I needed a place to keep all my affiliate links so I could reference them. This list will grow as I add new ones. You’ll be able to see what companies I’ve set up with to get a few bucks for the link and get some ideas of your own.
Please send some comments on any I don’t have and include your affiliate link with it – as long as the links relate to this site. I’ll click on your link to check it out to see if I want to sign up with them.
I’m considering investing in microloans for semi-passive income. The two biggest hitters in this arena are Prosper and LendingClub. I’m not sure which one would be a good investment – if either. Let’s look at them for a bit, shall we?
We have now moved to our new server. All the content here has been moved so you’ll find it all and then some at http://realizing.me or http://realzingme.com
We look forward to seeing you there!
Avoid This Company Like the Plague
By Chuck Saletta
August 29, 2008
Online person-to-person lending seemed like a terrific concept. People with a bit of available cash could have the opportunity to loan their money to folks who needed it. Without the expensive branches and staffs of brick-and-mortar banks, an online intermediary could keep its costs low. In theory, that would result in higher-than-bank-interest returns for the folks who could lend cash and lower-than-bank-interest costs for the people who needed to borrow it.
If it worked, it would have been a tremendous win for all involved. It’s too bad that online-lending pioneer Prosper.com botched the execution of that concept. Sure, any start-up will have growing pains. It’s how a company responds and adapts to those pains that really matters.
On that count, Prosper has earned an F.
[...]
Well. Let’s take a look at this article and see what he’s talking about. The link is from The Motley Fool, which is a great site for learning about investments.
I need a way to make this blogging stuff a bit more efficient. I work about 10 hours per day, 7 days a week here in Iraq (which is less than I work when I’m in uniform). That sill leaves me with 14 hours per day to sleep, eat and run errands. If I use up 9 hours of that with sleeping and stuff, that leaves me with about 5 hours per day of blogging or relaxing.
The problem is, I don’t always have Internet but still want things to post pretty consistently. I need a way to get content and push content when I’m not able to connect. I’ve found two ways to do that…
Man, this photo brings tears to my eyes.
Ever heard the Final Roll Call for a fallen friend, waiting for them to answer when their name is called as your eyes fill up with tears? If you haven’t, pray you never do.
I wrote this poem is for all my brothers gained and lost in this war…
OK. So if I want to be able to do the things I want to do in life, I need to find a way to get paid while I’m doing them. There’s only two ways I see that happening: get several paying jobs that each get me to do what I want or generate some kind of passive income that pays me while I’m doing the things that I want to do. I’m probably going to have to have a bunch of these things since they won’t each pay enough to give me the income I want.
So how do I basically get paid to do nothing (after I invest in something or set it up, of course)?
Since I don’t have a local expert that can help me, I guess it’s off to the Intertubes… Read the rest of this entry »
Buddhism and Today’s Issues
What does Buddhism say about today’s hot issues, like abortion, sexism and even the economy?
Global warming, Wall Street and embryonic stem cells were not concerns during the Buddha’s life. On the other hand, there was war, sexism and abortion 25 centuries ago. What does Buddhism have to teach about these and other contentious issues?
Post courtesy of http://Realize.Me
In my search to expand the capability of this blog, I’ve found a bunch of bullshit that only works for useless spam-like sites but I found something that might come in handy at some point; I’ve found a way to get some relevant content for the blog – http://del.icio.us by pulling in links with tags and then having them pushed to the blog automagically…
I was going to wait until this site started generating its own income to cover the costs of hosting the blog on its own server but there’s just too many limitations with keeping it at .WordPress that keep me from doing just that.
Getting a shared server is pretty cheap anyway so I might as well just go ahead and do it. There are a lot of plugins that will generate income that I can’t use now and I don’t want to mess with moving it when I have a lot of pages (all the internal links will have to change for one thing).
So where am I going to put it? [...]
Steve Pavlina’s website is on my ‘Stuff To Read’ list so I started perusing it some more. I ran across a great article everyone should look at. Read it yourself and post some comments here – I did!
By the way, Steve was kind enough to write the article so you should probably post some comments at his site.
April 10th, 2006 by Steve Pavlina 
Email this article to a friend
Having been a non-employee for about 14 years now, I’ve made my share of stupid business mistakes. I’ve also coached a number of people to start their own businesses, and I’ve seen many of them make similar mistakes. This advice is geared towards small business owners, particularly people who are just starting (or about to start) their own business.
You can read the article at its source here and come back or go on and read it with my comments interrupting it.
This is going to be a running list of things I need to sit down and take a while to read. If you’ve gone through any of these and have any comments, please post them. Hopefully I can keep this list down. I’ll take things off the list after I’ve read into it and let you know what I’ve found.
Also post a comment with some information and a link if you have some more sites that are very useful but will take a while to read. Don’t bother posting spam though, it won’t get approved.
Work with me people!!!
http://livingoffdividends.com/
http://www.rateladder.com/ – P2P Lending News, Information, Borrowing and Lending Strategy
Running and maintaining this site is not free. If you’ve found something of value here, please consider donating a small amount. I am also planning on catching up with my family and friends when I get home from Iraq and will need a boatload of Guinness for the occasion.
I would also like it if you donated because you found something useful here.
If you donate, please leave a comment below what you found on my site that prompted you to donate. You don’t have to mention how much you’re donating if you don’t want to but feel free if you’d like. If you donate at least $25 and let us know how you’ve used something in this site, feel free to leave contact information in your comment for all to see.
However, if you’d like to donate more, I’ll make sure to mention how more grateful I am to you on my site 
[Please click here to help buy some Guinness for me and the lads]
I want to thank Steve Pavlina for giving me the idea for this page.
I’ve started working with Amazon and now have a store for the blog set up. I’ve spent quite a bit of time researching good books and CD’s to get some things that will be of interest to what we’re trying to accomplish here. I’ll be publishing some posts with reviews of some of the books in the future. I want to make sure that the only things you find here will be useful.
Please let me know if you’ve written a good review of any of the books here. I may post it for you. Also please post a comment below if you know of any other books that will be of interest.
I’ve added a lot of meditation-type of books up there because you have to be happy with yourself before you can ever be happy with anything – or anyone – else.
Come October 10th, I’ll have a grand total of $10,000 in cash and savings that I can invest. I have to decide what to do with that money. Since I’m in a pretty unstable job (especially considering my wanting to leave this hole every day), I need to make sure I have money set aside to cover my bills while I look for another job when I’m home. I have about three weeks to figure it out before I reach that point.
If EVERYTHING goes south, I have about $34,000 in credit cards that I keep a zero balance on that I could live on but it would have to be a pretty big emergency to do that. I’ll keep that in mind though as I figure out what I’m going to do. I’ll have more money coming in that I can use after the 10th too. I don’t like using credit cards for anything except emergencies and to help my credit rating.
I’m not going to make a decision by the time I finish this post but it’ll get me started.
So, if I decide I’m going to invest $10,000 what should I put the money into?…
This list is a living document so it’ll be updated occasionally. If I don’t have some kind of list I can prioritize, I find myself surfing in circles.
I’ll update the date and repost it when I do that.
If you see anything interesting that you have some information on, please post a comment so I can check into it. If you have anything that fits into what I’m trying to do here, please post that as well.
This will be my first of many updates the current status of my search for financial freedom, which is one of the goals I have to allow me to do the things I want to do in life. These updates will probably change over time but they’ll be useful for me to keep on track and track my progress. Let’s begin…
Here are a few interesting links about meditation
Osho Meditation Sutras and Tips
Osho : YOU HAVE BEEN DOING THE MeditationS VERY COURAGEOUSLY HERE. Back home, you may feel alone. But don’t feel it as a loneliness. If you are ready, I can help you there also. Just remember me, feel my presence, and then meditate. …
Benefits of Healing Meditation
The type of healing Meditation can provide comes from within. Meditation can reap a number of benefits for people who practice it as a daily routine. Here are just some of the many benefits that Meditation can have in your life. …
Six Benefits of Meditation
Meditation is invaluable for many people. Think of Meditation as the opposite of a frazzled, stressful lifestyle. Learning to meditate is easy, and you will find the advantages of Meditation can be varied, so Meditation can help anyone …
Whether you are going downrange as a member of the military or a civilian contractor, you should know by now that what you decide to pack (and the corollary – what you decide not to pack) can have a huge effect on your comfort level downrange. This article will mainly discuss what to bring on a civilian deployment but most of it will be very applicable to military personnel as well.
Some of these items will be obvious and some may not make sense until you actually use them but they will all be things that soldiers today have used, sometimes under austere conditions, which have made a difference.
If you’ve been reading this blog at all, you probably know that I’m a civilian contractor for a big defense contractor and I’m in the Army Reserves. I love my Army job but it doesn’t pay enough to give me the expendable income that I want to do some of the things I want to do in life. I can’t stand this civilian job. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the worst job in the world but when you add it all up, I don’t want to do this for any length of time. I need to look at what I’m doing now so I know how long I want to keep doing it and then take a look at what I can come up with to do next based on what’s available and what skills I have.
Let’s look at the job I have currently so I can see what’s good and bad about it:
![childabuseG1109_468x329[1]](http://realizingme.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/childabuseg1109-468x3291.jpg)
Yeah, so I write poems sometimes.
This one is about the cycle of physical child abuse that permeates our society.
Care packages have been sent to soldiers ever since CARE (“Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere”, which used to be the “Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe” sent food relief boxes to Europe in World War II.
What do soldiers need today in Iraq? It may not be what you think.
Here’s another article I pulled from selling to give to you guys who read my rants and raves…
I originally thought I’d sell this article but nah…
I’m going to take down some of the things I’ve written that haven’t sold yet and post them here to talk about instead. This post is about ten rules on how children should be punished.
BTW, I think people shouldn’t have kids until they’re at least 25.
Man, these things iz funneh. What is a lolcat you ask? Do a search on Flickr for lolcat and you’ll see pretty quickly what they are. I love these things for some reason. You’ll probably see them pop up occasionally on this blog.
You can even make your own with the lolcat builder.
This post was actually a test to see how the ‘blog this’ thing works at flickr, but I do think these things are pretty funny. I’ll have to start collecting them at some point.
I managed to figure out how to forward http://Realizing.Me and http://RealizingMe.com to this blog. It was kind of confusing. There’s an awful lot of pseudo-help out there where people will just paraphrase the vague generic help on another site.
That’s fine if you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing on a simple thing but doesn’t help if you have no idea what you’re doing and there’s many ways to interpret what they’re saying. Assholes.
I changed both the ‘@’ and ‘www’ to URL Redirects at http://www.realizingme.wordpress.com. (including the trailing period). That forwards everyone to this site but changes it to the wordpress link as soon as they get here. You might remember from yesterday’s post about setting up that this is the box I’m talking about…
updated 11:26 p.m. ET Sept. 17, 2008BAGHDAD – An American Chinook helicopter crashed early Thursday as it was landing in southern Iraq, killing seven U.S. soldiers, the military said.
The CH-47 Chinook was landing after midnight about 60 miles west of Basra at the time of the crash, the U.S. statement said.
A spokesman for the Multi-National Force-Iraq confirmed that the helicopter had crashed. He said five had died, and the bodies of two soldiers who had originally been missing were found.
The spokesman said hostile fire was not suspected.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to provide details.
The chopper was a part of an aerial convoy flying from Kuwait to the U.S. military base at Balad just north of Baghdad. The Chinook, the Army’s workhorse, is designed to transport troops and supplies to combat and other regions.
The statement said the incident was under investigation.
Separately, a U.S. soldier died of noncombat-related causes on Wednesday, and an investigation into the cause of death was under way, the military said.
I chose the name ‘Realizing Me’ because it fit the theme of what I was going for: self-realization, and it was available in not only WordPress but also as Realizingme.com and Realizing.me . I’m planning on moving the blog to a different server when the traffic grows. I have too much writing to do it now!
I’m starting off with the site at WordPress because I already have a blog there (a personal one for family and friends) and it works with Windows Live Writer, which has made my blogging much easier.
I’m currently looking into purchasing RealizingMe.com and Realizing.Me from GoDaddy so they’ll be available when I need them. I doubt I’ll host the site with them since it’s kind of hard to import a wordpress site to their servers but I don’t have to worry about them as much for the name. Let’s see how that goes…
So what is this blog all about?
I spent a great deal of time trying to find a purpose for my site. I knew I had an urge to write something but had no idea what I wanted to write about. I spent many hours looking through naming conventions, SEO hints, lists of the most popular blog names etc.
Those of you who know me know that I’ve had a lot of time on my hands for a while now (I’m in Iraq right now working for the US Government and I’m also a US Army Reservist). I’ve had a great deal of time to start thinking about my life and where I want to take it. I’ve started writing a lot; articles, short stories, blog posts and even the start of a couple of novels. I read over and over that you need to write a blog about something that interests you or that you know about. Then it hit me: The only thing I really know is me and what I want in life – and that changes with every day…
Please visit http://Realizing.Me or http://RealizingMe.com
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