I just returned from Marrakech, Morocco where I attended a conference. On the last day, I went to the markets in with some friends to buy souvenirs and see more of the town. Overall, I found everything “fully valued” and there were few bargains. The shopping trip quickly turned into a negotiation workshop. Things started out very high, and you had to negotiate pretty hard just to get things back to any reasonable level. We learned about special “Americanâ€? pricing in the shops. At one point, one of my friends was haggling pretty hard with a vendor over an item. The seller was getting frustrated and he said to me friend, “I don’t understand why you bargain so hard! You are an American. You have all the oil of Iraq, and all the money in the world…!â€? Then the other salesmen in the shop started laughing.

That comment and the reaction of the others were very telling of how Moroccans see Americans for sure, and the impacts of the Iraq war. Be that as it may, it is true that Moroccans are poorer overall than Americans, so I was left pondering this question, among other things, is there any difference in negotiating with someone who is significantly poorer versus someone who is closer to your economic level? How much do you haggle with poorer people?

To totally show off today, I am posting my second video blog entry. My friend Gary took this yesterday when I completed my 2nd skydive, and I “stuck” the landing! The first time you skydive you can say it was for the once in a life-time experience and choose to never do it again. I did it again, so who knows, maybe I am crazy!?

My second freefall also flew by and it seemed like maybe 10.5 rather than 10 seconds like the first one. In real-time, you freefall for almost 1 minute. I am told this feeling of time compression is normal. This still makes skydiving probably one of the most expensive sports/thrills when you calculate it by the hour. For me at this level, the really fun part is flying the canopy. I will let the video speak for itself. Click here to view video

I am hosting a party on Friday, March 10th in Mountain View, CA to celebrate the conclusion of my divorce, and the beginning of my new life. Please join me to have a drink. RSVP as soon as you can to let me know if you will attend. You can RSVP here at eVite.com.

Today, unexpectedly, after almost three years of bitter fighting, my ex-wife and I settled our category 5 level storm of a divorce. The hurricane is over. I don’t feel happy or sad, but instead weird—like what just happened? It’s a strange feeling somewhat similar to the peace after attending a funeral or burial.

Now that I have been through it and it is over, I can write here that divorce is a total lose-lose scenario for everyone but the attorneys and experts. I definitely feel that I lost, my kids lost, our business lost, and I think my ex-wife lost too. Be that as it may, and I am glad those incredibly expensive (you would not believe what I spent) and wasteful proceedings are over and behind me so I can get on with things.

I am told my weird ambivalent feelings are normal and will pass. I am going to take a couple of days off now to reflect, and put all my legal papers, law books, cases, etc. into storage. I learned a lot about family law and divorce that I hope none of my friends reading this ever needs to learn themselves.

Peace.

Today, I stepped out of an airplane and 15,000 feet and it was incredible. I completed my first accelerated freefall (AFF) skydive at Adventure Center Skydiving in Hollister. I’d been waiting to do this for over a month. I went with my friend Gary who got me in the spirit. He’s been taking skydiving classes there for a few months. I actually took the skydiving training class back in December, but unfortunately the weather did not cooperate I was unable to make my first jump that day. Two weeks later I went back and the weather again wasn’t good either. You have to have clear skies from the ground up to 15,000 feet. On the bright side, I got to hang out with a lot of skydivers, and they’re an interesting group of people. Today, finally, the skies were clear enough to do it!

I am actually more struck by the experience now that it is over than when I was falling through 10,000 feet. You freefall for about 60 seconds but to me honestly it seemed like about 10 seconds. Time really flies when you’re hurtling towards Earth at 120 mph. I wasn’t nervous, and I didn’t have a lot of time to worry if I was going to be anyway. As I said earlier, I’d been training to do this for over a month so I think that helped also. I just took in the experience as best I could and tried to remain as relaxed as possible.

I will not forget how my instructor opened the skydiving class: “The purpose of this class is to teach you how to save your life. I will not teach you how to skydive. You will learn that later.â€? The class consists of four to five hours of training on everything they can possibly go wrong. Then I got to review the course twice each time I went back. You step out of the aircraft with two instructors holding on to either side of you. They don’t leave you until your parachute deploys and you are ripped out of their hands. Thankfully, absolutely everything went perfectly and I didn’t have to use any of the emergency procedures I learned. The only thing that went wrong during my jump was that wasn’t wearing any gloves and my hands were frozen by the windchill by the time I landed. My instructor said I made an awesome landing.

The team at Adventure Center Skydiving in Hollister was really great, and if you are in Northern California and want to try skydiving I think it’s a great place to learn. Now I have to decide if I’m ready to go back for jump number two.

This week I had my most retarded eCommerce shopping experience ever with Safeway.com. I think that ordering groceries and everything is great online, but Safeway has a lot to learn. For example, when you order products on the website, the products can be on sale today and will show the sale price, and they definately charge your credit card today, but you will NOT get the sale price if the products are not on sale when they arrive for delivery which could be the next day or the day after. This makes absolutely zero sense. Furthermore, you don’t know exactly when delivery is available until you checkout. Then get this, after you checkout, and get the bad non sale prices on some of your items, there is a survey! It asks you to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 their service. The screen has a bug so you can only select “10″ the highest mark. Wow. I wrote to their customer service, and of course, no reply. If anyone has a better online grocery service, let me know.

This week I started standup comedy classes at the San Francisco Comedy College. I figured I might as well put to good use some of the incredibly stupid things I have seen this year, and make good material out of them. The couse is held at the Improv in San Jose which is a great club, and one of the benefits is that you can stay after class and see the show. The school runs open mikes throughout the Bay Area so when I finish the course you can come to one of my shows.

It’s not something you want to see on your block. This Sunday afternoon as I was leaving my house I saw a van from Crime Scene Cleaners just two doors down. If you don’t know who these guys are, they are the people that get paid a lot of money to cleanup some really gross stuff. I wonder what happened, and today I found out. It turns out there was a guy that lived just two doors from me who had gotten divorced this past December. Apparently, he was depressed, and so he shot himself. I didn’t know him, but I really wish I had. I went by his house everyday and had no idea. I wish we could’ve talked becasue maybe I could have shared something with him from my horrible divorce experience that would have saved his life. Apparently, he was very quiet and didn’t have many friends. That definately didnt help him I’m sure. It always astounds me when somebody decides to commit suicide. I immediately remembered a college friend who shot himself over a woman. (I can tell you that story someday for those who want to know.) For me this all is the ultimate loss of perspective. What an incredible pity.

Today I upgraded to Comcast high-speed Internet. Wow, I guess I was a little slow to catch on to this service. The performance is so totally superior; I don’t even recognize the Internet at my house anymore. I am getting download speeds more than 10 times faster than DSL. I’m able to watch videos more easily, and downloading a 50 MB file is snappy. I’m online a lot, so I figure I just gained half an hour to an hour of productivity or more by making the switch. Oh and it costs less than my DSL service too. No contract.

I’m going cancel my DSL line, and with that my home phone line. The only reason I kept the landline phone was because of my DSL, and now I certainly don’t need that. I actually hate my landline phone from SBC. It costs a lot of money, and it doesn’t have free nights and weekends, and the charge me for “long-distance� calls which can be just the next town away. To avoid getting ripped off on toll calls, I subscribed to Sprint long-distance at an additional cost and they bill me an annoying service fee that just went up even if I don’t make any long distance calls in a month. Most of the calls or receive on my home phone are from solicitors anyway so it is pretty much a SPAM phone. I’m going cable modem and cell phone only, and I don’t see why I would ever want to go back.

I am so done shopping at brick-and-mortar stores. The last few days I just had too many frustrating experiences. What a waste of time! I got a copy of the movie Sahara from Peerflix, which is a pretty cool service by the way, but it wouldn’t play and I really want to see the movie so I was a Target and checked to see if they had a copy in the video section. I would’ve bought it even at full price, which really doesn’t make a lot of sense, but they were sold out. Then on my way home I stopped at a store called The Learning Center to pick up some addition flash cards for my son. Of course, they had every flash card imaginable, but were sold out of addition. Finally today, I needed a four foot card table, so I went Office Depot and, of course, they were sold out of four foot card tables. What a nightmare for them because instead of coming back later or buying something else, I’m just going to buy these items directly on the Internet and most likely from someone else with cheap or free delivery, no sales tax, and a lower price.

Recently, I’ve even been shopping for groceries on the Internet. I happen to have a computer in my kitchen and it’s super convenient order food from Safeway.com right there in my kitchen where I can see exactly what I have and what I don’t have. They also remember what you purchased before. And they don’t charge by weight so if you want to order 10 heavy cases of water just go for it. Finally, last month, I signed up for Amazon Prime. This is the new service you pay Amazon like $80 a year and get free two-day shipping on everything you buy. At first I thought this didn’t make a lot of sense. Actually now I think this is a great program, because I buy a lot of things on Amazon and I don’t know about you, but I at least often fall into the trap of buying extra items to bring my shopping cart total over $25 to get the “freeâ€? shipping. A lot of these extra items I’d buy just get the “freeâ€? shipping I really don’t need to buy at that time so it’s a waste of money and then anyway the free shipping usually takes a week or more to get to me which is very frustrating.

Last week I attended a special program from Landmark Education called “Living a Created Life.� This three hour special program focused on how much we are controlled by our bodies and lower brain functions, and how little we really are in control of our own lives. If we’re just reacting to our bodies needs for survival, hunger, and other physical stuff then who we think we are is really just mainly along for the ride. I read an article a few days ago about how when two people are attracted to each other so much of the attraction is based on physical and chemical interactions that we’re totally oblivious to. What we think when we are in love means nothing which is, of course, really not at all surprising to anyone who has been there. The psychological term for all these things we do without really understanding why is the “adaptive unconscious.�

In any event, if you haven’t attended any programs previously from Landmark Education, I highly recommend them. Landmark offers a series of group personal development and communications courses, and seminars, and a bunch of other stuff too. What to learn about yourself might surprise you.

I started this blog about thirty days ago, and today I received a wake-up, feedback email from a friend of mine. He told me very politely from how reading my new blog it was clear to him that I had lost my mind, was in need of therapy, how arrogant I am, and who was I trying to impress with all this bullshit I post here anyway? He was very sincere, and honestly trying to help me. I totally got what he said. It made me stop and rethink the whole purpose of this blog, and how it is being received.

What drives me or anyone to write a blog and post about their life and thoughts anyway? Blogging is a new, very popular and totally unnecessary, vain, self-aggrandizing public activity, so yes; I am guilty of showing off and trying to impress you the reader. Funny thing is that I have not even uploaded a fraction of the cool stuff and features I want to really show off! I just have not had the time and skills. And maybe only crazy people blog about themselves, so then I must be crazy.

For me this blog is an experiment. Maybe it is therapy too. I am not sure about that part yet. Just reading blogs is one thing, but I don’t know how to learn more about something than by doing it. I have been to two blogging conferences recently. (I didn’t even write about the first one here to not show off….) I will tell you one thing, the first time you meet a blogger at a conference they ask you, “What is your blog?” And then they never read it.

Are there good and bad reasons to blog? Should sane people not blog about themselves? I have friends that blog about TV shows or PDAs for example. I have plans to do a blog like that too someday. And I have a friend who started a blog last week to document her trip through India. I think that is much better than sending out an email to everyone.

So far in 30 days and two conferences, I have learned maybe 5% of what there is to know about blogging. Here are some of the things I learned.

• It takes a lot of time, and energy to do one–way more than you would imagine by just reading one. Maybe I have not even done mine right.
• A blog is a great tool for communication and sharing information. I have gotten a lot of feedback and discussions based on having this blog that I would not have gotten otherwise.
• There can be downsides and consequences to having a public blog and personal website.

Send me your feedback how this blog can be improved, changed, etc.

The mother of one of my good friends passed away suddenly this weekend, and this morning I attended the funeral. She was only 66 years old. I have been to several funerals, and this was a very special funeral. I knew that something was up when the parking lot at the church was completely full at 11am on a Tuesday. I would guess 400 to 500 people attended the funeral for this woman who I never met. The church was quite full. My friend’s mother had dedicated her life to helping those less fortunate and was a leader in her community and church. The service was beautiful. The stories that people shared about her left me and the audience deeply moved and inspired. She made a huge difference to so many people during her life. The service left me, and other people who I talked to, wondering what legacy we are each leaving, what we are doing to help others, and how many people will attend our funerals when we all pass away someday…. Even after death, my friend’s mother was having an impact.

A lot of my friends contacted me today, and I have been really touched by many of the conversations I had. I even got a half serious job offer–incredible. Thanks to everyone for their emails and calls of support! I spent part of the day updating my PC, and doing an “identity update” of what seemed like my millions of accounts and passwords all over the Internet, and stuff like that which I never had time to do before…. Time consuming. I am settling on an intial experiment which I plan to launch soon.