http://www.tristanhavelick.com A Series of Unrelated Obsessions Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:46:49 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've been doing a lot of reading of late on "Black Hat SEO", which is basically search engine optimization that doesn't play by search engines rules. This includes more grey area things, like scraping massive amounts of content from other sites, and re-optimizing with new keywords, to more nefarious ... http://www.tristanhavelick.com/underhanded-seo-tricks/ An Economic Case for Labor Unions in a Political World Ask most western economists today, and they'll tell you that a free market is the most efficient and fair economic system that exists. They'll show through the laws of supply and demand that price caps cause shortages, that subsidies cause ... http://www.tristanhavelick.com/an-economic-case-for-labor-unions-in-a-political-world/ If you've known me personally for a while, you'll notice that I tend to get very interested in certain topics for 4-6 month periods. During such a period, I'll focus nearly all of my energy in learning everything I can about that particular topic. I don't choose these ... http://www.tristanhavelick.com/on-obsessions/ I finally got some time to fix my blog this afternoon... (It had been broken for a long while). Since I last posted, I have lost interest in spirituality reading, and thus future posts will likely be about other things. Regarding Spirituality, I still sit in pretty much the same ... http://www.tristanhavelick.com/back-online-concluding-spirituality/ Tonight, I found this "spirituality survey":http://beliefnet.com/story/76/story_7665_1.html . Unlike some survey sites, this one is pretty unbiased and seems to have a wide variety of questions and answer choices. Although I think there is a lot to be learned from all the world's religions, even the ones we consider ... http://www.tristanhavelick.com/spirituality-survey/ Surfing around today, I stumbled onto a "blog":http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog&friendID=109090138&blogMonth=&BlogDate=&blogYear=&Mytoken=B4771944-93A6-429B-8F1AF10C434C8F3B29335858 on MySpace. Here is what he "says":http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=109090138&blogID=184293627&Mytoken=0E29DCE9-92A1-4DC8-828430BF7154408229477195 : ... I've come to view [Christianity] this way. If i live right, do what the bible says, and die (which – face it, we all will someday) and there is no God ... all i would ... http://www.tristanhavelick.com/debunking-religion-as-insurance/ Last Friday, my family and I saw the stage adaptation of Disney's _The Lion King_. It reminded me of an important lesson. Of late I had taken on the philosophy of staying focused on the present moment, and not dwelling in the past or fearing the future. ... http://www.tristanhavelick.com/spiritual-questions-re-emerge-after-seeing-the-lion-king/ Last week, when I walked into my local bookstore, they had a display paying homage to this being the Islamic Holy month of Ramadan. Seeing this, I thought it would be prudent to honor it by reading up on Islamic Mysticism, as seen by the Sufis. So ... http://www.tristanhavelick.com/islamic-philosophy-through-sufism/ In order to maintain a true balance in my quest for spiritual wisdom, I've decided to take a while to investigate the counter-argument. Thus, today I started reading: Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects. So far I am finding that ... http://www.tristanhavelick.com/sunday-quote-of-wisdom-ii-a-look-into-rationalist-atheism/ Reading the Tao, several of it's short chapters seemed to speak to me as a programmer. I'll quote some of them here and give my thoughts. *Chapter 4* The Tao is like a well: used but never used up. It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities. It is hidden but always present. I ... http://www.tristanhavelick.com/the-tao-te-ching-for-programmers/