1. Your Twitter name has your birthday in it.

2. Your car has a “My child is an honor student” bumper sticker on it… and you don’t even have kids.

3. You bought an iPhone for the camera.

4. You’re a Roman Catholic because “that’s where the power is.”

5. You bleach your jeans to make them look old.

6. You registered faaaceboook.com and you think it has value (it’s available… 3 a’s and 3 o’s).

7. Your computer’s desktop background is a picture of Barack Obama.

8. You buy Girl Scout cookies.

9. You have a tattoo where nobody can see it.

10. Your car’s rear-view mirror has teddy bears hanging from it.

11. You’re a straight gay-rights activist.

12. You believe the capital of Montana is Hannah.

13. You registered your first MySpace account in 2010.

14. You wear a fake diamond ring… and keep the real one in a safe.

15. You have a Mac because all artists have Macs, right?

16. You are a Unitarian Universalist.

17. You say age is “just a number.”

18. You believe Al Gore invented the Internet.

19. You started a blog on Viagra to make money.

20. You put your career before your family.

21. You go to the gym. (There are so many better ways to exercise… like mowing …

... CONTINUE READING

Music only has two true modalities of meter: duple and triple, from which all other meters are derived. A piece in 4/4 time is actually duple, just as a piece in 6/8 time is triple. Similarly, there are two modalities of existence: fear and love, from which all four modes are derived.

Fear only = the dark side
Love only = the light side
No fear and no love = death
Fear and love combined = insanity

This matrix is much like a Johari window.

There are many shades of fear and love, such as sorrow, joy, guilt, forgiveness, rage, kindness, anger, and contentment. More importantly, there are two significant combinations yielding four results:

Fear of love = independence or phobia
Love of fear = courage or submissiveness

A living person cannot experience the absence of fear and love, just as a deceased person cannot experience both combined. The combination of fear and love produces all the evils of the world, including murderers, rapists, devil-worshipers, and the insane. The …

... CONTINUE READING

You may be the most creative person in the world, but do you have a product to represent you? A book or CD? Something that can be mass-produced?

I have some print copies of my photos, and, well… that’s about it. So if I die tomorrow, I won’t leave behind much of a legacy. At the very least I should create a book of photos.

My father has a book that he has been unable to sell… but at least he has something.

If your product is hand-made crafts or paintings, you don’t really have a product because everything is dependent on you. If you get run over by a bus or someone saws your hands off, BAM, there goes your product. But if you have something that can be made by printing press or assembly line, then you have a product. Even computer softwater counts.

Time is precious. Create something now, or be forgotten forever!

Behavior that is self-destructive in one context might not be self-destructive in another. For example, chopping off a leg is definitely self-destructive… but not if you’re suffering gangrene and will die otherwise.

Eating 10,000 calories a day is extremely self-destructive for a normal adult, as it will result in massive weight gain. If you’re an Olympic athlete, it may be just right.

If you’re so obsessed with golf that you’ve quit your job and abandoned your family, you’re self-destructive… unless you’re the next Tiger Woods.

If you have the wisdom to know the difference between positive action and self-destructive action, you will go far. Just because you are passionate about something does not mean it is positive. Plenty of people are obsessed with playing video games, watching sports, or gambling, but none of them have any commercial viability.

Society may consider behavior normal under some circumstances and self-destructive in others. Teen pregnancy is considered self-destructive, but having a child in your thirties is not. Boxing or stunt racing is destructive when done by amateurs, but a money-maker when performed by professionals.

Healthy self-esteem is a positive trait, but wild narcissistic arrogance is destructive.

Half the battle is avoiding self-destructive behavior: the other half is reading self-help …

... CONTINUE READING

One benefit of the online, inter-connected world we live in is that it’s no longer necessary to purchase music or software. Although I have my favorite music and the latest video games and photography software, I haven’t purchased a single intangible item in years. Hardware, yes, software, no.

The Pirate Bay is the source for almost any music or software you are looking for. Get uTorrent and start downloading torrent trackers. While you’re receiving files, you’re also sending pieces of those files to other people, helping provide freedom to everyone.

If it isn’t on BitTorrent, it’s probably on RapidShare. Find your booty.

I have a brand new copy of Adobe Photoshop CS5 on my computer, Sibelius 6 for composing, a Nintendo Wii hooked to a hard drive with 50 games, a Nintendo DS with even more games and my favorite music, and I didn’t pay a dime for any of it. Anyone who pays a dime for any of this stuff is a chump, plain and simple.

The beautiful thing about piracy is that it’s a victimless crime which hurts no one. The people who pirate software would not buy it anyway, and the people who buy it are …

... CONTINUE READING

Wasted time can never be reclaimed, because you never have the opportunity to repeat the past. Therefore, you must make sure you are working toward your goals and making the best use of each and every day.

If you find you have wasted months or years of your life as I have, nothing good can come from dwelling on it, as this only wastes more time. The only thing we can do is learn from the past and not repeat the same mistakes in the future.

Average people waste most of their lives. Watching T.V., surfing the Internet, playing video games, reading fiction, pointless conversations, Facebook, day-dreaming, over-sleeping—eliminate this from the average person’s life and you will see their productivity triple. People who seem like super-humans are actually ordinary—they just don’t waste their time on garbage which takes up 12 hours of an ordinary person’s day. Even replacing television with doing nothing is a step up. Just call it meditation and you are instantly a monk or philosopher.

Anything important can be measured—save a few intangibles like intelligence. Schools and colleges measure your academic worth through exams and graded assignments. Employers measure your worth as a slave with performance reviews. And you can …

... CONTINUE READING

Proposed in the United Nations and the U.S. Congress is a tax on all carbon dioxide emissions. Whenever we light our wood-burning stove to heat our house, carbon atoms in the wood are being oxidized to release heat and carbon dioxide. Whenever we breathe in and out, we convert oxygen into carbon dioxide. A carbon tax is no more than a slave tax—a yoke around the necks of industry which will kill a billion people in the third world. Gasoline and power bills will easily go up 10%, and the cumulative effects will be even worse at the supermarket and the office stores.

The Carbon Tax Center postulates that “a permanent and increasing U.S. carbon tax is essential.” The theory is that burning carbon causes the Earth to become warmer, and that any influence we have on the Earth’s environment must be negative. Therefore, the ultimate solution is human extinction. We all know the Earth would be completely perfect without our presence. Short of that mass suicide, modern feudalism to our elitist overlords for our carbon sins will do (carbon is one of the four major organic molecules along with hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen). The mindset is we are a …

... CONTINUE READING

My Mom just sent me this question:

Dear Son,
My coworker Mark asked me if you have any good suggestions on laserjet printers. His printer at home ran out of ink and he doesn’t want an ink jet. If you know of any good deals out there, could you let him or me know?

Thanks.
Love, Mama

My answer:

Dear Mom,

I used to recommend Lexmark and HP, but I no longer recommend them because they gouge on toner in their low-end laser printers. I now recommend BROTHER.

I have a Brother HL-2140 and I like it. I paid $50 on sale (OfficeMax)… it’s $80 on Amazon now. Watch for a sale. It prints fast and clean. While it doesn’t duplex, you can just put pages face up, top toward you to print on both sides manually. I’m still on the starter cartridge (1000 pages) but you can order third-party replacement cartridges online for $30 shipped (refilled), which print 2600 pages. Much cheaper than new Lexmarks which have no refilled cartridges… $100 a cartridge with them. Brother is usually cheaper.

If he orders it have him order through this link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0010Z1W06/brilliaphotog-20

Then I get 4% ($3.20) and it costs him the same. That link puts an Amazon tracking …

... CONTINUE READING

I know they don’t teach you real history in history class. I know you haven’t read anything about the past 200 years of mankind and you have no historical knowledge. You don’t even know your own country. I don’t either, but if there’s something I want to know I don’t assume the status quo is correct. I look it up.

Eugenics was big in the 1920s in the U.S.A., and most states had laws allowing the government to sterilize people unfit to be parents. This isn’t just the insane—it’s people who have parents and family who are alcoholics and drug-users. Men and women who were mentally stable and led admirable lives were forcibly sterilized—60,000 of them. They could never have children or lead a fulfilling life (a fulfilling life involves raising a family). Not only that—the sterilization procedures were dangerous and frequently caused infections or death.

Do you want forced sterilization to come back? When you support abortion, you’re leading to it. The government is taking more and more power. Obama’s healthcare bills have “end of life” procedures to kill off sick old people. We don’t have the “resources” to take care of them. If the government would stop pushing us around …

... CONTINUE READING

You are always going to get negative feedback. As you get more and more positive feedback, you get more and more negative feedback.

For example: this month I reduced my freelance photography rate from $50 per event to $20 per hour, with a minimum of $20 plus a $10 travel fee. Editing and a CD are free, but I provide no prints. I’ve done almost no freelance photography and I don’t even care about it, but I offer it because people ask about it all the time. The people who say I’m too expensive are actually MORE vocal now. Out of the ten who have asked this month, two have said I charge way too much. I have good equipment, 5 years experience, and a gallery of portraits, so I’m charging very little, but some people still complain. If I charged $5 there would be people saying “it will only take a few minutes!” There will ALWAYS be negative feedback.

Sometimes negative feedback is valid. More often negative feedback is bogus and positive feedback is legitimate. If you are evil this will be flipped: positive feedback (”good job gassing those Jews!”) is bogus and negative feedback (”murderer!”) is legitimate. You …

... CONTINUE READING