How to have balance in life
I recently read a book by Raymond Aaron and he suggested the ‘MAINLY’ way to have a balanced life. I like his approach because its simple and quite frankly fun!
He suggests you go through his definitions of each letter of the cheesy acronym MAINLY
Here is how it goes, for each month:
M – Messes: Clean up a mess, a mess is something that’s negative; basically something that you are tolerating that you really want changed
A – Appreciate: Some appreciation for what you’ve been given by being appreciative. He says there is a balance of Appreciation/Depreciation that exists in the world that we should try to maintain. Appreciation is giving thanks or giving back. Depreciation is taking out off e.g. spending
I – Income: He suggests that you increase your wealth; reduce debt, reduce mortgage, increase your pay etc
N – New : He suggests that you do something new
L – Learn: He suggests that you learn something new
Y- Yourself: He suggests that you do something uniquely for yourself.
Obviously those are my take aways from one of the chapters; I don’t mean to claim any particular insights to his ideas; I just wanted to share what I learned.
Enjoy.
Artists and weird follow up albums
Wow, I decided to buy some songs on iTunes (gift cards)…. I started looking at my good ‘ol favorite artists and I was pretty disappointed.
Most of the artists I listen to have decided to turn their brands into strange mixtures of genres that are just plain weird.
I’m wondering if this is their way of appealing to a larger audience, or perhaps its time to look for newer artists!
I’m tempted to list the artists, but … no. I’ll save them the disappointment 
Good ‘ol me will stop buying their CD’s.
PS:
If any of you artists would like to send me copies of your CD’s/Albums I would listen to them and give you reviews
New Domain Names
I had a very fun time today brainstorming for domain names. Its ridiculous that almost all the common words and 2 word combination’s have all been taken.
Anyhow, I’m glad I found something that could work for a new product I have in mind.
Swoopo: Scam or Real
I saw an ad while checking my email today on gmail; It was a request to put up a bid on swoopo for a MacBook Laptop. Swoopo is a commercial site that allows users to bid on specific items.
The way it works is simple: You buy a couple bid’s: each bid is currently worth $.60 and for each bid you make on a product, a bid is taken from your stack of bids (similar to how Dave and Busters work where you pay money to get some tokens and then you use those tokens to play games, arcades, etc)
However, before I even toyed with the idea further, it was quickly apparent to me where the trickery was:
Since you are not able to bid by naming the price you want and Swoopo is the seller, it is very easy for Swoopo to game the system. Swoopo makes money when you use one of your bids. Therefore, the more people that make bids on an item the better for them; it makes sense that Swoopo could easily push in a bid from the backend. This effectively drives up the bid price and keeps the ball rolling on the bids. (cha-ching)
The Swoopo scheme is a genius idea; if you have an item that has a market value of $20 and then Swoopo lists this item… well since each bid is worth $.60 all Swoopo needs is just 33+ people to make a bid and they would have covered their cost of the item! When you factor in the fact that you could easily have thousands of people bidding on an item, its so easy to see how Swoopo would recover the cost of the original item and how customers effectively loose money.
The way eBay works is by far better and more transparent – eBay allows individuals to auction their items. This in effect is the transparency by which auctions are done. When Swoopo puts up an item for bidding, consumers are never sure that Swoopo is not gaming them!
In my opinion this is a site to stay away from; unless, perhaps, I’m missing something- in which case I would like to know.
Please tweet, share, send this article to your friends – lets stop the gimickry!
Programming Languages I know
Here is a list of programming languages I have programmed in one time or the other:
1. JAVA
2. C
3. C++
4. C#
5. Coldfusion- CFML, CFC,
6. Adobe FLEX
7. Adobe ActionScript 2 & 3
8. SQL
9. HTML
10. Javascript
11. PHP (Beginner)
12. Scheme (Beginner)
13. LISP (Beginner)
Would you pay for an idea to multiply your money?
I was just wondering today… would I pay someone to give me an idea that could multiply my money if they could give me a ‘business plan’ of sorts? My answer is… yes.
Would you pay for someone to tell you how to multiply your money?
In the Valley
Hmmm, I’m going to need sometime for this post.
First blog post!
My first blog post! Sweet. I hope I can keep this blog updated with the rest of my interent activities etc.