Money
You Don’t Need College to Make a Good Living
Guest post by Dee from SI Certs (he’s my older brother)
One of the biggest misconceptions today is that you need to get a college degree to make a decent wage. Sure, you may have heard of famous college dropouts that made it big like Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Simon Cowell. But many regular people are earning a good amount of money without a degree too.
Especially with today’s insane college costs, it’s a good idea to investigate other options before enrolling in a degree program. Also, a degree is so common these days. It’s like what a high school diploma used to be. Everyone has one so it’s hard to stand out from the crowd of job seekers.
But what if you avoided the marketplace for college graduates and instead entered an industry where degrees didn’t matter? By adopting this strategy, you can save lots of money and not have to compete with the hordes of people that believe that a degree is the ticket to making money.
April 9th, 2011 | No Comments | Money
New Revelations on the Black Friday After-Thanksgiving Day Sale
It’s been exactly 4 years since I first wrote about Black Friday in 2005 (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V). Nevertheless, those memoirs are still my most popular articles across all my websites every October and November. While this annual resurgence may be indicative of the continuous validity of my prior claims, I’ve learned that my pointers aren’t so timeless after 4 years. These days, I don’t participate in Black Friday Sales.
Read the rest of this entry »
November 2nd, 2009 | No Comments | Buying and Selling, Money
Basic Piano Music Improvisation Technique for Hymns
Music improvisation is kind of like losing weight. You see other people successfully doing it but you can never really get it down quite right. I admire those great pianists who can turn an ordinary, boring hymn into a complicated prelude. I’ve always wanted to learn how to do that. I figure, anyone can learn how to play precisely what is printed on a music score. But not everybody can add embellishments and grandeur to a plain piece. When people want me to play a hymn, often they also add, “Can you make it sound cool too?” They just don’t know how much I long to make it sound “cool.”
When I ask these accomplished accompanists the secret to their talent, they usually tell me, “I don’t know how to explain it. It just happens.” It seems that learning how to improvise is something that just gradually occurs little by little until one day you play something and you realize what you played is not what is on the music score. I wish somebody could actually think, pinpoint, and explain what happens when they improvise and share that knowledge to thirsty musicians like myself.
Luckily, I once had a piano teacher who was close to that point. She accompanied her church every week with grandiose, glorious, complicated fluff all from just reading off the church hymnbook. There is one secret that she taught me that made a world of difference in the hymns I play for my church. I like to call it the “left chord inversion sequence.”
Read the rest of this entry »
June 25th, 2007 | 9 Comments | DDR, Miscellaneous, Money, Music