Making Money Online : Myth or Fact?

Most people seem to be of the opinion that making money online is only for those lazy people that want to play World of Warcraft all day whilst their google ads are feeding their addiction. Well, it’s not that easy but it can be done.

In my previous article about making money online I discussed how so called experts of the “online money making” business become rich in the first place. But never mind those people, lets focus on the topic at hand.

Recently I’ve read this success story about someone earning $15,000 a month from adsense. Sounds unbelievable ? Well, at first it does you’re right but then there comes the explanation.

Here’s how this guy did it.

Step 1
Spend lots of time gathering keyword usage data from month to month. Grab a set of keywords use the Google Keywords Suggestion page to see how much people are searching for those keywords and record their trends from month to month.

Step 2
Forget the most common and obvious keywords that everyone targets and focus your energy on long tail keywords and yes…spelling mistakes. You won’t believe the amount of spelling mistakes people make when searching.

Step 3
Find a domain with your main keyword in it.

Step 4
Create a blog about it.

Too easy huh ? Well here’s the hard parts.

Step 5
Pay writers $8 per article to fill your blog with useful, original content. This guy spends $1000 in articles for his blogs.

Step 6
Find out potential competitors and other relates websites, contact the administrator for a link. This guy even goes as far as finding the domain registrant details and cold-calls them.

Step 7
Optimize your blog to revolve around your keywords and submit your sites to as many social networking sites as you possibly can.

Step 8
Repeat the above for 40 times. Yes, that’s right, he makes $15,000 spread over 40 websites and blogs and spends most of this living time updating them to keep them fresh.

Does making money online still sound easy to you ?… yeah..me neither.

10 Secrets of an IT Career

Having a career in IT can be nice but…

10. The Wage
The pay is often good but many companies think they own you! Up until the day you hand in your resignation letter and slap them smack in the forehead with a nice, tasty, reality-check.

9. The Scapegoat
Who’s fault is it when users make idiotic errors? Yours for not explaining well!

8. The Personal IT Butler
Your co-workers invite you over for dinner. Sweet huh? Then mid-dinner the topic of discussion suddenly morphs to computers and how he’s hating his PC lately for giving him trouble. Next thing you know you’re eating dessert off the computer tower while cleaning his Windows XP from the pesky spyware that got lose while he was watching his “favorite” websites.

7. The Zero
Guess who’s a hero when you do your job flawlessly everyday? You are! Now, guess who’s a zero when you mess up that one time?

6. The Babysitter
You will spend more time babysitting archaic technologies and fix obsolete hardware than implementing new stuff.

5. The Boss
You will spend more time explaining your technical actions to your 50 year old,commodore 64 loving boss, then to actually build a whole networking infrastructure.

4. The Thank You
It’s funny how when you do something good, a nice Email steps into your inbox from your superiors thanking the IT department for their collective effort, but when you screw up something…That's NEVER a collective effort is it?

3. The Idiots
You will always find the nice friendly fella’ that because he just got a $400 cell phone is suddenly transformed into this IT Guru and interrupts you mid-sentence to continue your explanations (thinking he knows anything) only to discover he just fell flat on his face with his stupidity.

2. The Budget
There is never any budget for IT but there’s definitely enough money for your superior to fund his “personal assistant’s” trip to some random town where that really cool expo is happening ;)

1. The Nights
Finally, your day is over…or is it ? The Email server broke down and you’re sitting there writing a Text Message to your wife, telling her not to cook, while your co-workers have a smile on their face from ear to ear waving at you and saying “see you tomorrow”. The sun rises, quite quickly I might add, and the first funny-guy comes in and says...”wow, you’re in early”.

You then fade away into a slow, uncomfortable mental sleep mumbling to yourself “I was here all night fixing this crap so you can come in the morning and spend your first hour chatting and making coffee”

Till next time :)

3 Tricks To Speed-Up Firefox 3

Firefox 3 is undoubtedly a great browser however with a few tricks we can speed it up a lot  more.

Trick 1 – Pipelining

Usually Firefox is very gentle with web servers. It waits for a response before sending in another request. Pipelining is basically the opposite. You’re instructing Firefox to not wait and instead do more requests at once. (Consider this as the browser is multi-tasking). To achieve this do the following :

In the address bar type “about:config” (without the quotes). Set the values of “network.http.pipelining” and “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “True” and set the value of
“double-clicknetwork.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to “8”

Note: Some servers don’t support pipelining. Reverse the procedure if you have any problems.

Trick 2 – Fast Rendering

Firefox waits a certain amount of time after it starts downloading a website before it shows you what it downloaded (thus making you wait longer to start seeing something). This is called “Content Notify Interval”.

Type “about:config”, right click somewhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type “content.notify.interval” as your preference name, click OK, input “500000” and click OK again.

After you’ve done the above, right click the window again and select New > Boolean. Create a value called “content.notify.ontimer” and set it to “True”.

Trick 3 – Faster Loading

If you do not use Firefox while it’s loading a page, the page loads faster. Yes, it wasn’t your impression, it really does that. It’s called “Content Switch Threshold”. After 0.75 Seconds, Firefox goes into a low frequency interrupt mode and which makes the interface less responsive but dedicates more resources to page loading.

To fix this do the following. Type “about:config”, right click in the window and select New > Integer. Type “content.switch.threshold“ and click OK, input “250000” and click OK to do the trick.

That’s it! Enjoy a faster Firefox :)

A Developer’s 8 Best Friends

Often, a very common question on web design forums pops up by developers. “Can someone help me facelift my application?” or “Can someone help me with graphics?”. Well, many times they either get the cold shoulder, or are given the half-assed answer- LEARN. Oh, and occasionaly the “How much are you willing to pay?” too.

Since a developer’s area of expertise (and rightfully so) is exactly that…developing, many lack the design skills to create something that looks decent. It’s a pity because there are so many excellent devs out there that create amazing applications yet they struggle to make it look presentable. In this post, I’m going to list a few tools/generators that not only will make you present your web-apps better but will also save you lots of time in “modifying” that button found on Google images *Wink*

1. Logo Creator - http://creatr.cc/creatr
2. Buttonator - http://www.buttonator.com
3. Form Style Generator - http://www.formstylegenerator.com
4. Menu Maker - http://www.izzymenu.com
5. RoundedCornr - http://www.roundedcornr.com
6. Color Scheme Designer - http://colorschemedesigner.com
7. Image Reflection Maker - http://www.reflectionmaker.com
8. Menu Tabs Generator - http://www.tabsgenerator.com

Web 3.0 – A Personal Internet

Do you remember the web 1.0 era? When the internet was just a bunch of links and people would go on a directory, find a category they want and whoever was lucky to be at the top on the list would be considered an internet god? Yeah, those days are not missed, at least from my point of view. As with everything, evolution took it’s course into the web 2.0 era AKA the user-generated content era.

YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and a gazillion other websites who’s owners became millionaires “overnight” because they gave the common internet citizen like you and I, a platform to express our opinions and individuality. A feature that the Internet has been needing ever since it evolved from a localized series of pages to this unlimited amount of useful (many times useless) information. So how could we possibly top that you might ask?

The Evolution of the internet, Web 3.0. The whole concept of this web 3.0 idea is based around a simple fact. We’re a picky species. Let me give you an example. If you’re searching for a car, you might be interested in car insurance, but you couldn’t care less about sushi at that point in time. Basically advertisers figured out that by showing you ads that are more related to your current search, you would be more inclined to purchase from them hence the term “Targeted Advertising”. The whole point behind RSS feeds is to have one single location where you can get the latest content from around a different bunch of sites without you having to visit each and everyone of them manually.

A more personalized internet experience is what people are looking for more and more each day. Playlists, YouTube Channel Subscriptions, RSS Feeds, Dashboards such as iGoogle, Widget driven websites and targeted advertising are some of the ways web 3.0 is coming in our electronic lives. We want only the content that we ask for, nothing more, nothing less.

Windows Live Writer

So recently Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer went out of beta and I’ve been meaning to try it out for a while, but never really got around to it.  This morning I decided to try writing this post using it. My blog is hosted on Google's BlogSpot so my review is purely based on that. (Which by the way, this thing supports all major free blogging services not just Live Blogs. Pity it doesn’t support Tumblr.)

At first glance it looks like a souped  up version of WordPad yet not souped enough to be confusing. You have the usual “word” like interface with the bold,italics, bullets, alignments etc and also an Insert Table which is pretty cool since the WYSIWYG Editor in BlogSpot doesn’t.

One great feature is the way you write. Let me explain. In BlogSpot's editor, all you see is this blank editor which doesn’t apply your blog’s theme/css to it. The result ? Well, you’re writing your article blind-folded since you don’t know exactly how it’s going look until you publish it, or preview it. Windows Live Writer is different. It applies your theme and shows you a preview of your blog template and you write directly on it. It’s much less time-consuming.

One cool feature is the plug-ins section. Basically it lets you download extra plug-ins from   http://gallery.live.com/results.aspx?bt=9&pl=8 which help a lot since for example, there’s no bundled support for Google maps. Luckily there’s a plug-in for that.

All in all I’m really impressed with the way Microsoft is heading now. Those who know me, know that I’m not a very big fan of Microsoft by any stretch of the imagination but with the release of Windows 7 and now Windows Live Writer, they seem to be heading into the direction that Apple has been preaching for years. Simple and Works, instead of cramming as much features as possible and none of them really work well. Let’s just hope they keep it up.

I seriously suggest you try it out for yourself.

Quick Tip: If you encounter the problem “The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden.” while posting articles with pictures to Blogger, go into your Google Picasa account and create an album named “Windows Live Writer”

Links
Windows Live Writer Download - http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com
Plug-ins Download Site - http://gallery.live.com/results.aspx?bt=9&pl=8

10 Tips for Web Designers

Being a professional web designer doesn't just mean that you're able to create a good looking site. It also has to function professionaly. To function professionaly it needs to load fast, be optimized and most importantly cross-browser compatible. So here are 10 tips to help you out.

10 - Always compress (And keep an uncompressed copy offline) of all your javascript files. By using JS compressors such as http://javascriptcompressor.com you can knock off a few extra unneeded K thus resulting in faster loading time.

9 - Avoid using tables to design layouts. Many make the mistake to simply put a couple of tables within tables to design sites because it's simple and then they end up having problems at a later stage. Use DIVs, SPANS and everything else exactly as it should be used. Believe me, you'll have less headaches later.

8 - Multilingualization. This one is fairly simple. Either hire a good translator that is specialized in web content or don't offer a multilingual site. There's no greater embarassment than translating something with google translate only to find out in reality, it makes no sense. You will look unprofessional.

7 - When you create websites for clients, take it by default that the site has to be search engine optimized. Now i'm not saying offer SEO for free, I'm simply saying that when clients (especially those that are not so technical) as you build a site for them, they wouldn't know they need SEO until a later stage. Be pro-active and design it that way in the first place. You'll thank me for this one later!

6 - Use structured folders when you create a website. Don't just grab every file and put it in one big folder. Seperate Images, JS files, css files, html etc. Be tidy. Sloppy designers don't get very far.

5 - A common mistake that designers do to speed up their production is the lack of naming conventions and structured code. Use tabs, name your tags, use alt text, give meaningful names to your form elements. You'll realize its good practice when you're 5-6 months down the line where you have to look back at your own code to make some changes and spend the first 30 minutes figuring out where is what.

4 - Whilst tools like Dreamweaver certainly make the life of a designer easier, DO NOT rely on it. When I started out coding html there was no Dreamweaver, we did everything in notepad. Take the time and learn the stuff inside out. Don't be lazy and rely solely on auto-completion and intelli-sense to code for you otherwise at the glimpse of a slight problem, you'll be stuck looking at it for hours.

3 - As much as I'd like Internet Explorer to be abolished for being so hard-headed and not follow standards (IE 8 was a good step forward), it's still the major player in internet browsers. Make sure that whatever you do, works perfectly in IE. Take some time to study the differences between browsers, it will help you a lot in reducing your troubleshooting time.

2 - A Sitemap is your friend and most importantly, it's your user's friend! Providing a decent sitemap not only helps your users find information faster but also helps your SEO efforts.

1 - Keep yourself updated. What worked yesterday doesn't necessarily mean it will work tomorrow. Follow up on new technologies and trends. And most importantly don't get stuck doing the same stuff. Look around other designers' work to get inspiration and always try new things.

Feel free to comment or ask for any help in the comments section and I'll be glad to answer any questions you might have.



If you like this article make sure you look at my other article : Top 10 tips for starting web designers

Top 10 Tips for Starting Web Designers

Today I'm gonna give some inside tips that I picked up along my years of web designing. I hope this helps aspiring designers into building a solid foundation for their career.

10 - Try to avoid using flash and rich-media content to present your information. Search Engines cannot read through video clips, pictures or flash banners.

9 - The website belongs to your client, so take the time and visualize what he wants rather than what you want to give him. Your job is to turn his dream into a reality, not make him accept your dream!

8 - Cross-browser compatiblity is a must. If you're serious about your craft, you need to take the time to test your creations in different browsers. Just because you're using Firefox, it doesn't mean everyone is. Also, always validate your code! http://validator.w3.org is a very good start.

7 - Most people read from left to right. Put your important information to the left of the site.

6 - Stick to a color theme. Take your time and analyze color swatches and see which colors match which don't.

5 - Yes, SEO is important, but think of who the website is aimed at. Your users! Many people overdo keyword injection into their content to drive up their rankings forgetting the fact that it's the users who are READING your site not search engines. SE's are just crawling it.

4 - Give relevant information to the topic at hand. Don't confuse users with a bunch of topics all at once. Make your content structured and easily reachable.

3 - Leave adequate spacing between elements. A website packed as a pack of sardines is confusing and not pretty.

2 - Keep your writing short and concise. You're writing in a fast-paced medium where most people if they don't find relevant information to their search within seconds, they leave. You're writing on a website, not a novel.

1 - Less is more. If you think that an element is cluttering the page, then it probably is. Get rid of it or find another way to present it.

Finally, I'm gonna mention 2 indispensable tools for web designers. These are 2 addons for firefox that help you diagnose problems on the fly and correct them. Saves you a lot of time and will help you visualize errors.

FireBug
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

URL: http://getfirebug.com


Web Developer Toolbar
This Firefox extension adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. Something which is extremly handy is the ability to outline block level elemts. Perfect to troubleshoot css/div errors.

URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60



If you like this article make sure you look at my other article : 10 tips for web designers

Damn, It's an E-Shrink !

Everyone knows about the problems surrounding online gaming...no...i'm not talking about lag or the 12yr old noob that yells "pwned" when he back-rapes you in CSS. The problem i'm talking about is addiction. The problem is so staggering that apparently, it can kill you too.

One 21-year-old man was discovered to have played a certain game minutes before committing suicide. Elizabeth Woolley, the young man’s mother, insists that “It’s like any other addiction. Either you die, go insane or you quit. My son died.” Sadly, he hasn’t been alone. In August 2005, a 28-year-old South Korean man died – not by committing suicide, but after playing the game Starcraft at an Internet café for 50 hours straight. The man had not slept properly and had eaten very little in that time. He died from heart failure stemming from exhaustion. More recently, a 13-year-old Chinese boy died falling from a building. His parents sued Blizzard Entertainment, makers of World of Warcraft because the boy was re-enacting a scene from the game. In another story that came out of South Korea this year, a couple was arrested when their four-month-old daughter died of suffocation. The couple had left the infant alone in their apartment for several hours while they played World of Warcraft at a nearby Internet café.

The solution to all of this? Well, someone apparently decided to monetize from this situtation by opening a center that charges $14,500 a month for the treatment of...INTERNET ADDICTION. You know how many months of WOW you can pay with that amount of money ? (80 years!) O_O

In July, a British psychiatrist said he plans to assemble fellow therapists to enter the online game World of Warcraft to treat in-game addicts. LOL? Imagine the guild leader orders you for an e-consultation before a raid to see if you show symptoms of group-wipeout or e-suicide!

Social Networking and Data Protection

Probably two of the highest internet buzz words these past few years but do people realize that sometimes they're preaching for anonymity on the internet whilst on another browser tab they're putting every little bit of information about them on facebook and twitter? Isn't that kinda hypocrite?

People worry about their credit card details, emails being stolen and stuff like that but in reality it's the people themselves that give it all away. Let me give you some examples :

Hacking into any website account: You go on lost password and it asks you for your favourite pet. You head to this girl's FaceBook where she has a shrine devouted to her cat SnowBall. Your Favourite band... again... you go on her MySpace and you've got the whole list there. First school attended ? Not a problem...head on to ClassMates.com for the whole curriculum. See where i'm going with this ? We are so paranoid about our privacy yet we're the stupid ones that are giving access to our private stuff in the first place.

Some people even step it up a notch or two and take matters into the real world. I've heard this story recently where a woman in the UK was stalked by one of her "best mates" from a very famous social networking site. Allegedly the woman was being flirtatious online and started blabbering her every step on her profile. I honestly don't know who to blame here. I mean, yes, the guy was definetly at fault but the woman wasn't innocent either. She tried to play the 'victim' card when in fact she was just as guilty as he was.

I hope that this article opens some eyes about keep our private stuff, PRIVATE.

Milking The Cinematic Cow

Sometimes a movie comes along that stands out above all others. I'm not talking about the million Harry Potter movies that once you've seen one you practically have seen them all. I'm talking about those movies that leave you mouth wide-open and go to work eager in the morning to tell everyone about one of the best cinematic experiences you've had in a long time...until one day, you head to IMDB for your daily Hollywood fix and find out that someone decided to screw it all up by releasing a sequel..And you start asking yourself one thing...WHY?

The Reason ? Well they want to give a continuation to the story. They want to answer the questions that everyone has been asking after the first one finished.

The Real Reason ? Money! The original made some of them rich and most of them even richer than they were before, and they wanna keep milking that cow of course.

Let's face it 9 out of 10 Sequels suck...or to sugar coat it a bit, they rarely come anywhere close to being as good as the original. Producers know this but why do they keep pooping sequels? Well, they made millions in profits from the original and even if the second one sucks, most probably it's gonna make profit anyway because movie buffs get curious and watch it anyway.

However, in all of this who is the real victim ? In my honest opinion it's the poor soul that watches these movies...but not because of his money...It's because they just ruined what in his mind was a perfect ending to a perfect movie. Yes sometimes they do release a good one, but that only happens when everyone on board care more about making a good movie than the profits it's gonna yield.

That said, I'm gonna leave you with my top 5 lists of best sequels, worst sequels and sequels that should never happen!

Top 5 Sequels That Should Never Be Done
1) Pulp Fiction
2) Schindler's List
3) The Shawshank Redemption
4) Fight Club
5) Devil's Advocate


Top 5 Worst Sequels
1) S. Darko (Donnie Darko 2)
2) Exorcist II - The Heretic
3) Transformers 2
4) The Matrix Revolutions
5) Basic Instinct 2


Top 5 Best Sequels

1) The Godfather (Part 2)
2) Terminator 2
3) Spider-Man 2
4) The Dark Knight
5) Die Hard 2

Till next time...

Make Money Online

If you're reading this, chances are you're one of the 600,000+ people that look for ways to make money online each month. You've heard of the internet phenomenon to make a living on the internet without breaking a sweat and the idea intrigued you. You want in on some of that action baby! Who doesn't? Well, the idea definitely sounds appealing doesn't it? Imagine you're in Hawaii sipping your pina colada while the internet is paying for it. However, like everything else, nothing is just black and white - It's always shades of grey.

The Dream

Many people choose to roll out a blog like this one, put a couple of ads here and there, post a couple of blogs every now and then and watch the dollars pile up. Actually this one works for some people (No...It didn't work for me so far lol) but those that succeeded have been doing it for a while before they saw some sort of cash.

The Scam

Some "smart" ones choose to take it to the next level and try to sell the information on how to get rich online, fast. Well some people actually do fall for it. These people make a living by finding people that don't realize that the person selling the "secrets" on how to make quick cash online, is exactly how they're making that money in the first place, and surprise surprise...their secrets don't work!

The Reality

Yes, some people actually do make LOTS of money online...legally. However what most people fail to specify is how long they've been trying! What most people don't know is these success stories didn't happen overnight. These self-made online entrepreneurs spent the first months and probably years accumulating cents on their Google Adsense account. Don't believe a single word of it when they say that someone made $2,000 within his first month. It's impossible. To make that amount of cash you need a huge amount of traffic and following. And by traffic I mean real traffic, not that twitter/facebook link spam trickery. You need great content and relative advertising that drive your CTR (Click Through Ratio). Without that, you aren't gonna see a cent.

Sorry to burst your little e-bubble but for now, keep your day job my friend. Making money online is a lot harder than some people want you to believe. You need to spend months building up traffic, creating great content and accumulating followers. If you put your mind to it, it's certainly possible however don't expect to retire off it...well at least not for the first few months or even years.

I hope this article helps you follow the online money making dream with a bit of a realistic mind set. That said, please don't hesitate to post your Success Stories in the comments section if you have any.

Till next time...

Facebook ? More like Failbook

A few days ago I wrote the article "To Tweet or Not To Tweet..." about instances where you shouldn't be tweeting and I found this picture that pretty much explains, and confirms the whole article. I Thought I'd share it with you guys :)

Art & Freedom of Expression

Many great art pieces displayed in museums or in some millionaire's golden dining room, all owe it to one of the solid foundations from the world's greatest civilizations; The Ancient Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Mayans to name a few.Each developed unique artistic characteristics that served as the starting point for today's masterpieces.

People that say that "art is a universal language" are only seeing a fraction of the picture. While many see art as just random splashes of ink on a piece of canvas, I look at it on a more personal level. Its something liberating that affects everyone differently, something that gives you mixed emotions while you're creating your next masterpiece. The only problem? Art is like having your own country with your own language, and most, do not understand it...but sometimes, someone does, and that's the greatest satisfaction an artist can get.

However, when someone doesn't understand your language, they try to lecture you in thinking why your language is incorrect, false or downright stupid.

One particular piece that comes to mind is Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ". In 1987, Serrano photographed a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass filled with his own urine. This of course left little to the imagination and wasn't really open to interpretation. As one can imagine, it sparked a bevy of religious groups complaining about how the dividing line between artistic freedom and filth was broken, and how it offended religious morals. The photograph won The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art's "Awards in the Visual Arts" competition, which is funded by the US Government for which Serrano won enough money to buy himself a lifetime supplies of photographic material to continue taking pictures like this. Most didn't get it, but someone did, and paid $162,000 in December 1999 in London. I guess one man's treasure is another man's crap.

In reality, art is all about perception. As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it probably cannot be more true in this case. No one can teach art, you can only teach technique. Talent comes from within you, not within books. There is no such thing as a technically correct piece of art, be it painting, music, pottery, sculpting etc...and whatever you do, even if no one gets it, it doesn't mean its bad, it's just your way of expressing it.

Stupidity at its best ?

Dispatcher: Nine-one-one
Caller: Hi, is this the police?
Dispatcher: This is 911. Do you need police assistance?
Caller: Well, I don’t know who to call. Can you tell me how
to cook a turkey? I’ve never cooked one before.

Dispatcher: Nine-one-one What is the nature of your
emergency?
Caller: I’m trying to reach nine eleven but my phone
doesn’t have an eleven on it.
Dispatcher: This is nine eleven.
Caller: I thought you just said it was nine-one-one
Dispatcher: Yes, ma’am nine-one-one and nine-eleven are the
same thing.
Caller: Honey, I may be old, but I’m not stupid.

Dispatcher: Nine-one-one What’s the nature of your
emergency?
Caller: My wife is pregnant and her contractions are only
two minutes apart.
Dispatcher: Is this her first child?
Caller: No, you idiot! This is her husband.

Dispatcher: Nine-one-one
Caller: Yeah, I’m having trouble breathing. I’m all out
of breath. Darn…I think I’m going to pass out.
Dispatcher: Sir, where are you calling from?
Caller: I’m at a pay phone. North and Foster. Damn….
Dispatcher: Sir, an ambulance is on the way. Are you an
asthmatic?
Caller: No
Dispatcher: What where you doing before you started having
trouble breathing?
Caller: Running from the police.

To Tweet or Not To Tweet...

It's no secret, Twitter has taken the social networking world by storm. Everyone is writing their short little tweets and is letting everyone know each little fart that escapes their ass 24/7.

...but...here's a few instances (which should be taken with a pinch of salt btw) where you shouldn't be tweeting :)

» You shouldn't be tweeting at work - your boss has twitter too.

» You shouldn't be tweeting if you're going away for a month on vacation - your neighborhood thieves have twitter too.

» You shouldn't be tweeting if you're a soldier in Iraq - yep...there's internet too there :)

» You shouldn't be tweeting that you're not gonna shower just before a blind date with your online friend - Pretty self explanatory why huh ? :P

» You shouldn't be tweeting where you're gonna be tonight - Twitter is a stalker's best friend.

» You shouldn't be tweeting about how annoying your neighbor is - at least not unless you want to find his garbage on your doorstep :)

I'm pretty sure you can come up with more ... post them in the comments section guys :)

My Art

Occasionally I'll be posting some of my art on here as well.

I'm a professional Graphic and Web Designer by day so feel free to ask for any tips in the comments section. I hope you like my work.

I want one of those ... NOT

I love watching what retarded gadgets some companies come up with to make money. From the fan-equipped chopsticks to blow on your noodles to the beer holding hat with straws. However, this one takes the cake, at least for now.

Some company actually is trying to market and sell this piece of boxed crap :

Electric Paper Airplane Launcherpaper
Every kid loves to make his or her own paper airplane and then toss it into the sky, however, not everyone is a successful paper airplane flyer, and all of us have tossed a paper airplane only to see it make an immediate nosedive for the ground. But with the electronic paper airplane launcher, you too can effortlessly create perfect flight arcs with your paper airplanes every time for a mere $18. You can even achieve speeds as high as 30 MPH, just in case you want to prove your mom right when she said paper airplanes could put a person’s eye out.

What the hell where they thinking ? I honestly don't get it. Do you ?

EMOnfestation

So during the past few years, one particular force has been growing more rapidly than any virus known to man. A new breed of striped socks-wearing people has emerged faster than you can say EMO!

Ever since twisted sister, poison and all the other glam rock bands started wearing makeup and having big Farrah Fawcett feathered hair, the world started slooooowly accepting that men also can wear makeup and it was all fine and dandy..Since, come on, there's no way in hell (unless you're Steevy Wonder) that you would have mistaken Dee Snider for a woman. Well, since then something really fucked up happened, someone, somewhere wondered what it would be like to just have 1 gender in the world and came up with this idea to confuse the fuck out of everyone whether these emo kids are male or female.

I honestly cannot tell if that's male or female. Can you ? If that was a tranny, then there's no real surprise there but some (I hope) are actually straight, yet they wear more makeup than women. And not the cool corpse paint kind of makeup, it's the Queer eye for a straight guy kind!

Then there's the music, which all fits so perfectly into this messed up style. Bands that can play two powercords and sing about how their dad took them to see a marching band are becoming famous with the help of these 13-16 year old kids that follow trends in school so they're with the popular bunch.

What's sad is that emos didn't come up with their own ORIGINAL style, they just borrowed bits and pieces from other styles and kinda mashed it all into one big fucking failure. Does their long, side-parted fringes, give them a feeling of shelter? Do they think that their heavy black eye-liner will make us fear them? Are their striped socks a sign of a pipi-longstocking rebirth in progress? These attributes all make part of this fashion butchery.

The God Delusion

Ever since the beginning of time, people felt compelled to believe there is a God. They worshiped anything, from cows to fat women (OK maybe that didn't change a lot LOL)...point is, people felt like their life is not safe. They needed to believe that after they die, there's a special place for them to go and have an eternal life with their beloved. They believe that this God knows everything, is everywhere and created everything perfectly...Then someday, reality hits them smack in the forehead and says "hey shithead, guess what, you're on your own!".

The sad reality is that you can pray how much you want, if it has to happen, it's gonna happen!

The path of logic doesn't lead to religion. If you really think about it, religion is probably the most illogical thing you can come up with. You're believing in something that doesn't exist and can never be proven otherwise. The worst part? Religion keeps finding sheep that follow the herd to the righteous path towards salvation (Which by the way also costs you money when you go to praise this so called god, that secretly goes towards the funding of the local priest's new comfy bedroom where he can play monopoly with his young altar boys.)

I strongly believe that in 2009, people should get a clue and start believing in what is right in front of their face and not some spooky invisible man that is praised when something good happens, and excused when bad shit happens.
In the great George Carlin's own words "These kind of actions do not belong in the resume' of a supreme being."

I'll conclude this article with one of my most favorite quotes :

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then why does evil exist ?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
- Epicurus