Stever’s blog

I am running another experiment in SEO. Please ignore this posting and excuse the bad english.

This laptop bag is specifically designed for women: cosmetic tote bag . It’s not just a secure place to store your cosmetics and other women’s stuff, but you can store your laptop computer in there too. The luggage is also stylish and comfortable. It’s also designed by women for women.

If you need a full-fledged laptop tote bag , vintage luggage probably has something you want. It’s more than a pretty looking laptop case, it’s actually pretty sturdy.

I attended the Southern California Code Camp last weekend. They were handing out free Windows 7 beta discs out, so I decided to put it on my laptop to play with it.

Initial impressions:
- Seems much faster than Windows Vista. The more I used Vista, the more I didn’t like it. Couldn’t Microsoft have made the damn thing faster? Subjectively, 7 seems faster than Vista
- The interface resembles that of Vista, which is a good thing. Seems more mac-ish and more modern. There are a few things that make things a bit slicker. Certain icons kind of glow when you hover over them. It just looks more modern.
- Release Candidate 1 seems remarkably stable. It was compatible with all my drivers, except my virus checker (AVG)
- 7 seems to be an incremental upgrade over vista in the same way that xp was an incremental upgrade over 2000. This is my impression anyway.

I’ve only used the OS for a few hours, so my review isn’t very in-depth, but i’ll write more on it as I learn more. So far, it’s a thumbs up.

To put things in perspective, this is our bailout costs vs historical large investments. To the readers of my blog, I would start investing in physical commodities (gold), or anti-inflation hedge funds (Universa’s Black Swan Protection Protocol). Taken from someone else’s blog (I forgot which). Here:

Dominant ideas are “obvious” ideas that polarize thought. Classic dominant ideas are “the earth is flat” and “the earth is the center of the universe”. Once dominant ideas are in place, additional evidence is interpreted in such a way that supports the dominant idea. For example, a paranoid schizophrenic views a person’s nice act as yet another piece of evidence that he is out to get him. While it’s easy for us to be critical of those that perceive things backwards, I guarantee that we are all captives of the same philosophy. One of the ideas of lateral thinking is to identify what the dominant ideas even are. Once the dominant idea is identified, it becomes easier to break out of it.

So just remember, there are breakthrough ideas all around us, but most of us don’t do them because they look wrong.

“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good”

- Samuel Johnson

I’ve been practicing giving talks in my room lately. I’ve even gone so far as recording myself speaking and playing the file back. I’m thinking about giving maybe a 20 minute “lateral thinking” talk, then recruiting a few hackers for a weekend-long hack-a-thon. Each hack-a-thon will focus on creating a quick-and-dirty website that won’t necessarily do something useful, but can later lead to breakthrough ideas. Sure, most ideas will fail, but if you aren’t failing at least 90% of the time, you’re not trying hard enough. Eventually, I will stumble upon a unique, different, and even breakthrough idea.

Give me a few months of practice and maybe I can start small (at my monthly 2600 meeting, perhaps). My dad’s going to have two more vacancies in Lankershim in the next few months and maybe I can take advantage of it.

I’m doing an experiment with one of my clients, Luggage 4 Less. They’re basically a luggage store that needs a lot more sales. I added a shopping cart to their site, and did some search engine stuff, but alas no sales in the first month. However, one of the keys of good SEO is to add keyword-laden links to things like “extra large suitcase” and “extra large luggage“. Google results should vastly improve. I don’t want to black hat this site though, I hate black hat SEO. Maybe I can hire a decent graphic designer to overhaul the really really bad design of the site.

So let’s see how this affects rankings. . .

There’s a running joke among hackers that “farmers didn’t invent tractors, they were busy farming”. Meaning that breakthrough ideas don’t come from experts in their industry. The reason is is that the closer an expert is to how something works now, the harder it is to imagine a new and better way of doing things. It’s just the way the brain works, it gets caught up in cliche patterns. Solutions are often not “hard”, but they require cognitive shifts in perception which are simply invisible to the people doing them. As I stated in a previous blog post, the ancient Incas couldn’t see the wheel, even though it’s an obvious idea to us. They manually hauled the stones up the hill or whatever to build their pyramids.

I said this once and I’ll say it again. . . intelligence is overrated in problem solving. More information/intelligence is not needed to solve problems, just a rearrangement of current information and a shift in perception.

Gee, the federal reserve can’t account for 9 trillion dollars. Words can’t describe this following video. Is anyone minding the store at the Federal Reserve?




I’m telling you, we are going to get a massive amount of inflation. Be prepared, go to the red cross site at http://tinyurl.com/m5ol66 and buy emergency provisions. You might also want to buy some guns for your house because there is going to be a huge amount of civil unrest.

I posted this picture up earlier, but I will explain it further:

Get it? His nose only grows when he lies. So if he’s telling the truth, he’s really lying and his nose will grow. On the other hand, if his nose grows, he speaks the truth and then his nose won’t grow. Either way, the statement turns in on itself. His nose is both growing and not growing. It’s doing both, none, either and or. In a way, it’s like saying “this statement is false”. As soon as you declare it to be true, it immediately turns on itself and becomes false.

Zen buddhism taps and remarks upon a similar principle. It’s a concept that can’t be understood with logic and can’t be encompassed by human thought. It can only be realized.