Entries Tagged 'Blog' ↓

Well, it’s another milestone at The Baglady!  This is the 200th post, and all of you kind readers have made over 1100 comments!  In my 2008 goals post I briefly mentioned that I would like over 1000 visitors to this blog daily by the end of the year, and now I am up to 300 to 400 per day so it seems highly likely I could reach my goal.  Since then,   I also  joined a great community blog named Wise Bread and started a new blog about San Mateo Home Sellers in Trouble.  Between the three blogs now my writing gets over 2000 views per day.  That’s a huge improvement from just 100 to 200 visitors daily 5 months ago!

In terms of blog income, I have gone from  $161 in January to nearly $600 this month.  All of the money I collect from blogging is currently donated to various charities.  It makes me happy when I see my articles earning money every day now, even when I am not writing.

With the growth of my blogs, I finally wrote  a Press page to showcase all the mentions my writing have gotten on top blogs and other press.  Check it out for some of the most amusing and useful articles I’ve written.

I want to say thank you all for reading my writing.  It really makes my day when I hear that my random thoughts have helped you or made you laugh.  I know that I piss people off, too, but getting any kind of reaction means that I made someone read and think a little bit and that is also rewarding.

The more I write the more I think that my writing could be the best legacy I could leave.  I would love for my future descendants to read my stories and my parents’ stories to get a glimpse of how we lived.  I know I love to hear my mom’s stories about  my grandmother’s family. So hopefully I will can preserve this blog for those that come after me.  I also think it is amazing that the internet allows this rapid sharing of ideas and lives.

With that, I leave you with some great Blog Carnivals in the recent weeks:

Carnival of Debt Reduction at Debt Free Revolution

Carnival of Personal Finance  at Alpha Consumer - I didn’t really submit to this carnival but they included my article under Four Pillar’s name.  Sorry Mike, I don’t know what happened there.

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This story comes from my friend The Retirement Hobo.  He has really finished working and is now traveling around Asia like a retirement hobo should.  He is sending his friends emails and I really liked this story so I asked him if I could post this story on my blog.  He said YAHHH!!! So here it is!
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Just wanted to share one day with you all.

A few days ago, a friend introduced me to his private mountain.  That’s right, a mountain.  He bought it years ago as an investment property but the license fell through and now he turned it into a farm where he and his family can camp out and eat fresh organic vegetables and tropical fruits he grows and barbecue fresh farmed trout from their pond.

We entered the gate that marked the mountain he owned…that’s right, a mountain…and it was so nice.  The weather was semi-tropical, a slight mist in the air, with the sunset beaming the day’s last rays through the myriad of trees, scattering light onto the stone path.  We drove a few hundred meters and reached his man-made cottage and barn.  There was some ducks and geese chilling by the lake and a bunch of vegetables and fruits growing in an orchard.

One of the fruits, when literally translated from Chinese (neither of us knew the English name) is called the “Fire Dragon Fruit” and was named because of its fire-reddish color that mixed in shades of orange and yellow (kinda like a mango) and it’s skin made it seem like it had scales (kinda like an artichoke).  It grew on a huge cactus that vined around and its flower was a huge tropical-looking red blossom (kinda like that plant that kills you in the movie, Jumanji).

His cottage had electricity and running water somehow (I’m guessing magic), and he put on a hot pot of water to boil some organic fresh tea he picked straight up from the garden.  We took a little hike and he pointed out the pond of fish, a waterfall and a creek, and various small reptiles and lizards.

We settle down on his porch and he tells me to get ready for some show that his magical mountain…that’s right, a magical mountain…was about to start.  He turns off all the lights and we wait.  A steady stream of water, frogs ribits, and other loud insects keeps the silence away while we wait.  Then a flicker of light flashes in the trees…too quick and sudden to be the sun, which has already completely set.  Then slowly, a chorus of small flashing lights, like lighters at a P-Diddy concert remembering B.I.G. while he raps “I’ll be missing you”, lights up the mountain.  Turns out, it was mating season for fireflies and his private mountain….that’s right, fireflies….was one of the few places left that had the right amount of water, humidity, firefly food for us to view them in the density that we saw.

Thousands of lights twinkle on and off lighting the forest.  We were able to catch them in our hands and make them flash lights to the music of Kanye West’s “Stronger” bumping from my iphone.  Well….not really, but we were able to catch them and that was kinda cool.

Anyways, that was one of my better days.  I hope the excruciatingly painful details I provided was a good alternative to my usual banter of falling off fences, psychobabble about father and son, and dudes that looks like ladies.  I’ll write some direct replies to your emails now too since I have all day on the internet today.

Until next time, kids.

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Today I saw a headline in Boston.com that listed 8 reasons why those under 30 belong to the dumbest generation. I read on, and apparently it’s a gallery based on a new book by Emory English professor Mark Bauerlein titled The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. Here is a blow by blow of his points with my comments.

1. They make excellent “Jaywalking” targets - Here Bauerlein makes an argument that young people do not know anything beyond friends, work, and Facebook. Well, I know many people older than 30 that do not know anything beyond money, cars, and sports. Basically, I don’t think it’s unique to our generation to focus on things that are narrowly important to ourselves. Jaywalking is a TV show segment that picks out the most hilariously dumb people on the streets, and I have seen Jay find dumb people of all sizes and ages.

2. They don’t read books — and don’t want to, either - I don’t think this generalization could be blanketed onto an entire generation. Some people love to read and some don’t. I am one of those people who used to read almost a book a week, but these days I just don’t have the time to dig through the thousands of books that are written everyday. I do read a lot of news, and I don’t believe that young people don’t want to read books. If we didn’t read books then how do giant bookstores like Amazon sell so many books that are interesting and targeted to our generation?

3. They can’t spell - In this point Bauerlein states that young people’s vocabulary and spelling have been defiled by IMs and text messages. Well, I do a considerable amount of instant messaging every day, and I do use shortcuts sometimes because they are easier to type. Bauerlein seems to miss the point that texting and IMing are forms of communication equivalent to speaking. When you talk to your friends it is completely acceptable to use slang and colloquialisms that are not applicable to formal writing. I think most people I know are aware of this fact and are completely capable of spelling correctly in formal papers and reports even though they IM things like “LOL” and “luv u”.

4. They get ridiculed for original thought, good writing - This is one of the dumbest points I have read. Basically the author states that when a young person actually formally composes something original on MySpace they are ridiculed for their spark of intelligence. Well, guess what, MySpace is not a place for literary greatness, and buddies are ALWAYS making fun of each other on sites like that. My husband writes an extremely intelligent blog about games, and I have never seen him ridiculed on his blog. There is a place for everything, and Bauerlein shouldn’t be scouring MySpace for intelligent discourse.

5. Grand Theft Auto IV, etc.- Ah, here is another required bashing of games and other digital entertainment for the dumbing down of my generation. My husband could probably write a ten page rant about this since he is a video game developer and he gets a bit riled up whenever the media blames video games for the downfall of modern society. Whenever I hear people bashing video games, I wonder if they have ever played a great video game. Yes, there are a lot of dumb games, but there are a lot of dumb books and movies, too. Any piece of entertainment reflects the skill and art of its creators, and I’m sure not all of the trashy pieces of entertainment we see are created by 20 somethings. Anyway, I am pretty sure that the author of this book doesn’t have 1/100th the ingenuity and creativity that goes behind creating a great game.

6. They don’t store the information - Here the author’s point is that young people have access to a lot of information at their fingertips so they don’t make an effort to retain the knowledge they obtain. Instead, they look it up and move on. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this. For example, I am a software engineer by trade, and I don’t make an effort to memorize every defined function in a computer language because things are changing all the time. So when I need to write something I am unfamiliar with I search for functions I need and read documentation. I know pretty much all of my colleagues young and old work the same way. Some of the older people may have stored more in their heads just because they have programmed in a language for a longer period of time, but that doesn’t make them smarter. We don’t store information because there is just so much information we need to know these days. Life isn’t as simple as knowing your multiplication table and this behavior of research instead of memorization is not stupidity. I would argue that it’s actually better than memorization because we constantly obtain updated information.

7. Because their teachers don’t tell them so - Well, this point actually says to me that the teachers are dumb. I have had teachers I needed to correct. The last time this happened was in college in Physics class. There were three problems on a midterm and two of them had wrong answers on the answer key. I had to email the professor and tell him he was wrong. I just want to say that just because there are teachers that do not do their jobs well it doesn’t mean that my generation isn’t learning and thinking.

8. Because they’re young - I made a comment on Can I Get Rich on a Salary saying that it is probably unfair to judge the money habits of generation Y right now because when we are in our 20s we are in a grand stage of transition. Life is confusing and abruptly changing for any generation of people at this age range. Anyway, this is an extremely retarded reason to call an entire generation stupid. It is almost as absurd as calling my friends’ children’s generation dumb just because they are all babies that can’t do anything but poop and eat. I really wonder if Bauerlein admitted how stupid he was when he was young in his book to support this point.

Anyway, I personally know more brilliant 20 somethings than smart older people just because most of my friends are about the same age as me. I researched this Mark Bauerlein a bit and it seems that his students think he is a very condescending guy. I am not surprised, and I am pretty sure he wrote this book to stir up controversy, and also make a bit of money so he is a little less angry about dumb twenty-somethings like me being paid more than a highly educated English professor like him.

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In part one I talked about dealing prejudice, and I got some pretty interesting comments. I encourage you guys to check it out. In this part I want to talk about the reasons why in some instances you shouldn’t try so hard to fit in. Granted, everyone wants to be “normal”, and I expressed that feeling in a previous post about sending children to school early. However, being “normal” is not always wise, and you shouldn’t follow along for the sake of being part of the majority.

It all started when I was a kid. I was never into fashion and I was fine with wearing things I picked out at church sales for 25 cents. Heck, I still have one of those shirts and I wear it sometimes. I have been teased about my clothing in elementary school, but it didn’t matter to me. I knew that having brand name clothes and shoes wouldn’t really affect my schoolwork and I had good friends anyway.  Additionally, my parents really didn’t have money to buy me new clothes so there was no reason for me to unnecessarily add to their expenses.

Now that I am an adult, I think I still tend to shy away from what is considered popular. For example, I still don’t have an iPod, and I don’t intend to ever get one. I could afford a very nice car, but I have no need for it. Considering how many of my coworkers have extremely luxury cars I would say that I am in the minority. I’m not in a car contest with them, so I don’t feel the need to join in and fit in. I have to confess that as a teenager I wanted a Porsche, but now I understand that fancy cars are not necessarily a mark of success because most of them are financed by debt.

Another way that I am a minority right now is that I am a renter. I have written quite a few articles on why I am not buying a house now, and I truly believe that in San Mateo County I am building more wealth by renting rather than buying. Even though I will buy a house some day, I think it is good to have a different mindset right now.   I know many people jumped in to real estate because everyone was doing it in the past couple years.  Now many of the same people are regretting their decisions.  So in the particular case of real estate, I am glad that my husband and I did not decide to buy anything when we got married even though our parents wanted us to.

Finally, what is scary to me is that in America debt is considered normal. Dave Ramsey actually has a funny sticker that says, “Debt is normal, be weird!”. So when it comes to things such as debt and fashion, I don’t mind being in the minority. In fact, I think many people would be much more successful than they already are if they stopped trying to fit in and do their own thing.  I know that peer pressure is a powerful force, but we have to be level headed and see if “normal” is really the best thing for our goals.

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The current Carnival of Money Stories is up at The Financial Blogger.  This wonderful carnival will make a stop at The Baglady on Tax Day!  Here are some of the highlights from today’s edition.

Working At Home To Build Passive Blog Income And Giving Up Full Time Job Pay - Money Blue Book - A story about giving up a job as a tax attorney to blog.

Whoring Out Your Spouse For Fun and Profit -  This is a funny post about pimping out your hubby or wifey.

Success Stories: 6th-Grade Teacher Worth $500,000 - I’ve been reading Can I Get Rich on a Salary lately and he finds a lot of these millionaire next door stories.

I hope I will get some fun stuff to read next week!  Meanwhile, stick around  to enter the last minute TaxCut contest and submit your entries to the carnival!

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