Silicon Palms

Canadian International Society - Silicon Palms Blog

2011-06-01T01:13:18Z

Recently I met British fellow at the commodity and futures exchange in downtown Sao Paulo, during lunch he mentioned that his wife, originally from New Zealand (aka Kiwi) and several other Kiwi and Canadian women, were members of a charity organization that was formally called "Canadian Women's International Society" and that they were hosting a party at the house of the Canadian Consul General, to celebrate the re-launch of their charitable society, plus opening the doors to men. My curiosity was piqued and a few days later I found myself enjoying the company of about 50 foreign nationals (Expats), many of whom were from Commonwealth countries, and all of whom were charmed by the gracious hospitality of our hostess, the Consul General of Canada for Sao Paulo, Brazil.

As my good luck would have it, I'm now a member of the newly formed "Canadian International Society"

Who we are

The Canadian International Society (CIS) takes its name from the group of Canadian Women, who founded the group in 1962. Led by the wife of the Canadian Consul General, it was founded as a social organization with a focus on charitable work in Sao Paulo.

These days the CIS is open to women and men of all nationalities, and has a broad range of members. The group has expanded and today has over 60 members from at least 20 different countries, including Brazil.

What We Do

The CIS mission is to offer a social forum for its members while also assisting NGO's in the Sao Paulo area through fundraising events and opportunities to volunteer in vulnerable communities. These activities include monthly luncheons and happy hours as well as one or two major events throughout the year such as family day BBQs, fashion shows or evening soirees.

The Society is coordinated by a volunteer Board of Governors who are elected yearly. Positions include President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer, Charities, Membership and Communications. The Canadian Consul General is the Honorary President of the board.

Lexicon of Sustainability - Silicon Palms Blog

2011-02-03T00:45:45Z

Introducing ... The Lexicon of Sustainability from the lexicon of sustainability on Vimeo.

Offshore Banking for Expats - Silicon Palms Blog

2011-02-01T17:40:25Z

People ask me all the time about moving money from one country to another and when I use the term "offshore banking" they often have a quizzical look on their faces and ask me: "is it legal to have an offshore bank account?" That about sums-up the way most people think about banking offshore, especially because of the way mainstream media has portrayed the topic but also movies often depict the lawyer with the brief case, on a tropical island, meeting-up with the beautiful co-conspirator, after having pulled of some big rip-off back in the states. So it probably surprises my friends in Brazil and Canada even more when I suggest that United States offers some of the best offshore banking services that they'll be able to find anywhere - now they're really confused....

Offshore relates to banking in any country outside of where you are domiciled (definition of domicile: a person's fixed, permanent, and principal home for legal purposes). Therefore, your bank account doesn't need to be in Cayman or Switzerland to be offshore and in many cases you can get excellent bank services from almost any country in the world. I recommend U.S. banking for anyone not permanently living there because the rates are relatively low but more importantly it's really easy to get a Paypal account with a U.S. bank account. However, in today's world privacy and asset protection play a more important part of an overall banking strategy and let's face it, the U.S. is just not big on privacy, as a matter of fact, when you open a new business account in America you'll soon-after be barraged with solicitations from local businesses and services, which means that the bank sold your information before the ink was even dry. Now that's not as much of a problem, more of an annoyance but the fact is that most people just don't want anyone, including a snooping government, to know how much money they have in the bank - that's where I come in and the reason people ask me about banking, as I've been setting-up offshore accounts since 1994.

My first education into offshore banking was way back in 1984 in Australia, where I learned by necessity how to open accounts and transfer money in foreign countries, to access while traveling in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Hong Kong, back then there wasn't an ATM machine on every corner either, so it took some strategy. Now let's fast-forward, I can set people up with what we refer to as; cloud banking - aptly named because your money doesn't reside in just one bank and your private information (notarized Passport color copy, bank reference letter, and copy of a utility bill) are kept with a trust company from New Zealand, housed in a storage facility in a third country, and once you're a depositing customer you can log-in to access your account from any Internet computer and granted the ability to order MasterCard branded, or Visa branded credit and/or debit cards, open new foreign bank accounts and easily move money between your master-account and any of your sub-accounts, or fund debit cards, pay for credit cards, make wire-transfers online and even choose to issue yourself anonymous bank cards that work with a PIN at any Cirrus Maestro ATM machine or anywhere MasterCard is accepted - all this with 100% confidentiality and completely legal by the laws of any country on earth.

The other service that we can now provide introductions to is offshore investing, in global financial markets of Forex, stocks, bonds, etf's or precious metals from the control of an International Business Company (IBC), this is often referred to as Trustee Trading, since the account management is done via an offshore trust - it's much easier than it sounds, but the bottom line is that this online investing service enables a person, or company, to invest offshore with complete privacy and security, in any major market of the world, just like using eTrade or any other online trading site, all you need is a user ID and password.

There are 4 types of people who seek the offshore services we offer:

Independently wealthy individuals
Expats earning money outside of their home country
Active Investors who prefer trading from an International Business Company
Corporate Structures that work in the International marketplace

If you are one of the above types of people and seek private, secure banking and investing, then contact me.

Brazil Poker Pro - Silicon Palms Blog

2011-01-18T23:03:49Z

In the country of Brazil the supreme court ruled that Poker is a game of skill, and is not classified as a game of chance like, say, Bingo. For this reason there are legal poker rooms throughout the country and online poker may be growing faster in Brazil than any other market on earth, which has prompted many of the biggest online poker companies to sponsor top players and spend allot of money in marketing and advertising their brands inside Brazil.

Brazil Poker Pro was launched to provide poker information in Portuguese and in a short few months the site has grown in popularity and created a buzz on Twitter and Facebook amongst Brazilian poker aficionados, some relationships with followed and strategic partnerships were formed and now less than 4 months later BrazilPokerPro.com is generating revenue and has a promising future to become a key voice in the poker community of Brazil.

The main author of Brazil Poker Pro is a an authority on the topic, extremely passionate about poker, has won some significant poker tournaments both online and in the big poker rooms of Sao Paulo but most importantly he's very prolific and likes to publish a new story every day, as well as Tweet to his large group of followers and friends and Facebook. We're seeking more strategic partners and thinking about adding another author, once the traffic reaches 1,000 visitors per day. Also, we'd like to hire an assistant to help us keep up with the social networking.

Nowadays with the built-in translation tools found on Google chrome, or available at the click of a mouse to Babelfish etc... the information on Brazil Poker Pro offers value to any poker player, no matter the language they speak.

Speaking Brazilian Portuguese - Silicon Palms Blog

2011-01-17T21:43:43Z

One of the great benefits of mastering Brazilian Portuguese is being able to fully appreciate the music by understanding the lyrics. Brazil enjoys the largest recording industry outside of the United States, so the number of brilliant artists and the wide variety of genres (most people have never heard of), is truly staggering. Perhaps the first time I'd ever hear this beautiful language was by recorded music, as my father had an extensive jazz collection, and even before I was born the bossa nova was played in my house and now today the first song I can sing in Portuguese is the Garota de Ipanema (The Girl from Ipanema).

Legend has it that the Portuguese language was brought to Portugal by the Knights Templar and was the last Romance language created from Vulgar Latin by an order of monks who were language makers, somewhat like today's software makers, that means that Portuguese was on the cutting-edge of the evolution of Latin, maybe a: Latin 5.0 at that time. Now there are some 800 million total Romance language speakers, worldwide, the largest segment of which would be about 500 million Spanish/Castilian and the French with 250 million are just slightly ahead of the worldwide population of Portuguese speaking people, however Brazil has the largest population of Portuguese speaking citizens and then a slightly lessor number of Italian speaking people. I've been told that it's easier for Portuguese speakers to understand and adopt the other Romance languages, for example many Brazilian's can understand Spanish but my friends from Costa Rica, for example, found it really difficult time to understand Portuguese.

Once upon a time the Portuguese were a great seafaring nation with a colony spread far and wide over the globe, today it is the fifth most spoken language in the world, the most widely spoken in the southern hemisphere, and the third most spoken in the Western world. In addition to Brazil and Portugal, it is used in Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe and East Timor, as well as in the former territories of Portuguese India (Goa, Daman, Isle of Angediva, Simbor, Gogol, Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli) and in small communities that were part of the Portuguese Empire in Asia as Malacca, Malaysia and East Africa as Zanzibar, Tanzania.

In modern times the language has a home, if you can imagine that? The world's only museum for a language was opened in 2006 in Sao Paulo, in a refurbished building (see photo) that was once the central train station, Estacao da Luz where 300 thousand passengers arrive and leave the station everyday, in a neighborhood of the same name. The Portuguese language lives and grows in this fabulous refurbished building which was chosen for the museum because of the fact that, it was mainly here that thousands of non-Portuguese speaking immigrants arriving from Europe and Asia via the Port of Santos into São Paulo got acquainted with the language for the first time.

The famous Brazilian singer, songwriter and composer, Gilberto Gil spoke at the opening of Estacao da Luz, with these remarks:

The language speaks for you. The purpose of studying and interacting with a language in a museum, cultural and exchange programs, orthographic agreements, and the development of new words show how important it is. The language is our mother. This museum covers most, if not all, the aspects of the written and spoken language, of the dynamic language, the language of interaction, the language of affection, the language of gestures and of any other aspects that this museum was meant to promote.

Looking around online I found some very good resources, both free and subscription, plus found a large variety of YouTube videos, some making the nearly impossible claim of having you speaking Portuguese in 30 days, The reason I say "nearly" impossible is because if you already speak another Latin language then it is possible to be conversational in a relatively short period of time, depending on your memory, study habits and your latent ability for languages. For myself I will be satisfied to reach the conversational status before the end of 2011 and plan to use this blog to post updates, from time to time, on the best resources I find.

The amount of positive comments from Rosetta Stone was what won-me-over to try their software but I also liked the course offering (especially price) and free downloads, blog and Facebook group associated with the company called Transparent Language and a really cool Blog called Tecla SAP.

Pursuit of Happiness - Silicon Palms Blog

2011-01-06T14:25:52Z

Image via Wikipedia

To become successful in life requires a long list of important steps, lots and lots of persistence but above all else; determination. There are several great manifestos, filled with the keys to achieving success and several thousand (or more) places where you can obtain this information, all of which is meaningless until it's assimilated to become knowledge, then put into practice to become wisdom. This process is known as "The Pursuit of Happiness".

If we were to amass all that's ever been written or spoken about happiness and then distilled it down to the purest idea, that which we could consume like a magical elixir, it would be this: the secret to success is in your mind. Now I know that may sound rather simplistic, and yes it's been said by a thousand different people but herein lays the road-map to enlightenment - master your mind, moment by moment, and make yourself manifest your destiny.

There's so much more than can be said on this topic and so many ways to come to the same conclusion but anyway you slice and dice it, you'll always come back to the same understanding. My favorite comparison of the mind, is the computer. Since the operating instructions for the applications to create happiness are default programs installed on the hard-drive (brain), and came delivered that way from the factory. It happens that sometimes we get more excited by new programs and become distracted by the gee-whiz shiny new applications, and forget the need to keep things simple.

Best Wishes for a New Year - Silicon Palms Blog

2011-01-01T01:15:33Z

In trying to think of something fitting to write about, to mark the passing of 2010 and the inception of 2011, I kept thinking about the meaning of happiness, then when I was searching WikiQuotes to read some inspired thoughts about happiness, I came across this simple and brilliant quote:

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
• Mahatma Gandhi

Interesting to note, that one of Gandhi's greatest admirers was Albert Einstein, he talked and wrote about Gandhi often, even stating in an interview that he thought Gandhi was the greatest Politician of our time, and that we ought to adopt more of Gandhi's policies. While I searching a little deeper, I came across one of the most spiritual quotes from Einstein that I've ever read, and once I grasped it, I knew this is what I wanted to share for my New Year message.

In 1950 Albert Einstein wrote the following profound nugget of knowledge, then nearly 20 years after his death, it was published in the New York Times, and again the same year in the New York Post. My wish for 2011 is that Einstein's idea will manifest itself on our planet, in a faster and greater way, maybe as a peaceful cultural-revolution. I believe that we all have within us, enormous capacity to change (for the better), and it's just a matter of awakening, to what needs to happen. Let's make it happen!

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. ~ Albert Einstein

Letter of 1950, as quoted in The New York Times (29 March 1972) and The New York Post (28 November 1972). Source: WikiQuotes

Brazil for Offshore IT Outsource - Silicon Palms Blog

2010-12-10T20:39:05Z

I recently returned to Sao Paulo, Brazil after 6 months in North America, if there were an economic downturn in the rest of the world, they forgot to mention it to Brasileiro's. This country is drunk with economic excess, even the street vendors are upgrading equipment and spending more money than ever to build-up their businesses. The signs of growth are everywhere in this city, especially in the skyline, which is sprouting new high-rise condominiums, like springtime grass on a newly seeded soccer pitch. The economic growth Rio, for a change, is even more accelerated than Sao Paulo.

Brazil's commitment to sport can be seen in the further venue investment that is already under way in Rio. The world-famous Maracanã stadium will close next year for two years of refurbishment. The areas around it will be renovated, with access and transport links improved as the entire neighborhood is reborn ready for host the final of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Work is already underway on the ongoing development of the Olympic Training Center (OTC), which includes many of the state-of-the-art venues built for the 2007 Pan and Parapan American Games. The OTC will be at the heart of the Rio Games - and international sport for years afterward. Athletes and coaches from all over the world will be offered scholarships to what will be a new regional hub for sport.

With a strong economy and now guaranteed funding, Brazil's economy is now the tenth largest in the world - and predicted to be fifth by the 2016 Olympics. Brazil is the world's second biggest food exporter, one of the world's largest oil and ore producers and the fifth largest advertising market. This diverse economy is the engine that drives South America and one of the world's top 10 consumer markets. Brazil has the highest levels of Internet use in the world and according to the Brazilian Association of Information Technology and Communication Companies (commonly known as BRASSCOM), Brazil's offshore IT outsourcing market hit $1.4 billion in 2008, rising 75 percent in a single year, making this one of the best places in the world for a web development company.

Experts predict that an additional $500M will be spent just on IT and web development for the FIFA World Cup of soccer in 2014. The overall Latin America market for outsourced services, is expected to grow 12 percent in 2010 to $8 billion, according to Forrester Research. That's on top of the $19 billion that local companies spend on IT consulting services. However, Brazil has approximately 250,000 IT professionals, 23,000 annual IT graduates, and infrastructure capable of supporting double-digit growth, this places Brazil firmly at the heart of the IT services supply chain in the Southern Hemisphere.

In October 2009, a report from Gartner claimed that "Brazil's economic footprint combined with having the largest domestic IT consumption in all of Latin America, as well as international recognition as one of the most promising and rapidly emerging economies, makes it a natural destination to evaluate for IT services.

We all want to be young - Silicon Palms Blog

2010-12-07T16:36:17Z

Sao Paulo, Brazil has some brilliant film producers and Internet marketing minds. Recently a Brazilian company that specialize in behavioral sciences and consumer trends released a short movie called "We All Want to Be Young", this brilliant film is the outcome of several studies developed by BOX1824 over the past 5 years.

Casino Beach Launch - Silicon Palms Blog

2010-07-01T04:43:28Z

Reefer Poker Announces Surf's Up Promotion to Celebrate Launch of New Online CasinoBeach.com

Malta, June 29, 2010 - ReeferPoker.com, in partnership with ReeferCasino.com, has announced the launch of their new online casino partner; CasinoBeach.com.

As part of the launch promo for this new Real Time Gaming casino, the group of sites, which includes the social network ReeferPeople.com, has created a promotion that has players visiting all of their sites on a hunt for branded surfboards.

Dave Ishere, Poker Room Manager for Reefer Poker, had this explanation; "We wanted to create a fun promotion for our players, while introducing them to the new Casino Beach software on ReeferCasino.com. Once players complete the requirements they are rewarded with several free poker tournament entries as our way of saying thanks."

"The 3 participating websites are ReeferPoker.com, ReeferPeople.com, and the new ReeferCasino.com. Each site has 3 surfboards to be found, and they are easily visible on 3 different web pages on each site," he continued. "Simply click on each one as you find them, and when you find all 9 you will automatically receive coupon entries to the private $1,000 Good Vibrations Freeroll poker tournament hosted on Thursday, July 8, and to the $1,000 Reefer Poker Community Freeroll July 11. This promotion ends at midnight, Sunday, July 4, 2010. You must have found all surfboards by then to qualify."
Players can register their new accounts instantly by visiting http://reeferpoker.com and http://casinobeach.com

###

For information and media enquiries please contact:
Gian Perroni
Canadian Affiliate Management Company
Email: gian@canaffco.com
Canada 1-604-947-2553
UK 011-44 (0) 20 8114 9366
Fax 1-604-608-9038

About Reefer Poker

Reefer Poker is a member of the Merge Gaming network. Reefer Poker offers a selection of poker tournaments and cash games 24/7, and provides its' players and affiliates with a trusted place to enjoy poker for free, or real money. Reefer Poker is pleased to accept players from every country except Australia, and every U.S. state except Kentucky.

About Reefer Casino/Casino Beach

The new Reefer Casino is in partnership with CasinoBeach.com, and provides over 100 different casino games provided by industry leading Real Time Gaming.

Layer Cake Analogy - Silicon Palms Blog

2010-04-16T15:32:32Z

One of my favorite movies is called "Layer Cake" a 2004 film set in London that focuses on an unnamed successful cocaine dealer (played by Daniel Craig). At only 29, he has a respected place amongst England's Mafia, and is secretly planning to retire from the business. There's a couple of quotes in the film that I find particularly relevant to my career, first is the main advice of the entire plot, imparted upon the main character by the wealthy businessman near the end of the story:

The art of good business is being a good middleman.

This is a meaningful quote to me because for most of my career I've been working at being a good middleman, even if you consider the purpose of web publishing, more often than not, it's about providing information to readers related to places, people, products or knowledge in the hopes of bringing them together to consummate a deal. Web publishing is about being a good middleman, it's important not to forget that the surest way to become successful in this business, or any business, is to help other people get what they want.

Another favorite quote is from the same character, the successful businessman to the dealer:

You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake son.

My slant on that advice as it relates to web publishing is that, over time, if you consistently publish respectable web content and learn the tricks of the trade, sharpen your product-knowledge and focus in on reaching your target market, the day will come when the work get's easier, generates more revenue, and brings you closer to that point in time, when you own a valuable web publishing business and control your destiny.

Silicon Palms has continued to grow, the products have improved and more and more opportunities are introduced to me, whereas one upon a time I had to seek products to sell. Now the process has become easier and more lucrative. Perhaps the rarified atmosphere of having forgotten what shit even smells like has finally arrived?

Online Trading System - Silicon Palms Blog

2010-04-04T00:55:06Z

10PIPS Review

With the large choice of trading systems available, with almost any trading markets can be traded on certain systems, including commodities, stocks or Forex, it's very difficult to choose a whole trading solution. The leading trading systems are very good at what they do; however, a comprehensive solution for all trading instruments with a simple interface is very rare. 10PIPS offers a real multichannel online trading system; its goal is to present a trading solution for all the available instruments with a variety which increases all the time. To create this solution an innovative system was built which is focused also on the ease of use with no lack on professionalism.

Trading easily with 10PIPS

The use of 10PIPS trading system is friendly and very easy, beginning with the short start up process which takes a very short time, continuing with the fact that the trader doesn't have to spend much time on learning how to trade; and with the simple, straight forward trading process.

10PIPS system can be used by a novice trader; however, with a great package of professional tools, experienced traders will also find all their trading needs. With such a large variety of professional trading instruments which increase daily and a very quick response time, it's hard to find a system which presents a more comprehensive solution.

It seems like 10PIPS puts a lot of faith in their system and believes that people who used it once will eventually choose to use it for all their trading needs. This can be seen in the fact that the use of demo account has no limitations - unlike many other online trading systems.

You can start using 10PIPS trading system in seconds with no registration forms needed, or even payment method details (for practice account) - unlike other online trading systems. Just enter 10PIPS website and click the download button. When the download is completed, choose a user name and password and the system and you are ready to trade!

10PIPS' benefits:

Short registration process

Large choice of trading instruments and channels

Simple trading process

Direct deposit, using the system's interface

Sophisticated charting system

"Trade through charts" function

10PIPS.com - Bottom line

Professionally Developed by Internet experts, with a great, simple design and a focus on usability, 10PIPS system is one of the strongest trading tools available today. With a comprehensive package of tools and a strong focus on the trader's needs, the guidance of experienced users is obvious. With all that and the strong financial backing, it's seems hard to find a better solution for trading online!

Vancouver Winter Olympics - Silicon Palms Blog

2010-02-22T01:33:04Z

On this day 50 years ago I entered this world on a night that was so stormy in Vancouver that electricity was knocked out through much of the city and phone lines were down in North Vancouver. It was in the very early hours at Lions Gate Hospital, so I'm told, that my mother delivered me. Truthfully, she's the person who deserves the congrats not me, and her and my Dad deserve a great many thanks for encouraging me to participate in sports. As a child I was taught to ski by my second birthday and since my parents were ski instructors at Mt. Baker in Washington State, I grew up "ski racing crazy", so it was especially enjoyable for me to watch the various skiing events taking place on the slopes where I used to race.

To say that I'm thankful for the 50 years of life (btw: I'm 49 years old today) is grossly understated. I've enjoyed the most marvelous lifestyle so far and it's about to get even better. What a blessing to have spent so many days every winter, for the first half of my life, up in the mountain pursuing my own gold medals. Sure I've had my fair share of bad days too, everyone has got to, or we'd never recognize the good one's but all things considered I'm content with my lot in life, I like who I've become and don't regret the decisions I've made, although on blazing hot days in Brazil (like today) I sometimes miss the snow-covered mountains of British Columbia.

Love is the key to a good life. Luck and love may have something to do with my own level of happiness but just like the famous quote: "The harder I work, the luckier I get" (either Gary Player or Samuel Goldwyn said that) when applied to my life, relates to the understanding that the more I learn to love life and the people in it, I luckier I get with love in return. In case you're wondering; I think I've been very, very lucky in love and life and consider myself very fortunate just to have been born and raised in Canada.

Vancouver Winter Olympics, from my perspective, as seen from the comfort of my home in Brazil, exemplifies everything that is wonderful and decent about Western Canada for the manifestation of the Olympic spirit. Peace on earth and goodwill towards mankind and may the best competitor win! Let the world bear witness that there is only one love, no-matter how many interpretations and expressions of beauty there may be for athletic perfection, in the end it's all about harmony and forgetting our differences to work together for the common good of sport, to make something bigger and better than the sum total of all our parts and purposes. The people of British Columbia and the City of Vancouver have done an excellent job hosting the Winter Olympics and made us proud to be Canadian, even if we don't win enough Gold medals.

Clarity of Mind - Silicon Palms Blog

2010-01-31T15:57:46Z

As we entered this new decade at the turn of the new year, despite having every intention, for the first time since I can remember, I neglected to write a new personal mission statement. I did however read over some of what I had written to myself in the past several years. To commemorate this new year I even had in my mind the steps I was planning, to write my mission statement for 2010, complete with spreadsheets for tracking my progress. However, not a word of my mission was written until today because in my heart I could feel that something was wrong with my thinking this year, or maybe for many years.

Over the last several weeks I became aware that I wasn't thinking completely for myself, one of my concerns was that I had allowed myself to become comfortably numb about the world around me. Sure I've been distracted by things in my personal life, such as loss of family members including someone I loved who left before his time, plus my business interests had been exceptionally tumultuous and occasionally stressful, on top of all this my own creature comfort habits had reached a level bordering on obsessive compulsive but none of these things alone was what was bothering me deep inside.

So I made a few major lifestyle modfications without even writing the new goals down, I just achieved them, almost like leaving one era of my life and entering another. Then in an attempt to understand the recurring notion that something in my life was misaligned I started consuming information at a tremendous rate, while at the same time stepped up my physical activity and exercise, reduced my food intake and eliminated all toxins. The data that I loaded in to my mind to process was very diverse and came from a broad spectrum of sources, mostly printed material, video segments and full length documentaries. Much of what I analyzed was not happy or uplifting but eventually I discovered one common nagging question I needed to answer.

During the past several years I'd travelled extensively but generally spent at least 6 months of each year in Sao Paulo, Brazil, however what I had seen and experienced in a dozen world capital cities on three continents had left skid marks on my psyche, especially interactions with individuals in America, where I witnessed otherwise sound intelligent people, reaching the depths of depravity, in a culture seemingly destined to bring down the entire empire, in one big blaze of glory. While in Vancouver, Rio, London, Barcelona and Amsterdam I was struck with the thought that each society showed symptoms of the same disease, people everywhere were mimicking the debauched role models who were leading us. What was this modern malady?

Towards the end of my process of self-evaluation and deep personal lifestyle retrospective I came to realize that world events in the past decade had slammed my mind with an information overload, my brain needed a scan. So many diabolical deeds had happened in the world that I'd unconsciously been brainwashed by "Group Think" and was being led towards our demise with the rest of the "Sheeple", just like the other 87% of the population of the planet. Even though I'm not much of a TV addict I had been receiving much of my information from mainstream media. The "People Think" data feed, combined with what happened as a result of my life experiences and the way in which I questioned the events of the world around me, caused chronic apathy.

Recently a breakthrough came, best described by a quote from "A Course in Miracles":

"Seek not to change the world but choose to change your mind about the world"

There's one nagging question that I had to address in order to change my mind about the world. Once this question was answered I felt a new clarity of mind. I had to know, what is the significance of the date December 21, 2012? Once I figured that out, everything else became clear to my mind, including what I should be doing with my life. Now I feel at peace with myself and my new mission statement was simple:

Through a commitment to self-empowerment and dedication to knowledge, I will strive to elevate my consciousness.

Poker Brasileiro - Silicon Palms Blog

2009-12-21T01:15:16Z

While attending a Poker Awards Banquet earlier this year hosted by the good folks from Flop Magazine here in Brazil, I had the great pleasure of meeting Gustavo Andrade the legal counsel for The Brazilian Confederation of Texas Hold'em as well as legal adviser to the Sao Paulo Circuit, Poker Tour. We hit it off from the beginning, finding that we had lot's of things besides an overly healthy interest in the business side of online gambling in common, so it was always fun to get together and compare notes about the industry of online poker in Brasil, I recon Gustavo knows as much or more about this industry as anyone in the country, especially as it pertains to the laws.

For several months Gustavo and I would get together on Thursday nights for a few cold beers at the "Blue Pub" in downtown Sampa (Sao Paulo) and talk shop, then one day I suggested to Gustavo that he should publish a blog, focused on poker in Brasil and promote some of the companies we know, including Reefer Poker. Well back in August we came up with the name "Poker Brasileiro", registered it and I set-up a personal publishing system on the Domain and gave Gustavo a short tutorial about how to publish stories, now some 4 months and 100 articles later Gustavo is really getting some traction on his blog, with as many as 250 readers per day and a growing syndication via RSS to some leading Brasil poker portals. He's a true natural, loves blogging and people love reading his stories.

Poker Brasileiro is not just about poker in Brasil but also sheds some light on the popular players from here who play poker professionally, as well as sharing some travel stories and photos about the great lifestyle, beaches, cities, the food, plus the wonderful culture of Brazil.