Cash Is (Still) King

As inefficient and unsafe cash is, it is still king. Which would you prefer, a $10,000 check or $10,000 in cash:

Chapter Closed

Sometimes, life lessons are painfully expensive. Lesson learned: Always have everything in writing. Do not trust the word of anyone, and don't say "you'll do it later."

As If We Didn't Know: Horse Backs Hurt by Riders and Saddles

"Horses in the wild never carry anything on their backs, and now a new study has found that when a horse bears the weight of a rider, it adjusts the position of its back and alters its limb movements, all of which could contribute to back pain and injury."

So you're telling me that jumping on the back of a horse and having it carry you actually puts a strain on the horse? Wowzers! Who would have thunk it!!

Full Article from Discovery Channel

Some People Just Don't Have a Sense of Humor

Warning, some vulgar language and violence against ballons:

Perfection and God

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" -Epicurus

Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher, rejected the concept of the gods of ancient Greece. He stated that the gods are perfect, therefore they cannot be the imperfect beings depicted by Homer and others. Their gods have human flaws, including jealousy. Perfect beings would not be troubled by anything, including the behavior of humans.

That is a very strong statement, and is the foundation of this entry: Indifference is the primary characteristic of perfection. One cannot be perfect unless he is indifferent to the world around him. While many people have different ideas of what defines perfection, the general consensus is that being perfect means being in a state of flawlessness with nothing more that needs to be changed.

And therein lies the paradox that disproves the "personal" god. Not only is the idea of a perfect being creating the universe self-contradictory (to create is to indicate a lack, and thereby an imperfection), but a perfect being who is intimately involved in the lives of its subject creates bias. A truly omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing), and benevolent (all good) god would have to be completely indifferent to the universe. Any involvement or interest would go against the definition of god.

Therefore, there is no "personal" god aka the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God.

And yes, billions of people can be wrong. They were wrong about the world being flat, and they were wrong about the Earth being at the center of the universe. Quantity proves nothing.

Next time I feel like discussing the topic, I'm going to go through a couple of websites "proving" god exists, and why the same argument can be made for Santa Claus.

Talk About Karma!

Seems legit. Regardless, it's hilarious:

Good Ol' Russian Drivers

TootTone: A Revolution!

Abreva: Be Glad You're Car Doesn't Need It!

Abreva, the patented cold-sore medicine, costs about $20 (w/ tax) for 2 grams at Ralphs. That seemed quite expensive, so I did some calculations. Lucky for us, our cars don't need Abreva:

1 gallon of gasoline: $2.87
1 gallon of Abreva: $1,280.00

Abreva also costs a little under half the price of gold (currently $600 per ounce) at $286 per ounce. So next time you are looking for an expensive gift to give your loved one, the kind of gift that will wow even the toughest critic - try Abreva!

The Sickness Is Rising

After having won the individual battles against the cold virus when my sister, brother, sister-in-law, brother-in-law, mom, dad, niece, and nephew had it, I finally had to admit defeat today. Having slept only a few hours, this cold has got the best of me!

I have pulled out my usual artillery: Advil Cold & Sinus and Gatorade. Drinking 4 32oz Gatorade Rains a day when my family was sick was what prevented me from getting sick. Now I hope it will come to my rescue now that I have gotten sick.

In other news, business is going EXTREMEly well (a few inside people know why extreme is capitalized)!

It's going to be a very busy quarter. I'm looking forward to it!

Redfoo!

Redfoo.com, the site I've been working on for the better part of 3 months is almost complete! The talented Stefan Gordy contracted CornerBLUE to make a myspace clone geared towards fans of Redfoo. Check out the site, check out his music on the album page. If you like what you hear, buy his album! You can also make a dollar for each album sale you refer (details when you sign up, let me know if you need help).

Basically, the site offers all the standard perks:

• Friends
• Blogs
• Comments on Profiles and Pictures
• Picture Album
• Private Messaging

There are a few unique features:

• Album page - You can listen to Redfoo's entire album, comment, and buy the album.
• Referrals - You can make a $1.00 from each sale of Redfoo's album that you refer. If your balance is greater than $10 on the first of the month, you'll get a deposit into your PayPal account.
• Browse page - Lists people in the order they logged in, with the most recent people showing up first
• Top Friends - Unlike myspace, you can have as many or as few top friends as you want. Then you arrange them however you like.
• Picture Album - In addition to being able to upload 25 pictures, you can also link to an unlimited number of external pictures, and also embed an unlimited number of media objects, such as YouTube videos.
• Rich text editor - For some reason, myspace doesn't have a rich text editor. I think they are working on one for version 2 of the site. Until then, we've got the upper hand! When adding comments, sending messages, or posting blog entries, you get a very nice editor that let's you format your text without any knowledge of HTML.

We've got a lot of new features lined up as well. For example:

• A CSS generator that will allow people to change the look and feel of their site without any knowledge of CSS.
• Live chat
• Webcam integration
• Online store where anyone can sell anything (anything legal, that is!)
• Ringtone sales!

Check out the site every now and then. New features are up almost daily.

How To Increase Traffic To Your Blog

While I am no expert, I have been able to increase visits to my blog 3 fold using these very simple steps:

1. Make sure Google's, Yahoo's, and MSN's web crawlers can crawl through your blog. Dynamically generated blogs - those using a database backend - are a lot harder for web crawlers to archive correctly. If you use blogger.com like I do, you will notice that each entry is its own page and nothing is dynamic. This makes your blog much easier to crawl.
   
   
2. Comment on other people's blogs! This has got to be the number one way to increase traffic to your blog. Visit blogs that are similar to yours, but much more popular, and leave a thoughtful comment on different entries. Most of the time, they allow you to leave your website address when leaving a comment, which really helps drive traffic.
   
   Now please understand that spamming blogs with your blog address is NOT going to help! You have to leave a real comment! This will also help you develop alliances with other blogs and hopefully have them link to you on their homepage.
   
   
3. Write often. You can't drive traffic if you haven't written an entry in months. Ultimately, you want the people who visit your blog to LIKE your blog and hopefully bookmark it.
   
   
4. Write about recent events. If you're writing about everyday things, make sure you also bring up and discuss top news stories. People are searching for these on Google and you want your site to appear somewhere in those search results. In addition, many people will reference your site when discussing the topic. My copy-paste of George Carlin's The Planet is Fine is bringing in more traffic than all my other entries combined! This is because a lot of websites are referencing my site for the quote.
   
   
5. Put your blog address in the signature of your email, along with your name. Every time you send an email out, you will also be advertising your blog.
   
   
6. Tags! These are becoming VERY hot in the blogosphere. Visit the leader in the tagging game, Technorati, and sign up! It really helps boost visits.
   
   
7. Write a meme (rhymes with dream). While a lot of the ones I see on sites like myspace are usually utterly immature, you can write a very decent and thoughtful one to give insight into your life. As stated on The Daily Meme, a meme is a list of questions that you saw somewhere else and decided to answer. Check out the examples on their page. The goal is to have some other blogger see yours, decide to answer the questions themselves, and credit your site for the inspiration.
   
   
8. Spell check spell check spell check!! There is nothing worse than misspellings on your blog, especially on important keywords. That's pretty much shooting yourself in the foot. Don't shoot yourself in the foot., especially if you are on the second floor. You might end up hurting someone, you know!
   

These are all I can think of for now. You can read more here:
Blogger Help: Promoting Your Blog
Search Engine Journal: Increase Traffic to Your Blog from Search Engines
Why Blog? How to Increase Traffic to You Blog, Provide Value to Your Readers

In the end, they all say the same thing, but it's good to read different perspectives on the topic.

That's it for now, happy blogging!



Blatantly stolen from Davezilla

Ads AGAIN?

Yes. To the right and bottom of the blog, there are Google Adsense advertisements. Do they work? I don't know. My goal is to increase the traffic to my blog by writing more often and about more topics that people are interested in. I'd like to move the hosting off of 1&1, so I would like the site to at least pay for itself (a modest $10 a month).

I think discussing more about business and finances would be a big help to my utterly dull blog. Any objections?

You know what I miss (besides Araks)?
The greatest steakhouse in existance: Ruth's Chris Steakhouse

April Fools Yet Again

Yes, it was a joke. ;-)

Back to School!

After having spent the last few years out of school and working, I'm finally at a point where I think a degree would really help. Therefore, I've decided to go back to school! That's right, I'm going to put on my cute lil backpack and dive back into the wicked world of education.

So here's my plan so far (subject to change without notice, void where prohibited): I'm going to go back to GCC, then transfer to UCIrvine. By this time, Araks will be done with her undergrad studies and we'll move in together at graduate housing. I'll work on my bachelors while she works on her masters. We get to live together!!! I'm so excited!

The great thing about CornerBLUE is that 99% of our customer contact is via phone and email. That means I can work from anywhere, so it won't matter if I'm in LA, Irvine, or North Dakota.

I've already talked to a GCC counselor and I'm going to start classes next semester.