What is Money?

Interesting conspiracy theory about how money works. But I don't have any better explanation... I'd be interested to talk to an economist about whether the video has any legitimacy.

This is the first in a 5 part series.

Photoshop your way to success

If you've seen "The Secret" then you know about vision boards, which are posters where you place visual images of your goals, so you can focus on accountability to yourself each day as you see the results that you're working towards. I was creating a vision board today, and I pulled a classic Zig Zigler move by sticking my head on someone else's body to visualize what I'll look like when I get in better shape. (Thanks to Marcus for the graphics assistance.)

Pretty soon I'll look just like that, so I can use a photo of my own body, and then hopefully I won't have the sickly red coloring in my face or the slightly distorted neck and head size.

Amazon Prime

I signed up for Amazon Prime's free trial, and then I forgot to cancel it, so now I'm stuck with a year membership. Even though I wasn't planning on keeping it, it really is a great deal -- for $79 a year I get free 2-day shipping on all Amazon products. (Only products that come directly from Amazon are included, so used items or items from 3rd party vendors are not included).

I can also share the membership with up to 4 family members, so you might be receiving an invitation to share the account. If you are not one of the invitees, but you need to buy something from Amazon that has expensive shipping, feel free to let me know and I can order it for you.

When ordering yourself, don't forget to use my affiliate link.

Rock Star Family

Now I have not one but TWO brothers with albums available on iTunes. Naturally I highly recommend them. Benj actually has 3 songs that show significant popularity on iTunes! (Each song shows a popularity rating in the iTunes store.) Mark just released his but I'm sure his songs will catch up soon.

Benj's group is called Cows Never Die, so you can search for "Cows Never Die" on iTunes, or the album name, "She Usually Wears Mittens." Or you can link directly to the iTunes store page for the group. The album features smash hits such as "Snow Fort Heaven" and "Polydactyly".

Mark's album is called Tomorrow. Search iTunes for "Mark Tanner Tomorrow" or link to the store page here. More info available on the official album website here.

Iridium Still Flying

My first job out of college was with Motorola, in 1999. I was working on software for a satellite system called Iridium, which was created for global satellite phones and pagers. After I'd been there a year Iridium went into bankruptcy, and Motorola offered me the options of taking a job in another department, or taking 10 weeks of severance pay. I took the severance.

Over the years since, I'd heard rumors about whether the Iridium service was still being used, and whether the "birds" were still flying, but I hadn't seen anything very concrete recently, until I stumbled across this article on Computer World.

Apparently business is booming, relatively speaking. So that's pretty cool to see. I was disappointed though, that the article didn't mention me, or whether my code was still running. :)

About As Much As Meets The Eye

I decided to go see a movie on my birthday. I couldn't go see Harry Potter 5 without seeing 3 and 4 first, and 6 plus hours of movies sounded like a lot, so I went with Transformers. [Spoiler alert. And by the way, Voldemort kills Hermione in book 7.]

I thought Caveman did a pretty good job in the lead role. Some of the saved-by-the-bell-esque juvenile drama was a little annoying, but overall not too distracting. And the effects were very cool.

Some of the Transformers' dialog killed me:

OP: It's you and me, Megatron!
Megatron: No, it's just me!

Megatron, first words after waking up from an 80 year coma: You've failed me again, Star Scream!

Classic stuff.

I was a little confused by some plot points though. For example, why did the government try to hide the evidence of the Transformers, when there were hundreds or thousands of eye witnesses who saw them fighting in the street? And why did they think the best way to protect the cube was to give it to a human and have him try to run it up to the top of a building and deliver it to a guy in a helicopter? Um... wasn't the human a little more likely to get stepped on than an Autobot? And if they wanted to take the cube to the roof, why didn't they give it to any Transformer who could hop up there in seconds? And weren't all the helicopters and planes getting shot down anyway? What was the helicopter guy supposed to do with it? Kind of a strange plan. But it all worked out.