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I've been an entrepreneur since the age of 12, running a variety of geeky businesses from BBSes in the 80s, to 3D design studios and rendering farms in the 90s. I've had my consulting business since I incorporated it when I was 15 (with an adult business partner who I bought out at 18).

I still moonlight through a variety of ventures, none of them geek oriented. EVERY moonlighting gig I did that was geek-oriented made my life miserable. Too much geekiness can really break you, honestly.

I run a Christian Printing business that accounts for about 25% of my income, and I run it on the side, maybe 1-2 hours a day. I blog, which accounts for 10% of my income, also very part time. I've owned retail stores which became too full time to manage. I'm starting a digg-like print magazine focused on Chicago (details to come).

Everything I do moonlighting-wise is anti-geek. Much of it is hands on, without programming or thinking about technology or electronics. It keeps me fulfilled.

Stay away from moonlighting in what you do for a living. Find a hobby you can profit from. There's a billion ways to make money, but the most fun ones are the ones that don't cross into the market you're in for a living.

I don't doubt it, and I actually live it. I serve hundreds of churches and faith groups with my church printing ministry, and am active in my community as an anti-tax and anti-force advocate. People know be my name, and I'm the first to shell out a few bucks for a single mom who needs gas or groceries.

But I don't support the "them" mentality. Each person I deal with is an individual. I don't look at "the black folks" or "the Pentecostals" or "the drug addicts" because that is groupthink that causes harm to the individual's uniqueness.

Even when I am in my "community," I am still dealing with individuals. I live life through relationships of "you and I" verses "us and them."

I'm not a frequent soap user at all, unless I really have some grime going on. I find that a simple rinsing a few times a day, along with the good ole pumice scrub, works wonder -- and keeps my hands soft enough to work with. Since I do a lot of hands-on production, I absolutely HATE the feeling of dry hands that comes along with using soap. Moisturizers are worse, since they always leave a greasy feel -- and when working with print jobs for churches, I can't leave smudges behind.

I've always told the wifey to stay away from anti-bacterial anything. A lot of bacteria is GOOD, and the ones that are bad are relatively easy to defend against if you're healthy. We want our bodies to adjust to whatever new bacteria is growing in our homes. Between cleanings, you'll have some growth. The body has a great defensive system already -- it builds the necessary defenses to learn and kill whatever comes into the body.

I've been sick twice in the last 2 decades -- once when I shook the hand of someone who was days later became VERY ill, and once after I rubbed my eyes after playing craps in a casino late one night. Both times I didn't rinse my hands after -- and I recovered well enough in a matter of days (much faster than the guy I got sick from).

Let others be suckers and buy into the manufacturer's marketing campaigns about what is healthy and what isn't. Humans have been around for a long time -- longer than soap. Running water > most daily chemicals for living longer and healthier.

It's supposed to do one thing and one thing well.

Everything else is just stuff to distract you from the fact that your phone network quality suddenly degraded to 3rd world levels.

My phone dials out VoIP if it finds a WiFi connection (it would use 3G but T-Mobile is limited to EDGE right now). Quality is great. T-Mobile's network quality in my regular areas (Chicago, Las Vegas, Savannah, and Miami) is perfect. I've never had a dropped call in those regions.

For me, it isn't "just a phone." I own a few different businesses in a variety of markets. I am constantly trying to maximize my efficiency so I don't have to work more than a few hours in any work-focused part of the day. I try to do the 4 hours in the morning, 4 hours in the evening type of deal, and having a truly multicapable PDA (with a phone) makes complete sense. I can do my billing, I can check my FedEx and UPS accounts, I can view PDFs (important when you run a Print Shop, I run an IT business, I maintain blogs and forums, etc, etc. By making my time management more efficient, I save a ton of time, and time is money.

If it wasn't for my ability to respond to customers, employees and people contacting me quickly, I would not be as efficient, and I would not be in the ultra-competitive businesses that I am in.

YOU may need a phone, but that's why the free market is great -- we can all get what we want, at the price we want, with the quality we want.

I am averse to concerts, I really din't think I've enjoyed any concert, the sound levels are just too uncomfortable.

I go to 3-4 shows a week, and I wear expensive form-fitting earplugs. I value my ears enough to wear them in my print shop and to wear them near an airport or subway/elevated line. I agree, the sound levels are ridiculous. But I do love live music, and I love finding bands to help out.

I really don't like the idea of devaluing a work just because it's easy to copy.

But that is how any market works. The laws of supply and demand are impossible to work around without government force and collusion, and I believe government makes it work. If an item has near infinite supply, no amount of demand will make that item command a price a little over cost, if not below cost.

The idea of buying presence may work for musicians, but it won't work for film makers and book authors, both require a lot of work and money to make, but once made, is easy to copy.

That's not true, necessarily. Any business you start has a huge level of risk to it -- it's called startup cost. With easy video distribution now available, you can create a few pilot-type episodes of a show, and Torrent or PeerCast the episodes for a loss. If enough people like what you're making (say, Firefly/Serenity), they pay for FUTURE episodes. This is how painters painted before copyright -- wealthy people would finance them. Today, fans can microfinance a production with more power than a few wealthy patrons of the arts. We're working on a small "TV" show that will be peercasted and torrented, utilized the directing and acting talents of 3 local Chicago theaters. Our estimated cost per episode, including sets, is less than $25,000 for a 44 minute show. $25,000 x 50,000 fans = $0.50 per fan. Bandwidth costs are relieved because of torrent/peercasting, and we believe we can break even with just simple Google Adsense and a paypal donation button. I believe we'll even profit enough to pay the cast and director and writers well more than minimum wage. Our cost to begin production is only $100,000, which we already raised from just 25 people we consulted with. If you can't raise $100,000 for an idea, it isn't a good idea. There is SO MUCH MONEY out there, even online, that there is no excuse not to move forward. Our episodes will NOT have a copyright, and we'll allow anyone to charge for distribution.

Under the suggested regime of no copyright, I just don't see how there's sufficient money to be made to make it worth making. I don't know if you'll recall, but a movie like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon only made money in countries with decent copyright. It effectively made no money at all in homeland China because the movie was bootlegged immediately and it was basically only the bootlegs that sold.

It would have made fine money regardless of copyright -- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had more ONLINE bootlegged copies in countries with copyright than in China -- the infrastructure for distribution in China is limited because of the State's ownership of so much. Bootlegging on DVD in a local community is the only form of distribution for much of China (I know, I've been there numerous times). It has little to do with copyight laws, it has a lot to do with the socialist ownership of physical distribution.

I've worked with 10 "local" bands that are now on national or international tours -- not one of them enforces their copyright notices. Not one of them has label support. All of them are eating, paying rent, and having fun on the side with the income from shows and merchandise alone. Two of the bands have active bootleg scenes for even their T-shirts, and they don't mind because the "real fans" laugh at those who buy the artificial merchandise. Big deal, the bands says, they can walk from a concert of just 200 people with $500-$1000 from the bar, and $500-$1000 profit from merch sales. $2000 for 4 guys investing 8 h

I own and run VIPMinistry.com, a church print co-operative. We used color laser printers for the first few months and they were slow and painful to watch. Then we discovered Xerox's Phaser LED printers -- basically a laser, but with a "full width" of LEDs spanning the width of the page. Now they crank out double-sided sheets about 6 times faster than single-sided sheets (full color). With just 4 of these printers, we have replaced 12 lasers, and likely could replace 24 of them. They're mega-fast.

Inkjet printers are still my favorite if not for the high cost of ink and the inability to work with a wide variety of paper. LEDs/Lasers are very maintenance heavy (drums, toner, a billion rollers, LED/Lasers over time, waste cartridges, etc, etc). I love the idea of a full-width printhead, though.

The biggest problem with inkjets is ink technology. I'd love to find a solvent-based printer or something closer to an Indigo. Instead of working on faster printers (which help business more than the home), I think they should be working on newer printhead+ink technology.

I run a church media ministry out of my home, and we use DVD Shrink. The software is freeware, and it is excellent. It lets you select what scenes/chapters/frames you want to copy, and creates a new DVD-compatible clip on your hard drive. What is nice about VOB files (the DVD files) is that they are MPEG-compliant, so you can just rename the VOB extension to MPG and off you go.

If you need to shrink the file to lower res than DVD, I recommend TMPGenc, which works very well. You can also import your VOB/MPG into Adobe Premiere Pro and export it to a new format, while editing clips together with fades, titles, etc.

What is your budget? Do you prefer F/OSS? Windows? Mac? Linux?