The economy isn’t so bad

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Chicago at night

Ding. Ding. Ding. Wham!

The gavel comes down on another 250 point black eye for the stock market. Somewhere a bunch of sweating guys in suits are swarming out into the sharp New York winter to drown another bleak Wall Street day in pubs and expensive restaurants.

Back when I worked for IBM, I dabbled with trading stocks just enough to see what all the fuss was about. Of course, I’m sitting here blogging for fun and profit so obviously I didn’t win big, but I did learn something interesting.

The market isn’t controlled by some giant HAL 2000 evil computer or a government appointed rich white guy. There isn’t even a mastermind midget behind a curtain pulling levers. The market, and economy in general, are both dictated by human psychology. Fear and Greed, as all the investing books say. The same guys crying over their single-digit stocks, are actually the cause.

The TV tells them every day that the economy is bad, so they start spending cautiously, get jittery, and send stocks on wild rides. The market runs on mob mentality on a very large scale.

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Posted in Ramblings |

Backpacking travel

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Its been said that you are what you spend the most time doing.

If that’s the case, then I guess I’ve been transformed from adventurer back to computer geek, full circle back to before I quit IBM in 2005.

Lately all I have been doing is burning eyeballs on the computer, trying to scrape together some meager travel funds off the internet. Easier said than done. After 3 solid years of no rat race job, I find myself for the first time in a long time worrying about money again.

Nothing a cheap wander won’t fix, but for the time being I am spending 15 hours days pounding a keyboard with the occasional photography gig to earn some pub money.

The latest fruit of my non-travel efforts is a complete redesign and re-launch of my backpacking travel website Startbackpacking.com. If its been a while since you visited, go check it out - the changes are definitely a good thing despite me joining the horde of Wordpress sites that already dominate the travel corner of the web.I think “www” stands for Wordpress, Wordpress, Wordpress now days.

Now that the new site has been vomited out of my brain and into the Matrix, I will be launching a couple of promotional contests soon - readers here will be the first to hear about them. If you have a backpacking website, let’s be friends!

Posted in Ramblings |

John Nance and the Tasaday

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Photo by John Nance

Tasaday Tribe

Everything happens for a reason.

This is something that I have maintained for a long time and still firmly believe. I was in Columbus, Ohio over the weekend to shoot photos for an USEA Area 8 (Sounds Army, but its a horse thing) banquet and made an unexpected and positively exhilarating discovery.

Amidst all the horse people in the crowded room, I was randomly joined at my table by an older friendly guy and his wife. My paradigm automatically flagged him as most likely another horse trainer, but casual conversation over dinner proved otherwise.

It turns out, the man was journalist John Nance - writer, one hell of an adventurer, and a fellow vagabond. He was also involved with the Tasaday tribe discovery and shot the early pictures of the tribe. I had no idea, but the guy sitting next to me was teeming with stories and life experiences. I could have listened to him all night….

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