In the words of Tommy Boy “I passed! I passed! Oh, man! I got a D+! I’m gonna graduate!”

In June I started training in Muay Thai, and Filipino Martial Arts at my friend Ervin’s studio, I.M.P.A.C.T. Athletes. Last week I had my first test and the above is the video. As you can see, I kinda got my butt kicked and have a lot to work on. It has been a lot of work, but I really have enjoyed it. Lots of new friends and my confidence level has grown tremendously!

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I passed! I passed! Oh, man!

A friend of mine called me about some stocks that he had heard about and I decided…what the hell.  I am going to do it.  I opened a Scottrade account the day before yesterday and put in my first order for stocks yesterday afternoon.  The Ask price never reached what I was willing to pay yesterday, but this morning the stock opened low and I got the stock for a bit lower than what I had put the order in for!  Awesome.

I am not much of a risk taker, but something is telling me that I need to  make a jump in the market while it is pretty volatile.  Some say that is the best time to make some money!  We’ll see how it goes.  If nothing else, it will be an inexpensive learning experience.  Its not like I am investing thousands of dollars or anything!!

If anyone is interested in setting up a Scottrade account, let me know.  If you put me down as a referral, we both get 3 free trades!

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Stock Market Beware!

At first I was a little upset…like I said, I wanted to make residual income. Have people paying me to advertise on my site, etc, etc. After much research I learned that I needed to find a topic and stick to it if I am ever to get consistent readers from a wide range of internet saavy folks that would tell others to check my blog out. To make a long story short, this blog is not interesting to the most people. I sure do have a lot of fun maintaining it though!! I’ve made many new friends with this blog and have reconnected with some that I had lost contact with.

Now my goal is to come up with a topic that I can write about and start another blog (while maintaining this one as a personal blog) that will draw crowds of fans and allow me to share something that I am passionate about. Herein lies the problem….there are many things that are interesting to me. What topic do I select? Graphic Design? Surfing? Photography? Web Site Design? Or maybe something entirely different. Whatever it is, I need to be able to push out lots of content that is relevant to the topic I choose.

Some people argue that there are plenty of blogs about all of those topics…and that since they have already been done, why waste the energy? The thing about it is that there is tons of money to be made in online advertising and online content delivery. Now that I have familiarized myself with the concept of blogging, it is time to take the next step. If you aren’t changing, you aren’t growing. Wish me luck.

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Blogging for Money

Here’s the article….I just don’t get it.  TEEN CHANGES NAME

Then again, me posting this blog post is exactly what this activist wanted me to do…another link to the story.  Actually it might be a little bit brilliant.  Odd, but brilliant.  Maybe I will change my name to ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ, just for the hell of it.

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I Just Don’t Get It

Happy Birthday, John.  You would have been 68 today.

Post from my blog: A Guy Called Nick: My Thoughts, My Experiences, My Life
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Happy Birthday Mr. Lennon. You’re not the only one.

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The Beast Lives

Several years ago I came across an artist (Ed Foster) on eBay and fell in love with his work.  I bought one piece from him, then another, then another.  I now own 7 pieces of his.  During that time he and I sort of became pen pals.  He was living in New York City, but earlier this year moved back to Southern California.  He was missing the lifestyle and the waves!

Anyways…this morning I got an email from him asking me to scan the piece shown above (titled “Surf’s Up 2″) because it is going to be featured in Longboard Magazine!  This is awesome!  Something hanging in my house, a one of a kind piece, is going to be in a globally circulated magazine!

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Ed Foster: Artist

Christy’s daughter, Lindsey graduated from Kempsville High School this weekend.  She was the third from the last person to graduate.  I know how she feels though.  I was 5th from the end I think when I graduated years ago.  Sucks to be a W.

Lindsey starts Tidewater Community College in the Fall.  Good stuff.

Congratulations Lindsey…I am proud of you. 

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Class of 2008

This is a picture that my good friend Jeff Holladay took of the band Deathcab For Cutie (an awesome band by the way)that will appear in Nylon magazine within the next month or so.  Jeff moved to Los Angeles last August to pursue two of his passions, better surf, and an immersion in the field of photography.

 Check out his website…he really has an eye and a way with the lens. www.jeffholladay.net.  Good job, Jeff!

This isnt his first appearance in Nylon magazine.  Slowly but surely he is getting more and more assignments. 

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Jeff Holladay: Deathcab For Cutie

Read on if you are interested in learning why…if you don’t, my feelings won’t be hurt.

RSS means Really Simple Syndication.  What is it though?  RSS is a simple way to gather posts from multiple actively posted websites into one location.  It’s sort of like a one-stop shop for blog reading freaks (like me).

For months I have been jumping from site to site trying to get my fix on all my favorite blogs all while pulling my hair out because of the length of time it takes.  I had to open up my list of favorites, navigate to the first blog, read it, open up my favorites again, navigate to the next one, read it, etc., etc., etc.  Enter the feed reader. 

A feed reader is a way to consolidate all of the blogs you are interested so that you can read them in one place.  Brilliant, I tell you!  I feel like an idiot for not taking advantage of this sooner.All you have to do is sign up for a free feed reading service (see below for links), then subscribe to your favorite blogs by entering their feed URL (found easily on most blogs) and viola…you are well on your way to reducing your time spent navigating to the sites.  As new posts are made to the respective blogs, you will get an alert in your feed reader interface that allows you to read the new post(s) right there! Feed readers are the way to go… I highly recommend them.Here are some links to free RSS aggregators.

www.google.com/reader www.feedreader.com

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Feed Readers: Take Advantage of Them!