A friend showed me a link to the first ever motion picture.
Lasts 3 seconds. I guess film must have been expensive to make.
Anyways, while clicking through the related videos the following were found:
Probably the second oldest surviving film.
The oldest sound recording from 1860 (amazing).
A repeat of the oldest recording plus 2 others (one of them Edison).
Now take a look at some old photographs.
And finally…
We have the first ever recorded fail.
Hope you enjoyed.
Regards
-Simon
Write a to do list.
Regards
-Simon
The Secret To Success is the new autobiography by motivational speaker and youtube extraordinaire Eric Thomas.
Half autobiographical and half self-help book, this book takes the reader chronologically through certain events Eric Thomas’ (ET’s) life, all the while relating a particular success principle to that event.
Take a look at the trailer for the book here:
The book begins with ET running away from home at the age of 16. He made this decision based on emotion, something he would regret later on.
Running away from home was the culmination of his step father’s violent abuse towards him and his mothers’ lie about who his real father was. Eric runs away from his parents shouting ‘I hate you’ to his mother while the whole street was watching.
There was no going back. He knew nobody would bail him out this time.
The book then takes the reader through this 4 years of homelessness, how ET found God and the people he would meet who would have a positive influence on his life.
The success principles shared are explained in the context of ET’s struggle through homelessness. Here are some of them:
Principle 1: Don’t make a habbit out of choosing what feels good over what’s actually good for you.
What may feel good at the time isn’t necessarily what is ultimately good for you. When ET ran away from home, he did what felt good at the moment, to let his anger get the better of him. This would result in him spending 4 years without a home, sometimes in the freezing Detroit winter.
This is caused by allowing your emotions to dictate your actions. The more emotion you are feeling at the point of decision, the less your ability to reason is.
Principle 2: Avoid being your own worst enemy.
When ET found a place to stay after running away, he took it for granted. Part of the deal was that he would finish high school. He skipped classes.
Despite his friends hospitality, he never cleaned up after himself and left the house smelling when the owner (his friend) got home. Needless to say, he was kicked out and found himself homeless again.
This was a situation entirely brought upon ET by himself. He was his own worst enemy (which is often the case with most people).
Principle 3: You can change environments, but until you change yourself nothing else will ever change.
Once Eric ran away from home, he thought he would change automatically. This wasn’t the case at all. Change would come from within.
He found many of the bad habits were present until he made them go away.
There are more principles, but I will leave it at that and allow you to get the book and go through the rest. The principles and the context behind him learning them cannot be properly explained in this review.
The turning point for Eric was when one of his street friends told him to leave the streets and get his college education. Here is the excerpt:
I was so grateful when Lil B called my name that night…. “E, you still headed down south for school with De in the fall?” Lil B said like a concerned parent.
“No doubt,” I said with a being cocky but with a proud feeling. Lil B’s next words shocked me because I assumed he wanted to talk about how I got down that night.
“Then you need to get outta here. You are not like the rest of us, you got a chance so don’t mess it up. You have an opportunity the rest of us don’t have. Get out while you’re alive. I am proud of you boy, now go make the Twain proud”.
As I walked off the block for the last time, I turned to B and said, “I promise, college won’t change me homie”. I walked away from the Twain that day and I never looked back.
From there, the journey would lead ET through crisis and victory. He would do church work, community service work and establish a career as a public speaker. The second half of the book is just as inspirational as the first half.
His journey would eventually lead him to creating the ‘secret to success’ videos which would go viral and explode his profile not only in America but world wide.
(Here are the videos)
Rating
As you can tell, I liked this book. This book is short (about 200 pages) but packs a punch. It is almost always worth it to pay $20-$30 to gain the experience that someone spent a life time earning. This book isn’t short of lessons.
Overall I give this book a 9 out of 10. I enjoyed it a lot however it was devoid of detail as to how ET resolved his problems with his mother and father (which the acknowledgments make clear happened). That was one part of the book I was looking forward to.
However you must realise that this is a biased opinion. ET’s secret to success videos ended up having a profound effect on me and how I approached life. There’s more to come, no doubt about it.
Regards.
-Simon
At the moment, almost every country in the world is going through a recession (thankfully not Australia… yet).
Here is a list compiled by Josh Sanburn of time magazine of what products that were bought more often since the global financial crisis of 2008.
He gives them the title of ‘recession proof products’.
They are listed below.
I won’t go into the explanation behind each and every one of the products (the slide show in the link does a good job of that).
It is interesting to note that most of these goods are comforts in hard times.
People are hiding from their problems rather than facing them head on. This is perfectly understandable and natural (although not productive).
There are a few smart choices on the list (e.g. buying generic drugs instead of brand name drugs and buying vegetable seeds in hard times). However products like donuts and lottery tickets aren’t going to get you too far (lottery is a dumb scam).
Unfortunately, people’s problems aren’t going to be solved by hiding from the problem.
I wish everyone good luck in these hard economic times.
Regards
-Simon
The man who ruled Libya for 42 years is now dead. I am not going to comment on the man himself. He died approximately 24 hours before the writing of this blog post.
You can read the initial reactions here and here (or you could google his name).
I find similarities between him and Saddam Hussein. Both led their countries for a long time. Both claimed they would fight to the death. One was found hiding in a hole, one was found hiding in a drain pipe. Both met death.
Both had control of many millions of dollars. It didn’t help either of them. You’re born with nothing and you die with nothing.
The death of Gaddafi was suspicious in that there is video of him alive (after being captured). The next time footage is taken of him, he is dead. There are claims that he was shot in the crossfire between Gaddafi Loyalists and ‘rebel fighters’ in between those videos.
I think this is rubbish.
My guess is that he was killed (execution style) and that the rebel soldiers wanted to cover up the fact that they destroyed any chance of their former leader going to trial. Maybe they wanted to claim the cash reward for themselves (I’m hearing that there was one) and wanted to make sure of it.
It really does end for all of us. The only thing left after our death is what we did for God.
Good luck to Libya.
Regards
-Simon
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Or so the story goes.
‘A tale of two cities’ (1859) was one of two historical novels written by Dickens. His first historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1840-41) was considered a failure by many.
A tale of two cities was considered one of his best works.
This is the second Dickens novel read by myself (after ‘Great Expectations‘). While it did not reach the same level of Great Expectations (which I consider to be the best book I have ever read), I still quite enjoyed the book.
The story follows the fortunes of both Paris and England. It begins in 1775 (just before the American revolution) and a number of years before the French revolution.
The reader is at one point told about the oppressed lower class in Paris (concentrating on the Defarge’s, a married couple who would become leaders in the revolution) and then at another point switch back to the relatively peaceful London.
London was graced by the presence of Sydney Carton (with poor social skills), Mr Lorry (hard and loyal worker of Telson’s bank) as well as Lucie Manette (who along with Mr Lorry pick her father up from the Defarge’s in Paris).
The book begins with Mr Lorry helping Ms Manette rescuing her father. On the boat home they meet one Charles Darney who later falls in love with Lucie and marries her.
During the height of the French revolution (after fast forwarding some years) Darney feels impelled to go back to Paris. This ends up placing him in quite a bit of trouble.
From here I will leave the rest of the story up to the reader to find out.
Dickens flexes his literary muscle in this book. His ability to quickly develop the story, and have all the parts quickly fall into place is nothing short of amazing. It is unfortunate that he did not have many pages to play with while writing this book (the reason for this I am not sure).
Often times he cuts through the story a bit too quickly.
Another criticism was that the book was at times hard to follow. The same held true with great expectations. With these books the first 2/3 of the book are a set up for the last third. If you can grind out the first part, the second part makes it all worthwhile.
Judging purely from this book and Great expectations, I can see why Dickens was so revered. No books have ever stirred my emotions as these books did. That is the true greatness of the writer.
At the end, the reader is left pondering many issues revolving around humanity and human life.
Overall I give this book a 8 out of 10. A very good book with a brilliant ending. However, as mentioned it was hard to get through in the beginning (more so than Great Expectations).
Regards
-Simon
Just a few days ago, Australia were soundly beaten by the All Blacks in the semi-final of the world cup. The All Blacks deserved the win, wanted it more and will most likely win the world cup (unless France can pull yet another rabbit out of the hat).
I had a real problem with the tactics the wallabies used this entire tournament. I found 2 videos which highlight where it went wrong for the wallabies. I will go through them one at a time.
The video has commentary so will not delve into each play. However I will say this. The wallabies, against every opponent had potential line breaks and potential overlaps in every game they played this world cup.
For some reason they decided to discard these advantages in bring the ball back into already crowded rucks. They also had the habit of running into the opposition defense when they should have kicked the ball down field for territory or into touch. This often saw wallabies players being isolated (sometimes we would have one back running into 3 or 4 opposition forwards).
Let’s have a look at the second video…
We don’t have commentary here so I will explain a bit what is going on.
Towards the end of the game the All Blacks had a player sin binned. Australia needed to score a converted try in the next 3 and a half minutes and hope they could score another converted try off the kickoff. It was a long shot but something that needed to be tried as it was a semi final of a world cup.
This video shows that despite their one man advantage, they were not able to convert a golden attacking opportunity into a try. They had set up their backs for a run at the all blacks defense. However the ball (for some inconceivable reason) was kept in the forwards (where no further progress was being made).
Once the ball got into the backs it was just a matter of converting. The extra man saw a single defender facing 3 attackers. At 2:05 in the video Adam Ashley-Cooper needs to pass left to create a definite 2 on 1 or possible 3 on 1 in the left hand corner.
Instead he did what the wallabies had a habit of doing all world cup. Cutting back into the wall of opponent forwards. This turned a 99% chance of a try into a turn over for the all blacks.
Full credit to the All Blacks. They did what they had to do and deserved the win. They easily wanted it more (every loose ball was jumped on by an All Blacks player).
Having said that, the Wallabies didn’t perform at their best. There were at least 2 occasions (both shown in the videos above) where a extremely good chance of a try was blown.
There were also other points in the game where the Wallabies could have claimed the ascendancy but failed to capitalize on their strengths.
Regards
-Simon
Today I was on facebook. I saw this on the side of the page…
It got me thinking. Why bother having a facebook if you’re going to make it private?
I have this thought quite a lot. It makes me laugh every time I hear about someone bitching about privacy when they actively place their information on a website that is essentially public.
I hear about people deleting their facebook because they are ‘being stalked’. 99% of the time that will be total B.S.
A story by some attention seeking idiot attempting to make people think that they are so desirable socially that they are being followed online. I have heard this stalking story a number of times. It has always been a girl that makes the complaint… and that girl is almost always of an appearance ‘not worth stalking’.
Back in the day of myspace I would see the same sort of thing. Myspace was a site where you could create your own unique page and show it off to the world. You would then get people setting their profile to ‘private’ so that only friends could see you (thus defeating the purpose of myspace).
Here’s 3 things:
1) Most of you aren’t worth stalking
2) If someone wants to get info off you from facebook, for whatever reason… they will usually have the resources to bypass any privacy settings (think government or law enforcement agency). Your token attempts are not going to stop them.
3) The only information you put on your facebook (or any internet presence) should be information you wouldn’t mind the entire world seeing. Use the ‘grandmother rule’… if you wouldn’t show your grandmother, you shouldn’t post it.
The ultimate privacy setting lies in you preventing yourself from typing idiotic things, or uploading stupid pictures (or having them taken in the first place).
Also… fewer people care about you than you either admit or think.
(I realise that this could really come to bite me on the arse if my account gets hacked… you have permission to say ‘I told you so’)
Regards
-Simon
There is a theory that your current consumption of a good depends on your past consumption. This theory is called ‘path dependency‘.
If your parents are into classical music and they played it to you as a child, then you yourself will be more likely to listen to classical music.
While the theory may or may not be reality, it certainly holds true when it comes to myself and economics (which I currently study).
It started when I was about 5 years old. I was with my parents at the supermarket when they consulted and decided to give me an allowance. I had no need for the money and frankly didn’t deserve it, but was happy to take the money none the less.
The allowance was $2 a week.
It was made very clear that if I spent it, the money would be gone (a lesson many of our nation’s leaders obviously didn’t get as kids).
Needless to say… it felt like being a millionaire.
$2 is a lot as a kid.
A single packet of mamee noodles ended up being bought (an addiction that would last to this day). $0.60 was paid and $1.40 received as change.
It was that initial encounter with money and the explanation that would result in 2 years of commerce class (2003 and 2004), 2 years of both business studies and economics class (2005 and 2006), a diploma of commerce and the current study of a bachelors of economics.
There is no saying where the interest will lead.
The addiction in action 17 years later.
Regards
-Simon
This is the super simple case for mandatory paternity testing. Read this article (note: I have removed the faces and family names as I don’t wish to bring attention to the people, just to the idiotic behavior).
This guy is gullible enough to believe that his wife got pregnant watching 3D porn while he was off in Iraq. While this is an extreme and ridiculous case, men are often gullible when it comes to being told that a kid is theirs.
Perhaps it is because they badly want to believe they have conceived a child. Or it may be because they do not want to face the emotional pain of having being cheated on.
Regardless, there are many men who are raising kids that are not their own. There is nothing wrong with this if they are doing this voluntarily and know that the kid isn’t theirs. However they should have a choice to either raise the kid or get out of their, not spending any time or money on the kid.
A mandatory paternity test will force many of these men to face reality. It will also weed out many cheating women who just use those men as a means to raise their offspring (while denying the men the opportunity to pass on their own genes).
A faithful woman will have nothing to worry about with mandatory paternity testing… it is just the unfaithful ones that oppose it. Which is why it will be a long time before mandatory paternity testing will come even close to law.
Of course she is suing the porn cinema which she visited to “see how a porno looked with 3D effects”. I wonder how successful she will be.
Regards
-Simon