Layered Thoughts

No worries, I have just been a little bit distracted from blogging lately.  I’m currently up in Idaho/Wyoming doing some snowboarding the girlfriend and her family.  Today was a great snow day, a little windy, but nice overall.  I’m wiped out now but we’re staying up all night for new years of course so I’m going to be especially tired tomorrow. I do plan on having a good post put together for tomorrow though.  Resolutions?

Here’s a quick little tip for if you’re running your computer in a dual boot setup with Ubuntu and Vista. I was doing just this because I was programming Ruby and Ruby on Rails apps from Ubuntu but the lack of Photoshop was killing me.  So I did some research and eventually discovered andLinux (the topic of a future post one day), which lets you run Ubuntu Linux as a Windows service.  So that so far has solved all of my problems when it comes to being able to both do design and programming on the same operating system (What I really need to do is buy a Mac, but who has that kind of money?). So I haven’t booted into Linux in about 3 months now.  That isn’t a big deal because it’s nice to know that there is a partition there if I need it. But the problem is that I recently started running somewhat low on hard drive space.  I found that kind of weird because I only have about 2,000 songs on my computer right now and very few movies. But I do have that 40GB Linux partition just sitting there. So I set out to delete that partition and recover some space.  What is important though is that you make sure to replace the Linux bootloader that is installed when you install Ubuntu, or else you’ll lose the ability to boot into Vista once you delete Ubuntu.  So we’ll start off by replacing the bootloader first in order to avoid any problems.  The process is pretty simple:

1. You first need to download Super Grub Disc and burn the ISO image to a CD.
2. Next, pop the disc in and reboot your computer.
3. The Super Grub Disc screens are kind of cryptic in the sense that a lot of the choices look just like gibberish, but the important one you want for deleting Linux so you only have Vista is: WIN => MBR & !WIN!  :(((((((((((((((((
4. That option restores the original Vista bootloader to the Master Boot Record, forcing your computer to automatically boot into Vista next time it starts up.
5. Now, reboot your computer, click “Start”, right-click “Computer”, and select “Manage”
6. On the left hand side (in the menu tree), click “Disk Management”
7. Find your old Linux partition, right click it, and select “Delete Volume”
8. Once deleted, right click your existing Windows partition, and click “Expand Volume”

Now you should have recovered the space from your old Ubuntu install.  If you had a swap partition for Linux, you can delete that as well. Now just remember to only do this after you have backed up everything in your Linux install!

I just finished up a 4 hour late night work blitz and feel much better about my progress on the project now than before I started. I was slowly slipping behind little by little with making the right amount of progress so I decided to just buckle down and catch myself back up. So here I am at 3:18 AM finishing up the night. I’ve really gotten hooked on listening to mellow, ambient music through my headphones as I work.  Letting music play through your speakers is OK but it still leaves you vulnerable to audible distractions from the area around you.  But if you instead throw on your headphones and play some mellow tunes, you’ll be distraction free and ready to kick some virtual ass. So nerdy.

Anyways, I’ve been listening to Groove Salad over at Somafm.com as I’ve been working.  It’s really mellow and slow, most likely just a few beats and melodies, never anything fancy.  But it’s great for keeping you focused while also not stealing your attention away, like most popular songs do whether you like it or not. I’m also downloading some ambient tracks so I don’t have to suck up whatever bandwidth I have with streaming tunes.  I found a great plugin for Winamp as well that let’s you record each track of a streaming radio station on the web and save them to your computer.  I did it earlier and captured about 15 of the songs I had heard on Groove Salad.  Pretty Sweet.  I’ll explain how to use that tool in another post. Til next time, good night.

Here’s an annoying little thing that led me to posting this tip today: Firefox has an autocomplete feature that keeps any form fields you’ve edited on a page filled with the same data if you refresh the page.  This is great if you’re say, ordering plane tickets and need to refresh for some reason because everything you’ve changed will still be there once the page reloads. But this feature became a problem for me today while I was working on a project.  The core of the project is that it is a rating system for a series of short data pieces that are randomly loaded each time the page is loaded, with the ability to both edit the data and submit the rating simultaneously.  Therefore, if you were to click refresh on the page, a new random data piece would be loaded.  This is all well and good, but when you throw in the Firefox autocomplete system into the mix, things get all messy. What I found was that if a user was editing a data piece, then for whatever reason clicked refresh, a new data piece would be randomly loaded for the next page load, but the editing fields that had data that was modified in it from before the refresh will still have that same data in those fields.  So you’ve loaded a new data piece, but the old edited data is still in the fields, so if the user now clicks “submit,” that old data is going to overwrite the new data in those fields. That’s bad news when you’re trying to maintain data integrity. So how do you fix it? Well, there is the ability to add to html form objects this piece of code: This effectively tells Firefox to ignore the caching that it would normally do to set itself up to autocomplete the field if a refresh occurs.  To achieve this same change in Rails, you must add the Ruby version of that code to every form element that you want Firefox to ignore. So to make a text_field form helper have Firefox autocomplete turned off, you would use code like this: To do the same thing for a collection_select helper, you need to add the autocomplete option to the html_options hash that is passed to the helper like this: Hopefully this little tip will help some people out because I know it drove me crazy today as I thought my app was all messed up but it turned out to be the browser.

I’ve been busy working on a few projects lately but have been keeping pretty good notes about a bunch of stuff I figured out a long the way so get ready for a barrage of tech/programming/geeky oriented posts coming into this weekend…there’s going to be some good info though about stuff that I figured out from relatively sparse, scattered information on the internet so I’m hoping I’ll be able to help someone out if they had any of the same problems that I did while trying to do something similar. That was a long sentence.

Check this shit out! Wall Street Journal posted some research about salaries for different college majors and Philosophy beats out Marketing, Business Management, and even Chemistry! (Check it yourself, sort by median Mid-Career-Salary, then think about whether or not you want to switch to Philosophy to bring in the biggg buckkkks). Frankly, I had no idea that Philosophy majors made that kind of money, but I would imagine it’s in a completely unrelated field from what they studied. What’s crazy is how big of a salary jump is made from entry level to median level salary: 103.5%.  Philosophy majors are doubling their salaries by mid career, not too bad at all considering the bad rap we get as philosophers. Why do they make that much money?  My guess is that it’s because Philosophy is hard and abstract, so anyone who can reason their way through it probably has a pretty good sense of problem solving. And who loves problem solving?  Big companies willing to pay you some good money to fix their problems.

I’ve decided a goal of mine for 2009 should be to set up a few reliable sources of passive income.  To be clear, what I mean by passive income is setting up revenue sources that basically self operate once launched.  The concept is outlined in the 4 Hour Work Week, a book by Timothy Ferriss that admittedly I have only skimmed, but needless to say I grabbed some good ideas from it anyways.  This concept of passive income has been brought up in many other places online though.

My personal idea of passive income is that of simple, relatively quick to build tools and solutions to a minimal set of problems.  A To-Do list site is a great example.  To-Do lists are easy to program, solve a pretty specific problem, and don’t require much work once launched.  The ideal situation for passive income.

What could be used for passive income? Well, for my skill set, which is web design/web development/blogging (yep, this shit is a skill of mine now), there are a few different options:

Web Design

I really want to get into Wordpress themes.  Wordpress is easily the most popular blogging platform and has a pretty healthy theme market surrounding it as well.  I would probably submit themes to a few different theme markets as well as post them here so as to be able to keep all of the proceeds if I managed to sell them here.  I wouldn’t charge much simply because I wouldn’t pay much if I need a theme.

What I think is a good option in regards to Wordpress themes is making themes for situations other than blogging.  Yes, Wordpress is a blogging platform at heart.  But it also can serve as an ecommerce site, a CMS, or even a news source.  So I think that if you were to cater to those different niche type Wordpress uses with your premium themes, you would be able to hit a much less saturated market with your product.  I have one layout in my files for a site that ended up never getting used and is only a few tweaks away from being a Wordpress theme so I’m pretty tempted to try and hack it into a theme once I have some free time.

Chris from CSS-Tricks.com has put together 3 really good Wordpress Theme Screencasts for anyone interested in customizing Wordpress themselves.

• Designing for Wordpress #1
• Designing for Wordpress #2
• Designing for Wordpress #3

Web Development

My tool of choice currently is Ruby on Rails.  I’ve finally gotten to a point where I’m comfortable enough to hack together some pretty advanced projects (As a matter of fact, I’ll be working on getting a full site done in one day tomorrow).  A nice way to pick up some extra consistent cash would be to build a few relatively simple web services that make people’s lives easier.  These don’t need to be massive solutions to a number of problems; in fact, I think doing so would be the opposite of passive income once the site is launched as you would have to focus on keeping everything maintained.

The goal with passive income is to work really hard in the beginning to get a product built, then launch it to the world with the most minimum amount of maintenance requirements possible in the future.

I have 3 ideas in my head right now for projects that serve a solid purpose, are needed by a pretty good amount of people, and would not require much work once built.  I actually have one of the ideas half way done.  I really want to try and get all 3 going.  Obviously I would start with the half way done one and see if that can bring in a few bucks.

One of the ideas revolves around affiliate marketing.  This is an area I’m admittedly ignorant in but seems like a pretty good source for passive income.  There are some tools that exist that allow someone to pick a set of products to sell for a commission, for instance, but instead of having to manually select products, you could just type in “fishing” and the store would self populate itself.  That is some great functionality and I think I have a pretty good idea of a site concept to try out.  It will take some work to get fully functional, but once there it would be very minimal upkeep, maybe only a few hours a week. Perfect.

Blogging

I know I know, I’m new to this stuff.  But I really like it.  I’ve made it a goal to write every day (or at least every other day to be realistic) with at least some post about something I found interesting.  I also want to post at least one major essay a week, like this one.  Something of real value and substance.  I’ve started using mind maps to organize some topics for new articles and it’s amazing.  I’ll actually be writing an article about how I plan to write articles soon.  I’m planning on keeping my essays focused on certain topics in regards to technology, the internet, and maybe some philosophy or religion if I feel it’s necessary.  Keeping this flow of content moving forward will fill this blog up with some good info in a few months.

And while I do not expect to become so crazy successful blogger with 100,000 readers a day, I do hope to at least pick up a good amount of traffic eventually.  If so, I’ll start looking into some advertising options for this blog to pick up a few extra bucks where I can.  Nothing intrusive so as to not affect the reading experience, but most likely some Google Adsense as well as some other advertising networks, some affiliate links, and maybe even some blog sponsorships if anyone would be willing to buy some space.

All of this is down the line, but being able to monetize something I enjoy would be pretty cool so I hope that one day that can become an option

Why Passive Income?

I am very much a project oriented thinker.  I come up with new ideas all the time, so I’m constantly bouncing around from one to the next, all the while making sure that I’m also paying the bills.  Having a steady stream of passive income would allow me to focus less on making my rent and more on projects that have the potential to really turn into something big.

And that’s ultimately what I want to do.  I see myself as an idea guy, someone who can think up a product and build the initial prototype and then pass it on to someone else to develop and then move on to the next project.

I would love for that to be my day job.  But to get there, I am going to need to build up these passive income streams in order to smooth over any low income spots.  That way I can stay completely focused on the big projects.

Plus, if I could pull in even just $0.10 from this blog, I can add “Professional Blogger” to my resume.

So I tend to check my traffic stats for this blog once a day to get an idea of whether or not people are actually coming to check out what I’m saying (turns out I got about 25 page views today, not too shabby).  I did not, however, expect to find out that this search term led someone to this site:

I mean, I’m not one to judge people very often.  But cell phone masterbating?

What the fuck does that even mean? Like masterbating to stuff on your cell phone or using your cell phone as some sort of awkward sex toy?

I will definitely think twice about borrowing someone’s cell phone in the future.

I had WP-Spamfree installed and after writing my last post about information addiction, it said it had blocked 5 spam comments.  Since the plugin deletes comments that it thinks are spam, I have no way of seeing if they were actually bad or not, so I apologize if anyone tried to leave a real comment and it got the boot. I have since deleted the plugin and will probably find another one to replace it (I’m looking at you Akismet), but until then, you can spam the shit out of me if you want. I have some good notes going for a few posts I want to write here soon.  I’ll be posting some more stuff later today. Peace.

I’ve always known that I have a potentially unhealthy fascination with the internet.  Some would argue it’s with good reason; there is literally everything on the internet. Everything. But recently (last few months I would say) I have seen myself and my work output drop significantly.  I’ll have bursts of creativity and productivity from time to time, but for the most part I’ve just been screwing around online reading about stuff that I will probably never touch again.  A perfect example of the effects of this is my bookmarks folder in Firefox right now.  There’s hundreds of sites in there that I’ll probably never go to again, but at the time I found them, they were THE thing that stole attention for some period of time. Or even better is my RSS reader.  I used to religiously check my news feeds multiple times a day, a pattern I only recently broke, simply because there was too much shit to read.  I subscribed to too many blogs and literally felt like I was drowning in information everytime I logged in, so I just quit. I have 898 unread blog posts in my newsreader right now, and I would say the last time I logged in was about two weeks ago. 898 Even if I would have kept up with reading the newsreader everyday, that’s still somewhere between 50-100 blog posts a day to read.  At first, those subscriptions served the purpose of keeping me in the loop for a few different fields I was interested in, namely web design, web development, programming, and the Packers.  Now they are just remnants of something that started me on my path towards information addiction and subsequently, information overload. That overload has killed my ability to produce work.  The lack of work output has seriously affected my life in a few areas that I wish it never did and I am truly sorry about it. I did a search for information addiction on Google a few minutes ago (please refrain from pointing out the irony of searching for information about information addiction on the internet, I know it’s hypocritical). There’s actually a wikipedia entry about information addiction, albeit a short one, as well as another entry about internet addiction.  Upon reading both of those, I realized that I was actually suffering from some sort of disorder.  Basically a technological ADD. There was also an interesting blog post about what I came here to write about, although the author took a little bit more of a literary approach to the description and prescribes a bit more serious solution to the problem than what I would like to take right now.  But there was a quote in there that really got me.

“Information is an analgesic. It not only dulls the pain involved in actually Getting Shit Done, but if you do it right, it actually feels like you’re doing something, instead of avoiding doing something.”

That sums up my reason for why I check these sites everyday so obsessively.  They make me feel like I’m getting something done when in reality, I’m just treading water in the pool of progress while everyone swims past me. So what steals my time and why?  I spend a lot of time on Hacker News, simply because it’s a constantly updated social news site about web startups and technology and programming that actually contains intelligent discussions for each post.  Sounds harmless, but I have come to read it so often throughout the day that it is interfering with the deadlines that I need to adhere to to ensure that I can maintain a way of life that is comfortable and healthy.  I also sit on Reddit a lot, railsforum.com, myspace and facebook of course, and random Google searches that lead me onto weird informational journeys to places that I’ll probably never need nor even return to in my life. I’ve developed an idea in my head that I need this information.  I need to keep searching and traveling the interwebs, learning about new ideas and concepts and tools.  But in reality, I only need what is important for making sure I can be happy and can make people around me happy. A lot of my friends know about my random ideas that I have constantly. I call my girlfriend a few times a week telling her about my new million dollar idea.  But I never do anything about them.  Or at least I haven’t yet. And it’s not because I can’t.  I have the knowledge and skills to do nearly all of them right now, or at least the means to find out how to do them.  I’m just so obsessed with information and other people’s stories and projects that it’s impeding my own ability to succeed. And that’s just plain bad. So how do I fix this? Well, it’s basically going to come down to me breaking the habit.  There’s not really a treatment for the problem that I can see.  I just have to stop. So that’s what I’m going to do.  I’m going to stay off of all of the social media sites I go to everyday during the week.  I will only let myself go to those sites on Sundays, generally mine and everyone else’s laziest day of the week.  The other six days of the week, I will only work on the projects I have in my head and on paper, write on this blog (this might entail a little bit of internet research, but I’ll keep it limited as I have a few pretty good topics in my head that I really would like to write about, and I’m really starting to like writing on this thing, so I’ll let this one slip), and keep on pushing towards making a better living for myself and the people around me. I’m going to experiment with a few different ways to keep myself organized and focused.  The first I’ll start using is some sort of To-Do list system.  I’ll be writing about what I find works the best in the future for sure. I owe it to everyone around me just as much as myself to start making more progress in life.

The scariest thing in the world is to look back and realize you’re in the same place you were a few months ago.