This morning my wife Emily started talking about a book she was reading that really struck a chord with me. The book is about a girl who struggled throughout school. She was disruptive in class so the school wrote her off as “challenged” and sent her to a “special” school. Her parents then sent her to a psychologist who determined that she was mentally fine. The psychologist turned on the radio, left the room, then watched as the little girl danced around the room passionately. His diagnosis? Put her in dance classes. That challenged little girl grew to became the choreographer for the play “Cats” and many other broadway plays that have swept the nation.

I love this story because my youth was not so different. I was diagnosed with a learning disability in elementary school. My problem was that I couldn’t effectively learn and be engaged with the single and narrow method that the school system deemed to work for everyone. As a result my grades suffered throughout high school.

To my rescue came the special education system. This system’s teachers dove deep into understanding my strengths, weaknesses, and how I learn best. Early in high school I was able to discover my true strengths and started to harness them. Doing this early in life has allowed me to have the career and ultimately live the life of my dreams. I’m very fortunate to have gone though the alternate education system. I even had classes that taught me important stuff like how to do a personal budget, how to open a checking account, pay bills, etc. Things everyone else has to learn the hard way.

What saddens me is that I had to be “special” to benefit from this awesome education. Could you imagine if everyone were taught to harness their strengths and follow their passions in the school system? As parents we cannot trust that the school system will take care of it.

Screw your weaknesses, harness your strengths.

A few weeks ago I tried tandem paragliding at Makapu’u. Amazing experience. We flew all the way over to Waimanalo and back. The flight was an hour long. Raymar (Ray) was an awesome pilot.

1. Toilets that have two flush buttons
   One small button for #1 that emits just enough water to flush’er down, another larger button that takes the kids to the water park. I can only imagine how much water this saves throughout the country!
   
2. Escalators that only run when there’s people on them
   At first i thought they were broken,  but as you approach them they turn on automatically. Makes sense.
   
3. Fixed temperature water faucets
   These water faucets let you fix the temperature so that its always the same when you turn it on by pulling the lever out. Brilliant.
   
4. Green Transportation
   The swiss railway system can take you pretty much anywhere you need to go, and once you get there you’ll see lots of energy efficient small cars, electric buses, and lots of people walking to their destination.
   
5. Organic (“Bio”) locally produced foods
   Most of the produce in the stores is organic. When something is not local, they tell you where it came from.
6. No plastic or paper bags in grocery stores
   Everyone brings their own reusable bags. You don’t even have the option for paper or plastic. This should be a law in the U.S.

With the U.S. consuming 25% of the worlds energy, and being the world’s largest single emitter of carbon dioxide, you’d think we’d be looking into what other countries are doing right to consume so little.

What you will need:

• Media box (like apple TV or Popcorn Hour)
• A networked hard drive (could be your computer)
• Bit Torrent
• TVrss.net
• A feed reader like Google Reader
• TV (preferably HDTV)

A little background

About a year ago when I moved to Hawaii, I decided to leave the TV behind. I soon started missing some of my favorite shows like south park, and resorted to watching it on sites like South Park Zone, which has crappy video quality, and full of annoying ads (the kind of ads that force you to click them to make them stop the obnoxious blinking). This got old fast; my laptop screen is pretty small, the speakers suck, and its just not as easy as using a remote on a TV.

As a wedding present my grandfather got my wife and I an awesome flat-panel HDTV. Instead of going out and subscribing to the local HTDV cable service, I decided to explore the digital hard drive media streamers that were starting to surface on the market.

The Media Box

These “media boxes” serve as the liaison between your TV and the movies/shows that are located on your local network…allowing you to control the media on your TV with a remote control, just as if it were on a TiVo or DVR.

Though the Apple TV was a decent choice (and can be hacked), it doesn’t play a lot of the formats that you’ll find from using bit torrent (hence, “commercial-free”), and is more expensive than the completely open standards box, “Popcorn Hour“. This thing will play anything you can throw at it, supports HD, and even surround sound.

The networked hard drive

I needed a new wireless router, so I naturally gravitated to the Apple Time Capsule, which killed two birds (a fast new router, and a built in 500gb wireless hard drive). I connect the time capsule’s hard drive to the popcorn hour media box, which streams the shows on the hard drive to my TV via remote control.

Bit Torrent

Now that I had the TV, the media box, and the hard drive, it was all about getting the media to play on it. This is where bit torrent comes in. One of the most popular mediums on bit torrent right now are TV shows. The day a show comes out on the networks, it is usually rampant on bit torrent, with thousands of seeders. This allows you to download a 300mb TV show in a matter of minutes. For example, check out this list of torrents for the popular show Entourage.



These are sorted by number of seeders, and notice how it happens to be pretty much chronological order with the most recent show first (S05E06 = season 5 episode 6).

Let the shows come to you with RSS

I quickly got tired of hunting down my favorite shows, and so did the creator of TVrss.net. On this site, you can narrow down torrents by TV show, and subscribe to the results, which will notify you the second a new show is available for download via bit torrent. Then all you have to do is click a link to start the download. Just look at this list of TV shows available on bit torrent.

Lets take the show Entourage for example. On TVrss.net, I can filter down the torrents to show only 720p HDTV versions of Entourage:




Now, all you have to do is subscribe to the RSS feed for that search, and you’ll be notified in your RSS reader when there are new episodes available in 720p HDTV format. Repeat this for all of your favorite shows, and you’re now rocking out on demand commercial-free HDTV.

One of the things mentioned in this book is a game that rich dad developed to help teach people and children these lessons of finance an investing that are not taught in schools. The game is called Cashflow 101. I caught wind that there was a “Cashflow” event going on at Dave & Busters so I decided to check it out and play the game.

Cashflow can be thought of as a more modern and realistic version Monopoly. First you choose a balance sheet which determines your occupation, your income, and your fixed expenses. The game is laid out in two parts: The rat race and the fast track. You also choose one of the many “dreams” on the fast track. Starting out in the rat race, you roll the dice landing on payday squares, opportunity squares, market squares, and doodad squares…and go round and round collecting money, having kids, paying for doodads, and investing in opportunities.

You get out of the rat race by creating a passive income that exceeds your expenses.

Once your in the fast track you focus on growing your estate by buying/selling businesses and real estate. You win by buying your dream that you choose at the beginning of the game, or increasing your passive income to more than 50k per month.

Just playing a rushed version of the game that we never finished was extremely enlightening. There were several moments where things just clicked for me. The game is brilliant and I cant wait to play it again…and also in real life!

Today I sold the beloved Jeep. It was not practical for our needs and we hardly drove it anymore since we got the CRV and take the bus most places. It was a damn fun Jeep though and the ultimate island explorer. It will be missed.

Sometimes the internet ceases to amaze me. Yesterday I get a facebook invite from a friend that Don Ross (my acoustic guitar hero) and Andy Mckee (You tube rockstar with over 50 million views) were playing as a duet in the restaurant in the building where I work. It was the first show (in Honolulu) of a month long tour they’re running all over the US and other countries.

The show was in a very intimate setting…with only about 100 people attending. Sitting right in front of them was such a thrill…I cannot even describe the brilliance of these two musicians. They played a bunch of songs together as well as traded off on some solo songs. They’re both really funny guys, talking about how they came up with the songs and other various stories.

During the break I was able to talk to Don Ross for a bit and I told him how much I had admired his Passion Session CD and how I came to find out about the show…which he ended up talking about in front of the crowd

Don Ross has been around a long time and is not as well known as he should be. Andy McKee’s playing has been greatly inspired by Don which has helped him become famous on you tube. Being a humble guy and playing the back-up parts to his own songs that he wrote, Don teaming up with Andy will help him to break through new barriers in his success and get the recognition he deserves.

If you ever get a chance to see these guys, don’t miss it.

Mosquitoes: 1000
Cory: 75 and gaining.

Die bitches!

• 1) First, I have an eMusic account. Its $20/month, DRM free, and I get 50 downloads. The catch is they support mostly indie labels so the more main stream stuff is usually not on there. Since I mostly buy and listen to electronic music, more times than not the music I’m looking for is there.
• 2) If eMusic doesnt have it, I search on Amazon.com. They have an ever growing collection of 100% DRM free downloads…almost as big as iTunes. They have a lot of DRM-free music that iTunes does not.

• 3) If Amazon doesn’t have it, I search iTunes. They are getting to where they have a lot of DRM-free downloads for the same price as the DRM stuff.

I used to foolishly buy DRM music and will likely end up loosing that music as old DRM technology fades out. I’m really more tempted to use bit torrent to get music that I cannot buy DRM-free.

UPDATE:It appears as Sony BMG has been reading my blog, just a couple days after this post they announced that they’re going DRM-free. Haha, like they had a choice.