Category: About

A List of Area Codes

Everyday-Freethought / / Site Updates

I am looking for work. I am getting calls from recruiters from everywhere. They leave messages on my Skype account. I like to know which ones to ignore, since there are large parts of this country that I do not want to move to. I like to use area codes to get an idea of where the call is coming from. Granted, this does not always work since someone could use a cel phone with an area code for a prior residence. Still, I have decided to make a list of area codes on this site.

New Category and New Energy Pages

Everyday-Freethought / / Ambient Echo, Energy, Site Updates

I will start a new category for the blog called “Ambient Echo”. Sometimes I read something that mirrors something that I wrote, and I would like to occasionally publish links to those pages. One reason I am doing this is I have a text file with notes for posts that is getting very long. This might help clean it out.

I am also going to change the “Energy” page, and make it multiple pages. I have been bookmarking a lot of energy sites, and I have not put all of them on the “Energy” page here. I think I could split them into multiple pages instead of having one page.

 

Still Getting Settled In Texas

Everyday-Freethought / / Austin, Site Updates

I don’t know when I will get back to posting about atheism, skepticism, politics, fitness and dividend investing.

A friend of mine from college is letting me stay at a place she owns for a couple of months. So in addition to finding out where everything is I have to find a new place. It takes a while to get to work everyday. When things get more routine I will post more.

I am in Austin

Everyday-Freethought / / About, Austin, Going To Texas

I have moved to Austin, Texas. I accepted a job offer here. It is a six-month contract. Hopefully either it will lead to a full-time gig, or I will be able to find something else afterward.

Doing a good job at my job is job #1. But I will also hopefully have time to learn more about technology, and meet people in the atheist/skeptical community here in Austin.

I will be updating the pages on this site. I have a list of atheist groups in Illinois. I will update that page with Texas groups. I do not know at this point what I will do with the info about the Illinois groups.

Image from Wikipedia

A Note To New Twitter Followers

Everyday-Freethought / / About, Atheism

I have gotten quite a few new Twitter followers over the past week. It’s not a lot, but it’s a lot for me. They seem to be atheists and skeptics. There is nothing wrong with that. I just want you all to know that I write about a lot of different topics on this site in addition to atheism and skepticism: energy, dividend investing, some politics and mindset/productivity. I plan on posting a lot on fitness as well.

Plus I am looking for a new job. That is a pretty high priority.

So if you don’t see a lot of posts about atheism or skepticism, don’t worry. I am still one of the rational. You might see me join one of the atheist roll calls on Twitter.

Image from Wikipedia

Mindset and Improvement

Everyday-Freethought / / About, Mindset/Execution, Misc

A while back I was going through some old posts on Yahoo Tech Ticker. There was one post saying that employers do not really care about skill set. Instead it is mindset that is important. The title is “The ’3Gs’: Mindset Over Skill Set Critical to Landing a Job, Harvard’s Stoltz Says.”  The guest was a professor from Harvard. They also have a website and a book.

I reserved the book from my local library, and I got it today. I will be blogging about it as I go through it.

Lately I have been bookmarking sites and pages about productivity and self-improvement. I may start another category on my website about this. I have not decided what I will call it yet.

FYI: The three “G”‘s are Global, Good, and Grit.

A Few Thoughts About the Site Slogan

Everyday-Freethought / / About

The slogan or tagline for the site is currently “Both Freedom Of and Freedom From.”

When I started the site it was “Join the Conversation.” When I started this site I did it to support the Everyday Freethought podcast. As I explained before, the whole idea was to talk to atheists and skeptics who were not part of the “professional” atheist/skeptic class, or people who were not professors or did not work for lobbying, advocacy or educational organizations. They could be involved in local groups, but they had to have day jobs.

I decided on the slogan “Join the Conversation”, since I wanted to get some Joe Schmoe skeptics/atheists as guests. It would not be just plain old me yakking away, but other everyday people telling their stories. So I thought “Join the Conversation” was appropriate.

Until I added the Twitter widget, and saw that their slogan was ALSO “Join the Conversation”. So I started thinking about another one.

Another reason “Join the Conversation” was no longer fitting was that I no longer do the podcast. It became too time-consuming. Now this is just a place for me to rant about whatever I want. I don’t care if nobody is listening. I think people just have an urge for self-expression, so I will express myself.

The slogan “Both Freedom Of and Freedom From” was inspired by the tired line that religious people in the USA give that the Constitution provides for freedom OF religion, and not freedom FROM religion. To some people, freedom from religion is freedom of religion. They want to be free of all other religions, I just add one more to the list.

I cannot remember which podcast this was on, but one had a guest who gave lectures to high school students about freedom of religion. He talks about prayer in schools. Then he offers to lead a prayer. The students are all for this. Then he tells them all to face Mecca. They protest that he cannot make them face Mecca to pray. Then he asks them if they understand freedom of religion. Some do, some do not.

 

 

I May Start Editing Comments

Everyday-Freethought / / About

I get a lot of comments, but a lot of them are just spam. But some of them sound complimentary, so for my self-esteem I may start approving them. Plus, some of them are kind of funny. One said that he would have given his right arm if he had found a particular post before he spent half a day searching.

But in order to prevent the spammers from getting any traffic, I will see if I can edit the URL to point to my main page. I will also try to add some text indicating that the comments have been edited.

Twitter Profile

Everyday-Freethought / / About

Here is the original text from my Twitter profile:

EverydayFreethought: A podcast 4 ordinary, everyday skeptics & freethinkers 2 share their stories & talk about whats going on in their hometowns

Even though I no longer do a podcast I left it like that for a year. Here is the new one:

EverydayFreethought: A website about atheism/skepticism, politics, dividend investing, and possible relocation from Chicago to Texas

 

Updating My Site

Everyday-Freethought / / About

I am changing my site. I changed the theme. At some point things got messed up. For some reason, no matter which theme I use all of the widgets show up at the bottom on the front page. But when you go to a post or a page, the widgets show up properly on the right side. I am tired of messing with it, so for the time being I will just leave it as it is.

 

UPDATE: One of the posts was causing some problems, so I changed it. The offending post was a list of all the Twitter accounts I follow related to Texas. I removed all the Twitter icons.