GroovyMojo.com

Here’s some weird mojo for you…

Either a real frozen Bigfoot body, or a doctored Bigfoot costume...

You no doubt have seen this all over the web and TV, but if you haven’t, there are two ex-cops (or whatever) in Georgia ( Georgia?! ) who not only have come across a group of living Bigfoot, but “found one dead.”  Not much of a co-incidence that these guys make a living giving a tour of the Georgian backwoods under the pretext of “tracking Bigfoot.”

Already there’s cries of it being a hoax, as the photo bears a striking resemblance to a $449 Hollywood movie-grade Bigfoot costume available on the web.  A costume, no doubt, that is going to sell like crazy right now.

But, I don’t want it to be a fake.  I want this to be real.  I want to believe.

I love anything to do with the Loch Ness monster, UFO’s, Bigfoot, etc.  I want them to be real, so much so I’m willing to look at this with the eyes of a child and give them a chance to prove themselves.

Supposedly on Friday they’re holding a press conference in California where they will turn over evidence to scientists, etc., and until then the body is in an undisclosed location “under armed guard.”

What I’m afraid is going to happen, is they’re going to look all shocked and saddened at the news conference, and say someone “stole” the body and all their evidence.  That will cause a major hoopla and they’ll be called liers, but nevertheless True Believers — people who want it to be true even more than I do — will no doubt go flocking to these two guys to take their “bigfoot tracking” tour in Georgia.

I mean, the whole thing sounds like a circus sideshow act already.  Here you have a group of what I would call (for the lack of a better term) redneck pseudo-scientists talking about DNA testing, yet are treating the find more like a … well, like they did to the giant ape in the story of King Kong.  If this thing is real, it’s not being treated as a scientific discovery, it’s being exploited as a big media show.

And I have another naive “I want it to be true” type question:  If it turns out the thing was shot, which is likely, and it’s determined that the creature is actually more human than animal, will there be a murder trial?

A moot point, I know.  It’s going to turn out to be a hoax.  We humans are a sucker for a mystery, and Bigfoot is one of the biggest, and we’re being suckered right into this, even when we say we don’t believe a word of it … we’re still staring at it, hoping it’s real.  And it can’t be, because that would be simply too good to be true.

UPDATE: The press conference was a whole lot of nothing.  Looking back at this, I’m almost embarrassed I even wrote about it.  Still, so did everyone else.  I guess that proves the point that we all want to see something magical.

FINAL UPDATE: This was a hoax after all.  The jackasses filled a bigfoot costume full of roadkill guts.  I feel stupid for even giving this a glimmer of credence.

One way to beat procrastination is to make a goal public and set yourself up for global ridicule if you don’t follow through. That’s what I’m doing right here, right now. I am in a situation where I can spend a lot of time on my current novel manuscript, and so I am challenging myself to do it. Not only work on it, but to finish the first draft. So I hereby challenge myself to get it done, to deny the little demon inside me that tells me everything else is more important, that tells me I should re-arrange the furniture or go take pictures of a streetlight instead of sitting here banging on this keyboard and putting words on my novel.

45,000 more words by mid August. That’s my goal.

Wish me luck and give me hell if I don’t do it. Thank you!

UPDATE 8/13/2008 - I was delivered a setback in the form of a broken molar, emergency dental work, and lots of pain killers.  Still, I’ve managed over 20,000 words, nearly half the goal, and I still have a few days left.  It looks like I won’t make it but I’ll be close, and that is better than nothing.

Everyone including your mother should watch these two videos. Even if you are innocent as a saint, you should watch these videos. And you should never, ever, ever, EVER say ANYTHING to a law enforcement officer. The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution exists to protect the innocent, not the guilty.

And don’t just take my word for it. Watch these videos. This small investment of your time may save you 5, 10, 15 years or more of your life.

This is the face of the ultimate loser. The new archetype of a loser. Loser with a capital “L.”

This was Eddie Davidson.

I never write negative articles for GroovyMojo, but I’m putting this here as an example of everything not to be. Everything to avoid. An example of bad karma taken out to the absolute end.

It’s bad enough that this Loser was a self-proclaimed “Spam King,” but his story is a spiral of bad choices and stupidity that is epic in proportions.

First bad choice: becoming the “Spam King.” Sure, Spam is simply annoying and it angers people, but multiply that by millions upon millions, and the bad karma piles up quickly. To make matters worse, some naive people fell victim to the scams within, which takes that bad karma and multiplies it by 10,000.

Second bad choice: he was sentenced to 21 months in a minimum security prison, and instead of reforming and pointing his life in a different direction — using the experience to reinvent himself — he escapes the prison. Multiply his bad karma by another 10,000.

Then this LOSER makes his final and worst bad choice: he takes a gun and kills his wife and three year old daughter. His bad karma total now stretches up to infinity.

All this bad karma bounced right back on him: he turned the gun on himself, ending his own life.

For what? He kills himself and his own family, and for what?

Spam.

For sending Spam emails.

He kills himself and his family because of being punished for sending Spam. This boggles my mind. And it’s tragic because at any time he could have turned this around, easily. At any point. This man was not a mafioso or a drug king pin. He wasn’t a bank robber. Until the end he had never reached a point where he could have stopped and made things right. He took his life and made it like driving a truck straight down a hill and into a ravine, refusing to turn away from disaster, pointing right at it like a compass needle pointing North.

And that is why I’m writing about him here. He is the ultimate example of making bad choices all the way to destruction.

If you ever feel you’re heading this way, remember this guy. Stop what you’re doing. Reflect. Look around. Pick a path — any path! — that leads away from the ravine.

That is why I say we need to put a picture of this guy in the dictionary to illustrate the word Loser. He chose to lose. And he pulled his poor wife and child down into the ravine with him.

I absolutely love the B-52’s, but I had thought they were part of history, and in my mind they were starting to fade.

Imagine my surprise to find out that, not only did they come out with a new album, but they came out with it back in March!

And I just now found out!

You can believe I immediately zipped over to iTunes and snagged a copy.

Nobody can get me bouncing around like the B-52’s can!

For years and years, and years, I would prefer to use anything but Outlook as my email client. When Google came out with Gmail, I was hooked on that. Still am, actually.

Microsoft made significant improvements with Outlook with version 2003, to the point where I grudgingly liked it, but still only used it when I had to. With version 2007 it actually started growing on me, but still. Why bother? I have Gmail.

Then two things happened. One, Google opened up Gmail to IMAP Access, and two, I stumbled upon Xobni.

Xobni is a Outlook add-in that even Bill Gates loves. What it does is comb through all the emails you have ever sent and received, and puts the pertinent information into a relational database that shows you, in an incredibly useful way, all the vital facts about your day-to-day communications, who is linked with who, who has sent you what, and when, etc. The way they describe it, it turns your own email into a virtual social networking site.

I take a step back from that statement, because I feel they’re just using “social networking” as a buzz term. I can see what they mean, but, no — it’s still just email. But it’s email where it is very easy to find exactly who it was that Bob was talking about when someone needed to modify widget X, or who was it that sent you that invitation to the Shpongle concert two years ago. Or what was the name of that science fiction writer who, uh, so-and-so was talking about… something Ledbetter?

When you have Xobni loaded, you’re three clicks away from the answer.

It is so useful, that I fully expect Microsoft to buy it and make it part of Outlook. Because when you add Xobni to Outlook, it makes Outlook kick email ass, and I have never used any email client that has been such a pleasure to work with.

Right now Xobni is in invitation-only beta, but I have 5 invitations. Let me know if you want one. First come, first serve.

UPDATE: As of May 5, 2008, it has gone into open public beta and can be downloaded without an invitation here: http://www.xobni.com/download

From GroovyGizmo.com

My current rental car is powered by Microsoft.

If that isn’t enough to strike fear into a mortal heart, I don’t know what is.

The first thing I noticed at the airport last week, climbing into this ugly dark gray Ford Fusion, is a big reset button on the dashboard. My eyes trailed down to a logo next to the gearshift, and they immediately bugged out. “Powered by Microsoft.” WTF?

I looked at the reset button. I looked back at the logo. I kept thinking, “So, what, does this car ‘crash’ and give you the Blue Screen of Death?” I could imagine driving down the highway and having the engine, brakes and steering suddenly lock up for no reason, and me desperately jabbing at the reset button and waiting for the car to reboot as it spins out of control and tumbles off the pavement.

Fortunately, the only thing Microsoft powers is the voice activated sync between the car stereo and your Bluetooth enabled phone, and your iPod (or whatever) plugged into a USB port in the center console.

I’d been playing with it all weekend, and this morning was driving to work and decided I wanted to listen to Bat Out Of Hell by Meatloaf. So I said, per the Microsoft instructions, “Play artist Meatloaf.”

The car made a pleasant tone and a female computer voice responded, “Playing artist Vivaldi.”

What the Hell? How did it get ‘Vivaldi’ out of ‘Meatloaf’? Did it misunderstand me, or did it make a decision?

Do I really want a car that has better musical tastes than I do?

As The Four Seasons began playing, I eyed the reset button, ready to push it. Just in case.

From GroovyGizmo.com

I’ve evolved quite a bit since starting this site.

When I first conceived GroovyMojo, I was recovering from divorce, recovering from the dot.com crash, and working at a fall-back job doing computer support.  I was rather lost at the time, and decided I needed to rediscover my path in life.

As I did some introspection of my own passions and interests, and searched for new things to help me on my way, this web site came about.  When I first put it together it was an experiment, just to see what I could do.  And I put the context ads on it to see if it would support itself.  When people asked me, "What’s it about?" I didn’t know how to answer.  "Everything, I guess," is what I’d finally say.

"Groovy" means good, and "mojo" means magic.  I wanted some good magic in my life.  I write science fiction and fantasy, so I actually think about magic quite a bit.  I think I’ve come to understand it, the way it really works, and it’s not actually supernatural.

Magic — real magic, not trickery — comes from thought, intention, and deed, all together.  The magic part comes from the synergy of the three.  Synergy, an over-used buzz word, is the term for the total being greater than the sum of the parts.  It a real phenomenon.  And that is how I define magic in our mundane world.

You mix a positive attitude, a lot of thought, solid realistic goals, passion, and action, and you get groovy mojo.

Good magic.

Good things start happening because you draw the good things to yourself.  Your success builds upon itself, and gets stronger.  You achieve goals and set new ones.

I worked myself into better jobs.  I achieved my goal of becoming a full time professional writer.  Then, as I realized — in a professional sense — what I really enjoyed is creating and maintaining websites, I worked myself into a position where I do that for a huge multinational corporation.

Even better, I’ve found someone who I love without measure, a person that I seemed to be designed for at a molecular level, and she for me as we11.  I can’t imagine someone more perfect.

Groovy mojo works.  It worked for me.  If it can work for me, it can work for anyone.  The requirements are that you have to believe, and you have to want it, and you have to be determined to study the ways that you sabotage yourself and develop ways to keep it from happening.

It’s an ongoing process.  You don’t set it up, get it going, and step back from it.  You have to live it.

That’s why, when I stumbled upon the quote, "Life isn’t about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself," I instantly knew that had to be my mantra, and so I made it the theme of this website.

So now if someone asks me what this website is about, I know what to tell them.

It’s about creating yourself.

This is the freeware that I always load on my computers:

• 7-Zip - Fast and reliable file compression
• Audacity - Full featured audio recording, mixing, and editing
• DeepBurner - CD and DVD burning so good I can’t believe it’s free
• Dorgem - High quality little Webcam application
• Filezilla - Full featured FTP client
• Firefox - Tabbed web browser with a zillion cool plug-ins
• Foxit PDF Reader - Smaller and much faster than Adobe’s
• Freemind - Brain storming and idea generation
• iTunes - Favorite music player even without an iPod
• MWSnap - Full featured screen capture program
• NetStumbler - Great for finding public Wi-Fi hot spots
• PDFCreator - Creates pro-quality PDF files
• Picasa - Google’s fantastic photo organizer and manipulator
• PureText - Utility for pasting text stripped of all formatting
• Skype - Best all-inclusive Instant Message and VOIP Phone program
• Startup Control Panel - An absolute must if you want to easily tweak which programs start automatically in Windows XP
• SyncBack - Fast and reliable file backup and synchronization
• Trillian (free version) - Replace AIM, Yahoo IM, ICQ, etc. with ONE program
• WordWeb - Best pop-up dictionary, can’t live without it
• Yankee Clipper III - Very good clipboard manager

These are my favorite (and most trusted) freeware sources on the web:

• FreewareGenius
• AumHa Freeware Portal
• The eConsultant "I Want Software to…" List
• The Pricelessware list
• Softpedia
• NoNags
• Freeware Pocket PC
• Freeware Palm
• Google Pack

This is a live list — check back occasionally because it will be updated. Remember there is a difference between "freeware" and "open source," which means you have to read freeware licenses if you are in a business environment. Lots of this software is only free for personal use, but in an office you’ll be required to pay for a license.

Knock Knock Books brings you the much needed, How To Procrastinate.

From their website: “Are you punctual, productive, and conscientious? Now there’s help. Because work expands to fit the time available, it’s never been easier to do the minimum amount of work in the maximum amount of time. Whether you’re naturally organized, cursed with achievement, or simply obsessive-compulsive, we’ll show you how to stop performing and start procrastinating today. Or tomorrow.”

I wish I’d discovered this book sooner. It would have been on my Christmas wish list.