Category: personal AnGoL

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rePost -The True Cost of Credit – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com

From personal experience the places where it is cheapest to buy stuff, only accepts cash transactions. Talking to one store owner it is because of the credit card company’s cut.

I was surprised at how high the fees were. For instance, in this example of a Mastercard, when you buy a $1.50 pack of gum at a convenience store, the credit-card company gets 28 cents. Even on big-ticket items like airline tickets, the credit-card company collects nearly 3 percent.
This is not to say that there is anything wrong with those fees. I presume that the issuing banks can choose their own fees (within reason), and that there is more or less free entry — which suggests that the industry should be pretty competitive. Merchants accept credit cards, which implies that the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs.
The True Cost of Credit – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.

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Strangely Comforting–My Wife or My Art | Art Market Monitor

My Wife or My Art
January 29th, 2009
Jack VettrianoJack Vettriano is the UK’s most popular artist, something of a Scottish Thomas Kinkade. But he got a late start on his career, as the Independent quotes him:
It wasn’t until my wife and I separated, when I was 39, that I started painting full time. Before that, we were trapped in a rather difficult position, like a lot of people, struggling to pay the mortgage and also paying school fees for my wife’s child. We could just afford to go out once a month if we were lucky. Once I was on my own, I began painting as a full-time career and within a year I was making three or four times what I had ever dreamed imaginable. Soon I had several galleries keen to represent me, and the press were also starting to show interest.
At Home with Jack Vettriano (The Independent)
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My Wife or My Art | Art Market Monitor.

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My Enneagram Test Result

Got this link from oui

Enneagram Type Indicator Results
Your highest score will indicate you basic type, or it will be among the top 2-3 scores. You have answered all the questions — terrific!
Type 1 6
Type 2 4
Type 3 4
Type 4 4
Type 5 6
Type 6 4
Type 7 3
Type 8 2
Type 9 3
4 4 4 6 4 3 2 3
The Nine Personality Types of the Enneagram
Type 1: The Reformer. The rational, idealistic type.
Type 2: The Helper. The caring, nurturing type.
Type 3: The Motivator. The adaptable, success-oriented type.
Type 4: The Artist. The intuitive, reserved type.
Type 5: The Thinker. The perceptive, cerebral type.
Type 6: The Skeptic. The committed, security-oriented type.
Type 7: The Generalist. The enthusiastic, productive type.
Type 8: The Leader. The powerful, aggressive type.
Type 9: The Peacemaker. The easygoing, accommodating type.
For more information about the types, the test or your score, click here.
Enneagram Test Result.

Cool test had to make some choices, don’t know if this is true, so I am a Thinking Reformer!hehe!

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Something I have been feeling for a while but do not have the chops to bring into life with words!–Consider the Lobster: 2000s Archive : gourmet.com

Here is a piece from the late great DFW who shows how a great writer can write about anything and still make you think, and feel.
as for the title Let’s just say that I’ve turned down a lot of vacations that I can honestly say I don’t like being a tourist. I went to baguio a month ago with Chuck,Vince and Tonio , and when we were deciding where to go Chuck wanted to go to an uninhabited island whilst I was really pushing towards a real tourist destination. This seems wierd. The fact is what I was trying to do was akin to what I used to do when I was a child and had a tooth that was about to fall off. I just kept moving it feeling the pain but nonetheless still doing it, till the pain becomes enjoyable and suddenly your tooth falls off. I loved going to Baguio, but I can say that any time and any where I am with friends and I can say with a straight face that I do not like tourist’s destinations, they me feeling something that I have failed to bring to life using my meager vocabulary and my ill command of the english language. The words quoted below do justice to my inner conflict with being a tourist. I don’t know I fancy myself as a traveller.

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
Consider the Lobster: 2000s Archive : gourmet.com.

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I Am A Producer!

I believe I am and I will do everything I can to be right1

While it’s true you’re likely a mixture of both types and will experience fluctuation in your ratio of production vs. consumption from one month to the next, unless your name is Robert Scoble you have to choose one or the other.
To recap:
* Consuming for the pure love of learning is absolutely ok.
* Producing purely because you have a fire that won’t die until you do is fine, too.
* But don’t kid yourself about who you are.
If you’ve been reading startup blogs for years and never started anything, it’s time to accept that you’re a consumer.
If you have 50 software product ideas and your hard drive is littered with folders containing 30 lines of code from each, you’re a consumer (or at least a producer who has trouble finishing things).
And if you figure out that you are a producer, stop daydreaming about the day you’ll make things happen. Start making it happen in the next 30 days, or forever hold your peace.
The Single Most Important Career Question You Can Ask Yourself | Software by Rob.

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Why I Never Got Into Guitar Hero-Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Complete control

Guitar Hero is in that sweet spot where it is hard enough to get the competitive juices flowing , but not hard enough to turn of a mass of people that would require playing it to recoupe all the expenses in licensing /creating /all production and marketing expenses.
If I was to waste as much time in doing something, I’d probably just learn the damn instrument (Guitar) and try to create music. I saw the ted talk of the Guitar Hero creator, and I admire his desire to bring music to everyone. I hope this funded his research, because it is far from successful if that is his goal.
I hate it when I have strong feelings on something, I tend to be incoherent, too many thoughts wanting to express themselves simultaneously and  when you get around to it the thought is lost.

“I’ve been puzzled by the popularity of the game Guitar Hero,” writes Rob Horning at PopMatters. “If you want a more interactive way to enjoy music, why not dance, or play air guitar? Or better yet, if holding a guitar appeals to you, why not try actually learning how to play? For the cost of an Xbox and the Guitar Hero game, you can get yourself a pretty good guitar.” Horning, apparently, doesn’t quite get the point of prosumerism; its joys are lost on him. He continues: “I can’t help but feel that Guitar Hero (much like Twitter) would have been utterly incomprehensible to earlier generations, that it is a symptom of some larger social refusal to embrace difficulty.”
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Complete control.

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Enormous Happiness– All by ourselves alone – Roger Ebert's Journal

This made me remember how i text myself whenever I am truly happy. I haven’t for a while. This made me realize how rare being truly happy is. What I mean is that the peaks, being enormously happy in the words of Roger Ebert, Is not something we have control over.
To complete the thought. It is entirely out of your control to be enormously happy but to be happy is totally within your power. Cherish the rare moments and work for the happiness.

Suddenly I was filled with an enormous happiness, such a feeling as comes only once or twice a year, and focused all my attention inward on the most momentous feeling of joy, on the sense that in this moment everything is in harmony. I sat very still. I was alone at a table in a square where no one I knew was likely to come, in a land where I did not speak the language, in a place where, for the moment, I could not be found. I was like a spirit returned from another world. All the people around me carried on their lives, sold their strawberries and called for their children, and my presence there made not the slightest difference to them. I was invisible. I would leave no track in this square, except for the few francs I would give to the cafe owner, who would throw them in a dish with hundreds of other coins.
All by ourselves alone – Roger Ebert’s Journal.

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The Law of Jante at Paulo Coelho’s Blog

from paolo coelo:

Of course I had never heard of this, so he explained what it was. I continued on my journey and discovered it is hard to find anyone in any of the Scandinavian countries who does not know this law. Although the law exists since the beginning of civilization, it was only officially declared in 1933 by writer Aksel Sandemose in the novel “A refugee goes beyond limits.”
The sad truth is that the Law of Jante is not restricted to Scandinavia: this is a rule applied in every country in the world, despite the fact that Brazilians say that “this only happens here,” and the French claim that “unfortunately, that’s how it is in our country.” Now, the reader must be annoyed because he/she is already half way through the column and still does not know what the Law of Jante is all about, so I’ll try to explain it here briefly in my own words:
“You aren’t worth a thing, nobody is interested in what you think, mediocrity and anonymity are your best bet. If you act this way, you will never have any big problems in life.”
The Law of Jante at Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

I believe that people inherently want to be the great, its just that fear stops them from even trying. Whenever anyone haas the courage to try to be really great, to really blaze a trail we are faced with our initial inability to overcome our fear. The existence of someone courageous enough to try rubs our insecurities and inabilities to even try.
Whenever faced with this I tell myself this from here:

Our Greatest Fear —Marianne Williamson
it is our light not our darkness that most frightens us
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other
people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of
God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.
—Marianne Williamson