Moosicles

It’s so depressing. It’s hot outside and humid. Even at night time when it gets down to the 70s it’s still way too humid to go outside. Upon walking through that door everything that was once dry becomes sticky and damp. Sleeping outside is like sleeping in wet clothes that didn’t get dried all the way. Hiking or biking is like walking through the steam from a hot spring if the water was coming out of the exhaust pipe of the world’s nastiest, biggest car that ran on a mix of Elmer’s glue and gasoline.

On top of that, the days, even when sunny, are just too freaking hot. You can walk about half a mile before a profuse sweat breaks out. It’s not even a nice salty, sweaty sweat though, it’s a nasty dirty damp sweat that makes everything stick to you. Your clothes stick to you, your skin sticks together, dirt and air pollution stick to you. It’s as if you ate a dozen glazed donuts and didn’t wash your hands afterwards and then decided to spend the rest of the day touching things that were equally sticky and dirty.

Oh yeah, and another thing. It’s too sunny, yet the sun never actually does come out all of the way because it can’t quite find it’s sorry way through all of the smog and humidity. Instead, it is perpetually cloudy and stagnant. But this isn’t to say it’s not insanely bright outside. It’s furiously bright. Driving involves a lot of squinting. Think Asian people. It’s so bright because the amount of sun that does make it through the humidity and smog (which is still about a thousand times more sun than on the sunniest winter day) decides to bounce off of every possible surface, notably the black asphalt that so beautifully carpets our cities and suburbanfucks, and shoot right back up to the undersides of the humidity-clouds and then again bounce back into your eyes and onto your skin where it will likely give you permanent Cataracts and a nasty farmer’s tan, if not malignant melanoma.

With that said, a lot of people get the idea that the solution is to head over to Jordan Lake, Lake Crabtree, Bond Park Lake, Kerr Lake, or Lake Raleigh. No, I promise you, these are awful ideas. If you still think they are good ones, you haven’t actually tried to swim in them yet. First off, every single one of the above mentioned lakes are man-made. They are dammed up forests with trees sticking out of them and logs on the bottoms. The fish in them were put there by rednecks to entertain them. The water is usually brown. If you are lucky, it might be green, but either way, you won’t be able to see more than a few inches in. That means that you can’t even see your feet if you are wading in water that only comes up to your ankles. Yes, its true, I assure you. If you want to kayak, don’t bother: your kayaks will have so many spiders in it that you’ll be itchy with bites and covered in webs the moment you get in. Hopefully none of the bites will be from black widows. When that happens, you’ll probably pass out and drown in the middle of the lake. If you are fortunate enough that your kayak doesn’t flip when you slump over, you will still be met with the most excruciating pain of your life (worse than having a child women say) and then die anyways because the paramedics won’t come and get you. Not because you are in the middle of a lake in a kayak, but because they don’t want to face the heat and humidity.

Another reason not to go in the water is that it’s not even allowed at some lakes. The government admits that it’s so bad at lake Crabtree that you aren’t allowed to swim in the water. Not one of the lakes allows you to eat more than one of two fish out of it because they are all full of unpronounceable chemicals and mercury. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the lakes are all just big cover-ups of former nuclear testing sites.

If you try to go sailing, just forget it. There’s no wind. To explain my point, Jordan Lake has an insanely overactive weather station that you can call at any time and get the current wind conditions and temperature. When I say it’s overactive, I mean that on a calm day in the fall or winter it will respond by telling you that wind speeds are 20 miles an hour. At the warmest part of a winter day, the stupid thing will be convinced that it’s 90 degrees out. In the summer, it’s so hot that the thermometer entirely fails. Yet the wind speed reading is a dead zero degrees. In fact, the air tends to move so slowly that time kind of comes to a halt and people just die for no apparent reason.

Oh, but the mosquitoes thrive off of stopped time. It lets them suck your blood more easily. Friends won’t even go in my backyard in the summer in fear of being eaten alive. I can’t really check the garden when I get home anymore because I don’t enjoy the sight of looking at my ankles being munched on by about 50 to 100 mosquitoes. But that’s okay, because my garden pretty much dies when it gets like this outside. For a month or so in the springtime the garden was doing great. The vines would grow about six inches a day. Maybe they though they were bamboo or something but summer has certainly told them otherwise. Nothing grows anymore. There’s been a small pumpkin in the garden for about a month now. It exploded from the size of a nut to the size of a soft ball in about a week, but once it got as hot as it is now, it just stopped and said, screw this, it’s too hot and humid to move. The pumpkin leaves all droop down during the day as if drooping will kill them and put them out of their misery. The beans have all gotten strange heat related diseases, and the peas have shriveled up and died completely. Even the dogwoods and Inca ivy leaves droop constantly. Not even rain is enough to make them perk up.

So yeah, that’s a typical summer in North Carolina. On a good year, a Hurricane will come by and provide some critical entertainment, as well as maybe bring the temperature down from 105 to 102 and maybe allow plants just enough water that they don’t commit suicide. Actually, Hurricanes are especially useful because they remind all of the property owners with houses on the outer banks that they are complete morons and are trying to put houses where houses shouldn’t go. Hurricanes are good about doing that. Maybe this year will pick up a bit – there are more hurricanes than normal predicted. But then again, it’s also feasible that a hurricane will decide to scoop up a hundred million gallons of oil and wash them up on our shores from the Gulf Coast.

In addition to Hurricanes, another great perk that NC provides for us in the summer is lightning storms. Occasionally the atmosphere will realize that it’s got more humidity and heat than it can handle and it will puke. It’s puke is electrifying and deadly, also known as lighting. While the lightning can be powerful and beautiful, it doesn’t last and there’s no good place to view it from. Because of the vast amount of trees and complete lack of hills or mountains, there’s nowhere high up enough that you can go to sit in the car and watch the lighting strike its victims. A few sky scrapers in Raleigh and maybe the occasional radio tower are tall enough, but personally I wouldn’t want to be in a radio tower during a lighting storm and no skyscraper-owning corporation values the little people enough to let them observe the skyline.

While I’m at it, I should mention that you can’t really do anything outdoors, even if you somehow manage to lose your sanity and brave the heat, humidity, ticks, and mosquitoes. It requires a certain small knowledge that there won’t be hail and lighting coming your way before you go off and put up a metal tent in the forest or hang your hammock between two trees that make sketchy deals with the storms for free electricity. This simple type of knowledge is impossible to obtain here because the weather is permanently stuck under the category of “thunderstorms likely”. Sometimes I wonder if the meteorologists just don’t bother to come in to work in the summer to update their forecasts because it’s too hot to get from their front door to the car. Even the rare day that there is no possibility of thunderstorms or rain, there is probably 105 degree heat, direct sun that penetrates the skin right down to the bones, and what we call the “air quality alert” – also known as smog. This is the kind of stuff where the meteorologists on TV admit that the humidity in the air has acted like glue and decided to grab all of the particulate matter coming out of your exhaust pipe, and shove it down your lungs. On these special days teachers aren’t even allowed to take their classes outside for recess. Not even for 5 minutes. Either way though, storms predicted or not, you probably won’t have one. The predictions are wrong about 97% of the time. In fact, it’s so predictable that the predictions will be wrong that they should really be reversed and called “unpredictions.” With an unprediction, when they say one thing, you know the opposite will happen. Of course though, I should not fail to mention the little fact that last time I went hammock camping at Umstead, there was the definite prediction that there would be no rain or storm that evening. Right as I had reached that heavenly point right in between being alive and being dreaming, I was awakened by flashing and banging. We had ridden our bikes into the park and were about 30 minutes from the outside of the park. Either way though, we were going to be on metal bikes or we were hanging from two trees that happened to be right next to gigantic power lines. We were screwed. Somehow we got out of that situation alive, but it wasn’t fun. I should have known it was an unprediction, not a prediction.

So yeah, it would be nice if either a hurricane or autumn would hurry up and get here. Either one is fine with me.

It’s been awhile since I’ve had the motivation to post anything on here, but I’m making a comeback. I’ve got some (in my opinion) crazy awesome ideas for useful webapps or general software, but first, some background info:

I want to make a personal inventory system to keep track of all of my crap. I just bought some new Choco sandals for $80 – those things are known to last years. The guy that sold them to me had his for 13 years and repaired them only occasionally with some shoe glue. Now this is the first time I’ve spent that much money on footware, normally I would go spend $10 at Walmart for flip flops, which is what I did last summer, and they broke less than a year later. But let’s assume these Choco’s last me 10 years. That makes them just $8 a year – and these are NICE. They are comfortable and great for hiking. After 10 years, the Walmart flip flops will have cost $100 assuming they break every year like this year, and then they are not as nice to begin with. Oh yeah, one more thing – think of all the time and gas money it would take to have to go to the store to get more flip flops every year. Unless you love shopping, which I hate, it’s pretty much to your advantage, as well as the environment’s, to get something that’s going to last as long as possible. It used to be that lasting long was something that was looked for when we bought things perhaps 40 years ago, but now, Walmart has changed this. Now you are seen as being wealthy and loose with your wallet if you buy quality items instead of going to Walmart. Why can’t we learn to invest in the long-term when we make purchases nowadays? I think this should change, in order to increase our own quality of life and address the social and environmental problems that are occurring in the world.

With that said, I think that for me, the main reason that I don’t think about making things last as long as possible is that I forget about things quickly. I’ve got a busy life – I’m in college. I don’t have time to keep track of my crap, to research everything before I buy it, and to do a cost-benefit analysis of stuff before I buy. What I want to do is create a personal inventory system that is aimed at helping people make their personal items last as long as possible and get their money’s worth out of them. Maybe something like this already exists. If it does, please show me! But I want the system to be simple: just input items that you buy and expect to last longer than… let’s say six months. You will input the date of purchase, the place you bought it from, the price, and the target amount of time that it’s supposed to last. Then, you will know what you have, how much it’s worth, and if your small investments in simple objects are paying off or if they are ripping you off. This will also help people to know when it’s worth it to repair an item and when it’s worth it to buy a new one.

What do you think?

• Orgasm
• The sound of wind blowing through a forest
• A close group of friends
• A significant other
• Love
• Sitting in the sun
• Being in nature
• Having children

These things may seem random and unrelated but they may be more related than you think. All are approaching what many people would describe as “the meaning of life.” It is easy for us to provide experiences like these that we can put a finger on and say “this definitely makes my life feel meaningful.” All of these tend to put us in awe, or even hurt, because we realize that life is so beautiful and that our time here is limited. So why is it so hard to define the meaning of life then?

While Wikipedia may attempt to address the question by acknowledging all of the historically accepted definitions that have exited throughout human cultures in the past millennia, which is probably the most politically correct way to go about it, I propose a scientific study to address the question. This is perhaps the most unconventional research topic that I have ever thought of or even heard of, but I believe it could be done. Obviously the only way to know the true meaning of life is to find it yourself through introspection, but science should still be able to shed some light on the definition.

First, a researcher would survey a select group of randomly selected participants and ask them to list the top three life experiences or sensations that they would consider to be related to the meaning of life. The wording in this survey would be critical because it could influence their responses, so care must be taken to ask the question neutrally. I foresee much debate and consideration being put into the choice of wording in the question.

Once the survey is completed, researchers would select the responses that reoccurred the most often and make a list. Perhaps a reasonable list would include ten experiences or sensations. From here, ten small psychological experiments would be designed to analyze the experiences or sensations. These experiments would be aimed at looking at what emotions, neurotransmitters, hormones, etc are present during each experience/sensation and which parts of the brain are the most active. The goal would be to find a link that is in common with the experiences.

The results would hopefully break new ground in psychology and potentially find cures for depression and loneliness that do not involve drugs. Psychologists may be able to more accurately help patients solve life problems by helping them find the parts of their lives that are meaningful and the parts that are not meaningful. Lastly, the results may be able to help us design a better society and better cities that place emphasis on making our lives more meaningful and thus increasing overall happiness, health, and life satisfaction. It’s hard to argue with someone who is backing their agenda with the scientifically proven meaning of life.

I have a two part possibility plan for the summer:

1. I will save money by living on a sailboat.

2. I will earn money farming worms and selling them to fishermen and gardeners.

Part 1: Living On A Boat

I found that a boat slip at a nearby marina for a 24′ boat will cost $1756.80 per year, or $146.40 per month. In contrast, a cheap apartment around here will go for $300 a month, and that does not even include utilities. The boat slip comes complete with water and electricity. If I wanted to be truly cheap, I could even anchor the boat away from shore for free, but I would rather spend the $146.40 per month for the water and electricity. With that said, this leaves the problem that boat slips are one-year leases. There are two easy solutions: I can either rent for the summer and then sub-lease to another boater for the remaining nine months or I can simply live there for a full year. Going to school at NC State, it would be easiest to not have to drive 30 minutes each way to school every day – but hey, living on a boat for half the price of an apartment can’t be that bad! Then there is the other possibility that I could have a “boat mate” in which I would split the price of the boat slip with them, making it cost only $73.20 a month. That is dirt cheap for a place to live. While it would be tight, a boat mate is a possibility. A 24′ sailboat can typically sleep 2 people comfortably or 4 people uncomfortably. So lastly, the cost of the boat would have to be factored in, but I plan on purchasing a sailboat anyways. For the sake of the cost analysis, I will assume I spend $3,000 on a used 24′ sailboat, which is a reasonable price to expect to pay. There may be problems with the boat, but for the purposes of living in it, not everything has to work perfectly. $3,000 + $1,756.80 = $4,756.80, divided by 12 months is $396.33, which is not an unreasonable monthly price to pay for a place to live, not to mention this assumes that (1) I will be on the boat alone, and (2) the boat will cost $3,000. In reality, it is possible to find a 24′ used sailboat for as little as $1,000. I think you get the idea: living on a sailboat is not expensive, and it will provide a fun experience that I will be glad to have. Oh yeah, and I should also mention that sailboats don’t require gas. There’s savings in that aspect as well.

Part 2: Selling Worms

Worms are easy to breed and sell. Farming worms is not much more complicated than putting worms in a dark, moist bin and feeding them a little bit of food, like a slice of bread, every once in awhile. Like growing anything, it takes practice to get it right, but I’m confident the task could be conquered in a summer. A bin of worms would be extremely easy to keep on a sailboat and it would be closed, so there would be no risk of having worms get all over the boat. There is no initial investment cost in this endeavor: I loosened the soil in my garden today and collected about 100 worms which I put into an old plastic cat litter bin with some moist dirt. My plan is to get the worm farming down by the time summer comes so that I can raise the worms and sell them. Since I will already be at the lake on a boat, selling worms will be easy. A small container of about 25 worms will sell for about $5 (about 20 cents per worm). This is only slightly more expensive than a gas station near the lake sells the same amount of worms for, but mine will be fresher and I will be already at the lake where I can hand-deliver the worms to the fishermen.

I have two final comments: A summer selling worms allows for a lot of free time. I will purchase a cheap 3G internet device for my laptop so that I get internet access at the lake, and I will do web development from there. I can work on a small buisness that I am working on starting as well as make simple websites for friends at a small cost and blog.

I’ve been following a lot of news stories and researching a lot of political problems that The United States is facing these days, and I’ve noticed that an insane amount of our troubles come from partisan disagreement. Simply put, the country is very polarized. There tends to be a strong Democrat and a strong Republican opinion, yet relatively few moderates and independents speak out for compromise or in-between solutions.

With the passing of the recent health care bill, partisan disagreement is at the worst I have possibly ever witnessed. Republican John McCain flat out said that “there will be no cooperation for the rest of the year.”

The truth is that there is an easy solution to the chaos. The United States citizens should vote on the issues rather than have politicians make all of the decisions. Currently the argument does exist that if you vote for the president, then he can do what he thinks is best, even if unpopular, simply because he was voted for. This philosophy is completely valid, because they were indeed elected for the purpose of making critical decisions. But while this philosophy is valid, it is a very indirect way of taking care of these important issues that affect the lives of every American citizen.

This is the 21st century. Before we know it, it will be the 22nd century, and the 23rd. We have the technology, the organization, and the resources to allow citizens to vote on issues. Why do we still have politicians making all of the decisions? The health care bill that recently passed may very well have been voted in, or it may just as easily be voted against by citizens, had it been voted for at all. If it had been voted for though, at least we wouldn’t have to put up with the bitching and complaining that we are hearing because it would have been directly voted in or out. If you don’t like it, then at least you will know that you are the minority and hopefully you will accept that fact.

I understand that voting is a huge process, but there is no excuse not to allow citizens to vote per-issue rather than per-candidate. We have the internet and we have computers. Stop taking useless online polls and use the computers to vote! I know: you are going to say, “but not everybody has a computer and internet.” The reality is that laziness and lack of time stop more people from voting than the fact that some people have no computers and internet. Additionally, people without computers could still make their way to public places such as a library or fire station that have do have public computers. If America is not ready for computerized web-voting, then there is still the option of absentee voting, which is quite simple: you mail in your vote. Voting on issues does not necessarily have to be done on a single day in the way that voting for candidates is done, so a mail-in absentee system has more potential to succeed. Either way, there are plenty of solutions.

As far as how often to hold these issue-based elections, there are multiple ways to go about letting citizens vote per-issue as opposed to per-candidate. One solution is to have annual or semi-annual voting days in which citizens will vote on the issues that have been brought up in that period. Perhaps citizens will vote against an issue. It might then have to be revised and then voted for three more times before the citizens of the United States accept it. If we have quarterly voting days, the reality is that we would still be creating legislation and solving problems at about the same speed that politicians do the same task today. Another solution would be to only have voting days when a truly important issue is at stake, but this would be more difficult as it is hard to spontaneously schedule a voting day.

After browsing the the internet for awhile, I found a number of websites and webapps that I thought were intriguing:

roundcube.net This is a free, open source web mail client. It looks quite a bit nicer that the webmail client that we have to use in college!

textpattern.com I have no idea how this CMS compares to others, but the website caught my eye. It is well designed.

dailybooth.com This website looks kind of empty – but click on a picture. It’s just like twitter only you use pictures rather than tweets. I can’t help but think this is a really cool idea.

herway.com I still feel like online dating is a little bit weird, but the way this site gets users to sign up is exceptional. It takes boring forms and turns them into a fun game.

speckleapp.com This is a simple app that allows you to create checklists with multiple checkboxes – I feel like it is up against tough competition – paper and pencil, but you have to admit that not too many sites let you create a dummy account if you don’t feel like registering.

townme.com I couldn’t figure out what townme is by looking at this site, but I thought the site was simple and elegant.

iplotz.com This is a really useful idea for web designers! I wish I had something like this when I was creating web designs for some of my past projects. It allows you to draw out the lines for website design concepts before you jump into creating them.

threadless.com The idea is simple: sell cool t-shirts, but their site design and slogan of “Nude No More” makes them stand out. I wish I had the money to buy a t-shirt.

belongsto.me Now this one is just plain classic. I love this idea. Not sure if it will ever catch on, being that people don’t tend to have time to log all of their belongings, but I might find some spare time on a weekend and look into this one.

ziehlke.com I don’t see personal websites too often, maybe just because they don’t come to the surface in search engines, but this guy’s website is well done and gets his message out there well. I like the way he markets himself.

snipt.net This is a pretty classic idea. As a coder, I understand exactly what the founder was thinking when he made it. However, I can’t see it catching on. Google and notepad make too convenient of a pair. I hope it proves me wrong though.

After touring five local companies and hearing about five more local entrepreneurs give speeches about their successes, I’ve drawn some entrepreneurial conclusions. These are very likely existing business concepts, but I have never taken a business class, so bear with me. I’m just making connections from what I have seen and heard.

There are two types of entrepreneurship: precedented and unprecedented. In precedented entrepreneurship, you are simply creating a business based on ideas that already exist and on a business model that has already been proven effective. Precedented entrepreneurship is important as it fills needs that society has – it is purely a reaction to a demand. Any perfectly competitive market, such as web design, web hosting, marketing, restaurants, or accounting fits into this category of precedented entreprenurship. Precdented entrepreenurs start new businesses, but not new ideas. This is not to say that precedented entrepreneurship does not ever fill niches or involve creativity: even businesses within a perfectly competitive market are all slightly different and try not to overlap 100%. With that said, there is a little secret about precedented entrepreneurship that I will let you in on: its easy to get into because it’s based on products of high demand, but it’s also highly competitive and highly standardized. If you start a precedented business, based on an existing model, with an already well-defined market, you better be ready to compete with those standards. You obviously don’t have to be the best at what you do starting off – nobody ever is. But you should at the very least offer a product of comparable quality to your competitors and you should meet the industry standards. Upon starting a precedented business, be prepared not to come up with new, innovative ideas, but rather to try to be the best at what you do and to simply offer a damn good product or service. Don’t expect to get very big.

In unprecedented entrepreneurship, you are trying to create an entirely new idea, or connect existing ideas in an entirely new way. There is no precedent for you. You have to be able to innovate and constantly be open to new ideas and constant change. You will likely be creating a new technology that you might not even know how to apply in an economically feasible way. You may have no idea how to even create a business plan for the product. In fact, the product may simply not be profitable or demanded. With a new idea comes a new market. You will have to define a market that might not exist yet – you will have to even create a demand through advertising and demonstrations. If you are successful, it is very likely that you will get big and have little or no competition. Many huge corporations started, and often continue to be of this nature.

Both types of entrepreneurship are important to society. Precedented entrepreneurship brings prices down, brings quality up, and satisfies our basic demands. Unprecedented entrepreneurship  changes the way that society operates by creating new technologies.

There is a bad kind of entrepreneur. While entrepreneurs are largely credited with taking important risks in moving society into new territory and trying to bring to life risky, new ideas, not all entrepreneurs provide a fairly-priced, quality product. Occasionally there will be the entrepreneur that is impatient and goes after money with no understanding of his market of choice. Here is how I came to these realizations:

Back in February I got to my Entrepreneurship Initiative class one day and we were presented with a guest speaker. Our speaker told us of how he started a huge trucking company and how he had recently dropped out of college with one remaining semester to pursue his new web design firm that he had started. He had no background in web design and he didn’t know how to even go about it at first; but he quickly became motivated, learned a little bit about the industry, and hired a friend of his with a little bit of web design experience. The overall attitude of the teacher and class toward him were praise and respect for having crossed lines into a new industry and starting something new, even though he didn’t know how. This lack of experience and learning how to do something you don’t know how to do based purely on motivation were praised, and I don’t blame the class one bit for praising him. I was one of the people that thought it was very respectable what he had done. In fact, I offered him my resume at the end of class to see if he needed any help given my web design background.

But then I went online and saw his company’s portfolio. I was shocked. I was offended that a company would pay someone thousands of dollars to create such a basic, mediocre, web 1.0 website. I honestly do not mean to be overly critical of the firm: they were good businessmen and they knew how to find their clients well. Perhaps even too well. I could have made websites of far better quality in just a few hours, for far less than $10,000.

A couple months later, the speaker emailed me saying that he needed help and was looking to hire. I thought I might be able to help, though I wasn’t really looking for a job. I rather enjoy the web development job that I have now.  I got there and talked to the speaker and his buddy that did the web design portion of the sites. It turned out that the speaker/firm owner still had no knowledge of even basic web development. From the moment we got into talking about web design, the main guy didn’t really appear to have a clue what I was talking about when I got into the technical skills. The web designer kept claiming to have been in my shoes four years ago, and said he saw himself as me in four years, yet he didn’t seem to understand half of the technical stuff I was talking about. I’m sorry buddy, you may be four years older than me, but you have no idea how to make a high quality website. At this point I realized that their egos had soared high above their levels of skill, and I had no more desire to even help out.

I had discovered that starting a business completely outside of your field of expertise is not always the best thing for society. While people may offer you a lot of money for it, you have to understand that you might not yet be up to the industry standards. You might actually be ripping people off with inferior quality due to your inexperience.

I am a huge supporter of entrepreneurship and I do recognize its importance in society. I recognize that every success did start as nothing more than an idea. Often even a sketch on a napkin. I get that. I know you have to start somewhere. But this guy’s firm was trying to enter into what economists call a perfectly competitive market. In such a market, standards of quality are well defined and there is a certain level of quality that should be kept if you are to provide your customer with the best product that is possible. Other web design firms have proven that a higher quality website is possible to make for far less than $10,000. Your customer may not be aware of this, but it is your duty to inform them. This is not to say that the speaker’s firm was not purposefully ripping off customers. This is only to say that you must be careful, especially in a perfectly competitive market, that you have a good understanding of what the standards are, and you make sure that you are providing your customers with just as good a product as the next guy.

Now I do love that he was trying. I love his entrepreneurial spirit, but he really ought to have surrounded himself with some people that had strong web design backgrounds, knew the market well, and understood the standards of quality.

I got an annoying piece of spam in the mail today from the “Domain Registry of America.” Why is this a problem?

1. They are contacting me where I did not give them any information and I did not ask them to be contacted. I have not looked it up, but I would be surprised if there were not anti-spam and anti-privacy laws against this.
2. They begin by saying “as a courtesy.” There is nothing courteous about receiving spam that asks you to pay more than you should have to to renew a domain.
3. They ask you to pay more than you should have to to renew a domain. A domain should never cost more than about $10 a year. In fact, if you get one for more than a year, it should be even less. In fact, many hosts even offer free domains if you pay for them to host your site. $30 is nothing short of a rip off.
4. There is nothing legitimate about this company. They are not the ICANN.

Do not get ripped off by this scam.

For the last few weeks I have been working my ass off developing a new web service, SpotPlot.net that allows users to visually graph their daily lives. My friend Quinten is handling the marketing while I am doing development.

The way it works is such that you create “studies” in different areas of your life… say sleeping for example. Each study will have its variables, just like a scientific study. In the example of studying your sleeping habits, the variables might be sleep, stress, caffeine, and sociability. Each day, the user logs in and is prompted to enter the simple information… how much sleep did you get last night, how stressed do you feel, how much caffeine have you ingested, etc. The numbers, often based on a scale of one to ten, are then plotted on a graph and shown to the user so that they can visualize how different aspects of their lives affect eachother. Essentially, users are attempting to discover correlations.

We have big plans for this project which I cannot release yet, but I can say that we are focusing primarily on versatility and social media, with later plans to reach the psychological and therapeutic market.

So anyways, I’ve been spending long nights coding and researching and it is the most time I have ever put into a project. I am trying to keep my grades from slipping but it feels inevitable. I am not afraid of failure though – failure can only enrich me with more experiences. I’ll keep you posted with our progress. I encourage you to follow us on Twitter.

-Moose