Never thought of myself as a Libertarian or for that matter any other general classification. Growing up in Canada most of my spare time was devoted to sports and the outdoors, then when girls and cars became important almost everything was blown-off in favor of working for, or on, cars and then using them to go find girls. It wasn’t until much later in my life that I started to wonder about how I felt towards events that were happening in the world, then I was drawn towards deeper thinkers and embarked on somewhat of a personal quest to seek knowledge.
Author: Aaron
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Conspiracy Theory
I’m a sucker for a good conspiracy theory and partly blame a lifetime of conditioning from Hollywood movies. Certainly fact is stranger than fiction, which has made diabolical stories more plausible and the older (hopefully wiser) I get the more cynical I become. The risk however is letting information, whether it be theory, thesis or journalism take total control of how I think about life in general, since I’m too sensitive and impressionable. Over the years I’ve recognized my own weakness to sensational journalism and conspiracy theories.
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Tennis Anyone?
The French Open is on and in Brazil the television coverage begins in the morning and continues all through the day and evening. As you may know, there are no night-matches at Roland Garros, the Paris location of the French Open, so live television coverage concludes before dusk and unfinished matches are completed the following day. Tennis is so popular in Brazil that they even play pre-recorded matches all evening for those who weren’t fortunate enough to watch during the work day – another benefit of being a web geek.
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USS New York
Artists Rendering of the USS New York
With a year to go before it even touches the water, the Navy’s amphibious assault ship USS New York has already made history. It was built with 24 tons of scrap steel from the World Trade Center . -
Futures Market Guide
CommodityTrader.com has evolved into a popular website and now I’m taking the next step, adding a Newsletter. For a long time I’ve been using the open-source list-management software called PHPList by a group from the UK, it’s served me well in lists up to a few a thousand subscribers, which is as far as I’ve gotten in the last few years, although in 1999 we built Rock-n-Roll.com to 1.2M, however it was done through acquisition rather than 1 subscriber at a time.
So today I’ve been too busy to blog here because I’m getting ready to launch the first issue of Commodity Trader News. -
Modern Day Life
One great thing about modern day life is the level of communication but it can be a curse if like me you have to delete through hundreds of emails every day just to find the few that were sent by someone you know. Fortunately I use Eudora and have dozens of filters in place and a good junk filter to eliminate over half the spam.
Often I get little interesting nuggets of wisdom, like today from NASA telling me of a most interesting alignment of planets during the next 20 days, or Point of Life Newsletter from Michael Levy, always uplifting. Some people send me jokes and or amusing stories and pictures and occasionally I get a good chuckle, like today’s message from my friend Carl of Pompano Beach.You know you’re living in 2006 when…
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Drive Sao Paulo
You think your city has tough traffic? Take a drive in Sao Paulo, this city of 18 million. First there’s a big disparity between vehicles because many wealthy inhabitants are driving luxury imports, and then there are multitudes of cheap wrecks that may or may not even be registered. Volkswagen has factories in Brasil that have been pumping out vehicles for decades, these little cars being famous as reliable are like cockroaches in that they’re hard to kill and seem to come out from every crevice. So it’s not uncommon to see old VW Combi-vans, Beatles and Golfs lined up beside Mercedes and Land Rovers at an intersection.
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Propaganda
I’m enjoying this blog more everyday, although I don’t know who reads what I write or if it serves any purpose. Today I added some advertising under the heading “Propaganda”, which is a great word isn’t it? Maybe you know that I publish other blogs and web sites? and perhaps you’ve figured-out that this one is a personal project and not really commercial. However, there’s a purpose to every page that I publish and that’s to improve my communication skills, so it’s all just propaganda.
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Zen of Web Design
My first web page designs (from scratch) were published sometime in 1994, very crude but made with a simple Notepad editor. I consider that I was very fortunate to have had an excellent teacher in RJ Sullivan he’d been trained in college about commercial art then went on to work for major advertising agencies and for big design firms in NYC. Bob was much more passionate about fine art and music but figured commercial art was a good means to pay for those pursuits.
We became business partners and Bob shared many art design philosophies with me, one of his favorites saying’s was that often “less is more”. -
Yahoo Publisher Network
Today I was accepted in the Yahoo beta program to test out their new Affiliate Network, for displaying contextual ads that they serve for my pages. I’ve always been a big fan of Yahoo, so shouldn’t have been surprised that I already had an account because I once used services from Overture, which is now owned by Yahoo. Most people think Google pioneered the idea of brokering pay-per-click (CPC) advertising but I remember Overture selling CPC advertising services long before I knew that Google was involved, however it was Google that improved upon the concept, broadened the scope by including all web publishers (instead of just the major news portals) then made it really user friendly to the masses.