Monday, January 21, 2013
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Email to SMS gateway now NUMBER@txt.att.net
Email to SMS gateway now NUMBER@txt.att.net
As part of the rebranding of Cingular to "Wireless from AT&T", the
preferred email-to-SMS-message gateway address (even for Cingular
customers) is now NUMBER@txt.att.net, or YOURID@txt.att.net if you're
set up a personalized address in the Message Center
Best regards, FAQ FOR CINGULAR WIRELESS:
As part of the rebranding of Cingular to "Wireless from AT&T", the
preferred email-to-SMS-message gateway address (even for Cingular
customers) is now NUMBER@txt.att.net, or YOURID@txt.att.net if you're
set up a personalized address in the Message Center
Best regards, FAQ FOR CINGULAR WIRELESS:
Email to SMS gateway now NUMBER@txt.att.net
As part of the rebranding of Cingular to "Wireless from AT&T", the
preferred email-to-SMS-message gateway address (even for Cingular
customers) is now NUMBER@txt.att.net, or YOURID@txt.att.net if you're
set up a personalized address in the Message Center
Best regards, FAQ FOR CINGULAR WIRELESS:
As part of the rebranding of Cingular to "Wireless from AT&T", the
preferred email-to-SMS-message gateway address (even for Cingular
customers) is now NUMBER@txt.att.net, or YOURID@txt.att.net if you're
set up a personalized address in the Message Center
Best regards, FAQ FOR CINGULAR WIRELESS:
White House answers Death Star petition: No. | The Ticket - Yahoo! News
White House answers Death Star petition: No. | The Ticket - Yahoo! News
White House answers Death Star petition: No.
By Olivier Knox, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 12 hrs ago
Share
17
Imperial stormtroopers from the movie Star Wars take up positions at the Panasonic booth the Blu-ray release of …Build this Death Star, we will not. That’s the message from the White House in an official response to a petition urging President Barack Obama to build the moon-sized planet-killing space station from Star Wars.
“The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense,” writes Paul Shawcross, chief of the science and space branch of the White House’s budget office. But “the Administration does not support blowing up planets.”
Plus, Shawcross points out: “Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?” (Cue speculation that China has built an X-Wing fighter). And with the price tag estimated to run at least $852 quadrillion, Shawcross says, “we’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.” (Hmmm, so the stimulative impact of government infrastructure spending does not balance out its cost? That might come up again as Obama clashes with Republicans this Spring over how best to reduce the national debt.)
Sunday, January 13, 2013
White House answers Death Star petition: No. | The Ticket - Yahoo! News
White House answers Death Star petition: No. | The Ticket - Yahoo! News
White House answers Death Star petition: No.
By Olivier Knox, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 12 hrs ago
Share
17
Imperial stormtroopers from the movie Star Wars take up positions at the Panasonic booth the Blu-ray release of …Build this Death Star, we will not. That’s the message from the White House in an official response to a petition urging President Barack Obama to build the moon-sized planet-killing space station from Star Wars.
“The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense,” writes Paul Shawcross, chief of the science and space branch of the White House’s budget office. But “the Administration does not support blowing up planets.”
Plus, Shawcross points out: “Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?” (Cue speculation that China has built an X-Wing fighter). And with the price tag estimated to run at least $852 quadrillion, Shawcross says, “we’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.” (Hmmm, so the stimulative impact of government infrastructure spending does not balance out its cost? That might come up again as Obama clashes with Republicans this Spring over how best to reduce the national debt.)
Saturday, January 12, 2013
1. What are drones? « Drone Wars UK
1. What are drones? « Drone Wars UK
1. What are drones?
This article, written by Chris Cole and Jim Wright, was originally published in Peace News in January 2010
What are Drones?
Predator drone firing missile
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS), also known as drones, are aircraft either controlled by ‘pilots’ from the ground or increasingly, autonomously following a pre-programmed mission. (While there are dozens of different types of drones, they basically fall into two categories: those that are used for reconnaissance and surveillance purposes and those that are armed with missiles and bombs. The
use of drones has grown quickly in recent years because unlike manned aircraft they can stay aloft for many hours (Zephyr a British drone under development has just broken the world record by flying for over 82 hours nonstop); they are much cheaper than military aircraft and they are flown remotely so there is no danger to the flight crew.
While the British and US Reaper and Predator drones are physically in Afghanistan and Iraq, control is via satellite from Nellis and Creech USAF base outside Las Vegas, Nevada. Ground crews launch drones from the conflict zone, then operation is handed over to controllers at video screens in specially designed trailers in the Nevada desert. One person ‘flies’ the drone, another operates and monitors the cameras and sensors, while a third person is in contact with the “customers”, ground troops and commanders in the war zone. While armed drones were first used in the Balkans war, their use has dramatically escalated in Afghanistan, Iraq and in the CIA’s undeclared war in Pakistan.
The Only Game in Town
The US has two separate ‘squadron’ of armed drones – one run by the US Air Force and one run by the CIA. Using drones, the USAF Air Force has increased the number of combat air patrols it can fly by 600 percent over the past six years; indeed at any time there are at least 36 American armed UAVS over Afghanistan and Iraq. It plans to increase this number to 50 by 2011. CIA Director Leon Panetta has recently said that drones are “the only game in town.” The CIA have been using drones in Pakistan and other countries to assassinate “terrorist leaders.” While this programme was initiated by the Bush Administration, it has increased under Obama and there have been 41 known drone strikes in Pakistan since Obama became President. Analysis by an American think tank The Brookings Institution on drone attacks in Pakistan has shown that for every militant leader killed, 10 civilians also have died.
Drones UK
The UK has several different types of armed and surveillance drones in Iraq and Afghanistan and others in the production or development stage. The UK began using armed drones in Afghanistan in Oct 2007 after purchasing three Reapers from General Atomics in 2007 at a cost of £6m each. The MoD confirmed in June 2008 that a British Reaper UAV had fired its weapons for the first time, but refused to give any details. In March 2009, the Daily Telegraph reported that British drones had been used ten times in armed strikes.
Watchkeeper
As well as armed drones, the UK has several types of surveillance drones, most notably Watchkeeper, a drone jointly produced by Israeli company Ebit and Thales UK. The UK is purchasing 54 Watchkeeper drones and ground stations at a cost of £860m. The first ten will be built in Israel and then production will transfer to a specially built facility in Leicester. Testing is taking place at Aberporth in Wales and Watchkeeper is due to enter service in 2010. There have recently been reports that Watchkeeper may be armed in the future.
Serious Concern
Thes UN’s Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, has said that the use of drones is not combat as much as ‘targeted killing’. He has repeatedly tried to get the US to explain how they justifies the use of drones to target and kill individuals under international law. The US has so far refused to do so. In a report to the UN he has said the US government (and by implication the UK government) “should specify the bases for decisions to kill rather than capture particular individuals …. and should make public the number of civilians killed as a result of drone attacks, and the measures in place to prevent such casualties”.
A further question is the extent to which operators become trigger happy with remote controlled armaments, situated as they are in complete safety, distant from the conflict zone. Keith Shurtleff, an army chaplain and ethics instructor at Fort Jackson, South Carolina worries “that as war becomes safer and easier, as soldiers are removed from the horrors of war and see the enemy not as humans but as blips on a screen, there is very real danger of losing the deterrent that such horrors provide.”
Increased Surveillance
Military drone manufacturers are looking for civilian uses for remote sensing drones to expand their markets and this includes the use of drones for domestic surveillance. Drones will no doubt make possible the dramatic expansion of the surveillance state. With the convergence of other technologies it may even make possible machine recognition of faces, behaviours, and the monitoring of individual conversations. The sky, so to speak, is the limit.
Alice May Brock
Alice May Brock"Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good."
Friday, January 11, 2013
New wifi router vulnerability Turn off WPS
New wifi router vulnerability, easy hacking of WPA/WPA2 routers | Gamers With Jobs
New wifi router vulnerability, easy hacking of WPA/WPA2 routers
*Legion*
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Location: Austin, TX
Thursday, January 19th, 2012 - 11:27am
A new attack on wifi routers has emerged, and it's the biggest wifi threat since WEP cracking. And this time, it applies to WPA/WPA2 encrypted networks.
WPA/WPA2 itself has not been broken - it remains as cryptographically viable as before.
However, almost every modern router on the market has a feature called WPS - Wifi Protected Setup. It's supposed to be the "easy" way for technologically illiterate people to set up encrypted networks. You've probably seen the little push buttons on the front of some routers, for enabling a sort of "pairing" mode, to easily get a new device onto the network.
WPS - and this is the part I was not aware of - is not limited only to the push button pairing mode. It also is in an always on state, ready to accept a static 8-digit PIN number that is usually written on a sticker on the bottom of the router.
And here's the other part I was not aware of - WPS is required to be both present and on by default in order for a device to be giving Wifi Alliance certification and use the little "wifi" logo. Which, of course, every wifi maker wants, and so they comply. Virtually every big-name router manufacturer (Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, Belkin, Cisco, etc) have WPS on by default on virtually all of their routers.
So, that's not good - Joey Nerdboy has a WPA2 router at home with a 64-character random key, yet it's got an 8-digit PIN number that would be much easier to crack instead.
And it gets much worse. Because the vulnerability I'm talking about is a weakness in that 8-digit PIN number, which reduces it from ~10 million possibilities to a search space of about 11,000 instead. And that is what turns this from a long brute-force attack into a fairly trivial one.
This is not a theoretical attack either. A tool called Reaver has been released to run this attack. It is very much like WEP cracking - it's open season on vulnerable routers now. If you want to see how easy it is, Lifehacker has made a How-To.
The solution here is, turn WPS off. There's a problem, though. If you have a Cisco or Linksys router, you can't! There's a setting in the admin panel for turning WPS off, but it doesn't actually do anything. Look for a firmware update for your router very soon.
If you are running DD-WRT or Tomato, you are not vulnerable. These firmwares do not implement WPS (by design). The only exception to this is the Buffalo routers that come with DD-WRT builds - Buffalo insisted on WPS and the DD-WRT guys provided it, but they intentionally leave it out of "true" DD-WRT.
So, in short:
* If you're running DD-WRT or Tomato, high five! Open source firmware rules again
* ... unless your DD-WRT is a Buffalo branded build, then go turn WPS off
* If you're running a router modern enough to have WPS, go check your admin panel NOW and turn WPS the hell off
* If you're on a Cisco or Linksys router, either go look for a firmware upgrade, or better yet, join the DD-WRT club
Having and Striving for Control Let GO
Amy Cuddy: Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are
Power. It's that intangible thing that so many people strive for. For some people, feeling a sense of control -- over themselves, others, situations or all of the above -- is a natural thing. For others, it doesn't come as easy.
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Hypnic jerk - Psychology Wiki
Hypnic jerk - Psychology Wiki
A hypnic or hypnagogic jerk is an involuntary muscle twitch (more generally known as myoclonus or a myoclonic twitch) which often occurs during the transition from wakefulness to sleep (see hypnagogia). It is often described as an electric shock or falling sensation, and can cause movement of the body in bed. Hypnic jerks are completely normal, and are experienced by most people, especially when over-tired or sleeping uncomfortably.
Contents
[show]
Cause Edit
The exact cause of the sudden jerks is not clear, but there are hypotheses:
That it is a naturally occurring part of the sleep process, as is slower breathing, and reduced body temperature.
That the feelings associated with relaxation before sleep are misinterpreted by the brain as falling or toppling over, and by reflex the body jerks out the limbs to stay upright.
Occurrence Edit
Hypnic jerks are usually felt just once or twice per night. More regular (and usually less dramatic) muscle twitches often occur during normal sleep (perhaps as often as one every thirty seconds). In extreme cases, this may be classified as a disorder called periodic limb movement. The person with the disorder will usually sleep through the events.
When a subject is deprived of sleep and is trying to fight sleep, hypnic jerks can occur more often. This normally happens to subjects who have successfully deprived themselves of sleep for longer than 24 hours.
Monday, January 7, 2013
Chicago lottery winner's death ruled a homicide - Yahoo! News
45, no health problems, dies day after receiving lotto payout, not suspicious? All those unemployed still looking for a job in chicago please apply at the Medical
Examiner's office no experience required apparently.
Picasso, Kepler, and the Benefits of Being an Expert Generalist :: Tips :: 99U
Picasso, Kepler, and the Benefits of Being an Expert Generalist :: Tips :: 99U
One thing that separates the great innovators from everyone else is that they seem to know a lot about a wide variety of topics. They are expert generalists. Their wide knowledge base supports their creativity.
As it turns out, there are two personality traits that are key for expert generalists: Openness to Experience and Need for Cognition.
Openness to Experience is one of the Big Five personality characteristics identified by psychologists. The Big Five are the characteristics that reflect the biggest differences between people in the way they act. Openness to Experience is the degree to which a person is willing to consider new ideas and opportunities. Some people enjoy the prospect of doing something new and thinking about new things. Other people prefer to stick with familiar ideas and activities.
As you might expect, high levels of Openness to Experience can sometimes be related to creativity. After all, being creative requires doing something that has not been done before. If you are not willing to do something new, then it's hard to be creative.
However, creativity also requires knowledge. In order to do something that has not been done before in some area, you have to know a lot about that discipline. Creative painters need to know a lot about art and painting. Creative scientists need to be skilled in their science.
If you are not willing to do something new, then it's hard to be creative.
At the same time, creativity often requires drawing analogies between one body of knowledge and another. Pablo Picasso merged Western art techniques with elements of African art. He was struck by the way African artists combined multiple perspectives into a single work, and that helped lead to the development of cubism. Similarly, great scientists often draw parallels between different areas to create new ideas. In the history of science, Johannes Kepler struggled to understand how the planets could move around the sun, and drew on his knowledge of light and magnetism to try to understand the force that moved the planets.
In order to have deep knowledge about a discipline as well as a wide base of knowledge that can be mined later for analogies, it is important for someone to enjoy thinking. Learning new things can be difficult and frustrating, and so those people who like to think will stick with a new topic long enough to acquire good knowledge about it. Psychologists John Cacioppo, Richard Petty, and their colleagues have identified the Need for Cognition characteristic, which reflects how much people like to think.
Some people are driven to think about topics deeply, while others avoid situations that require them to think. People high in Need for Cognition routinely spend the time and effort necessary to learn new things, simply because they enjoy the process of learning.
Creativity often requires drawing analogies between one body of knowledge and another.
The combination of high Openness to Experience and high Need for Cognition is powerful. People with this combination of characteristics develop the habit to learn about a wide range of topics. They watch documentaries and follow up by reading articles. They engage in conversations about new subjects and ask lots of questions to ensure they understand.
I call these individuals expert generalists, because they have a wide variety of knowledge. They are able to use this knowledge to suggest new ways to look at problems. They are also good at translating across areas of expertise. So, when a group gets together to solve a problem, they can help different members of that group to see how their knowledge inter-relates.
Of course, if you don’t happen to be high in Openness to Experience and Need for Cognition, you can still develop habits to help you to be more creative. If you tend to resist new ideas, recognize the value in new experiences and work to open yourself up to more opportunities. If you are the kind of person who often avoids thinking in favor of other activities, add a little more time to your day where you focus on learning something new. The more that you broaden and deepen your base of knowledge, the more opportunities you will have to be creative.
--
How About You?
Would you consider yourself an expert generalist? How have you broadened your knowledge base?
Sunday, January 6, 2013
What your driving style says about your personality
what your driving style says about your personality | 2KnowMySelf
What your driving style says about your personality
Why do some drivers suddenly cut others off?
Why do some drivers honk repeatedly at those who slow down?
Why do some calm people become very aggressive as soon as they sit behind the driving wheel?
Just like your choice of a car can tell some information about your personality the way you drive your car can tell a lot about you.
Mainly there are two factors that determine how will a person behave behind the driving wheel, his current mood and his psychological make up.
I am sure you already know that driving while feeling angry will result in a more aggressive driving style. Because humans usually try to channel their negative emotions in any available way they get a relief when they direct their anger towards other drivers on the road.
Our moods can explain to a great extent why do we sometimes change our driving style but our personalities determine the style that we will stick to most of the time.
Psychological factors that affect the driving style
Here are some psychological factors that greatly affect people's driving styles:
1) The need to be in control: Control freaks or those who are obsessed with being in control are ones who will respond aggressively to other drivers whenever they force them to do something that they don't want to do. If for example a driver kept flashing high beams at another driver's mirror in order to let him speed up then this driver will refuse to speed up if he cares about being in control. A stubborn driver will do the same exact action as well, in fact stubbornness can be nothing more than a defense mechanism a person uses to remain in control
2) Ego & Achievement: Drivers who have inflated egos will rarely allow someone to bypass them. Those drivers might drive calmly until somenoe bypasses them quickly in a way that annoys them. Because those people believe that they are more worthy than others they wont accept coming in the second position and that's why they might start racing with whomever who dares to challenge them. (see also The psychology of arrogant people)
3) Inferiority and cheap victories: Many of the drivers who start racing with others feel inferior to them. Its not uncommon for a driver who is driving an old car to try to race with a new sports car. In such a case this driver wants to feel superior to the one driving the new car because he already feels inferior to him. In other words some drivers race with others in order to get a cheap victory. This usually happens with the ones who failed to make great achievements in their lives. In the Solid Self confidence program i said that when a person fails to satisfy his need for success in a direct way he starts seeking cheap victories in order to satisfy these same needs in other ways
4) Aggression and road rage: Aggressive people are the ones who were taught that violence is the best way to handle conflicts. Those people usually prefer bigger and stronger cars or even trucks because they know that strength can be used to tame other drivers. By picking a car that is larger and stronger than most cars those drivers manage to intimidate the other drivers on the road and to keep them away. Those drivers want to maintain the identity of being dangerous because it makes them feel more worthy. Their goal is to make other drivers believe that they are the ones whom they shouldn't mess with (see also How your psychological identity affects your behavior)
5) Cautious drivers: Some drivers are overly cautious. They never exceed the speed limit, always have their seat belt on and they never race with other cars. Those people are the ones who are overly cautious in real life as well. On the opposite are rebels or people who refuse to stick to norms. While rebels might not always drive progressively you can still find many of them driving without licenses, ignoring road safety signs and driving recklessly in some occasions
How to figure out someone's personality by watching him driving
The first thing you must put in mind is that a person's mood can greatly affect the way he drivers a car. Happiness is more likely to result in driving with higher speeds while depression can result in the opposite.
In order to get an accurate interpretation of a driver's personality you need to sit beside him more than once in order to be able to figure out how he drivers when he is not emotionally charged.
Try to connect the driver's behavior with his behavior in real life and you will discover that personality can be revealed through the driving style alone.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
High Concept & High Touch
High Concept & High Touch : BeConceptual.COM
High Concept & High Touch
Daniel Pink talks about the need to supplement the well developed technical abilities with abilities that are termed “high concept” and “high touch”
SmallPebbles
High concept includes abilities related to:
Artistic and emotional beauty;
Detecting patterns and opportunities;
Creating meaningful narrative; and
Combining what appears to be unrelated ideas into strong innovative actionable ideas.
High touch includes abilities related to:
being empathetic;
understanding the nuances of human interaction;
eliciting the joy in others and one’s self; and
stretching beyond our everyday approach to doing things with a stronger focus on our purpose or meaning for life.
High concept and high touch abilities require skills and tools in the following areas:
Design
Empathy
Meaning / Purpose
Play
Storytelling
Symphony
Learning and Thinking
Social Transaction
The Costs of War for Oil
The Costs of War for Oil | FPIF
The Costs of War for Oil
By Bonnie Bricker and Adil E. Shamoo. Edited by Erik Leaver, October 19, 2007
"We have to decide, as a nation, whether our need for Middle Eastern oil is more important to our future than our conduct as a moral and ethical people." Which brave presidential candidate would lay it on the line so clearly? None yet. And that's the problem with the national debate on the war in Iraq, and possibly, our foray into Iran as well.
Alan Greenspan, former chair of the Federal Reserve, has declared that "...the Iraq war is largely about oil" in his recently released memoirs. "People say we're not fighting for oil. Of course we are," said the Republican Senator from Nebraska Chuck Hagel to law students of Catholic University last September. "They talk about America's national interest. What the hell do you think they're talking about? We're not there for figs."
Yet, although anti-war activists decried the "blood for oil" connection from the beginning of the war, no honest conversations have occurred in the public to involve Americans in this discussion.
This is the debate that Americans should be having: on the one hand, America's economy is fueled by our use of energy to run our lives--fueling our cars and SUVs, our industry, our homes. The United States uses 25 % of the world's oil and but we're only 4% of the world's population.
We like to be cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and we love the freedom of choosing to use as much energy as we want. We also don't like anyone telling us that we have to change our ways. If we keep using energy the way we always have, we're going to need a dependable source of it to ensure that our children and grandchildren have access to the same way of life. But we have competitors for oil in the world marketplace--China, especially--and many argue that if we don't lock up Middle Eastern oil for ourselves now, we won't have it for our use in the very near future. That will mean paying even more for energy and allowing other nations to rev up their economic engines at our expense.
On the other hand, the cost of ensuring this oil supply is a hefty one. Americans are losing lives. A generation of veterans will be suffering through the vast wounds of this war. Our actions in Iraq have led to as many as a million Iraqi deaths and many more wounded, and displaced 4.4 million Iraqis. We have, in the name of "The War on Terror", created so many U.S. enemies around the world, that our college-age students sew Canadian flags on their backpacks when abroad in the hopes of disguising their American identities. As a result of this war, many Americans have come to accept that U.S. policy will include the moral and ethical disruptions of war--even when we have not been attacked by the people we invade, but rather are invading a weakened nation for the resource we desire.
Americans deserve this discussion so we can decide who we are and how we wish to solve this problem. Is it feasible or naïve to think we can use alternative energy sources instead of oil to address our needs? Is it possible to change our habits and our lives to accommodate lower energy needs- or will too many Americans reject any change in habit? And finally, are we really the noble Americans we like to think that we are, if we allow death and destruction of this magnitude to occur in our name? I'm still waiting to hear the honest debate from our presidential candidates, from our media, and even with our friends and neighbors.
Transference
Transference is a phenomenon characterized by unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another. One definition of transference is "the inappropriate repetition in the present of a relationship that was important in a person's childhood."[1] Another definition is "the redirection of feelings and desires and especially of those unconsciously retained from childhood toward a new object."[2] Still another definition is "a reproduction of emotions relating to repressed experiences, especially of childhood, and the substitution of another person ... for the original object of the repressed impulses."[3] Transference was first described by Sigmund Freud, who acknowledged its importance for psychoanalysis for better understanding of the patient's feelings.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/53424300?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=e91c6b" width="500" height="375" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/53424300">Rilla Alexander: Without the Doing, Dreaming is Useless</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/99u">99U</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
7 Reasons Why You Should Start Your Own Internet Business
For example, as an Internet business owner, you could:
- Sell your handmade arts and crafts on Etsy
- Run an informative site that generates revenue through advertisements
- Provide professional services to clients around the world
- Generate client leads for offline businesses
- Sell other peoples’ products and earn a commission for each referral
But the “how” of Internet business isn’t important – there are enough different Internet business models out there to suit any particular combination of strengths and weaknesses. What really matters is the “why” – that is, why you should consider pursuing online business in the first place.
The following are just a few of the benefits of owning your own Internet enterprise to help encourage you to make the leap:
Reason #1 – Find the ultimate job security
Ask a handful of people what they think about the idea of pursuing Internet business, and you should hear at least one person respond with, “It’s too risky!” I have to disagree. When you learn how to do business online, you’re actually training yourself to create ultimate job security. If you learn how to sell products online, chances are you’ll be able to repeat this process – even if your original idea doesn’t pan out.
The same goes for finding freelance service clients, sending traffic to ad-based sites and successfully re-launching every other Internet business model out there. Now, contrast the ability to generate income online over and over again with a steady day job held at a single employer. Considering how many companies go under these days, putting all your eggs in that single basket ultimately sounds much riskier to me than learning how to make money online!
Reason #2 – Work on projects you’re passionate about
As someone else’s employee, you aren’t working on the projects you’re passionate about – you’re completing tasks in order to increase somebody else’s bottom line. And while this arrangement works for some people, most chronic employees don’t know what they’re missing when they trade the passion of working for yourself on projects you care about for the “security” of the daily grind.
If you aren’t personally satisfied by your current day job, you owe it to yourself to at least investigate the potential fulfillment that comes from running your own online enterprise.
Reason #3 – Access a wider network of clients and buyers
If you already operate an offline business that either sells products or takes on freelance clients (for example, as a freelance writer, web designer, programmer or accountant), transitioning your business online will give you access to a much wider pool of clients and buyers. No longer are you competing against other agencies in your area for the same small network of customers – instead, as an Internet business owner, you’re free to think as big as you want. This could mean accessing buyers a few towns away from your own or even “going global” in order to expand your business’s reach dramatically.
Reason #4 – Cut your child care expenses
With childcare costs rising steadily and often topping thousands of dollars a month for the full-time care of infants and toddlers, you may find that running an Internet business allows you to both cut your costs substantially and spend more time with your children. For most dual-income families working today, that’s a pretty big win-win!
Reason #5 – Explore your interests
One of the greatest advantages of running your own Internet business is the flexibility this arrangement provides. When you work a day job, you’re tied in to a set schedule that in no way corresponds to the amount of work you have or the hours in which you’re most productive. Unless you have a very understanding boss, you aren’t able to drop everything for a two-hour hike when the weather’s nice or start your day at noon because you aren’t a morning person.
Running an online business gives you the flexibility to set your own working arrangements based on your particular needs. It allows you to travel more (as most Internet businesses can be operated from anywhere in the world), to work when you’re most productive and to pursue the hobbies and interests you care about alongside your business pursuits.
Reason #6 – Enjoy low startup costs
If you’ve always had an entrepreneurial bent, know that business owners who choose to launch their ventures online enjoy substantially lower startup costs than those in the real world. Think about it – the “real world” business owner must pay for commercial space, physical inventory, printed stationery and more.
As an Internet business owner, your only real expenses will be a domain name and hosting account. Even if you do decide to purchase inventory outright or invest in tools that will make running your Internet business easier, your overall investment will still be much less expensive than maintaining a physical presence offline.
Reason #7 – Increase your earning potential
If you’re employed in a full-time day job, your earning power is limited by your field and your experience. If you work as a teacher, for instance, you can accrue all the experience and certifications you want – you’re still never going to hit the same million dollar salaries that investment bankers or lawyers will. But with online business, the sky’s the limit.
If you sell one product online, you can train yourself to sell fifty. If you decide to expand your service offerings significantly, you can always take on additional employees to help manage the workload. Instead of negotiating a pithy 3% raise with your boss, you’re essentially creating this increase (and much, much more) for yourself – a truly empowering experience that makes all the risk and uncertainty of Internet business worth it.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
You've lost that loving feeling
Photography was my addiction for such a long time. I did it all the time and strived to do it more, to do it better, to push boundaries.
But have i reached my limit. Have I mastered it to the best that my curiosity can handle and am I ready to move on to something else. Sadly I think I am. I have been thinking about selling my camera and just staying with my ist DS.
I just feel that well when I look at a picture and maybe its the pictures at my job that pictures just seem dead and flat to me. I look at the work others do and the work that I do and I say haven't I already tone this before and I am tired of it. Need to get and find something new.
I don't hate photography I just feel that it is everywhere and the novelty of it, the fun of it, has been diluted by that fact that it is everywhere and everyone is doing it.
But have i reached my limit. Have I mastered it to the best that my curiosity can handle and am I ready to move on to something else. Sadly I think I am. I have been thinking about selling my camera and just staying with my ist DS.
I just feel that well when I look at a picture and maybe its the pictures at my job that pictures just seem dead and flat to me. I look at the work others do and the work that I do and I say haven't I already tone this before and I am tired of it. Need to get and find something new.
I don't hate photography I just feel that it is everywhere and the novelty of it, the fun of it, has been diluted by that fact that it is everywhere and everyone is doing it.
Types of Intrinsic Motivation
Challenge
One day in the late 1970s, Sony co-founder Akio Morita called a meeting of his chief engineers. On the table in front of him he placed a very small block of wood. He told them that their task was to make a hi-fi no bigger than the block. At the time this was an outrageous challenge — but one that fired the imagination of his engineers and led to the release of the Walkman in 1979. Creative people like nothing more than a challenge — the more difficult, the better.
Interest
Creatives have a very low boredom threshold. One of the most common complaints among junior creatives is that the senior people take all the interesting work and leave them with the routine stuff. And they’re usually right. In some companies, the opportunity to work on complex, interesting briefs is seen as a right that has to be earned. Inevitably, a certain amount of fairly routine work needs to be done in any company; a common way of persuading people to do is to promise them something more interesting ‘next time’.
Learning
Challenge and interest fuel the learning process. A large part of the satisfaction of creative work comes from discovering something you didn’t know before and developing new skills in the process. This is what Honda mean when they say that problems are a joy.
Meaning
When the partygoers looked at Seth Godin in the hotel lobby, they only saw a geek checking his e-mail. They didn’t realise that those e-mails connect Seth with a global audience of hundreds of thousands. They had no idea that for Seth, writing e-mails, blog posts, books and presentations means he is helping to change the world. They only saw the superficial activity, not the meaning, and missed the attraction.
Purpose
Work becomes more attractive when we feel it is achieving something important. There’s a world of difference between photocopying an expense claim and photocopying inspiring source material for your novel. It can be fun to design a website, but it’s the website of your favourite band or a charity in the business of saving people’s lives, the task goes beyond fun and becomes compelling. Because it involves external results, you might be tempted to consider purpose as an extensive reward — but I’m not talking about a personal reward you receive for having done the work, but an effect that is integral to the work itself, usually affecting people or situations beyond your usual sphere of influence. So does purpose = completely selfless action? Absolutely not. This sense of purpose is the reward.
Creative flow
I’ve written before about creative flow — the state of intense absorption and pleasure that for many of us is the main motivation for doing creative work. The cause of creative flow is usually a combination of the intrinsic motivations I’ve just listed, particularly a balance between the challenge in front of you and your levels of skill. The result is what happens when all the different elements resolve themselves into a highly focused state, experienced as sheer joy. If you don’t believe me, look at Iggy’s face.
One day in the late 1970s, Sony co-founder Akio Morita called a meeting of his chief engineers. On the table in front of him he placed a very small block of wood. He told them that their task was to make a hi-fi no bigger than the block. At the time this was an outrageous challenge — but one that fired the imagination of his engineers and led to the release of the Walkman in 1979. Creative people like nothing more than a challenge — the more difficult, the better.
Interest
Creatives have a very low boredom threshold. One of the most common complaints among junior creatives is that the senior people take all the interesting work and leave them with the routine stuff. And they’re usually right. In some companies, the opportunity to work on complex, interesting briefs is seen as a right that has to be earned. Inevitably, a certain amount of fairly routine work needs to be done in any company; a common way of persuading people to do is to promise them something more interesting ‘next time’.
Learning
Challenge and interest fuel the learning process. A large part of the satisfaction of creative work comes from discovering something you didn’t know before and developing new skills in the process. This is what Honda mean when they say that problems are a joy.
Meaning
When the partygoers looked at Seth Godin in the hotel lobby, they only saw a geek checking his e-mail. They didn’t realise that those e-mails connect Seth with a global audience of hundreds of thousands. They had no idea that for Seth, writing e-mails, blog posts, books and presentations means he is helping to change the world. They only saw the superficial activity, not the meaning, and missed the attraction.
Purpose
Work becomes more attractive when we feel it is achieving something important. There’s a world of difference between photocopying an expense claim and photocopying inspiring source material for your novel. It can be fun to design a website, but it’s the website of your favourite band or a charity in the business of saving people’s lives, the task goes beyond fun and becomes compelling. Because it involves external results, you might be tempted to consider purpose as an extensive reward — but I’m not talking about a personal reward you receive for having done the work, but an effect that is integral to the work itself, usually affecting people or situations beyond your usual sphere of influence. So does purpose = completely selfless action? Absolutely not. This sense of purpose is the reward.
Creative flow
I’ve written before about creative flow — the state of intense absorption and pleasure that for many of us is the main motivation for doing creative work. The cause of creative flow is usually a combination of the intrinsic motivations I’ve just listed, particularly a balance between the challenge in front of you and your levels of skill. The result is what happens when all the different elements resolve themselves into a highly focused state, experienced as sheer joy. If you don’t believe me, look at Iggy’s face.
Archaic artistic imprisonment
Bribes
According to legend, Dylan Thomas was so unreliable at fulfilling contracts to write radio plays for the BBC that his producer used to literally lock him in a room with nothing but a typewriter and telephone. When Thomas had finished an act, he was allowed to use the telephone to ring the producer — who would then reward him with a tot of whisky, and the promise of another when he’d written the next act. This kind of thing probably isn’t a viable long-term strategy, but if you know your team’s foibles and desires, then dangling the carrot of an (ethical) bribe could get you out of the occasional tight spot.
According to legend, Dylan Thomas was so unreliable at fulfilling contracts to write radio plays for the BBC that his producer used to literally lock him in a room with nothing but a typewriter and telephone. When Thomas had finished an act, he was allowed to use the telephone to ring the producer — who would then reward him with a tot of whisky, and the promise of another when he’d written the next act. This kind of thing probably isn’t a viable long-term strategy, but if you know your team’s foibles and desires, then dangling the carrot of an (ethical) bribe could get you out of the occasional tight spot.
show me the money vs art
Show me a professional artist or creative with no ambition and I’ll show you a liar. No matter how much we may love our art for its own sake, very few of us will turn our noses up at the rewards on offer, such as money, fame, status and privilege. Such rewards are known as extrinsic motivations, because they are external to the work itself. In many creative fields, the extrinsic rewards on offer are so spectacular that competition is cutthroat and hordes of young (and not so young) hopefuls are prepared to invest huge amounts of time, effort and energy for a shot at the big time.
‘But hang on a minute — didn’t you say in the last post that intrinsic motivation is critical for creative success? And that most creative professionals are more motivated by the joy of work than by money?’
Absolutely. If you want to produce outstanding creative work, then while you’re working you need to be 100% focused on the task in hand. In fact, you probably need to be obsessed by your work. But that doesn’t mean you don’t care about the rewards. Have another look at the list of IT workers’ motivations in the last post — ‘compensation’ is not the highest ranked motivation, but it still is comes in fourth place, above professional development, peer recognition and ‘exciting job content’. Money may be relatively less important than things like challenge and flexibility, but it’s still important. IT is a reasonably well-paid profession, so it could be argued that these workers are sufficiently well off that they have the luxury of not having to worry about money. Unlike the young Charlie Chaplin, who ended up in a south London workhouse after his father had abandoned him and his mother was committed to an asylum.
Have another look at Chaplin’s words. He didn’t say that his art was driven by money, but that he ‘went into the business for money’, implying that this was a hard-headed career choice. He also said that ‘the art grew out’ of the business, suggesting something separate but related, as if the business and his professional ambition where the soil, and his art a beautiful flower that emerged from it. Or to change the metaphor, it’s as though art and business are parallel rails in any creative career. Both are essential for success and leaning on one at the expense of the other can be disastrous. Lean too far towards the rewards and you become a hack, churning out mediocre work to pay the bills; neglect the money side of things and life becomes too stressful to focus on your work properly.
Managers of creative professionals are faced with the same dilemma. On the one hand, it’s in their interest to spend company money wisely. But if they fail to reward people according to their expectations, this can become a point of contention and a distraction, affecting the team’s performance. Think of the premiership footballer whose form dips during protracted contract negotiations. Before we look at options for striking the right balance, it was reviewing the different kinds of extrinsic reward on offer for creative work.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
New Years Resolutions
For me the big resolution will be to be more aware. Aware of where I am going, what my actions today are bringing about for me tomorrow. To know what is coming a few weeks ahead.
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