Well on Friday afternoon I got the call to teach a class at one of the local middle schools. I’ll be teaching 8th grade Math. This is a great opportunity. The students need a quality Math teachers and I can give them that. I have some great ideas planned for my students over the course of the year. This is going to be awesome and best of all, I have the feeling in my heart that this is the best thing possible.

I am going to be having a lot of fun and you’ll read about it for sure. Don’t worry, I will still be posting here about business, technology and opinion.

I really think that many people check their Facebook more often than they check their regular email. This means that a Facebook message will get to them quicker. I also can see if they had a chance to read it or not based on their Facebook activity.

I just wish Facebook messages had more features. A better list of features would sure make it more usable for sending messages.

What kind of changes would you make to the Facebook Messaging System in order to make it work better?

I used MySpace on and off during that time period but haven’t logged in a maybe 2 years. I find that there is no point in it and I don’t even think I can remember my login. I stopped using MySpace primarily because of the fact that people themed out their pages to the point of making them ridiculous but I think I might be the only one who left because of that reason.

This last school year I witnessed my students going from all on MySpace to all one Facebook over the period of about 3 or 4 months. For them it was the Facebook games and then it all snowballed. The kids wanted to be where the other kids where. Pretty much everyone had moved over to Facebook by the end of the year.

I don’t know if MySpace can get that back. Facebook’s now a place where families hang out, where kids meets other kids, where parents meet other parents, where people play games, join in political discussions, and just about anything else you can imagine. It’s the modern day equivalent of a town square. That’s something that MySpace never was. If they change then they need to be a better town square, but even that might make people make the switch.

Why? People don’t like going back to something they abandoned. They made a choice to leave it behind so they need a good reason to head back. I just don’t see that happening.

As some of you may know, I have Type II Diabetes and I am overweight. My health is not very good and I found myself in the hospital a couple of weeks ago. I knew that I needed to make some serious changes in my life to improve my health. I immediately eliminated Coca Cola and several other sources of calories and started eating right. I also started doing a lot of walking and hiking.

It’s just starting but I really hope that it can serve as a way to encourage other people to lose weight and get their health back in shape. If you want to check out the site, then go ahead and click on Better Living Quest.

Sure we have spent some time at the beach and we have visited PIC and World Resort this summer, but we haven’t gotten much hiking done. I want to do some hiking in the mountains this summer. I’d also like to hike the trail to Forbidden Island with my oldest son.

The benefits of getting out in the mountains and doing some real hiking is that I can get to feel better about myself. My health isn’t as good as I’d like it to be, but I know I can improve it with some good exercise.

I see that we could revolutionize a lot of the ways we are doing things by making things more local. That means more home power generation, more sane energy production methods, and more efficient food production. New emerging technologies can make this possible.

This is a new area that I am going into and hope that I can make a positive change. We are on the cusp of a big change and we can make it happen.

It’s disturbing that Ms Brown, the Federal Ombudsman, continues to give out advice that isn’t exactly true to guests workers. She should know better than to make the statements that she has made lately.

Just for a little background, employers wanting to hire new employees in the US, including the CNMI, need to have a properly filled out I-9 form for each new employee. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security has issued an I-9 form specifically for the CNMI.

The I-9 CNMI form that is required for all new hires after November 27th, 2009 has a list of acceptable identification proving a person’s right to work in the CNMI, including CNMI only documents. This form can be viewed on the internet at http://www.uscis.gov/files/form/i-9_cnmi.pdf.

Anyone viewing this document can see that can see that there are only three classes of acceptable CNMI only documents:

1. Foreign Passport with red band entry permit(IR).
2. Foreign passport with CNMI permanent residence card.
3. Foreign Passport with Temporary Employment Authorization Letter from CNMI Department of Labor as long as proposed employment is not in conflict with any restrictions or limitations on the temporary work authorization letter.

Call me stupid, but it seems to me that having a revocation date on the permit is a limitation on that permit. Furthermore, I never knew that a permit allowing a student to stay in the CNMI was an employment authorization letter. Of course, Ms. Brown is unilaterally saying all of this and more, even though she is not connected with the Department of Homeland Security and has absolutely no authority in this matter.

I hope concerned people look out for themselves and make sure that they are following the law because after Ms. Brown’s unlawful collection of data in December, I find her opinions untrustworthy at best.

I am very concerned about the collection of information currently underway at the Federal Ombudsman’s Office for several reasons and I think everyone else should be concerned as well.

I think that all residents of the CNMI, whether they are aliens or citizens, deserve a proper and legal count of long term guest workers in the CNMI that complies not just with Public Law 110-229 but every other law that governs how government agencies gather, collect and store data.

I hope that this will hopefully open up some eyes and get the proper people looking into this issue. Government, no matter how benign their purpose, must follow the law.

More than just the increased income, I also had more free time. I was in the Philippines at the time so I was able to go out to Jollibee with the kids whenever I wanted to. I could let them play in the kiddie area while I just sat back and relaxed. This easy life continued for about a year.

It continued until there was a confluence of negative events all at once. The financial crisis in September 2008 was a major catalyst. People started getting scared and within a few weeks, the paid writing market just about dried up completely. People just weren’t paying for business services. This meant a sharp reduction in my writing income.

Another problem that came up was a bad decision on my part. I decided to take a month to help a friend try to build a business quickly. He needed the help and I thought that I could afford to stay away for a month from paid writing while people got their heads back on straight. Bad move. It was a bad decision because first the friend’s business went nowhere and was basically a lost cause. Second, well the few existing customers I had looked elsewhere for their writing needs.

As I said, there was a confluence of events. The last nail in the coffin was diabetes. Normally diabetes develops over a period of time and there are plenty of warning signs. Not for me. I was hit like a freight train and it culminated in a month of being bed ridden not able to figure out what I had. By time I got to the doctor and got proper medication, I had been out of work for more than 2 months. Two months is a long time in an industry that moves at internet speed.

December 2008 wasn’t a good month for me. I spent the month trying to once again get back into doing the internet work that had solely supported me for more than a year. I sputtered along but several things started to become abundantly clear to me. I think it was the turning point for my time in the Philippines.

By January 2009, I was looking for alternatives and knew that real alternatives were hard to come by during a Great Recession. During my research, I ran across a post about Saipan. I started doing some real research about Saipan but found that there wasn’t a lot of information about it. The most important fact that I learned was that my wife could come here with just a visitor entry permit and that I could change it to an IR permit within 30 days. I realized that it was our best chance and with a window closing by June 1st, it was something that needed to be done right away.

I remember arriving back dead broke to the US back in August 2004. I struggled financially for the first couple of months but then things finally started to click for me. I had a few extra dollars and an old computer connected to the internet. I decided to start hosting a few sites and get back into the work that I had been involved with several years before. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time needed to devote full time to this so guess what? I didn’t find the level of success that I wanted.

I ended up going abroad once again, this time to Korea and then on to Thailand once again. I was back teaching English. I was doing programming for others, as always, but I was also trying my hand at putting together sites of my own. Into my lap fell an opportunity in January 2006 to run a TEFL community called TEFLWatch. While it wasn’t very profitable at all, it did open doors that had previously been closed. Unfortunately, I closed it in December 2007 because of a confluence of several factors.

With many doors open, by August 2007, I was able to support myself entirely through a mini network of sites that I developed. I did everything on them, from hosting to web development to content development to marketing. It’s hard to be a jack of all trades, but I think I could classify the work as a success.

But this isn’t the end of the story, it’s merely the beginning….