Written by Zenhabits Photo courtesy of Sukanto Debnath

“Babies are always more trouble than you thought – and more wonderful.” – Charles Osgood

Anyone who has kids knows that any life with kids is going to be complicated, at least to some degree. From extra laundry to bathing and cooking and shopping and driving and school and chores and crises and sports and dance and toys and tantrums, there is no shortage of complications.

You won’t get to ultra-simple if your life includes children … but you can find ways to simplify, no matter how many kids you have.

Take my life, for example: I have a house full of kids, and yet I’ve found ways to streamline my life, to find peace and happiness among the chaos. How is this magic trick accomplished? Nothing magical, actually, but just little things that have simplified my life over the years.

The main magic trick, however: making my family my top priority, and choosing only a small number of priorities in my life. If you have too many things you want to do, or need to do, your life will become complicated. But if you choose just a few things that are important to you, you can eliminate the rest, and simplify your life greatly.

What follows is a list that might seem complicated to some – 25 items! Trust me, I could easily double this list, but I don’t want to overwhelm you. Instead of trying to tackle everything on this list at once, choose a few things that appeal to you, and give them a try. Bookmark this page and come back to it from time to time to try out other ideas. Best yet, they might inspire new ideas of your own!

1. Self-sufficiency. This one tip could simplify your life greatly, over time. However, it will make things more complicated in the short term. The idea is to teach your kids to do things for themselves as they get older and more capable. Teaching them to do something themselves instead of just doing it yourself takes time and can be a little frustrating at first, but it will pay off for years to come. My kids, for example, can make themselves breakfast, shower and dress themselves, brush their teeth, and generally get themselves ready in the morning with only minimal prompting from us. They can clean their rooms, wash dishes, sweep, mop, dust, wash the car. The older ones can cook basic dishes and babysit the younger ones. This type of self-sufficiency has saved my wife and me tons of time and trouble over the years.
2. One calendar. If you have more than one kid, you might have a lot of activities going on that you need to track, from school events such as Christmas performances and parent-teacher conferences to extracurricular activities such as soccer practice, dance classes, or Spring concerts. Organize your life with a simple calendar (I use Google Calendar) and enter all activities and appointments on this one calendar, from kids’ stuff to your own goings on. When they hand you papers from school, or soccer schedules, immediately enter everything onto the calendar. Then a quick glance at the calendar each day will help you plan your day.
3. Toy bins. It’s an inevitable fact of life that kids have lots of toys, and that they will be everywhere. You will drive yourself crazy if you try to manage them with dictator-like ruthlessness. Instead, let kids play, but have lots of bins where they can toss the toys inside when they’re done. Then cleaning up is a cinch – they just toss everything on the floor into the bins, and move on to making their next mess. You can have designated bins for certain toys (this one’s for Legos, this one’s for stuffed animals, this one’s for cars), and also have some general-purpose bins for things that don’t fit anywhere else. Don’t be too strict about them – the whole purpose is to make things simpler.
4. Regular cleanups. If you’re like me, you don’t like a huge mess. Teach your kids to clean up after themselves – let them make a mess, but every now and then, tell them it’s time to clean up. Be sure to tell them to clean up before moving on to something else, such as lunchtime or bedtime. It’s good to have regular times during the day when they do cleanups, such as before bed or before they leave for school, so that the house is always clean at night and during the day.
5. Quiet bedtime routines. Kids thrive on routine, and no routine is better than the one before they go to sleep. Have a regular routine before bed – it might consist of cleaning up, showering, brushing their teeth, getting into their pajamas, and reading a book. Reading aloud to them just before bedtime is a great idea, because it quiets them down after a day of activity, it gives you quality bonding time together, and it gets them into the habit of reading. Plus, it’s just something that everyone can enjoy.
6. Prep the night before. Mornings can be a hectic time for parents and kids alike, but they don’t have to be. Instead, prep as much as possible the night before, and have your mornings be a little more relaxed. I like to prep lunches, get their clothes ready (and mine as well), and have them shower, get their homework and school bags ready. Then the morning is simply eating breakfast, a little grooming, getting dressed, and gathering everything together before you head out the door. It’s a great way to start your day.
7. Don’t schedule too much. Sometimes we schedule things back-to-back-to-back, so that every minute of every day is planned out. That leads to stress and problems. Instead, schedule as little as possible each day, and leave space between events, appointments or activities, so that your day moves along at a more leisurely pace. Start getting ready earlier than necessary, so there’s no rush, and leave yourself time to transition from one thing to another. A more spaced-out schedule is much more relaxing than a cramped one.
8. Have dedicated family times. Try to find regular times in your schedule when you do nothing else but spend time together as a family. For some people, dinner time works well – everyone sits down to dinner together as a family, and no other activities are planned at that time. For others, weekends, or maybe just one day of the weekend, work better. We reserve Sundays as our Family Day, and try our best not to schedule anything else on that day. It’s something we look forward to. Weekends in general are for our family, as are evenings – all work gets done on weekdays, before 5 p.m.
9. Simple clothing. It’s best to buy clothes for your kids that will match easily – choose a similar color scheme, so that you’re not always digging through their clothes to find stuff that matches. Go through their clothes every few months to get rid of stuff that doesn’t fit (kids grow so fast!) and donate the old clothes to relatives or charity (or pass them on to a younger sibling). Keep their wardrobe simple – if it doesn’t fit neatly in their drawers, you have to get rid of it or get rid of something else. Don’t stuff drawers, or you’ll make it hard to find stuff. Also, socks are usually a challenge – use mesh bags, one for clean socks and another for dirty ones. Then throw the dirty mesh bag in the laundry, and socks won’t get lost (or at least, not as often).
10. Always prep early. I try to make it a point to look at the schedule in advance (usually the day before) to see what’s coming up. That allows me to prepare for those events or activities early, so that we aren’t in a rush when we’re getting ready. For example, on soccer days, we make sure that all the soccer gear, plus folding chairs and water bottles and snacks and whatnot, are all ready to go beforehand. Prepping early makes things a lot easier later on.
11. Always bring snacks. Kids always get hungry. So be ready – if you’re going on the road, pack some snacks in baggies. Crackers, cheese, fruit, carrot sticks, PB&J sandwiches, graham crackers, peanuts, raisins all make good portable snacks. An insulated lunch container with re-usable ice packs help keep things fresh. Also always bring plenty of water, as kids are always thirsty. Can’t help you with the urgent bathroom breaks, though.
12. Baby wipes and emergency kit. There will always be messes. Be ready. Baby wipes, even after they are past using diapers, are indispensable for all kinds of messes. Pack them in a little “emergency kit” that might include medical supplies, reading material, activities, a towel, and extra clothes – anything you can think of that might prepare you for anything that regularly arises.
13. Pack spare clothes. We have a little carry-on luggage that’s always packed with a couple of changes of clothes for each kid – good clothes (for a party or something), regular clothes, underwear, socks. This way we’re always ready, if there’s an accident, or should they want to spend the night with grandparents or a cousin while we’re out at a party or something. It’s indispensable.
14. Create weekly routines. Aside from regular family times (mentioned above), it’s good to have a weekly routine that’s written out and posted somewhere everyone can see it. A weekly routine might include regular practice times, house cleaning day, washing the car, yard work day, errands day, recurring appointments, etc. This makes the schedule more predictable for everyone, and eliminates a lot of surprises.
15. Communicate as a family. Regular communication between family members solves a lot of problems. Have regular times when the family can talk about family issues. Dinnertime is a good time for that. We also have a weekly “Family Meeting” where we all sit down and talk about household issues, we compliment and thank each other, we plan our Family Day, and we play a fun game at the end.
16. Go on dates. If you have trouble finding alone time with each child (whether you have one child or more than one), setting up “dates” can be a good way to ensure that you do things together. Make a date with your child for a specific day and time, and together you should decide what you want to do on that date. It can be something simple, like taking a walk in your neighborhood or in a park, reading together, playing board games, sports or video games, or it can be something like going to a restaurant or movie or amusement park. If you have lots of kids, you might have to rotate dates with them.
17. Create alone time for your spouse. It’s easy to become so busy with your kids that you forget about your significant other. Don’t let this happen – it’s a sure way to drift apart and lose that bond that led you to having a family together. Keep the relationship alive by getting a babysitter (maybe once a week) and doing something together, just the two of you.
18. Let things go sometimes. I’m not always good at this, but it’s something I work on constantly: don’t always be so strict. Let things go. They’re kids – let them live. I have a tendency to be very strict about things, but I remind myself constantly that it’s not worth all the hassle to get on their cases about things. Instead, let things go, and just relax. They’ll turn out just fine in the end, as long as you love and support them.
19. Make decluttering a family event. I like to set aside one day every few months when we go through all the stuff in our rooms and declutter. We do it together, and it can be a bonding time. We end up with trash bags full of junk, boxes full of stuff to donate or give to family, and in the end, much simpler rooms. It’s very satisfying.
20. Spend quiet time at home. Often we get so busy that we’re on the road all the time, going to one thing or another. And when we have family time, that’s often spent on road too – going to movies or restaurants or other fun events. But that can be exhausting, and expensive. Instead, try to spend time at home as often as you can. You can watch a DVD instead of going to the movies, and pop some popcorn. You can play board games or go outside and play a sport. You can read to each other, or by yourselves, or tell stories. There are dozens of things you can do at home that cost nothing, and that are relaxing and fun.
21. Create traditions. Kids love traditions, from holiday traditions to family traditions. My mom likes all our kids to come over before Christmas to make Christmas cookies, or come over before Easter to color eggs. The kids love those traditions. You might also create some traditions at your house, whether that’s a family dinner time, Family Meetings or Family Day, or anything that brings you together. If you make it a regular thing, and give it special importance, it will be a tradition, and it will be something your kids remember into adulthood.
22. Make cooking and cleaning a family thing. Cooking and cleaning can be complicated things, and they can take your time away from your kids. Doing these activities as a family solves both problems – having everyone pitch in can really simplify cooking and cleaning, and it gives you quality time together while teaching your children valuable life skills. Make it fun – let them choose recipes, go shopping for ingredients with you. See how quickly you can clean the whole house – if my whole family pitches in, we can do it in about 30-40 minutes. Make everything a game or a challenge.
23. Reduce commitments. This tip applies to both your commitments and your kids’ commitments. If you have too many, your life will be complicated. If you reduce your commitments, your life will be simplified. It’s that simple. Make a list of all your family’s commitments and see which ones align with your priorities, and which ones are the most important. Which ones give you the most joy and benefit? And which ones just drain your time and energy without giving you much back in return? Keep the essential commitments – yours and your kids – and eliminate as many of the rest as possible.
24. Get active. These days, kids can become very inactive (and unhealthy) with all the TV, Internet and video games they consume. Get them active by going outside with them and taking walks, going for swims, playing sports. My family likes to play soccer or kickball. Play freeze tag. If you run, let your kids run with you, at least part of the way. Get them bikes and go to the park. Do challenges, like races or pushup or pullup challenges. Make it fun, but get them active. How does this simplify your life? It means they consume less media, which in my opinion is a complicating factor. And even better, it gets them healthy in an inexpensive way, reducing your healthcare costs down the road.
25. Focus on doing, not on spending. Too often we send messages to our kids about how to live life, based on what we do: we like to go shopping, and eat out, and go to the movies, and so our kids learn that having fun means spending money. We focus on material things, and therefore so do they. Instead, teach them (by talking but also by your actions) that what’s important is doing stuff, not buying stuff. Go for walks in the park, play outdoors, play board games, read, tell stories, play charades, cook and clean, go to the beach or lake, build stuff, wash the car. Spend quality time together, doing stuff that doesn’t cost money.

“You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.” – Franklin P. Jones

Written by Todd Ciolek

The ’80s were supposed to be a harmless time for toys and the cartoons that sold them. Whether shilling lines of action figures or promoting characters who would eventually be action figures, these shows were designed to eat up kids’ attention in 30-minute blocks while ham-handedly promoting good citizenship and hygiene. In spite of this, cartoons sometimes snuck in certain moments that were clearly designed to break impressionable minds and pervert the youth of America. In the interests of helping a generation get through long-stewing cartoon-related stress disorders, we’re confronting the worst things the ’80s ever did to us.

10) Shipwreck’s Family Melts in G.I. Joe

Rule one of traumatizing kids through cartoons: abuse the most beloved character. And G.I. Joe‘s most beloved character was Shipwreck, the likable naval wisecracker who was in no way based on Jack Nicholson. So the episode “There’s No Place Like Springfield” took Shipwreck and stuck him in a bizarre simulacrum of the future, in which he was living in a small town with his wife and a daughter he didn’t remember having.

Of course, the whole thing’s a plot by Cobra, and all of Shipwreck’s down-home friends and family are Synthoid androids. This is slowly revealed as people around Shipwreck start melting right before his eyes (see the eight-minute mark above), and his wife and daughter eventually try to shoot him inside a burning home, before Shipwreck’s pet parrot swoops in and melts them with a magic ray. Paranoia? Fake families? Perfect for the Cold War.

9) The Care Bears Raise the Dead in The Care Bears Movie II

The Care Bears were purportedly intended to promote Christian values, but they generally pushed the same lessons as filthy amoral heathen cartoon characters: believe in yourself, eat your vegetables, don’t litter, don’t cut in line, don’t be an asshole, and don’t sell your soul to demons. Yet there’s one moment where the sky-dwelling bears go into full-blown Jesus mode and raise the dead.

The second Care Bears movie pits the legions of bears and other toy-friendly animals against a malevolent shape-shifting creature named Dark Heart, who demands a picked-on girl’s soul in exchange for making her the best athlete in her summer camp. The girl, later realizing she’d been a moron, joins the Care Bears in confronting Dark Heart at the film’s end, and, in a strangely morbid turn for a cartoon inspired by American Greetings, catches a villain-propelled lightning bolt and, at about the two-minute mark in this clip, dies.

As the human-shaped Dark Heart cradles her lifeless form, the Care Bears devise a solution straight out of old Peter Pan plays: yelling that they care and asking all of the movie’s audience to join in. Of course, it works, thus teaching children that one can resurrect the deceased by sheer force of will. One can only imagine all the soon-to-be-disappointed kids left screaming at dead family pets or grandmothers’ caskets.

8) Turtle-Human Lust in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Over the course of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, each of the turtles got his own love interest, and none of them, mercifully, ever included their most prominent human ally, April O’Neil. As we all saw it, they were all just friends. Our perspective didn’t change until later, thanks to the Internet and a lot of things we’d just as soon not discuss.

Yet there’s at least one scene that gives us viewers pause: in the episode “April Fool,” April leaves behind her yellow jumpsuit for once and dons formal wear. For some reason, she treks down into the sewers to show off her gown to Donatello, Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo. At the 3:27 mark here, all of them are on the verge of howling like Tex Avery wolves, with even Splinter, the turtles’ sanguine rat-man mentor, ogling a woman not of his species. And then the turtles follow April out of the room, clogging the door in one writhing mass of undisguised reptile lust. Horrifying.

7) The Smurfs Sing Someone to Death in The Smurfs

On the list of threatening cartoon characters, the Smurfs land just above the Snorks and just below the Shirt Tales, who could probably still tear a grown man apart if they all attacked at once. But there’s another side to the Smurfs and their seemingly innocuous world of mushroom houses and single-trait characters. And it’s not just the “GNAP” virus.

In their first Christmas special, the Smurfs were called upon to save two lost children and their longtime nemesis Gargamel from a sorcerer who, as the show goes on, is clearly painted as an emissary from Hell. The Smurfs fight back the only way they can: by singing an interminable non-Christmas song with the refrain “Goodness makes the badness go away.” And the Satan-worshipping sorcerer screams and screams and screams until he disappears. Don’t fuck with Smurfs.

6) Seaspray Loves a Mermaid, Becomes a Mermaid and Hits on Bumblebee in Transformers

Never mind all of the gruesome mechanical death in the Transformers movie or the episode where Perceptor became a robot geisha on a planet of feudal Japanese aliens; the most screwed-up moment in Transformers cartoon history comes when the burbling-voiced Seaspray commits several crimes against nature.
Dispatched to break up a Decepticon mining operation on a distant civilized planet, Seaspray quickly strikes the fancy of Alana, one of the entirely humanoid natives. In a testament to just how little the writers of Transformers cared at this point in the show, it’s revealed that she and her people use a magic pool to change into mermaids.

Though the pool is shown to destroy robots, Seaspray jumps in and becomes an Aquaman look-a-like. Not only is it weird, it also demonstrates that Transformers have souls…which makes the full-scale robot slaughters in the movie all the more disturbing. Also disturbing: the episode’s opening moments, in which Seaspray has an oddly romantic oceanside conversation with a clearly uneasy Bumblebee.

5) My Little Pony and The Hosts of Hell in My Little Pony

Unlike every other cartoon based on a toy line, My Little Pony had no pre-designated villains, leaving the writers to constantly devise new ones to wreak havoc on the little pastel mini-horses. Some of these antagonists weren’t so threatening; think giant cartoon squids and overweight witches who wanted to flood the Pony Mansion or steal all the Pony Savings Bonds. The first ever Pony villain, however, was a demon overlord.

That’s what we assume, at least. Tirac, the angry horned centaur-thing who debuts at 3:45 in the above clip, certainly looks the part, and sounds it, too, with a raspy voice worthy of Frank Welker’s finest roles. This emissary of Satan sends out dragons and lizard-men to kidnap unsuspecting ponies. Then, in scenes far too creepy for a cartoon ostensibly aimed at 5-year-olds, he chains them up, laughs at their bleats for help, and turns them into monstrous dragons by unleashing the mutating nightmare of his dark magic upon them. Still, his image is shaken later on, when the ponies and their token human ally confront him and the snarling hell-creature is crushed inside…a rainbow. Pansy.

4) Nuclear Zombie Children in Spiral Zone

It’s easy to mistake Spiral Zone for another G.I. Joe retread-because, to some extent, it is. The show’s heroes a pack of conveniently international super-soldiers in hi-tech armor, would’ve fit right into a battle with Cobra. The show’s villains, however, played a little differently. By the show’s beginning, a crazed scientist had already conquered half the world by dropping an insidious bacteria from space, turning people into yellow-eyed zombies with red fungus sprouting from their faces, as we see right from the opening clip.

Between the burned-out city wastelands of infected “zones” and the hollow-eyed victims shuffling around them, Spiral Zone was the closest thing kids’ TV had to The Day After. Sure, the heroes had names like Dirk Courage and the villains, even with their creepy facial lesions, were stupid-looking, but there’s something bleak and unpleasant about Spiral Zone. Was it an allegory for nuclear war? The AIDS crisis? Probably not, but it’s disturbing that the question should arise around a toy commercial.

3) Jem Makes Love in Jem

Censors in the ’80s were, we assume, fairly watchful people. They’re the reason every G.I. Joe plane had parachuting pilots, and why the word “die” was avoided like profanity. If we were to pick a cartoon adept at sneaking things past those censors, we wouldn’t have picked Jem, the extended pop-music war where the most objectionable thing was the way the title character’s soulless, computer-aided songs invariably triumphed the slightly less manufactured faux-punk anthems of her rivals, The Danzig-free Misfits.

Yet it’s one of those vapid little songs that slid innuendo past the network watchdogs. In the number “Who is he Kissing,” Jem/Jerrica openly wonders if her Ken-doll boytoy, Rio, is “making love to a fantasy.” Perhaps there were board meetings and studio debates over it, but in a cartoon climate where some stations refused to show interracial dating on Robotech, we find it strange that no PTA group got Jem’s song altered.

2) The Remorseless Eating Machine from The Inhumanoids

The Inhumanoids is the cartoon every maladjusted eight-year-old boy would’ve made if he’d had his own studio of overworked Japanese and Korean animators in 1987. There are some human scientist heroes in there someplace, but it’s all about the show’s hideous giant creatures who dwell deep inside the earth and do horrible, horrible things. In the show’s opening mini-series, for example, the scientists’ lone female member is turned into a drooling skeletal horror at the touch of the undead D. Compose, possibly because she didn’t have an action figure. (See it here.)

Even more unsettling is the Gagoyle, an armless, one-eyed monstrosity with a transparent stomach. After being hatched by the show’s human villains, the creature gruesomely devours all of its unhatched siblings and then waddles around devouring things, including the arm of D. Compose and two underworld guardian statues who, despite being stone, writhe and scream as the Gagoyle rips off their heads (shown at 4:35 in that clip up there). Then the show’s primary villain, Metlar, endears himself to children everywhere by killing the creature. He was a bit too late, though; the nightmare fuel had already leaked onto the beach of our happy childhoods.

1) Naked Thundercats

By the time the ’80s hit, cartoons had gotten away with showing Donald Duck pants-less for decades, but Thundercats pushed the envelope a little more with its first episode, in which all of the title characters arrive on their new homeworld stark naked. Yes, even Cheetara. Granted, there were no nipples showing anywhere, and the show might’ve even passed the lack of clothing off as natural; after all, they’re animals, right?

Not really, no. Later in the episode (around the 5:30 mark in the glorious Spanish episode above), every Thundercat save Snarf puts on clothing, making it quite apparent that all of them were, in fact, completely naked just a few scenes ago. And so a generation lost a little shred of innocence. Some parents doubtless banned their children from watching Thundercats five minutes into the first episode, although, when you think about it, they were doing their kids a favor in the long run.

Written by TKK

We all hate our jobs. Even those of us with cushy gigs like, say, writing dumb lists on the Internet, have reasons to complain about our J-O-Bs. Thankfully, video games are here to save the day-they take the mundane jobs that you and I are forced to do day in and day out and turn them into something awesome. If our jobs were anything like these, we’d probably work for free! Well, actually, no, we still wouldn’t.

7- Food Service Industry

We pity people who work in the food service industry. They work long grueling hours and often wait on whiny, demanding bastards who think that just because they’re paying for a meal, it entitles them to act like they’re royalty. And then there are the hardworking parents who struggle night in and night out to provide a home-cooked meal for their lousy kids who won’t just sit quietly and eat their damn vegetables.

It’s too bad that working in the real food service industry isn’t as awesome as it is in video games. Games like BurgerTime and Cooking Mama make preparing meals and serving it to others seem like fun. Standing in front of a hot griddle while you flip patties sucks; making giant hamburgers by stepping on the ingredients while avoiding contact with mutant food products, on the other hand, does not. And consider this: if you’re a real chef and you mess up an order, you get an angry customer or a jerk of a lead chef yelling at you. But mess up an order in a video game and all you get is a cute cartoon cook offering you some light-hearted encouragement. If only Gordon Ramsay were so understanding.

6- Paperboys

The paperboy is dead; long live the paperboy. What used to be an American institution has now gone the way of the dodo-these days, papers are delivered by shadowy men in cars, which is sort of creepy. Even though it’s a long forgotten occupation, the paperboy had it tough: you had to wake up at the crack of dawn then haul ass on your bicycle around the neighborhood with a heavy sack of newspapers slung around your shoulder. And why did you do this? So you could earn a measly few bucks for that fancy baseball mitt or wooden airplane or whatever it was people played with back then?

Video game paperboys don’t have it any easier: you get chased by angry dogs, killer lawn mowers, swarms of bees and even Death himself. But video game paperboys did have a few benefits that made the job all worthwhile. There was the sweet obstacle course at the end of the block, the fact that the newspaper was dedicated to putting you on the front page every day, and last but not least, you could break the windows of anyone who canceled their subscription without recourse. Throw a newspaper through a former client’s window in the real world and you’d probably get fired; do it in a video game and you got bonus points.

5- Doctors

Being a doctor has a lot of perks. You can make a lot of money if you play your cards right and relatively speaking, it’s a pretty revered occupation. Sure, it can be mentally grueling and the road to becoming a doctor isn’t exactly easy but if you play your cards right, you can make a good living as a doctor. Oh, wait: there is that whole life and death thing and the malpractice suits and the fact that you have to deal with stuff like blood, urine and feces on a regular basis, isn’t there? Okay, maybe being a doctor isn’t so easy after all.

Too bad it can’t be like in video games: you can operate on your patients in a sanitized environment-no muss, no fuss-and in the unfortunate instance that you lose a patient, you can hit reset and try again. And instead of wasting time running tests and diagnosing symptoms, video game doctors can just throw a bunch of color-coded pills at the problem and make it go away. We admit that being a doctor in a video game won’t get you rich and your parents aren’t going to brag to their friends about how good you are a Trauma Center but it beats spending your day collecting other people’s urine in little plastic containers, doesn’t it?

4- Photojournalists

Photogs like Dead Rising’s Frank West and Disaster Report’s Keith Helm embody what every photojournalist wants to be; in the thick of the action, kicking some ass (objectivity be damned), and taking the controversial shot that blows a worldwide conspiracy wide open. Sure, some war photojournalists get to take some pretty gripping shots, but most are stuck taking pictures of blue-haired elderly ladies complaining at town hall meetings or sleeping in their car waiting for Britney Spears to leave her house and (hopefully) leave her baby on the roof of the car as she drives off to Starbucks.

3- Taxi Drivers

Here’s another group of hardworking and underappreciated people: taxi drivers. Where would we be without taxi drivers? Okay, there are some bad cabbies out there who try to cheat you by taking the long way there and who sometimes yak on their cell phones the entire ride out but for the most part, taxi drivers are an essential part of city life.

But being a cabbie in real life sucks. You’re trapped in your car all day, you have to fight traffic on a regular basis and if you get in one minor fender-bender, you run the risk of having your fare sue you for “whiplash.” Video game cabbies have it much easier. Sure, you’re still driving around in your car all day but the upside is that you can drive like a maniac and actually be rewarded for it. Forget about safety: drive on the other side of the road and hit that sweet ramp if you want to-your customers will not only thank you for it, they’ll give you a fat tip to boot. Who’s got time to obey traffic laws when there’s money to be made?

2- Criminals

Gaming has always celebrated breaking society’s rules to get ahead (Hear that, Mom and Dad?), but the Grand Theft Auto series has taken that to the next level. Ever since GTA III premiered on the PS2, millions of gamers have reveled in the seedy lives of fictional criminals. In GTA, you can run over dozens of innocents with a stolen firetruck, wait for the cops to arrive, and then mow them down with a chaingun, give the fuzz the slip by visiting a nearby paint shop, visit a prostitute who actually makes you healthier, and then bash her brains in to recoup your cash. If you get caught, it’s a night in the slammer and a couple hundred bucks out of your multimillion dollar bank account. In real life, you’re selling bootleg DVDs on street corners and running a dozen pyramid schemes a week just to make ends meet. And if you so much as cough around a cop, you’ll probably be Roscoe’s bitch for a good 5 to 7 years.

1- Plumbers

Real life plumbing is about the worst job you can have. You’re stuck in others people’s bathrooms all day. And not the clean and fancy bathrooms you see on Cribs. We’re talking the nastiest ones possible. When you’re in there you don’t even get to partake in the relaxing bowel release that usually accompanies a bathroom visit. Instead, in a cruel twist of fate, you’re performing the very tense action of sticking your hands and arms in areas that have been visited (or may currently be occupied) by human waste. Video game plumbers get transported to a fantasy world where they can grow to twice their size, shoot fireballs, ride dinosaurs, collect coins, and save beautiful princesses from utterly incompetent enemies. Which job would you rather have?

Written by sharky

The first thing to notice when you join a private BitTorrent site is the eye-popping quality of the torrents. Each one is carefully culled, hand-picked through a strict moderation process. However, before you start hammering away on that download link – here are a few things you need to know.

On private torrent sites, everything revolves around ratios. A 1:1 ratio (or 1.0) means that you’ve downloaded exactly the same amount of data as you’ve uploaded. Thus a 0.80 ratio indicates that you’ve uploaded less than you’ve downloaded, which is hurtful to the health of the torrent. Inversely, a 3.0 ratio means you’ve uploaded 3 times more data than you’ve downloaded. Strive to achieve at least a 1.0 ratio – each site will have specific consequences for members who maintain a ratio of less than this. Attain a ratio over 1.0 and the rewards shall follow you into the P2P afterlife.

If you’re brand-new to a private site, it will be difficult in the beginning to acquire a 1.0 ratio. Luckily, users are given a ‘grace’ period to achieve this. Since there are so many more seeds than leechers (a total flip-flop from public BT sites), it becomes harder to upload to others – due to the fact that there are fewer people to share with.

So why go through all the trouble to keep an honest ratio? Because deep down, you’re an upstanding denizen of file-sharing society! Aside from that shameless pat-on-the-back, good ratios offer many perks, including an upgraded account on the tracker (i.e. VIP status), higher download speeds, free “invites” for your friends, and no waiting periods associated with accounts in arrears.

Here are Ten Tips to get your ratio in top-shape as fast as possible:

1. Start out with Smaller Files

Initially, opt for smaller (i.e. under 1 GB) files for downloading. This gives you a greater chance of someone coming along after you and downloading the same torrent (and you’ll be able to upload to them). Obviously a 700MB movie file will be more appealing to other site members than a 30GB ‘Blu-Ray’ rip.

2. Jump on the ‘Newly Released’ torrents

This is a great tip for increasing your ratio in a hurry. Camp out in your favorite private BT site, and refresh the torrent listings frequently. Newly added entries will have many more leechers than seeds, so you’ll be able to share (upload) more data. To maximize this tip, select smaller files – the “TV Episode” category works great for this.

3. Select Files that have a High ‘L’ or upload number

This is important. When selecting torrents, base your initial selections on a high number of leechers (the more, the better). This will ensure you have many avenues to upload to during (and after) the transfer. When starting out on a new private BT site, we would even go so far as to say that you should download torrents that you don’t want – just start grabbing torrents that have lots of leechers. Once your ratio get over the 1:1 (1.0) mark, delete them.

TIP: If one of your seeding torrents remains popular, leave it running in µtorrent permanently. This will always help to boost your upload ratio.

4. Avoid ‘Zero-Leech’ torrents

When you’re new to a private site, steer clear of the ‘zero-leech’ torrents – it is impossible to increase your share ratio when there are no other downloaders. When viewing a list of torrents, look for the “Leecher” column (or just “L”) and avoid anything that has a zero ( “0? ) in it. After your account ratio has become relatively stable, now is the time to snag whatever you want.

5. Leave some tasks running in uTorrent

After the completed download of a torrent, leave the task running (as a seed) in µtorrent to increase your upload statistics. Don’t delete (or move) the files of a running task! You can, however, extract (unRAR) the files, or copy the files from one place to the next. In the event of a movie/video file – you’ll be able to “burn” or “extract” the *.avi file (or even play it on the PC) without affecting the seeding torrent.

TIP: Always keep a few things running as ‘seeds’ in your BT client. If you notice that they aren’t uploading, replace them with newer ones.

6. Go for the ‘Freebie’ downloads

Many private sites will offer “free” torrents that won’t count against your download statistics (thus, your ratio will remain unchanged). Grab these freebies – especially when searching for torrents on a new account.

7. Use ‘Credits’ to purchase…

A popular feature among superior private BitTorrent sites is the addition of a ‘credits’ feature for account holders. Credits can be used to ‘purchase’ VIP status, increased sharing ratios and other perks. Not all sites are the same, but some credits can be acquired just from staying active in their IRC channel, or from just having the torrents available for download in your BT client.

8. Do NOT try to ‘cheat’ the Private Trackers

There are a variety of ratio cheating tips available out there, but don’t be tempted. Trackers are fairly sophisticated and ever-evolving. If you get caught cheating, you won’t even be warned – it’s a permanent ban for you and bye-bye for good.

9. Set a proper Upload Limit

Setting a proper upload limit in the BT client makes all the difference! You’ll want to supply a high enough limit to maximize uploading, but not have it eat into your download bandwidth. The general rule is to set it at 80 – 85% of your upload limit. To figure this out, visit www.speedtest.net and conduct the simple test. Results are shown in kilobits, so pide the result by 1/8 and then multiply that by 0.85. This will give you the proper number in KB/s (KiloBytes).

In µtorrent, go to OPTIONS > Preferences… > Connection and enter your upload rate. Click “Apply” and then “OK” to save the changes. While your in that same ‘settings’ page, make sure to use a port number from the good list (e.g. 49152 – 65535).

10. And if all else fails…donate

Most sites allow for monetary contributions to keep up with the server costs. If you enjoy a particular site immensely but cannot seem to be able to approach a decent sharing ratio (due to turning off your computer at night, going to work, or sharing your computer with your kids, wife, husband or siblings), think about donating. In most cases even a not-so-generous gratuity will robustly affect your account status – plus you’ll feel good about helping out the BitTorrent community.

Other Tips – Follow ‘The Rules’

Yeah, we know: you hate rules! That’s why you probably moved out of your parents’ basement. Rules are probably why some turned to P2P.

Nevertheless, rules are an important aspect to private BT sites – they ensure healthy torrents and blazing-fast download speeds for all. Each site will have their “rules” posted – the link is usually not hard to find. Below are some general rules / tips that pertain to any private BitTorrent site:

Use an ‘Accepted’ BitTorrent client

Not all private trackers are the same – and each one has different rules in regards to which BitTorrent client is on the “allowable” list. Most sites recommend µtorrent, but only specific versions (or builds) of it. If you stick with v1.6.1 or the latest version v1.7.7 (recommended), you can’t go wrong with ANY private site (avoid any versions in between these numbers). And do not use BitComet on private trackers.

Proper BitTorrent client configuration:

Many trackers recommend that you disable DHT and Peer Exchange (PEX) in your BT client’s settings. To do this in µtorrent, go to OPTIONS > Preferences… > and select the BitTorrent tab. Remove the three checkmarks that pertain to DHT and PEX (see image below):

Do not ‘Hit & Run’ a Private BT site:

A ‘Hit & Run’ (or H&R) is when someone joins a private tracker, and downloads as much as they can before making off without uploading to a proper ratio. While this practice is frowned upon even on public sites such as mininova.org, it is deplorable to private sites. This can (and sometimes will) lead to your IP address being banned from the site – forever.

Stick within these guidelines for HAPPY Torrenting!

Written by lifehackery

You may remember the often-discussed tennis ball headphones or these 99 extraordinary uses for ordinary objects. Those were pretty great, but it makes you wonder what else these little bundles of latex and wool can do. Since they wear out and lose their bounce quickly, most tennis balls simply end up in the garbage when they stop being useful on the court. If you can’t stand to throw them away, they tend to pile up quickly – so what can you do with them?

1) Cut an X in the top of each ball and put them on the bottoms of chair legs to cut down on noise and floor scuffs. If you don’t have scuffable floors (or all of your chair legs are already covered) check with your local school. Many schools take donations for just this purpose.

2) Donate them to a local nursing home for use on residents’ walkers. They make the walkers easier to push around for people who aren’t strong enough to lift them.

3) Hang one on string from the garage roof to help you park without running into things. When it touches the windshield or rear window (depending on which way the car is pointing), you know it’s time to stop. If you’ve got a lot of time on your hands, make it into a funny character.

4) Keep certain types of gnats or flies away from you when you are outdoors. Just cover a tennis ball in Vaseline and hang it from a tree or bush.

5) Tennis balls with holes drilled in them have been used in the UK as protective homes for field mice. Pet mice or hamsters may enjoy them, too!

6) When packing something for shipping in a box that’s too large, use tennis balls as shock-absorbing cushions that will hold the item steady in the box.

7) Use them to remove scuffs on floors. Many janitors use this trick by placing a tennis ball on the end of a broom so it’s always handy.

8 ) Protect your surfboard when it goes on an airplane journey.

9) Play a creative catch game that will amuse kids to no end – especially if you’re the one missing the ball.

10) Throw a few tennis balls into the dryer when you are drying comforters, fluffy coats, pillows, or anything else that could use a good fluffing.

11) Tennis balls can also help any laundry load dry faster – just throw two or three in the dryer and your clothes will be done quicker.

12) Speaking of laundry, put a tennis ball into your washing machine along with your shower curtain and 1/2 cup of vinegar, then wash with hot water. The vinegar will kill the mildew and the tennis ball will help to scrub the mildew off.

13) If you or your partner (or, if you’re really unlucky, the guy in the next apartment) snore, attach a pocket to the back of the snorer’s pajamas and secure a tennis ball inside. This will ensure that the snorer sleeps on his/her side – most people snore only when sleeping on their backs.

14) Make your own juggling clubs.

15) Make a very cute pencil/mail/phone holder. (Putting a cigarette in its mouth and giving it long dreadlocks would be really funny, but maybe not so kid-project-friendly.)

16) Cut a slit in one and use it to cover the trailer hitch on your truck.

17) Hide stuff in them. Make a slit in a tennis ball, then squeeze either side of the slit to open it up. Place money or other objects inside, and release to close the opening.

18 ) Use the same concept as above to pass notes or other items over long distances. Just be sure other people don’t pick it up! This idea has been used at auctions to pass receipts to winning bidders.

19) Cut a portion of the ball off so that it will fit over the sharp corner of your coffee table. Repeat for the other corners to baby-proof a room. Use this for all furniture with sharp or protruding bits to protect little foreheads.

20) Make a beautiful flower for your sweetheart. You can even fill it with candy, just in case your sweetheart isn’t quite sweet enough yet.

21) Slit a tennis ball open, insert some beans or jingle bells, and seal closed with glue or rubber cement. Give it to a toddler as a musical instrument.

22) When you are seated, put a tennis ball (or two or three) under each foot and roll your feet around on them. They make wonderful massagers.

23) Put two tennis balls into a large sock. Tie the sock securely, then use the contraption as a back massager. This is a great tool to have in your hospital bag when you have a baby since concentrated back pressure can help to relieve a great deal of labor pain.

24) Make bizarre furniture.

25) Use tennis balls to anchor clusters of helium balloons at parties. Knot together a group of ribbons attached to balloons. Cut a small X in the top of a ball and insert the knot. Fill the ball with sand if you want extra security.

26) If you are an athlete (probably even if you aren’t), learning to juggle tennis balls can improve your hand-eye coordination and visual reaction time. It can also help to keep your brain sharp.

27) Put tennis balls on the tops of poles to mark the edges of your driveway or drainage ditch. The bright yellow balls will be visible in the dark and help you avoid driving into the ditch or over the grass in the dark.

28 ) Put a tennis ball on the end of a broomstick and use it to clean cobwebs from the ceiling.

29) Wrap a piece of sandpaper around a tennis ball. It’s easy on your hands and can be used to sand curves on furniture or woodworking projects.

30) Make a unique ornament for your home or to give as a gift.

31) Make an incognito squirt gun.

32) Prevent your bike’s kick stand from sinking into soft dirt by cutting a small slit in a tennis ball and sliding it over the kick stand.

33) If you find that the legs of your lawn chairs get stuck between the slats of your deck, put tennis balls on the bottoms to keep them where you want them.

34) Keep the yuckiness out of your pool by floating some tennis balls in the water. Supposedly, the balls will absorb body oils from people who swim in the water – but you need to replace them every few weeks to keep them fresh.

35) Cut a tennis ball in half and use it to get a better grip when opening jars. Just place the ball half over the lid, and the rubber on the inside grips the lid to help you rotate it easier.

36) You can apply the same concept to screwdrivers to give you a better grip. Simply cut a slit in the tennis ball and slide it over the screwdriver handle to give you a better grip.

37) Make a tiny stereo.

38 ) Ham radio enthusiasts with gigantic antennae on their cars can use a strategically placed tennis ball to keep the antennae from ruining the paint on the cars.

39) To keep a door knob from smashing into and damaging an interior wall, cut a large slit in a tennis ball and slide it over the knob. This trick also works great to keep curious toddlers out of off-limits rooms…until they figure out how to squeeze as they turn.

40) Use a tennis ball to explain internet security to n00bs.

41) Squeeze a tennis ball in your hand whenever you have an extra few minutes to increase your hand strength.

42) If you want to leave your car door open but don’t want the interior lights to run down the battery, just wedge a tennis ball into the door frame to keep the light switch depressed.

43) When fueling up your car, use a tennis ball to keep the handle of the gas nozzle pushed in to avoid painful hand cramping.

44) Make a snowman ornament for your holiday tree.

45) Explain and illustrate molecular structure.

46) Make a pretty awesome pocket tripod for your small camera.

47) Build a model trebuchet and hurl tennis balls into your annoying neighbor’s yard.

48) Make talking apple puppets. These will amuse kids to no end. Let them be creative and make up their own characters.

49) Put tennis balls under the windshield wipers of vehicles that will be stored for long periods. This will help the blades last longer.

50) Use the time-tested method for finding your car in a crowded parking lot: put a tennis ball on the end of the antenna.

Some words of caution: tennis balls should not be used as dog toys. The felt that covers them can wear down a dog’s teeth. Larger dogs can choke on tennis balls. Ask your veterinarian for advice on alternative toys.

And in case you’ve ever wondered, this is how tennis balls are made:

Written by Daniel Miessler

Safari is an excellent browser for many reasons; its speed, clean aesthetics and ease of use are attractive from the outset. But there are a few extremely attractive and lesser known features that people should be taking advantage of as well.

Browsing and Search Snapback

Search snapback allows you to instantly jump back to the original search you made after clicking on a bunch of results. So if you originally searched for programming, and you clicked on a bunch of Wikipedia links and didn’t find what you want you can, with one action, instantly get back to the original Google results.

There are two ways to do it; you can click the little orange arrow to the right of the search as seen above, or you can use the keyboard shortcut – option-command-s

You can do the same thing with browsing as well, but it works slightly differently. If you type an address into the URL bar and go to that page as your initial page in a tab or window, that page is marked as your snapback page. You can then go anywhere else and snapback to it by hitting the orange arrow or by using the keyboard shortcut – option-command-p

You can also set a new snapback location by marking a current page as your snapback location. The fastest way to do that is with the keyboard shortcut – option-command-k , but you can do it from the history menu as well.

URL Path Navigation

It’s also possible to view and navigate through the various levels of a nested site using Safari. So on my site, for example, I have the root, then /study, then various pages. Well from one of the nested pages I can right-click the title of the page and see exactly where I am on the site. And from there I can navigate up if I want to.

Web Inspector

With the latest version of Safari (3.1) you can now inspect HTML and CSS elements right from your browser. The functionality is similar to the Firebug extension for Firefox, and gives you all sorts of information that’s helpful during web development and design.

To enable the functionality just type the following into a terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true

Once you’ve restarted your browser you can then right-click on various elements in the browser and select “Inspect Element”.:

Written by positivesharing

When the customer isn’t right – for your business

One woman who frequently flew on Southwest, was constantly disappointed with every aspect of the company’s operation. In fact, she became known as the “Pen Pal” because after every flight she wrote in with a complaint.

She didn’t like the fact that the company didn’t assign seats; she didn’t like the absence of a first-class section; she didn’t like not having a meal in flight; she didn’t like Southwest’s boarding procedure; she didn’t like the flight attendants’ sporty uniforms and the casual atmosphere.

Her last letter, reciting a litany of complaints, momentarily stumped Southwest’s customer relations people. They bumped it up to Herb’s [Kelleher, CEO of Southwest] desk, with a note: ‘This one’s yours.’

In sixty seconds, Kelleher wrote back and said, ‘Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.'”

The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to:

1. Convince customers that they will get good service at this company
2. Convince employees to give customers good service

Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim – ironically because it leads to bad customer service.

Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong.

1: It makes employees unhappy

Gordon Bethune is a brash Texan (as is Herb Kelleher, coincidentally) who is best known for turning Continental Airlines around “From Worst to First,” a story told in his book of the same title from 1998. He wanted to make sure that both customers and employees liked the way Continental treated them, so he made it very clear that the maxim “the customer is always right” didn’t hold sway at Continental.

In conflicts between employees and unruly customers he would consistently side with his people. Here’s how he puts it:

When we run into customers that we can’t reel back in, our loyalty is with our employees. They have to put up with this stuff every day. Just because you buy a ticket does not give you the right to abuse our employees . . .

We run more than 3 million people through our books every month. One or two of those people are going to be unreasonable, demanding jerks. When it’s a choice between supporting your employees, who work with you every day and make your product what it is, or some irate jerk who demands a free ticket to Paris because you ran out of peanuts, whose side are you going to be on?

You can’t treat your employees like serfs. You have to value them . . . If they think that you won’t support them when a customer is out of line, even the smallest problem can cause resentment.

So Bethune trusts his people over unreasonable customers. What I like about this attitude is that it balances employees and customers, where the “always right” maxim squarely favors the customer – which is not a good idea, because, as Bethune says, it causes resentment among employees.

Of course there are plenty of examples of bad employees giving lousy customer service. But trying to solve this by declaring the customer “always right” is counter-productive.

2: It gives abrasive customers an unfair advantage

Using the slogan “The customer is always right” abusive customers can demand just about anything – they’re right by definition, aren’t they? This makes the employees’ job that much harder, when trying to rein them in.

Also, it means that abusive people get better treatment and conditions than nice people. That always seemed wrong to me, and it makes much more sense to be nice to the nice customers to keep them coming back.

3: Some customers are bad for business

Most businesses think that “the more customers the better”. But some customers are quite simply bad for business.

Danish IT service provider ServiceGruppen proudly tell this story:

One of our service technicians arrived at a customer’s site for a maintenance task, and to his great shock was treated very rudely by the customer.

When he’d finished the task and returned to the office, he told management about his experience. They promptly cancelled the customer’s contract.

Just like Kelleher dismissed the irate lady who kept complaining (but somehow also kept flying on Southwest), ServiceGruppen fired a bad customer. Note that it was not even a matter of a financial calculation – not a question of whether either company would make or lose money on that customer in the long run. It was a simple matter of respect and dignity and of treating their employees right.

4: It results in worse customer service

Rosenbluth International, a corporate travel agency, took it even further. CEO Hal Rosenbluth wrote an excellent book about their approach called Put The Customer Second – Put your people first and watch’em kick butt.

Rosenbluth argues that when you put the employees first, they put the customers first. Put employees first, and they will be happy at work. Employees who are happy at work give better customer service because:

• They care more about other people, including customers
• They have more energy
• They are happy, meaning they are more fun to talk to and interact with
• They are more motivated

On the other hand, when the company and management consistently side with customers instead of with employees, it sends a clear message that:

• Employees are not valued
• That treating employees fairly is not important
• That employees have no right to respect from customers
• That employees have to put up with everything from customers

When this attitude prevails, employees stop caring about service. At that point, real good service is almost impossible – the best customers can hope for is fake good service. You know the kind I mean: corteous on the surface only.

5: Some customers are just plain wrong

Herb Kelleher agrees, as this passage From Nuts! the excellent book about Southwest Airlines shows:

Herb Kelleher […] makes it clear that his employees come first – even if it means dismissing customers. But aren’t customers always right? “No, they are not,” Kelleher snaps. “And I think that’s one of the biggest betrayals of employees a boss can possibly commit. The customer is sometimes wrong. We don’t carry those sorts of customers. We write to them and say, ‘Fly somebody else. Don’t abuse our people.'”

If you still think that the customer is always right, read this story from Bethune’s book “From Worst to First”:

A Continental flight attendant once was offended by a passenger’s child wearing a hat with Nazi and KKK emblems on it. It was pretty offensive stuff, so the attendant went to the kid’s father and asked him to put away the hat. “No,” the guy said. “My kid can wear what he wants, and I don’t care who likes it.”

The flight attendant went into the cockpit and got the first officer, who explained to the passenger the FAA regulation that makes it a crime to interfere with the duties of a crew member. The hat was causing other passengers and the crew discomfort, and that interfered with the flight attendant’s duties. The guy better put away the hat.

He did, but he didn’t like it. He wrote many nasty letters. We made every effort to explain our policy and the federal air regulations, but he wasn’t hearing it. He even showed up in our executive suite to discuss the matter with me. I let him sit out there. I didn’t want to see him and I didn’t want to listen to him. He bought a ticket on our airplane, and that means we’ll take him where he wants to go. But if he’s going to be rude and offensive, he’s welcome to fly another airline.

The fact is that some customers are just plain wrong, that businesses are better of without them, and that managers siding with unreasonable customers over employees is a very bad idea, that results in worse customer service.

So put your people first. And watch them put the customers first.

Written by Jason Arango

There are some things that scream out “I’m a huge douchebag!” in a way that makes you stop, take in what you’ve just witnessed, and then give a silent nod of confirmation that “yes, that is one giant douchebag.” These are ten items so intrinsically douchey they could take even the most dignified gentleman and make him look like a raging jackass.

10) Axe Body Spray

Perhaps the douchiest of all the body sprays, Axe’s scent alone wouldn’t be enough to push it into the top 10, but coupled with a marketing campaign specifically tailored to douche bags, it squeezes its way in. Spray this on your body and women will drop what they’re doing and flock to you. Watch the commercial and buy this product, and intelligent people will assume you’re an a-hole.

9) Spray on Tan

If you’re a white male you just have to accept the fact that you’re going to be pasty white for about eight months of the year and alternate between sunburned and tan for the other four. But, assuming you refuse to bend to god’s will, you can always spray your tan on like it’s time to cheer Syracuse to a national title. Once you start looking like C Thomas Howell in Soul Man it’s pretty much a bronze beacon to the rest of the world that you are one steaming pile of douche.

8) Watches with an Enormous Face

If you’re going to wear a watch, there’s a simple bell-curve of functionality versus size that needs to be adhered to. After a certain point your watch becomes so large it ceases to be merely a functional time telling device and transforms into a giant gaudy douchometer that’s constantly pinging “hot.” Unless you’re Dick Tracy or Randy Jackson, you probably just look like a little kid that stole his dad’s watch in a desperate attempt to impress all his friends.

7) Puka Shell Necklaces

Although only the first link in the popped collar/white hat trifecta, the puka shell necklace is still a strong stand alone sign of douchiness. Unless you’re a Hawaii native there’s really no way to justify adding this little piece of island flair to your classy khaki and pink polo shirt ensemble.

6) Calvin Peeing on Anything

This co-opted image from the beloved comic strip offers a creative way to voice an opinion on issues ranging from brand superiority all the way to environmental consciousness. Unfortunately, just because Calvin is peeing on global warming doesn’t mean it’ll magically reduce the emissions on your beat up Jeep Cherokee.

5) Barbed Wire Tattoos

Maybe there was a time when a barbed wire tattoo really meant something; a golden era of manliness where getting one was an initiation into a tough-guy society and everyone sat around talking about chest hair, motor oil, and mixed martial arts. Sadly, if there ever was a time like that, it’s long passed, and now a barbed wire tattoo is nothing more than a razor sharp reminder to the rest of the world that you are a douche bag.

4) A Set of Balls for Your Truck

The trailer hitch doppelganger of a pissing Calvin sticker, “Your Nutz” are the ideal vehicle accessory for any guy who decides a V8 Hemi is still a little too subtle. Giving your truck its own set of balls makes a bold statement about the type of life you lead. It says “I’m not afraid to let it all hang out.” It says “I’ve got stones” and “Convention be damned, I do what I want.” But most importantly, it tells everyone else on the road to watch out for the asshole in the pickup that spent twenty-five bucks on a fake pair of balls.

3) Female Body Inspector T-Shirts

It’s an acronym for guys who are only vaguely aware of what an acronym is. Although one of the douchier t-shirts around, you could really expand the FBI shirt to encompass any “I’m on spring break” type slogan, including “one tequila, two tequila, three tequila…floor” and all paraphernalia with the shocker on it.

2) Bluetooth Headsets

While the technology is useful, the application pretty much consists of causing public disruptions and walking around leaving a verbal fart trail of self-importance in your wake. The one caveat to this might be the surprisingly large percentage of Bluetooth users that look like they’re dirt poor and yet are sporting a shiny new headset to field the incoming calls on their cellphone that’s been “temporarily disconnected.” Either way though, the only distinction would be giant uppercase yuppie Douche Bag or broke-ass lowercase d-bag.

1) I Heart My Penis Merchandise

There are some things that should be accepted as basic fact, and one of them is that most guys love their penis. That being said, there’s really no reason to go out of your way to advertise this to the rest of the world. Unless you’re the type of guy that’s tired of waiting two whole seconds for people to decipher the double entendre on your Big Johnson t-shirt, you might want to just keep quiet about your affinity for your own genitalia. Pins, magnets, and even air-fresheners sharing your founding member status in a fan club of one is only tipping people off that they’re dealing with a Grade-A douche bag.

Written by Inside CRM

These quick tweaks will help you keep visitors engaged.

A webmaster’s work is never done. What may have worked a few years ago when could be outdated today, so it’s important to constantly improve your Web site. However, a massive overhaul is just too much work to undertake at one time. Instead, tackle these quick fixes over time, and you’ll be able to improve your Web site with minimal pain.

Copywriting

Content, specifically text, is perhaps your site’s most important asset. Make sure that it’s up to snuff by following these improvements.

1. Tell readers why they should perform a task. If your site is full of passive suggestions, toughen it up. People are trained to follow a request, as long as you give them a good reason to do it.
2. Make the most highly trafficked pages easier to scan. If your current site consists of large blocks of text, break it up so that it’s easier for the average Internet user to read.
3. Convey a sense of trust. If you’re experiencing skepticism, offer social proof like testimonials or risk-mitigating offers like a free trial.
4. Stress benefits. Ensure that your copy always shows users exactly how your site will benefit them.
5. Make headlines meaningful. Be sure to change any vague or cutesy headlines to something more up-front and meaningful.
6. Repeat yourself. Check over your copy to make sure that you’re really driving the point home by making it in a number of ways.
7. Tell visitors what to do. Revise your site to ensure that people know exactly what the next step is. If you want a visitor to click a link, tell them
8. Keep the reader engaged. Make sure that your current content gives visitors a reason to keep reading throughout the entire piece; otherwise, you need to spice things up a bit.
9. Stay consistent. Check your copy for consistency, or else your site may be seen as unstable or flighty.
10. Stay simple. Simplify your message simply to avoid confusing visitors, while at the same time improving conversion rates.
11. Structure content persuasively. Restructure your content so that it’s more focused, specific and credible.
12. Offer social proof. Seek out testimonials and case studies to show just how effective your services are.
13. Keep offers simple. If you’re offering lots of different options, pare them down.
14. Make an offer that visitors can’t refuse. Check out your site to make sure that you’re giving your visitors a reason to pick your company out of an overcrowded field.
15. Avoid making hollow promises. Check out your guarantee, and ensure that you’re backing it up with something of substance, like a money-back guarantee.
16. Keep each block of text to a single topic. Make sure that your text isn’t too overwhelming with many different thoughts in one place.
17. Offer comparisons. Make it easier for your reader to understand and relate to your business by offering metaphors, similes and analogies.
18. Be concise. Make sure that your copy is only as long as it needs to be to get your point across reasonably.
19. Go with what works. Study other copywriters to adopt the words and methods that have worked for them. Customize these words and phrases until they become your own.

Usability

If your site isn’t usable, visitors will not stick around. Take these small steps, and you’ll have a more user-friendly site that’s ripe for conversions.

20. Add a short “about” page. Put a real person behind your site by allowing your visitors to learn a bit about you.
21. Make navigation consistent. Make sure that your site’s navigation is on the same place on each page so that visitors don’t get confused.
22. Make text links clear. Be sure that your links are descriptive enough so that visitors know exactly where they’re going.
23. Use underlined link text. Get rid of your fancy link navigation. Visitors expect to click underlined links. If you dislike underlines, use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to employ a different method of highlighting, like a different text color or font.
24. Never ask for more information than you need. If you’re currently asking for excessive information, rethink your data-mining tendencies. When you get greedy for data, you’ll turn off some visitors.
25. Always have text links. Although your JavaScript menu might look great, some browsers and users have JavaScript disabled.
26. Have a text-based site map. With a text-based site map, lost visitors can find their way, and you’ll make it easy for search engine spiders to find your pages.
27. Link the site logo to the home page. Visitors will expect your logo to link to the home page, so make it easy for them to find it.
28. Add a search box. Are your current visitors lost? Make it easy for them to find exactly what they’re looking for with an internal search box.
29. Use plenty of contrast. If text seems to melt into the background, change things up and make your text easy to read by using colors that highly contrast one another.
30. Customize the error page. If you have a standard set of error pages, you need to step things up. The error page should not only reflect your site’s design but also provide useful links that will get your visitor back on track.
31. Ask for feedback. Create a contact form that makes it easy for customers to speak with you about your site.
32. Test the site on real users. Ask regular people to navigate your site to find usability problems.
33. Create specific landing pages. If you want to sell, make sure that you have landing pages for specific campaigns and that each of those pages has a purpose.
34. Add more internal links. If you’d like to get more traffic to your income-producing pages, add some internal links to your most highly trafficked pages.

Search Engine Optimization

Follow these tips if you’d like to see an improvement on your search-engine rankings.

35. Replace underscores with hyphens. In search-engine results, words separated by underscores will run together, while hypens will create a space between each word.
36. Implement 301s to consolidate page rank. If your site lives on both non-“www” and “www” domains, redirect one to the other in order to consolidate.
37. Add a dynamic meta description. Make sure that your meta description makes sense so that your excerpt in search-engine results is more appealing.
38. Use heading tags. Let search engines know what’s important by highlighting titles and more in header tags.
39. Update content often. Give search engines a reason to keep coming back with fresh content.
40. Ensure that your host is up to snuff. Make sure that your host is providing maximum uptime so that your site is visible at all times.
41. Create a robots text file. Make life easy for crawlers by creating a file just for them.
42. Make sure that your domain is brandable. If your name isn’t easy to say or remember, you need to find something that is.
43. Build link popularity. Actively seek out relevant, inbound links to your site to build trust and profile with search engines.
44. Turn off music. No one wants music to greet them every time they click a link, so turn off the music – or at least offer an easy option for disabling it.
45. Give pages real names. For example, if your page is about red widgets, its filename should be, or at least include, the words “red” and “widgets.”
46. Take off the black hat. If you’ve used tactics like keyword stuffing, remove them from your site. They may be working now, but in the long run, they’ll only hurt.
47. Open up the drop-down menus. Let your user see all of the navigation options available, or you’ll confuse them.
48. Ditch registration. Don’t turn off users by forcing them to register to access content.
49. Ditch frames. Frames are horrible for search-engine optimization and design in general. Just stay away from them.
50. Fix broken links. Don’t send search engines and users down dead ends. Clean up links for better search-engine optimization and usability.
51. Avoid resizing the user’s window. Let the user be in control of their browser, or your site will lose credibility.

Accessibility

If your site isn’t accessible, you could be making things frustrating or even impossible for visitors with disabilities. Take these steps to make your site more inclusive.

52. Create accessible forms. Make sure that your forms can be filled out by all visitors.
53. Specify spacer images as empty. Make sure that nonvisual browsers know to ignore your spacer images by noting them as empty.
54. Set captions on tables. This will ensure that your captions render correctly even in visual browsers.
55. Modify color. Ensure that pages are readable by using appropriate colors.
56. Summarize tables. Add a summary of tables so that visitors with screen readers will understand what they’re all about.
57. Provide real lists. Use list tags to ensure that lists render correctly for disabled browsers.
58. Remove text from images. Using image text will make it difficult for those using screen readers to read text.
59. Offer an alternative to JavaScript links. Many browsers for the disabled don’t support JavaScript, so make it easy for them to have access to “real” links.
60. Identify the language. Screen readers need to know how to pronounce words, so let them know what language your site’s content is in.
61. Add titles to links. Ensure that links are descriptive enough for visitors by adding link titles.
62. Create accessible tables. Make sure that tables are accessible to all by using scope, header and ID attributes.
63. Allow text resizing. Make it easy for readers to resize text if necessary.
64. Supplement navigational aids. Offer additional navigational aids to help visitors who use text-only browsers.
65. Define keyboard shortcuts. Set up keyboard shortcuts so that disabled users can navigate your site with ease.
66. Provide alternate text for images. Alternate text will let disabled visitors know what images represent.
67. Set a document type. Let readers know what sort of programming language your site uses so that content can be displayed correctly.
68. Present content first. Make sure that text-only browswers aren’t being presented with your navigation before main content.
69. Set horizontal rules. Instead of just using an image to break up your pages, use horizontal-rule tags and CSS to display them properly for disabled users.
70. Accessible pop-up windows. If your site uses pop-up windows, make sure that they’re accessible.
71. Create meaningful page titles. Make sure that your site’s page names make sense for their content.

Design

Spruce up your site’s appearance using these design fixes.

72. Place important information “above the fold.” Move your most important content high on the page so you can be sure that visitors will see it.
73. Keep background colors and images at a minimum. Backgrounds are often less than visually appealing and can make your site load slowly.
74. Reduce choices. Avoid overwhelming your visitor with lots of different options.
75. Design small. Cut your Web pages down to 50KB or less so that they load quickly for anyone.
76. Nix banners. Abandon banners for a more effective design element, or they’ll be ignored.
77. Stay consistent. Check to make sure that colors and design are in the same general scheme so that visitors know they’re still on your site.
78. Validate design in alternative browsers. See how your design renders in browsers like Safari, Opera and Firefox to make sure that it looks right no matter who is viewing it.
79. Minimize columns. Reduce columns to avoid distracting the reader with excessive visual choices.
80. Lose the splash page. No one wants to sit through a fancy Flash introduction. Replace it with a helpful home page instead.
81. Create a tagline. Stand out with a striking tagline that will draw visitors in.
82. Ditch frames. If your site uses frames, you need to move on to another method, like CSS or SSI (Server-Side Includes).
83. Make sure that text outnumbers HTML. Provide good content with text rather than HTML.
84. Slow down the technology. Although you may have state-of-the-art computers, many of your visitors don’t. Get rid of memory-hogging technologies like JavaScript.
85. Remove link cloaks. Make sure that your visitor knows exactly where they’re going, or you’ll lose credibility.
86. Limit each page to one topic. Give each page a singular purpose to avoid confusing visitors.
87. Ditch crazy fonts. If you’re using a ransom-note font, it’s time to switch to something simpler. Chances are, your visitors’ browsers are rendering it as Times New Roman anyway.
88. Reduce your graphics. Graphics not only slow pages down, but they also steal attention away from what’s important: content.
89. Add functional links to the footer. Make it easy for visitors to find contact information or your privacy policy just by scrolling down.
90. Standardize link colors. Make sure that users know which links they’ve visited and which they haven’t.
91. Update information. Put on a fresh coat of paint with a new header, logo or other design element.
92. Convert PDF files to HTML. Make browsing flow a little smoother by converting PDF files to a format that’s more easily readable in a browser.

Legal

Keep your site safe and protect your content using these improvements.

93. Update the privacy policy. Ensure that your site’s privacy policy fully discloses everything it should.
94. Revise “deep” links. Update links so that they point to the home page of a site rather than a specific page, or make sure that you’re attributing them correctly.
95. Legitimize images. If you’re using images that you don’t legally own, it’s time to update them with your own images or those that you’ve purchased.
96. Pay taxes. If you’re making money from your site, it’s a business and is taxed as such. Take care of your taxes or you could end up in hot water with Uncle Sam.
97. Protect content. Keep your content safe from thieves by copyrighting it and taking steps to shield it from unscrupulous eyes.
98. Form a legal entity. Get liability protection by forming an LLC (limited liability company) or other formal legal entity.
99. Register a trademark. If you own your domain name but not a related trademark, a trademarked entity with the same name could take it from you, so be sure to register it before someone else does.
100. Store a Web site cache. Keep a copy of your site handy in case of copyright disputes or loss.
101. Revise the email campaign. Make sure that your email campaign complies with the CAN-SPAM Act.

Written by photojojo

Say you’re out for a photographic stroll, taking pictures of that cool old power plant on the edge of town. Suddenly seventy security guards swarm you and demand you hand over your camera.

“What is this,” you ask yourself, “a Michael Moore movie?”

You’re sure you haven’t done anything wrong, but you don’t know whose side the law is on. Fret no more- we’ve got a list of things you can and can’t do, and it’s a lot more permissive than you might think.

Now grab your camera back from that Rent-A-Cop and let’s hit the books.

Photography and The Law: Know Your Rights

*Charlton Heston not included

p.s. Thanks to everybody who entered our “Monday Stinks!” contest! Congratulations to Notorious D.A.V., Warren Photography, evaded, mommaozzy 84, biancaprime, berdandy, spade, AnasBananas, trenity00, andreskrey, determinedforce01, ladibug, killbyte, Nellofcourse and Mia!

Before we get started here, we have to point out that even though we’re smart and awesome and devastatingly attractive, we’re not lawyers. None of this should be construed as legal advice. If you have a legal issue, get in touch with a lawyer. Much of this information was gleaned from attorney Bert P. Krages‘ website, so we’ll go ahead and recommend him.

The Ten Legal Commandments of Photography

I. Anyone in a public place can take pictures of anything they want. Public places include parks, sidewalks, malls, etc. Malls? Yeah. Even though it’s technically private property, being open to the public makes it public space.

II. If you are on public property, you can take pictures of private property. If a building, for example, is visible from the sidewalk, it’s fair game.

III. If you are on private property and are asked not to take pictures, you are obligated to honor that request. This includes posted signs.

IV. Sensitive government buildings (military bases, nuclear facilities) can prohibit photography if it is deemed a threat to national security.

V. People can be photographed if they are in public (without their consent) unless they have secluded themselves and can expect a reasonable degree of privacy. Kids swimming in a fountain? Okay. Somebody entering their PIN at the ATM? Not okay.

VI. The following can almost always be photographed from public places, despite popular opinion:

• accident & fire scenes, criminal activities
• bridges & other infrastructure, transportation facilities (i.e. airports)
• industrial facilities, Superfund sites
• public utilities, residential & commercial buildings
• children, celebrities, law enforcement officers
• UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, Chuck Norris

VII. Although “security” is often given as the reason somebody doesn’t want you to take photos, it’s rarely valid. Taking a photo of a publicly visible subject does not constitute terrorism, nor does it infringe on a company’s trade secrets.

VIII. If you are challenged, you do not have to explain why you are taking pictures, nor to you have to disclose your identity (except in some cases when questioned by a law enforcement officer.)

IX. Private parties have very limited rights to detain you against your will, and can be subject to legal action if they harass you.

X. If someone tries to confiscate your camera and/or film, you don’t have to give it to them. If they take it by force or threaten you, they can be liable for things like theft and coercion. Even law enforcement officers need a court order.

What To Do If You’re Confronted

• Be respectful and polite. Use good judgement and don’t escalate the situation.
• If the person becomes combative or difficult, think about calling the police.
• Threats, detention, and taking your camera are all grounds for legal or civil actions on your part. Be sure to get the person’s name, employer, and what legal grounds they claim for their actions.
• If you don’t want to involve the authorities, go above the person’s head to their supervisor or their company’s public relations department.
• Call your local TV and radio stations and see if they want to do a story about your civil liberties.
• Put the story on the web yourself if need be.

More Resources

• We’ve condensed these facts a great deal. We recommend downloading The Photographer’s Right and keeping a couple of copies in your camera bag if you’re shooting somewhere you might expect trouble.
• Andrew Kantor has written a good article and a PDF summary of your rights, including some of the ins-and-outs of publishing your pictures.
• The Legal Handbook for Photographers is a great resource covering all aspects of photography and the law.
• Live outside the United States? Try these links for photographer’s rights in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.