Myanmar - Places to Spend

That's a picture of me at my first wine tasting. Did I bother to learn the name of the winery? No. I think it might be something like The Red Roof Winery.


That's a picture of one of the walls at the spa I visited in Myanmar. This was the pedicure floor. The lower floor was for massage and manicures.


And that's a picture of my deep fried soft shell crab that I had a part of my 5 course meal at a four or five star restaurant in Myanmar. Why am I sharing this? Well, I had decided that I would not indulge while overseas, but my instructor had other plans in mind because it was so cheap.

Wine tasting - $4
Pedicure + reflexology foot massage + shoulder massage - $18
Meal at 4-5 star restaurant - $10

Luxury treatment for all under $40 dollars. My treatments at the spa ran around 2 hours by the way. So there was a little bit of an exchange. I had a lot of nights with upset stomach while visiting the second poorest country in the world, but I also got the star treatment on the cheap.

My instructor could not help but chat about Thailand where the massages were $2 for most of the time. Thailand. I would have liked to visit there, but for this study abroad trip. I am happy that I got a chance to witness global arbitrage at it's best.

I was told that the avg. monthly income was $40.

Life In a Day - Realizations

Okay so a couple of hours ago something terrible happened. Well, I am not quite sure if it is terrible or just an occurance. After interviewing two very impressive characters this week on Skype and recording the interviews with Vodburner I went to create the videos only to discover that I was out of hard drive space. Thank you Vodburner for not warning that you average file size is larger than life. Yes, two 1 hour interviews took up more than half of my hard drive, that was 60 GB! I know, no onw should have less than 500 GB these days, but...

What surprized me was that I was more concerned with getting these interviews to the persons that I interviewed and my blog posts set for this month than completing my school work. I not being effective in any areas right now. I have not finished any blog posts. I'm behind in my class work, and I have not began to prepare for my trip in two days from now. Yes, everything is a mess, and strangely, I am okay with it. I've accepted that the class was designed for us to fail in week three. Vodburner is designed to take over hard drives and crash computers, and that I might possibly not care about completing my Master's degree as much as I did 12 months ago. I thought I could keep it together for the two months that I have left in the program but maybe not.

But, I am very proud to have taken part in the life in a day submissions. I felt that it was more important to get this submission in by the deadline than it was to get my reading discussion post in, which was uncharacteristically difficult.

A 3 Month Commercial for Celebrity Branding You

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

It was an odd day today. I woke up and decided that I would fix my bank account. It's been underperforming lately, so to speak. I have these images on this vision board on my wall, and only today did I realize that I was capable of most of all of the things, Now, that I was planning on being someday.

Anyway, I've taken Tim Ferriss' low information diet to heart, only reading material to help you finish the current project you are working on, and started something new today. I've decided that it is my responsibility to make sure these seeds of greatness blossom into beautiful flowering trees.

A seed will never feed you unless you water it. I aim to water these seeds of talent daily. A couple of months back, I had the idea of doing all the little challenges at the ends of the chapters in the 4 Hour Workweek and recording myself on video doing them. I couldn't justify myself doing it, because I couldn't see it going anywhere. I couldn't see how it connected to my ultimate goal: which it like many is to be rich, famous, and respected. (Yes, I am laughing at myself as I write this.)

All that was just a preface into this. I have justified doing the steps outlined in Celebrity Branding You, and I will do them in the next 90 days. Well I think I should put the list with some deadlines here.

professional photo -- cool rockband style (July 24th)
write a book -- on your topic of interest (August 7th)
testimonials -- of products and services (August 21st)
start a newsletter -- digital, then physical one later (August 22nd)
design and build a website (OMP) -- online marketing platform (August 31st)
promote your website -- syndication strategy (September 11)
monitor, optimize -- create new revenue streams (September 25th)
rollout -- go national with your business (October 9th)

*October 14th is the 90th day unless I just can't count the days properly on my phone.

I have to admit that this list looks intimdating, especially because I am going to be out of the country for most of the month of August, but I have gotten amateur photos taken by an art student, written a short book that I'm not very proud of, and gathered character testimonials (not product testimonials) in the past. But let's start at square one.

I am going to be creating a ridiculous amount of content in the next 90 days, because I've decided like Ed Dale that there is no charge for awesomeness. Well, there really shouldn't be. I have to get cracking on my recommendation website. Yeah, I just want to recommend products and services (free and paid) that work for me.

I'm going to go for a two times a week update since I have my main blog to attend to until I'm in Burma suffering from Internet withdrawal.

Brain Dump - Grad School Blahs

(*sigh) my cup overfloweth and yet I frown. I'm writing to maintain my sanity. For the life of me and I cannot express how pressed I am in this course Second Language Assessment. I cannot fully express how it drains the life from me to even write a few words about the material. And I have loved everything so far about the TESOL program.

There is some unfair grading practices...won't talk about those here, but I must say. Even though I have put everything on hold, and when I say everything, I mean all the fun things that I was doing to distract myself from my work, I still cannot seem to get everything finished. Twelve days left until the close of the course. I too finish on time so bad. I really do although I have already discussed a two week extension with Mary. So much is out of place. So much is incomplete. But, the professor has extended me grace with late work so I am going to try to get it all done in the next 12 days.

Aha, I know why I am dragging now. I have note listed everything in my usual neat little check-off list. I need to do that now:)

Testing Out Miscrosoft One Note

Audio Recording.wma

Audio recording started: 8:17 AM Wednesday, February 03, 2010

This is OneNote