zanzibarjones

I am in no way an expert on the subject, but I would have to say that being a good leader, manager takes a few key qualities.1) Integrity2) Knowledge of the job3) Fairness4) OrganizationOf these four qualities, Integrity stands out to be the most important I think. You need to be able to do what you say you are going to do, and stand by your decisions. Don't lie, and don't kiss *bottom*.What do you think?

I know of Microsoft Accounting and I think Intuit offers a free version of quickbooks, I could be wrong though.I have used the Microsoft Accounting package, and for a free app, it's pretty nice. Very customizable and easy to use.Any others out there you would recommend?

I often see listings for jobs, such as intern or non-pay positions.Would you ever work at one of these jobs, just for the experience? Or would you feel that the employer was taking advantage of you. using you and your skills to further the company, and then at the end of your stay, they drop you like a hot turd.What do you say?

I often used Joomla on most of my sites. I love it's interface and ease of use. I also have used many shopping cart systems to set up ecommerce sites.Personally I recommend VirtueMart for Joomla. I love it's interface, ease of setup, customization, layout, description boxes, item options, etc.OsCommerce was ok, and I found it can be used for a lot, but it has mainly turned into a whole site all by itself. I like it more when it was a plugin.What about you guys and gals?

I think they would. I look at games like WoW, and Everquest, and Entropia. These players are spending hundreds of dollars a month to get their characters to level up, and make them unique. So Yeah I think if you gave a player to completely customize their character, and then allow them to turn around a buy a real plastic figure of their character, I think they would. And games like Entropia are using CryEngine 2 for their graphics, online, and let me say they are just beautiful.And I honestly believe you could make some serious money offering those plastic characters...

So you have a great idea for an online business but have no money for startup. So here is a small tutorial on how to get started.What you will need to get started:1) Computer2) Internet Access3) Office Suite Software4) A Website5) Marketing6) Financial Software7) Email8) Other various applications to get your business up and running9) A logoand other services to get whatever idea you have up and running.So where do you get all this great stuff for free or very little cost?Well computers are not that hard to find. You don't need to have the top of the line either, because most of what you will be doing, will be done on the web. Unless you are doing graphics, I would recommend seeing if a friend or acquaintance has an old one you could have. I can tell you I have found dozens of computers in dumpsters need office bldgs.Internet Access. This is going to be your only cost out of pocket. Unless you live in an area where you can piggy back on someone open wireless connection. Which I highly recommend BTW :)Ok so you have a computer, you have internet access, what's next. An office Suite. Yeah but MS Office is like $200 and up. Ok so do get that. Go download OpenOffice from http://www.openoffice.org/. Their software is as compatible and works with all the file formats that MS Office produces and save sin those formats as well. And it's 100% and community supported.Ok now you need a domain name and a website. Here is an easy solution. Xisto.com. Post and keep posting quality posts and you can get both for free.Marketing: This one will take a little work, but it does work. Try posting ads on Craigslist.org, it's free. Post ads in other forums and open websites that allow comments. Try setting up fan pages on facebook, and creating a twitter account. ALl good marketing for free. Make a video for your site and stick it on youtube....Email, Financial software, other software, etc. Goto Zoho.com. Sign up for a free account and get access to, your own wiki, your own financial software for billing, presentation software, chat software, contacts, a CRM (Customer Relation Management software), and much much more, including email.And a logo. Now this one may seem hard to come by, but there is a myriad of people out there that will design you a logo for free. Just so they can add it to their portfolio. All you have to do is ask. Try multiple forums, posting sites, and college forum sites.Pretty easy huh?Oh yeah, need a phone number for your business, google voice. It's free and you can forward it to any phone you want. Need 2 numbers? Sign up for 2 google voice numbers, change the options to land or work, and you can forward 2 numbers to the same forwarding number :)Enjoy!

Yup been there done that. I've already submitted close to 40 resumes. had 2 interviews, one offer, and he wanted to pay me half of what I am making now.....

Ok here goes this one. I have an idea for a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) based on an RCE (Real Cash Economy).My idea goes like this.Make the game called Opportunity. The game centers around 3 playing elements. A free to play option, a pay to play option, and a land owner/play option. The difference is, that the land owner hosts the land on their server through our services. A doorway to another land type of framework. The land owner would have the ability, using our developed software, to terraform the land as they see fit, add or remove mobs as they wish, and charge a tax for hunting or mining on their land.Just like any other game, allow the players to choose a race and a job function or skill, like hunter, crafter, miner, etc.Now here is where my idea becomes different. Each user would actually OWN their character and it's assets. As part of the incentive to continue playing the game, offer recreations of their characters in real life.The reason this would be a HUGE money maker is because of people's wants for what they invest in. People spend a lot of money gaming online, and they spend a lot of time building up their characters. Give them the ability to really customize their characters as they want, and you will have them hooked for life. Give them the ability to change the character frame, skin color, eye color, facial structure, tattoos, garments, etc.Hence offering the 3d characters in real life, Kind of like action figures of their characters, with weapons and all. Even offer creatures from the game and foliage.In that alone you will wind up making a huge amount of profit.There is a lot more detail about this, I have worked really hard on a Mindmap of the whole scenario. but I hope you get the idea behind it.I wish I had the money to develop this, because of all my ideas, this one is 100% a winner.

Thanks for your condolences guys, I really appreciate it. And yea, it's tough, especially with the US economy the way it is right now. I am struggling with a decision to stay in Texas and try finding work, move back home to Maryland and find work there, or try my hand at starting my own business. But There are hundreds of computer companies doing fixit work, either residential or SOHO. I could try doing the consulting thing, but that never pans out, unless you 'know' people.I just don't want to wind up having to get 2 or 3 meaningless jobs, JUST to make ends meet. I have this talent for a reason, and I should be able to find a job making what I was making, and get benefits on top of it. If not, well then I will have no choice but to work as a janitor and do whatever I have to to make sure my family is taken care of. Ya know?It sucks, but you gotta do what you gotta do.Man if there was a way to collaborate with people all across the globe to work as a team to get work and make money, that would be the bomb.

So my boss, last tuesday, told me that starting today, I have 2 weeks left. He said it's because of the lack of funds to keep me around, last one hired, first one fired, sort of thing. He says he is going to give me either 2 weeks or a months salary for severance. Ok cool, I can handle that.But here is what I don't get. He is hiring 2 other people. 1 person to be a tech manager above us techs at more than what I am making now, almost double my salary, and then he is hiring a tech at less then what I am making now. So both salaries equal 10k a month more than what he is paying me right now.Does that make sense to anyone? I mean I have heard of knee jerk reactions, but I don't know if it's that or if he just lying to me. I don't know why he would lie though and give me a months salary for severance, ya know?Can anyone explain this kind of behavior?

Love your work. Nice contrast of colors on some, other it's the layout that touches me. Although I think I'd like to see what you can do with some abstract pictures. I mean, we have all seen the usually plants and still objects. So maybe, try this, go to a familiar place, and lay on the ground. Close one eye, and look at the world from there. See what you can see then, and photograph that.

I know I am probably late on this, but there are hundreds of free joomla templates out there. And it's actually pretty easy to configure a template to suit your own needs. But if you don't know how to do that,just find a template you like, and with some kind words, you might, just might, someone out there who willing to do or make the changes that you want for it/ Or you could barter something for the work.Just a suggestion.

Just so I can chime in on the subject, could you put a good definition to both spirituality and meta-physics?

Man I love stirring up trouble.@bikerman, there has to be 'something' in between the molecules... I mean there can't be just nothing. Nothing, as a thing, does not exist. There is always something, everywhere regardless of how small or insignificant.So with that in mind, don't you think, even in the littlest bit, that it may be possible?How else do you explain the feeling of force from you blowing on your hand? If you can feel it, you should be able to stop it right? Or at least stop it in it's tracks.I look at it like this, I can't see the air, but i can feel it against my skin, see the results of it blowing through the trees. but some could argue, well you can feel gravity, doesn't mean you can stop it from happening. True. I can see the effects it has on objects, and yes I can feel it from the force an object induces from me holding it, it's weight.But gravity isn't made of particles. Gravity just is.Air though IS made of particles, something tangible, therefore i should be able to, through some sort of means, halt these particles from moving. They are already suspended in their spots, unless moved by object going through them or other means.

Here here!!! On yeah and lack of beer distribution to the rest of the world. Drink a pint, save a life. That's what I always say... ok I don't really say that, I just made it up

I find it easy to locate people or businesses looking for web site design and hosting. But the first thing to do is get yourself some clients. How? Offer to do 2 or 3 for free. This gets you the experience needed, work out the kinks, and it provides you with the most powerful advertising on the planet, word of mouth. Once you establish those 2 or 3, then start to market locally. Start with churches, and focus on media streaming, video and vocal. Then you can move to bigger companies. Hosting is always an added option, but go in with the mindset, "I am selling a web site AND I can host it for an additional fee" provide them with a list of why they should host with you over whomever they have already. Then just go in for the kill. that is how I see it.

Well great then. I have an idea or two laying around that might work out well for this forum. So we will see. Of course, I will take criticism as it comes. I like learning from my mistakes. And i hope you guys are upfront and honest with me. It's the only way I will get better at what I do.

Thank you for the welcome. And yes I try to be as informed as I can. I am not as well educated as others on here, as I made it through high school by the skin of my teeth. But that, by no way, means I'm an idiot, just lazy, or was lazy. Now I spend a lot of my time thinking and searching for answers to my own personal questions. Yes I work, I am a computer geek by trade. Have been for going on 17 years. Taught myself everything I know. never had one class or course. Never took any special studies. Just had a great desire to learn, and no one in my area of the US could answer my questions, so I started just meddling with it. Breaking them down and building them back up. I have several ideas for website projects, the problem in the past was I had no way to truly implement such ideas. But now, thanks to Xisto, I do. And hopefully with the amount of posts I can make per day, you will get to see some of those ideas come into fruition.

Ok then let's go with this.... The Bible is not Chronologically ordered. Therefore there are things that happened during a certain time period, and are not brought up till later. Does this mean that the account was wrong or untrue? No, it means there was no reason to bring it up then. You want to go at it word for word, then look at it logically. Yes in the beginning the world was void and dark, and God spirit was above the waters on the earth. Have you ever considered that there was life before man, before he separated those waters? If you read the bible through instead of just picking at pieces of it, the book will never make any sense to you. If you read it thoroughly, you would have found out that God cast satan out of heaven before man was created. And where did he cast him? To earth? How could he have done this if the earth wasn't formed? how about that there was existence on earth before man. Hence dinosaurs. It is said that Satan is considered the prince of the earth, because we WAS an angel and was cast out. Is it possible that satan, out of his anger for God, tried to created life on his own? Those would be some very odd looking creatures would they not? Dinosaurs would fit the bill I think. So here comes the ICE age, follow me here. The ice age did what? killed most life on the earth? What happened to all that ice? Where did it go? Perhaps it melted and created, follow me, the waters that were on the earth and covered the earth and the same water that God's spirit hovered over. You say that we can argue a myth until we think it's true, and you'll show me science. Funny, I didn't realize you or anyone else was alive 4 billions years ago, and could tell me what was going on back then. Sure you can guess, but hey isn't that like a myth. A fabrication of what you think occurred, even though you weren't really there to observe it. Did people live for 900 years? Sure why not? How do you know what happened, again you were not there. Sure you can see the limits of people on the earth today, but if you believe in evolution, you have to believe people have changed....evolved so to speak. So why couldn't people have lost their ability to live long periods of time. Aside from the fact that the calendar year is calculated differently today (gregorian) as it was back in the days of the bible (jewish calendar) Sure I would say that the bible probably does have passages that are misunderstood, but I would have to say again, people back then probably describe things a lot different then they do today. Genesis talks about giants. Do you think they truly meant giants, or people who are today diagnosed with gigantism, a tumor pressing on the pituitary gland? Think Goliath. They describe him the best they could. Also, if you want to go with time frames, look at this. I believe that the book of genesis was written inspired by God through Moses. The bible accounts for the past 6000 years from a few decades after Christ was born. So we are talking somewhere between 5000-5500 BC. So how would a man, who never left out of his surrounding countries/areas, know that the lands were separated by great vast bodies of water? How could he have known this? He knew the earth was round... how did he know that? That didn't become public knowledge till the 1800s. You also have to remember, that you are treating this as if it were being told and recorded at the time of it's actual happening. It was not. It was told of inspiration from God through Moses. So when you point out things like: Moses is telling the facts. Moses has a mother and father. And, just so you know, God lives outside of time. And when he made Adam, he knew that they would become parents, and there would be other parents. And he made marriage to go along with the inter-minglings that humans would have one another. Setting down a ground work of moral laws. Science as we know it, has only been around since the ancient greeks (and I said as we know it). Modern science can NOT account for all knowledge since the beginning. There will never be a way to prove it all 100%. Therefore you can either believe in man or believe in God. It's so funny how people want to pick apart Christianity. We are a peaceful bunch of people. The biggest problem people have with religion is that eventually they know they will have to own up for all the wrong doings that have done in life. And they are scared. Christianity does not say, go kill others, as a matter of fact is says help those who need it. Love one another and spread the word of this love. Yet people want to hate it. Odd.... what if you were told to spread the word of your parents love, would you hate them too after all that they did for you? Oh well...

Well don't get me wrong. I am in no way saying that a child can not be smart or taught at that age. I just believe that a child should have the chance to be a child. There are some very important development skills a child learns growing up before going to school. Manners, understanding yes and no, discipline, etc.I have seen some amazing kids go into a pre-k school setting, and turn out amazing, smart kids. But I wonder if they lack the social skills needed to survive in the real world. Those early years are prime for that.

Well i guess I am assuming just as the scientists are assuming they know what happens in a black hole, that it actually exists and that they are what they sat they are. If you have never seen, nor been to or through a black hole then you can't say for a fact that they exist or do what you think that they do. As you said, "There is no universal law that everything has to have a purpose from your perspective". I agree. So who says they are right too? No you're not being harsh. That is what these discussions are for, to discuss. I guess all I am am saying is that don't believe everything that a scientists says. They change their theories and truths all the time, because they do not know. Use your own head and your own science knowledge to try and figure stuff out on your own, because in a few years or decades or whatever, i am sure their theories will change about what is what and how it works.

Are you guys still looking for new logo designs? I have a few ideas if you are. Just curious

This is one I did a while back when I was trying to define something unique about myself. My interests and design interests.