Where am I?

I’m on a temporary leave of absence from my permanent retirement home. Permanence, of course, is subjective since I don’t really have complete control over everything (I don’t think anyone does). I’m residing in an “extended stay” apartment complex in Phoenix, Arizona with my wife, my younger son and my mother-in-law (no rental or lease contract required). My mother-in-law will be returning to the Philippines soon (to her own home, not mine), most likely near the end of October 2013.

When I say “temporary”, I’m meaning less than two years. My younger son (who has a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the Philippines) has to have his nursing college credits and transcripts converted for the Arizona Board of Nursing, while they’re processing his application. The board application fee is $350, the conversion fee is $375 and the board examination registration fee is $300. This all has to be paid around the same time and it’s going to take a few months to get that much together. I have other financial obligations to take care of at the same time, hence the time it’s going to take to get the ball rolling. Some of the fee payments are only good for a year. Even after everything else is taken care of, there’s yet another fee of $200 to take the board examination itself. If he fails the exam, he’ll have to wait a few months to take it again, which means I may have to pay one of the other fees again.

Homes for My Articles

My plan is to eventually do away with this website, Untwisted Vortex and my previous article explained my reasons. A lot of the existing articles are pure crap and I’m well aware of that. There are a lot good and useful articles mixed in with all the garbage and those are the articles I’m trying to save.

I’ve already started moving and rewriting articles related to coffee and tea (my two favorite beverages) to a website called Coffee, Tea and Me. Food-related articles are being moved to Natural Food and Me and tech-related articles are being moved to Tech Silo. Are you detecting a pattern? I’m not very good with titles. Of course, I’m rewriting all those articles and writing new articles at the same time.

The website I’m having the hardest time working with is called A Writer’s Paradise. It’s funny that I have no problem writing about a lot of subjects but I have difficulty writing about writing.

I still have other websites I need to create, to cover the subjects the new ones don’t already cover.

Popularity and Ranking Issues

It’s going to take some time, and I have no idea how long, to build all of my new websites into websites better than this one was at around the six-year mark, before Google’s animal attacks decimated my desire to work with it. After the initial brunt of the content is added, I’m taking it slow and steady. I have no expectations of ranking for anything worthwhile or attaining any level of popularity with any of the new websites in a short period of time. I’m not going to waste a lot of time promoting them.

I like to write – that’s about the only thing I really like to do these days (and I don’t really care if anyone else likes what I write or not). I don’t like to spend a lot of time promoting my stuff and I don’t like to build links. Perhaps I’ll someday give it all up and decide to do something completely different with my retirement years and it may not even be Internet-related. I don’t know what the future holds, especially as I progress from being a middle-aged grandfather to a senior citizen.

I’m not even really concerned about making money online, not like I was a few years ago. As long as I make enough to cover the cost of my Internet connection and my web hosting fees, I’m happy with what I make.

The post Creating New Homes for a Lot of my Articles appeared first on Untwisted Vortex.

Rationale

From October to December of 2011, I had the most visitors on this website that I ever had, averaging more than 2000 unique visitors a day. Most of them were either search engine visitors or comments spammers. Since the beginning of 2012, I’ve removed a lot of dead comment author links as well as keyword-only author links. Of course, I’ve also been rewriting a lot of the content to make it better than it was before – better, stronger, uh, whatever.

After being attacked by one of Google’s animal algorithms several times, I removed a lot of useless content. It didn’t help. Website traffic dropped to about half, a little more than 1000 unique visitors per day. I took it in stride and I knew I needed to create more good content to build things back up again. I was making headway until Google released another animal algorithm attack in April of 2013.

All through this period, I looked at the various reports on Google Webmaster Tools. I had well over 100,000 backlinks pointing to various posts on Untwisted Vortex. Today, I have less than 30,000. I never belonged to any of the huge blog networks that were penalized by the algorithms and I never paid attention to where most of the more than 70,000 links came from. The only real link building I did was on directory sites and most of those pointed to the home page.

This website was penalized more than once, the first time as part of the PayPerPost fiasco in 2007. I have no idea what the rest of the penalties were for and I really don’t care. Since April of this year, I’ve been averaging 500-600 unique visitors per day. Most of the articles that used to come up on page one of the search results still show up there, but not in the top five like before. Usually, they’re at the very bottom – many have moved to page two.

A Lack of Motivation

Can you blame me for losing my desire to write as often as I used to? It was while I was thinking about what to do with my online writing career that something dawned on me.

The web is a very different place than it was when I started doing this in 2006 and I really didn’t know what I was doing until sometime in 2008. The social thing didn’t pick up steam until Facebook opened to the public, Twitter came along and finally Google Plus became more than a test. Before that, the only way to be social was through blog commenting and things related to it. Nowadays, most comment sections look like either a spam city or a ghost town. I see more comments on Facebook than anywhere and that’s why I started connecting my site to it. Google Plus comes in second for me.

I started writing on this website, as a blog, in 2006 because I thought it was fun. Money wasn’t an issue and even today, what I make online isn’t a driving force for me – anything above what I need to pay for being online is usually reinvested elsewhere (anything above $150, give or take depending on the current exchange rate, or a little more if I’m working on something new). Writing here isn’t fun anymore. When I wrote Merging Websites and Creating Websites from Existing Content recently, I was already thinking about a way to make it fun again.

Rather than merging content from some of my sites that have languished, I’m creating all new websites under one domain name, rtcx.net. They’re all going to be subdomains. In fact, the main subdomain, “www” (which doubles for the domain name without it) is going to get a makeover and a reboot. If Hollywood can do it and get away with it, so can I. All of these new websites, using the blog part to write articles with, are going to be focused as niche topic websites. I already have two new websites going, with most of the content transplanted from here (of which some was already transplanted to here). I’ve been careful to ignore that which I didn’t write in the first place. I have ideas for more, but I need to get the reboot done before I continue.

My Exit Strategy

Once I’ve created all the websites I want to create from existing content, I’ll stop writing on this website altogether. If any of the content is worth moving, it will get moved.

I’ll probably keep Untwisted Vortex functional for two years after I stop writing on it, if for no other reason than to keep the URL redirections in place. If you want to see what I’m doing and where, I suggest you follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook or circle me on Google Plus. I don’t see much value in most of the other places I exist, so you can do what you want if you see my name or something.

I’m sure I’ll see a drop in online income, even lower than it has dropped already, and it probably won’t be enough to cover my online activities. Oh well, I’ll be in the US from July 5, 2013 to sometime in 2014 anyway and the biggest chunk of my online income (if there’s still a chunk at all) will be deposited in a bank account I won’t have access to until I return to the Philippines.

The post My Exit Strategy – I Think I’m Done Here appeared first on Untwisted Vortex.

Street Addresses to Use

The first address I used was my parents’ address. They both died while I was living here (within the first five years). I used a close friend’s address until my wife (Josie) started living with her cousin (we’ve been geographically separated quite a bit since I’ve lived in the Philippines). Once my older son and his family returned from Germany, I used his address.

I have a ticket to fly to Phoenix on July 4, 2013, to arrive the same day, just before midnight (it’s a longer flight than it seems due to crossing the international date line – without it, it would be just before midnight the next day). My older son has already sold his house because his wife is being stationed in England for an extended tour. His family is now staying with her parents. Josie, her mother and our younger son (Jon), however, have moved into an extended stay apartment.

It doesn’t make any sense to use Josie’s new address even though I’ll be staying there as well because she and I both will be returning to the Philippines together as soon as we take care of the things we need to take care of with our younger son. It also doesn’t make sense to use my close friend’s address again because he plans to move within a couple of years.

I have four sisters and four brothers in the US and I don’t communicate with any of them (except for one or two on Facebook at times). I haven’t lived with any of them since I was 17 years old, and I’ve had a falling out with some of them since then, so I won’t be using any of their addresses.

I understand there are services designed to provide permanent addresses in the United States that are nothing more than drop boxes and mail forwarding services and it’s something I’ll need to look into.

Why Bother with Maintaining a Home of Record in the US?

Well, it seems like every business in the US wants a US-based address. I’ve tried using my overseas address on a lot of online forms and it only works for a fraction of them. They usually choke on the zip code or the phone number and sometimes both. The phone number issue is the reason I have a US-based phone number through Skype.

Another reason is that I’m still an American and I’m still concerned about what goes on in the US. I want to be able to vote from overseas as easily (or easier) than voting in person. There’s always a distinct possibility that I may move back to the US permanently even if I don’t plan to do so.

You see, it all depends on my younger son. He’s 27 and he has a BS in Nursing. I’m specifically returning to help him get to the point of obtaining his registered nurse license. He’s also betrothed to another nursing school graduate in the Philippines (from a different college). Once he’s set, he can petition to have her go to the US and then go through the same routine to help her get a license, without my help.

I like keeping all of my options open. Josie and I may live the remainder of our years in the Philippines or we may end up moving back to the US, to live with Jon and his future family. What we’ll probably do is visit him from time to time until we’re too old to travel.

It doesn’t make sense to burn bridges when I might need to get back to the other side, if you know what I mean.

The post Establishing a new US Home of Record while Living Overseas appeared first on Untwisted Vortex.

Fresh Fish and Dried Fish

The street vendors who sell fresh fish go to different places early in the morning to get their initial supply and then sell the fish street by street and door-to-door. The word “isda”, which means “fish”, can be heard as the word is yelled for hours as the vendors walk by.

A brother-in-law’s wife (a bilas of mine) does this also, but she tends to focus on smaller fish while a guy from another neighborhood focuses on large fish. On occasion, he’ll even have octopus or squid mixed in with the fish.

Some street vendors sell dried fish as well (or dried fish only), but the fish are usually yelled out by name, such as “daing”. Frankly, I can’t remember all the names and I’ve given up trying to discern what they’re yelling most of the time.

Taho

Taho is a Philippine snack food made of fresh soft tofu (soybean) covered in a sweet syrup of some kind. It’s served warm at a price of around five pesos (about 11 cents USD) and it’s usually the kids that go for it. If I have pesos in my pockets when my nieces and nephews are around and wanting taho, I’ll usually give up several five-peso coins within an hour (my pocket full of posies).

In all my time here, I’ve only seen one street vendor selling it and that’s in the neighborhood I live in now.

Ice Cream

There’s a street vendor with an ice cream stand attached to a motorcycle that winds his way from neighborhood to neighborhood in the late evening, usually an hour or two before it gets dark. He sells thin ice cream cones with two or three tiny scoops of ice cream of various flavor on top of them.

Again, it’s usually the nieces and nephews that beg for money to buy ice cream cones and if I have any loose change, I’ll usually cough it up. Thankfully, they only catch me outside when their favor snacks are being sold a couple of times a month. If it was daily, I’d probably go broke in short order – I have lots of nieces and nephews (and I would have to stop and count them to give an accurate number but it’s more than 10 and that’s just those that live in compound).

Balut

Back in the 1980s and in two other places in Olongapo City, it was common to hear the word “balut” being yelled at all hours of the day. Since I’ve lived in my present location, however, I’ve yet to hear it once.

Balut is either chicken or duck eggs fermented while still in the embryonic stages. It’s a Filipino delicacy but for some strange reason, I can never get past the sight of the beak when the egg is cracked open.

Some Americans love balut, but I’m not one of them.

Household Goods

This is something I don’t understand at all. I’ve seen street vendors carrying furniture, bedding and rugs on their backs and attempting to sell them door-to-door. The furniture is usually in the form of cheap plastic chests of drawers and things like that. I’ve never seen anyone buy anything from them but then, I don’t spend a lot of time outdoors, especially in the summer heat and humidity.

They obviously sell some of whatever they’re selling because my in-laws have some of that junk and that’s really what it is because it doesn’t last very long.

Rice-Related Food and Various Fruits and Vegetable

The number of street vendors that yell out their products seems to be a lot less these days than in previous years. I used to hear “puto” (a sweet rice cake) and “pan DE sol” (as the bread was pronounced for emphasis) but I never hear either anymore. As far as bread goes, it’s probably because there are more regular loaves of bread being sold in local bakeries (which can be nothing more than an oven in someone’s house).

While standing outdoors, I’ve seen various fruits and vegetables being sold, but the vendors usually don’t yell out anything. The products can be anything from mangoes to malungay (moringa in other places) leaves.

The Shift in Noise

Years ago, the noisiest things to be heard in any neighborhood in Olongapo City were the street vendors. Nowadays, however, the noise emanates more from various vehicles on the road, from motorcycles to large flatbed trucks, but that’s during the daytime.

At night, along with the sound of various tricycles (motorcycles with sidecars) coming and going, the roosters and the dogs make a lot of noise and tend to be much more annoying because they crow and bark at random times all night long. The barking is what keeps me awake at night. I’ve become accustomed to just about everything else.

The post Street Vendors in the Philippines appeared first on Untwisted Vortex.

Oats or Oatmeal

For breakfast, I like to eat plain oatmeal, as a kind of porridge. I usually add a couple of spoons of sugar and a little milk to make it more palatable. How much I add depends on how much of the bowl I fill with oats. Over the course of a couple of months, I’ve found myself preferring oats over just about anything else and I practically have to force myself to eat other kinds of food for breakfast (like eggs and toast).

There are other kinds of porridge, like wheat porridge (usually called wheat farina or just farina) and I don’t have any problems with gluten, but I’ve never developed a taste for it. I grew up liking oatmeal and not just as a porridge. I love homemade oatmeal cookies.

Mangoes

The Indian Mangoes that grow on the trees around where I live only mature and ripen during certain parts of the year, like April and May. It’s been many years since I’ve eaten a complete mango of any variety because I developed a dislike of the mangoes that were available when I lived in Hawaii (in the 1970s).

My relatives are constantly pulling mangoes off the trees before they’re completely ripe. Like my wife, they like them at that stage, although I once saw a niece tearing up a completely ripened mango.

I’ve seen nieces and nephews eat two or three mangoes at a time, which can’t be good for you. I’ll usually eat a slice or steal a bite from one of them, rather than take the time to eat one completely. I’m never hungry enough to eat more. I prefer drinking fruit juices over eating fruit and I usually have at least one small glass (or can) of fruit juice every day.

Eating Too Little vs. Eating Too Much

It’s taking me forever to lose the belly I’ve grown over the years, but my camel hump is slowly dissipating. As long as I eat healthy foods, and not too much of them, I should eventually flatten it out to some degree. I’m not on a low carb diet, but the foods I like tend to low in carbs anyway.

I usually eat two full meals a day and I like variety, but I don’t like to cook. Lately, I’ve abstained from cooking anything other than oatmeal for breakfast and I end up eating a couple of slices of mango in the late afternoon and then end up not eating anything for the rest of the day. This will all change, of course, when I’m no longer living in the house by myself.

I’m probably not eating too little, but I’m definitely not eating too much, otherwise I wouldn’t be losing anything. Regardless, I have to force myself to eat sometimes because I want to lose fat, not muscle. If it takes a long time to lose the belly fat, so be it, as long as I continue to lose it.

Why am I telling you these things?

Obesity is a problem, especially when it comes to Americans. The problem isn’t always the food we eat, but how much we eat of it. Developing a taste for foods that aren’t fattening except in huge amounts can only be considered a good thing. The secret to controlling your appetite, in this modern age, has a lot to do with triggers.

I don’t watch regular TV and therefore, I don’t get bombarded with fast-food commercials. I don’t hang around other people when they’re eating unless I’m eating with them. Both are known appetite triggers that aren’t affecting me in any way and obesity is a problem I’m never going to have to worry about unless some other health problem comes up.

The post Eating Oats and Mangoes appeared first on Untwisted Vortex.

The Philippines

The Philippines is officially known as the “Republic of the Philippines”. The country is an archipelago of 7,107 islands located in the western Pacific Ocean, situated between the China Sea and the Sulu Sea on the west side and the Philippine Sea on the east side.

The largest island is Luzon and the capital city of Manila is located in central Luzon. It is estimated that over half of the more than 92 million people of the Philippines live on Luzon. There are more than 11 million people living in Metro Manila, which is composed of 16 cities.

The Philippines has a long and diverse history behind it. After being ruled by three other countries, the Philippines has been a sovereign country since July 4, 1946. It is a mixture of eastern and western cultures and various influences.

The official language is Pilipino (patterned after the Tagalog language) and is slowly evolving into “Taglish”, a portmanteau of Tagalog and English. More than 78 million people in the Philippines speak English as a second language, more than the entire country of England. Filipinos use English as a bridge between the various languages in the Philippines, of which there are too many to list.

For more information about the Philippines in general, please read the Philippines Wikipedia page.

Olongapo City

Usually simply called “Olongapo”, the actual Tagalog name is Lungsod ng Olongapo, which translates to “City of Olongapo” or “Olongapo City”. The city is at the southernmost edge of the Zambales province, bordered by the provinces of Bataan and Pampanga (just barely) and adjacent to the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, which sits next to Subic Bay (naturally).

The “village” of Olongapo existed prior to 1885, when the Spanish government built an arsenal on the land south of the river. At the time, the Spanish Navy occupied the entire area east of the Spanish Gate and the village itself was located on the “island’ that is now the Subic Bay Freeport Zone. During World War II, the village was destroyed twice in 1941 and once again in 1945. The only remaining landmarks are the Olongapo Parish Church (now called the San Roque Chapel, located on Dewey Avenue) and the ruins of the Spanish Gate (now located on Sampson Road).

After the war, development of Olongapo City began on the undeveloped north side of the river and the ruins of the village on the “island” were made a part of the US Navy base. The city developed slowly until the Korean war and zoning was completed in 1956.

Unlike the rest of the Philippines, Olongapo City wasn’t turned over to the Philippines until 1959. On June 1, 1966, it was converted to a chartered city with the help of the “father of Olongapo”, James Leonard T. Gordon. Despite popular belief, Olongapo City is not part of the Zambales province, or any other province, even though online services ask for it to be included in the address.

Today, Olongapo City is a highly urbanized city with more than 300,000 people living with the city limits. In recent years, with the advent of modern shopping venues and the proximity to the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, the roadways are incapable of providing sustained vehicular traffic during peak traffic hours for a variety of reasons. The old transportation workhorses, the jeepneys and the tricycles, compound the problems added by more and more people owning personal vehicles. Of course, the local tourism industry is also responsible for even more vehicles arriving from other provinces, which includes packed buses along with personal vehicles.

The latest shopping venue added in the city proper is called “SM City Olongapo” and it contains an indoor parking garage with reasonable parking rates. It’s located next to the Magsaysay gate (which used to be the main gate, but is only open to pedestrian traffic now) on Magsaysay Drive. It sits where the old Olongapo City Mall used to sit, but it’s much larger in height, width and length.

There are 17 barangays (administrative subdivisions) within the city, with Gordon Heights and Santa Rita (where I live) being northernmost, away from the downtown area. You can read more about the city and the surrounding area at the Wikipedia page for Olongapo.

Getting to and from the capital city of Manila is much easier these days. The Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway (SCTEX) is accessible from National Road, just north of Olongapo City and from Tipo Road at the Subic Bay Freeport Zone. SCTEX connects to the Northern Luzon Expressway (NLEX) at Dau, which ends at the edge of Metro Manila. It takes about two hours to get to the end of NLEX, but it can take another hour to get through the city. It usually takes me three hours to get to the airport or the US embassy, which is next to Manila Bay.

Subic Bay Freeport Zone

The Subic Bay Freeport Zone, as it is called today, is a relatively new Philippine government reservation which has turned into something of a powerhouse of an economic zone. There are no taxes on purchases made at the freeport zone and no tariffs on imported goods, keeping the cost of imported goods lower than in the non-economic zones of the country.

The freeport zone started out as a chunk of land south of the current drainage canal (often called a river when it’s not). It belonged to Spain at the time and in September 1885, work started on the Arsenal en Olongapo for the Spanish Navy. They created the drainage canal to turn the arsenal into a defensible island. It was connected to the mainland only by the bridge at what is now called the Kalaklan Lighthouse Gate on the west side. The village of Olongapo, not to be confused with the current city, was situated between that gate and the Spanish Gate. After the Spanish-American war, the US government took control (December 10, 1899) and established a US Navy base. After World War II, the people left in the ruins of Olongapo Village were relocated north of the drainage canal and the entire island became the base.

On November 24, 1992, the base was closed and handed over to the Philippines government. It was converted to a freeport zone soon after that and millions of dollars (billions of pesos) have been invested in the infrastructure of the island so far. If you want to read more about it as a base, please read the Wikipedia article on the U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay and as the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, Subic Bay Freeport Zone.

The freeport zone is now a popular destination for tourists as well as the local citizens. As an economic zone, it encourages shopping seven days a week. The Harbor Point Ayala Mall is located between the Magsaysay Gate and the Rizal Gate on Rizal Highway. It’s huge, but it’s not the only shopping venue.

There are resorts, nature trails, diving establishments and whole lot more at the freeport zone for the casual visitor. It’s turning into one of the most popular destinations in the Philippines.

The post The Philippines, Olongapo City and the Subic Bay Freeport Zone appeared first on Untwisted Vortex.

Easier than E-Mail

My primary source of communication, outside of Skype for family and friends, has always been e-mail. The e-mail being sent to my Gmail account, along with my wife’s, is forwarded to my Thunderbird client, which I access via IMAP so it stays on my server until I intentionally delete it.

From my past uses of Twitter, I can tell you that Twitter’s direct messages are easier to use and usually faster than e-mail, at least for me.

Keeping up with the News

Over the next few days, I’m going to start following news sources of all kinds on Twitter because up until now, I’ve been basically pulling up Google News to find out what’s going on in the world. But it’s not all about traditional news sources.

I already follow a few people who tend to keep me up-to-date with things I would never otherwise know about and a lot of those things never see the spotlight of traditional news sources.

Managing it All

Since I’m going to be spending most of my time monitoring things from Twitter, I need a good Twitter client and I think I’ve found one: MetroTwit. When I installed Skype on my laptop, I replaced the “metro” version that came pre-installed with the desktop version. Likewise, I installed the desktop version of MetroTwit.

I can still pop onto Facebook and Google Plus infrequently (and any other social network I may belong to) using just a web browser and that works fine for me, but I prefer to use a dedicated client for Twitter. I didn’t say so long to my Facebook friends or anything stupid like that. I merely mentioned what I was doing and offered my @ address (which is a link way down at the bottom of every page on this website as well).

Too Much Drama

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of seeing status updates concerning politics, religion and cat pictures and I’m extremely tired of invitations to play games. It seems, with Facebook anyway, I’m spending more time blocking than reading or looking.

I hope to see some of you on Twitter, but I’m not counting on it. I’ve practically ignored Twitter for months at a time (which I’m now rectifying) and I don’t expect any more from you.

The post Twitter is where I’m Hanging my Hat appeared first on Untwisted Vortex.

Irrelevant Information and Irrelevant Comments

All article authors write crap articles from time to time and I’ve written my fair share of crap since I started this website in 2006 as a personal journal, more or less. A lot of what I wrote was of little interest to anyone other than people close to me.

What I like to do, if I can, is update and republish lackluster articles as something a bit more engaging. That feat of magic isn’t always possible and sometimes those lackluster articles just need to be nuked out of existence, or at least incorporated into something better. When I get rid of articles, I either allow them to be served as 404 errors or redirect them to a relevant article or a blanket article that explains what I’m doing.

When I update articles, I also check the comments attached to them. If some comments are irrelevant, or they’re just there promoting keywords as as the author names (keyword spam), I’ll delete those comments or edit the author names, depending on the value of the comment text itself.

What Others Do isn’t What I Do

There are people who publish articles without dates and sometimes without author names attached to them. Other people use specialized plugins to rotate articles to make the older ones appear fresh to the search engines. Both methods are disingenuous at best. They’re either trying to fool the search engines or their visitors or both.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve searched for specific information and ended up on an article that looked like it could have been written yesterday until… I find information within the article that tells me it’s more than just a couple of years old.

There’s nothing wrong with not using dates and names when you’re talking about static pages that never change, but those aren’t the kind of pages that “bloggers” typically use and they’re the worst offenders. Now, “blogging” isn’t a dirty word, but it doesn’t adequately describe most website authors by itself since most websites with blogging components are much more than blogs. However, blogging does describe writing articles in a chronological order and when that chronology is tampered with, it can reduce the value of that content and this is why I always add an “originally published on” note when I rewrite and republish.

Gold in the Hills

There are very good reasons for rewriting, updating and republishing old articles and they’re not obvious unless it’s something you practice on occasion. Once you realize how much gold you have stashed away in those hills of content, you’ll learn to take advantage of it.

I sometimes find mistakes, but that’s the least of what I find. I find things that I meant to follow up on and didn’t. I find other things that have changed so much since I first wrote about them that I now have enough information to split one article into several.

I’m particularly fond of checking the keywords used to find my old articles. Sometimes they tell me that my focus within a particular article was a bit off and correcting that discrepancy can only help me rewrite that content as something better than it was before.

Cleaning Out the Cobwebs

The single, biggest reason for doing things the way I do them is that there are good articles that are never read anymore, regardless of how relevant they may be at the present time. It’s so easy to bring some of them up-to-date and republish them, that it amazes me that other writers out there refuse to touch their old articles.

In thinking about SEO and why Google’s animal attacks are devastating to some websites, the only thing I can figure out is that leaving old content as old content, content that doesn’t get any visits from anyone or anything other than the search engine crawlers, is a routine that invites getting stomped on.

The post Recycling and Updating Articles to Serve Multiple Purposes appeared first on Untwisted Vortex.

Income Tax

I won’t even try to make sense of the bureaucracy that is the IRS because Wikipedia already provides a pretty detailed page on Income tax in the United States. To put it to you bluntly, however, most Americans absolutely hate the IRS, even more so than having to pay income taxes in the first place. Violations of the tax code have resulted in property seizures and jail sentences — most Americans are afraid of being audited by the IRS. Personally, I believe the “tax return” to be a violation of the 5th Amendment of the Constitution, but I’d probably have a hard time proving it (even if I had the resources to do so).

There are a lot of problems with the income taxes levied against citizens of the United States and the biggest problem, in my opinion, is how the tax laws are used for selective discrimination. Discrimination by income level is expected, but it also discriminates by location, and that’s not expected. If you don’t know what I mean, read the part of the tax form that talks about dependents as being residents of Canada or Mexico. I’m sure if I examined the actual tax laws, I could find a lot more cases of selective discrimination embedded in the tax code.

There are a lot of politicians who want to dismantle the IRS as well as other government-endorsed organizations, such as the Federal Reserve. Unfortunately, they are in the minority. These same politicians advocate things along the lines of the Fair Tax and other tax reform measures to replace the current tax laws.

The Weight of the IRS

There’s a term that my father used when I was young and thin, even though I ate like a horse. It was “poor to carry it”. This is a term that could probably apply to the IRS today. How much taxpayer money is consumed by the IRS itself? Your guess is as good as mine. If you think about the fact that some people get a return of more than they paid in, even when they paid in zero during the tax year, you can understand why I think the IRS actually spends more than it takes in.

The federal government is already fat and bloated and will continue to get fatter and even more bloated if Americans don’t do something to curtail its appetite. When there are more people just trying to get by, living from paycheck to paycheck, the federal government doesn’t need to be taking money from them. In other words, the government should consume at the same rate the public consumes. When times are hard for the people, they should be equally hard for the government.

The post Is it Time to Dismantle the IRS? appeared first on Untwisted Vortex.

Walis Tambo and Walis Tingting

Shame on Wikipedia. When I did a search for “walis”, I was redirected to a page on “Elis”. Several searches using the full names merely yielded content results as off-handed remarks on other pages. I lifted a couple of images from Philamfood rather than taking pictures myself, just to show you what these brooms look like. Now, I’m using the Tagalog names for them and they could be called something else in other Filipino languages, but it’s not worth my time to find out what or if they’re called something else.

The Walis Tambo is a soft broom, usually made of Tiger grass. It’s normally used for indoor sweeping. I have two of them leaning against walls on the lower floor of my house, but I don’t use them. Usually a brother-in-law or someone else will sweep the tiled floor when it needs to be swept (which is rarely these days since I spend most of my time upstairs).

I keep a regular “American-style” broom for sweeping up the messes I make upstairs, which are usually around my computer desk. I don’t like to bend over a lot in order to sweep, and I’ll expound on that in a minute.

The Waling Tingting is a stiff broom (sometimes called a stick broom), usually made of the ribs of coconut leaves. It’s normally used for outdoor sweeping. The closest equivalent I can think of is the push broom and I have one of those in the “garage” area in front of my house.

One of my brothers-in-law uses my push broom to clean the cement flooring of the “garage” and that’s about it. Everyone else in the compound uses a walis tingting outside their home, even though they can use the push broom, which is something I’ve learned to expect.

Street Cleaning as well as Cleaning the Compound

One of my Facebook “friends” mentioned at one time how messy Filipinos tend to be, throwing food wrappers (including the kids with candy wrappers) and cigarette butts wherever they happen to be at the time, without any regard to throwing things away in a garbage bin or something.

Well, everyone does that around here too, but there are people that clean it up as well. I guarantee you there isn’t a government service for it.

Every morning, I can see several people sweeping their areas of the compound, as well as a few people out on the street (usually women) sweeping up and disposing of the trash from the previous day. What do they use? The walis tingting, of course.

Both the walis tambo and the walis tingting practically require a person to be bent over while sweeping. The shortest adult female in my compound still has to bend over to sweep and I’m at least a foot taller than her. Honestly, I don’t know how the Filipinas can keep doing it every day without causing permanent damage to their backs. My back hurts just watching them. For at least a couple of years after my wife moved to the US, she would buy these types of brooms from some store that imported them, simply because that’s what she was used to using. She uses regular “American-style” brooms while in the US these days and a walis of some kind when she’s in the Philippines.

The post Brooms used in the Philippines appeared first on Untwisted Vortex.