Author: Brian

Whatever it is you want to do… start now.

The advice is the same, whether it comes to us from ancient China (“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”), from a blog about finances, those concerned about the environment, a progressive talk radio show host, or an athletic shoe company.

• “How wonderful is it that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world?” – Anne Frank
• “The successful person makes a habit of doing what the failing person doesn’t like to do.” – Thomas Edison
• “Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.” – Leonardo da Vinci
• “Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.” – Yoda
• “When a problem comes along, you must whip it.” – Devo
• “Travelers, it is late. Life’s sun is going to set. During these brief days that you have strength, be quick and spare no effort of your wings.” – Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

Of late I’ve been interested in the idea of passive income. The idea and implementation of it, actually. I think I’ve blogged before about alternative sources of income, and it turns out that several of those ideas on that list are also considered passive income: any of the ones that involve writing something and selling it, for instance. Royalties on a novel would be passive, after the hard work of writing and publishing it, the sales of the book over time will generate income.

Other examples would be interest income, or investing in stocks or bonds. Or investing in someone else’s business – another way to earn interest is loaning money out to others. Of course, the hard part of all this is having enough money to loan it out to others. Takes money to make money. And unless you have a large amount of money to spend, even getting 10% return isn’t going to replace the day job.

This all ties in to my epiphany about collecting capital in a capitalist society, as well. The largest form of capital for most Americans is their house. Once the purchase is made, typically the value of the property rises over time, and hopefully rises faster than you’re paying interest on the mortgage. Once the value of the house is greater than what you owe on it, you’re making money. So home ownership in, in a very real way, a common form of passive income.

My sister’s husband once talked about a friend of his from high school. This friend was renting an apartment in a small complex, and managed to purchase the whole complex. He could then eliminate or drastically reduce his main living expense by applying the rents he collected from the other tenants towards his mortgage. Clever. I’ve thought about that, too, but I’m not sure that the building I’m living in is worth it… or even for sale. There’s also the whole maintenance and upkeep thing to consider. Ugh. Still, rental income is another form of passive income, to a certain extent.

Another idea for generating ongoing income without much actual work is my idea of starting a web hosting company. If I’m going to maintain a server for myself anyway, why not rent out disk space, bandwidth, and software services, too? In fact, on my to-do list is a note to look into what it would cost to rent a tiny office somewhere that can get DSL or bandwidth that I can re-sell. Stick a server and enough hard drives in there, configure it for serving web pages, learn a bit about using Apache and creating virtual domains, and see how many customers I could get. Again, it wouldn’t replace my current income – it would supplement it, and it would always be coming in, as long as I kept the servers running and connected to the intertubes.

Combining several of these would enable me to rely less and less on the day job. At the very least, the plan would reduce the stress I feel about my day job, and would give me vital contacts and skills in areas I very much value.

Plus most of them seem like fun. I love writing. I love tweaking computers and fixing them. I love playing with numbers and spreadsheets and calculating returns. And who doesn’t love playing with other people’s money?

Of course, it would all be so much easier if I could just win the freakin’ lottery already. Until that day, I have to make do with the foldin’ green I got, not the foldin’ green I deserve…

Fashion is the art of looking good. Now, that means different things to different people, but in Western culture, the basics of fashion is this: dress so that you look tall and thin. Make use of color and pattern and various optical illusions to draw people’s eyes away from whatever it is about you that isn’t tall or thin.

When I was in my 20s, I paid a little bit (not too much – I was cynical at an early age) of attention to fashion. I was, however, operating under a handicap; a self-inflicted one, perhaps, but still… I didn’t realize I was short. I thought 5’6″ was OK. I didn’t realize that I would be considered a “short man”. I just assumed my male friends were all “tall” and that I was at, or near, the average. It should have been a huge clue that all of my male friends were taller than me. Objectively, that put my height somewhere to the left of the bell-shaped curve. Ah, the delusions of youth.

And yet, subconsciously, perhaps I knew that I was below average in height for an American male, because I made up for height with weight. I, like many who aren’t paying much attention, gained and gained and gained in weight. I became a blocky, squared-off shape. And the bigger I got, the more I started to dress to hide that weight. Baggy clothes, dark colors, long coats, heavy shoes.

Several years ago, as I began to bring my weight under control, I slowly re-learned all the basic fashion tips that fashion experts give for men. And I quickly realized that there are separate tips for short men, and big men.

And they tend to contradict each other. It’s impossible for someone who may fit into both categories to follow all of the advice.

This makes sense on one level; short men are trying to look bigger, and heavy men are trying to look smaller. The advice is working at cross-purposes to each other.

Since I fit both categories, I had to pick one or the other. I went with the “big man” advice.

But the more weight I lose, the more I can start to incorporate the advice for shorter men: lighter colors, snug fit. And my friends are starting to notice…

I’ve been away from my blog for a bit. Couple of days, but I’m sure there are people out there eagerly awaiting an update or seven from me.

I’m sure of it.

What have I been doing? Learning that there really is nothing you cannot do with teh Google. Check it out: you can text searches to Google and they’ll text the answers back to you! I could have totally used the movie listings on Tuesday night, when a friend called me on the spur of the moment, and wanted to see a movie because he didn’t have the wife with him. I didn’t know about Google Mobile that night, and so I had to sneak into the Apple Store at Pioneer Place Mall to use their internet connection to find out showtimes.

I could have just texted something like:

movies 300 97201

and had the showtimes sent to me for all theaters in that zip code.

And I’ve taken my surfing to a whole new level with Google Reader. It’s a page that collects all the new posts for all the many sites I normally surf manually. There are hitches – some sites don’t have “feeds”, which is a way to tell when a new post has arrived.

And speaking of texting, I can text my Google Calendar to create new events, and it will text a reminder to me about the event. This makes the anemic calendar on my phone pale in comparison… but possibly only because I’m now a wiz at texting.

There’s other stuff going on in my life that don’t involve Google, but things like the above is probably why Google reported waaaaay better sales last quarter than anyone expected.

A man getting shot in the stomach, at close range, with a cannon ball.

Why, yes, I am in fact up at 1:52 AM in the morning.

What am I doing? I’m taking the Pew News IQ test.

I scored a perfect 9 out of 9 questions. How did you do?

Just so you know, if you tend to watch local news, or listen to Rush Limbaugh, or Fox “News”… you probably won’t do so well.

However, if you tend to watch “The Daily Show” with John Stewart… you’ll do fine.

Note to my friends: Don’t worry, I’ll still love ya no matter what your score is.

As Bucky Katt says: “I don’t need constant adoration and ego stroking to feel good about myself. I’m not a dog.”

If you’re not seeing some of me in Bucky… you’re not looking hard enough.

Even Tracy sees it. Really, really well. Especially today. Click through the link to see what I mean.

Perusing the Sunday paper and digging in to my reward breakfast (reward because I ran a personal best time in the Race for the Roses 5K this morning – 27:12! 8:45 per mile pace!) in a window seat at the Limelight. Home-fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, French toast, sausage.

And coffee. Lots of cream and sugar, and I’d just gotten it to the perfect combination of temperature and flavor. The cup was half-full.

Lydia approached the table, asked me how I was doing. “Great,” I said, smiling. She carried a coffee pot.

She started to turn away, saw my coffee cup, turned back. Poised the coffee pot over my cup. “D’you want me to top it up?”

I didn’t answer right away. I sat there, looking at the cup, mentally still tasting the flavor of cream and coffee and sugar, feeling the hot-but-not-too-hot-to-drink liquid splashing over my tongue and warming my tummy.

The moment, silence… lengthened. Grew.

I looked up at her. “…ok” I finally said. She flipped her blonde bangs from her eyes, and her normal polite smile shifted into an amused sly grin.

I felt compelled to explain: “It’s just that I’ve got it to that perfect state -”

She laughed. “Oh, no, I remember!” She filled the cup, the milky tan fluid darkening to a rich medium brown.

“- and I didn’t want to have to do it again, but I figured the cup -“

“It’s a delicate balance,” she agreed.

“- was half gone already, so…” I trailed off. She knew. She understood.

“I drink mine black now, but I remember the ritual of preparing my coffee, back when I drank it with waaaaay more cream and sugar than almost anyone I know,” she continued. She’d moved to the next table over, and was clearing away the leave-behinds of the previous patrons. “But then I went camping -“

“Oh,” I interrupted “and you had to!”

Her eyes were focused on another time while her hands moved in the present. “Yes, exactly. No cream, no sugar. But I couldn’t go without coffee. So I learned to associate the good feelings of being in the woods with the black coffee. It’s just so” her hands left her task in the present and folded themselves around an imaginary mug while she leaned her face over it and took in the scent “rich and dark and strong.”

“That’s awesome,” I said. My mouth twisted into a smirk. “But that’s not gonna work for me. I hate camping.”

b!x at Furious Nads! had been covering the teacher in Sisters, Oregon who was fired for teaching Creationism in public school science class. He mentioned that one EMALman was questioning b!x about his coverage.

I took a look, and decided to jump in to answer at least one of EMALman’s questions. After two tries, it seemed obvious that the discussion was going nowhere so I politely declined to continue the discussion. I didn’t want to get angry over the massive amounts of miscommunication going on (on both sides, admittedly) and figured I’d call it off. I didn’t want to troll his site, I only wanted to present my own point of view. But EMALman’s follow-up questions showed that I would have to literally start from the beginning of my philosophy, which would take waaaay longer than just a comment or two. Not worth my time, and though he may find it interesting to discuss, I’d rather put those posts on my own site, actually.

At any rate, keeping all that in the back of my mind, I read in this week’s Ask Marilyn column some tips on keeping political discussions friendly:

Rule No. 1: Don’t expose weaknesses and flaws in the political beliefs of others. It provokes defensiveness, because everyone believes they are right; it makes people mad, because everyone hates to be called wrong; and people who are both defensive and mad are going to be ready to quarrel. Plus, showing people the error of their ways doesn’t make your ways right.

Rule No. 2: Explain the positive basis and evidence for your own political beliefs. People are more likely to adopt new beliefs than to drop old ones; also, people are more receptive to other ideas when not annoyed, and they will listen longer to pleasant, well-grounded comments and points. Plus, your beliefs needn’t be “right”; they need only to be a better choice.

Marilyn vos Savant is apparently the smartest person in the world – based on her scores on several I.Q. tests. I like her take on things, and in this instance I think she’s hit on a brilliant way for people to talk about so-called “touchy” subjects and still keep things civil. In spite of her disclaimer I think this would work for religious discussions, too – except for really aggressive evangelical-types, who would tend to not see a difference between talking about the benefits for themselves and their ideas of the benefits for others… though perhaps Rule No. 1 would mitigate that somewhat.