The bright side of a Moon
Presented for your amusement (and potential death-defying): a list of 60 things worth shortening your life for.
I’ve done a few of these… Looks like I’ve got some work to do.
Feel free to incriminate yourself in the comments.
Me? I’m a bit too self-preservation-y to do that.
A lady in nearby Milwaukie, OR fell for a scam involving a cashier’s check for $2950. Scammers sent her a check, asked her to wire that amount back to them as some sort of security, and they would send her $50,000.00 in return as a prize.
I want one of those – what’s to stop me from just cashing the check and finding some reason the wire back won’t work? What are they going to do – sue me because I didn’t play along with their con-game?
I guess they could come beat it out of me. But beyond that… what?
One of the best things about blogs, at least for me, is that I can get new material from writers I like, and much more often (daily or even more often) than waiting for a new book by them (every few years). And almost all of my favorite authors blog. I’m not sure that should surprise anyone – writers write, and blogging is writing, and since most writers write because they want readers to read their writings, it’s a marriage made in some heavenly (though material and scientific) place.
And so today I read Neil Gaiman (though he calls it a “Journal” and not a “blog”). Fans of his have noticed that he writes his first draft out longhand, in some beautiful Italian leather-bound book, and to the fans’ surprise, Mr. Gaiman has not made any edits to his copy – no cross-outs, no line-outs, no scribbles in the margins. They write to him, and he replies:
If I’m writing fiction by hand I’ll put a loose line through something that I’m definitely not going to use (but I’d never pull it out, and I’d normally want it to be readable in case I change my mind, or in case there’s something there I can use). But for me the important thing is that it’s pure first draft, straight out of the head and onto the page, sort of like this blog. The important thing is moving forward, for me: editing, fixing, tidying, leaving stuff out, that’s all for when I put it onto the computer, that’s all for the second draft.
This is very good advice, and not just for writers. Just do it, just start; take that first step; start now. Begin and see what happens. Say “yes”, and shelve your worry and tell your negative inner voice (the voice of “Mom”, saying “No”) to pipe down.
There are no mistakes, in a first draft. There’s pure thought becoming pure action. Save everything. Judge nothing. Later, when the thought has run its course, you can go back and collect the things you like and set aside the things you don’t (but you may still want those things for different projects, and even if you don’t, they still stand as examples of what you tried).
For instance, I’ve had an idea of collecting and posting links to my favorite authors’ blogs, and calling out the ones who don’t blog (Tim Powers, you rascal; why don’t you blog?!), the ones who do, and the ones who might blog a bit too much (Bruce Sterling, I’m lookin’ at you – You write so much, that it’s theoretically possible to keep up with everything you write, but there are practical limits to how much one fan can do).
But that post idea became this actual post, and on the whole, I’d rather post actual posts, rather than think about potential posts – and I hope that anyone reading this feels the same!
I just broke a lamp.
Well… I knocked it off the stand by the door with my messenger bag, grabbed Smacky and tossed him in the bathroom before he could sniff around the broken glass, got a plastic bag to put all the larger pieces of glass in, put that in the trash, hauled the vacuum cleaner out of the closet, plugged it in, vacuumed, surveyed the area with a flashlight to make sure I got all the glass, put the vacuum cleaner away, put the remains of the lamp in the garbage, and let Smacky out of the bathroom.
Does that count as “just” breaking a lamp?
I’ve seen it a bajillion times, said it a bajillion-quadrillion times, and made use of it eleventy-bajillion times.
But until now, this very moment, I have not paid much attention to the OK button:
It’s universal, ubiquitous, friendly, decisive, connected. It’s on your screen, it’s in your pocket. It’s everywhere. It’s you and the machine having a casual conversation. “How’s this?” “OK!” We probably say OK dozens of times each day without realizing it. It’s a word that requires two people, the speaker and the listener. OK is connection.
All interaction with technology is a conversation. You ask a device to do something. It responds with a question or some choices. In most situations, your simplest response is to simply say OK. The OK button is the handshake. You and the device have worked together to a mutual agreement. “Do you want to save this phone number?” OK. “Do you want to print your document two-sided?” OK.
It’s the one button that requires nearly no translation. Luckily, it’s also one of the most compact words available. OK. Two letters that will fit on any button. OK is not just a word anymore. It’s an icon. A wordicon.
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.
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.