First, no Linux version. I’m only using it now because I am sharing a computer with my wife, who happens to have installed Windows XP on it. Otherwise I’d have stuck with Linux, and hence be unable to use Chrome.

Second, it’s still in Beta. Obviously this will change over time, and I have noticed no particular glitches so far. Nonetheless, it is possible that this could cause someone a problem down the road.

Third, it lacks one of Opera’s endearing features that Firefox also lacks: zooming images. It’s pretty stupid to omit this feature, when it’s so easy to include and so handy to have. I have no clue why Google chose to have the browser only increase font size when you press control-+. It’s pretty intuitively obvious that when you want to see a closer view, you want to see the images bigger. (In certain cases I could understand perhaps disabling this feature — disabling all images, for that matter.)

Another problem I have is that it seems a little system-resource intensive, again comparable to Firefox and worse than Opera. But it does a better job of aesthetics than Opera and Firefox, so I definitely like it. And hopefully, given time, these problems will be solved.

The more competition there is in the browser arena, the more likely it is that the major browsers will improve themselves. Also, it makes it easier for smaller start-ups with new ideas to get themselves going, when people are used to a multitude of quality options rather than depending on a single brand.

There are certain power-features that Opera (for example), provides out of the box that I wish other browsers would include by default, instead of requiring extra plug-ins. I am always disappointed at the failure of other browsers to include these simple features. Nonetheless, I think Google Chrome is a good browser, and I am happy to be using it for now. I hope Google gets the message and improves in these areas, but even if not, I believe it will spur other browser developers to greater competence.

Perspective #1: “I broke a PROMISE? Shame on me!”

Logically, this is correct. I committed to 3 times per week, and failed to continue AT ALL for over a month. A promise is a promise. If I can’t live up to a promise like this, what’s to say I wouldn’t live up to a more important promise? As a child, I was taught to keep promises — breaking them is a very bad habit to get into. I wholeheartedly disapprove of breaking commitments, and therefore must feel ashamed about this one.

Perspective #2: “There’s far MORE IMPORTANT things in this world.”

I made a promise to a blog audience to update three times weekly. But if I fail to do so, the consequences to them as individuals are fairly minor. They may miss out on some sage advice / education, they don’t get the chance to form a relationship with me (or rather my blogging persona) as much, and are a bit less entertained. Maybe they get irate. But they have the option of spending their time on other blogs, or going through previously written articles here. The worst part of it all is probably the confusion left by my insisting that I wouldn’t quit.

However, by contrast, if I were to fail to keep my promise to love and support my wife, it would be a much more drastic effect for her. My whole world could fall apart. So if it comes to choosing between the two, I should definitely spend time with her, and focus on her needs. Thus my life has had more of a focus on spending time with her, as well as working to earn money to support her. (BTW: IdaCold ended, lately it’s been Root Rents at $8/hr — through the same staffing agency.)

Perspective #3: “It’s all JUST BUSINESS.”

It is tempting to take this too far because on the internet, relationships and activities tend to center around business, entertainment, and education. The element of personal bonding is limited, or rather I should say our intentional limitation of personal bonding is easier to effect. This is because in the medium of text, the connection between two people is lower bandwidth. Gestures and facial expressions are nonexistent — only writing style is present.

When it comes to purely business contacts, you do need to take into account variables like trust and how well your brand is being represented — but it does not have to be quite as serious as your sense of personal morality and how you treat your friends. Yes, ethics are important (and cheating people is definitely a matter of personal morality) but there’s a certain line where meeting the expectations of your customers 100% ceases to be such an important matter — and making money off them becomes the primary concern.

And where making money is concerned, I have to admit I’ve made more by not blogging (working instead) than by blogging, so far.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I don’t see it as a matter of choosing between the three perspectives. Real life is more complicated than that. I see it as more an act of balancing between them. Yes, the fact is (#1) I broke a promise and am ashamed of it. But that’s not going to make me too very guilty in this instance because of #2 (supporting my wife is more important), and to some extent #3 (from a business perspective, it’s a matter of balancing costs and benefits, rather than feeling guilty for every slip-up.)

Does my recent failure mean I don’t deserve to make $10k/week? Absolutely not. Deserving the money (on a personal level) is actually beside the point. There exist plenty of people who are little more than con artists that make millions of dollars, just as there are plenty of hard-working and honest people who make their way to lucrative incomes by providing value. I probably deserve it more than many millionaires, and yet less than some poor people. If I make $10k/week it will be because I provided enough value and became widely enough recognized for that value — nothing more or less.

My standards for myself as a person are higher — and may be unattainable. I want to be more disciplined and trustworthy even on the little things. So I will make this a lesson in personal values — don’t promise too much, plow ahead when you make them. I’m not going to say “hey please trust me, I’m reformed now” or any of that garbage. That kind of trust must come from actions, not words. But I do apologize for my failure (even if it’s not such a big deal).

It’s not great, but it’s not terrible. I’ll make $7/hr. It starts tomorrow at 6am. At 8 hours, that’s $54, approximately 1/200th of my $10k goal for this week.

Keeping a positive mental outlook is important. Whatever your goal, however high it may be, the first step may seem tiny in comparison to the ultimate end. But that’s no reason to lower your sights. You get what you settle for! Just because $54 seems like a lot of money, does not mean $10k is unachievable.

A good approach to this is to look at it using the doubling algorithm. If $54/week is reasonable to start with, and I double that every week for a while, I will reach my $10k goal pretty quickly. In fact, after two months my total weekly income would be $13,824.

If I simply add $54/week to my income, it would take less than 4 years to reach the $10k goal… Only about 200 weeks, in fact.

In all likelihood, I will probably work, not only tomorrow, but the next day as well. (I’ve been through this before…) If not, I will keep calling the agency back — and perhaps even sign up at a few additional ones. The income from my day jobs will likely always pale in comparison to what I plan to earn online, but you have to start somewhere.

I hope my blogging keeps a regular frequency despite employment, however many hours I put in at that. I realize I skipped a beat yesterday, but really I think I can stick with this. If my past experience with jobs is any indication, a hobby is often essential to “wind down” after a hard day at work. As brutish as some of these temp jobs are, the mental challenge of writing is generally a welcome relief.

While I’m working, three posts per week is my new minimum. That’s so I don’t stop altogether, but don’t start feeling overwhelmed. I will attempt to get one done per day, nonetheless.

I spoke out recently against first-person posts, but I think that for certain types of posts with specifically personal content, it is permissible and perhaps even best done that way. One of my main goals here is to enjoy this blog and use it to focus on a positive and profitable mindset. So personal updates like this will probably continue… in moderation.

TCL/TK is a combination of TCL (a simple-to-learn scripting language) and TK (an extension that lets you access the windowing system and do graphical stuff). TK can be used in other languages too. Python, Perl, Lua, and C++ all have versions of TK available for them. To edit text documents, I like to use an editor named vroom that is written in Python’s version of TK, known as Tkinter.

TCL’s version of TK is probably the best documented and supported, which is why I used it to make Message Flasher. Over at wiki.tcl.tk you will find thousands of user-written articles on how to do pretty much anything in TCL/TK. In fact, if you do a google search to find what you’re looking for in TK, that’s the site that will most likely come up.

The version of TCL/TK that is most common is called “wish”. This is short for “WIndowing SHell” and comes pre-installed on Mac OS X and Linux. So the simplest thing is to take the .tcl file and type “wish myprog.tcl“.

Unfortunately, not every system is going to have wish pre-installed. For example, Windows. Furthermore, not every user is competent enough to figure out how to run the script as a wish application. (It may open up in a text editor instead, for example.) Besides which, there’s something convenient about just double-clicking a .exe file and having it run.

With TCL/TK, there are two ways to do this, one of which is long and complicated and one of which is easy. The complicated way is to create a “starkit” and wrap that using TclKit. The other way (better in my opinion) is to use freewrap to wrap your script, quick and easy.

Freewrap will create an executable for Linux or Windows, although it can also be used as a stand-alone interpreter (just like TclKit). Also, because it has winico installed, certain advanced features like customizing the icon and putting your app in the system tray (lower-right corner of the screen) are also easily possible.

In the future, I plan to extend my Message Flasher to the point where it is more easily and intuitively controlled by the user. I have been working on this a lot for the past few days — which is why some of my posts have been late. When I have all the kinks in this new version worked out, I will release the .exe file for free download.

There will be one catch with this new version: to get the free exe, you must submit your email address. This gives me a legitimate reason to email you from time to time. The source code will still be freely available and public domain.

Lacking a valid business relationship, you will find yourself guilty of spam. Email spam, telephone spam, direct-mail spam, it’s all spam if you don’t have their permission (however implicit that may be) to contact them.

To form the valid relationship, one great way is to give away something for free. Info products are good because they don’t cost anything to reproduce, and can help you target your audience. People who buy an ebook on marketing are quite possibly marketers, who can help you sell your products. People who download a computer game may also be interested in computer hardware.

Another important aspect of this is that with a free product, you can make it viral. People who got it and enjoyed it can be encouraged to spread the word. If over 50% tell 2 or more people, you can have a growing phenomenon.

Once you have people on your list, you can contact them with relavent offers. Keeping them interested and positively inclined towards you can be done by providing helpful content on a regular basis. You can also hit them up more than once to buy a product, or to spread the word about your freebies.

Leads are an important part of building your business. People aren’t always able, or in the mood, to buy the first time they see your product. However over time, with repeated exposure to your information, they will be much more likely to buy something (or tell someone who will). On average it takes seven exposures to an ad before a person decides to buy something.

In summary, collect leads if you want to make money. I haven’t been doing this yet at 10k Luke, but I will certainly in the future. I do have email addresses from commentors, but this isn’t quite the same as them volunteering to recieve information from me. My plan is to publish a software application (that’s what I have been working on today) and give you the chance to download it’s exe file in exchange for your email address.

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1. Challenge yourself. Give yourself a specific challenge. For example, to write a new post every day. Or learn and write about everything you can on a specific subject for a week.

2. Make friends. There are all kinds of people out there. Some of them are bound to share many of your interests. Interact with them, not only on your own blog but theirs as well — or wherever you can get ahold of them.

3. Decide to have fun. If you have a business blog, it’s easy to stop having fun because you need to focus on the needs of the customers (readers). Don’t let that deter you. Mindset is significant. Approach things in a way that emphasizes fun, and you will have fun. This is similar to how body language can lift your mood.

4. Look cool. If your blog’s look sucks, not only will people avoid you, you will want to avoid your own blog.

5. Be simple. The KISS method is under-used, and highly powerful. Do things the simple way. You can get elaborate if it’s either extremely fun or extremely profitable — but usually the elaborate way takes much more time to keep up.

6. Write about interests. Something you’re genuinely interested in is great material for blogging about. For example I wrote about red worms a while ago, and it was a lot of fun. Generated a lot more interest than some of this other stuff I’ve written about blogging, plugins, and stuff like that.

7. Embrace tangents. You do have to stay focused, but that doesn’t mean a few tangents are going to kill things. Give in once in a while to the temptation to go off topic. The simplest way to balance the two is including a link to somewhere else where it is mentioned — another site, or another blog post you wrote.

Blogging is fun. Even if you’re not making money at it yet, it can be a powerful medium for entertainment and social interaction.

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In other news, Revolution decided to extend their $25 give-away for another month. The button on my side-bar there still works — you can go get your $25 now! (Ends on May 15th, unless they extend it again.) Be sure to refer all your friends once you’re in… obviously.

My little Red Worms are doing well! I have been seeing cocoons for about a month, and now there are lots of little baby worms squirming around in there! I don’t know how many pounds of worms I’m up to, because I can’t count them all — but it sure seems like a lot when I dig through the bedding.

I’m very happy to be alive this morning. One reason for that is, I just recently got married! Spending the night with a loving wife is the best experience a man can ask for, and I thank God for it.

Well, that concludes this little update. I love my readers, and I’ll keep you posted! Please leave comments if anything new is going on in your life. Success rocks, peace out!

Before that, I read a little book (yay, public domain!) called The Science Of Getting Rich. It was very interesting… but at the same time, somewhat esoteric and mysterious. The Harv Eker video really drove it home for me though, and I highly recommend watching it.

Basically, the idea is that you have an inner “wealth thermometer”. You envision yourself at a particular level of wealth, and strongly resist anything that brings you either below or above this. It’s kind of like a subconscious thermostat.

This concept strongly resembles the body fat set point. No matter how thin or obese you are, your body strongly resists changes in fat levels. Likewise, no matter how poor or rich you are, your subconscious will tend to reject any change in that status.

My focus over the past few months has been on changing my inner mindset. I’ve been telling myself, over and over again; “I think the thoughts of a rich person.” I have also given myself a very specific goal — far above my current situation, but definitely achievable. $10,000.00 per week. I don’t plan to stop there, but at the moment I’m most concerned with getting my thermostat turned up at least that far.

The change hasn’t been instant. I still think many limiting thoughts. However, I am more aware of them, as well as the need to get rid of them. I no longer think of 200-lb worm farms, I think of 200-ton worm farm. Instead of a single Make Money Online blog, I think about having multiple niche-targetted, high-class online stores.

Two phrases that Harv said that stood out in my memory: “What you think about, expands,” and “What you get is what you settle for.” I think I’ll settle for $10k/week. For a few weeks, anyway. Then perhaps I will train myself to think about $10k/day.

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While we can’t influence the emotions of others, we can influence our own emotions. In a sense, we are able to both soothe and riot specific emotions in ourselves to a limited degree.

What is interesting about this is that emotions exist in a sort of equilibrium, with each having an opposite counterpart. So if you reduce the intensity of one, it increases the intensity of others. For example, if you soothe your sense of fear, distrust, and anger, it tends to amplify feelings like love, trust, and forgiveness.

So the two powers are linked, in the long run at least. Which method do you prefer to use, though? Is it calmly meditating to accentuate feelings of peace and compassion? Or do you carefully stoke and riot up your sense of enthusiasm and self-confidence on a daily basis?

Most people don’t consciously control their emotions in this manner. They let life toss them around and react to events however they happen. But if you learn to carefully soothe down or stoke up your emotions in the right way, you can achieve amazing results.