I spent a couple of hours last night shooting and editing a comment for the Andre Rene voting. When I went to bed last night she was way ahead, but right now she is behind by 1 vote. Someone may be stuffing the ballot box.

Go Vote Andre Rene

Here is my video comment from Seesemic. I used CamTwist and SoundFlower to get the shot video into the comment.

Seesemic is interesting. It isn’t so much a video sharing site, as a video forum if you will. The whole idea is to start threads of comments and follow-up video comments.

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I’ve been following the search for a new Mahalo Daily host for awhile now and already had a favorite before today’s episode. Lucky for me the gun toting babe was the cute redhead Andrea Rene I was already rooting for.

She chose as her audition episode topic “How to shoot a gun”. While we didn’t learn much about how to shoot, it was fun watching a totally new shooter doing it for the first time. Her “Mahalo” in the final credits is worth watching the whole video.

The guy from the LA Gun club was a little too street for me, but he did teach her the four rules. Well he taught her rule 1. I assume they just didn’t show the rest.

But he didn’t teach her a proper grip, that was painful to watch.

A 9mm Berretta is the easiest gun to shoot? Huh? What about a 22? Then he recommends a revolver for the 70 year old grandma. What a young woman like Andrea would find that harder to shoot?

Ok, the point of this post isn’t to critique the gun guy, but to get you to vote for Andrea Rene.

They had various challenges for 20+ contestants and narrowed it down to 6. Those six each get to produce one show. The contestants get to pick what topic they cover. Then they write and produce the sample show.

Andrea chose how to shoot a gun, which seems a brave choice to me. My take is Mahalo Daily’s audience is very much high tech, silicon valley, northern California people. I.E. very liberal. Talking about shooting wouldn’t be very politically correct for that crowd.

Andrea Rene has the skills for to be the new host. She’s a red head which would get me to vote for her on its own. Then she chose shooting a gun for her topic. Which made me so happy I wrote a whole post to get people to vote for her.

Her fate isn’t completely in the voters hands, but it will be influenced by it. So go to Mahalo Daily and comment on how great she is.

UPDATE: For my pro-gun readers, if this comment doesn’t make you comment for her nothing will. “Sorry, absolutely nothing against Andrea, but I wouldn’t continue to watch Mahalo if this was the kind of featured subject matter.”

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A few days ago I went down the hall to a coworkers office for some conversation. We got to talking about holsters and drawing from them. I was explaining how when you draw from the hip, you draw the gun straight up from the holster, and then pivot it forward right next to your body. Then you push the gun out toward the target.

My non-gunner friend commented “That just doesn’t seem natural.”

Which is isn’t.

I explained the reasons for doing it this way, but the comment stuck in my head for later contemplation.

You know what? Natural is almost never optimal.

Did you throw a baseball well the first time you tried? How about a football? Is there any athletic endeavor that the way you naturally do it the way you should?

The exception that proves the rule is what we say when a person does something well the first time.

“He’s a natural.”

This means he naturally does something optimally, which is different from everyone else. Even then we know we can train him to do it even better.

So if something feels natural the first time, it is probably wrong. But the goal of training is to make something optimal feel natural.

I could also apply this to philosophy, morality, and theology, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

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Went to lunch today with a coworker and we talked internet business and marketing. See I’m getting ready to launch a new business/web site real soon. It will take my passion for glamour photography and turn it into something I can hopefully make a living at. More details to come. Soon.

There were three main things that influenced and inspired me, and I thought they deserved a little blog time.

The first was Tim Ferris’ book The Four Hour Work Week. I realized just recently I read that book, and gave it to two of my co-workers, a YEAR ago. It did not seem that long ago. But it changed my way of thinking. I no longer thought success was having a multi-million dollar bank account to live off. Success was having enough income to let me live where I wanted, control my schedule, and do my dreams.

But like I said I read it a year ago and was no closer to achieving anything in the book.

Then there was SXSW and my discovery of Twitter. Me seeing the concept of micro celebrity and followings that I talked about before. Those peculated in the back of my head until I stumbled across Teaching Sells[aff].

Teaching Sells is the brain child of CopyBlogger.com’s Brian Clark. I’ve got great respect for CopyBlogger it is where I learned a lot about blog writing. So when Brian said he knew what the problems were trying to make money blogging and depending on Google, I believed him. I believed him so much I signed up for the course’s free trial with out even reading the free report.

He gives a $1 one week trial for the site. Before my second day I knew I was staying at least a month, and I knew I was going to do this. The material is really good, if a little PC centric.

Since I was going to be starting an internet business, I decided it was time to reread Four Hour Work Week. While doing so I decided to take to heart one of principles in it. (Sorry forgot the name and I don’t have the book with me.) That principle said the work expands to fill the time you give it, so do give it any time.

I decided I’d focus and get this website read to go in a month. Even though I had no idea how to do that.

The only reason I decided on a month was because I discovered I needed to build up a demand via marketing before the site went live and started charging money.

So I decided to do a survey and drive traffic to the survey via friends in the market.

I also decided I needed a partner and approached one of my studio partners about being part of it. He was on board from the get go and assumes I know everything. Even though he has extensive experience in direct marketing in the real world, and is a great salesman.

Now I needed to learn internet marketing. But where? Well back when I was doing my Apologetics course I needed to learn podcasting and discovered Jan Van Orden’s website How To Podcast and subscribed to it in iTunes. In one of his podcast’s he mentioned two things.

One, he was living the FHWW dream by moving to Argentina for 6 months. He wasn’t doing a literal 4 hour work week, but he did have a business that didn’t require him to be in the states. So why not live in Argentina?

That was a epiphany for me. I don’t need to have a business that only takes 4 hours a week. I just need one that lets me live anywhere.

Second, Jason mentioned he had another podcast on internet business. So I subscribed to it. After the first episode, I was clicking the get button in iTunes like crazy to get back episodes. There is a ton of great information in this podcast.

I just forwarded my friend from lunch the URL for Internet Business Mastery not 10 minutes after he asked me what got me motivated to actually do, and not just talk about doing it. Low and behold they had a new post up titled What is the Tipping Point Between Thinking & Learning About Internet Business and Actual Success in Internet Business?. I haven’t even read or listened to it, but my friend went “Wow. How strange is that. I just asked you about this. Weird. I appreciate you sharing all this, man.”

I want to convey the same sentiment to the people mentioned in this post. Thanks for sharing this with me.

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So I’m on a low carb diet. Been that way for over a month and have started figuring things I can eat when I’m eating out. Currently I can eat pretty much anywhere, except maybe sushi.

Sunday after church we went to Taco Cabana. I like TC, it is high quality fast food. Have eaten there quite a bit in the past few years.

One of the things I’ve learned I can eat at Mexican restaurants is fajitas, though they can be boring if you are just eating the meat. Recently I figure out to make it more fun is to pour queso over the meet. I know you low fat people are cringing right now, but it is good and low carb.

Back to Sunday. TC is offering a special deal. Fajitas for 2 only $7.99 with beans and rice. Well beans and rice are right out on low carb. Since we aren’t going to eat them, there is no point getting them. “But hey”, we think, “since I’m saving them the expense of some beans and rice, maybe they could substitute my queso.”

So we ask the guy at the counter to do that. But he doesn’t know how. At least he went to ask, then he came back and said “There is no way to enter that in the computer.”

Is the computer the arbiter of customer service? Apperantly so. But bright boy that I am, I figure we can just go around the computer. “Well can you just do it and not enter it in the computer.”

“No, man there are cameras everywhere.”

The overlords are watching and if you don’t go through them you will be punished.

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Thirty days ago I started a low carb diet and a few days later posted about it. Well the book I was following was a 30 day book, so it seem time to give you an update. If a picture is a 1000 words, here they are:

Since I didn’t give weight details at the start here they are:

That is a loss of 7.8 lbs of fat in 30 days. Don’t know if the other 4 lbs is muscle or other lean body mass. And I’m not sure how accurate my scale is on BF. I use it mainly for trend data and the trend is down.

The book said men would lose between 12-20 lbs of fat. I didn’t do that anyway you look at it. One thing to take into account is I weight 220 just a few days before starting the diet. I lost 4 lbs before starting, which I’m sure was mostly water. So the water weight you lose at the beginning of a diet was already gone when I started. If you add that 4 lbs of water weight in, I lost 15 lbs, which would be accurate.

Either way I’m happy. My weight is down and I don’t feel like I’m on a diet. I go through ups and downs on eating the food, but mostly its is fine. I can keep this up for a long time. I’ve decided when I hit 198 I’m going to take a day off and eat crap. French Fries, Bread, Ice Cream Candy. Then I will puke and go into a sugar coma. Then I’ll go back on the low carb is keep going down.

I had this belief in my mind that I used to - like in the last year - struggle right at 190. Couldn’t go down, but didn’t rise much over that. Well I caught up entering all my weights for the last few years into my excel spreadsheet and here are the results.

As you can see I haven’t been under 195 in two years. I’ve been riding the 200 mark for awhile. And the trend line shows a steady increase as I age. I need to watch this.

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I have a dream.

In the dream I’m at a photoshoot in my studio. I’ll take a picture of a lovely model and in a moment the image will show up on my laptop across the studio.

No wires, just wireless tether.

Nikon teased me with this capability for the D200, but that wasn’t my camera. Now they have it on their D300 and D3, but you have to wear small pack on your belt and have a cable running to the camera. Remember no wires.

Well the Eye-Fi looked like the answer. Alas it is not so.

Obviously not aimed at the professional. If it was it would be a CF card and not a SD card. Seems a CF card would have been easier, because it was bigger. Also it is geared toward uploading to web photo sharing sites like Flickr, but few pros use these sites.

But I believed, and I bought an Eye-Fi and a CF card adapter. I scheduled a photoshoot with a 5′ 10″ strawberry blonde. Decked her out in lingerie, set up my lights, and put the eye-fi in my Fuji S3.

And it worked. Click the shutter, and eventually the image showed up on Flickr. And later it showed up on my computer.

“Eventually” and “later” are the problem. It took easily over five minutes per 3.5 MB file for upload. I shot over 3 hours and at the end only had 10 pictures out of 200+ images on Flickr. When I needed to review some images to make sure over powering the sun looked right, I had to take the card out and insert it into the card reader. It downloaded all 200+ images into Lightroom in less time that it took to upload 1 image via wifi.

So I’m disappointed. My dream is still just that, a dream.

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