…are not part of my life right now. Which explains why I’ve been quiet.

To give you something to look at while I take pictures of my bike or something to post about, take a look at Gorod Killerov. I’m trying to bring the campus game Assassins to Russia. Assassins translates to ‘Killers’, Russians aren’t as creative with their murderer-esque names. Killer.ru was taken, so I approximated the name to something easy to remember, but also easy to type in latin letters.
Gorod = City
Killerov = of Killers
Best I could do, and don’t talk me out of it, I already bought the domain name!

The basic sign-up/in for is there, but the game isn’t playable yet: just Lorem Ipsum text and a picture. Feedback, as always, is greatly appreciated!

BTW, the socks in gun sight are alluding to the fact that socks are the instruments of death!

• Tanks in Red square as per Mandy’s request. I hope to have at least 1 picture (me foreground, tank background probably not actually in Red square, although me in tank would be cool too).
• My Bike, and the weather
• My plans for the future, to get feedback

That is probably enough for one sitting, while I could make a huge list, then it would become daunting and I’d never get to anything. How’s that for getting things done started!

I will soon be finishing my time here at the American home and with that in mind I’ve been looking at what I will do with my life in general in Kuwait. I’ve been looking at ways to start fresh with how I organize and motivate myself. I spend a large part of my free time here looking up ways to make money online, start a business from the comfort of my laptop, hack life, and cool and new things I can try in my life.

One thing I have found over and over again is GTD. Getting things done (or Getting to Done) is a book with a cult following about how to organize your life. The main idea is to put your tasks down on paper, post-it notes, computers, parchment, slabs of rock so that your mind isn’t worried about scheduling and can focus on working. It is just a hyped up in and outbox system that worked for some guy and might work for you. The system has weird aspects like 43 folders for each calendar day and month, and wikis with tons of GTD info.

I do want a nice clean system for deciding what I’ll do, and when how I’ll do it, but developing a system is actually a lot of work. I want my great work in life to be something that isn’t how to organize your life to do great things. Lots of people have had systems to organize every aspect, but they take lots of work. I’ve only recently adopted To-Do lists on my computer, not because I can’t remember, but to visualize what I do.

How do you organize your life? Would you start again with something new and organized down to the details, or do you like having everything uncertain in your life. What do you think I should do to organize me in Kuwait?

I said I had enough cool stuff to post here almost daily for the rest of the month, and I wasn’t lying.  While I wanted to post everyday, I have rethought the focus of my website.  Instead of looking for articles all the time that I find interesting enough to share, I’m going the way of the personal blog.  I’m never going to monetize bobg.net unless I have something content-based to bring to Internet denizens.  Most of my friends, students and family read this, and not many other people.  From now on, my posts will focus on me and what is happening in my life.  If I find something really interesting to share, I’ll share it, but I won’t spend my time looking for nifty articles.

Speaking of me, I have a large class load this semester.  I’m the only teacher at the American Home who is working 5 days a week.  Three days a week I teach 2 really long classes that are grammar heavy and crucial to understanding English.  They take a lot out of a teacher and at the end of the day, I just want to go home and sleep.  Twice a week I teach conversation classes with advanced English speakers and it’s just wonderful!  They hardly ever need correcting, they are all adults and willingly contribute to class, and they are interested in the same things I am.  We will actually try to play Dungeons and Dragons in our class!

I’ve also created a wiki portion for Bobg.net called LifeWikified.  It is mostly just a wishlist of things that I want, and gift ideas for people I know.  If you have a birthday, anniversary, bar-mitzvah, or it’s Christmas time, then leave your name and a gift idea and I might get it for you.  You’ll find that you need an account to edit the page.  Leave a comment with your e-mail address here and I’ll make you an account!

There are tons of resources out there to help you improve your blog and expand your readership. Recently, I’ve found a blog community building site MyBlogLog. There you can register your blog, get useful data tracking widgets and meet other people who write fun and interesting blogs. Another good resource is copyblogger.com. Great tips and advice for bringing readers to your blog and getting them to come back. From Copyblogger, I’ve found that I need to change my about and author pages to sound more professional.

If you’ve read my previous post, then you know about John Chow dot Com, a blog that helps you make money on the internet. One way to remain one of the most popular blogging sites on the Internet is to start pyramid schemes linking back to you. In that vein, John Chow is giving away a Microsoft Zune in exchange for mentioning it in your blog and linking back to him. To enter, all you have to do is write about it. As you can see, I’ve already entered and you can now enter too. Just to get my chance, I have to give all of you a chance to win my Zune!

The best way to improve your readership is by linking up with big blogs. If you never get anyone to link to you, then you’ll never rise in Google and will never be as popular as John Chow. He has the blogging market cornered and makes money by blogging about how you can try and do what he does. By being popular, he gets more popular, and he knows how to cash in on this. One day, I wish to be like John Chow, making money by telling you how to make money online. Its a win-win situation. If you’d like to get in on this super-blog-improving action, you can review his blog to get a boost in traffic.

Serenity is the best science fiction movie ever. Its better than Star Wars, Blade Runner and The Matrix; at least, according to a recent poll by SFX magazine. Serenity, if you haven’t heard, is the feature film based on the canceled show Firefly. It is a space western, telling the story of a group of bandits on a cargo ship trying to get by on the edge of space.

Following in the footsteps of other great shows canceled by Fox only to return(Futurama, Family Guy), Firefly is the only show to have been canceled in its first season and gone on to become a major motion picture, role-playing game, and soon to be an MMORPG.

If you haven’t seen Firefly, Serenity won’t be as fantastic. I recommend picking up the first season (the entire show) on DVD and watching it through before sitting down to enjoy Serenity. If you also think that Serenity is the best science fiction movie to date, then go to the BBC and vote!

One of the best ways to get news from all over the Internet is through an RSS reader.  I use Google reader and it works very well.  When you have all of your news sources from across the vast Internet all in one place, you realize that the Internet isn’t as varied and cool as you thought.  I often get the same ‘news article X’ from 5 different sources in a few day’s time.  News stories are sensational, they are cool for a bit then fade away, only to appear a year later when someone does a “best of something” and everyone else is reminded to add ‘news article X’ to their “best of something similar” too.  Don’t believe me?

I Present to you the Bagel CD Spindle = tote lunch holder thing from:

Boing-Boing

Gizmodo

TechEBlog

LifeHacker

SeriousEats

Tailrank

Core77

all from this Flickr photo.

I don’t want to track down who posted it first, but I’m almost positive they all read each others’ blogs, and now I get the same story 7 times!  This is a new problem faced by news aggregators.  For their next trick, I’d like to see them filter the news so you get the same story only as many times as you want.  I understand the importance of getting your news from several different sources so you can get a more unbiased view of the events, but there should be limits. Especially with bagels.

Depending on your news sources, you may or may not have seen the following table describing how easy it is to crack your password using the ‘brute force’ method. (guessing with completely random strings of letters)

And you thought your passwords were safe at the minimum 6 characters because you added a 1 at the end.

This article covers how a hacker would get at your bank accounts and other important websites. The top three suggestions from the article:

• Don’t underestimate your e-mail password! Most ‘password reset’ buttons require only your e-mail address
• Don’t use the same password for everything
• Use UpperCase, lowercase and numb3rs.

My suggestion:

• The longer, the better (the longest you can memorize).
  According to Moore’s Law: the power of a computer doubles ever 1.5 years. This shortens the password guessing time, so you better have a really long password.

If you’d like to check your current password or try out new ones, visit Microsoft’s password checker.

[-via One Man's Blog]

Yes, the only 2 things you can count on in your life.  Except that Taxes imply work.  So, if you want to avoid paying any taxes next year, (This year is a bit too late as they are due in less than a month) you should stop working.  If you don’t stop working, here is a nifty poster to show you where your federal income taxes go.  You can look at the poster if you stop working too, but you won’t have any money to buy it (for me)!

My presentation went fairly well.  I didn’t have an enormous audience like the presentation on ‘Chicago’ had, but I had enough people.  After I spoke for some time about games, we played them!  I introduced many students to D&D.  Now that I’m done with my presentation, I can return to my normal daily posting schedule and get some work done on gateway games, where all the simplified D&D materials I used in my presentation will be available to you!