My Dear Hard Drive

Archive for January, 2009

I just have to share this message sent by a customer at Constant Content, an article (writing) shop.

You have received a new message at Constant Content

Subject: New Public Request for CC Community: luxury Articles

Customer XXX has requested a new article on Constant Content, below are the details:

Title:luxury Articles
Description:They should be written by English native speakers in a tone that is intelligent, witty,inspired, somewhat provocative, polite and non offensive.The titles must not have more than five words and must be catchy. We do not wish that you refer to a single company but to the category at large.

Amount of articles:10
Price per article:$10-20
Length of article:300-350
Subjects:1. Luxury Cars
2. Private jets
3. Jewelry
4. Watches
5. Luxury hotel
6. Rent a jet
7. Wine
8. Cigars
9. Luxury golf clubs
10. Leather goods

Date requested:2009-01-30 17:42:16
Other notes:Please bear in mind that all products and services that will be implied in your articles are the most exclusive and expensive in the world. For example:  on the cars, our image car is a Rolls Royce and not a Mercedes or similar



Thanks,

Constant Content

Now on to my comment: Every time I drive my Rolls Royce to a luxury hotel I’m looking to make a quick 20 bucks.

Popularity: 4%

Do you know people, who rant and rave along the lines of ‘why can’t they just take my advice’ in their frustration of yet another failed attempt to help? I’m sure you know a relative like this (like your mother), but maybe you know one that is a chronic helper, someone who helps anyone who submits to it. These people don’t care if you want their help or need their help, because they are not helping you, they have their own issues forcing them to help you.

A conversation I had earlier today awoke my thoughts about this. An enlightened, wise man. I’ve admired his writing for years, and then, recently, had a few IM conversations with him when it hit me. He was on an ego-trip.

Let’s back up a bit. I learned something about myself a long time ago. I love giving people advice, helping them and giving them virtual playgrounds like discussion boards and the like. To the surface it seems like I’m doing this out of the goodness of my heart, but that’s only a part of the motivation. I get my reward. The reward is the feeling of superiority, authority, capability and control. I of course take delight of actually helping the people and seeing them enjoying what I created for them, but that is not my only motivation, unless I’m helping a friend. On the flip side of the coin, I don’t ask for help, and I don’t like receiving it either. And I believe, most people don’t really care for it either.

So the question arises; how do you help people without making them submit to your superiority and feeling like shit, while still getting the same satisfaction you do it for? The answer is simple: Never help anyone individually, unless they ask for your help. Also, never offer help assuming someone needs it. Always check with them if they need help, and try not to sound desperate to help, so that they won’t feel OBLIGATED to be helped, and let them give you green light to do it. When you have the permission to help, don’t abuse that permission and help the person on areas they didn’t request for help, even if they needed it.

Now you might say that you have to help a person if they need it. It’s your duty. You cannot pass them without helping them if they need your help and wisdom. I tell you to get over yourself and reassure yourself that it is none of your concern. If you really want to help that specific person, open the doors and offer your help to anyone who is willing to help themselves to it, but don’t ram it down someone’s throat when they’re not asking for it. The reason is, that there is a big difference between these sentences: “I’m out of my depth here, I need help.” and “You don’t know what you’re doing, I can help you.” I’m sure most of you can pick the difference, but I’m not sure everyone can. Once the green light is on, you can go in like a whirl wind and fix everything up, but before that happens, you have to keep your distance and let people figure things out for themselves.

The reason why general help works better than individual help is that it is less intrusive and less personal. You’re not making people feel like a charity case, inferior to you, like a child. They can see that this problem they’re having is big enough to be addressed to masses, so they’re not the only damned idiot who still hasn’t gotten it. If you go in and target an individual, they think that boy, they really must be stupid for not getting this as you go through all the trouble just for them – or at least you must think they’re stupid, or they realise it is a power sift thing intended to establish a child-parent (submissive-dominant) relationship. Neither one is really a fertile ground for any kind of growth. The bigger the help you’re offering, the more careful you have to be with the approach. If you swing into someone’s life with an intent to change their lives forever and solve all their problems, “if they just listen to you” that’s not going to work. You are telling them to accept you as their saviour and blindly follow you like you were Jesus himself.

Yesterday, I got some help from my brother-in-law. He solved a problem I’ve had for months. (To save my face I’ll have to say that I have been doing other things other than just trying to solve that one issue…) I went to him and asked him a simple question, and in 5 minutes my problem was solved. I didn’t feel stupid or anything, because at least I was clever enough to ask the right guy. Now, if he had come to me and told me: “Oh, let me do that for you!” it would have made me feel like a complete loser. He would have declared his superiority over me, but in the situation that happened, I had already decided that okay, this is one thing I can’t do without asking someone. (Some of us take longer to admit that than others. )

Another reason for chronic helping is the escape of one’s own problems by helping out other people. They don’t need to face their own failures and inadequacies if they just focus on yours. Again, it gives a feeling of capability, like they were in control of their lives – or at least somebody’s. Helpers motives are rarely questioned if it is apparent they don’t want your money, and pointing out the selfish motives for selfless acts might not go unpunished. Let’s see.

Popularity: 48%

It seems that there’s some sort of an anti-breeding and anti-dog show movement going around the world at the moment. It is the age old myth raising it’s head again, that pure bred dogs suffer from more illnesses than the mixed. Let me shed some light on this…

I have a pure bred, of course, but I don’t want to go around saying you shouldn’t have a mix. Just that I want to have the same right with my pure dog without having to justify it to people. My dog is a product of a combination that has a risk of mild eye problem, and mild hip dysplasia. If he was a mix, I wouldn’t have a clue of that fact, because neither the eye problem or the hip problem is any way detectable other than through fairly costly medical scans. Most mutt owners don’t take these scans, because they have no use for them, therefore they don’t know that their dog has a problem, because it simply isn’t a practical problem. My dog has been hip scored and eye checked. He shows no signs of eye problems, but scored B and C on his hips. The other hip is scored B and the other one is C. B means “nearly normal” and C means “mild hip dysplasia”. When I saw the X-rays, I actually cheered, because there was nothing wrong with them. I could not see a problem. I was surprised to find out that they were not perfect. And that is exactly how a mutt owner would feel, they wouldn’t have a clue about the underlining health issues of their dogs, if they don’t show symptoms, and therefore they would declare the dog completely healthy.

Pure bred dogs can be bred like they were mutts though. That means, that you take two dogs of the same breed, stick them together and see what happens. It may or may not cause problems. In the long run, it probably will. When a reputable breeder mates dogs, he will have both parents hip scored and eye checked, see the lineage of dogs to ensure they are not closely related unless he wants to reinforce certain genetic trade. He will probably have an idea of what colours he should expect from the litter and avoid using two dogs with similar health problems, reducing the risk of producing sick off-spring. Because genetic manipulation isn’t done, it is impossible to weed out health problems, which a breeder probably would do if he could. Mutts are not immune to genetic diseases, in fact, they can have any mix of bad genes and you wouldn’t have a clue. You won’t hear about sick mutts that much though, because the diseases are not recorded, nor are they of any great interest to anyone. Who would care that some one’s mutt has a disease of some kind, probably just a fluke anyway, right? And who knows where they got the dog from, probably some puppy farm, and you never know about them! And so what, his mix is completely different to my mix, so it wouldn’t really effect me anyway! Ignorance is a blitz.

That is not to say that every pure bred breeder is a responsible one. Good heavens no. They have a lot more reason to lie to you about their motivations, successes and failures than guy with a litter of accidents. They can also get so wrapped up into their image as a breeder, that they can lie about test scores and even use different dogs than what they claim they used in breeding. The kennel clubs are fighting against fraud all the time, but nobody controls the mutt market. I can check an official registry online for any health records in Finland for each dog that has ever checked. I can see if they’re not checked. I can see their show results and their field results. I can see if they are microchipped so I can be sure it’s the right dog. You can not attend a show without a microchip or id tattoo anymore, so that the dog shown is surely the one that it’s supposed to be. Most countries have banned docked dogs from shows, while the breeders applaud. (Some don’t though.) You can’t even use hair spray on poodles in some countries. Most dog owners stop showing their dogs if the dogs seem not to enjoy the shows. A lot of them LOVE dog shows though, you should go see sometime if you think it’s abusive.

I cannot swear that every breeder is doing what is best for the dogs, just the same as you can’t swear that every mutt has been brought to this world with responsible motives. We all just want what’s best for the dogs, and we cannot just down right say that you’re wrong and you should stop doing what you do. We can educate each other of our own methods, and give each other the benefit of a doubt and a bit of understanding. Don’t throw the puppy out with the bath water.

Popularity: 46%

I am no expert in healthy habits. That’s why I call myself the Average Jane. I had my beliefs about health food, exercise and the sort, just like the next guy. I HATED sports at school. I still hate the types practiced at school. I hated salads. I no longer do. And, some months later, I felt really old and fat. I no longer do. I want to bust some myths for you, like my strength and conditioning coach (it’s a qualification to train professional athletes) -husband busted for me.

90% of weight loss is about diet

Exercising to loose weight is not really necessary. You don’t have to buy Total Gym and bust your ass to lose weight. It helps, but not that much. Exercise will tone you, it gives you a better form, but in terms of weight loss it’s fairly insignificant. The basic formula is simple: Eat less than what you use – but don’t starve yourself. You see, you can go too far with “eating less”. It’s not about not eating, it’s about eating smart. Let me elaborate.

Breakfast

You’ve heard that you have to have breakfast, right? Have you heard why? I will tell you. After sleeping the full night, your body has completely used up all available carbohydrates. Normally, you would start looking for food straight after waking up, as the ancient human would not worry about having a shower, doing hair and make-up, get kids to school and so forth before sitting down to eat. So if you start franticly fussing around before eating, your body will get this message: “Okay, there’s no food available and it looks like a crisis, we better hang on to what we’ve got!” It goes into an economy drive, slowing down your metabolism to only use what it takes to keep you alive. You’ll feel tired; your brain doesn’t function well and so forth.

If you have your breakfast, your body decides that everything is fine, and it can safely burn off the calories that you take in and then some. If you’re in a hurry, have a banana. It’s easy and fast to eat and contains a lot of energy – and sugars (carbohydrates), everyone loves bananas! Ideally, you could eat more, but you can start off with the banana and once you’re done with most of the hassle of the day, have something else that keeps you going until lunch.

Eat 5 times a day

Every meal you skip will send the wrong message to your body. You can’t go on the whole day and then eat at 11 pm. You can snack during the day, but snack with quality foods, not with potato chips. You might find yourself feeling hungrier than normal. I certainly do, even though I eat more than what I normally would. I believe this is because the metabolism has sped up so much. So I eat something little at a time so I’ll know when I’ve had enough before I over-killed the hunger.

You love junk food

Now, let’s talk about the type of foods to eat. Try crossing out the word “junk” when you declare you love junk food. You don’t, trust me. You love food. We all love food, because it’s so damned nice! You think you love junk, but the reason why you like it is because it’s tasty and it’s there without you having to cook. You don’t like the taste of fat; it’s the salt, and the fillings. In fact, I don’t think you’d notice if the fat was missing, unless it’s replaced with something plastic like nasty equivalent.

Tips: Have a salad with a balsamic vinaigrette based dressing. If you love salt & vinegar chips, you’ll love vinaigrette dressing. If you can get your hands on Paul Newman’s Own Balsamic Vinaigrette (Lighten Up), get some. It’ll turn any salad into an irresistible snack. (I did not believe 6 months ago that I would ever say anything that silly.)

Find a healthy fast food. Fast food isn’t unhealthy by definition. It can be quite good for you. Me and my husband love love love something called Steve’s Favourite Kebab. To me it looks more like a chicken wrap than a kebab, but who am I to dispute the label. What ever it is, it’s beautiful! Salad, grilled (not fried) spiced chicken in chilli sauce wrapped up in a tortilla bread and grilled. Unfortunately, unless you live in Hobart, I think you’re out of luck, but you can find your local Subway instead. At Subway, get the honey oats bread instead of white bread.

For home made burritos, get the Old El Paso burrito kit. Spicy hot, and healthy at the same time, what could possibly beat that?

Body time

Your body doesn’t work on a weekly basis. It works on a daily basis. This means, that you can’t eat like a horse today, and then say to yourself that you’ll make up for it tomorrow and eat nothing. Your body thinks that your tribe had a kill today and you ate that one fat cow, but today we’re back to no food available -panic mode. Your body is engineered to keep you alive during starvation, and it jumps to every chance to save your life. (Do it a favour and give it the same consideration it gives to you.)

Plan a menu for a week

You know how the panic strikes when you simply don’t know what to make for dinner? Plan a weekly menu and repeat it until you’re sick of it and then plan again. It takes so much hassle off your days when you know what you’re going to have for dinner. It also gives you something to look forward to, if you have some extra very special favourite foods on the menu. Here’s what we have:

Monday – pasta (durum wheat) with mince and a sauce. (We vary the sauces.)
Tuesday – Salad, chiken thigh and couscous.
Wednesday – Old El Paso burritos light version extra hot. :p
Thursday – Steve’s Favourite Kebab (they laugh at us when we go in.)
Friday – Fast Food Friday; meaning cold foods that don’t need cooking. Little indulgence allowed.
Saturday – Random (Saturdays can get so varied that it’s easier to decide what to eat on the day.)
Sunday – Home made Rye base tuna pizza.

Exercise

Do you want to buy Nintendo Wii? Do you have it? Do your kids want it? If you can afford it, get it. It’s fabulous. (Wii and a dance mat.) If you have it already and you thought it’s just for the kids, kick them off it for an hour a day and use it yourself. It’s so much fun you won’t believe it. Weight loss exercise doesn’t need to be over the top. Don’t believe in the images of “the Biggest Loser” where they work out like they were at a boot camp. They are doing fitness training, not weight loss training. It’s for drama purposes, not for efficiency. There’s two ways to do it: The interval training: Work as hard as you can for a minute, and then slow down to almost stopping pace for a minute and repeat for the duration of half an hour to an hour. The level heart rate method: Keep your heat rate around between 114 and 153 for the duration of 30 minutes to an hour. Both are good, interval is better but sucks ass to do. Wii is excellent for the later method, as it raises your pulse easily to that level. If you don’t have a heart rate meter, just keep an eye on your general level of exhaustion – you shouldn’t be overly exhausted, light sweat would be about right. (It doesn’t matter if you work out a bit harder than that, it just takes you to fitness training levels, and but you’ll still lose some fat.

Other methods: Biking, roller-blading, walking, swimming. Same general rules apply.

Pros

I have a lot more variety in my favourite foods now.
I look better. My skin is glowing; it sometimes stops me in front of the mirror!
I have my waist back.
Very little effort.

Cons

I miss chocolate, but the less I have it, the less I grave for it. I still allow myself a chocolate treat every now and then though.

Reading: Donna Aston Fat or Fiction

Motivational help and monitoring your progress: Traineo.com

Popularity: 32%

Unbelievable? You betcha, but that’s exactly what happened to Australian writer Harry Nicolaides, who wrote a fictional story three years ago. He self published it, made 50 copies and sold only seven of them. In one paragraph, he refers to an unnamed prince who has a “wild” private life. That was enough to land him in jail for 3 years for insulting the king.

Now, I wonder, again, which would have been wiser. Collect the 50 books and give the author a slap on the wrist in the silence, or throw him in jail for 3 years, making headlines all over the world? The Thai King, Bhumibol Adulyadej, cannot possibly understand the contempt I feel for him and his country at this very moment. Ironically, my blog, as insignificant as it is, will probably reach a larger audience than the said books, and I am stating quite loud and clear, that I think that is a disgrace and bloody ridiculous. Every time I will see a Thai from here on, I will remember this injustice. The shame of this punishment will stay in my mind forever and forever.

I do hesitate writing this. Who knows, maybe I will end up to some jail if I ever make a landing in Thailand between now and the day I die. I do not hesitate out of respect for the king, but out of fear for people who are capable of such heinous acts. If kings want respect, they always must stay fair. Gods must always stay fair, and people who consider themselves somewhere between a god and a king, must always stay fair to receive respect.

I know the King didn’t pass this ruling himself, but he has the power to take it away and scold those who thought it was necessary. Make it right Bhumibol Adulyadej, make it right and remove this shame off your country.

EDIT 29.Jan.2009 I did a search to see what’s going on with Harry, and I believe he is still in jail. However, I found this older article about his case with a lot more detail, including this little bit of info: The king, Bhumibol Adulyadej himself actually is against the whole law of Lese majeste! How utterly disrespectful toward him it is to enforce the law! In addition, all Thai-people who have been charged with this lately, have been given bail. Not Harry though… And what is Australian goverment doing about this? It seems nothing, as per usual. This is not the first time I’ve heard that Australian goverment is absolutely useless when it comes to Australian Citizens outside of Australia.

Popularity: 5%

I’ve been actively using Twitter for about two weeks now. I’ve been reading blog posts about it, checked services, downloaded “Tweet Clients” and what not. Somehow, the short-worded world of Twitter didn’t really open up to me that easily. I tend to be wordy, as you know, so the 140 marks -limit really didn’t do it for me. But, I think I finally got the gist of it – in the bloggers point of view.

Frankly, if I had stayed on Twitter.com alone, I still wouldn’t get it. Twitter.com is very basic compared to all the services surrounding it. Who has time to hang out on one site all the time anyway? Not me – and I’m not doing anything that important. Twitter is supposed to keep you up-to-date to the minute, but who on Earth has time to stare at the public Twitter update stream to come up with something even remotely interesting? So I downloaded a couple of desktop Tweeting programs to make it easier to update and follow. But quite frankly, even that didn’t really get me much anywhere.

Then I found Tweetlater.com and their keyword alerts. It sends me an email summary of tweets that have certain keyword in them, every 4 hours. I can quickly read it through to see what people are saying right now about social networking for example. Most of the time, they don’t say anything that interesting. It only takes that one tweet though, that will spark your interest and get you somewhere. The thing is that the bulk of bloggers don’t say anything interesting or helpful either. Most of the time, they write the same stuff over and over – 10 steps to successful blogging, 13 great tutorials, 15 rules to great web design blah blah blah, heard it all before and wrote about it already. It takes you a lot longer to check if a blog has any useful information to you, or anything you’d find remotely entertaining, rather than read through a bunch of Tweets.

Sure, you may miss a great article on Twitter because of a badly structured tweet, but if the tweet is good, chances are that the blogger can actually write – something that you can’t take granted these days. Being witty and to the point in 140 marks or less is a good test for your self-expression skills.
You’ll also be able to quite quickly put your finger on the latest trends. For example, I have a keyword “Finland” on my keyword alert. It took me one summary to learn, that postcrossing is huge in Finland. About 70% of Tweets concerning Finland were about writing a postcard to Finland or receiving a postcrossing-card from Finland. (After I learned this, I told Tweetlater to ignore messages about cards thank you very much.)

During the last 2 weeks I found out that promoting your blog on Twitter is more effective than StumbleUpon – at least if you’re a small-timer like myself. Stumble relies on thumbs up and your readers stumbling your posts, while Twitter… You tweet it, and if you’re lucky (good) someone will retweet it, because it’s easy. It takes about half a second compared to properly stumbling it (for the first time). My advice: If you have those share-buttons on your blog and you had to choose only one, choose Twitter.

Another important thing to know as a blogger, is that you can automatically tweet your blog posts by using TwitterFeed. In addition, there are few services that will update your Twitter status, but a word of warning… Avoid loops! I went tweet-rss crazy myself, and added every feed I could think of to every service I could, and ended up having the same update appear first on Facebook, which updated Twitter, which updated Facebook, which updated Twitter… And so forth. You don’t want to annoy your followers by doing that! I was lucky nobody reported me as a spam bot before I realised what was happening!

The most awesome thing about Twitter is that it is actually very social. A lot of other social networks could easily just drop the “social” off and be more accurate. Because there’s nothing else to do on Twitter than send messages to people and read them, you won’t get side tracked by millions of applications and editing your profile all the time. How many of you confess to staring at their own profile page thinking what else to add, while hardly ever visiting other people’s profiles? Twitter has stripped everything else off the menu and sticks with the main thing: Socialising. On Twitter, reading other people’s content is even more rewarding than sending out your own. That’s just fantastic.

And for some reason, hearing “follow me on Twitter” isn’t nearly as irritating as the normal “add me as a friend” even though you can’t possibly know who I am. Twitter is public by definition, so following thousands of people is completely allowed, unlike on many other social networking sites. So, follow me on Twitter, only if you want, of course.

Popularity: 37%

I suppose I am taking a risk here, because I’m speaking in defence of the freedom of speech in a way… Apparently, being honest about your true feelings isn’t appropriate these days. Someone important might get offended. In this case, that someone important was Fred Smith of FedEx for a comment made on Twitter about their town by certain Mr. Andrews who was on his way to give him a presentation of a sort. The unfortunate Mr. Andrews didn’t like Memphis. It seems, that Mr. Andrews should have liked Memphis, or at least should have pretend to, and as he didn’t he got into a world of trouble for mentioning that on Twitter.

What I want to ask is that how petty do you have to be if you bother to write a 350 word letter about a tweet message that most people wouldn’t thought twice about without you bringing it up? Now we all know that Memphis is a bit of an eye sore from the airport point of view. Mr. Andrews never said why he didn’t like Memphis. Maybe he has an obnoxious auntie there. He also never mentioned WHICH town he didn’t like, but thanks to Fred Smith, we all know now that it was Memphis. Now I know, that if I ever go to US, Memphis isn’t probably the nicest place to go see. (Not that I would have anyway, so no big harm done there, or even if I had been thinking about going, the harm still wouldn’t be big I suppose.)

I once got into trouble by stating online that I couldn’t understand how people could live in Helsinki. To me it was way too noisy and there were no trees in sight, and every building looked alike. I lived in Helsinki for some years after that, and I still can’t understand why some people choose to live there. I said that online, and a (former) friend who lives in Helsinki was offended. I simply cannot understand why anyone would be so precious about their home town. Now that I live in Hobart, I LOVE this place. I absolutely ADORE it. But I do understand that some people will find it way too quiet for their taste; they even might say it’s not pretty as there are no neon lights and some of the houses and stores are a bit of an eye sore, but do I care if someone says that out loud on Twitter? Of course not! They have a right to their opinion, and it won’t change my love for Hobart one tiny bit. I happen to like those eye-sores as well. They add character. :p

I don’t know how the letter got online, but I suspect that unless Mr. Andrews got sacked for this he wouldn’t have dared to. However, it got online and Fred Smith should know that publicity these days goes both ways. Everything that can be legally published and a bunch of illegal stuff can become public information. (And here’s a tip, Mr. Smith. If you resort to personal insults toward the little guy in response to something so generic than someone not liking your town, it doesn’t really sit well with general public.) Now, I am one of the few people who don’t have to worry about what drinking party photos will be published of me on Facebook, because I’ve yet to have my first drink. I still feel it’s completely unrealistic to demand a squeaky-clean public image from the people around you, because the only people who can keep that up are very likely to suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, and you would not want to hire them if you knew. People are people, and we are very fast getting to know that we all have things in our lives that other people will judge. Be it your figure, your opinions, your way of life, your religion, someone will think you’re an abomination for it.

I rarely quote the bible, but this is such a perfect opportunity: Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged

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There’s more to this story yet. Please read the comments made by Terbil Towl explaining who exactly wrote that letter… May that be a lesson in thinking before typing in anger.

Popularity: 30%