I have been thinking....

I have been blogging for a bit now and I think I am starting to get the hang of it and I am thinking I might want to take it more seriously now. I have looked around and seen some blogs which I consider serious (in the sense that it has become a full fledged hobby for the authors). These authors mostly have their own domain names and they have really customomized templates, hence having a proffesional look.

Well I dont plan to be launching a own site very soon but my first step I feel is to gain total control of my blog and my problem with that is that I dont think blogger.com can do that for me.

Here are my issues:

1) Blogger.com is not fully compatable with safari (Ya I am a mac user), and I think that is ridiculous considering that macs are becoming more popular daily. This also causes me to use two browsers FireFox for blogging and safari for everything else (I prefer safari to Firefox due to FF's memory leak problems) this is a problem for me.

2) There are not alot of options in templates on blogger.com as supposed to wordpress, you have to mess around with alot of the HTML on blogger, which can be seen as a plus, cause you are kinda given full control of your template. But for me who has no time, I prefer to find some obscure template, tweak it a little and I am ready to roll.

3) Blogger doesn't give future posting feature. I travel alot and I don't know how my internet access will be when ever I am away, so I would like to schedule posts to be saved and then published the day I want them to, so to my readers it seems I never left.

4) With blogger I have to use third party applications to view my web stats, this is ok but need me to manage and create extra accounts on the internet thereby keeping track of multiple user names and passwords.


I am presently living with all the issues listed above and if I am to take blogging seriously, it has to be something I enjoy and not a burden, I have to reduce all this over heard, so I started this research and then I found out that Wordpress (Blogger.com's main rival) has all these features I am looking for and more and to put icing on the cake they have an import function that lets me import my blog and comments form blogger.com to the new blog, which I think is amazing.

Hmm... so when do i move? when i finish my personal website or before?

Seeking Inspiration

You remember my previous post about how to become a genius?. I quoted Thomas Edisson, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" What I left out is that finding that 1% Inspiration might be as hard as or if not harder than putting in that 99% perspiration.

The definition of inspiration as defined by Dictionary.com is: "Stimulation of the mind or emotions to a high level of feeling or activity" but the definition I liked best of inspiration was that of spiritwritings.com which was: "a psychic state in which one becomes susceptible to creative spiritual influence or, to a varying degree, unwittingly lends oneself as an instrument for through-flowing ideas" . This is because I like to liken the recieving of inspiration to seeing the light (an internal awakening).

Sometimes I run out of inspiration for different things, from blogging topics to my next computer related project to how to start my assignments. Sometimes I go out of my way to seek inspiration, for me I need to break the flow I need to change my routine. Routine stagnates my mind, so these are a few methods I use to clear my mind:

1) Go to bed Thinking about what I want to solve.
Thats right, whenever I have a problem and I don't know where to start I lay on my bed with the intention of sleeping (to also calm my nerves) but sometimes if I am lucky I wake up with a clue or finally decide on the path I want to follow in tackling whatever the situation is.

2)Read a magazine
Many times when I am short on inspiration on designing a website, flyer or I am short of a blog topic. Magazines have never failed. Well published periodicals are filled with other peoples creativity which you can feed off and gain inspiration.

3)Put yourself in a random scenario
I go to places where there is talking but not to much noise that you cant think, just watching random interactions from people and events pop different Ideas into my head. Library and Coffee shops fpr example.

4)Colors
There is this place on the first floor of my school library which is called the Idea Factory (as if they knew) I can dare to say it is one of the most colorful places on campus, multi colored couches, abtract paintings on the walls, a flat screen tv in the corner and so many other things. The place is so busy that your mind processes a lot at once but at the same time so organised that you can see symetry in this madness. That kind of place is my ideal place to do homework. think and relax.

What are your own methods when you seek inspiration?

Movie Review Monday (MRM): 300

I am always asked to recommend movies when ever my friends are debating seeing a movie and for some reason I always go blank. I find that really unusually cause I'm the kind of guy that should get paid to watch movies. I think I have a broad range of movies I watch, actually I am really unbiased when it comes to movies and music, for me it is all about the mood I am at, at that particular time. So in a way I could be a good movie partner but many people dont like me cause I always give side commentary while the movie is going on. Yes I am that guy, that annoying guy that feels he can predict the next five scenes and feels that he can actually tell you the end of the movie from like 40 minutes into the movie. O.k I know that is bad but I think for a significant percentage im right though but anyway I am steering away from the point.

I recently decided to review one movie I have seen recently every monday (hence forming MRM: Movie Review Mondays) so all of you out there can know what I have seen and from my review decide if it is worth your while or not. Although I do not believe in movie ratings by movie critics I will put them side by side with my own rating for you to see what other people are saying about that movie.

So I recently saw the movie "300". To give you are very brief description of the movie without saying too much, it was about 300 legendary soldiers from sparta (a city in ancient Greece) and how they fought against the Persians (Who wanted to enslave them). It is a typical ancient Greek war movie, if you liked the movie Troy, you would probably love this. The cinematic effects was highly impressive. This movie was highly digitized so you can probably find it in a 3-D movie theater near you (recommended). This is one of those movies better seen in the theater than at home on you couch, its an action packed adrenaline pumping movie that I would recommend.

Movie Trailer here.

My rating: 80% (A must see)
Rotten Tomatoes: 61%(Fresh)
Yahoo movies: B+


Note: Rotten Tomatoes rates harshly and rates better towards Oscar worthy movies rather than what might just be a plain chill/fun movie

Internal Alarm

Everyday as I go to bed I look at my cable box to get the exact time I lay my head down to sleep ( I have a clock in my room but I'm just lazy to look in the opposite direction) I think about my plans for the next day and then decide what time I have to be up the next morning, meditate on the time for a minute or two and then try to sleep and then "POOF" like clockwork I always wake up 10 -15 minutes before the time I planned to, I try to sleep the remaining 15 minutes away but I keep waking up at 5 minutes interval scared that I have over slept. Yes this happens every single morning and no I do not have an alarm clock, actually I have never owned an alarm clock in my entire life. the closest thing I have ever had to an alarm clock is the alarm in my cell phone.

I have told people this several times. Most people think I'm lying and others just say "Wow thats cool" (I'm not really sure if they believe me). In my whole life I have only met about three people who say they can do the same thing, go to bed decide what time they want to wake up and actually wake up at exactly that time. Noticing the small amount of people with this ability naturally I thought I was special, well I know we are all special but I was thinking towards the super heroes/ special ability kind of special only to be disappointed today when I stumbled unto this web page.

What the article says in a nutshell is that psychologist have found that we all have this ability, that is if we meditate on the time we want to wake up some hormones that induce stress are released into your blood about an hour before we are to wake up and this wakes us up eventually. After several other attempts to research this phenomena, I read that this ability is most prominent/or easily controlled by people into deep meditation. Well I wont say I am into deep meditation but I know I think a lot, about a lot of deep stuff, I have also noted this ability since I was in elementary school, so I have been working on it for a while and I can say it has matured quite a bit (although from time to time there are discrepancies, depending on how tired I am when I go to bed and how early I have to wake up or If the time I plan to wake up is much earlier than my usual sleep pattern from the previous weeks).

After my discovery I was both happy and annoyed at the same time. Happy because I can finally prove to people that I have not been lying, that this is a known and documented occurrence but annoyed that it is not a special ability. You know maybe the Xmen times are not as near as I thought, but that would be a wack ability though.

There is one thing that I found interesting, of all the people I have met and told about this ability there is only one person that asked me a question that I still think about today. He can also wake up in the morning when he thinks about it and he asked "You know my body can tell the time when I am asleep and know when to wake up but when I try to guess the time during the day it never works can you?"

I will answer that on a different day.