which some may find
subpar. Sirius describes its sound as "digital quality," a euphemism
for "digital audio with a bitrate so low that we don't want to scare
people by revealing what it is." Whatever it is, its character is very
close to what you'd hear from 96 kbps MP3--clear and listenable, but
lacking depth, fullness, high-frequency extension, and dynamic range...

That's just horrible. I can barely stand to listen to my old 128Kbps mp3's anymore, I rip all my music at 256Kbps. When I tune in on Shoutcast, I only listen to channels with 128Kbps or higher. There's no way I'm going to listen to satellite music at anything lower than 128Kbps. Especially if I have to pay for it every month!

So much for satellite radio.

What's more likely to happen in the next year or two is that your cell phone becomes a streaming audio system at a higher bitrate. It's wireless, and more portable than any receiver bolted into your car. As the bitrate increases for data communications on cell phones, it can be used for anything, not just music.

As far as I can see, satellite radio is dead.

2006-03-30T21:13:00.000-07:00

My headlights look much brighter now that I cleaned 'em with the brass cleaner, as described in my previous weblog entry. This evening I was driving home from a local restaurant around 8:30PM, and noticed the difference. They look about 30% brighter now.

2006-03-26T17:40:00.000-07:00

The headlights on my 1999 Mitsubishi 3000GT have been turning foggy over time. It's the outer part of the plastic headlight covers where the problem is. I thought it was some weird coating, I tried scratching it off but it doesn't help; it's like the plastic itself is crystallizing or something. I've just been living with it for years now, with poor illumination on the road at night-time... until today.

I saw an article on digg about some guy who figured out how to remove scratches from the plastic cover on his Ipod, by polishing it with Brasso. Other people leaving comments below the article swore it worked.

My cell phone is 1.5 years old, and had lots of scratches, so I went to the grocery store to buy some of this stuff. The place I go to does not have Brasso, specifically, but they did have a generic looking brass polish, so I bought it. It took a lot of rubbing this smelly liquid on my cell phone screen with a cloth, but it made my cell phone screen look almost brand-new!

Then this weekend it occurred to me - why not try that stuff on my car lenses? They're clear plastic, just like the cell phone screen. So I tried it. And it WORKED. I rinsed off the goop after rubbing for about 10 minutes on each side of the car, then let it dry. Check out these pics.

Yes, I know my car needs a wash really badly. It rained the other day, just a little bit, which always deposits dirt like mad.

I think my headlights will work a lot better now. There's no reason to spend hundreds of dollars replacing the lenses (especially since I couldn't find any on the Internet for this car), when you can simply spend less than $7 on a bottle of this stuff, and about 20 minutes of work.

I can't wait to try driving with my lights on after the sun goes down.

technorati tags: 3000gt, headlights, foggy, cloudy, car, lenses, polish

2006-03-20T18:52:00.000-07:00

My ipod wiped out every song I had from it's memory, and I think it's Itunes' fault. Luckily, Itunes keeps my "library" on hand (along with my favorite podcasts, audio books, etc.) so I was able to reconstruct what I had on my ipod... sort of.

The failure scenario went like this.

I needed to move 2 episodes of Firefly to my laptop from my main home computer, so I could watch them in another room last night, and my normal keychain memory stick was not big enough. I remembered you can use an ipod the same way, so I copied the files onto my 1GB Shuffle - and it turns out I barely had enough room. So after copying the files to the ipod for transport and yanking it from the computer, I plug it right in to my laptop (where I have never used it before). Itunes opens up (I had installed it but never used it), and says "this ipod is part of another server/fileset/something or other, are you sure you want to switch it to a different set and wipe out all your songs?" I don't remember the wording, but you get the idea. Naturally I clicked "no", and closed Itunes. Then I pulled the files off the ipod, and deleted them from the ipod itself; the transfer was now complete.

That was yesterday. Today I plugged my ipod into my main computer, as usual, just like I have done so many times before, and guess what it says to me: The same exact message! It thinks I had switched my ipod to the laptop computer, and now I'm trying to switch it back! The only 2 choices it gives me are "no" and "yes", so I click "no". And guess what - the ipod does NOT show up in Itunes when you do that! I tried it twice.

You have to click "yes", and wipe out all your files, to get it to show up in Itunes again - even though I never granted permission for it to do anything on the empty Itunes computer (my laptop).

This is an extremely severe bug, in my opinion. Apple should never have shipped Itunes with this, and a number of other, extremely irritating bugs that I deal with every week.

So I guess I won't be using my ipod as a memory device, ever again. That's really screwed up.

Itunes is extremely poor software. I'm a programmer and know what can be done, and Itunes is not up to my standard. It's just too bad it's the best thing out there, for what it does.

technorati tags: ipod, itunes, bug, flash

Learning about Market Research

2006-01-02T23:38:00.000-07:00

I am beginning to realize the importance of market research. I’ve never really understood marketing, or selling for that matter. I’m a techie at heart. But I’m trying to understand every aspect of business in general, today, for my own education.

Market research is when you have a good idea for a product, and test it on a s mallish set of live customers to see their response, especially if you have multiple styles/types/colors/patterns/choices, and test to see how people receive them. You get data back about which models or colors they like the best, etc.

Let’s say you have a great idea, and want to implement it and sell it. But that’s not enough, what if people won’t buy it, or don’t like it. The more successful you are at shipping product to many stores quickly, the more danger you might be in, if you don’t have a product that will sell well. You cannot predict exactly what people will accept, only the people themselves can give you that knowledge - through market research.

Some great ideas will never fly. For example, my idea of making solid gold coins with imprints of video game characters, like Mario, Luigi, Donkey Kong, Sonic, etc. I thought it would be cool. But now I realize NOBODY would buy that. Here’s why. It turns out the class of people who like those arcade games is completely separate from the class of people who understand gold investing and coin collecting. Sure there is probably a little overlap, but in general, arcade gamers are years old, and collectors (who have the money to spend on gold coins because they have a steady good paying job!) are generally years old.

Suppose you create a cool new toothbrush design, and the plastics company says it will be easy to manufacture. You can even do the math, and realize you’ll make a lot of money from this, if it will only sell. That’s the question – will it sell? And at what price will you make the most money? If you price it too high, few people will buy it, and you lose money. If you price it too low, too close to what it costs to manufacture ship, you don’t make any money either. There’s actually a “sweet spot” in between, for any product, you just have to find it.

The best thing you can do with a product like a new style of toothbrush is generate a variety of patterns and see which ones people prefer. Pick only those with strong response, and throw away the rest. Then find out what prices people would pay for them. I’m not sure how you do that, maybe put them in a “test market”, i.e .1 or 2 stores, at a certain price, and different stores at a different price, etc. But now, for that to be a reasonable test, you have to know your customers. All those stores must be in the same general neighborhoods (or have similar types of customers). You have to get a feel for what would happen if you raise the price $.50 each, lower it that much, etc. Find the perfect “knee in the curve” for maximum profit.

It’s not just for maximum profit however. The customers will be more comfortable if they see a reasonable price on your item – reasonable from their point of view. If the price is too high, not only will fewer people buy it, but the ones who do will more likely be irritated when it turns out to be a plain old toothbrush – “for that price, I thought it would be electric or something!” You’ll get complaints, and unhappy customers. It’s not worth creating extra conflict for people who already have enough difficulties in their lives.

Your products need to genuinely help people, at a reasonable price, to benefit both you and them as much as possible. This can best be achieved through proper market research.

If you’re going to do all the work and overcome all the obstacles to make and sell a product, shouldn’t you get as much money as possible from that effort? Market Research enables you to fit this product more perfectly to your customers, making it as successful as possible, at a fair price for the customer.

technorati tags: business, marketing

Happy New Year

2006-01-01T14:43:00.000-07:00

Happy 2006 everyone!

Lint Trap Trick for Allergies

2005-12-30T23:38:00.000-07:00

Are you allergic to dust? Does cleaning the lint-trap of your clothes dryer bother you when that cloud of dust billows out, engulfing your head?

I found a great solution - don't clean the lint trap when the laundry drying ends. Start the next load, let it dry for around 1 minute, then clean the trap! Enough dampness from the new load will soak thru the lint in the trap, so nothing will float thru the air when you clean it.

What should you do, you may ask, about the very last laundry load? How do you clean the trap then? My answer is, you don't. That lint ain't goin' no place. Leave it until you begin the first load next week, and clean it then.

I figured this out today while doing the 5th load of laundry (out of 7).

Christmas Time Is Here

2005-12-22T22:08:00.000-07:00

It must be Christmas - family members are coming into town. My brother-in-law Craig arrived earlier today; my own brother Bill is arriving early tomorrow morning. My dad already lives just a few miles away from us, so basically my whole family will be with us for the holidays, and it makes me happy to think about it.

Craig's arrival was a little more spectacular than most. He just got back from spending a year in Kuwait in the Army Reserves, along with about 100 others returning today to Arizona. They had a whole ceremony for them all, and the local news was there. They interviewed him briefly, along with my wife and son. We got to see ourselves on the 5 o'clock news today. (I recorded it on VHS for posterity).

I sent our family Christmas email card out today. We wanted to include an inline image of our family wedding picture from last May, however neither Yahoo nor Gmail allows inline images normally. I had to use the Flock-to-Gmail inline image trick that I found on the 'net. I can't seem to locate the page now, otherwise I would link to it. The next entry I write for Paulio Tech will describe how I did it.

I still have more shopping to do for Christmas presents. The place I was going to go today closed at 4PM, so I have to go tomorrow. I also have to pick up my brother first thing in the morning, take him over to my dad's, have lunch with them both. Oh, and I'm supposed to work tomorrow from home! I have to fit in some work some time, during the day tomorrow. Such a busy time of the year.

I'm on vacation all next week, which will really be nice. I managed to carve about an hour today to play GTA Vice City, which was really fun. That game is the greatest, most perfect game for me. A whole world you can run around in or drive any car, truck, jeep, bus or motorcycle, and go anywhere you can figure out, based on the physics of the game. You can run from the police, which can be easy or challenging based on how many "stars" you have. Three is perfect, in my opinion, because then the police cars go as fast as the faster cars in the game, and they are willing to follow you off-road more, when you drive on the grass. The story line bores me, plus I won it already. Just driving around causing havoc and jumping off ramps is my favorite thing to do. Man I just love Vice City so much.

It really feels like Christmas to me, today. I almost don't know what to do with myself; there's so much "work" I don't feel like doing at home now. I just want to be lazy, play with the kids, and do whatever I feel like.

technorati tags: craig, bill, christmas, army, flock, imagetrick, vicecity

My December

2005-12-20T22:37:00.000-07:00

This is My December

December is always a time of sadness and pointlessness for me. It's not real, it's just a feeling I get, as hordes of citizens shop madly for Christmas presents and cards for everybody in their lives. I'm part of that horde of citizens, but not happy about it. Life just becomes too much for me in December. I know I'm not the only person like this. Linkin Park has a great song about December, which matches my feelings exactly. I usually can't listen to that song much at this time of the year, it's too depressing.

But this year is better than most. This is the first Christmas where I'm married! We got married last May. So I have someone - a whole family in fact. That means all the difference. I'm no longer alone, I have people to share my life with. All the happy and sad moments are all good, keeping me busy, making me feel useful and parental.

New Years Resolution Time

In December, I spend a lot of time reflecting back on the past year, usually focusing on all the failures and feeling overwhelmed. It takes effort to remember all the positive things that occurred, and when I do, some of the pain is relieved.

I think this is the normal balance of life - at the end of our year, we have a chance to mentally review all the things we wanted to do, how much of those we actually accomplished, and how far we've come. It is painful, but important. I learn two things from these thoughts, which helps me with next year - I realize how much I can actually accomplish during 1 year (so I don't overestimate next year), and I can decide which things to continue working on in my life, what things I want to change, where I want to go, what I want to do, which charities I want to contribute my money and time, and so forth.

In December, I read my New Years Resolutions from last year and plan new ones for the next year. When I do this seriously, the feelings of failure and overwhelmingness completely wash away, and I am my usual chipper Paulio self once again, through the end of the year!

January Comes

Then, in January, the new energy comes! The energy of making these projects come to life. By mid January I can't imagine what I was depressed about in December. There's a bright new year that has been launched, and the future is limitless! Accomplishing my resolutions will be easy! (They always seem easier in January than they actually end up being, by a long shot.)

This is what I've observed about my life, in many years past. It's interesting what solutions you can find to help you get through tough times. I suppose it varies between people. But if you feel the same things I feel in December, I recommend these steps.

Honestly review your year, and your life. Don't judge yourself or put yourself down, just look objectively at all that went down. What have you learned? In what things are you more experienced? If you have a list from last year, you can review it - some things you accomplished, some you probably didn't. It's all OK. Don't block yourself from feeling what you feel about it, remember that it's OK to be you. You're the only you you've got.
Imagine what you'd like to be, what things you'd like to accomplish in the future. Think about every category of your life. What do you want to accomplish related to things you like? Hobbies? What skills / knowledge do you want to learn? What do you want related to your job/work? What about social things - friends, family, etc.? What spiritual goals or accomplishments do you want to make? What food changes do you want to make? What money will you need, and want, during the next year? Dare to put down what you really want, even if it seems totally out of reach to you at this time.
For each of those goals, write down their purpose - why you want them. What's the reason? What would the results be if you had them? How would it help you, or others? Would it be fun? Do some of them interconnect, and create multiple improvements in your life?
Now, for each of those goals, write down as many practical tasks you can do to accomplish those goals! What steps can you actually take that will get you at least part of the way there? Be honest with yourself about what you can accomplish during the next year.
Schedule the next step of each goal into your calendar for January.

You'll be amazed at how much better you'll feel if you follow this general guidelines for your life.

technorati tags: december, depressed, new year, resolutions

2005-12-15T10:12:00.000-07:00

The trick to make Flock work with Blogger web logs is clearly documented in my other web log, Paulio Tech.