Now, I know we are well into January and already celebrated the new year, but not everyone measures their time like us, and according to the Chinese zodiac the new year – the year of the dragon – starts today.
People born in the year of the dragon are considered powerful and having a strong charisma. Many want their children to be born under this sign, and therefore a baby boom is expected during the year. Since China has its “one child” policy, many couples have waited with having children in order to get a dragonchild.
According to the Chinese zodiac dragons are born leaders, those who make things happen. As far as they can see their power is unchallenged. Most people look up to a Dragon, and he is often the example of others. Dragons are idealists, perfectionists, and because they are convinced that they are already perfect they have big difficulies to change. Because of his thirst for power the Dragon does not age well. The prospect of losing their power, the feeling of his youths strength slowly disappearing is unbearable to him.
The dragon is irritable and stubborn. He is bigmouthed and often speaks without thinking. Nevertheless, his opinions worth listening to and his advice worth taking into consideration. He easally gets an audience and he has a substantial influence over people. The dragon is known for his arrogance. He is enthusiastic on the verge of impatiant, and it’s easy for him to lose his temper.
Dragons are dauntless, dynamic and charismatic. As a Dragon joins a group of people, the room starts to simmer. He has such a firm confidence and inflated ego it’s no use trying to point out when he’s wrong.
Dragons are tyrannical. They hate orders, unless it is they themselves who share them. Unlike the Tiger, who has his way with his assertiveness and his seriousness, or the Taurus, whose authority is implied in his rugged appearance, the Dragon knows instinctively how to exercise authority in a mild and friendly manner.
Dragons are terrible snobs. Even if money is not always important, they can not avoid being impressed by wealth, prestige, status and glory.
The Dragon is gifted, intelligent, diligent and generous. He can carry anything through. Regardless of what the Dragon chooses to devote his life to art, medicine or policy, he will shine. He succeeds wherever he goes.
The Dragon is often loved. He is never disappointed in terms of love – rather, he is often the subject of an unhappy love. Women born in the year of the Dragon are often surrounded by a crowd of admirers.
Famous dragons are Joan of Arc, Jimmy Connors, Salvador Dali, Kirk Douglas, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Oliver Hardy, Edward Heath, Grace Kelly, Bruce Lee, John Lennon, Yehudi Menuhin, Walter Mondale, Francisco Franco, Martin Luther King, Florence Nightingale, Shirley Temple, Haile Selassie, Frank Sinatra, Ringo Starr, Anthony Quinn, Mae West, Harold Wilson, myself and my dear wife.
As a Dragon you should supposedly avoid another Dragon as a partner because the relationship might become a permanent race or fight. But if you succeed
in getting through the fight with the relationship intact, it can work well. Something I can vouch for.
Walters’s Workshop is a designer and distributor of premier motorcycle parts for safety and comfort. Our company is dedicated to people who love to tour on Harley Davidson Motorcycles™.
The Internet is on strike to protest SOPA and PIPA and I participate in the strike.
The blog is blacked out and will stay black for 24 hours, like thousands of sites all over the internet.
Ironically, this means that you can not see this post until tomorrow.
Tomorrow I close down The Biker Blog in protest against SOPA – Stop Online Piracy Act and its sister proposal PIPA – Protect IP Act, both of which will be voted through in the U.S. unless something is done quickly. Thousands of websites, blogs and web services will go out tomorrow in protest and to show what the Internet might look like in the not too distant future if these bills are voted through.
Many of you might be thinking that “Yeah, that’s a bummer, but what they decide in the United States does not affect us here,” and while it’s easy to think so nothing could be more wrong. The Internet has no national borders and if the U.S. enforces censorship on the net, how long do you think it will take Sweden to do the same? We already have the FRA law and directives to all ISPs to save logs of IP addresses and web traffic for the authorities to take part of them.
We live in Little America, as the song goes, in the 51st State. Everything that comes to the U.S. comes to us too – it just takes a little longer.
If You don’t know much about SOPA and PIPA and what they mean You might benefit from watching the movie below.
I received a comment from Jonte (or Jonas Carlstrom as his real name turned out to be) with a link to the site nyatatueringar.com. Of course I went there and checked it out, but pretty soon I started to get a weird feeling. To begin with, I was bothered by the “free offer” of tattoo designs on the page. The only way to shut down the “offer” was to fill in your name and email address and download. It was not so terribly hard really, but I was annoyed that you could not decline, and one can only speculate in what Jonas Carlgren will use all the mail addresses for…
At first glance, the site gave a professional impression, but the more you read the stranger it seemed. The author (Jonas?) is good at writing, but seems to have no real knowledge of the subject.
Nevertheless, I read a bit on the site and even managed to comment on an article in which it was proposed that one could let a student at a tattoo school do your tattoo to get away cheaper, before I seriously started believing there might be another hidden purpose to the whole site.
“WARNING!
There are NO tattoo schools in Sweden! Sometimes theres been adverts in the newspapers about “tattoo educations” that goes over 3-5 days, but no real tattooist (meaning those who who work in environmental and health-controlled studios) knows who organizes these programs or what they include. You can not become a tattoo artist in such a short time. An apprenticeship usually lasts between 1 and 3 years!
Registered Tattooists of Sweden (http://www.srt.se) has unsuccessfully tried to get in touch with those responsible for these courses.
As they are quite expensive it seems to be an attempt to fool people with tattoo dreams out of their money.
The right way to go if you really want to become a tattooist is the apprentice way. Forget everything else!”
The site lacks all contact information. Not even an alias or an anonymous email address is to be found. Most images has been copied from Gaddad.se. They are greatly reduced and tightly cropped, but you can still see the copyright information on several of them.
Apart from Google ads there are ads for “world’s best tattoos” from Chopper Tattoo. The link to the chopper Tattoo is a so-called affiliate link that goes through Clickbank.net. The affiliate Account name jozcar and he gets 75% of any completed purchase at Chopper Tattoo that goes through that link. How professional Chopper Tattoo is and what you can buy there, I do not know because I had no desire to sign up, and You have to signup i order to see anything of the site. They claim to have “the largest selection of award winning tattoo designs” but what they really are, I don’t know.
Jozcar, as the affiliate account is called is the name of Jonas Carlstroms company, Jozcar Marketing, and it is also the name of the company that registered the domain nyatatueringar.com.
In the pdf file one had to download before one could see nyatatueringar, there are adverts for
tatueringsbilder.com which despite its swedish name is registered in Los Angeles. The domain owners identity is protected from transparency, but the registration was handled by the same company doing the registrations for most of Jonas Carlstroms blogs and websites. If you try to access the site, there is a re-direct sending you to Chopper Tattoo via the affiliate link.
Jonas is according to himself, a marketing profile among other things holding seminars on search engine optimization and on how to make money on the internet. He appears frequently both in words and pictures on the web, and in non of the pictures I’ve found he has so much as a single visible tattoo. He sais this¸ on one of his sites:
“Jonas has also created the educational product Blog Pro School where he walkes You through via video how to step by step attract people to your blog / website and live on your interests as PROFESSIONAL BLOGER. You will, among other things learn how to create Content & Products that attract visitors, so that you do not have to guess to know EXACTLY what your market would rather read about. But you may also practice how to deliver it to them in a flash. This can include how quickly you can position yourself as an expert in your market. Or how easily You can build trust and be perceived as an expert in your industry.”
I don’t think Jonas Carlstrom is the least interested in tattoos but nyatatueringar.com is just a way
to catch tattoo related searches on the search engines and then send them on to Chopper Tattoo to
hopefully collect those 75% of what people buy. It is also remarkable that he uses a lot of copyrighted images while at the same time his “official” sites carefully points out that one must not use their text and images without permission.
I left for Kingsroad Tattoo earlier than usual Friday morning, partly because I’ve arrived at the last minute for several days in a row and thought it was time to break this pattern, and partly because I needed to refuel on the way.
Now I didn’t even get to the gas station before misery started. When I got out to the main road, I had to wait for traffic, and when my turn came and I stepped on the gas the car suddenly died.
I knew I was low on fuel, but it wasn’t supposed to be all empty according to the meter. Well, well. I grabbed the spare fuel can, which of course was empty and started walking homewards. At the same time, I called my dear wife and woke her up.
She did not appreciate this the least. Anyway, she drove me to the station and after getting 10 liters of gas for the car, I tried to start it again with the same result as before. That is to say no result at all.
Eventually, I managed to drain the battery and we had to use jumper cables, which also didn’t help. We had to tow the car home, which wasn’t that easy since it weighs more than my wife’s Volvo.
In addition, we managed to break the tow rope.
I realized that I wouldn’t be able to make it to the tattoo studio so I had to call and let Rebecca know. I canceled my first client and the next one poor Rebekka had to take care of. She had to work two hours overtime because of it.
I managed to find a sparkplug wrench. I figured the most likely errors woud be the plugs or the fuel pump, and I intended to start with the plugs since they would be the easiest to check. Yeah right!
The engine was probably mounted using shoehorns and lubricants. The plugs on one cylinder could not be accessed without removing the generator, belt system and a bunch of other gizmos. On the other cylinder, Hulk Hogan must have been the one mounting them or they were welded in place.
I put so much force on the wrench so I could taste blood in my mouth, but nothing happened. It was cold outside and I was freezing. I looked at my watch and there were two hours left before it would start getting dark, so I gave up and phoned the workshop.
My sister came with a bigger car and a tow rope that was good for eight tonnes. At 18 o’clock the car was in the garage and I was done for the day. Nothing left to do but borrow a car and go to my night job.
There hasn’t been many link suggestions lately, but here we go again and for starters I’m shamelessly plugging my tattoo studios new site, which we are very happy for!
When you’ve drank all the juice, Ate all of the turkey, got tired of the presents and the tree starts to wither …
Get Your Fun On Route 61! Saturday, January 7, 2012.
We then continue to meet in the bar on February 4, March 3 and April 7.
As usual, it’s private events for club members and friends (this includes clubs associated to SBM, and other invited clubs). Friends, neighbors and other individuals who usually attends our events of course counts as friends.
Now that 2011 is almost over, I want to wish all my readers/visitors a happy new year.
It’s common to give New Year’s resolutions (although they are often broken fairly soon), and if I were to promise something for the New Year, it would be to try to manage the blog a little better and update more frequent.
