Pat Hanlin’s one-shot, one-take masterpiece.

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I know this video doesn’t really have anything to do with this site but I don’t care because it’s Friday and it’s amazing. You gotta check it out. It was all done in one shot with one take. Catchy song, too!

Filmed at Foundry24 by Strewnshank Studios.

Is it PIN-trest or PIN-ter-est?

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Just over heard one of those awesome conversations where one person pronounces a word one way, and the other person pronounces it the other way. It’s great because neither will address the fact that disagree with the pronounciation of the word, instead they just keep working said word into the dialogue whether it’s relevent or not.

Actual conversation (sorta…it’s from memory)

A: Do you have a PIN-trest account?

B: Nope, I request and invite to PIN-ter-rest, but they haven’t let me in yet. Bastards.

A: Really? When did you ask PIN-trest for an invite?

B: I dunno, I remember I went to the site and clicked that invite button under the PIN-ter-est logo. Maybe 2 weeks ago?

A: That seems like a long time, I know PIN-trest usually gives you access after a few days. Maybe you should go PIN-trest dot com and ask PIN-trest for access again.

B: Well PIN-ter-est emailed me a few times about it, so I guess it’s up to PIN-ter-est to decide when I get access. The bastards.

and it kept going but my eyes glazed over and my brain turned off, so I can’t say how much longer it went on for..

For the record, I say PIN-trest.

Check out my PIN-trest page here

also: sorry that image is so ginormous… it’s a test for pinterest.

EDIT: oh, those of you in other countries… i’m actually quite curious about that. Le-PEEN-trah? el-PIN-ter-EST-o-REEN-o? (sorry, i’m barely mono-lingual)

Blank Swatches for Photoshop

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Here’s a blank swatch (.aco) file for Adobe Photoshop. I made this with CS5.1, but it should work for any CS version. I just got sick of deleting all those swatches after a reinstall (10 levels of gray!) and figured I’d share.

Blank Swatches.aco

There’s a bunch of ways to use this. You can just double click on it, which usually works, or you can click on the icon in the top right and go to ‘Preset Manager’ and load it there. Should work for PC or Mac.

P.A.R.D.I. Time – My quest for passive income begins.

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Passive. Automated. Renewable. Diversified. Income.

I finally know what I want to be when I grow up…

Nothing.

I’m far to scatterbrained and distracted to really ever be ‘something’ worth being. I enjoy lots of things much, much more than I enjoy any single thing. The last time I bought ice cream and only got one flavor was like ’96. For me, happiness is not being hassled or tied down so I can do whatever I want on a whim. Any amount of money that allows me to reach that end is ‘enough’.

I used to have a real, full-time job. They paid me money EVERY week. It was crazy. Sometimes I can’t believe I just up and quit one day. On the other hand, some days I can’t believe I worked there longer than 30 minutes. Regardless… my current financial situation, while not completely dire, is rather meek. I find myself not doing things because I don’t have the money and that’s just not acceptable. But I have a plan.

Passive. Automated. Diversified. Renewable. Income. PARDI. That’s my new goal in life. Although, it’s more of a means to an end, but whatever. Here’s what I mean…

  • Passive – Yeah, I don’t want to be the one doing the work. And once I do some work
  • Automated – Once someone does the work, I want to reap the benefits for a long time.
  • Renewable – The model that gets my automated income with no work, should be replicable.
  • Diversified – That same model should be able to be tweaked such that it could provide totally new revenue streams.
  • Income – As in, money. Coming in. To me.

I’ve taken a few initial steps to get my PARDI started, so to speak. Here’s what I’ve done so far…
Spent about 30 hours reading up on outsourcing, affiliate programs, and online marketing. This folded in with my 10 years experience as a web developer should put me in a decent spot to create a plan and then execute it.

  1. I’ve hired a full-time virtual assistant. Her name is Clarice*, and she lives in the Philippines. She is going to be doing most of the content. She will be working for me full-time, 40 hours per week. She speaks better english than I do and calls me ‘sir’. She’s off to a strong start, so far. I’ll write more about this in future posts.
  2. I picked a niche. I haven’t put anything together yet, or rather, Clarice hasn’t, but if you read this site at all, you’ll probably be able to figure out what I’ve been interested in lately. I have several other ideas, that still come flooding in daily, but I’m going to focus on one for now. That’s the hardest part, so far; not getting distracted and wandering off to the next shiny thing.
  3. I joined umpteen affiliate programs, including Amazon’s. Protip: If you go to http://afx.cc/amazon and buy something, anything through there, it helps me out. So go nuts with that. Pass it around like a cold. I had it forward to Amazon’s Gold Box deals, so there’s actually a chance you might find something useful on there that you wouldn’t have if you just typed in the URL. Look at me addin’ value like whoa.
I’ve always been much better at making things than making money. Some of my good friends seem to just be naturals when it comes to making money, so hopefully I can learn from them and on my own enough to start living my dream.
 
Here’s the book that kinda got all this started:
4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. (sponsored link, natch) I’ve recommended this book to more people than all other books combined. I wish I had read it BEFORE I quit my job, but still… pretty life changing. Once you get past all the self-help huckster-ism, there’s some really good stuff in there.

*it’s totally not Clarice, but I figured I should change it since I didn’t ask to use her name and that might be a lame thing to do.

For one minute please.

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src: http://imgur.com/pq4JO

cheers,

=IFERROR() is your friend

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If you don’t want that #DIV/0 error in Google Docs, wrap your equation in =IFERROR() like so:

Done & done.

Bonus Tip I: Selecting the whole column and hitting CTRL+D or APPLE+D will apply that formula all the way down the column (or as far as your selection).

 

VS.

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Google’s auto-suggest functionality has completed changed the way I search now. I no longer even attempt to beat the browser with my search term, but rather just type the first few characters and instinctively pause and wait for the  cloud to figure out what I meant.

One of my favorite uses of this feature is using the word ‘vs’ for product and service research. Say I’m looking for e-commerce software, and I find one that looks pretty good.

and BOOM, a bunch of suggestions to also consider. Beware though, there can be a telephone-effect when you keep picking a topic and doing a new ‘vs’ search.

Google vs tip
adsense vs tip

Do you have any similar tricks? Please post in the comments or get at me @glwngrctngls

 

King of the Juice: My Top 8 Juicing Tips

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I haven’t been juicing for that long, but during my fast, I learned a few tricks that made the whole process a lot easier and enjoyable.

  1. Save the plastic bags that you get when you buy produce and use them to line the ‘hopper’ of the juicer. The hopper is the bucket part that pulp ends up in. Cleaning juicers sucks, so make it easier by lining with the produce bags. Another bonus is that you can then tie off those bags when you throw them away to prevent fruit flies.
  2. 2 apples, 1/2 a lemon, and a bit of ginger make just about anything taste good. It won’t cover up the taste of celery very well, but everything else yields to the sweet and tart flavors. I prefer red delicious apples.
  3. When cleaning the dish or basket (the mesh part that strains the juice from the pulp), hold it directly under the water faucet and scrub in a circular motion with a short bristled brush. The water flow is necessary, otherwise you just mush everything around and it take 5x as long to clean. If the bristles are too long, it just won’t work very well. You need short lil’ scrubbing circles. Also, be gentle with that mesh, as the basket on my juicer seems a tad fra-gee-lay. (it must be italian)
  4. Blueberries, blackberries, etc make a mess. It’s hard to dump them all down the shoot and cover the hole with the plunger before the blade obliterates them and makes bits of purple berry go everywhere. I started just covering the hole with my hand as I drop them in.
  5. Garlic sucks. I tried to make V8 juice based on some recipe I found online. There was very limited success. Garlic is good for you, but juiced garlic is very potent. I’d say like 1/4 clove or so for a quart is plenty. Either way, it’s definitely not 2 cloves.
  6. Go easy with the hot stuff. I’m a fan of spicy food and can handle a decent amount of heat, but for a quart of juice, I’d go with a 1/3 of a jalapeno, max. Something about the extracted oil makes the heat go a lot further than if you just ate the pepper outright.
  7. Quart sized mason jars work great. My juicer didn’t come with a receptacle for the juice, as some others do. I happen to have a few dozen mason jars in my apartment for no ulterior purpose whatsoever, so I started using them to catch the juice and they work great. I use the quart sized widemouth jars and the Mean Green juice recipe fills them up with just enough room for 4 ice cubes.
  8. Watermelon flavor is stronger than you’d think. I figured I’d use watermelon as an easy way to add some volume to a juice, but watermelon flavor is always detectable. It’s not like cucumber where the flavor just disappears in the face of nearly any other vegetable. Basically, if you add watermelon, you’ll taste it. It’s yummy though so whatevs.

That’s all I can think of for now. If you have any other tips, please leave them in the comments.

King of the Juice: The 3 Day Shopping List

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When I was doing the total Juice Fast, I drank 3 quart-sized juices per day. This is my shopping list that would last me for 3 days. Over the course of 3 days, i’d have 9 juices. 6 of them would be the mean green and the other 3 would be more fruity ones.

Primary Juice: The “Mean Green” from FS&ND:

  • 6 big kale leaves
  • 3-4 Stalks of celery 4 if smallish, 3 if larger.
  • 1 Cucumber Regular sized.
  • 2 Apples I prefer Red Delicious, as they are sweeter.
  • 1/2 Lemon Rind cut off
  • A piece of ginger about the size of the tip of your thumb. not too much.

That’s your base juice. Have 2 of these per day, if not for all 3.
Shopping List:

  • 2 ‘things’ of kale. – It usually comes in pound-ish sized bunches. Get 2. Kale will keep for a while, so get 3 if they look small. you can always just add more Kale if you have extra.
  • 8 cucumbers
  • 2 bags of celery – 3 bags of ‘celery hearts’ if your mr. fancypants.
  • 20 apples – Two of those bags you can get at S&S works well and are a bargain. Also the smaller size of those apples mean you can just throw them in the juice straight up.
  • 3 lemons
  • A fairly decent amount of ginger – Ginger doesn’t keep very will and will get moldy, so heads up.
  • 1 bag/bunch of carrots
  • 1 english cucumber – Use 1/2 per juice… sweeter than the normal ones.
  • 2 green apples – Granny Smith preferred.
  • 3 limes – Use a whole lime, but only a half lemon. Cut of the rind
  • 1 Zuchini
  • 1 Summer Squash
  • 1 Red Pepper
  • Any weird fruit or veggie you’ve wanted to try – Rhubarb? Swiss chard? why not. Don’t get a lot though.

And that’s that. All totalled, you can usually get that for ~$30.

I use the Mean Green as my base, and then work off of that. If it was a tough day, i’ll make a fruitier juice as a treat. I usually try to get some kale in there, even if it makes the juice a gross color. Kale + carrots is not a very appetizing color, but with apples and lemon and ginger it’s really yummy.

Protip: Pretty much anything + 2 apples, 1/2 a lemon, and some ginger will taste pretty decent.

 

King of the Juice: The Process

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How I went about my Juice Fast.

Step 0: Watch “Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead” documentary to get mentally stoked.  It’s on Netflix instant. And Hulu for free. (Thanks Manface)

Step 1. Buy a juicer. You need an actual juicer. Not a food processor. Not a blender. You aren’t making smoothies, you are making juice. I bought a Hamilton Beach 67601 and I’m quite happy with it. ~$90

Step 2: Go buy a metric ass-load of vegetables. My primary juice was the ‘mean green’ from FS&ND. It’s mostly kale, cucumber, celery with apples and ginger. I bought other stuff to mix it up.

Step 3: Only drink the stuff that comes out of the nozzle of the juicer for 10 days. Nothing else, other than water. No booze. No eating fruit. No carrot sticks.

I averaged about 3 juices per day, but I heard 4 is the norm. I’d wake up in the morning and make a juice. If I was going out that day, I’d make a travel one. Normally it’s better to drink the juice RIGHT after making it, as the nutrients die off or evaporate. In a pinch though, you can premake it. It should be good for several hours.

I schedule to make the juices at 9am, 1pm, 5pm and 9pm, but it ended up being 10am, 230pm, 9pm for most of the days.

I found that it wasn’t as hard as I thought. In many respects it’s actually easier than dieting because there are no decisions to make. You just quit food cold turkey for a week to 10 days. There’s no ‘ooo..maybe I can have a little of that.’ or ‘this is kiiiiiinda on my diet, close enough’… it’s just black and white. Really simple, and the simplest things usually work the best.

I highly recommend trying it. I’ll probably do it again after I get back from my next vacation or something.

I plan to continue juicing, just as a supplement. The next experiment is to add some muscle where that fat used to be.  I guess that’s next month.

tl;dr – Buy a juicer. Cram vegetables and fruit in to it. Only drink the stuff that comes out of the nozzle for 10 days.

UPDATE: This also means no booze.

 

cheers,