Recap on NY Resolutions

I figured that before starting out on Next Year's Resolutions I should see how I did with this year's. Luckily this time I wrote them in a place where they wouldn't get lost. So here we go..

1- Write more
I've been pretty much writing all of the Dumbagent.com entries, as well as most of the Ticinowedding.com entries. I also wrote that book (available here), so I'm pretty satisfied with this aspect (although this blog has been the most neglected)

2- Learn HTML, XHTML & CSS
I read the "for dummies" book. Of course, I no sooner finished it than I realized I should probably take on php, Joomla, Wordpress, etc. Anyway, that'll be next year I guess.

3- Publish a book
Available here! It was self-published, which is a choice I made more for expediency than anything. I was also able to learn the ropes of publishing though, which should come in useful.

4- Learn to cook at least 5 dishes well
Total Fail. I learned one dish cause I forced myself. Yeah. I guess I don't like cooking. I should find a way to kick my own ass and learn a few dishes though.

5- Have a business be profitable and self-sustaining
Yeah, pretty much fail again. Ticinowedding (soon to be Lugano wedding), should be profitable in 2011. Dumbagent is a big If, since I plough any money I make right back into it. Self-sustaining would be the key for these, so I can at least concentrate more on other endeavors.

6- Enter at least 1 contest per month
I guess. I was good at this at the beginning, although I noticed none of my writings won anything; only my pictures. Hmmmm.

7- Multi-task less
Work in progress, as always. If anyone is interested in this I highly recommend the application "Selfcontrol" (at least for Macs). Oh and read Getting Things Done and The 4-hour workweek.


8- Take more pictures
Yeah I've been taking tons (you can see them all here).



So I guess i give myself a 5.5 out of 8, or 68.75%. I should continue numbers 4 and 5 next year. But I'll address that later on.

Hittites

The Hittites were an ancient empire, in power between the 16th and 12th centuries BC, situated in what later became Anatolia. Their empire ranged from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the East, to Damascus in the South, North to the Black Sea and East to the confines with Greece. In fact the city of Troy was under their vassalage (or, to be precise, was a confederate state).

The principal God of the Hittites was the God of storms. Different dialects gave him slightly different names, but the Luwians (whose dialect was the most spoken in the Hittite empire) called him Tarhunt, and he was represented by the Bull. In fact, the Luwians, as opposed to the people from Hattusa, where the Hittite capital was, had a Genitive form in their language, which can be found in place names ending with -assa. So the southern shore of what is now Turkey, which was called Tarhuntassa, meant land of the Storm God. This phenomenon lasted into Ancient Greece, which place names ending in -assos having the same Genitive meaning.

If the God of storms seems like an arbitrary one to have as a principal god, we should remember that Zeus, the main god of the Ancient Greeks, famously carried a lightning bolt. We should also remember that Greek legend has him disguised as a bull when he rapes the goddess Europa and takes her to Crete (and her grandson is the Minotaur). It isn't hard to see how the word for the storm god, Tarhunt, became the ancient Greek word for bull: Taurus.

Ticino Wedding Brochure

Please vote on our new Brochure design for Ticino Wedding! http://99designs.com/print-design/vote-a28ec0


You can do it anonymously too. Feel free to spread it around. Thanks!

Weeknotes August 30

This week I will:



1.- Update posts for the Ticinowedding blog through the end of September.

2.- Contact Ticino Turismo (again) re: setting up a Ticino Wedding collaboration.

3.- Update posts for Dumbagent through the end of September.

4.- Respond to (yet another) Jury summons. They always seem to want me when I'm out of the country.

A Banking Service for Everything Else

So you have to travel pretty often for your work. You've found that you tend to go to the same cities quite regularly. So, say you end up going to Atlanta, where your company headquarters/big client/main warehouse is located. Do you look forward to these trips? Is the baggage fee an extra hassle? Do worry about getting overhead space for your carry-on? Do you dread having to stand there waiting for your luggage to turn up at the carousel? Do you worry what state the luggage will be in, or if it will show up at all?

Now consider this: how much more would you look forward to these trips if you didn't have to worry about luggage at all? What if, when you arrived at your hotel, your suit, shoes, shirts, ties, jogging suit, bathing suit, informal wear, toiletries, electronics chargers, etc. were all waiting for you?

ObjectBank can make this happen. After your first visit, we will offer to store whatever clothes, objects, electronics you may need. We can even have your clothes dry-cleaned. We will then deliver them to you upon your next arrival. From now on you don't have to worry about checking in luggage. In fact, you barely need carry-ons! Just leave what you need with us and don't worry about it again until your next visit to the Peach State!

As we expand you will even be able to have the clothes and objects you dropped off in Atlanta be available for you when you travel to San Francisco (or whichever other city we operate in). ObjectBank aims to be a veritable bank for your objects, where you can deposit in one city and withdraw in another.

If you would like to contribute to this new project you can donate using the link below. Those who donate more than $250 will have free services for one year. If you would like a form of convertible debt option you can let us know at info@ObjectBank.com.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to contact us at info@ObjectBank.com.


In order to contribute click here:
donations@Luganotranslations.com

Nashville

I need a name for this business venture

So you have to travel pretty often for your work. You've found that you tend to go to the same cities quite regularly. So, say you end up going to Atlanta, where your company headquarters/big client/main warehouse is located. Do you look forward to these trips? Is the check-in fee an extra hassle? Do worry about getting overhead space for your carry-on? Do you dread having to stand there waiting for your luggage to turn up at the carousel? Do you worry what state the luggage will be in, or if it will show up at all?

Now consider this: how much more would you look forward to these trips if you didn't have to worry about luggage at all? What if, when you arrived at your hotel, your suit, shoes, shirts, ties, jogging suit, bathing suit, informal wear, toiletries, electronics chargers, etc. were all waiting for you?

We can make this happen. We will offer to store whatever clothes, objects, electronics you may need. We can even have your clothes dry-cleaned. We will then deliver them to you upon your arrival.

From now on you don't have to worry about checking in luggage. In fact, you barely need carry-ons! Just leave what you need with us and don't worry about it again until your next visit to the Peach State!


Update
I've settled on the name ObjectBank.com for now. You can click on the link below to donate to this idea. I'm looking for $6,000 to get it started. If you donate $200 and up you will get free services for a year. If you want to set up some form of convertible debt option just contact me.

Weeknotes June 28

This week I will:



1.- Set up the meeting with a possible local collaborator for Ticino Wedding, who can hopefully attend my meetings with the event managers as well.

2.- Order 4 Dumbagent books to be sent to predetermined list of people.

3.- Meet with a prospective for handling local consulting in Atlanta.

4.- Reply to a Jury Summons I received (and request a postponement since I'll be out of the country).

Weeknotes June 21

This week I will:



1.- Create a detailed plan and timeline for the rest of the year for Ticinowedding: in terms of partnerships and clientele back in Switzerland, to marketing and promotions.

2.- Contact the event planners and the catering company for Ticinowedding to set up meetings.

3.- Write up a "Contributions" page for Dumbagent, as well as an article promoting it, and choose a release date.

4.- Finish Chapters 16 and 17 in my HTML, XHTML & CSS book.

The Origin of Breakdance

Breakdance comes from the dances the early colonists in the United States used to do in the morning to get their wives and mothers to cook them breakfast. The "breakfast dance" got shortened to "break-dance". It involved headspins and the robot.

Bringing Sexy Back to Economics

Drum roll please....

In case you read this and don't know yet, I'm Bringing Sexy Back to Economics, one Demand Curve at a time...

Yup, my new book is available for Download, at an introductory price of $11.99.

Yes, this is a discount and no, it is not permanent, so check it out now!


If you want more details about just how I'm bringing sexy back, check out the Dumbagent.com information page right here.


And also check out Dumbagent.com regularly for bi-weekly economics updates.



Ok.. you can stop the drum roll now actually.

Throw out Your Old Maps

The San Andreas Fault is a line which marks the border between two tectonic plates: The Pacific and the North American. It runs 800 miles through the length of California. Californians, especially Southern Californians, will talk of "The next big one", meaning the next big earthquake. This is because Central California had a big one in the 1850's, while San Francisco (in the North) had one in 1906, but Southern California is long overdue for a big earthquake, due to rising tension along the fault line.

The general worry is that, when this occurs, California will break off from the rest of the continent, looking somewhat like this:




This map was made in 1650, by a Dutch Cartographer named Joan Vinckeboons. Was he a brilliant geologist or a prescient cartographer?

It turns out he was neither. The San Andreas Fault, unlike most fault-lines, moves in a horizontal motion, not a vertical one. Therefore, while Los Angeles will probably move North of San Francisco at some point in the next 20 million years, a part of California will never break off to form an American Madagascar (Vinckeboons thought it already had). We should tell the Library of Congress they might as well throw this map away during their next spring cleaning session.

Spring Break

Wednesday night, in New York city, after spending an intense night making love to one of my numerous paramours, I bludgeoned her to death with a cupid statuette I own. I know from my strict upbringing that women of loose morals should be shown no mercy. George Bernard Shaw once said 'Women upset everything', and who am I to contradict him? So I was satisfied in having done the correct thing. I read some more of my Derrida book while I waited for her body to congeal, so as to minimize the amount of blood spilled. I then proceeded to saw her body into more easily manageable pieces. As testimony to what higher education can teach people, I took into account the anatomy of her limbs and organs so as to facilitate the cutting. Once I was done I was able to fit the pieces of her body into my Vuitton Keepall overnight bag and my new Samsonite suitcase. I then set off for Washington D.C.

I had decided not to take the plane because I hate to eat even small snacks when there is the risk of turbulence. People with decent upbringings prefer order and tidiness over raw speed. Utility can only be truly maximized when indifference curves are at their highest. I decided that the train would be much better. I arrived at the station by limousine, where a porter offered to carry my luggage to the platform. New York can be such a civilized city. I noticed a police officer ask a homeless man what he was doing there, to which the homeless man stood up and shouted about the Rights of Man and Thomas Paine. The policeman smiled and wandered off.

The train from New York to D.C., despite not having a smoking carriage, has become more pleasant in recent years. On the train I read in the paper how the Dubai Ports deal had been rejected by Congress because foreigners should not be controlling our ports. This made sense. After all, no one would want to trust our precarious points of entry to foreign entities. Once arrived in Washington D.C. I took the metro from Union Station to Anacostia, where I walked two blocks south and left my luggage in a storefront. I walked around the corner and waited all of ten minutes for both pieces of luggage to be stolen. They were someone else's affair now.

I then took the metro to East Falls Church, to my friend's house, for a well-deserved beer.

New Year's Resolutions

One of my New Year's Resolutions was to write more. So I figured a good way to start was to write out my New Year's resolutions and, in the process, keep this here blog more up to date. So here they are, in no particular order:

1- Write more
Put more of my thoughts onto documents and blogs, for no other purpose than to seek attention. Deal with it.

2- Learn HTML, XHTML & CSS

I deal with websites way too much not to know what the hell is going on. I bought a "For Dummies" book on it, which I figured is a good start.

3- Publish a book
Ok, or an article, a novel, a novella, a word. The important word here is publish, as in, have someone else decide to put something I wrote somewhere public.

4- Learn to cook at least 5 dishes well
It's about time I did.

5- Have a business be profitable and self-sustaining
I'm looking at Ticino Wedding or Dumbagent. By profitable and self- sustaining I mean that I can step back from the day-to-day process.

6- Enter at least 1 contest per month
Any contest or competition that gives a prize I like or offers recognition.

7- Multi-task less
I need to. I think everyone should. As Tony Hsieh put it: Multi-tasking is Multi-Stupid.

8- Take more pictures
I gots me a nifty new camera, I need to learn to use it well.